The Biography of the motion picture camera

The story of the motion picture camera, carries further the history of the antecedents of cinema, showing how the development of the cinema arose out of scientists desire to analyse movement, in order to study the movements of animals and birds. The first man to undertake a scientific study of movement was Marey, a french physician; his experiments were extended by Edward Muybridge, a San Francisco photographer, who settled a trans-Atlantic argument about the way a horse gallops by using a battery of 24 cameras to photograph its movements. The problem then remained of creating one camera capable of doing the job of these 24. Marey, among others, achieved this by inventing the chronophotograph; Edison in America made a further advance by introducing celluloid film in place of photographic plates. Edison also invented a projector, which allowed only one person to view the film; it was Louis Lumiere in France who invented the first successful commercial projector which enabled him to show motion picture films to a fairly large audience. The Lumiere brothers began to make films about every-day events which at the time proved sensational.