May 13, 2019 • 43 mins
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
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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 we're back with another part of our
exploration of the invention of the motion picture. So, as
we were discussing in the previous episode, so, I think
one of the things we've we've been trying to lay
(00:23):
the groundwork for, is that the idea of the motion picture,
like the movies we watched today, was not one of
these inventions that just like comes out of nowhere, right,
the Eureka moment that strikes some brilliant inventor's brain. The
motion picture very much grew out of several streams of
existing technology, right, absolutely, Yeah, there's not just one individual
(00:46):
as this is this dream of motion pictures and then
develops it, invents it, and then an unveils the motion
picture for a hungry for the hungry masses to view. Right. Uh.
And it's something also that I think people's taste for
in a way had to develop up over time. And
I think we can explore that more as the episodes
go on. But uh, where we're starting today, I think
there are three major streams of technology that are feeding
(01:11):
into the development of the motion picture. So one is
something we talked about last time that we might call
animation devices like the Phoenickista cope or the Phoenikista scope
it's been called both, or the zootrope. These were toys
that created an illusion of continuous motion by rolling through
a succession of still images that took advantage of loopholes
(01:35):
in the way that our eyes and our brains perceive images,
known as a parent movement. Basically, it was an optical
illusion that allowed a bunch of still images to appear
to us as something that is moving, right, And these
were devices that grew out of the age of photography.
So these were not ancient by any or really any
older than photographic technology. Right. But these early animation devices
(01:58):
were mostly known for animating like drawings or silhouette cutouts.
But an interesting question you might have wondered about at
the time, say it's the eighteen seventies of the eighteen
eighties or so, you might be getting to wonder if
you could combine the optical principles here in the in
these animation devices of a parent movement generated by looking
at successive still images really fast with another technology and development,
(02:21):
which of course is photography, so to replace these hand
drawn or hand cut still images with direct records of
scenes in reality exactly. And then finally, another technology that
we've explored a lot less so far but will become
really important in today's episode that feeds into the history
of the motion picture is something that's known as the
magic lantern, and that's an invention that had existed for
(02:45):
centuries by the time of the motion picture was invented.
But essentially you can think of it as kind of
an early version of the slide projector. You ever like
go over to you know, back in the day, you
go over to somebody's house and they want to show
you pictures of their vacation, and they go through the
slide projector it shows them up on a screen or
up on the wall. Oh yeah, I mean, I fondly
remember my family's own slide projector. I was never really
(03:06):
allowed to mess with it, uh, and maybe that's why
it was so fascinating And then you broke it. No,
I never never never got the chance. Okay, I guess
some some schools use these two occasionally. Yeah, I definitely
remember projectors, slide projectors coming up in in classroom environments
as well. Yeah, But basically it combines a transparent plate
on which an image is drawn or otherwise captured, uh,
(03:29):
and a lens and a light source that shines through
the plate that has the image on it, and through
the lens projecting the image on a surface or screen. Yeah.
I mean I should also add that, of course, you
have you have other old performance methods that involved you know,
shadow puppets, yes exactly, which would have also been a
projection based medium. Well, that's a really great point. I mean,
(03:51):
one way to create a very crude version of a
motion picture would be to use a magic lantern to
project images and then actually just to move the plate
or elements within the plate around, kind of like you
would move your hands in a shadow puppet show. You know,
like if you're projecting through a glass plate and you've
got things on the plate, you could kind of have
(04:11):
them dance around and fight each other and all that
kind of stuff. But obviously you'd be fairly limited in
what you could do with that. So all three of
these are not motion pictures, and yet they all kind
of converge into the idea of the motion picture. Right
if you combine these three principles, you've pretty much got
the earliest makings of a live action movie, but we're
not there yet. A sort of early combination of these
(04:34):
three elements was another device that we mentioned in the
last episode, the Zoa practice scope, which was invented by
Edward my Bridge, the photographer and inventor around the end
of the eighteen seventies. So you remember we talked about
Edward my Bridge in the last episode where he didn't
just use one camera, but he would use a battery
of cameras to capture a bunch of images really fast.
(04:56):
Absolutely Yes, as the as a horse ran by, this
battery of cameras would go off, resulting in this this, this,
this series of images to portray the locomotion of the horse. Right,
So if he wanted to like show off those images
in a way that wasn't just like you know, looking
at them one at a time. He he could sort
(05:17):
of animate them together. And that's what the zoo practicoscope
was for. Uh. He used a very complicated process to
sort of treat and re render the silhouettes of all
those still images taken really fast by a battery of cameras,
and then it would put he would put them around
the edge of a glass disk in sequence, which could
then be rotated in front of a projected light source,
(05:40):
showing off the sort of realism of movement captured frame
by frame. But of course, even if you look at this,
this is sort of the principle of the motion picture.
But I think most people wouldn't think that it was
a movie just yet. Now, at this point in the story,
we have to reintroduce a character who has already shown
up on invention in the past. I believe he made
an appearance in our X ray episode. Oh really, Yeah,
(06:02):
he shows up a lot in the especially like the
second half of the nineteen hundreds. If you're dealing with inventions,
whether or not he necessarily deserves all the credit for
some breakthrough, he may show up in the story, right
and you, yeah, you can't remove him from the story.
He was a major player, right. So this is where
Thomas Edison enters the picture. So you may have heard
(06:24):
that the prolific inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison invented
the motion picture, And I think if that is what
you believe, you are sort of unwittingly a part of
Thomas Edison's diabolical plan. Uh, though he did play a
very important role in the early development of the motion
picture I don't want to play that game. A lot
of people really love to sort of over demonize Thomas Edison.
(06:46):
I think there are some very valid critiques of the
man historically, but you know, a lot of people just
like that. They go the Tesla versus Edison route, and
like Tesla is the hero and Edison's the villain. But
I do think it's basically true. A lot of what
Thomas Edison did was come up with, or catch wind
of innovative technological concepts that are sort of on the
(07:08):
edge of discovery, and then hire other people to do
the heavy lifting of designing these things, so then Edison
could reap the much of the profit and the credit himself.
And one of these assistants that Edison hired who worked
for Edison was a guy named William Kennedy Lorie Dickson,
also known often in books referenced as W. K. L.
(07:28):
Dixon and Dickson was a photographer, and this may have
been part of the reason that in June eight eighty nine,
Edison selected him to actually design a device that Edison
had kind of conceptualized, which he was calling the kinetoscope,
of course, from kineto meaning movement and scope meaning like
to see or to watch. But you might wonder where
(07:50):
did Edison get this idea from. Well, we can't know
for sure all of what Edison had in mind before this,
so I think there's some indication he may have already
been interested in the idea of move being images. But
one thing we do know that I was reading about
is that in eighty eight Edward my Bridge visited Edison's
laboratory in New Jersey. Apparently my Bridge was there to
(08:11):
suggest a partnership. UH see, Edison and his lab workers
had recently invented a device, or not not quite so recently.
It was around eighteen seventy seven. I think it was
patented in eighteen seventy eight called the phonograph, And the
phonograph was huge. It was a big breakthrough. It was
a sound recording and playback device that was immensely popular.
(08:34):
It would later evolve into the record player, though the
original uh phonograph both recorded and played back cylinders, not disks,
you know, if I remember correctly, These pop up in
brom Stoker's novel Dracula Really yeah, some of the you know,
it's all a little bits, tidbits from various people's journals
and diaries and in some cases their cylinder recording. Oh
(08:56):
Dr Seward does he do dictation on phonograph cylinders? See,
I don't remember exactly which characters. I know it's not Dracula,
and there are no chapters from Dracula's perspective, unfortunately. But yeah,
So so Edison and his people they had the phonograph,
and that was this very popular revolutionary technology could record
(09:18):
in playback sound. And so in February of eight, my
Bridge showed up with an idea. He said, Hey, let's collaborate.
I'll pare your phonograph with Miso practice scope, and we'll
have sound accompanying moving pictures, which is perfect. Like, that's
exactly the direction things we're gonna go in. Edison passed,
(09:41):
and he was like not interested. But then pretty much
immediately Edison moved on the idea of creating an improved
motion picture capture and playback device quote to do for
the eye what the phonograph does for the ear. And
this would be the kinetoscope that we mentioned a moment ago.
So I don't think you can say that Edison was
(10:02):
stealing my Bridge's idea because what they would eventually come
up with was so much better and more practical than
the Zoo practice practice code. But it does seem right
that he thought, you know, instead of partnering with this guy,
I can just make a much better version of his thing.
Whether that's crooked or not, I don't know. I'll leave
that up to you to judge. So in eighteen eighty nine,
(10:24):
Edison tasks uh William Dixon, his his worker W. K. L. Dixon,
with inventing this device that he has conceptualized to do
for the eye what the phonograph did for the year,
essentially a video recording and playback device, and apparently early
prototypes did not work very well. One idea seemed to
be inspired by the phonograph cylinder, Uh, and it was
(10:47):
the idea that you would place tiny reflective photos on
a cylinder that would simulate motion through reflected light. As
the cylinder spun, you can kind of just like picture.
That not working very well, so you might want or okay,
how do we solve these problems? Well. In the last episode,
we talked about the French physiologist A Tene Jules Moray
(11:07):
who in the eighteen seventies invented this device that was
called the Chrono photographic gun, or at least that's what
we called it at the Chrona Photograph uh And it
was like this scientific instrument. It's kind of like a
machine gun for taking pictures. Its goal was to rapidly
capture a lot of photographs very quickly, around twelve photos
(11:28):
per second on a rotating piece of glass on which
photographic emulsions had been prepared inside a drum. That makes
it look kind of like a mutated Tommy gun. Yeah,
it's super weird. It's like a Wizards machine gun. It's whatever. Yeah,
that's right. Uh So, so it's a precursor in the
movie camera in a way. But it also straight up
looks like a rifle. And Murray was inspired by Edward
(11:52):
my Bridge's work and he used the chrona Photographic gun
to take lots of pictures really fast, of like birds
in flight, to get a better idea of what's happened
with the movements of a bird's wings and body during flight,
which normally happens too fast for us to see is
just a blur. So Murray was very much in the
in the spirit of science. He was not trying to
create an entertainment device. He was trying to study nature,
(12:13):
study the locomotion and of birds in this case. So
in a way, Murray's Gun was a step in the
right direction toward motion pictures. But because it it has
some limitations that either variously relied on either plate glass
exposures or relatively fragile paper film, there's no way you
could use it to record more than a very short
(12:34):
period of motion, maybe like a second or two, and
you couldn't effectively load and have ready enough of the
medium it recorded the images on to make it, you know,
something that could record for extended periods of time. But
it seems Edison did draw some inspiration from Murray in principle.
And this is where another individual from a past episode
pops up, an individual who played an important role in
(12:57):
the development of photographic technology. G George Eastman. That's right.
So Eastman played an important role, uh with helping come
up with the medium. So Eastman of Eastman Kodak, of course,
who we discussed previously, had created paper film rolls that
did not require glass plates. And this is this is
(13:18):
an important step in in thinking about the media on
which photographs are recorded, because just think about if you
had to create a movie cameras capturing I don't know,
so you're trying to capture forty frames per second or
even if you're going low and just trying to do
like sixteen frames per second or something, and you want
to do that all on like glass plates. How do
(13:39):
you do that? You do use like glass glass plates
framed with wood that are on like a belt chain
together to go past the camera to get exposed. How
many times per second? You can imagine how the medium
there makes the camera set up really unwieldy and and
to a certain extent, impossible to record more than a
few seconds at a time. Right, Yeah, you're coming up
(14:01):
against the hard limits of the of the material there.
I would love to see one of these, though. I'm
sure there's a great version of like a steampunk video
game or something that has like just like giant drums
of glass plate belts rattling through as the cameras shooting
on them. Uh So, one thing Eastman had created by
eighteen eighty eight was paper film roles that didn't require
glass plates. Uh this wasn't the first paper film, but
(14:24):
this was a version of paper film. Uh and and
this is an improvement because you can imagine at least okay,
paper can be like rolled up in great quantities that
you could feed through a camera if you needed to
shoot tons of photos in quick succession. Right, it begins
to to make it possible to really um capture footage
(14:44):
of of of the world in action. Yeah, but this
paper film was relatively fragile, flimsy, difficult to work with.
It just wasn't very good. Meanwhile, a year before, in
eighteen eighty seven, an American Episcopalian rector named Hannibal Goodwin
who lived in Newark, New Jersey, came up with a
different ideas, an idea for a medium for photographic exposures,
(15:06):
and that would be celluloid. Now, celluloid is a transparent
kind of synthetic plastic invented in the eighteen sixties. And
to to make it, you can start with natural cellulose,
which is a plant polymer that you'd find in cotton
or wood or in himp. Cotton is like mostly cellulose,
so you can just picture a ball of cotton, and
(15:27):
then you take that cell cellulose and you treat it
with nitric acid and this gives you an extremely flammable
plastic compound called nitro cellulose, and nitro cellulose and celluloid
become the early basis of film technology, creating these continuous
strips of plastic that could serve as film roles. Uh
And originally, though it's funny reading about how celluloid plastic
(15:50):
in the like eighteen sixties seventies that served all kinds
of weird uses, or at least people imagined it would
like as a substitute for expensive precious materials like ivory,
or it was also used in clothing. I've read something
about like men's shirts and stuff being having cell celluloid components.
(16:12):
Another one was I read about somebody's idea to use
celluloid to make billiard balls. Um. But eventually Eastman and
collaborators would switch over to producing roles of celluloid based film,
and this could be manufactured in the kinds of long,
durable roles necessary for exposing the dozens or hundreds or
(16:33):
thousands of shots necessary to record more than a second
or two of motion picture. Uh. Though Eastman did have
a long running patent dispute with Hannibal Goodwin and his
estate about celluloid film. They had to go back and
forth about who had the rights to do what with it.
But once this durable plastic film celluloid film was available
(16:54):
in bulk from Eastman, William Dixon and Edison and colleagues
suddenly had new kinds of option is open to them,
Like this would allow you to do a lot more
with filming the world and why did they ever film
the world? We're going to take a quick break and
when we come back we'll continue our discussion with the
history of the motion picture. Alright, We're back, all right,
(17:19):
So I guess we should discuss some design issues with
the movie camera that William Dixon in Edison's lab was
trying to create. One problem would be this, do you
ever think about the like, how does a movie camera
simulate motion? In the last episode we talked about how
it has to simulate motion by showing you still images
in a very rapid succession. This is the way that
(17:42):
the optical illusion works. Uh. And it doesn't work to
take say a few hundred photos in succession and then
roll them past your eyes in one smooth emotion, right,
because what would you see there? Just a blur? Right?
That won't cut it right. I mean, that's not showing
you a succession of still in images. That's just showing
you images that are moving top to bottom or moving
(18:04):
side to side too fast for you to look at them.
So instead, what you have to do is find a
way to project lots of distinct, unmoving images very rapidly,
one after another. So how to do that? Well, if
you've ever think about what celluloid film roles look like,
especially movie film, you know those holes in the sides
of the film strip, Well that's where they come in. Uh.
(18:27):
These holes allowed their devices to rapidly grab the film
strip with a fast moving lever that had teeth to
fit the holes, advance exactly one frame, project that frame
through the shutter without moving it, and then close the
shutter and advance the next frame. So you're hitting here's
the image, and then here's the new image, here's the
(18:47):
here's the next image. Yeah again, not just running it
through like it's the like the belt on an engine, right,
but dozens of frames for second and it has to
stop on each one. So in AUGUSTE. Edison filed for
a patent on two separate machines, the kinetic graph, which
was the movie camera and the Kineta scope, which was
the movie playback device. And these were two separate things,
(19:10):
so that the Kinetic Graph camera was this gigantic, monstrous
electrical device for shooting films. It weighed like a thousand
pounds or something. It was huge. Uh. It used components
modeled on the internal workings of a clock to ensure
the regular stop and start motion of advancing the film
and stopping it one frame at a time, and to
(19:31):
synchronize the opening of the shutter with the placement of
the next frame. And this device initially filmed at a
rate of about forty frames per second. Meanwhile, the Kineta
scope was a large wooden cabinet about four ft high
that held a film strip inside, and this was the
dedicated playback device for films made on the Kinetic graph.
(19:53):
The viewer would look through a lens at the top
of the cabinet, kind of like the eyepiece for a
view master. Did you ever have one of those? Okay, yeah, yeah,
So it's not really a screen. It's like binoculars that
you know, you put your eyes in and you look
down into the machine, and inside the machine the film
hung from rollers and during playback it would be advanced rapidly,
(20:15):
one frame at a time by an electrically powered sprocket
with an electric lamp shining up through each frame into
the viewing lens, which allows you to see the motion
picture projected into your eyes. Right, and now that this
is impressive, don't get me wrong. But but obviously the
limitations are apparent, Like this is a device that can
be used by one person at a time. It is
(20:36):
a large cabinet. Uh, it's more like a peep show
as opposed to what you might think of as a
as movie viewing, certainly as a communal experience. That's exactly right.
I mean, can you imagine a world where everybody was
just walking around staring into their own individual devices to
watch video and weren't interacting with each other. Yes, but
(20:59):
it is a great point because the history of of
motion picture technology, cinematic technology, the ability to watch the
moving image. Uh, it's kind of you see these different
trends like the like, like something will be individual and
then it will go communal, and then there'll be new
ways to make it more individual again and generally with
(21:19):
the we see it both ways. Like here, the advancements
would make movie viewing more communal, and then later on
it would be in the different direction. Let's take let's
take this thing that is that has to be communal,
and let's let you do it in the privacy of
your own home. Um, and I imagine you know, they're
they're they're pros and cons with with both with both directions. Yeah, exactly.
(21:41):
I mean this was a very different viewing experience, even
then looking at a video on your phone. Uh, it
was just extremely different because number one, um, we'll talk
a little bit more about where these kinetoscopes were deployed,
but they would be out in public semi public places,
you know, and you could go use one. And while
the kinetoscope parlor might be a happen and hang out
(22:02):
when you view the movie, you're viewing it alone with
your face attached to a box. That's not like going
to a movie theater, like you're saying. It's completely different
kind of culture around how these things are viewed. But
also the films had to be very different then because
of the technical physical limitations on the film strips, on
(22:22):
the kinetograph, and on the kinetoscope the way they were built,
you can only accommodate about fifty feet or about fourteen
meters of celluloid film at a time and then play
it back. So this severely limits the length that the
film can be. It makes it you know, it could
be maybe fifteen seconds or so. So let's say you
saunter up to a kinetoscope, you know, you go, you
(22:43):
go to the local kinetoscope parlor and you're gonna have
a look see into one of these things. What did
you watch in there? Well, Edison essentially had to become
not just an inventor, but a a media mogul, like
a film producer, because nobody else was making films to
go in this thing. He had to make the content
to go in the device. So he founded a movie
(23:04):
studio in West Orange, New Jersey to record the first
real commercial motion pictures. And these movies tended to be
like short spectacles. Uh. Again, due to the limitations on
the technology, they couldn't be more than, you know, fifteen
seconds or so. And they didn't have dedicated sound because
even though Edison was into pairing this thing with the phonograph,
(23:27):
they couldn't yet figure out how to synchronize the movie
and the sound right. And at the time, there wasn't
really a practice of film editing, which meant that the
you know, the convention was that the film would be
shot in one take. So what ended up on these
early films were things that were brief and kind of
interesting to look at and could be done all at
(23:47):
once in one take. Many of them were like quick
vaudeville acts featuring slapstick comedy or circus performances like you know,
so Ballerina's dancing, or people like doing trapeze acts, or
a strong man lifting something. Right. I mean, basically, the
technology allowed you to capture motion, and so you just
had to go out and find interesting examples of motion.
(24:09):
The person doing this, an animal doing this, a machine
doing this. Now that might sound boring to us, but
these things people were very interested in seeing this, Like
this was a hot technology. People were into it. Yeah,
Like I mean, I can imagine, you know, we can
talking about how it's not a communal thing to watch it,
but you know, you might go with somebody to see this.
You would each have your turn looking into the machine,
(24:30):
witnessing the motion, and then you would inevitably talk about it.
Did you see that? Was that not amazing? You just
you looked in it and and there it was brought
to life. Yeah, and so in the eight ten nineties, kinetoscopes,
the viewing machines were bought and put anywhere I would say,
you might normally see some kind of cabinet attraction or
game machine, So amusement parks, the lobbies of public buildings,
(24:52):
stuff like that. Dedicated kinetoscope parlors also became popular, starting
in New York City. They were sort of like a
video arcade where people would go and line up at cabinets,
not to play street fighter, but to look through the
peep hole and watch the films inside the boxes. I
am trying to imagine what it would what what it
would have been like to be in one of these
(25:12):
uh kinetoscope parlors, because you'd have it was like a
public setting, but you would be frequently while you were there,
like going into this other world for fifteen seconds or so,
where you would lose your body and you disappear into
the machine and the machine is your awareness, but everybody
could see you. So you're just standing there with your
(25:34):
face in this cabinet and like you, I don't know
this this weird public, private kind of thing, you know,
I know exactly what it would be like. I remember
when when we went to New York City and we
went to a premiere of One Strange Rock. Okay, they
had these helmets. When you put the helmet on and
you would it was like part of the marketing thing. Yeah,
the daft punk helmets, and it was like this daft punk,
(25:55):
like really cool helmets, very well designed. You put them
on and you would get to see in here in
this case, um like essentially a trailer for the show,
and it was pretty impressive projecting it inside a screen
on the inside of the helmet. So you're just sitting
there in a room full of people having cocktails and
wandering around and you've got a helmet on and you're
like drooling. Well yeah, so I imagine that's kind of
(26:18):
what this was like. Okay, well that was I'm not
saying I didn't appreciate the experience. It was a little
awkward standing there in a room full of people with
your own consciousness engaged inside a device. Yeah, but then
when you put the device on, it's pretty cool. And likewise,
the kinetoscope would have had a similar experience. Again, it's
just I imagine a lot of people standing around talking
(26:41):
about it, like man what was it like when you
looked into it. Did you see that horse running? Did
you see that you know whatever, the particular bit of
motion that was captured, whatever it was like, people would
just be geeking out over it. Yeah, And so what
did Edison think about the potential of this this thing?
I mean, obviously people were excited about it. You get
(27:03):
kind of mixed feelings reading about this that in some
ways it seems like he didn't at first seem to
fully realize the potential of films as their own extended medium,
Like he obviously failed to make some certain leaps from
the kinetoscope and the kinetograph immediately, right, Like it's easy
to imagine, I'm guessing where you're thinking, Like, Okay, I've
(27:23):
created an entertaining, uh side show, a machine for amusement,
and I can see them continuing to be a successful thing.
Like maybe it's it's like a pinball machine exactly, there's
the one in the front of a pizza joint. Yeah,
and maybe if you're like really savvy, you might see
the future nefarious uses of essentially peep show machines. But
(27:43):
for the most part, like you're not imagining the Academy
Awards but then at the same time, I mean Edison,
he says like some grandiose stuff about it there. This
was later, I think this was in like in the
nineteen teens or something, But I found a quote where
he once remarked, I am spending more than my income
getting up a set of six thousand films to teach
(28:04):
the nineteen million students in the schools of the United
States to do away entirely with books. Dear god Edison,
step back, friend, Well, I mean, clearly he was. He
he had doubled down on that point and said, no,
not only is this an important technology, it's the important technology.
(28:25):
It's going to erase the written word from our schools. Now. Edison, Dixon,
and and the people we've mentioned so far definitely were
not the only people to serve in the creation of
motion pictures around the you know, the eighteen eighties. This
was in the air and other people were sort of
working on this. It does seem that Dixon and Edison
got there first with commercially viable, patented machines, but it
(28:50):
seems that a French inventor named Louis la Prince got
there before Edison's lab to make a movie camera that worked,
though he never got to capitalize on his work. Uh
La Prince invented a motion picture camera. He shot several
films in England around the year eighteen eighty eight, and
he'd been planning to show off his invention in the
United States in the year eight teen ninety. But then
(29:11):
something very strange happened. Mysteriously, he disappeared before he had
a chance to show off his invention. And we're actually
going to devote an entire episode to this subject to
explore this mystery, in an episode where we'll be joined
next time by our friend Scott Benjamin. But a short
version is that that Edison is the name that remains
important here. Yes, certainly is getting the credit, right, though
(29:33):
I think more recent historians would probably say it looks
like Dixon did more of the work, and of course
Edison just sort of like owned his work and was
his boss and then got the credit for it. All Right, Well,
on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
But when we come back, we're going to discuss another
pair of individuals who are exceedingly important in the development
of motion picture technology. We're gonna talk about the Lumier brothers. Alright,
(30:01):
we're back. So Robert tell me about the Loumier brothers.
All right, well, uh, just like it sounds, there are
two of them. They're brothers. There's Auguste Lumier and Louis Loumier. Um. Uh.
August lived eighteen sixty two through nineteen fifty four and
Louis lived eighteen sixty four through ninety eight. So they
(30:22):
were the French sons of the painter turned photographer Antoine Lumier. Uh.
So basically they were both born into the photographic world. Uh.
And they both had an aptitude for science. At the
age of eighteen, with his father's help, Louis opened a
factory for photographic plates and it was quite successful. Um.
And so you know, this becomes this is the family
(30:44):
business at this point. Meanwhile, their father, Um, he attends
a showing of Edison's kinetoscope in Paris and was really
impressed by it. So he comes back and he tells
his sons about it, and they began to work on
the problem of animating objections projections. Okay, so now remember
the kinetoscope we were just talking about is a cabinet
(31:06):
where you have a private experience with a moving picture.
The cabinet might be at a parlor or business somewhere,
and you go and you stick your face in it
and you can watch a fifteen second movie of uh,
you know, a circus act or a vaudeville show. Right. Yes,
it's it's like it's like going to a gathering and
someone is showing something on a like a tiny iPhone screen. Yeah,
(31:29):
you know if you get to look at it one
at a time, right, yeah, that sort of thing. But
so the brothers here they questioned, you know, what else
was possible? What can we do with projection? So they
created a camera, uh this cinematography, and that could photograph
and project project at sixteen frames per second. And it
had a number of advantages over Edison's invention. It was
(31:50):
far lighter. Oh yeah, Edison's Now remember the kinematic graph
the camera they used that was like it was gigantic.
It was like a thousand pounds or said. This was lighter,
it was more portable, um and uh. And then when
you're actually projecting the resulting footage, it moved at a
slower speed as well, creating a more fluid movement movement.
It was also far less noisy, because that was another
(32:12):
thing about Kinetograph is that it was it was noisy.
Another key improvement, though, is that more than one person
could watch the film at a time. Seems like a
big deal. Yeah. To quote Caroline Slade in her two
thousand twelve Telegraph article about the Brothers, uh quote, the
Lumier's cinema, cinematography not only created the filmmaker, it created
(32:34):
the viewer. That's interesting because again there's no I mean,
when you have when you create media, you created for
an audience, and when there was previously no wide audience
for a certain kind of media, you have to make
that audience somehow. You have to like teach them how
(32:54):
to receive what you're producing. And kind of like what
I said earlier, cinema was for the longest time, and
in large part still is about communal viewing. I mean,
technology has introduced different waves of private viewing over the years,
you know, be it uh you know, TV broadcasts or
VHS tapes, etcetera. Uh, you know, and it's it's impacted
the medium and the way we engage with it. But
(33:16):
we still place a high priority on communal viewing. We
may not like the people that sometimes we have to
watch a film with if they're like too noisy, or
they you know, they eat your popcorn too loud. But
you know, I think by and large, if we want
to share the viewing experience with someone, yes, I mean
it's it's like the experience of going to a play,
(33:37):
except of course it's a movie. I mean, being an
audience is a communal experience, and there is it can
be moving at times, like when you go see a
big new movie that's really good and the audience is
excited about it and they're cheering and they're clapping. That's
part of the experience too. It's not just like you know,
you're there with the movie and there happened to be
other people around you. I mean, all movies today could
(33:58):
be released directive video. There's no reason that they that
they couldn't be except that there apparently just is still
desire for people to go to movie theaters, right. And
I think about that a lot because I'm often the
person who's like, I have to wait for this Avengers
movie to show up on an airplane. Can't I just
watch it and let it? Now? You know why I
don't want to go to a theater and spend three
(34:20):
hours there and and so sometimes if i'm more, you know,
I'm grumpier about it, I'll think, Oh, it's just the
nobody actually wants to go to a theater. This is
just the theater industry. But but no, I think people do.
I mean, we do want to go see films we
care about in a theater. There's something about the theater
experience especially, and at least there's something about the communal
(34:40):
viewing experience, especially if something is supposed to be funny. Yes,
that that is huge the laughter or I think actually also, um,
it's important with horror movies, horror movies that the audience
plays a role there too, and it might actually have
to do with laughter. I mean, if if you see
a horror movie in the theater, you will encounter sometimes
(35:01):
as much laughter as you do when you're seeing a
good comedy, either because the horror movie is bad, as
it often is, and it becomes very funny, or because
it's very good and there's a constant kind of low
level nervous release going on whenever tension is alleviated somehow
in the film. Yeah, Christian and I did an entire
episode of stuff to blow your mind about that a
(35:22):
few years back. So you can people can look for
that at stuff to blow your mind dot com. Uh so,
let's let's get back to the French brothers here, okay,
uh and the and essentially they were in the same
boat as as Edison, like, you create this technology, now
you've got to create some films. I don't know what.
I'm sorry, I just realized I'm picturing both of them
(35:43):
as the candlestick from Beauty and the beast. That was
his name, right, was it? Was it Loumier? Okay, well
that was that must have been their their their reference there, No,
they were. They both looked more like Cogsworth alright. So
their initial experiments, for the most part, involved simple captures
of daily French life, um like. For instance, we look
(36:03):
at the ten short films that they initially unveiled. They
were all less than fifty seconds each, and most featured
scenes such as workers leaving the Lumier factory, which is
just you see a bunch of frenchmen, uh like, walking
out of a factory, and it's, you know, given given
the state of the technology at the time, it's impressive. Right.
(36:24):
There's also Baby's Breakfast, which is a pair of like
a mom and a dad, presumably feeding a baby, and uh, yeah,
it's it's impressive. But then the crazy thing we talked
about the importance of comedy. One of the films is
the Gardener or the Sprinkler Sprinkled, and this is a
forty nine second film of UH in which a gardener
(36:47):
is like spraying a garden and then a kid comes
behind him and stands on the hose, and then the
gardeners like, what why the water stop? And of course
he does the comedic thing. He looks at the hose
like stares down the barrel of the Then the kid
jumps off the hose and the gardener gets squirted in
the face. And so that's good. It's really good. But
(37:08):
it's clearly done for comedic effect. It is, you know,
it's you could compare it, I guess to like um
Blooper's show or Candid Camera or you know, later on
like the Jackass TV shows. You know, it's essentially uh,
you know, it's it's all about the comedy. It's meant
to generate laughter. So it's interesting to to to think
(37:28):
about that, like this is the first crop of tin
films and they've already touched on UH some sort of
narrative comedy. A friend of mine in high school I
actually remember, talked about this short film. He was talking
about it and he, uh, he said that basically the
film is mostly the same today, except now it would
say punked at the end, Yeah, exactly, punked. Um. So
(37:52):
from you know, from there that, you know, they would
get into you know, into shorts that were comedic, and
they would later present the first newsreel and some of
the first documents rays, uh, these covering the Leon fire Department.
And by eighteen eighty six they were sending crews out
to capture footage from around the world and they am
asked thousands of films. So you know, they were not
only inventors, but they are also some of our first cinematographers.
(38:14):
I do think this is interesting. We're seeing with both
Edison and the Lumire brothers that in the eighteen nineties,
again there wasn't yet this division between the technical side
and the artistic side. They were like fully merged. You know,
you're you're doing both because if you want to have
an audience for this thing you invented, you've got to
create media for it. Nobody else is doing that yet,
so uh, one thing I wonder is about what that
(38:38):
divergence looks like over time, Like Wind is making films
become an art and not something that's associated with the
technical side of like inventing or maintaining equipment for making films. Well,
this is something that becomes difficult to nail down, right
because even like these for first ten films from the Brothers,
you know, they're not just like Crewe demonstrations of of
(38:59):
the techno oology, like there is at least some art
to them. So, um, yeah, definitely in the Sprinkler Sprinkled, Yeah,
I mean, like if you if you have to, if
you're asking the question like what is the first film
that has made like for the joy of filmmaking, I
don't know. Um, like it's there's a lot a lot
of joy and the Sprinkler Sprinkled, Well, I just wonder
(39:20):
there probably is an answer to this that somebody is
positive before. But who was the first filmmaker who had
nothing to do with making cameras or anything? Uh, Well,
that's I think that's a question we'll have to come
back to now. As for the Loumire brothers, you know,
they were they were true innovators and they were they
were ahead of the curve on their invention, and yet
kind of like Edison was, at least initially, they may
(39:43):
not have really seen the full potential of what they
were they were working with. Well, I think they were
also still limited by their technology to like longer than
the Edison films, but still shorter than the films that
would come later. Right, Yeah, they were. They were limited
by what they could do at the time. But but
even then they're often quoted as having said, quote, the
(40:03):
cinema is an invention without any future. Uh. They didn't
sell their camera to other filmmakers. And now part of
it too with with both the Lumier brothers and Edison,
is they weren't like all in on films like Edison,
had a lot of interests. Uh. And then the Lumiser
brothers were also important made important in advancements in color photography.
(40:23):
They had their they had their whole photographic business going.
So you know, it's it's not what like they were
like clinging to this one invention or that they had
all their eggs in this one basket. So perhaps we can,
you know, forgive them for not having you know, the
clearest vision of where this technology was going but as
we said before, I mean that's the danger of hindsight.
(40:44):
Like it's easy to look back at this invention and say, well,
how come on, Lumier brothers, how come you couldn't predict
the box office success of the Avengers in game based
on this technology, based on the sprinkler sprinkled Well, I
would have to think one reason might not yet have
been able to predict that is that artists hadn't come
(41:04):
along yet, just pure artists who would take the craft
of filmmaking to new heights. I mean, one thing you
have to consider now is that is how crucial editing
is too good visual storytelling on on film and these
early things we're seeing, you know, the stuff made by
the Edison Labs and by the lomi Are brothers. Um.
(41:27):
I can't recall if the Lomie Air Brothers had used
editing yet. They may have employed editing, but if they did,
it was certainly not to the extent that it would
be employed by filmmakers later to you know, really get
the best of each angle and the best the best
performances out of a number of takes, and to put
things together in time different times in places like That's
how storytelling really takes off through the visual medium of
(41:52):
the motion picture, right, I mean, it's really it's almost
like thinking about the difference between just marveling at the
wonder of being able to say, capture spoken language in
written words, and comparing that in that to say, the
difference between just the wonder of watching footage of a
horse running versus seeing an actually fully composed motion picture. Um,
(42:13):
I mean, I think that's part of it. Like, we're
still discussing examples of of the of of motion pictures
that are not truly telling stories yet, and they're certainly
not manipulating our our our senses and our cognition to
the level that that films ultimately would manipulate us. But
(42:34):
we're gonna have to come back and discuss all that
in a future episode. That's right, We're not done with
the motion picture yet, And next time, we got a
murder mystery for you. That's right, all right. In the meantime,
if you want to check out more episodes of Invention,
head on over to invention pot dot com. That's where
you'll find them. Uh. And likewise, if you want to
support this show, the best thing to do is make
sure that you rate and review us and subscribe where
(42:56):
you have the power to do so. So wherever you
get your podcasts, find us, rate us, review us, and subscribe.
Huge thanks to Scott Benjamin for research assistants on this episode,
and to our excellent audio producer Tori Harrison. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to just a topic
for the future, we're just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention
(43:25):
is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with another part of our
exploration of the invention of the motion picture. So, as
we were discussing in the previous episode, so, I think
one of the things we've we've been trying to lay
(00:23):
the groundwork for, is that the idea of the motion picture,
like the movies we watched today, was not one of
these inventions that just like comes out of nowhere, right,
the Eureka moment that strikes some brilliant inventor's brain. The
motion picture very much grew out of several streams of
existing technology, right, absolutely, Yeah, there's not just one individual
(00:46):
as this is this dream of motion pictures and then
develops it, invents it, and then an unveils the motion
picture for a hungry for the hungry masses to view. Right. Uh.
And it's something also that I think people's taste for
in a way had to develop up over time. And
I think we can explore that more as the episodes
go on. But uh, where we're starting today, I think
there are three major streams of technology that are feeding
(01:11):
into the development of the motion picture. So one is
something we talked about last time that we might call
animation devices like the Phoenickista cope or the Phoenikista scope
it's been called both, or the zootrope. These were toys
that created an illusion of continuous motion by rolling through
a succession of still images that took advantage of loopholes
(01:35):
in the way that our eyes and our brains perceive images,
known as a parent movement. Basically, it was an optical
illusion that allowed a bunch of still images to appear
to us as something that is moving, right, And these
were devices that grew out of the age of photography.
So these were not ancient by any or really any
older than photographic technology. Right. But these early animation devices
(01:58):
were mostly known for animating like drawings or silhouette cutouts.
But an interesting question you might have wondered about at
the time, say it's the eighteen seventies of the eighteen
eighties or so, you might be getting to wonder if
you could combine the optical principles here in the in
these animation devices of a parent movement generated by looking
at successive still images really fast with another technology and development,
(02:21):
which of course is photography, so to replace these hand
drawn or hand cut still images with direct records of
scenes in reality exactly. And then finally, another technology that
we've explored a lot less so far but will become
really important in today's episode that feeds into the history
of the motion picture is something that's known as the
magic lantern, and that's an invention that had existed for
(02:45):
centuries by the time of the motion picture was invented.
But essentially you can think of it as kind of
an early version of the slide projector. You ever like
go over to you know, back in the day, you
go over to somebody's house and they want to show
you pictures of their vacation, and they go through the
slide projector it shows them up on a screen or
up on the wall. Oh yeah, I mean, I fondly
remember my family's own slide projector. I was never really
(03:06):
allowed to mess with it, uh, and maybe that's why
it was so fascinating And then you broke it. No,
I never never never got the chance. Okay, I guess
some some schools use these two occasionally. Yeah, I definitely
remember projectors, slide projectors coming up in in classroom environments
as well. Yeah, But basically it combines a transparent plate
on which an image is drawn or otherwise captured, uh,
(03:29):
and a lens and a light source that shines through
the plate that has the image on it, and through
the lens projecting the image on a surface or screen. Yeah.
I mean I should also add that, of course, you
have you have other old performance methods that involved you know,
shadow puppets, yes exactly, which would have also been a
projection based medium. Well, that's a really great point. I mean,
(03:51):
one way to create a very crude version of a
motion picture would be to use a magic lantern to
project images and then actually just to move the plate
or elements within the plate around, kind of like you
would move your hands in a shadow puppet show. You know,
like if you're projecting through a glass plate and you've
got things on the plate, you could kind of have
(04:11):
them dance around and fight each other and all that
kind of stuff. But obviously you'd be fairly limited in
what you could do with that. So all three of
these are not motion pictures, and yet they all kind
of converge into the idea of the motion picture. Right
if you combine these three principles, you've pretty much got
the earliest makings of a live action movie, but we're
not there yet. A sort of early combination of these
(04:34):
three elements was another device that we mentioned in the
last episode, the Zoa practice scope, which was invented by
Edward my Bridge, the photographer and inventor around the end
of the eighteen seventies. So you remember we talked about
Edward my Bridge in the last episode where he didn't
just use one camera, but he would use a battery
of cameras to capture a bunch of images really fast.
(04:56):
Absolutely Yes, as the as a horse ran by, this
battery of cameras would go off, resulting in this this, this,
this series of images to portray the locomotion of the horse. Right,
So if he wanted to like show off those images
in a way that wasn't just like you know, looking
at them one at a time. He he could sort
(05:17):
of animate them together. And that's what the zoo practicoscope
was for. Uh. He used a very complicated process to
sort of treat and re render the silhouettes of all
those still images taken really fast by a battery of cameras,
and then it would put he would put them around
the edge of a glass disk in sequence, which could
then be rotated in front of a projected light source,
(05:40):
showing off the sort of realism of movement captured frame
by frame. But of course, even if you look at this,
this is sort of the principle of the motion picture.
But I think most people wouldn't think that it was
a movie just yet. Now, at this point in the story,
we have to reintroduce a character who has already shown
up on invention in the past. I believe he made
an appearance in our X ray episode. Oh really, Yeah,
(06:02):
he shows up a lot in the especially like the
second half of the nineteen hundreds. If you're dealing with inventions,
whether or not he necessarily deserves all the credit for
some breakthrough, he may show up in the story, right
and you, yeah, you can't remove him from the story.
He was a major player, right. So this is where
Thomas Edison enters the picture. So you may have heard
(06:24):
that the prolific inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison invented
the motion picture, And I think if that is what
you believe, you are sort of unwittingly a part of
Thomas Edison's diabolical plan. Uh, though he did play a
very important role in the early development of the motion
picture I don't want to play that game. A lot
of people really love to sort of over demonize Thomas Edison.
(06:46):
I think there are some very valid critiques of the
man historically, but you know, a lot of people just
like that. They go the Tesla versus Edison route, and
like Tesla is the hero and Edison's the villain. But
I do think it's basically true. A lot of what
Thomas Edison did was come up with, or catch wind
of innovative technological concepts that are sort of on the
(07:08):
edge of discovery, and then hire other people to do
the heavy lifting of designing these things, so then Edison
could reap the much of the profit and the credit himself.
And one of these assistants that Edison hired who worked
for Edison was a guy named William Kennedy Lorie Dickson,
also known often in books referenced as W. K. L.
(07:28):
Dixon and Dickson was a photographer, and this may have
been part of the reason that in June eight eighty nine,
Edison selected him to actually design a device that Edison
had kind of conceptualized, which he was calling the kinetoscope,
of course, from kineto meaning movement and scope meaning like
to see or to watch. But you might wonder where
(07:50):
did Edison get this idea from. Well, we can't know
for sure all of what Edison had in mind before this,
so I think there's some indication he may have already
been interested in the idea of move being images. But
one thing we do know that I was reading about
is that in eighty eight Edward my Bridge visited Edison's
laboratory in New Jersey. Apparently my Bridge was there to
(08:11):
suggest a partnership. UH see, Edison and his lab workers
had recently invented a device, or not not quite so recently.
It was around eighteen seventy seven. I think it was
patented in eighteen seventy eight called the phonograph, And the
phonograph was huge. It was a big breakthrough. It was
a sound recording and playback device that was immensely popular.
(08:34):
It would later evolve into the record player, though the
original uh phonograph both recorded and played back cylinders, not disks,
you know, if I remember correctly, These pop up in
brom Stoker's novel Dracula Really yeah, some of the you know,
it's all a little bits, tidbits from various people's journals
and diaries and in some cases their cylinder recording. Oh
(08:56):
Dr Seward does he do dictation on phonograph cylinders? See,
I don't remember exactly which characters. I know it's not Dracula,
and there are no chapters from Dracula's perspective, unfortunately. But yeah,
So so Edison and his people they had the phonograph,
and that was this very popular revolutionary technology could record
(09:18):
in playback sound. And so in February of eight, my
Bridge showed up with an idea. He said, Hey, let's collaborate.
I'll pare your phonograph with Miso practice scope, and we'll
have sound accompanying moving pictures, which is perfect. Like, that's
exactly the direction things we're gonna go in. Edison passed,
(09:41):
and he was like not interested. But then pretty much
immediately Edison moved on the idea of creating an improved
motion picture capture and playback device quote to do for
the eye what the phonograph does for the ear. And
this would be the kinetoscope that we mentioned a moment ago.
So I don't think you can say that Edison was
(10:02):
stealing my Bridge's idea because what they would eventually come
up with was so much better and more practical than
the Zoo practice practice code. But it does seem right
that he thought, you know, instead of partnering with this guy,
I can just make a much better version of his thing.
Whether that's crooked or not, I don't know. I'll leave
that up to you to judge. So in eighteen eighty nine,
(10:24):
Edison tasks uh William Dixon, his his worker W. K. L. Dixon,
with inventing this device that he has conceptualized to do
for the eye what the phonograph did for the year,
essentially a video recording and playback device, and apparently early
prototypes did not work very well. One idea seemed to
be inspired by the phonograph cylinder, Uh, and it was
(10:47):
the idea that you would place tiny reflective photos on
a cylinder that would simulate motion through reflected light. As
the cylinder spun, you can kind of just like picture.
That not working very well, so you might want or okay,
how do we solve these problems? Well. In the last episode,
we talked about the French physiologist A Tene Jules Moray
(11:07):
who in the eighteen seventies invented this device that was
called the Chrono photographic gun, or at least that's what
we called it at the Chrona Photograph uh And it
was like this scientific instrument. It's kind of like a
machine gun for taking pictures. Its goal was to rapidly
capture a lot of photographs very quickly, around twelve photos
(11:28):
per second on a rotating piece of glass on which
photographic emulsions had been prepared inside a drum. That makes
it look kind of like a mutated Tommy gun. Yeah,
it's super weird. It's like a Wizards machine gun. It's whatever. Yeah,
that's right. Uh So, so it's a precursor in the
movie camera in a way. But it also straight up
looks like a rifle. And Murray was inspired by Edward
(11:52):
my Bridge's work and he used the chrona Photographic gun
to take lots of pictures really fast, of like birds
in flight, to get a better idea of what's happened
with the movements of a bird's wings and body during flight,
which normally happens too fast for us to see is
just a blur. So Murray was very much in the
in the spirit of science. He was not trying to
create an entertainment device. He was trying to study nature,
(12:13):
study the locomotion and of birds in this case. So
in a way, Murray's Gun was a step in the
right direction toward motion pictures. But because it it has
some limitations that either variously relied on either plate glass
exposures or relatively fragile paper film, there's no way you
could use it to record more than a very short
(12:34):
period of motion, maybe like a second or two, and
you couldn't effectively load and have ready enough of the
medium it recorded the images on to make it, you know,
something that could record for extended periods of time. But
it seems Edison did draw some inspiration from Murray in principle.
And this is where another individual from a past episode
pops up, an individual who played an important role in
(12:57):
the development of photographic technology. G George Eastman. That's right.
So Eastman played an important role, uh with helping come
up with the medium. So Eastman of Eastman Kodak, of course,
who we discussed previously, had created paper film rolls that
did not require glass plates. And this is this is
(13:18):
an important step in in thinking about the media on
which photographs are recorded, because just think about if you
had to create a movie cameras capturing I don't know,
so you're trying to capture forty frames per second or
even if you're going low and just trying to do
like sixteen frames per second or something, and you want
to do that all on like glass plates. How do
(13:39):
you do that? You do use like glass glass plates
framed with wood that are on like a belt chain
together to go past the camera to get exposed. How
many times per second? You can imagine how the medium
there makes the camera set up really unwieldy and and
to a certain extent, impossible to record more than a
few seconds at a time. Right, Yeah, you're coming up
(14:01):
against the hard limits of the of the material there.
I would love to see one of these, though. I'm
sure there's a great version of like a steampunk video
game or something that has like just like giant drums
of glass plate belts rattling through as the cameras shooting
on them. Uh So, one thing Eastman had created by
eighteen eighty eight was paper film roles that didn't require
glass plates. Uh this wasn't the first paper film, but
(14:24):
this was a version of paper film. Uh and and
this is an improvement because you can imagine at least okay,
paper can be like rolled up in great quantities that
you could feed through a camera if you needed to
shoot tons of photos in quick succession. Right, it begins
to to make it possible to really um capture footage
(14:44):
of of of the world in action. Yeah, but this
paper film was relatively fragile, flimsy, difficult to work with.
It just wasn't very good. Meanwhile, a year before, in
eighteen eighty seven, an American Episcopalian rector named Hannibal Goodwin
who lived in Newark, New Jersey, came up with a
different ideas, an idea for a medium for photographic exposures,
(15:06):
and that would be celluloid. Now, celluloid is a transparent
kind of synthetic plastic invented in the eighteen sixties. And
to to make it, you can start with natural cellulose,
which is a plant polymer that you'd find in cotton
or wood or in himp. Cotton is like mostly cellulose,
so you can just picture a ball of cotton, and
(15:27):
then you take that cell cellulose and you treat it
with nitric acid and this gives you an extremely flammable
plastic compound called nitro cellulose, and nitro cellulose and celluloid
become the early basis of film technology, creating these continuous
strips of plastic that could serve as film roles. Uh
And originally, though it's funny reading about how celluloid plastic
(15:50):
in the like eighteen sixties seventies that served all kinds
of weird uses, or at least people imagined it would
like as a substitute for expensive precious materials like ivory,
or it was also used in clothing. I've read something
about like men's shirts and stuff being having cell celluloid components.
(16:12):
Another one was I read about somebody's idea to use
celluloid to make billiard balls. Um. But eventually Eastman and
collaborators would switch over to producing roles of celluloid based film,
and this could be manufactured in the kinds of long,
durable roles necessary for exposing the dozens or hundreds or
(16:33):
thousands of shots necessary to record more than a second
or two of motion picture. Uh. Though Eastman did have
a long running patent dispute with Hannibal Goodwin and his
estate about celluloid film. They had to go back and
forth about who had the rights to do what with it.
But once this durable plastic film celluloid film was available
(16:54):
in bulk from Eastman, William Dixon and Edison and colleagues
suddenly had new kinds of option is open to them,
Like this would allow you to do a lot more
with filming the world and why did they ever film
the world? We're going to take a quick break and
when we come back we'll continue our discussion with the
history of the motion picture. Alright, We're back, all right,
(17:19):
So I guess we should discuss some design issues with
the movie camera that William Dixon in Edison's lab was
trying to create. One problem would be this, do you
ever think about the like, how does a movie camera
simulate motion? In the last episode we talked about how
it has to simulate motion by showing you still images
in a very rapid succession. This is the way that
(17:42):
the optical illusion works. Uh. And it doesn't work to
take say a few hundred photos in succession and then
roll them past your eyes in one smooth emotion, right,
because what would you see there? Just a blur? Right?
That won't cut it right. I mean, that's not showing
you a succession of still in images. That's just showing
you images that are moving top to bottom or moving
(18:04):
side to side too fast for you to look at them.
So instead, what you have to do is find a
way to project lots of distinct, unmoving images very rapidly,
one after another. So how to do that? Well, if
you've ever think about what celluloid film roles look like,
especially movie film, you know those holes in the sides
of the film strip, Well that's where they come in. Uh.
(18:27):
These holes allowed their devices to rapidly grab the film
strip with a fast moving lever that had teeth to
fit the holes, advance exactly one frame, project that frame
through the shutter without moving it, and then close the
shutter and advance the next frame. So you're hitting here's
the image, and then here's the new image, here's the
(18:47):
here's the next image. Yeah again, not just running it
through like it's the like the belt on an engine, right,
but dozens of frames for second and it has to
stop on each one. So in AUGUSTE. Edison filed for
a patent on two separate machines, the kinetic graph, which
was the movie camera and the Kineta scope, which was
the movie playback device. And these were two separate things,
(19:10):
so that the Kinetic Graph camera was this gigantic, monstrous
electrical device for shooting films. It weighed like a thousand
pounds or something. It was huge. Uh. It used components
modeled on the internal workings of a clock to ensure
the regular stop and start motion of advancing the film
and stopping it one frame at a time, and to
(19:31):
synchronize the opening of the shutter with the placement of
the next frame. And this device initially filmed at a
rate of about forty frames per second. Meanwhile, the Kineta
scope was a large wooden cabinet about four ft high
that held a film strip inside, and this was the
dedicated playback device for films made on the Kinetic graph.
(19:53):
The viewer would look through a lens at the top
of the cabinet, kind of like the eyepiece for a
view master. Did you ever have one of those? Okay, yeah, yeah,
So it's not really a screen. It's like binoculars that
you know, you put your eyes in and you look
down into the machine, and inside the machine the film
hung from rollers and during playback it would be advanced rapidly,
(20:15):
one frame at a time by an electrically powered sprocket
with an electric lamp shining up through each frame into
the viewing lens, which allows you to see the motion
picture projected into your eyes. Right, and now that this
is impressive, don't get me wrong. But but obviously the
limitations are apparent, Like this is a device that can
be used by one person at a time. It is
(20:36):
a large cabinet. Uh, it's more like a peep show
as opposed to what you might think of as a
as movie viewing, certainly as a communal experience. That's exactly right.
I mean, can you imagine a world where everybody was
just walking around staring into their own individual devices to
watch video and weren't interacting with each other. Yes, but
(20:59):
it is a great point because the history of of
motion picture technology, cinematic technology, the ability to watch the
moving image. Uh, it's kind of you see these different
trends like the like, like something will be individual and
then it will go communal, and then there'll be new
ways to make it more individual again and generally with
(21:19):
the we see it both ways. Like here, the advancements
would make movie viewing more communal, and then later on
it would be in the different direction. Let's take let's
take this thing that is that has to be communal,
and let's let you do it in the privacy of
your own home. Um, and I imagine you know, they're
they're they're pros and cons with with both with both directions. Yeah, exactly.
(21:41):
I mean this was a very different viewing experience, even
then looking at a video on your phone. Uh, it
was just extremely different because number one, um, we'll talk
a little bit more about where these kinetoscopes were deployed,
but they would be out in public semi public places,
you know, and you could go use one. And while
the kinetoscope parlor might be a happen and hang out
(22:02):
when you view the movie, you're viewing it alone with
your face attached to a box. That's not like going
to a movie theater, like you're saying. It's completely different
kind of culture around how these things are viewed. But
also the films had to be very different then because
of the technical physical limitations on the film strips, on
(22:22):
the kinetograph, and on the kinetoscope the way they were built,
you can only accommodate about fifty feet or about fourteen
meters of celluloid film at a time and then play
it back. So this severely limits the length that the
film can be. It makes it you know, it could
be maybe fifteen seconds or so. So let's say you
saunter up to a kinetoscope, you know, you go, you
(22:43):
go to the local kinetoscope parlor and you're gonna have
a look see into one of these things. What did
you watch in there? Well, Edison essentially had to become
not just an inventor, but a a media mogul, like
a film producer, because nobody else was making films to
go in this thing. He had to make the content
to go in the device. So he founded a movie
(23:04):
studio in West Orange, New Jersey to record the first
real commercial motion pictures. And these movies tended to be
like short spectacles. Uh. Again, due to the limitations on
the technology, they couldn't be more than, you know, fifteen
seconds or so. And they didn't have dedicated sound because
even though Edison was into pairing this thing with the phonograph,
(23:27):
they couldn't yet figure out how to synchronize the movie
and the sound right. And at the time, there wasn't
really a practice of film editing, which meant that the
you know, the convention was that the film would be
shot in one take. So what ended up on these
early films were things that were brief and kind of
interesting to look at and could be done all at
(23:47):
once in one take. Many of them were like quick
vaudeville acts featuring slapstick comedy or circus performances like you know,
so Ballerina's dancing, or people like doing trapeze acts, or
a strong man lifting something. Right. I mean, basically, the
technology allowed you to capture motion, and so you just
had to go out and find interesting examples of motion.
(24:09):
The person doing this, an animal doing this, a machine
doing this. Now that might sound boring to us, but
these things people were very interested in seeing this, Like
this was a hot technology. People were into it. Yeah,
Like I mean, I can imagine, you know, we can
talking about how it's not a communal thing to watch it,
but you know, you might go with somebody to see this.
You would each have your turn looking into the machine,
(24:30):
witnessing the motion, and then you would inevitably talk about it.
Did you see that? Was that not amazing? You just
you looked in it and and there it was brought
to life. Yeah, and so in the eight ten nineties, kinetoscopes,
the viewing machines were bought and put anywhere I would say,
you might normally see some kind of cabinet attraction or
game machine, So amusement parks, the lobbies of public buildings,
(24:52):
stuff like that. Dedicated kinetoscope parlors also became popular, starting
in New York City. They were sort of like a
video arcade where people would go and line up at cabinets,
not to play street fighter, but to look through the
peep hole and watch the films inside the boxes. I
am trying to imagine what it would what what it
would have been like to be in one of these
(25:12):
uh kinetoscope parlors, because you'd have it was like a
public setting, but you would be frequently while you were there,
like going into this other world for fifteen seconds or so,
where you would lose your body and you disappear into
the machine and the machine is your awareness, but everybody
could see you. So you're just standing there with your
(25:34):
face in this cabinet and like you, I don't know
this this weird public, private kind of thing, you know,
I know exactly what it would be like. I remember
when when we went to New York City and we
went to a premiere of One Strange Rock. Okay, they
had these helmets. When you put the helmet on and
you would it was like part of the marketing thing. Yeah,
the daft punk helmets, and it was like this daft punk,
(25:55):
like really cool helmets, very well designed. You put them
on and you would get to see in here in
this case, um like essentially a trailer for the show,
and it was pretty impressive projecting it inside a screen
on the inside of the helmet. So you're just sitting
there in a room full of people having cocktails and
wandering around and you've got a helmet on and you're
like drooling. Well yeah, so I imagine that's kind of
(26:18):
what this was like. Okay, well that was I'm not
saying I didn't appreciate the experience. It was a little
awkward standing there in a room full of people with
your own consciousness engaged inside a device. Yeah, but then
when you put the device on, it's pretty cool. And likewise,
the kinetoscope would have had a similar experience. Again, it's
just I imagine a lot of people standing around talking
(26:41):
about it, like man what was it like when you
looked into it. Did you see that horse running? Did
you see that you know whatever, the particular bit of
motion that was captured, whatever it was like, people would
just be geeking out over it. Yeah, And so what
did Edison think about the potential of this this thing?
I mean, obviously people were excited about it. You get
(27:03):
kind of mixed feelings reading about this that in some
ways it seems like he didn't at first seem to
fully realize the potential of films as their own extended medium,
Like he obviously failed to make some certain leaps from
the kinetoscope and the kinetograph immediately, right, Like it's easy
to imagine, I'm guessing where you're thinking, Like, Okay, I've
(27:23):
created an entertaining, uh side show, a machine for amusement,
and I can see them continuing to be a successful thing.
Like maybe it's it's like a pinball machine exactly, there's
the one in the front of a pizza joint. Yeah,
and maybe if you're like really savvy, you might see
the future nefarious uses of essentially peep show machines. But
(27:43):
for the most part, like you're not imagining the Academy
Awards but then at the same time, I mean Edison,
he says like some grandiose stuff about it there. This
was later, I think this was in like in the
nineteen teens or something, But I found a quote where
he once remarked, I am spending more than my income
getting up a set of six thousand films to teach
(28:04):
the nineteen million students in the schools of the United
States to do away entirely with books. Dear god Edison,
step back, friend, Well, I mean, clearly he was. He
he had doubled down on that point and said, no,
not only is this an important technology, it's the important technology.
(28:25):
It's going to erase the written word from our schools. Now. Edison, Dixon,
and and the people we've mentioned so far definitely were
not the only people to serve in the creation of
motion pictures around the you know, the eighteen eighties. This
was in the air and other people were sort of
working on this. It does seem that Dixon and Edison
got there first with commercially viable, patented machines, but it
(28:50):
seems that a French inventor named Louis la Prince got
there before Edison's lab to make a movie camera that worked,
though he never got to capitalize on his work. Uh
La Prince invented a motion picture camera. He shot several
films in England around the year eighteen eighty eight, and
he'd been planning to show off his invention in the
United States in the year eight teen ninety. But then
(29:11):
something very strange happened. Mysteriously, he disappeared before he had
a chance to show off his invention. And we're actually
going to devote an entire episode to this subject to
explore this mystery, in an episode where we'll be joined
next time by our friend Scott Benjamin. But a short
version is that that Edison is the name that remains
important here. Yes, certainly is getting the credit, right, though
(29:33):
I think more recent historians would probably say it looks
like Dixon did more of the work, and of course
Edison just sort of like owned his work and was
his boss and then got the credit for it. All Right, Well,
on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
But when we come back, we're going to discuss another
pair of individuals who are exceedingly important in the development
of motion picture technology. We're gonna talk about the Lumier brothers. Alright,
(30:01):
we're back. So Robert tell me about the Loumier brothers.
All right, well, uh, just like it sounds, there are
two of them. They're brothers. There's Auguste Lumier and Louis Loumier. Um. Uh.
August lived eighteen sixty two through nineteen fifty four and
Louis lived eighteen sixty four through ninety eight. So they
(30:22):
were the French sons of the painter turned photographer Antoine Lumier. Uh.
So basically they were both born into the photographic world. Uh.
And they both had an aptitude for science. At the
age of eighteen, with his father's help, Louis opened a
factory for photographic plates and it was quite successful. Um.
And so you know, this becomes this is the family
(30:44):
business at this point. Meanwhile, their father, Um, he attends
a showing of Edison's kinetoscope in Paris and was really
impressed by it. So he comes back and he tells
his sons about it, and they began to work on
the problem of animating objections projections. Okay, so now remember
the kinetoscope we were just talking about is a cabinet
(31:06):
where you have a private experience with a moving picture.
The cabinet might be at a parlor or business somewhere,
and you go and you stick your face in it
and you can watch a fifteen second movie of uh,
you know, a circus act or a vaudeville show. Right. Yes,
it's it's like it's like going to a gathering and
someone is showing something on a like a tiny iPhone screen. Yeah,
(31:29):
you know if you get to look at it one
at a time, right, yeah, that sort of thing. But
so the brothers here they questioned, you know, what else
was possible? What can we do with projection? So they
created a camera, uh this cinematography, and that could photograph
and project project at sixteen frames per second. And it
had a number of advantages over Edison's invention. It was
(31:50):
far lighter. Oh yeah, Edison's Now remember the kinematic graph
the camera they used that was like it was gigantic.
It was like a thousand pounds or said. This was lighter,
it was more portable, um and uh. And then when
you're actually projecting the resulting footage, it moved at a
slower speed as well, creating a more fluid movement movement.
It was also far less noisy, because that was another
(32:12):
thing about Kinetograph is that it was it was noisy.
Another key improvement, though, is that more than one person
could watch the film at a time. Seems like a
big deal. Yeah. To quote Caroline Slade in her two
thousand twelve Telegraph article about the Brothers, uh quote, the
Lumier's cinema, cinematography not only created the filmmaker, it created
(32:34):
the viewer. That's interesting because again there's no I mean,
when you have when you create media, you created for
an audience, and when there was previously no wide audience
for a certain kind of media, you have to make
that audience somehow. You have to like teach them how
(32:54):
to receive what you're producing. And kind of like what
I said earlier, cinema was for the longest time, and
in large part still is about communal viewing. I mean,
technology has introduced different waves of private viewing over the years,
you know, be it uh you know, TV broadcasts or
VHS tapes, etcetera. Uh, you know, and it's it's impacted
the medium and the way we engage with it. But
(33:16):
we still place a high priority on communal viewing. We
may not like the people that sometimes we have to
watch a film with if they're like too noisy, or
they you know, they eat your popcorn too loud. But
you know, I think by and large, if we want
to share the viewing experience with someone, yes, I mean
it's it's like the experience of going to a play,
(33:37):
except of course it's a movie. I mean, being an
audience is a communal experience, and there is it can
be moving at times, like when you go see a
big new movie that's really good and the audience is
excited about it and they're cheering and they're clapping. That's
part of the experience too. It's not just like you know,
you're there with the movie and there happened to be
other people around you. I mean, all movies today could
(33:58):
be released directive video. There's no reason that they that
they couldn't be except that there apparently just is still
desire for people to go to movie theaters, right. And
I think about that a lot because I'm often the
person who's like, I have to wait for this Avengers
movie to show up on an airplane. Can't I just
watch it and let it? Now? You know why I
don't want to go to a theater and spend three
(34:20):
hours there and and so sometimes if i'm more, you know,
I'm grumpier about it, I'll think, Oh, it's just the
nobody actually wants to go to a theater. This is
just the theater industry. But but no, I think people do.
I mean, we do want to go see films we
care about in a theater. There's something about the theater
experience especially, and at least there's something about the communal
(34:40):
viewing experience, especially if something is supposed to be funny. Yes,
that that is huge the laughter or I think actually also, um,
it's important with horror movies, horror movies that the audience
plays a role there too, and it might actually have
to do with laughter. I mean, if if you see
a horror movie in the theater, you will encounter sometimes
(35:01):
as much laughter as you do when you're seeing a
good comedy, either because the horror movie is bad, as
it often is, and it becomes very funny, or because
it's very good and there's a constant kind of low
level nervous release going on whenever tension is alleviated somehow
in the film. Yeah, Christian and I did an entire
episode of stuff to blow your mind about that a
(35:22):
few years back. So you can people can look for
that at stuff to blow your mind dot com. Uh so,
let's let's get back to the French brothers here, okay,
uh and the and essentially they were in the same
boat as as Edison, like, you create this technology, now
you've got to create some films. I don't know what.
I'm sorry, I just realized I'm picturing both of them
(35:43):
as the candlestick from Beauty and the beast. That was
his name, right, was it? Was it Loumier? Okay, well
that was that must have been their their their reference there, No,
they were. They both looked more like Cogsworth alright. So
their initial experiments, for the most part, involved simple captures
of daily French life, um like. For instance, we look
(36:03):
at the ten short films that they initially unveiled. They
were all less than fifty seconds each, and most featured
scenes such as workers leaving the Lumier factory, which is
just you see a bunch of frenchmen, uh like, walking
out of a factory, and it's, you know, given given
the state of the technology at the time, it's impressive. Right.
(36:24):
There's also Baby's Breakfast, which is a pair of like
a mom and a dad, presumably feeding a baby, and uh, yeah,
it's it's impressive. But then the crazy thing we talked
about the importance of comedy. One of the films is
the Gardener or the Sprinkler Sprinkled, and this is a
forty nine second film of UH in which a gardener
(36:47):
is like spraying a garden and then a kid comes
behind him and stands on the hose, and then the
gardeners like, what why the water stop? And of course
he does the comedic thing. He looks at the hose
like stares down the barrel of the Then the kid
jumps off the hose and the gardener gets squirted in
the face. And so that's good. It's really good. But
(37:08):
it's clearly done for comedic effect. It is, you know,
it's you could compare it, I guess to like um
Blooper's show or Candid Camera or you know, later on
like the Jackass TV shows. You know, it's essentially uh,
you know, it's it's all about the comedy. It's meant
to generate laughter. So it's interesting to to to think
(37:28):
about that, like this is the first crop of tin
films and they've already touched on UH some sort of
narrative comedy. A friend of mine in high school I
actually remember, talked about this short film. He was talking
about it and he, uh, he said that basically the
film is mostly the same today, except now it would
say punked at the end, Yeah, exactly, punked. Um. So
(37:52):
from you know, from there that, you know, they would
get into you know, into shorts that were comedic, and
they would later present the first newsreel and some of
the first documents rays, uh, these covering the Leon fire Department.
And by eighteen eighty six they were sending crews out
to capture footage from around the world and they am
asked thousands of films. So you know, they were not
only inventors, but they are also some of our first cinematographers.
(38:14):
I do think this is interesting. We're seeing with both
Edison and the Lumire brothers that in the eighteen nineties,
again there wasn't yet this division between the technical side
and the artistic side. They were like fully merged. You know,
you're you're doing both because if you want to have
an audience for this thing you invented, you've got to
create media for it. Nobody else is doing that yet,
so uh, one thing I wonder is about what that
(38:38):
divergence looks like over time, Like Wind is making films
become an art and not something that's associated with the
technical side of like inventing or maintaining equipment for making films. Well,
this is something that becomes difficult to nail down, right
because even like these for first ten films from the Brothers,
you know, they're not just like Crewe demonstrations of of
(38:59):
the techno oology, like there is at least some art
to them. So, um, yeah, definitely in the Sprinkler Sprinkled, Yeah,
I mean, like if you if you have to, if
you're asking the question like what is the first film
that has made like for the joy of filmmaking, I
don't know. Um, like it's there's a lot a lot
of joy and the Sprinkler Sprinkled, Well, I just wonder
(39:20):
there probably is an answer to this that somebody is
positive before. But who was the first filmmaker who had
nothing to do with making cameras or anything? Uh, Well,
that's I think that's a question we'll have to come
back to now. As for the Loumire brothers, you know,
they were they were true innovators and they were they
were ahead of the curve on their invention, and yet
kind of like Edison was, at least initially, they may
(39:43):
not have really seen the full potential of what they
were they were working with. Well, I think they were
also still limited by their technology to like longer than
the Edison films, but still shorter than the films that
would come later. Right, Yeah, they were. They were limited
by what they could do at the time. But but
even then they're often quoted as having said, quote, the
(40:03):
cinema is an invention without any future. Uh. They didn't
sell their camera to other filmmakers. And now part of
it too with with both the Lumier brothers and Edison,
is they weren't like all in on films like Edison,
had a lot of interests. Uh. And then the Lumiser
brothers were also important made important in advancements in color photography.
(40:23):
They had their they had their whole photographic business going.
So you know, it's it's not what like they were
like clinging to this one invention or that they had
all their eggs in this one basket. So perhaps we can,
you know, forgive them for not having you know, the
clearest vision of where this technology was going but as
we said before, I mean that's the danger of hindsight.
(40:44):
Like it's easy to look back at this invention and say, well,
how come on, Lumier brothers, how come you couldn't predict
the box office success of the Avengers in game based
on this technology, based on the sprinkler sprinkled Well, I
would have to think one reason might not yet have
been able to predict that is that artists hadn't come
(41:04):
along yet, just pure artists who would take the craft
of filmmaking to new heights. I mean, one thing you
have to consider now is that is how crucial editing
is too good visual storytelling on on film and these
early things we're seeing, you know, the stuff made by
the Edison Labs and by the lomi Are brothers. Um.
(41:27):
I can't recall if the Lomie Air Brothers had used
editing yet. They may have employed editing, but if they did,
it was certainly not to the extent that it would
be employed by filmmakers later to you know, really get
the best of each angle and the best the best
performances out of a number of takes, and to put
things together in time different times in places like That's
how storytelling really takes off through the visual medium of
(41:52):
the motion picture, right, I mean, it's really it's almost
like thinking about the difference between just marveling at the
wonder of being able to say, capture spoken language in
written words, and comparing that in that to say, the
difference between just the wonder of watching footage of a
horse running versus seeing an actually fully composed motion picture. Um,
(42:13):
I mean, I think that's part of it. Like, we're
still discussing examples of of the of of motion pictures
that are not truly telling stories yet, and they're certainly
not manipulating our our our senses and our cognition to
the level that that films ultimately would manipulate us. But
(42:34):
we're gonna have to come back and discuss all that
in a future episode. That's right, We're not done with
the motion picture yet, And next time, we got a
murder mystery for you. That's right, all right. In the meantime,
if you want to check out more episodes of Invention,
head on over to invention pot dot com. That's where
you'll find them. Uh. And likewise, if you want to
support this show, the best thing to do is make
sure that you rate and review us and subscribe where
(42:56):
you have the power to do so. So wherever you
get your podcasts, find us, rate us, review us, and subscribe.
Huge thanks to Scott Benjamin for research assistants on this episode,
and to our excellent audio producer Tori Harrison. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to just a topic
for the future, we're just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention
(43:25):
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United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
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Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com