November 29, 2017 • 27 mins
Despite the huge impact the Lumières made with their multi-function motion picture camera, they didn't stay in the movie business. Louis went back to photography, and Auguste took a very different path.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. But Hey,
this is part two of a two parter on Louis
and August Lumier, two brothers who contributed significantly to the
(00:23):
motion picture industry before there even was a motion picture industry.
That's what they're mostly famous for. But they went on
to do some other things, which is largely what we're
talking about today. But if you have not listened to
part one, we highly recommend you do so, otherwise you're
probably going to be lost. Yeah, we have two parters
sometimes that each part can stand on their own, but
this that would be harder with this one. Yeah, this
(00:45):
is definitely a continuation of right where we left off.
So last time we ended at the point where the
loom Years had developed a camera that could capture, process
and project motion pictures, and they had trained a group
of employees to use the new technolog so they could
travel around Europe showing off this marvel of innovation and
taking new movies. Right. So it wasn't long before the
(01:08):
brothers were sending their trained cameraman farther and farther afield
going outside of Europe. Because the cinematograph was relatively compact
in light, it was pretty easy to expand their filming
and demonstration presence all across the globe. They sent teams
to India, Great Britain, Canada, and Argentina. And these were
not small numbers of cameramen. In the United States alone,
(01:31):
the Loomiers had almost two dozen of their men doing
what they had been doing in Europe by the late
eighteen nineties. Yeah, so they were just taking these movies
showing them to people. Uh. And some of these staff
members were actually sent abroad as part of deals with
businessmen in foreign countries. So as part of these contracts,
(01:52):
the Loomiers would basically loan out their camera, but the
partner business would have to pay a Loomier company staff
member as a contractor to actually use the camera. So
it's like you can have it come to where you
are and take films, but you can't use it. Only
our trained cameraman can use it. And then the partner
business could then stage their own screenings of these films
(02:13):
that were taken, and the revenue from those screenings would
be split fifty fifty between the business that was renting
the camera and paying for the cameraman and the Loomier company. Eventually,
this whole partnership system became too unwieldy to manage, so
Loomiers finally started selling the cameras outright. Starting in May.
The cameras and film were sold first to businesses and
(02:35):
then to anyone who wanted them. Loomiers also began publishing
a catalog of all the films they had to offer
for purchase, so anyone could start their own entertainment business
by showing these short films. Yeah, you could basically say
you had a big space, I would like to get
a cinematograph and order the following ten films or whatever,
(02:55):
and then you can charge people admission and Vola, you
had your own movie theater running. In some demonstrations abroad
in the early days of this the company actually experimented
with presentation style, and so they hired speakers to stand
to the side of the screen and explained to audiences
what they were seeing. But it was immediately evident that
that was just silly and the explainer was extraneous. No
(03:17):
one really needed to be told, and a train is
coming at you, A baby is being fed here, especially
when you consider how basic they're titles. Are workers leaving
a factory. So here are the workers leaving the factory.
Just as their fame had spread in Europe, in the
United States, Bloomiers were heralded as geniuses. The slates of
(03:40):
films that were shown at any given screening were a
combination of movies featuring local and international scenes, and that
menu proved to be the perfect balance to delight and
excite viewers. But as you can also imagine, a French
firm stealing the thunder of someone like Edison in his
kinetoscope in Edison's own home country was problematic, and there
(04:03):
was also this growing sentiment in the United States that
American innovation should be prioritized. As we know from the
War of the Currents, Edison was not timid in going
after his rivals. He started a campaign to discredit the
work of the Loomiers while promoting his own motion picture technology.
Edison had bought the rights to the fantascope projectors from
(04:24):
Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armatt and was working on his
own film screenings. Was actually a whole patent story between
Jenkins who invented the pantoscope and Armatt, who financed it.
But that is really a tale for another day, as
is the entire War of the Currents, which has been
touched on before. Yeah, there's a two parter in it.
(04:47):
I think it's two parter. Yeah, But the bottom line
here is that the Loomier's agents in the United States
started to experience one problem after another as they attempted
to continue touring because Edison's sort of smearcamp pain was
really quite successful. So eventually customs officials started claiming that
the French cameras had been brought into the country without
(05:07):
proper documentation, and at one point one of the Lumier's
cameraman was actually jailed on a charge of filming without
a permit. As the climate of the United States grew
increasingly unwelcoming for the Loonier's cameraman, the company finally decided
to halt all efforts in North America in late eighteen seven,
and it was to some degree beginning of the end
(05:28):
of the Loonier's work in film. They didn't make a
few more movies in they actually had more than fourteen
hundred different movies in their catalog, most of which had
been shot by those traveling cameraman that they had trained,
and for the next two years they did continue to
work on developing and refining film technology, but that part
of their business was no longer really growing, and in
(05:50):
fact was kind of shrinking. They were shooting fewer and
fewer films each year. The last big demonstration the Lomiers
made in motion pictures was at the nineteen hundred Expositio
and Universal in Paris. Let's come up pretty frequently on
the podcast. Lumiers were featured as part of the expo,
and they had a screening there as part of their screening,
(06:11):
which fictured a mix of footage shot there at the
expo and films their team had made traveling through Mexico.
They also debuted a new large scale screen. The Library
of Congress is digitized master edit of much of this
footage online, and we'll link to it in our show notes.
Heads up, there are some movies in this group that
(06:31):
feature activities that could definitely be considered animal cruelty. Yeah. Uh,
there's some cock fighting in there, and there are some
horses being treated sort of poorly. So if that is
stuff that is not for you. Maybe don't look at
these ones, but you can look at their other earlier films,
and which also include blasts of spanking. As a writer,
(06:51):
that also yeah, which and I will say though, is
some of the least least aggressive spanking I've ever seen.
So if you're worried about seeing someone get hit, it's
definitely very much on the mild side. Um. After that
Paris Expo, both Louis and August turned back to photography
to some degree. So throughout their foray into motion pictures,
their family business had continued to run and to thrive.
(07:13):
It was still funding all of these little expenditures to
train people and send them abroad and also for them
to experiment and try new things. And as you recall,
the motion picture work that they did was really intended
as a way to sell new cameras and film. That
then turned into this temporary foray into movie production. They
never intended to be a film studio, but they were
(07:34):
for a brief period of time, and competition in the
motion picture space was only getting more intense, and the
brothers just wanted to move on to other things. The
Loomis soon began to work on other projects outside of
motion pictures, and that is what we'll talk about in
a moment, but first we're gonna pause for a quick
sponsor break. So the same year of the r sex FO,
(08:00):
but at the end of the year, on December, Louis
filed another patent. This time it was for a device
called a photo rama and this was a method for
taking full three sixty degrees still panoramic photos in one
long exposure. And these panoramic images were intended to be projected,
but again to be static. Meanwhile, there was a long
(08:23):
desired achievement in still photography that the brothers had yet
to crack. So while the Loomiers had made millions thanks
to their blue label plates and they had captured incredible
film of real life in motion pictures, one goal that
had been kind of on their minds for quite a
while had remained elusive, and that was creating a photographic
(08:45):
process that could reproduce images of the world as they're
truly seen with the human eye in full color, just
as was true with motion pictures. They were not the
only people working on this idea, and indeed other innovators
were trying their hand at color photography. Some were actually
successful at creating color images, but the processes were really
(09:06):
labor intensive and cumbersome, so they weren't really viable. Photographers
would either have to take three different exposures or use
three different cameras and then composite the resulting images. But
on December seventeenth of nineteen o three, the Lumiers applied
for a patent on a color photography system that they
called Autochrome. On May nineteen o four, they debuted at
(09:31):
the Academy de Siance, and for the next several years
the brothers worked on refining their process before they finally
presented it before the Paris Photo Club in nineteen o
seven to introduce it commercially. Incidentally, seven was also the
last year that the Loomier's published their catalog of films,
so surprisingly, perhaps the key to the Lumier's color photosystem
(09:54):
was potato starch. They died fine grains of starch in
three color ways, a red, orange, a green, and a violet,
and then these fine grains were combined and then applied
in a fine layer to a glass plate. And I
keep saying the word fine, but they were very, very fine.
So there were seven thousand grains per square millimeter in
(10:15):
their plate application, and then a sticky varnish of lamp
black was used to fill in any spaces between the grains.
This plate was compressed with seven tons of pressure per
square centimeter. The plate was treated with a silver bromide emulsion,
so when a photo was taken the potato starts grains
(10:35):
filtered out all the light but that which corresponded to
the color it was dyed. This is ingenious. The light
then passed through the grains onto the light sensitive emulsion
and created a glass transparency from which princes could be made.
This made the autochrome system the first commercially successful color
(10:55):
photography process. This was a massive shift in the world
the photography. For one, obviously it made color work achievable,
but for another, it completely changed the way photographers approached
their work. The exposure that was needed for an autochrome
image was a bit longer than a black and white
image would require. It was longer than a second I
think um so most photographers primarily worked with still subjects initially,
(11:20):
and also sometimes a yellow filter had to be used
on the camera's lens when they were shooting outside in daylight,
because otherwise the blue sky was overwhelming and so they
had to balance that out with a little bit of yellow.
The new level of depth offered by auto chrome also
meant that photographers had to relearn their craft. Part of
this learning curve was understanding and predicting what colored would
(11:42):
actually be captured in the photographic process, because this really
wasn't a system that faithfully captured true to life color.
If you look at autochrome images, they have a pretty
distinctive and recognizable color palette. But the images that resulted
from photographer is experimenting with this new medium were so
uniquely beautiful that they caused concerns that painting would soon
(12:06):
fall out of favor. Yeah, we um include one as
part of our show art, but if you go looking
around for autochrome images online, they are spectacularly beautiful, and
you can see why there might have been a little
bit of concern in the art world that their jobs
were in jeopardy. But part of that concern for painters
in their job security, uh, it's interesting, actually came from
(12:29):
the way that errors looked on autochrome photographs. So in
instances where the subjects moved slightly during that slightly prolonged
exposure period, it actually produced this really lush looking Painter
Lee effect. Autochrome became the standard in photography, and it
remains so for more than two decades. In nineteen fourteen,
National Geographic printed its first color photo of a garden
(12:52):
of blooming flowers, taken in Belgium, and it was made
using autochrome. And it actually was not until the nine
teen thirties that other processes such as Codex code of
chrome supplanted autochrome. So just as the loomiyear's motion picture
cameras had offered a more portable option for creating films,
code of chrome was able to offer a more portable
(13:14):
way for color photos to be made. So with autochrome,
even though it had been a huge advancement, photographers still
had to carry cases of glass plates, which could be
a little bit cumbersome. But all the photographer needed to
shoot code of chrome was a small camera in their films,
so it really was again another big step towards portability.
In the nineteen thirties, is new color photography options were
(13:37):
hitting the market, Louis once again turned to the cinema,
this time to try to find a way to marry
color with motion pictures. He exhibited this work at the
Paris Exposition of ninety seven, but it was never developed
into a commercial product. While the exact reason Lumier's color
motion picture process never went into production is not entirely known,
(13:57):
world War Two probably played a part. Yeah, There is
some speculation that had he been able to put this
in production and take it around the globe as they
had with their cinematograph, that he probably could have given
Technicolor a run for its money. Um but uh In nine,
Louis was tapped to participate in what would have been
(14:19):
the first Con Film Festival as its president, but once again,
world War Two was a problem. In late August, as
the festival September one date approached, Europe was in the
grip of conflict. People had already begun arriving in Con
on August three when the German Soviet Non Aggression Pact
was signed, and that made it immediately clear that things
(14:42):
were getting very unstable and that the event really could
not proceed as planned. And by the time the festival
was officially canceled on August, pretty much everyone that had
come into Con anticipating the festival had already left. During
the occupation of France by German troops. Louis Lumier moved
from Leon to Bendel under Philipp Patent, who was Marshal
(15:03):
of France at the time. Louis served as the science
representative on Patan's Advisory Council. He did not stay in
this council for very long, though, he resigned and returned
to Bendal and In his later years, Louis was given
a multitude of honors for his contributions to photography and
motion pictures. He was a member of the Institute of Optics,
(15:24):
the National Office of Inventions, and the National Conservatory of
Arts and Trades. He was made the honorary president of
the French Chamber of Cinema and the president of the
French Society of Physics. Louis Lumier died in Bendel on
June six. Next up, we will talk about what Louise
brother August worked on after the brothers transitioned away from
(15:46):
the cinematograph. But not so we have one more quick
word from a sponsor. So, while Louis had stayed in
the family business a goose, Lumier made a rather dressed
a career change in the early nineteen hundreds. He had
always been interested in chemistry, and he was undoubtedly incredibly
(16:08):
influential in the family business in that regard. Figuring out
color photography almost certainly involved a lot of work on
his part as well as his brothers. But what he
was truly interested in was actually biochemistry, so he started
to study medicine. One of his efforts in the medical
field that brought him a claim was his interest in
the healing process and developing new ways to treat wounds.
(16:31):
During World War One, he examined the wounds of hundreds
of injured men, and he also studied scarring and healing
in dogs to further his research. We don't personally know
the details of how these dogs were wounded, and I
do not want to know well, and medical experiments involving
dogs were not uncommon at the time m hmm. But
(16:55):
he did use that that research to really get a
lot of information about out how tissues would heal themselves,
and in nineteen fifteen he applied his wound research to
the development of a bandage called a too gras, which
translates to oily gauze, and this sterile bandage was impregnated
with vassiline and balsam of Peru, so it wouldn't stick
(17:16):
to wounds, though it was of course not absorbent, so
if you also needed an absorbent bandage you needed to
have too. But tool grow dressings are actually still used today.
Uh and August also devoted a great deal of his
time in medical research to colloidal solutions to disinfect wounds,
so he really actually did have quite an impact on
wound management. From nineteen fourteen to nineteen fifty three, August
(17:39):
Lumier wrote more than a dozen books based on his
medical research, covering not only wounds and how to treat them,
but also tuberculosis and cancer, among others. August Lumier died
six years after his younger brother, on April tenth, nineteen
fifty four, at his home in Leon. You'll often see
a lot of common in biographies or um articles about
(18:03):
the two of them that by the end of his
life people knew August Lumier for his medical work, and
they had often not made the connection that he was
one of the Lumiers that had worked in film, because
he was so completely ensconced in the medical community by
that point, and even though the Lumier's abandoned motion pictures,
they also inspired one of the first motion picture storytellers,
(18:25):
George Millier, and when the Lomiers had demonstrated their films
in Paris very early on, Millier, who was a magician
and a theater manager, had seen them We're talking like
in the period, and he was completely blown away by
the possibilities that this new technology offered. And while the
Lumier's films were pretty basic and generally more on the
(18:46):
documentary side, Milliers began to immediately dream of crafting fantastical
tales that could be projected on screens. He begged August
Lumier to sell him a cinematograph, but there was just
no convincing the man to do it. Lumier told Millier,
you should be grateful since although my invention is not
for sale, it would undoubtedly ruin you. It can be
(19:09):
exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but
apart from that, it has no commercial future whatsoever. Oh goose,
I want this is like that moment. You know how
often people will ask us, like if we do live
shows and we do Q and A, if you could
travel anywhere in time, where would you go? I think
(19:29):
going forward, my answer has to change and it is.
I would go and I would scoop a goose Lumier
rope and I would take him to and I would say,
rogue one made a billion dollars and then just watch
him go whoops. Um. Yeah. Of course this happened before
they had started offering the mass producinematograph for sale. But
(19:52):
it is interesting that initially he was just like, no, no,
not go into film. It's a as a dead end. Uh.
It offers some insight this interaction to why the Loomiers
were not especially concerned with an ongoing business venture in
motion pictures. They really thought they were going to get in,
make a bunch of money and ticket sales while this
idea was still a novelty, and then get out, which
(20:12):
is what they did. But they abandoned a really lucrative business.
But of course Millier did get his hands on a camera,
though not on Loomi air camera. He started making films
that really broke open the world of fictional narratives. While
fictional stories had been told on film before through animated characters,
Millier was really the first one to tell fictional stories
(20:33):
by filming actors. He made his first film Playing Cards
in but It's Milliers nineteen o two film La Voyage
Laloon or A Trip to the Moon, that remains one
of the most famous pieces of early cinema. That's the
one where the spaceship crashes into the eye of the moon. Uh. Yeah,
that's one of those pieces. And sometimes you'll actually see
(20:56):
I know I have a couple of times seen um
a trip to the Moon uh ms accredited to the
Lumiers and not Millier. Um. Sometimes that that's been confused.
I think most people that know anything about cinema will
get it right. I have definitely seen it listed incorrectly before.
(21:17):
I don't think I've seen it listed incorrectly, but I
have heard I have heard people miss say it incorrectly. Yeah. Um.
And of course, even though filmmaking technology has evolved significantly
and the Loomier's inventions were replaced by others that improved
on their capabilities, I love that we still unconsciously pay
(21:38):
homage to the brothers and their father linguistically all the time.
So the words cinema and cinematography, for example, hearken back
to that first cinematograph created in Lyon. In two, the
Loomier family home in Leon became the Lumier Institute focused
on research and the study of film. The institute hosted
a massive celebration in commemorate the centennial of the Loomier's
(22:02):
first film. The first prototype of the cinematograph is kept
there and the second prototype was donated to the National
Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in ninety two by Louis Lumier. Incidentally,
UM the Lomier Institute is now on my list of
places I want to visit because they have amazing programming
all the time. Also in nine two, the same year
(22:23):
that that home was made into the Loomier Institute, the
Loomier Company, which was still going at that point, was
purchased by the UK film manufacturer Ilford, and it was
renamed Ilford France. Although you will sometimes still see it
listed in Ilford's um business listings as UH the Loomier.
I forget how they referenced it, but the name Lumier
(22:44):
is still attached sometimes. A new theater named the Lumier
in honor of the brothers, was built on the site
of the original Loomier factory and today uh there are
Loomier archives of film and photographs all over the world,
but one of the most impressive belongs to National Geographic.
They have an archive that contains almost fifteen thousand glass
(23:07):
plates of autochrome images, but eleven thousand of those have
never been published. So there's all this amazing photography that
uh does not really get seen, but it is being
carefully preserved because, as you can imagine, glass plate photography
kind of delicate. Yeah, a lot of photograph glass plate
photography made with potato stars. Yeah, well, a lot of
(23:30):
a lot of photographic media are incredibly delicate. Um. I
got to go on a tour of the Special Collections
at Harvard Business Schools Library earlier this year, and they
had acquired the entire collection of I think Polaroid, and
they've got stuff that is just like, this is remaining
(23:51):
in this refrigerator forever, and if it is ever to
be removed and examined, we are going to remove it
and examine it and immediately put it back right or fine,
remove it to a refrigerated room where well they have
all the things. Was like, this is the safe place
that we can open this and look at this. So yeah,
there's there's definitely stuff that's like if we don't preserve
(24:13):
this continually, it will just degrade and not be visible anymore. Yeah.
I mean that's a case with a lot of Millieri's
films as well. He made more than four hundred films,
but a lot of those are completely gone, never to
be seen again. Thankfully, some of them have been preserved,
which is why we all know about the Trip to
the Moon, because that is one that made it through
(24:34):
the ravages of time. I have some listener mail that
I almost feel guilty in taking pleasure in. Okay, it's
from our listener John. It's about our Carl Tandler episode. Uh,
he writes, Dear Tracy and Holly. First off, I'm a
huge fan of your program, and I listened to it
during most of my longer jogs. I am currently training
(24:57):
for my first marathon. Congratulations, John, amazing Uh, and I'm
slowly increasing my miles, which means I get to listen
to more of your histories as I run. I did
hit a snag though, thanks to the Carl Tandler's Corpse
Bright episode. I remember being very cavalier during your warning
that there was going to be some very gross material
coming and listener discretion should be advised, thinking that I'm
(25:19):
pretty desensitized to hearing gory details, I continued listening. Huge mistake.
The overall awful actions by Carl Tandler made me angry,
which forced me to run faster than I probably should have,
and this caused me to be more exhausted than normal.
By the time you were describing Mr Tandler's process of
removing mold from poor Maria, I was nearing the end
(25:40):
of my run. Hearing the gruesome details coupled with my
exhaustion made it almost too much to bear. Not wanting
to stop, I tried to focus on my run, but
that super focusing mint I was also super focused on
the horrible nature of Tandler's deeds. Miraculously, I managed to
keep my stomach in check and I did finish the
run successfully, but I'm sure I free out a few
other runners with my occasional shiver and the increasingly pained
(26:03):
and disgusted look on my face. From here on, I
will pay attention to any warnings that come with future podcasts,
and may hold off on listening to them for less
success less stressful times. Thank you again, Oh John, I'm
so sorry, but that didn't make me laugh, Mostly because
you're a good Storyteller's not got sick. Um. Yeah, the
(26:24):
tanselar one is super gross, but I also just wanted
to say yea John. Training for a marathon is so
much work, and I applaud anyone that does it. I
have gotten progressively more lazier with my own running, barely
do it anymore. Um, work, work in life are just
a little too busy right now to put in long
term training time. But if you would like to write
to us about any episode that made you sick to
(26:45):
your stomach or anything else, you don't have to have
been sick to your stomach to write us, just say hi.
You could do so at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com. You can also find us on social
media pretty much everywhere as Missed in History, and you
can also come to our website, which is missed in
History dot com, where you can find every episode of
the show that has ever existed, and for the ones
(27:05):
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come and do that at missed in History dot com
and we'll see you there for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Visit hostof works dot com
Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. But Hey,
this is part two of a two parter on Louis
and August Lumier, two brothers who contributed significantly to the
(00:23):
motion picture industry before there even was a motion picture industry.
That's what they're mostly famous for. But they went on
to do some other things, which is largely what we're
talking about today. But if you have not listened to
part one, we highly recommend you do so, otherwise you're
probably going to be lost. Yeah, we have two parters
sometimes that each part can stand on their own, but
this that would be harder with this one. Yeah, this
(00:45):
is definitely a continuation of right where we left off.
So last time we ended at the point where the
loom Years had developed a camera that could capture, process
and project motion pictures, and they had trained a group
of employees to use the new technolog so they could
travel around Europe showing off this marvel of innovation and
taking new movies. Right. So it wasn't long before the
(01:08):
brothers were sending their trained cameraman farther and farther afield
going outside of Europe. Because the cinematograph was relatively compact
in light, it was pretty easy to expand their filming
and demonstration presence all across the globe. They sent teams
to India, Great Britain, Canada, and Argentina. And these were
not small numbers of cameramen. In the United States alone,
(01:31):
the Loomiers had almost two dozen of their men doing
what they had been doing in Europe by the late
eighteen nineties. Yeah, so they were just taking these movies
showing them to people. Uh. And some of these staff
members were actually sent abroad as part of deals with
businessmen in foreign countries. So as part of these contracts,
(01:52):
the Loomiers would basically loan out their camera, but the
partner business would have to pay a Loomier company staff
member as a contractor to actually use the camera. So
it's like you can have it come to where you
are and take films, but you can't use it. Only
our trained cameraman can use it. And then the partner
business could then stage their own screenings of these films
(02:13):
that were taken, and the revenue from those screenings would
be split fifty fifty between the business that was renting
the camera and paying for the cameraman and the Loomier company. Eventually,
this whole partnership system became too unwieldy to manage, so
Loomiers finally started selling the cameras outright. Starting in May.
The cameras and film were sold first to businesses and
(02:35):
then to anyone who wanted them. Loomiers also began publishing
a catalog of all the films they had to offer
for purchase, so anyone could start their own entertainment business
by showing these short films. Yeah, you could basically say
you had a big space, I would like to get
a cinematograph and order the following ten films or whatever,
(02:55):
and then you can charge people admission and Vola, you
had your own movie theater running. In some demonstrations abroad
in the early days of this the company actually experimented
with presentation style, and so they hired speakers to stand
to the side of the screen and explained to audiences
what they were seeing. But it was immediately evident that
that was just silly and the explainer was extraneous. No
(03:17):
one really needed to be told, and a train is
coming at you, A baby is being fed here, especially
when you consider how basic they're titles. Are workers leaving
a factory. So here are the workers leaving the factory.
Just as their fame had spread in Europe, in the
United States, Bloomiers were heralded as geniuses. The slates of
(03:40):
films that were shown at any given screening were a
combination of movies featuring local and international scenes, and that
menu proved to be the perfect balance to delight and
excite viewers. But as you can also imagine, a French
firm stealing the thunder of someone like Edison in his
kinetoscope in Edison's own home country was problematic, and there
(04:03):
was also this growing sentiment in the United States that
American innovation should be prioritized. As we know from the
War of the Currents, Edison was not timid in going
after his rivals. He started a campaign to discredit the
work of the Loomiers while promoting his own motion picture technology.
Edison had bought the rights to the fantascope projectors from
(04:24):
Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armatt and was working on his
own film screenings. Was actually a whole patent story between
Jenkins who invented the pantoscope and Armatt, who financed it.
But that is really a tale for another day, as
is the entire War of the Currents, which has been
touched on before. Yeah, there's a two parter in it.
(04:47):
I think it's two parter. Yeah, But the bottom line
here is that the Loomier's agents in the United States
started to experience one problem after another as they attempted
to continue touring because Edison's sort of smearcamp pain was
really quite successful. So eventually customs officials started claiming that
the French cameras had been brought into the country without
(05:07):
proper documentation, and at one point one of the Lumier's
cameraman was actually jailed on a charge of filming without
a permit. As the climate of the United States grew
increasingly unwelcoming for the Loonier's cameraman, the company finally decided
to halt all efforts in North America in late eighteen seven,
and it was to some degree beginning of the end
(05:28):
of the Loonier's work in film. They didn't make a
few more movies in they actually had more than fourteen
hundred different movies in their catalog, most of which had
been shot by those traveling cameraman that they had trained,
and for the next two years they did continue to
work on developing and refining film technology, but that part
of their business was no longer really growing, and in
(05:50):
fact was kind of shrinking. They were shooting fewer and
fewer films each year. The last big demonstration the Lomiers
made in motion pictures was at the nineteen hundred Expositio
and Universal in Paris. Let's come up pretty frequently on
the podcast. Lumiers were featured as part of the expo,
and they had a screening there as part of their screening,
(06:11):
which fictured a mix of footage shot there at the
expo and films their team had made traveling through Mexico.
They also debuted a new large scale screen. The Library
of Congress is digitized master edit of much of this
footage online, and we'll link to it in our show notes.
Heads up, there are some movies in this group that
(06:31):
feature activities that could definitely be considered animal cruelty. Yeah. Uh,
there's some cock fighting in there, and there are some
horses being treated sort of poorly. So if that is
stuff that is not for you. Maybe don't look at
these ones, but you can look at their other earlier films,
and which also include blasts of spanking. As a writer,
(06:51):
that also yeah, which and I will say though, is
some of the least least aggressive spanking I've ever seen.
So if you're worried about seeing someone get hit, it's
definitely very much on the mild side. Um. After that
Paris Expo, both Louis and August turned back to photography
to some degree. So throughout their foray into motion pictures,
their family business had continued to run and to thrive.
(07:13):
It was still funding all of these little expenditures to
train people and send them abroad and also for them
to experiment and try new things. And as you recall,
the motion picture work that they did was really intended
as a way to sell new cameras and film. That
then turned into this temporary foray into movie production. They
never intended to be a film studio, but they were
(07:34):
for a brief period of time, and competition in the
motion picture space was only getting more intense, and the
brothers just wanted to move on to other things. The
Loomis soon began to work on other projects outside of
motion pictures, and that is what we'll talk about in
a moment, but first we're gonna pause for a quick
sponsor break. So the same year of the r sex FO,
(08:00):
but at the end of the year, on December, Louis
filed another patent. This time it was for a device
called a photo rama and this was a method for
taking full three sixty degrees still panoramic photos in one
long exposure. And these panoramic images were intended to be projected,
but again to be static. Meanwhile, there was a long
(08:23):
desired achievement in still photography that the brothers had yet
to crack. So while the Loomiers had made millions thanks
to their blue label plates and they had captured incredible
film of real life in motion pictures, one goal that
had been kind of on their minds for quite a
while had remained elusive, and that was creating a photographic
(08:45):
process that could reproduce images of the world as they're
truly seen with the human eye in full color, just
as was true with motion pictures. They were not the
only people working on this idea, and indeed other innovators
were trying their hand at color photography. Some were actually
successful at creating color images, but the processes were really
(09:06):
labor intensive and cumbersome, so they weren't really viable. Photographers
would either have to take three different exposures or use
three different cameras and then composite the resulting images. But
on December seventeenth of nineteen o three, the Lumiers applied
for a patent on a color photography system that they
called Autochrome. On May nineteen o four, they debuted at
(09:31):
the Academy de Siance, and for the next several years
the brothers worked on refining their process before they finally
presented it before the Paris Photo Club in nineteen o
seven to introduce it commercially. Incidentally, seven was also the
last year that the Loomier's published their catalog of films,
so surprisingly, perhaps the key to the Lumier's color photosystem
(09:54):
was potato starch. They died fine grains of starch in
three color ways, a red, orange, a green, and a violet,
and then these fine grains were combined and then applied
in a fine layer to a glass plate. And I
keep saying the word fine, but they were very, very fine.
So there were seven thousand grains per square millimeter in
(10:15):
their plate application, and then a sticky varnish of lamp
black was used to fill in any spaces between the grains.
This plate was compressed with seven tons of pressure per
square centimeter. The plate was treated with a silver bromide emulsion,
so when a photo was taken the potato starts grains
(10:35):
filtered out all the light but that which corresponded to
the color it was dyed. This is ingenious. The light
then passed through the grains onto the light sensitive emulsion
and created a glass transparency from which princes could be made.
This made the autochrome system the first commercially successful color
(10:55):
photography process. This was a massive shift in the world
the photography. For one, obviously it made color work achievable,
but for another, it completely changed the way photographers approached
their work. The exposure that was needed for an autochrome
image was a bit longer than a black and white
image would require. It was longer than a second I
think um so most photographers primarily worked with still subjects initially,
(11:20):
and also sometimes a yellow filter had to be used
on the camera's lens when they were shooting outside in daylight,
because otherwise the blue sky was overwhelming and so they
had to balance that out with a little bit of yellow.
The new level of depth offered by auto chrome also
meant that photographers had to relearn their craft. Part of
this learning curve was understanding and predicting what colored would
(11:42):
actually be captured in the photographic process, because this really
wasn't a system that faithfully captured true to life color.
If you look at autochrome images, they have a pretty
distinctive and recognizable color palette. But the images that resulted
from photographer is experimenting with this new medium were so
uniquely beautiful that they caused concerns that painting would soon
(12:06):
fall out of favor. Yeah, we um include one as
part of our show art, but if you go looking
around for autochrome images online, they are spectacularly beautiful, and
you can see why there might have been a little
bit of concern in the art world that their jobs
were in jeopardy. But part of that concern for painters
in their job security, uh, it's interesting, actually came from
(12:29):
the way that errors looked on autochrome photographs. So in
instances where the subjects moved slightly during that slightly prolonged
exposure period, it actually produced this really lush looking Painter
Lee effect. Autochrome became the standard in photography, and it
remains so for more than two decades. In nineteen fourteen,
National Geographic printed its first color photo of a garden
(12:52):
of blooming flowers, taken in Belgium, and it was made
using autochrome. And it actually was not until the nine
teen thirties that other processes such as Codex code of
chrome supplanted autochrome. So just as the loomiyear's motion picture
cameras had offered a more portable option for creating films,
code of chrome was able to offer a more portable
(13:14):
way for color photos to be made. So with autochrome,
even though it had been a huge advancement, photographers still
had to carry cases of glass plates, which could be
a little bit cumbersome. But all the photographer needed to
shoot code of chrome was a small camera in their films,
so it really was again another big step towards portability.
In the nineteen thirties, is new color photography options were
(13:37):
hitting the market, Louis once again turned to the cinema,
this time to try to find a way to marry
color with motion pictures. He exhibited this work at the
Paris Exposition of ninety seven, but it was never developed
into a commercial product. While the exact reason Lumier's color
motion picture process never went into production is not entirely known,
(13:57):
world War Two probably played a part. Yeah, There is
some speculation that had he been able to put this
in production and take it around the globe as they
had with their cinematograph, that he probably could have given
Technicolor a run for its money. Um but uh In nine,
Louis was tapped to participate in what would have been
(14:19):
the first Con Film Festival as its president, but once again,
world War Two was a problem. In late August, as
the festival September one date approached, Europe was in the
grip of conflict. People had already begun arriving in Con
on August three when the German Soviet Non Aggression Pact
was signed, and that made it immediately clear that things
(14:42):
were getting very unstable and that the event really could
not proceed as planned. And by the time the festival
was officially canceled on August, pretty much everyone that had
come into Con anticipating the festival had already left. During
the occupation of France by German troops. Louis Lumier moved
from Leon to Bendel under Philipp Patent, who was Marshal
(15:03):
of France at the time. Louis served as the science
representative on Patan's Advisory Council. He did not stay in
this council for very long, though, he resigned and returned
to Bendal and In his later years, Louis was given
a multitude of honors for his contributions to photography and
motion pictures. He was a member of the Institute of Optics,
(15:24):
the National Office of Inventions, and the National Conservatory of
Arts and Trades. He was made the honorary president of
the French Chamber of Cinema and the president of the
French Society of Physics. Louis Lumier died in Bendel on
June six. Next up, we will talk about what Louise
brother August worked on after the brothers transitioned away from
(15:46):
the cinematograph. But not so we have one more quick
word from a sponsor. So, while Louis had stayed in
the family business a goose, Lumier made a rather dressed
a career change in the early nineteen hundreds. He had
always been interested in chemistry, and he was undoubtedly incredibly
(16:08):
influential in the family business in that regard. Figuring out
color photography almost certainly involved a lot of work on
his part as well as his brothers. But what he
was truly interested in was actually biochemistry, so he started
to study medicine. One of his efforts in the medical
field that brought him a claim was his interest in
the healing process and developing new ways to treat wounds.
(16:31):
During World War One, he examined the wounds of hundreds
of injured men, and he also studied scarring and healing
in dogs to further his research. We don't personally know
the details of how these dogs were wounded, and I
do not want to know well, and medical experiments involving
dogs were not uncommon at the time m hmm. But
(16:55):
he did use that that research to really get a
lot of information about out how tissues would heal themselves,
and in nineteen fifteen he applied his wound research to
the development of a bandage called a too gras, which
translates to oily gauze, and this sterile bandage was impregnated
with vassiline and balsam of Peru, so it wouldn't stick
(17:16):
to wounds, though it was of course not absorbent, so
if you also needed an absorbent bandage you needed to
have too. But tool grow dressings are actually still used today.
Uh and August also devoted a great deal of his
time in medical research to colloidal solutions to disinfect wounds,
so he really actually did have quite an impact on
wound management. From nineteen fourteen to nineteen fifty three, August
(17:39):
Lumier wrote more than a dozen books based on his
medical research, covering not only wounds and how to treat them,
but also tuberculosis and cancer, among others. August Lumier died
six years after his younger brother, on April tenth, nineteen
fifty four, at his home in Leon. You'll often see
a lot of common in biographies or um articles about
(18:03):
the two of them that by the end of his
life people knew August Lumier for his medical work, and
they had often not made the connection that he was
one of the Lumiers that had worked in film, because
he was so completely ensconced in the medical community by
that point, and even though the Lumier's abandoned motion pictures,
they also inspired one of the first motion picture storytellers,
(18:25):
George Millier, and when the Lomiers had demonstrated their films
in Paris very early on, Millier, who was a magician
and a theater manager, had seen them We're talking like
in the period, and he was completely blown away by
the possibilities that this new technology offered. And while the
Lumier's films were pretty basic and generally more on the
(18:46):
documentary side, Milliers began to immediately dream of crafting fantastical
tales that could be projected on screens. He begged August
Lumier to sell him a cinematograph, but there was just
no convincing the man to do it. Lumier told Millier,
you should be grateful since although my invention is not
for sale, it would undoubtedly ruin you. It can be
(19:09):
exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but
apart from that, it has no commercial future whatsoever. Oh goose,
I want this is like that moment. You know how
often people will ask us, like if we do live
shows and we do Q and A, if you could
travel anywhere in time, where would you go? I think
(19:29):
going forward, my answer has to change and it is.
I would go and I would scoop a goose Lumier
rope and I would take him to and I would say,
rogue one made a billion dollars and then just watch
him go whoops. Um. Yeah. Of course this happened before
they had started offering the mass producinematograph for sale. But
(19:52):
it is interesting that initially he was just like, no, no,
not go into film. It's a as a dead end. Uh.
It offers some insight this interaction to why the Loomiers
were not especially concerned with an ongoing business venture in
motion pictures. They really thought they were going to get in,
make a bunch of money and ticket sales while this
idea was still a novelty, and then get out, which
(20:12):
is what they did. But they abandoned a really lucrative business.
But of course Millier did get his hands on a camera,
though not on Loomi air camera. He started making films
that really broke open the world of fictional narratives. While
fictional stories had been told on film before through animated characters,
Millier was really the first one to tell fictional stories
(20:33):
by filming actors. He made his first film Playing Cards
in but It's Milliers nineteen o two film La Voyage
Laloon or A Trip to the Moon, that remains one
of the most famous pieces of early cinema. That's the
one where the spaceship crashes into the eye of the moon. Uh. Yeah,
that's one of those pieces. And sometimes you'll actually see
(20:56):
I know I have a couple of times seen um
a trip to the Moon uh ms accredited to the
Lumiers and not Millier. Um. Sometimes that that's been confused.
I think most people that know anything about cinema will
get it right. I have definitely seen it listed incorrectly before.
(21:17):
I don't think I've seen it listed incorrectly, but I
have heard I have heard people miss say it incorrectly. Yeah. Um.
And of course, even though filmmaking technology has evolved significantly
and the Loomier's inventions were replaced by others that improved
on their capabilities, I love that we still unconsciously pay
(21:38):
homage to the brothers and their father linguistically all the time.
So the words cinema and cinematography, for example, hearken back
to that first cinematograph created in Lyon. In two, the
Loomier family home in Leon became the Lumier Institute focused
on research and the study of film. The institute hosted
a massive celebration in commemorate the centennial of the Loomier's
(22:02):
first film. The first prototype of the cinematograph is kept
there and the second prototype was donated to the National
Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in ninety two by Louis Lumier. Incidentally,
UM the Lomier Institute is now on my list of
places I want to visit because they have amazing programming
all the time. Also in nine two, the same year
(22:23):
that that home was made into the Loomier Institute, the
Loomier Company, which was still going at that point, was
purchased by the UK film manufacturer Ilford, and it was
renamed Ilford France. Although you will sometimes still see it
listed in Ilford's um business listings as UH the Loomier.
I forget how they referenced it, but the name Lumier
(22:44):
is still attached sometimes. A new theater named the Lumier
in honor of the brothers, was built on the site
of the original Loomier factory and today uh there are
Loomier archives of film and photographs all over the world,
but one of the most impressive belongs to National Geographic.
They have an archive that contains almost fifteen thousand glass
(23:07):
plates of autochrome images, but eleven thousand of those have
never been published. So there's all this amazing photography that
uh does not really get seen, but it is being
carefully preserved because, as you can imagine, glass plate photography
kind of delicate. Yeah, a lot of photograph glass plate
photography made with potato stars. Yeah, well, a lot of
(23:30):
a lot of photographic media are incredibly delicate. Um. I
got to go on a tour of the Special Collections
at Harvard Business Schools Library earlier this year, and they
had acquired the entire collection of I think Polaroid, and
they've got stuff that is just like, this is remaining
(23:51):
in this refrigerator forever, and if it is ever to
be removed and examined, we are going to remove it
and examine it and immediately put it back right or fine,
remove it to a refrigerated room where well they have
all the things. Was like, this is the safe place
that we can open this and look at this. So yeah,
there's there's definitely stuff that's like if we don't preserve
(24:13):
this continually, it will just degrade and not be visible anymore. Yeah.
I mean that's a case with a lot of Millieri's
films as well. He made more than four hundred films,
but a lot of those are completely gone, never to
be seen again. Thankfully, some of them have been preserved,
which is why we all know about the Trip to
the Moon, because that is one that made it through
(24:34):
the ravages of time. I have some listener mail that
I almost feel guilty in taking pleasure in. Okay, it's
from our listener John. It's about our Carl Tandler episode. Uh,
he writes, Dear Tracy and Holly. First off, I'm a
huge fan of your program, and I listened to it
during most of my longer jogs. I am currently training
(24:57):
for my first marathon. Congratulations, John, amazing Uh, and I'm
slowly increasing my miles, which means I get to listen
to more of your histories as I run. I did
hit a snag though, thanks to the Carl Tandler's Corpse
Bright episode. I remember being very cavalier during your warning
that there was going to be some very gross material
coming and listener discretion should be advised, thinking that I'm
(25:19):
pretty desensitized to hearing gory details, I continued listening. Huge mistake.
The overall awful actions by Carl Tandler made me angry,
which forced me to run faster than I probably should have,
and this caused me to be more exhausted than normal.
By the time you were describing Mr Tandler's process of
removing mold from poor Maria, I was nearing the end
(25:40):
of my run. Hearing the gruesome details coupled with my
exhaustion made it almost too much to bear. Not wanting
to stop, I tried to focus on my run, but
that super focusing mint I was also super focused on
the horrible nature of Tandler's deeds. Miraculously, I managed to
keep my stomach in check and I did finish the
run successfully, but I'm sure I free out a few
other runners with my occasional shiver and the increasingly pained
(26:03):
and disgusted look on my face. From here on, I
will pay attention to any warnings that come with future podcasts,
and may hold off on listening to them for less
success less stressful times. Thank you again, Oh John, I'm
so sorry, but that didn't make me laugh, Mostly because
you're a good Storyteller's not got sick. Um. Yeah, the
(26:24):
tanselar one is super gross, but I also just wanted
to say yea John. Training for a marathon is so
much work, and I applaud anyone that does it. I
have gotten progressively more lazier with my own running, barely
do it anymore. Um, work, work in life are just
a little too busy right now to put in long
term training time. But if you would like to write
to us about any episode that made you sick to
(26:45):
your stomach or anything else, you don't have to have
been sick to your stomach to write us, just say hi.
You could do so at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com. You can also find us on social
media pretty much everywhere as Missed in History, and you
can also come to our website, which is missed in
History dot com, where you can find every episode of
the show that has ever existed, and for the ones
(27:05):
that Tracy and I have worked on, we include our
sources and some show notes on occasion. You can also
find all kinds of other goodies at our website. So
come and do that at missed in History dot com
and we'll see you there for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Visit hostof works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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