The Motion Picture, Part 1

In this episode of Invention, Robert and Joe continue their exploration of photographic technology by taking it to the next phase in its evolution: the motion picture! 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be embarking on
a sort of second part of our saga of photographic history.
We just did several parts talking about the camera obscura
and then the invention of photography, and now we're moving

(00:24):
on to the motion picture. And I wanted to start
with a question that might be a stupid question, but
it's something that I often think about when I go
to the movies, and it's that when you go to
the movies, you sit down to see a motion picture.
The basic media that you're viewing is a succession of
still images that are perceived by the brain, is continuous

(00:46):
visual motion and audio that accompanies it. And so that
in itself is pretty neutral, right like that that it
could show you any number of sights and sounds. But
what we came to view for some reason as the
motion picture, the thing you go see in a theater
most of the time these days, is something like a

(01:07):
visual novel or a visual short story. It's like a
story shaped thing, and then you watch it for an
hour and a half or two hours and then it's over.
And obviously there are lots of exceptions to this, and
if you want to expand a video you I mean, god,
I mean, there's a whole pool of different kinds of
content out there, But the things we think of as
movies are these stories. And I wonder why that is. Well,

(01:30):
I mean, there's a lot of we said about just
the importance of storytelling in human culture or something we've
talked about on Stuff to Blow your mind recently. I
think that's that's a major factor, Like what do we
what do we do with our art and our technology
while we do human things? We we tell stories for starters.
But it's interesting when you go back to the earliest
days of the motion picture, I feel like you get

(01:53):
a sense back then that it wasn't always necessarily gonna
be this way, because yeah, it's some of the the
examples we're going to discuss in this episode. You see
the more of the scientific direction of motion picture, the
way that motion picture can be used to to unravel
what is actually going on in the world, to to
slow it down and to better understand it. Yeah, to

(02:15):
either present kind of a non story based visual spectacle
to just kind of show you a succession of things happening,
or to study, Yeah, to study the world and get
a closer look at it, maybe to see it in
a kind of slow motion that you wouldn't have seen before.
So you're you're wondering if there's perhaps like an alternate

(02:36):
reality where it, say, documentary is the primary Like when
someone says, hey, do you want to come over to
our house and watch a movie, you just assume documentary,
and then if it's a fiction film, you're like, oh,
it's not a documentary, how surprising, or things that might
be called like art films. Now, I mean, there are
a million different ways you could show somebody a succession
of still images simulating motion and accompanying sound, and it

(03:00):
would not like, you know, there's an infinite variety of
things you could do there that wouldn't be a story
that some somewhat simulates the structure of a novel. Yeah,
or or I mean there of course, there are plenty
of examples of things like say, live sporting events also
presented via the medium of essentially the moving picture. Yeah, Well,

(03:20):
maybe then this just has more to do with with
our categories, like the things that we end up calling
movies because as you know, as we mentioned a minute
ago there there's there's an whole internet full of video
content that you wouldn't call movies, but it's it's something, right, yeah. Uh.
But you know this, this does get to the heart
of what we're talking about here and what we've been

(03:41):
talking about with the evolution of photographic technology. How it
how we see that the technology grow advance, then spread
out and and and become you know, not merely the
technology of elite individuals, but the technology of the man,
and then how that inevitably changes everything as well. Exactly. Now,

(04:04):
one of the things that we have been talking about
in our history of photography here is how the invention
of photography was sort of part of a quest for
ever increasing realism in imagery, right that that was something
that Louis de Guerre was concerned with. He wanted to
create more and more realistic paintings, first working on his
panoramas and the diorama, like taking the art of painting

(04:25):
to two new heights of realism and simulating real scenes,
and of course the next step beyond that is directly
just transferring the light reflected off of things onto a
permanent record. But of course, as we were talking about,
fixed images are also sort of a simulation because reality
is never a fixed image, right, We we see a

(04:47):
fixed image and it kind of implies motion, right, Yeah,
there's this this wonderful blurring that kind of takes place
in our imagination. Yeah. Just I mean, just think about
the ways that people had to be put in the
Iron Maiden in order to have their portrait taken in
the earliest Guera types, because you know, you had a
exposure of several minutes and you couldn't move your face,
and so how natural is that a representation of a person.

(05:10):
Uh So the real way to get reality even more,
to get even closer to the experience of just looking
at the world, would be to record continuous imagery. Yeah.
This there's a particular type of video portrait. I think
probably a number of people have probably seen it utilized
in the film Baraca that came out many years ago.

(05:33):
I haven't seen it, Oh you should. It's a you know,
fabulous and beautiful cinematography. Um just you know, scenes of
life and tradition and ritual around the world. But they're
these wonderful scenes where it's just an individual staring into
the camera and and you're just kind of locking eyes

(05:54):
with them, and it feels it feels very intimate. It's
you know, it's essentially a motion portrait. That is interesting.
I wonder why that didn't catch on once we had
photo and video technology as the new form of portrait.
You had painted portraiture, then you had photo portraiture. Why
not video portraiture. So up on the wall, there's Grandpa.
They're just on a continuous loop of about ten minutes

(06:15):
of looking into the camera. Well that's what they have
in the Harry Potter world. There do not seem to
really be any stationary photographs. All photographs are these motion portraits.
So their ahead, Yeah, they are aheading. We don't lack.
The technology is just that doesn't seem to be what
people want when they're in their portraiture. Alright. So yeah,

(06:36):
as as we've been discussing, some of the predecessors to
the motion picture are are very much the photographic technologies
we've discussed before. But but but some things are not
really directly related to that technology. And then we also
really need to discuss some key phenomena that play into
the experience of motion picture viewing. Right, These would be

(06:59):
neurological and brain brain phenomena. Psychological phenomenon also, and one
of these phenomena has historically been referred to though it's
a problematic concept. We can discuss a little bit as
as persistence of vision, and other relevant phenomena that I
think we'll have to mention are known as beta motion
and the five phenomenon, which we will collectively call a

(07:19):
parent movement or a parent motion. Right, So as we proceed,
we'll we'll kind of like catch up on all of that. Yeah,
but let's let's start with this idea of persistence of vision. Okay,
so how do we think about motion pictures? Well, when
when when it's really good, we often don't think about
it at all, do we? Well? Yeah, I mean that's
what they say is the best director of a film

(07:40):
is the one who creates a film where you don't
notice the direction, Like you're not picking out technical elements,
I mean unless you're really looking for them. But it's
the person who creates the film that is pure experience, right,
You just get lost in the action, the emotion, the wonder.
But even if we're say a little bit bored or
checked out during a movie, or a TV show. We
may think of these things as well. We might just

(08:01):
think of it as a massive production or a work
of our We might kind of take it apart in
these different directions, right, Like, I wonder how they shot this,
So this is this is a pretty pretty long take.
I'm bored, but I'm admiring the all the work that
went into making it. But we're probably not thinking of
the film that we're viewing as visual stimuli. That exploits
a loophole in the way that we process images, right,

(08:23):
But that's exactly what it is. It's taking advantages of
sort of particular facts about the way our eyes and
our brains work to make us have the illusion that
we're looking at continuous images when actually we're when we're
looking at a succession of still images that do not
move at all. That's right. So, persistence of vision is
is the retention of a visual image for a short

(08:45):
period of time after the removal of the stimulus that
produced it. The human brain can only process ten to
twelve images per second, retaining an image for a for
up to a fifteenth of a second. If a new
image comes along within a fifteenth of the second, it
creates an illusion of continuity. Yeah. Now, in the nineteenth century,
persistence of vision was originally sort of believed to occur

(09:06):
because images lingered on the retina for a short period
of time after you see them. But I think that's
not exactly believed to be the true cause of the
experience of persistence of vision. Now, it is true that
fast successions of still images are processed in the brain
as continuous motion or you know, as as a single experience,

(09:28):
and not as a a succession of images, but not
because the retina functions like a camera taking snapshots that
can be measured in frames per second, where they stack
up if they come fast enough. I think the idea
there was that you'd sort of blend one frame into another, uh,
that persists as new frames are sensed. But our modern
understanding of vision as as perception is less like a

(09:51):
camera taking snapshots and more kind of like an integrated
sensation that involves the brain as much as the eyes.
So even though the original understanding of persistence of vision
might not be exactly technically correct, I think it's still
useful as a metaphor for one way that the still
image seems to flow smoothly from one moment to the next.
If these still images are projected fast enough, and it

(10:14):
it's ultimately simulates continuous motion. Yeah. And so motion pictures
were traditionally sixteen frames per second for silent films and
then twenty four frames per second for sound films. And
that seems to be kind of a low threshold of
what we what is good enough for us to perceive
is continuous motion. Yeah. Anything anything less than that, and
you're going to get into sort of a herky jerky

(10:36):
stop motion kind of feel right towards then the herky
jerkyman singing songs of love. Yeah. The the fire effect
was originally defined in nineteen twelve by psychologist mac Max Verdheimer,
and it's a He looked at it as a type
of optical illusion of perceiving a series of still images
when viewed in rapid session as a continuous motion. Yeah,

(10:57):
and this is one form of apparent movement. Unfortunately, it
seems to me that these two concepts are apparently constantly confused.
In writings on Photo History, I came across this because
I was getting confused reading about them when preparing for
the episode. Uh So. In in writings on vision Perception,
and film scholarship. The definitions of beta movement in five

(11:18):
effect seem kind of blurred together, as documented in a
two thousand paper published in the journal Vision Research. So
it took me forever to figure out what was going
on here, and I was glad to find out it
wasn't just me. Now here's the short, simple version both
of these two phenomena, the FI effect and beta movement,
they enable us to see various kinds of illusory motion

(11:41):
in successive still images, but they referred to different speeds
of projection and types of visual sensation. And to the
best of my understanding, it appears to me that what's
taking place in our perception of films is more related
to what's known as beta movement. But either way, it's
the brain's tendency to interpret certain types of changes in
successive static images displayed at the right speed as smooth

(12:04):
continuous motion. So, for example, if you see successive still
images in which three dots are changing position on a
black background in between the images, if you project them
fast enough, we don't see images one at a time,
but we see a snake moving around. Basically, you know
what happens when you make a little flipbook out of
the corners of a of a document. Yeah, so, on

(12:26):
its own, apparent movement is an extremely interesting phenomenon given
what it illustrates about the brain. It might be more
mysterious and more interesting than we give it credit for,
especially now that we're used to the idea of movies.
But we've discussed it a bit on stuff to blew
your mind before. In the context of forming a perception
of the present moment in our sense of now, like

(12:47):
apparent movement cited under the name of the fire effect
can be demonstrated, for example, by rapidly flashing dots on
different parts of a screen. Uh. And if the flashes
are timed and positioned correctly, we don't just perceive a
dot flashing here and then a dot flashing there, but
we perceive a single dot that moves between the locations

(13:09):
of the flashes. And this is one of the many,
many ways for us to realize that our vision is
not a straightforward objective record of reality, but it's a
world of sensation stitched together in the brain based on
objective light data, but definitely not a one to one
representation of it. And just as a side note, because
it's too strange and interesting not to mention. One really

(13:30):
spooky effect here is the so called color fi effect.
So what happens if you take this principle of two
flashing dots perceived as a single dot in motion, and
then you change the colors of the dots between flashes.
If your brain perceived continuous motion when there was none,
how does it handle the color change between the end

(13:52):
points of this path? You imagine you see the dot
taking right, flashes here, then flashes there, but changes color
in between. What what? What does the brain do there? Will?
Studies show that people tend to perceive a change in
the color of the dot about halfway along the path
that it takes. So you flash a red dot, then
you flash a green dot, and people see a dot

(14:14):
zip from one place to the other and change color
from red to green about halfway there. But the really
interesting question is how can you have seen the dot
change color halfway there if it wasn't actually traveling and
you didn't know what color the second dot would be
until you saw it. Oh wow, Yeah, that that's that
really forces you to rethink how we're perceiving now, how

(14:36):
we're perceiving time exactly. It's so strange because it's like,
for a split second your brain was able to predict
to the future, but of course we know that's not
what happened. In fact, what this seems to indicate instead
is that not only is our vision a stitch together
impression in our minds that's not a one for one
representation of reality, our perception of time from moment to

(14:56):
moment is a stitch together simulation as well, such that,
like our very perception can essentially be post addicted. What
you think you see in one split second can be
changed by what you see a split second later. It's
not until after you see the green dot that your
brain forms your perception of the dot you saw halfway

(15:16):
along its imaginary journey. So this means you're not just
seeing with your eyes, you're seeing with your memory and
with other cognitive functions of your brain. So it's it's
vision is not reality. Of course, it's an illusion mostly
informed by reality, but it's sort of formed in a
in a in an anti chamber of consciousness that's not

(15:37):
quite there in your sensation, where things are quickly edited
together for you to perceive. And of course all this
is crucial in the way that movies work. Movies are
not merely audio visual objects. They require quirks of the
human brain to make sense and to feel like representations
of reality. Alright, we're gonna take a quick break, but
when we come back, we're going to continue to discuss

(15:59):
how of the motion picture works in our brain and
then also some of the earlier models of this technology.
All right, so I've got a kind of weird proposition
about film technology, and it is that film technology we
should think of the earliest versions of it that originally

(16:21):
evolved as a specifically human biotechnology, sort of like a
medicine made specifically for the human body, rather than as
a pure physical technology, because it has to do specifically
with the human brain and the human eye. That's right.
This is something that I think is really mind blowing

(16:42):
to to think about, because given the numbers we mentioned previously,
you know, the human brain can only process ten to
twelve images per second um and and you know, and
then the way that the image will persist for the
fifte the second. You might be thinking, well, what about animals?
What about the various pets it we sometimes have hanging
out in our living rooms while the TV is on.

(17:04):
You might wonder, well, can some animals not see television
or films, or at least not see it the same
way we do? Right? And then how do they see it?
What would that be like just uh, to have different eyes,
different visual processing. I was wondering about this and I
found an excellent little article in Science Nordic and UH.
In this particular article do dogs see what's happening on TV?

(17:26):
They talked to Auto rope Stad, an associate or at
least then associate professor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary
Science and UH. He pointed out that he would this
would probably be like a strobe like torture show for
for any for for various animals to try and watch
or be forced to watch television um or a movie

(17:47):
at least on an older television set. So they're they're
they're being visited by the herkee jerkyman basically. So. The
article points out that while humans requires in this articles
at sixty twenty images a second to perceive the illusion
of films, dogs require seventy images per second. So it's
really only been in the past decade or so that
TV has become watchable to the canine audience. So at

(18:10):
least for the you know, the vast majority of canines
out there. Yeah, my dog has never shown any interest
in TV at all, even you know, our our more
recent TV and I but I think that may just
be because he's a snob. Because I was looking this
up and uh, there is research indicating that dogs can
recognize images, such as the images of other dogs and
humans on modern digital TV screens. It just seems like

(18:33):
some dogs don't really care. I also wonder about just
like the senses and that are important to have given
an organism, because obviously dog can't smell. Yeah, that the
dog sense of smell is is phenomenal, Like it they
live in a different sensory realm Uh that it's really
difficult for us to try to even imagine where it's.
It's really like like odor first, and if you remove

(18:56):
odor from the equation, they're just not going to be
taken in by the illusion. But we're we we put
all of our emphasis on visuals and then you know,
an audio second. Uh, we don't for the most part,
we don't really care what the films would smell like
outside of you know, a few smell a vision gimmicks
here and there. For the most part, we're we're fine

(19:17):
not smelling the film. Are we going to do an
episode on smell a vision one of the most important
inventions of the twentieth century. I think it would be
cool to do an episode where we talk about all
the sort of failed inventions and innovations of of of
the movie theater industry. Uh, you know, getting into The
Tingler and whatnot. The Tingler, Yes, fun film, The Tinkler. Um.

(19:40):
But okay, so the dogs seventy images per second. The
article points out that birds need a hundred frames per
second to see. And while the article didn't mention cats,
I have read elsewhere that they need a hundred frames
per second as well. Um and uh, and I have
noticed that that our cat, she will all lot of

(20:00):
times just not look at the television, but occasionally we'll
put on these these HD bird watching videos on YouTube
and she definitely perks up and gets into those. Now,
part of that is listening. Of course, dads have have
you know, amazing hearing, so they are you know, they're
she's definitely listening to all these birds sounds. But then
she's also tracking the movements as well. Um. But you know,

(20:24):
conceivably though this would not have been the case if
you were playing bird videos in prior decades. Well, I
think one thing we should keep in mind is that
our while we can be fooled in this illusion of
successive still images being interpreted as motion in our vision,
um that all our sense are different. Senses are not

(20:44):
all synchronized in how they perceive things. Uh, And they don't.
They don't get fooled in exactly the same way as.
For example, I was reading somewhere that in the early
days of film technology, when you would have like a
hand crank film playback, people could deal with slight variations
and speed at which the visual frames were coming, but
they could not deal with variations in which the accompanying

(21:07):
sound was coming. Yeah, I think back on on the
like the the the varying levels of of video quality
I've been willing to deal with, such as watching like
half scrambled episodes of Tales from the crypt you know,
in in my my childhood. But but when it comes
to audio, if there is audio present, like you needed
to have a certain degree of fidelity. Now, all of

(21:29):
this we we've discussed, then you can probably guess there
are ways to get to these effects, to to exploit
these phenomena and the human visual processing system without using
motion picture technology. Right, pote photographic motion picture technology, because
I guess you could have different definitions of what motion
pictures are, but like you could, there were things that

(21:52):
were sort of like a movie before there was ever
a photography based movie. Right. So the first thing we
want to talk about here is just sequential images and
sequential art, and we could easily do an entire episode
on sequential art. I I, for instance, I highly recommend
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. If you're at all interested
in comics and you haven't picked this up, uh, you

(22:13):
definitely should. It's an insightful, uh comics based breakdown of
all of this. So it it itself is in comic
book form, and it discusses like how comics work, how
they're composed, and its origins and sequential art. Can I
admit a weird personal thing about my experience with comics,
And I don't know why I do this. Often when
I read a graphic novel or read a comic book,

(22:36):
I find that I have to go back several pages
and look at the pictures because I get into a
rhythm of just reading the text in each frame and
only barely noticing what the image rey is. And I
find I have missed important plot elements because they were
subtle visual things in the images, and I it's like

(22:57):
I don't pay enough attention to that, and if I
don't make myself, I don't do it. Now, that's interesting.
I I've never experienced quite the same thing, but I
do find myself, especially if I'm reading a book that's
particularly gorgeous, I have to remind myself to go back
and look at the images, just to to take them
in fully, because I'm I'm just kind of speeding. I'm
speeding through them, and I'm not really focusing on all

(23:18):
the work that went into each frame, which if you're
dealing with, you know, with with some of the again,
the more gorgeous graphic novels out there, I feel like
I'm doing a disservice to the book and and and
also I'm not getting my money's worth out of it, right, Yeah,
I know I feel that sometimes too, And I don't
know why I have that tendency. I Mean, it would
seem almost obvious and automatic that you should pay attention

(23:40):
to the images, but sometimes the brain just doesn't work
that way. Maybe maybe this book you mentioned would help. Yeah, I,
like I said, I think it's a wonderful breakdown of
comics and it's uh, it makes you appreciate them all
the more. But it does get in a little bit
into the history of sequential images sequential art. Uh. We
should probably just summarize a bit and point out that

(24:01):
the modern comic book, like what you're probably thinking of
a comic book, and our idea of comics itself, largely
this came out of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So
some of the earlier forms actually pre date the motion picture,
such as the French comics of the eighteen thirties. Um. Now,
when you're going further back than that, when you're when

(24:22):
you're asking yourself, well, what are the oldest examples of
sequential art, I think about the fart scrolls, the fart scrolls. Oh, yes,
the Japanese farts and evil Japanese fart scrolls. I guess
they're not necessarily always sequential, but but no, um, that
is one of the one of the areas you can
end up going is not not so much the fart
scrolls themselves, but but the use of scrolls in Eastern traditions,

(24:46):
illustrated scrolls, yeah, scroll paintings in India, scroll paintings in
in East Asia, and Chinese traditions. There are there are
also some traditions in which the scroll is presented umm,
almost like uh, you know, a scrolling picture where it
is it's there's there's a performance art to it as well.
It's not just hey, look at these scrolls. It's like,
gather around, we will present to you the scroll, um,

(25:10):
and you know in the and so these are you know,
epic paintings where you you just you know, scan your
eyes across you you take it all in. So this
doesn't in any kind of optical illusions since simulate motion,
but it does allow you to cognitively put the motion
together in your head. Right, Yeah, there's But then again
that does get kind of difficult to write because we
are creatures of the motion picture era making sense of

(25:35):
sequential art and potential examples of sequential art from the past.
So there are a lot of these examples where it
depends on who's who's arguing which side. For instance, looking
at some of the uh, you know, the the the
ancient cave illustrations, some make the argument that, well, we're
looking at some form of sequential art. Others say absolutely not.

(25:55):
The bio tapestry is another example where some make the
argument it, yeah, what you're looking at here is sequential art,
grizzly medieval sequential art. But again, in all of this,
there is no actual illusion of movement. You know. I
was just thinking that, on one hand, it makes sense
too to just naturally sort something like an illustrated scroll

(26:16):
or a comic book into a different category than than
like a modern motion picture with a high frame rate,
because one, at least, it seems to me, we just
automatically perceive as continuous motion through this optical illusion, like
the beta movement type things. Uh, and and that's just
automatic and immediate, and whereas this other type of thing

(26:37):
like a scroll or a comic book with successive images
requires cognitive effort in the imagination to piece together into
a visual narrative that seems continuous. I do assume that
that's probably a difference that's hardwired into the brain. But
I wonder, I mean, I wonder what sort of role
conditioning and and sort of a culture of imagination in

(27:00):
place there that if you don't have things like movies,
if something like a comic book or a scroll with
successive images could, through a sort of culture of imagination practice,
feel more like a movie does to us, with like
this kind of automatic conjuring of continuous visual sensation. Does

(27:21):
that make any sense? Yeah? Again, this is one of
those areas where you can you can really work kind
of think yourself into a into a circle when you
start trying trying to decipher how you are actually absorbing
any particular form of media. You know, because you're getting
into the you know, you're reading an action scene in
a book and you're picturing it in your head um,

(27:42):
and then you're then you're watching an action scene. You're
reading an action scene on a comic book page. There's
something similar going on, but with more visual data to
inform what's happening in your mind. I read a book
a couple of years ago called What We See When
You Read? And I think the author's name was Peter

(28:02):
MENDELSSOHND or something like that. But I thought it was
a really interesting book. Basically it was just a sort
of artistically put together extension of this question of what
do you actually picture in your head as you read
a piece of fiction. How does the imagination work? Um,
Because we have this idea that like, Okay, when I

(28:25):
read a book, I see the character, but it keeps
asking all these probing questions about what exactly is it
that you think you see? How do you see it?
And it really makes you start to question the the
experience of your own imagination. It's almost like the imagination
can start to feel like a second order illusion within
your mind. Yeah, and and I feel like I had

(28:46):
my own experience. It's it's changed a lot over time.
Like when I first started reading like full blown novels
as a kid, I went to great lengths to sort
of cast it in my head and decide I did
like what actors were playing what characters, and then I
would like focus on a consistent casting throughout my reading

(29:07):
of the book. But for the most part, I got
away from that as I got older. Now I'll only
rarely do that, or or if there's some sort of
film adaptation of a book or something, perhaps that'll kind
of infect my my thinking along it. Um. I also
remember there was a time when if I watched anything
animated and then went and read a book, I would

(29:29):
end up seeing an animated and and it would always
kind of discourage me from reading. I'm like, I'm gonna
I'll read this tomorrow when the cartoons are out of
my head. But I don't really experience that anymore. I
wonder if does does the animation or the live action
take precedence when you've seen both, Like, do you so
you've seen live action and animation of the Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings, just one have precedence in

(29:52):
your mind? It's It's weird because this is a great example,
because there was a time, like the first time I
read The Lord of the Rings, I went to great
pains to not think about the animation right, and then
in rereading The Hobbit to my son Um, I kind
of forced myself to and I think by just distance,
by having not seen them in a while, I was
able to avoid like summoning just the images from the

(30:13):
Peter Jackson films and hopefully kind of have something in between,
something that we just kind of emerged more from from
my mind as opposed from these visual adaptations. I guess
there's some elements that are easier to dash than others,
because I feel like I could read Lord of the
Rings without picturing most of the stuff from movies, except
like Christopher Lee would be stuck there. Yeah, I couldn't.

(30:34):
I couldn't have any sorrow moan but him. Here's another example.
Um the Name of the rose By and Berto Eccho.
The first time I read it, uh, like uh in
high school. I think I was a big fan of
the film adaptation, which I had seen previously. So of
course I pictured brother William as being Sean Connery. But
that's not really how he's described in the book. He's

(30:56):
they say he's extremely tall and thin with red hair.
I believe. Yeah. So when I reread it, uh, And
this was several years ago. But during that I actually
had to I went to great pains to focus myself
and not picture Sean Connery, but instead to picture something
more along the lines of, say Jeremy Bratt or maybe
Jeremy Irons. You know, someone who has actually played Sherlock Holmes,

(31:18):
or has you know, something more in line with with
the like the field of a Home's character. Okay, I
feel like we've gotten really far field. I think it's
my fault. We should get back to simulations of the
h of movement. Simulations creating this illusion of continuous motion uh,
I guess after just mere sequential art, when they're started

(31:38):
to be devices that could rapidly show us images, that
would that would more automatically simulate motion. And one of
the crazy things about these, uh, these these these technologies
we're gonna discuss here is that they all emerge from
the same time period. They're all products of the photographic
era and and and products of the the birth of

(31:59):
the motion picture. Well, yeah, I mean this is a
time when people were thinking about the science of imagery
and vision, not just in the invention of the photograph.
And I remember it was in the eighteen thirties that
Louis de Gerret and Henry Fox Talbot were inventing their
their photography methods, like the Digera type and the what
would eventually become Talbot's Cala type method. It was in
eighteen thirty nine that they both announced them. So in

(32:20):
eighteen thirty two, that is when we see a little
invention that was known as the finn akistoscope. Yeah, and
so you you may have seen one of these in
a museum or perhaps you own one yourself as a
toy or a collectible. But it's a spinning cardboard disc
attached vertically to a handle and in position radially around

(32:40):
the center of the disk center, you have a subsequence
of images that, when rotated and viewed through slits on
an opposing disc, this creates the illusion of movement, like
a very simple animation. Generally it's something like an individual
jumping rope or an animal running, that sort of thing,
a person walking. Another example of this, pretty much the

(33:02):
same device is the zoo trope from four, a cylindrical
variation of the previous invention with viewing slits on the side,
so it looks like a drum, and you rotate it
and you stare through, and again you watch a very
simple animation unfold. And these two you'll find them in
a lot of like hands on science museums, you know,
around the world. Yeah, and to be clear again, in

(33:23):
the zoo trope, it's still images, but because you view
them spinning rapidly, and because you view them in these
slices through the slits, it simulates the continuous motion, but
it doesn't perfectly simulate it. It's a little bit jerky.
And one thing that's cool about that is that it
creates a kind of creepy effect. I was going to
mention that there are several scenes with a zootrope in

(33:45):
the horror movie The Conjuring Too, where the one of
Patrick Wilson. Well, he's in all the Conjurings, I think
at least the first two. The second one is the
one where he sings an Elvis song for some somebody
thought that was a good idea, but uh, there's a
sea where Patrick Wilson stares into one of these zootropes.
He's looking through the slit says the thing is spinning,

(34:06):
and he watches this strange man in a bowler hat
and an umbrella walking around until suddenly, like there's a
jump scare. A boogeyman with bad teeth does a jump
scare on Patrick Wilson. But it's actually a very effective
sort of set piece object for a horror film because
there is a way in which it's obvious and not
quite Their simulation of smooth motion is unsettling. I can't

(34:31):
think if I've seen it used in another horror movie.
Maybe it has been, but certainly other films have used
the idea, if not of a zootrope, at least of
a flickering presence or gait like I think of the
ghost in The Ring. Basically, I think any presence that
is almost but not quite smooth and continuous the way
modern films are tends to be perceived, at least these days,

(34:54):
is creepy or horrifying. And this could have to do
with a version of the Uncanny Valley effect, which we've
discussed on a couple of episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind. But I it's clear that a lot of
people perceive that type of motion or presence in a
flickering way as creepy today. Well, I know with Samara
in The Ring, I remember correctly they filmed the actor

(35:15):
walking backwards and then reversed the footage, so she's walking
towards the camera, but the motion, like we can tell
there's something weird about the motion, the way that her
limbs are moving. Yeah, but there is also like a
like a like a flicker, like there's a glitch in
a VHS tape or something. Uh, And so that that's
a weird. So there's the weird gate and there's the

(35:35):
flickering like you would see in the zootrope. I don't
know if it would have been perceived as creepy in
the same way back when these things were popular children's toys.
Maybe maybe not, I don't know. Now another case, and
this is a a really fun case to consider, is the
flipbooka um, and uh, you know it's easy, especially with hindsight,
to assume that the flipbook was surely invented, you know,

(35:57):
well before uh these pretty previous advancements, But there's no
evidence that it was really I mean, I made them
when I was a kid. You have to imagine that
people came up with this idea hundreds of years ago. Yeah,
I mean you can you I would guess like, all right,
well you need you need paper, so you need the
printed word and then you just need somebody board enough

(36:19):
to start drawing like a just a cartoon horse in
the corner, and then flip through them to create the
illusion of movement. Uh, you know, the kind of thing
that we all did as children, uh, in various notebooks
and what have you. But yeah, when when you start
looking at the history, it looks like, again, this is
one of those things that, yes, it clearly could have
been invented at any point, uh, in as long as

(36:41):
that we had paper and uh, you know, and it
was readily available. You know, we had some sort of
flippable book at your disposal. But it seems like eighteen
sixty eight is about as far back as we can
go the flip book. That is when uh, British printer
John Barnes Lena patented a flip book and uh, and
that's the oldest known documentation of the flipbook. And I

(37:04):
think a few things are illuminated here. Again, as we've
discussed in uh in previous episode, the dangers of hindsight
in considering the history of inventions, also just the true
impact of motion picture technology and the way it's changed
the way we think about images. And then of course
the fact that for most of of of of history,
paper wasn't something so readily wasted or even uh and

(37:28):
even bound flippable books. I imagine we're too revered for,
you know, for someone to make a bunch of scribbles
in the corners, though I'm kind of surprised a monk
never made one in the Middle Ages, like doing an
illuminated manuscript, Well, it's entirely possible that it that it
did and it didn't survive, Like that's possible, there's just
no evidence. Um. I think there have been some cases

(37:48):
for certain sequential art in illuminated manuscripts, but not not
a flipbook, nothing that creates the actual illusion of movement.
That's really interesting. Yeah, hindsight bias exactly. All Right, I
think we need to take another break, but then we
will be back to discuss a little more about the
technology that directly preceded the motion picture. Alright, we're back.

(38:15):
So when you think about a motion picture camera, in
order to do what it does, it has to take
a lot of photos in very quick succession that can
be played back in very quick succession, right, in order
to get the level of frame rate that actually looks
like motion to our eyes. So how how do we
get there? Like? What was there between the Daguero type
or the Cala type, you know, these single exposure camera

(38:39):
shots and the actual movie camera. Yeah. I can't help
but use the metaphor of of guns and weapons of
war when thinking about them, because certainly a Daguerreo type
would be kind of like an old timey canon, right,
Who's a pain to load it, to aim it, to
fire it, and then you'd have to go through the
whole rigamarole of loading it again. Uh So you know

(39:01):
you're you're dealing with with lengthy exposure times and some
of the earliest cameras. Right. But but but as the
but from a motion picture camera. To function as a
motion picture camera, you essentially have to have a machine gun.
It's just just taking picture after picture after picture after picture.
And so one thing that immediately occurs to me is
that you've got to somehow deal with the change in

(39:22):
the media on which it's recorded. Because the earliest photos
were taken on on media that had to be sort
of specially prepared and loaded up one at a time.
How how how could you load a camera for rapid
exposures of many images? Yeah, and when we're talking rapid exposure,
we're talking expacture exposure times of a fraction of a second,

(39:43):
a long way from those hour long exposures that we
were talking about and in previous episodes for photography, by
eighteen seventy the exposure time was down to one second
and ultimately one one thousands of a thousandth of a second,
which is fast enough for for motion pictures of course,
But how do you get all the like you obviously
you're not gonna be using like metal plates for that, right, Yeah, Well,

(40:06):
so here's the here's the thing. One of the earlier
approaches to this problem simply involved using multiple cameras. You know,
think again about the cannon where you can't possibly create
a single old timing cannon that's gonna fire uh six
cannon balls in the space of a few seconds. It's impossible.
Get your six cannons. You get six cannons, you line
them up, you have them, you know, you know, in

(40:28):
the ship, right, and then you just fire them all
off in succession. That's exactly the approach that was taken
early on by photographers such as Edward my Bridge. Oh yeah,
famous for the his running a Horse images from seven
He used a battery of twelve cameras to pull this off.
And I guess we'll explain more about that in a minute. Yes, Now,

(40:48):
before we came in here, Robert, you were you were
telling me some strange details about the life of Edward
my Bridge that I have never heard before. Yeah, I was.
I was reading a little bit about him in the
History of Photography by Beaumont new Hall and and um,
my Bridge is a fascinating character. Um do you know
why he spells his name the way he does? Yes,
so he wanted he wanted his name to sound more

(41:09):
archaic because he was born Edward James, Uh Muggeridge and Uh.
He wanted a fancier show name essentially, so it's Edward
in his name is spelled like ed weird, yes, and
then uh, and then my bridge is spelled m U
y b r I d g E. So earlier in
his life he was he was born eighteen thirty. He

(41:30):
would die in nineteen o four, but earlier in his
life he was a bookseller. But then he sustained severe
cranial injuries in a runaway stagecoach crash in eighteen sixty,
which it was like a brutal accident, actually killed one
of the passengers and injured just about everybody else too.
But anyway, you know, severe cranial injuries required a good
year of treatment uh, and he was forever changed by it.

(41:54):
Possibly there's possibly the reason for some of his emotional
and erratic behavior later in life. But during his recovery
he took up photography. Now and then this in photography
is where he would he would really make his name.
But as a there was just a note about a
murder trial that took place in the history of photography,

(42:14):
so I had to look into it a little bit
more and the and this is the story. Basically, in
eighteen seventy two he married Flora shall Cross Stone, but
then he caught wind of a former lover that lived
in the area and Major Harry Larkins, and he got
it in his head that that that Larkins was the

(42:35):
father of Stone's son, Floredo. So my Bridge went to
Larkins house, confronted him at the front door, and shot
him dead on his doorstep. Yeah, uh he or he
shot him and then he died later that day. At anyway,
fatally shot him on on his doorstep. And so my

(42:55):
Bridge was accused of the murder, and the defense ended
up leaning on his previous brain injury, saying, look, you
know he was in this horrible accident and it it
changed the way his his brain works. And and they
brought in an expert testimony, They brought in people to
speak to say, yeah, he was a totally different person
before this took place. And they were going for, you know,
an insanity plea, which I've read that that my Bridge

(43:17):
apparently undercut this himself when when he was questioned. But
at any rate, the judge ended up throwing out the
insanity pla and then acquitted my Bridge on the grounds
of justifiable homicide. That was a different time. Yeah, it was, yeah,
because clearly there was no questioning based on what I
was reading that he killed this guy, he murdered this

(43:40):
guy on on his doorstep. But but yeah, he was
he was acquitted. Uh, and it was considered justifiable homicide. UM.
It was an important case apparently because it serves as
like an historic forensic neurology case and neurology forensic neurology
neurology defense. Uh. It would also, by the way, go
on to become an opera. Philip Glass would compose an

(44:02):
opera based on these events titled The Photographer. But It's
just a yeah, really tragic episode. Uh. Flora petition for divorce,
had to do it twice and was finally granted it.
She died in eighteen seventy five, and then my Bridge
had the son placed in an orphanage and Florida ended
up working his entire life as a ranch hand and
a gardener, and he himself died into in a pedestrian

(44:26):
traffic accident. But but my Bridge had established himself by
this point as a as a photographic pioneer. Former Governor
of California, Leland Stanford had commissioned him to photograph his racehorses.
Work that was interrupted by the trial, but the resulting
images were widely published for their detailed depictions of horse locomotion.

(44:48):
And this was the idea of using multiple cameras set
up in succession to to capture images very rapidly back
to back. Yeah, run the horse pass this battery of cameras,
fire the cameras off, and then we can look and
see are the horses legs actually all coming off the
ground as it runs across the field. Apparently this is
a controversy in the eighteen seventies, like people are are

(45:10):
actually highly concerned to know whether the horses ever completely
airborne or always has at least one hoof on the ground, right. Yeah,
And so these images were since it were a sensation,
they were widely published for their detailed depiction of horse locomotion.
And uh And in eighteen eighty my Bridge invented what
he called a zoo gyroscope or a zoo practice scope

(45:34):
to project his pictures on the screen. So you know,
in all of this from capturing locomotion to projecting images.
He was highly influential. Like he he influenced a number
of individuals who would go on to continue to to
tinker with and uh and innovate uh motion picture technology.
I'd heard about his his accomplishments in photography before, I

(45:55):
had never heard about like the murder or any of this. Yeah. Yeah,
it's like it's a brutal and sad story because it's
it's one of those where you're you're dealing again with
with a brain injury as well, so it's not just
a situation. And I mean, we've talked a bit about
this and stuff to blow your mind when you really
start breaking down like neurological realities. A lot of our

(46:16):
judgments about people's behavior are not so cut and dry,
but this one I feel feels especially problematic. Um first
of all because of the brain injuries is sustained, and
then secondly because it's just like he clearly murdered somebody
in cold blood and um and was acquitted. So it's uh, yeah,
I'd say it's a tragic, tragic episode. But like I said,

(46:39):
he influenced a number of individuals, including in the eighteen
seventies French physiologists Etna Jules Mara, who lived eighteen thirty
through nineteen o four. Yes, the same the same years
that that my Bridge lived, and they both died in
May of nineteen o four, one week apart. So it's
just pure dumb luck. It is one of those things

(47:00):
that suggesting my Bridge did it. No, but it's one
of those things. When I was putting together my notes,
I was like, oh, did I just write down the
wrong dates for this individual's life because they're exactly the
dates of the previous individual. No, they just happened to
have been born and to have died in the exact
same years. But anyway, Um Murray he invented what he

(47:21):
would call the chrono photographic gun to capture the movements
of birds in flight. So he set out He's one
of these individuals who, like he was really going after
the science first, Like he was, he really wanted to
to break down how a bird is flying, to capture
the visual details that are that are happening too fast

(47:42):
for the human eye to observe, and so he was
developing the photographic technology to make it happen. Inspired by
my bridges work with horses, and this is a wonderful
contraption to look up, because it really did look like
a gun. Uh. It imprinted twelve photos a second on
a rotating glass plate. Uh. And it had it had

(48:03):
like a butt, you know, the shoulder, It had a
trigger like it was it was it was built on
the like the stock of a rifle. So there are
these wonderful old illustrations of a of a gentleman, presumably
Murray himself, you know, going down on one knee and
holding up the uh, this fabulous photographic gun and aiming

(48:26):
it at birds in flight. And and with this device again,
he's doing what my bridge did, but he's doing it
with a single instrument, yes, with one camera. So this
is a step closer actually to the idea of a
movie camera. Right. Again, only twelve images here, So all
he could do, and all he was setting out to do,
of course, was to capture the movements of a bird.

(48:47):
And uh and the and the the images that this uh,
this camera gun produced are are pretty impressive. Like they
are taking locomotion that is happening at a scale that
the human eye can't really perceive, in the human mind
can't fully process, and it's breaking it down so that
we can analyze it and this, uh, this continue to
inspire that both of these cases continue to inspire other

(49:09):
individuals to do the same thing with human locomotion, with
the locomotion of various animals. Uh, and you know, really
taking on the scientific task of using this new technology
to better understand what is transpiring in reality. Well, as
we were talking about at the very beginning, it makes
me imagine an alternate history in which movies come about,

(49:30):
but they're only considered like a tool of documenting reality
in order to study it, and they never get repurposed
into like any form of storytelling. Yeah, or you could
imagine an alternate world where where it's prohibited, where where
cinematic technology, photographic technology is only for uh, for science

(49:50):
and truth, never for for for narrative, never for transformers. Alright, well,
we're gonna go ahead and cut this episode off here,
but we will be back to finish with a part
two on motion picture technology. That's right, we'll get into
a great Edison rivalry that doesn't even involve Nikola Tesla. Yeah,

(50:12):
but but yeah, Edison will definitely play a role, as
will Kodak as as we set up in previous episodes,
and and we'll discuss more about just the impact of
like how how motion pictures were initially perceived and how
people reacted to this in this new medium, and then
again how it's just changed the way we understand reality
in the passing of time and our our own sense

(50:33):
of self in the meantime. If you want to check
out more episodes of Invention, head on over to in
Invention show dot com. That's where we'll find all the episodes.
If you want to discuss episodes of Invention, a really
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where folks talk about episodes of Stuff to Bow Your Mind,

(50:55):
which Joe and I also host, but also episodes of
Invention are discussed there as well. Big thanks to Scott
Benjamin for research assistance with this episode, and to our
excellent audio producer, Tor Harrison. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback about this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at

(51:16):
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