Today's films got their start from inventions like the Zoopraxiscope
History best remembers Eadweard Muybridge for his invention the Zoopraxiscope, a stop action motion picture viewer. Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, England, in 1830. By the 1860s, he was living in San Francisco, California and working as a photographer, becoming world-renowned for his nature and landscape photographs. He later when on to develop a method for stop-motion photography and the development of the Zoopraxiscope as a way to view animation from his photographs.
Stop Motion Photography
In 1872, Muybridge began experimenting with motion photography. Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate, hired him to prove photographically that all four of a running horse's hooves are off the ground at some point in its gait. Muybridge was able to develop a system with 12 to 14 cameras with very fast shutters in a line. A moving object, like a horse running, would move past the cameras, which each took a still photograph. This creates a set of photographs each taken only a fraction of a section after another. Muybridge was later able to photograph people and other moving objects with a single camera with a very fast shutter.
Zoopraxiscope
Although his stop-motion photographs proved that a horse actually does have all of it hooves off the ground when galloping, doubters would not believe he could replicate animation photographically. To prove that he could, Muybridge developed a projection system to "playback" his photographs as a short animation. Because in his first attempts at this new method his photographs were all of animals, he named the Zoopraxiscope.
The main moving part of a Zoopraxiscope is a glass wheel. Individual images or photographs are painted or printed evenly spaced around the outside edge of the glass wheel. As the images on the wheel rotate rapidly past a lantern, the image projects. Because the glass wheel rotates fast, the images display so closely together that they give the illusion of animation. Essentially, the Zoopraxiscope applies the same principles as a cartoon flip-book.
Technology
The images on the glass wheel of Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope were typically painted or printed onto small triangular glass pieces that were then glued onto a 16-inch glass wheel. The glass wheel was similar to the later phonograph records in that it had a center mounting hole and center circular label. However, it did have a textured paper edging around its outside rim. Depending upon the amount of time separating the individual images of a sequence or their size, removable shutters controlled how much of the resulting animation was seen.
A separate and interchangeableset of lenses projected the animated images, with different lenses controlling the size of the projected images or the distance it was projected.
Zoopraxiscope's Legacy
The Zoopraxiscope may be the first film projector that actually showed motion photography in public. There is some debate on that, but nonetheless it Muybridge and the Zoopraxiscope were pioneers in the capture and presentation of animated images. In fact, Thomas Edison and William Dickson use the technology of the Zoopraxiscope along with other early projection systems to develop a camera that would record still images on film and a projection system that displays the images from the film. Nearly all of Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope disks still exist and are parts of several cinema history collections and museums.
