Inventions which played a huge role in creating of first films:
"Magic lantern" - was invented in the 17th century by Athanasius Kircher in Rome. It was a device with a lens that projected images from transparencies onto a screen, with a simple light source (such as a candle). Temperance and religious lectures were given but the lantern was also used in education, for the demonstration of scientific principles and to relay the latest news of world events. The firm of Carpenter and Westley were the first to commercially produce lanterns and slides in Great Britain from about 1826 onwards. They employed some of the top miniature painters of the day who in their turn created some of the most exquisite transparencies in the history of the Magic Lantern.
A thaumatrope is an scientific toy invented in 1825 by Dr. William Henry Fitton. Fitton got the idea from Sir John Herschel who observed that humans combine images from both sides of a spinning coin. The word thaumatrope comes from Greek meaning "wonder turning." It was believed that humans could see these two images as one because of the theory of persistence of vision. The modern explanation is called the phi phenomenon. The phi phenomenon is used to explain how we perceive movies, television and Flash as continuous movement.
Fantascope is a disk that turns freely around its own center. An observer must turn the disk at sufficient speed while observing images on the disk through a slit. This procedure results in an animated image, repeating itself in loop fashion, appearing on the other side of the slit. The Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, born in 1803, is often credited with the invention of this ancestor of motion pictures.
The zoetrope is the third major optical toy, after the thaumatrope and phenakistoscope, that uses the persistence of motion principle to create an illusion of motion. It consists of a simple drum with an open top, supported on a central axis. A sequence of hand-drawn pictures on strips of paper are placed around the inner bottom of the drum. Slots are cut at equal distances around the outer surface of the drum, just above where the picture strips were to be positioned. It was invented by British inventor William George Horner.
The Kinematoscope was patented in 1861 (US patent No. 31,357), a protean development in the history of cinema. The invention aimed to present the illusion of motion. The patent was filed by Coleman Sellers of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as an "improvement in exhibiting stereoscopic pictures". Coleman applied stereoscopy to the existing principle of toy phantasmascopes using rotating discs. A series of still stereographic images with chronologicaly successive stages of action were mounted on blades of a spinning paddle and viewed through slits. The slits passed under a stereoscopis viewer. The pictures were visible within a cabinet, and were not projected onto a screen.
Praxinoscope, invented in 1877 by the Frenchman Charles Reynaud, was the first device to overcome the picture distortion caused by viewing through moving slots. A band of pictures is placed inside a shallow outer cylinder, so that each picture is reflected by the inner set of mirrors. The number of mirrors is equal to the number of pictures, and the images of the pictures are viewed in the mirrors. When the outer cylinder rotates, the quick succession of reflected pictures gives the illusion of a moving picture.
'Chronophotography' is the photographic capture of movement over time by means of a series of still pictures, which are usually combined into a single photograph for subsequent analysis, was invented by Britisher Eadweard Muybridge. He successfully conducted a experiment in Palo Alto (California) for his wealthy San Francisco benefactor, Leland Stanford, using a multiple series of cameras to record a horse's gallops - this conclusively proved that all four of the horse's feet were off the ground at the same time.
"Photographic gun" was constructed in 1882 by Marey, who is often claimed to be the 'inventor of cinema'. It could take multiple (12) photographs per second of moving animals or humans - called chronophotography or serial photography, similar to Muybridge's work on taking multiple exposed images of running horses
Kinetograph was conceived and invented in the late 1800s by Thomas Edison and his assistant, William Dickson. The device provided users a way to photograph motion pictures with a stop-and-go ability. It could also use longer rolls of film than other devices of the era. The Kinetograph's images were played on a device called the Kinetoscope. The idea was that it would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." The first public showing of the prototype for the Kinetograph was in 1891 at the National Federation of Women's Clubs. This version used 18mm film that ran on two spools placed horizontally.
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. Though not a movie projector—it was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components—the Kinetoscope introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video: it creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.
Videos which illustrate some of these inventions
