Movies Thomas Edison The Creation of Motion Pictures

Movies

Thomas Edison

The Creation of Motion Pictures A weird and wonderful tale of unrelated things coming together

That’s gun cotton Soak cotton in nitric and sulfuric acid n Let dry n Wash in water n Let dry n Light it and get… n

It’ll make sense later

Franz Uchatius

Projector - 1853

Ludwig Doebler

Aristotle

Pinhole camera

Ibn Al-Hathem (Alhazen)

Joseph Nièpce

World’s first photograph

Louis Daguerre

Daguerrotype of Lincoln

William Henry Fox Talbot

Photograph of Lincoln

Ludwig Doebler (again)

Uchatius’ projector

Eadweard Muybridge

The Horse Bet - 1872

Muybridge’s disk

The Zoopraxiscope - 1879

John Wesley Hyatt - 1863

Why is Hyatt important?

n Hyatt, a printer, combined camphor, alcohol and gun cotton, compressed it into billiard balls n The material was called “celluloid” n Great stuff, except

n They had an unfortunate tendency to explode – after all, they were made of gun cotton.

Hannibal Goodwin n Took the celluloid invented by Hyatt and turned it into sheets

George Eastman n Took Goodwin’s celluloid sheets and turned them into strips n These strips are called film

Etienne Jules Marey n n Added sprocket holes to the edge of film in order to pull it through the projector The first movie projector using strips of pictures instead of disks

Thomas Alva Edison

Edison put together all the parts n Parts and ideas he got from others Uchatius’s idea of passing pictures rapidly in front of a light and through a lens, creating the appearance of moving pictures, which was taken by Doebler as stage show, attracting the attention of Muybridge, who told Edison about it n Hyatt’s celluloid, turned into sheets by Goodwin, and then into strips as film by Eastman n Marey’s sprocket holes on the edge of the film n

n Edison’s parts n The light bulb for a light source n Marketing the whole idea, selling his

Edison’s Kinetoscope – 1894

n Movies were short films of regular life Two men boxing n A girl dancing n Personal lives, such as n

Lumière Brothers

Lumière’s program n La Sortie des usines Lumière (quitting time at the Lumiere factory)

n Le Repas de bébé (a Lumiere child eating)as

n L’Arroseur arrosé (a boy playing a practical joke on a gardener)

n L’Arrivée d’un train en gare

Arrivee d’un train en gare

All this was fine, but soon the novelty wore off. More was needed.

George Méliès

Méliès - 1902

Melies and others followed the Lumieres and showed movies in theatres. They were called “Nickelodeons” – odeon from the Greek for theatre, and nickel for what patrons paid to watch the movies.

Edison jumped on the bandwagon.

Edison’s projecting kinetoscope

The Great Train Robbery - 1903

Again, the novelty soon wore off. The time had come for longer films – two and three reelers instead of one-reelers, like D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”

You may have noticed something

No sound

Edison tried adding sound by combining his kinetoscope and his kinetophone, showing the film while playing the sound.

The major problem was synchronization

Remember the telephone – How sound could be converted to electrical impulses

Changing the amplitude of an electrical current can cause a light to brighten or dim in direct relation to the amount of electricity.

Danish researchers – Discovered selenium would generate an electrical signal in direct relation to the amount of light shining on it.

Exposing film to the flickering light created by sound, then putting it on one side of the film created the sound track.