by Vaclav Smil
FIGURE 5.7. Four of the 12 silhouetted frames of Muybridge’s famous sequence of “automatic electro-photographs” showing a trotting horse (Abe Edgington, owned by Le-land Stanford) at the Palo Alto track on June 15, 1878.
When George Eastman (1854-1932), the man who removed the other two obstacles that precluded the popular diffusion of photography, developed his interest in taking pictures, he was a poorly paid clerk at Rochester Savings Bank. He bought a heavy camera and the associated wet-plate outfit for a planned trip to Santo Domingo in 1877. The trip fell through, but Eastman found a new calling: he experimented with coatings, began making Bennett’s dry plates, and in 1879 he devised, and patented, a new coating machine to do the job (Kodak 2001; Brayer 1996). Searching for a lighter and more flexible support than glass, he introduced a three-layered negative stripping film (paper, soluble gelatin, gelatin emulsion) in 1884, and a year later, in cooperation with camera maker William H. Walker, he invented a roll holder that could be attached to standard plate apparatus. All that was needed was to put a smaller size of his film into a handheld, easy-to-use camera.
His solution was a simple and heavily advertised camera whose principal selling slogan was “You press the button, we do the rest.” Eastman created its name, Kodak, in order to use K, his favorite letter, to start and end a word that would resonate in his advertisements. The U.S. patent for the camera was issued in September 1888, and Kodak’s first version was in production between June and December of that year (Coe 1988; GEH 2001). This design did not include any technical innovations as it used only already tested components, but it produced the first handheld camera suitable for amateur photography; its mode of operation (not its size) made it an obvious forerunner of all modern point-and-shoot models that became particularly popular during the last third of the 20th century. Kodak’s operation was not quite as simple as the slogan had it: the film had to be advanced and rewound, and the first 13 Kodak models had a string connected to the shutter mechanism whose protruding top had to be pulled two or three times to wind up the barrel shutter spring to its full tension (figure 5.8).
The camera’s wooden box (a rectangular prism, 16.3 cm long) was covered with smooth black leather; the 57 mm lens was centered on one narrow face, the rewinding lever and the string pull were on the top, and the release button for a cylindrical shutter was just above the center on the left side. As the lens had a great depth of field, it produced focused images from as close as 1.2 meters, and its angle (60o) made it possible to dispense with a viewfinder. Kodak spools were available with 50 or 100 exposures, and the entire camera was returned to Rochester, New York, factory, where the film was removed, developed, and printed. The camera took circular photographs (so the users would not have to worry about keeping it level) with a diameter of 6.25 cm, and as it had no exposure counter, photographers had to keep the track of pictures taken. The original list price was $25, a considerable amount in 1888, and about 5,200 units were produced before new models were introduced in 1889.
That was also the year when the stripping film, whose development required time-and labor-intensive operations, was replaced by the precursor of modern films made of modified celluloid. This nitrated cellulose was first made by Alexander Parkes (1813-1890) in 1861, and under the name Parkesine it was used to make a variety of small items such as combs, knife handles, pens, and boxes. Henry M. Reichenbach, a chemist working for Eastman, discovered that by dissolving the cellulose nitrate in alcohol and by using several additives, he could produce thin, flexible, and perfectly clear films by casting the mixture on glass plates (Coe 1977). Once set, this celluloid was coated with gelatin emulsion to make the world’s first transparent roll film, whose production was patented in April 1889 and which was used in the Number 1 Kodak camera released in October 1889.
FIGURE 5.8. Patent drawings for Eastman’s Kodak camera, and its actual appearance and a detail of its shutter mechanism (reproduced from Scientific American, September 15, 1888).
Several technical advances of the 1890s made amateur photography even easier. They included the easy-to-load cartridge film that was patented by Samuel N. Turner in 1895. This film was backed by black paper marked with numbers that could be read through a small window and thus allowed for advancing a precise length of a film for each exposure, a technique that was displaced only by the advent of electronic cameras. The Folding Pocket Kodak, the obvious ancestor of all roll-film cameras marketed during the next six decades, was introduced in 1897. Kodak’s subsequent most notable pre-WWI innovation was the world’s first practical safety film that used cellulose acetate instead of the highly flammable cellulose nitrate (Kodak 2001).
By the beginning of the 20th century, amateur photography was thus one of the most accessible, if often disparaged, arts. Alexander Lamson’s reaction in The Beacon of July 1890 expressed the feeling of “real” amateurs: “Photographers who merely ‘press the button’ and leave someone else to ‘do the rest’ are not really entitled to the honorable name” (Lamson 1890:154). This was a misplaced judgment, as the overwhelming majority of picture takers had no special intents and aspirations beyond producing small mementos of their lives, families, friends, and places. And that is what they still do today: they snap, without any focusing, billions of images every year. And while too many of these pictures are fairly useless or merely frivolous, millions of them carry a unique emotional message as they help us to make links between generations, to recall special occasions, to reknit the social fabric—and to leave behind a visual record of changing times.
The 1890s were also the first years when just about everybody could also enjoy inexpensively reproduced photographs thanks to the invention and perfecting of the halftone printing process. Previous reproduction techniques could either produce limited numbers of excellent (continuous tone) but costly copies, while several processes aimed at larger print runs (most notably photogravure) were cumbersome as well as very expensive. That is why, for decades after the invention of photography, pictures were used only to replace earlier field sketches as the basis for preparing reproducible images and why most publications contained no, or only a few, illustrations. Because the most common relief printing processes could render only solid blacks and whites, large numbers of skilled artists were engaged during the second half of the 19th century in converting photographs into reproducible engravings.
An alternative to this laborious process became available during the 1880s with a photomechanical reproduction that could convert black line (or dotted) drawings into relief matrices by producing negatives on sensitized zinc plates and then etching them. But, obviously, this technique was also unable to reproduce photographs or wash drawings. Only halftone reproduction could do that by breaking up the continuous tones of the photographic image into a pattern of tiny dots of variable size that could be printed by the inexpensive relief technique (Phillips 1996). Because of the limited resolution of our vision, these variably sized dots blend and produce the illusion of shaded grays from an image that is composed entirely of black and white. Moritz and Max Jaffé used a gauze screen as early as 1877, and Charles-Guillaume Petit and Georg Meisenbach were other inventors credited with commercialization of the process whose first versions were quite complicated and relatively slow.
By 1885 Frederic Eugene Ives (1856-1937) perfected the process by inventing a screen that was made from two sheets of glass with a fine series of etched lines (six per millimeter are now standard for fine resolution) forming a cross-line grid that was filled with an opaque substance (Ives 1928). Rephotographing a full-tone photograph through the screen produces the halftone effect as a sensitized copper plate is marked by a dotted pattern. Ives never patented his cross-line design, and halftone printing diffused rapidly once the Levy Co. began producing cross-line screens in 1892. The new technique cut the cost newspaper illustrations by about 95% and made illustrated printing commonplace. During the late 1880s, full-page engraving in such upscale publications as The Illustrated London News or Harper’s
Magazine cost about $300; a few years later it was an inexpensive option (less than $20 for a full page) for every printer (Mott 1957).
Halftones introduced an unprecedented realism to printed illustration and merged the market for photographs with the market for printed word; this combination brought an enormous expansion of the publishing industry after 1890. And because it was cheaper to print halftones than the text, the new technique made illustrated newspapers and magazines not only less expensive to produce but also more attractive, further stimulating their sales (Phillips 1996). And, obviously, photographs quickly became an indispensable tool for advertising. Nothing has changed in this respect: the halftone technique remains as essential today to convert photographs into inane advertising images as when it was introduced during the 1890s.
Ives’s other great printing invention also dates to the early 1880s: producing primary-color separations (Ives used blue, red, and green filters), making their halftones and then overprinting precisely aligned layers of yellow, cyan, and magenta ink to get a full-spectrum color reproduction of the original image. We still use three colors of ink (cyan, magenta, yellow) and black and you can see their overlaps by examining newspaper or magazine illustrations with a magnifying glass or notice their alignment markers that are often left near the edges of color-printed pages.
Movies
After Edison refused Muybridge’s offer to transform Zoopraxiscope into a more sophisticated machine, he became determined to develop a device that, in his own words, would do for the eye what his phonograph did for the ear. But, unlike in the case of incandescent light, most of the work on Edison’s concept to combine a camera and a peephole viewer was done by his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860-1935), who worked previously on Edison’s ore milling. Development of Edison’s Kinetograph and Kinetoscope is a perfect example of complexity of technical inventions and of the inappropriateness of narrow attributions. Edison’s initial idea was to follow his phonograph design and have tiny photographic images affixed to a rotating cylinder. But after his visit to Paris in 1889—where he met Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), professor of physiology, whose Chronophotographe used a continuous roll of film to produce a sequence of still images for research in cardiology—he abandoned that impractical approach and directed Dickson to pursue the roll design.
Edison, irrepressible as always, told a reporter of the New York Sun: “Now I’ve got it. That is I’ve got the germ or basic principle. When you get your base principle right, then it’s only a question of time and a matter of details about completing the machine” (cited in Musser 1990:71). The U.S. patent for the Kinetograph (a camera) and Kinetoscope (the viewer) was filed in August 1891 (figure 5.9). Dickson ordered 35-mm film from Eastman (whose cameras used 70-mm film) and fed it vertically through the Kinetoscope. Edison’s first film studio was completed in May 1893, and on May 9 was the first public showing of an electrically powered Kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science. The reward for lining up and peering into the machine was to see three Edison employees hammering on an anvil and passing around a bottle of beer. Such was the sublime beginning of American motion pictures.
Soon, with Dickson and William Heise in charge of the motion-picture production, Edison’s studio began releasing an increasing variety of full-length (in 1894 that meant less than a minute) films. The first copyrighted product, a would-be comical clip that showed Fred Ott, an Edison employee, sneezing into a handkerchief, was followed by pictures of an amateur gymnast, of a lightning shave in a barbershop, and of Eugene Sandow, an Austrian strong man, flexing his upper torso. Nearly 80 pictures were made in 1894, and they included wrestlers, cock fights, terriers attacking rats, Buffalo Bill and Indian war council, and the gyrations of skimpily dressed dancers. Comparisons with some leading subjects of mainstream U.S. filmmaking a century later are unavoidable: wrestling, violence, Westerns, sex, even another muscle-displaying Austrian (Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course).
The pattern of moviemaking was set right at the beginning; all that remained was to embellish it and make it gradually more provocative and, technical advances permitting, much more elaborate. Although the resulting images could be seen only by one person at a time, Kinetoscope parlors (the first one opened in New York in April 1894) showing short clips became fairly popular in many large U.S. cities. While Edison’s derivative invention of individual peephole viewing was the first commercial display of filmed moving pictures, it was not clearly the beginning of movies, the collective experience of rapidly photographed images projected on screen in darkened rooms.
The real movies were born and greatly improved between 1895 and 1910 (Nowell-Smith 1996; Rittaud-Hutinet 1995; Musser 1990; Mitry 1967). Precise attributions of particular beginnings (first camera, first projection) are more exercises in selective definitions than in describing the complex reality. Unlike in the case of such decisive solo inventions as Parsons’s steam turbine or such accurately datable performance breakthroughs as Edison’s durable incandescent light, moving pictures have no precise moment of origin, nor can any country or any individual claim a clear-cut priority for their earliest commercialization and artistic development. But the cinematographic protagonists clearly fall into two groups: the largely forgotten ones, and a few iconic names.
On the technical side, the first group includes about a dozen Frenchmen, Germans, and Britishers. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1842-1890) patented his 16-lens “apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life” in January 1888 (U.S. Patent 376,247), and the images of his in-laws and his son he took with it in October of that year in the garden of their house in Leeds were the first successfully photographed and projected motion pictures. Leon Bouly designed his Cinématographe in 1892 and patented an improved version a year later. Max and Emil Skladanowsky held the first public show of their 15-min movie program produced with their Bioskop on November 1, 1895, in Berlin.
And the first portable apparatus to make films was Kineopticon made by Bert Acres, who began his work on a kinetic camera in 1893 (de Vries 2002). In April 1895 Woodwille Latham demonstrated his Eidoloscope, a kind of projecting Kinetoscope. Dickson, who left Edison’s company, joined with three partners to form the American Mutoscope Co. to market his projector (subsequently widely know as the Biograph, the name that later became synonymous with cinema in a number of countries), which used wider film (70 mm) and advanced it by friction, without sprockets.
The best-known names are, of course, those of Edison and the Lumière brothers, but the invention attributed to Edison was a case of outright deception and the Lumieères’ principal contribution was skillful marketing. As the Kinetoscope was enjoying increasing popularity, Edison was in no rush to develop a competing device. But when Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat introduced their Phantoscope (figure 5.9), Edison’s company bought the rights to the machine and agreed to manufacture the projector (slightly altered by Armat) on the condition that it would be advertised as Edison’s new invention, the Vitascope. The promotional brochure claimed that Edison invented “a new machine … which is probably the most remarkable and startling in its results of any that the world has ever seen” (quoted in Musser 1990:113). Edison’s role in all of this was indisputably unethical: not only did he agree to this deception, but he also appeared at the first private screening of the Vitascope, on March 27, 1896, and acted for the benefits of assembled reporters as the inventor of yet another magical machine, assuring widespread press coverage of the event.
America’s first Vitascope theater opened its doors on April 23, 1896, in a New York City music hall, and a year later there were several hundred of these projectors across the country and even in Honolulu. But this rapid diffusion was accompanied by many recurrent problems: only a few experts could initially set up the system, which ran on DC (choice dictated by Edison’s bias) and hence could not be accommodated without converters in an increasing number of AC settings. Poor quality of early films that caused repeated perforation t
ears, and fire was the greatest hazard. Film tearing was solved in 1896 by doubling the thickness of the nitrate base, but the first nonflammable acetate film was introduced only in 1908.
FIGURE 5.9. Patent drawings for Dickson’s (Edison’s) kinetographic camera (U.S. Patent 589,168) filed in August 1891 and granted six years later (top), and for Jenkins and Armat’s Phantoscope (U.S. Patent 586,953), whose slightly altered version was produced as Edison’s Vitascope (bottom).
Standard film histories concur that all those inventive Americans pioneering their competing scopes were not the creators of cinema, and that that primacy belongs to Louis Lumière (1864-1948), the younger son of Lyon photographer Antoine Lumière (Conreur 1995; Rittaud-Hutinet 1995; Mitry 1967). At the age of 17, Louis improved the preparation of a gelatin-bromide plate used for snapshots, and the family’s company began producing these plates in 1882. His brother Auguste (1862-1954) is usually named as a co-inventor of motion pictures, although he left a clear account that credits Louis with the key revelation. But Auguste also conceded that Louis did not construct an entirely new machine from fundamental principles: “The only problem that remained to be solved consisted of finding a drive system that would ensure uniform exposure and substitution time for the images” (quoted in Mitry 1967:70).
Origins of the Lumieères’ machine (French Patent 245,032) thus go directly to Edison’s Kinetoscope, Marey’s Chronophotographe, and Bouly’s Cinéma-tographe. After Antoine Lumière saw the display of Edison’s new device on a visit to Paris in 1894, he bought it and had one of his workers to disassemble it. And not only was he familiar with Marey’s work, but he also picked up Bouly’s expired patent and with it the name of the device, because Bouly, much like Beau de Rochas, did not pay his annual patent fees. Perhaps the most important advantage of Cinématographe Lumiére was that it combined camera and projector in a small box that weighed less than 5.5 kg and hence could be easily used for filming in plein air.