History of Movies

Prominent Photographer

1878

In 1878 the businessman and race-horse owner Leland Stanford was debating with his friends about whether or not all four hooves of a horse were off the ground during a gallop. Leland met a prominent photographer called Edward Muybridge. Muybridge set up twelve cameras along the edge of a racetrack in a line, to get twelve different pictures of one stride of a gallop. you took many photographs of one image very quickly one after the other and put them together-you got a moving image.

Zoopraxiscope

1879

Edward Muybridge was also an inventor. He had come up with a machine called the Zoopraxiscope. This marvelous invention had a viewfinder that peeped into a lightbox. Inside this lightbox was a disc that spun around.

Kinestoscope

1880

Tomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, set his company photographer, William Dickinson, the task of creating a machine that could take the idea of moving silhouettes to real images (Kinestoscope). He also invented flexible reels of negatives which could be fed into the Kinestoscope.

The cinema

1889

Ottomar Anschultz discovered how to project this image so that a group of people could all enjoy the same image together.

Brothers Lumiere

1895

Auguste and Louis Lumiere got a hold of the two ideas, they merged them into what became the cinema. The brothers advances in the photography had reached the point that cameras could record up to 24 frames per second which closely resembled how the eyes sees motion.