Evolution: A Peep into the Past
By CLAUDE FRIESE-GREENE
In 1912, about two years before the war, the number of cine-technicians was very few indeed;
not more than a dozen or so in this country. I was quite a youngster then and happened to be
one of the very few engaged in “film production,” and, just as a matter of reminiscence, I am
going to recall in a very few words a day’s work for me at that time. With an assistant even
younger than myself, we collected a few magazines together and loaded them with 100 feet
rolls of negative. The camera I used then was a wooden affair with a Zeiss 45mm lens. I was
lucky if I could get the camera to run 25 feet of film without a jam. However, if the sun was
shining (and it had to shine in those days) everybody was quite happy if I was able to expose
even a few feet at a time of some action on a two-reel drama we were making in the backyard
of some large premises in Brighton. We kept shooting whilst the light permitted, and after
collecting the exposed magazines, took them round to the Laboratories, which consisted of a
few rooms which were darkened with paper and blankets and had running water laid on.
I prepared the developer, getting it up to temperature by heating a pint or two over a gas ring.
The developing dishes were flat, and the negative had to be wound round and round a kind of
square frame that fitted into the dish. This frame had hundreds of pins sticking up, hence the
name “pin frames,” and it used to take about twenty minutes to thread the film. The negative
was then immersed into the developer and continually kept on the move by hand, until one
judged the density to be correct. It was then put into another flat dish containing the hypo,
and fixed; then into another similar dish where water was turned on from a running tap. After
washing, the drying business was quite a work of “art” to get the film off the pin frame and
feed it on to a hand-driven drum, which had to be turned round and round until the film was
dry, a good two hours. Then came cleaning the negative and preparing for printing — no
gammas to wink to in those days.
The printing machine was also a hand affair — one turn, one picture — adjusting the light by
placing it nearer or farther away from the film, and perhaps if it were a “thin” negative, it was
necessary to wrap a few pieces of tissue paper round the lamp. However, when the exposure
was thought satisfactory, off one went turning picture by picture and printing away.
Next, of course, the development of the print in exactly the same manner as the negative —
the hand-drying drum again, and then at last the finished article. Join on a piece of leader and
the day’s “rushes” were ready for the projector.
Having passed the word to the “producer” and those concerned that all was ready, I then
finished off by projecting the result of my day’s efforts, for better or for worse, somewhere
about midnight.
[fig]Daguerrotype. Panorama of City Scene, 1844. (From the original in the Science Museum,
South Kensington).
In other words, just doing everything from the start to the finish.
Now that was about twenty-five years ago. Picture for yourselves the tremendous advance this
industry has made since that time. It is amazing that now every single phase concerned with
the technical production of moving pictures has its own department, and inter-departments.
Such is progress.
***
Having gone back so far, let’s go back further still. I enjoy looking up old books, new books
and manuscripts, so that I may filter in my mind the beginnings of the wonderful science we
are serving. Little discoveries and achievements, even hundreds of years ago, are now parts of
the evolution of cinematography. There is no need to go into the general principles of
photography; we are conversant with the camera, the exposure of light on to a sensitive
emulsion, the development of the latent image, fixing, etc. But what I want to dwell upon for
a short while is, “How did it all start?”
I should say that the first step in the direction of the evolution of photography, the predecessor
of cinematography, happened somewhere in the middle of the sixteenth century. There were
probably many men who must have noticed the peculiar phenomenon, but it is credited to an
Italian philosopher, one Battisto Porta, who “exhibited” what is known as the camera obscura,
This is what he did. He covered up his window with a piece of wood so that all light was
excluded from his
[fig]Hark Calotype by Fox Talbot: “The Chess Players.”
(From Science Museum, South Kensington, Fox Talbot Collection).
[fig]Stereo-Daguerreotype. Tinted Portrait of Child, circa 1850.
(From the original in the Science Museum, South Kensington).
room. In this piece of wood he made a very small hole, then — lo and behold — on the wall
on the opposite side of the room was reproduced the scene of the view outside his window,
but, of course, upside-down. It must have caused a sensation in those days. Anyhow it was the
beginning, the nucleus of the idea of the camera. It was later found out that the image thus
obtained on the wall could be made sharper by placing a glass lens over the hole in the piece
of wood covering the window. (Lenses, by the way, were invented over a hundred years
before, because the idea of focussing light with glass is known to date back to the time of the
ancient Romans.
As time went on, it was discovered that by placing a mirror at a certain angle to the lens (hole
and glass) it caused the light to be reflected down. Thus, instead of people standing on their
heads in order to see the picture on the wall the right way up, they could at least stand in a
normal position and view it more or less naturally. Sounds silly now, but this happened five
hundred years ago. This step which, as I say, one might liken to the camera itself, must have
existed at least three hundred years before the actual art of photography developed, which
could not take place until the camera and chemical discoveries were mated.
There is probably no doubt that at the time of the discovery of the camera obscura, old
alchemists knew of the existence of silver nitrate. h is said that it was by chance that one of
these old fellows dropped some ordinary sea salt into a solution <>l silver nitrate, whereupon
the liquid took the appearance of something like milk, and it was observed that, when sunlight
fell on it, it quickly turned black. This accidental discovery was, of course, not then treated as
of any importance nor was there any idea of the link it would be in photographic art.
Years passed by, and a German physician, Schultze, in 1727 carried out an experiment with a
mixture of chalk and silver nitrate. He used to cut out designs in card- board, place them over
the mixture and expose them to the sunlight, after which the design appeared in black upon
his mixture of chalk and silver nitrate. A Dr. William Lewis repeated this experiment in
England in 1763. At his death his records were bought by Josiah Wedgwood, the potter. He
also made many interesting experiments with silver salts. He was later assisted by Sir
Humphrey Davy, and between them they coated paper with a weak solution of silver salts.
They placed opaque objects to cast shadows over the prepared surface, resulting in the paper
turning black, except where the shadows were cast ; thus they succeeded in securing a print of
the objects on a black ground. They also tried their prepared paper with the camera obscura,
with no success, owing no doubt to the lack of intensity of the light, their paper being coated
only with such a weak solution of silver salts. They were never able to fix any of their results.
Nevertheless, this was at least another step forward towards the real invention of
photography.
A little more than a hundred years ago, several men in many countries were striving to
capture “pictures painted by light” and retain them permanently (it was an art in those days to
trace the images of scenes on a piece of paper caused by the camera obscura), and it was the
pioneering work, energy, invention and sometimes accidental discoveries of men like
Daguerre and Niepce in France and Fox Talbot in England (who eventually mated the picture
caused by the camera obscura with a sensitive surface that was affected by light and by
chemical treatment) that resulted in the image being permanently retained.
Niepce discovered that a mineral substance known as bitumen of Judea (a sort of asphalt or
pitch), when dissolved with some oils, was affected by exposure to light, an exposure in
sunlight lasting many hours. He spread his preparation of bitumen on a tablet of plated silver
or well-cleaned glass. This was very similar to the method Wedgwood and Davy had used, of
paper soaked in silver salts. Daguerre and Niepce entered into partnership, and Daguerre (who
had also been experimenting with silver salts) made many improvements in Niepce’s process.
Daguerre, however, soon became dissatisfied with the long exposure necessary, and earnestly
sought after some quicker process. It is interesting to note that Niepce called his process
“heliography” or sun-drawing. He died in 1833, and his son joined Daguerre in the
partnership.
The following paragraphs I quote from Mr. Charles R. Gibson’s book, “Romance of Modern
Photography”; they are extremely interesting at this juncture:—
“Daguerre had abandoned the bitumen process of his late partner, Niepce, as also his early
experiments with silver salts, but lie was evidently seeking once more to engage silver, in
some form or other, in his service. It is said that Daguerre accidentally discovered that a plate
treated with iodine was sensitive to light. We are told that on one occasion he noticed that a
plate which had been treated with iodine retained the image of a silver spoon which had
chanced to be laid down upon it. Al- though I can only find one historian who has preserved
this tale for us, it seems a very probable one. Daguerre had already seen Niepce use iodine to
blacken his bitumen pictures, so that iodine would be sure to be among Daguerre’s stock of
chemicals. It would be quite natural that he should try to improve his own pictures by
exposing them to the vapour of iodine, just as Niepce had done, and no doubt it would be
upon a plate which he had thus treated that he accidentally discovered the image of a spoon.
This would suggest to him at once that iodine would make his silver plate sensitive to light.
“This iodine with which Daguerre was working had not long been discovered. It is an
elementary substance and was obtained by some chemical manufacturers from seaweed. Daguerre took a brightly polished plate of silver and sought to make its surface
sensitive to light by exposing it to the vapour of iodine. Alas, when Daguerre exposed
his plate in the camera, lie could only get a faint sort of
[fig]Facsimile reproduction of front page of William Friese-Greene Patent, June 1889,
reproduced by kind permission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office.]
image of bright objects, and that after in, my hours of exposure. It seemed as though the hopes
that he had built upon his silver plate, with its coating of iodine of silver, were going to share
the same fate as his earlier experiments with paper soaked in silver salts ; indeed matters
looked even more hopeless.
“It so happened that one clay he removed one of these silver plates from his camera, as the
exposure, probably due to the light, had been insufficient to produce any image. Had the
spoilt plate been a glass one or a prepared paper it would doubtless have been immediately
consigned to the rubbish heap, but being made of silver it was naturally laid aside in a
cupboard to be re-polished and again prepared for a fresh exposure.
“How many of us would have lost heart at this point and abandoned the whole affair as a
practical impossibility? Not so with the indefatigable Daguerre. It was no light task to repolish the silver plate; it requires great skill and care. I fancy that Daguerre must have come
forward to open his cupboard next morning with a feeling of dogged perseverance; nothing
for it but to try, try, try again. Imagine his surprise when he took the spoilt plate from the
cupboard to find an exquisite picture upon it. Doubtless he questioned whether he was waking
or dreaming; it was too like a fairy tale. A perfect picture! Nothing approaching it has ever
been seen by man before.
“Wherein could lie the magic power of his cupboard ? Will another short exposure in the
camera — another twenty-four hours’ imprisonment in the cupboard — present him with
another ‘perfect picture’? I very much doubt if Daguerre slept the following night. At any
rate there would be no chance of his sleeping on and failing to remove the second plate on the
expiring of the twenty-four hours.
“Another picture did appear, and equal in every way to the first, and so it only remained for
Daguerre to discover wherein lay the magic in his cupboard.
“It was clear that the plate must have been affected by vapours from some of the chemicals in
the cupboard, and so a little patience would be required to find out which dish of chemicals
was the ‘good fairy.’ I think that the one which did prove itself to be the magical one was one
of the last that Daguerre would have suggested. It was a simple dish of that bright semi-liquid
metal known as mercury. In this way Daguerre discovered that if what he had previously
considered to be a very much under-exposed plate was exposed to the vapour of mercury, the
invisible image was gradually built up into a visible picture
[Fig, 3. Diagrams showing working of William Friese-Greene’s first motion picture camera.]
.
“What really happened was that the mercury vapour attached itself to the sensitive plate in
exact proportion to the amount of light which had previously affected the plate while in the
camera.
“Here we have the sensitive plate receiving a latent image, which only appears when
chemically developed. To the photography of to-day this has ceased to be a marvel, but to
Daguerre and his compatriots it was indeed a true romance.”
Daguerre had previously succeeded in making his pictures permanent by fixing them,
washing them in a solution of common salt. By this means the remaining iodide of silver
which had been unaffected by the light was washed away, so that there could be no further
chemical action. Sir John Herschel, the famous astronomer, suggested later that hyposulphate
of soda was a better substance than common salt (chloride of soda) wherewith to fix the
image. This hypo-fixer is, of course, still supreme to-day.
At the same time when Daguerre was experimenting in France, William Henry Fox Talbot, in
England, was also hard at work more or less on the same lines as Daguerre, and there seems
no doubt that it was only because Daguerre announced his invention to the world first, that the
official dates of this phase of photography are credited to Daguerre. Nevertheless, Talbot was
in some sense ahead of Daguerre, because he was making prints from his negative papers. He
apparently went through the same trials as Daguerre, starting off with silver nitrate and
common salt, making a solution of chloride of silver. He also tried iodine to form iodide of
silver, but it was not until he discovered the use of gallic acid in development, that he
improved his pictures considerably in detail and found that his exposure in the camera could
be much shorter. (John Frederick Goddard discovered that a vapour of bromine, a nonmetallic element, greatly increased the speed of exposure used in conjunction with
Daguerreotype plates, and he was able to make an exposure in 20 seconds iusie.nl oi .1- m.m\
minutes). Fox Talbot was therefore able to develop the latent image which was called the
negative. (Sir John Herschel was the first man to use the words “negative” and “positive” in
connection with photographs). From this paper negative (which he made translucent with
wax), he was able to produce any number of contact prints.
* **
Now this all happened nearly a century ago. It was the beginning of photography. The whole
world started thinking, and minds of many great men started improving and improving on this
great discover)’, which was destined to be one of the greatest sciences of the age. As time
went by, it became known that a Swiss chemist had discovered that if ordinary cotton wool
was immersed in a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids, it became highly explosive. A little
later there was a substance produced by dissolving gun cotton in a mixture of ether and
alcohol. The resulting material was called “collodion,” being so named because of its
adhesive qualities. Collodion was used in surgery to form a film over wounds, and thus
prevent contact with air. Several scientists suggested that collodion might be used for holding
chemicals together on the photographic plate. It was a London sculptor, Frederick ScottArcher, who brought these suggestions into a practical form and made it known in 1851.
The collodion process quickly displaced Daguerreotype and Talbottype, and made
photography a popular art. It was necessary, however, that these collodion plates should be
exposed in the camera while the chemicals were moist, and they had to be developed before
the chemicals dried. Chemists succeeded in arranging the chemicals so that the plates might
remain moist and sensitive for a week or more.
Later, it was found possible to make plates that would remain sensitive when dry.
Improvements in dry plates continued, and gelatine was substituted for the more dangerous
collodion (the silver salts being dissolved in the gelatine). And so the chemical side of
photography went on and is still improving.
***
As the speed of emulsions became faster, so it became possible to take photographs
instantaneously, and this possibility started the thoughts of man in the direction of
reproducing inurement by photographic means.
It is as well for me now to take you back to the starting point of Motion Pictures, a history
which could never have been written were it not for the physiological phenomenon of
Persistence of Vision, that basis upon which rests every one of the mechanical appliances for
producing the illusion of motion.
One of the stock experiments which proves Persistence of Vision is of so elementary a
character that man must be supposed to have noticed the effect long before he was capable of
theorising upon its cause. If a stick with a lighted or glowing point is taken and whirled in a
circle (an action doubtless performed in prehistoric times) it will be at once noticed, if the
speed is great enough, that the glowing end of the stick is no longer seen as a point, but a
luminous circle filling its whole path is visible instead. Again, take a flat steel spring and fix
it at one end, strike the other so as to cause it to vibrate, and the spring will appear to fill the
whole space over which it moves. Now, it certainly does not require much proof that neither
stick nor spring can be in two places at once ; and the only possible solution to the “mystery”
is that the luminous point or spring appears to be in any given spot after it has moved away,
and continues to appear there until its return to the same position, when its image again falls
on the same spot in the eye. The observer thus gets an impression of continuous presence.
This taking place all along the path of the moving object naturally causes it in appearance to
fill the whole space.
Fortunately as this, like most other experimental facts, admits of simple verbal expression,
one sentence suffices — we continue to experience the visual effect of light after it has ceased
to act. Such is this phenomenon known as Persistence of Vision. There is a deficiency of the
human eye of which we have taken advantage. This wonderful organ of ours has a defect
which is known as “visual persistence.” The brain persists in seeing an object after it is no
longer visible to the eye. Let us get it clearer. The eye is a wonderful “camera.” The imprint
of an object is received upon a nervous membrane which is called the retina. This is
connected with the brain, where the actual conception of the impression is formed, by the
optic nerve. The picture, therefore, is photographed in the eve and transmitted from that point
to the brain.
Now a certain amount of time must elapse in the conveyance of this picture from the retina
along the optic nerve to the brain, in the same manner that an electric current flowing through
a wire, or water passing through a pipe, must take a certain amount of time to travel from one
point to another, although the movement may be so rapid that the time occupied on the
journey is reduced to an infinitesimal point and might be considered instantaneous.
When the picture reaches the brain, a further length of time is required to bring about its
construction, for the brain is something like a photographic plate, and the picture requires
developing. In this respect the brain is somewhat sluggish, for when it has formulated the
picture imprinted on the eye, it will retain that picture even after the reality has disappeared
from sight. This peculiarity can be tested very easily. Suppose the eye is focussed upon a
white screen — a picture suddenly appears. The image is reflected upon the retina of the eye,
and transmitted thence to the brain along the optic nerve. Before the impression reaches the
brain, the picture has vanished from the sight of the eye. Yet the image still lingers in the
brain ; the latter persists in seeing what is no longer apparent to the eye, just as plainly and
distinctly as if it were in full view. When the image does disappear it fades away gradually
from the brain. True, the duration of this continued impression in the brain is very brief. In
the average person it approximates about 1/10th to 1/24th of a second, subject to the degree of
intensity, duration, and colour of the light received by the eye. Still, in a fraction of time a
good deal may happen, and in the case of animated photography it suffices to bring a second
picture before the eye before the impression of the preceding image has faded from the brain.
It is interesting to note that the first written reference to Persistence of Vision is contained in
the fourth book of “De Rerum Natura,” by Lucretius, dated about 65 B.C. He says, “This
(perception of movement) is to be explained in the following way, that when the first image
passes off and a second is afterwards produced m another position, the former then mviux to
have changed its gesture. This we must conceive to be done by a very rapid process “ This, of
course, only expresses the fad of persistent vision, and mentions no means for its
demonstration. Throughout the ages many men put forward theories with regard to
persistence of vision. This history needs a further at tide to give it full justice, and perhaps I
may have the opportunity of referring to it at some later date, so we will take up our story
again from the time when inventors were trying to reproduce movement by photo- graphic
means.
With the advent of snapshot photography, a Mr. Muybridge, an Englishman resident in San
Francisco, in the year 1872 conceived a novel idea for securing a series of snapshot pictures
in rapid succession. He built a studio beside a track, in which twenty-four cameras were
placed side by side in a row. On the opposite side of the track, facing the studio, he erected a
high fence painted white, while across the track between the studio and the fence, twenty-four
threads were stretched, each of which was connected with a spring which held in position the
shutter of the camera. When all was ready a horse was driven over this length of track at a
canter, trot or walk, as desired, and as the animal passed each camera, it broke the thread
controlling its shutter, so that the horse photographed itself in its progress.
After this method of photographing the movements of a horse, many men attempted taking
pictures on glass plates. Among them was William Friese-Greene, who in 1880 engaged
himself in scientific research relating to photography, particularly with regard to
photographing animated objects in motion. In 1885, he built an adapted camera which was
used for taking “Motion Pictures” by merely turning the handle of the machine, this operating
a circular shutter to permit the exposure of separate sections of a sensitised glass plate. In
1887 he devised and constructed a camera to take photographs upon a sensitised strip of
paper, about 50 feet in length, which was wound upon two rollers, a feed roller and a take-up
roller, which strip of paper passed through a guide across the light aperture of the camera, the
strip being intermittently exposed upon the revolution of the circular shutter, when the
apertures therein registered with the light aperture of the lens.
In this camera he employed a strip of paper perforated at both edges, the perforations being
for the purpose of permitting registration of a pair of sprocket wheels with either edge. These
sprocket wheels were worked by what was termed a star movement, to give the intermittency
of motion. Turning the crank of the camera caused the star movement intermittently to engage
a toothed wheel fixed to the shaft carrying the sprocket wheels, which in turn, when operated
by the star movement, moved the film forward step by step across the light aperture,
permitting successive portions of it of equal area to be uniformly and regularly exposed while
stationary, thus producing upon the strip of paper a series of equally spaced equidistant
images or negatives, each negative showing the animated object in its successive phase of
motion. The pair of sprocket wheels were mounted on a common shaft and engaged the
perforation in the edges of the paper strip at a point intermediate between the feed and take-up
rolls and just below the aperture, drawing the strip downward across it. The feed roll by the
series of pulls of the sprocket wheels upon the strip was caused to rotate in a successive series
of motions, each causing to unwind therefrom sufficient of the paper to produce a loop or
slackness of the Strip between the feed roll and the guide, so that in the taking of pictures and
turning the handle of the camera, the paper strip should not be under such stress or strain
arising from the pulling of the sprocket wheels as to cause a breakage or tearing.
I have given the above description of this 1888 camera because if you read it carefully you
will appreciate that it contains all the essentials to make cinematography commercially
possible. It embodies the nucleus of all that appertains to cinematography even to-day ; that
is. a camera that carries a roll of material that is sensitive to light (the negative film); this film
having imparted to it an intermittent motion so that it is stationary when the picture is being
exposed, and when it is moved on for the next exposure, the light is cut off by means of a
shutter; resulting after development in a series of pictures (snap-shots), one after another, on a
long strip of material.
William Friese-Greene succeeded in utilising celluloid film in the latter part of 1888. It is
interesting to note, however, that when using paper before, he made it transparent by treating
it with oil.
It would be well for us all to remember that the Patent taken out in June, 1889, No. 10,131, by
William Friese-Greene (copies of this document can be obtained from the Patent Office and a
facsimile reproduction of the front page accompanies this article) constitutes the master Patent
of the world for a camera that made cinematography, as we know it today, possible. This
Patent has stood the test of time, having been upheld even in the American Supreme Court.
With pride we should remember it was the invention of an Englishman.
end