Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam
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Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam
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Overview
In 1888, Thomas Edison announced that he was experimenting on “an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion.” Just as Edison’s investigations were framed in terms of the known technologies of the phonograph and the microscope, the essays in this collection address the contexts of innovation and reception that have framed the development of moving images in the last one hundred years. Three concerns are of particular interest: the contexts of innovation and reception for moving image technologies; the role of the observer, whose vision and cognitive processes define some of the limits of inquiry and epistemological insight; and the role of new media, which, engaging with the domestic sphere as cultural interface, are transforming our understanding of public and private spheres.
The seventeen previously unpublished essays in Moving Images represent the best of current research in the history of this field. They make a timely and stimulating contribution to debates concerning the impact of new media on the history of cinema.
Contributors include: William Boddy, Carlos Bustamante, Warren Buckland, Valeria Camporesi, Bent Fausing, Oliver Gaycken, Alison Griffiths, Christopher Hales, Jan Holmberg, Solveig Jülich, Frank Kessler, Jay Moman, Sheila C. Murphy, Pelle Snickars, Paul C. Spehr, Björn Thuresson, and Åke Walldius.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780861969173 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Stockholm Studies in Cinema |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 218 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
John Fullerton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University, and has published widely on early Swedish film. With Jan Olsson, he is editor of the Stockholm Studies in Cinema series, and edited Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema for John Libbey in 1998. He has also recently co-edited Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam the second publication in the Stockholm Studies in Cinema series.
Astrid Söderbergh Widding is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University and is the author of a number of monographs on cinema. Her most recent book is Stumfilm I brytningstid: Stil och Berättande I Georg at Klerchers filmer.
Read an Excerpt
Moving Images: From Edison To The Webcam
By John Fullerton, Astrid Söderbergh Widding
John Libbey Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 John Libbey Publishing Ltd.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86196-917-3
CHAPTER 1
Unaltered to Date: Developing 35mm Film
Paul C. Spehr Fairfield, Pennsylvania, USA
At the end of the year 1889, I increased the width of the picture from ½ inch to ¾ inch, then, to 1 in. by ¾ in. high. The actual width of the film was 1 3/8 in. to allow for the perforations now punched on both edges, four holes to the phase or picture, which perforations were a shade smaller than those now in use. This standardized film size of 1889 has remained, with only minor variations unaltered to date.
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, 1933.
Edison standard film
When Thomas Edison introduced his Kinetoscope in April 1894, it used a film that is almost identical with the 35mm film used today – the same width and with four similar perforations on each side of the image. W.K.L. Dickson's abridged account is accurate except for the date, which he exaggerated in his eagerness to reinforce Edison's claim that his invention preceded all competitors. At the end of 1891andthebeginningof 1892Dickson made the changes which resulted in a film 35mm wide.
Dickson's pride was justified because it was, arguably, Edison's – and Dickson's – major contribution to the future of the motion picture and, perhaps, the most important technical innovation of the 1890s. In 1895 and 1896, when numerous competitors were designing cameras and projectors, many of them, following Edison's lead, used 35mm film. So many, in fact, that by 1897 it was already called 'standard film' or even 'Edison standard film'. Although competing formats appeared and keep appearing, 35mmwas and is so ubiquitous that writers rarely define the gauge or format when they discuss 'film' or 'cinema' or 'movies'. Because the acceptance of 35mm happened so early and became so universal, film historians have regarded it as inevitable and paid very little attention to the factors that influenced what is, in fact, a remarkable phenomenon that was far from inevitable. These historians have also neglected to examine the close relationship between the movies and other, related industries, particularly the photographic industry and the phonograph.
Far from being a trivial matter, the early acceptance of 35mm as a standard had momentous impact on the development and spread of cinema. The standard gauge made it possible for films to be shown in every country of the world – in cities large and small, to audiences rich and poor. Because it was – and still is – a consistent, predictable technology it gave the motion picture industry coherence as well as stability. It provided a uniform, reliable and predictable format for production, distribution and exhibition of movies, facilitating the rapid spread and acceptance of the movies as a world-wide device for entertainment and communication. 35mm film made it possible for productions made in the US, Britain or France to travel easily across borders and to be shown in small towns as well as big cities. If made in 35mm, there would be projectors that could show the film, which was not true for films made in other gauges. This is still true and, furthermore, images recorded in 1897 can be copied by modern film laboratories and be seen by modern audiences.
This was not inevitable, or even natural. Technical stability is not a normal characteristic of modern invention. Manufacturers usually want exclusive markets and resist developing compatible products that competitors can use. Patents and copyrights as well as the legal entanglements that relate to them are tools supporting exclusiveness rather than consistency. Consider the movies' sister industries, the phonograph and television, where examples of technical incompatibility are frequent: cylinders vs. disks; 33 1/3 rpm vs. 45 rpm vs. CDs; beta vs. VHS; videotape in ½ in., ¾ in., 1 in., and 2 in. formats; open reels and cassettes. Both industries have been and still are plagued with a never-ending parade of confusing and confounding 'new and improved' technologies, and almost all of it incompatible with what preceded it.
It has been assumed that Dickson arrived at 35mm by cutting a standard roll of Eastman Kodak's transparent roll film in half. John Belton has the best description of this in his section on 35mm film in Widescreen Cinema as well as in his paper 'The Origins of 35mm Film as a Standard' in the SMPTE Journal, August 1990.2 Belton's assumption is reasonable enough, but the evidence that survives in various photographic and scientific journals, Edison's papers, and George Eastman's correspondence shows that 35mmevolved in a different way. The story is intricate, involving many important contributors to the introduction of the movies, and it casts an interesting light on the process of invention and the evolution of the industry. The principal players are Thomas Edison, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (Fig. 1), and George Eastman (Fig. 2), but we will also meet C. Francis Jenkins, Thomas Armat, Robert Paul, Louis and Auguste Lumière, and Thomas Blair as well as a large and varied cast of supporting players. It starts in the 1880s.
A celluloid melodrama, part 1
The new film is as thin, light, and flexible as paper, and as transparent as glass ... it is wound on spools for roll holders.
Ad for the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co., July 1889.
It is as thin as a blister and as clear as glass.
The Philadelphia Photographer, July 1889.
An editor of The Philadelphia Photographer wondered 'in the name of all that is beautiful' why anyone would patent print photographs on celluloid.
6 October 1888.
The narrative begins at The Celluloid Company, a chemical factory in Newark, NJ, and the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. A revolution was beginning. It was quiet and unobtrusive, but it produced a profound transformation in photography. It began in the early 1880s with the introduction of a celluloid base that could be coated with photographic emulsion. It gathered strength when George Eastman developed a process that linked celluloid film with his recently developed roll holder and put them in an inexpensive camera. Coming on the heels of improved film emulsions that made rapid photography possible, Kodak brought an end to an era when photography was the exclusive domain of professionals and talented amateurs. Photography no longer required time, skill, and where-with-all. Photographers did not have to mix chemicals, operate complex cameras, and work in dark rooms.
George Eastman was the force behind the change. He foresaw a new and completely different photography which put inexpensive cameras in the hands of ordinary people. He also saw a monopoly of the photo industry in the hands of George Eastman. His roll film system, which could fit existing cameras and allowed multiple exposures to be taken, was introduced in 1884. In 1887 the company introduced the Kodak No. 1, the first roll film camera, with an ad campaign featuring the slogan 'You press the button – we do the rest'. Kodak was soon a household name. At first Eastman's system used a rather complicated 'stripping film' with a sensitive emulsion supported by paper but transparent celluloid soon replaced it.
Celluloid was introduced in the 1860s and was used in the manufacture of a variety of products such as combs, collars, cuffs, billiard balls, dolls, etc. Although celluloid coated with photosensitive emulsion was introduced in the early 1880s as a substitute for glass and paper, it was not until 1887 that celluloid began to make an impact on the market. That year Vergara 'Ivory' Film, patented by Francis A. Froedman of Dublin, Ireland, was marketed in England, and John Carbutt, of Philadelphia, introduced a celluloid film based on the pending patent of the Rev. Hannibal Goodwin of Newark, N.J., Allen and Rowell of Boston, and E. & H.T. Anthony, a photographic supply house also began selling transparent 'film'. All of these firms sold sheet film in sizes from 3¼ x 4¼ to 11 x 14.
Carbutt applied his photographic emulsion to a nitro-cellulose base which he purchased from The Celluloid Company of Newark. The Celluloid Company had a virtual monopoly on the manufacture of celluloid products because of their patents, and the methods they developed to handle the volatile, hazardous nitro-cellulose in manufacture and for disposing of the dangerous waste materials which resulted. They produced sheet celluloid by slicing slender sheets from large blocks of celluloid and treating it to produce a very thin, relatively clear film base.
As the editorial comment from The Philadelphia Photographer quoted above indicates, celluloid 'film' was not welcomed by all photographers. Nevertheless, there were those who felt it was an important breakthrough, and it created a major stir in photographic circles. There were demonstrations at camera clubs, and articles in professional journals throughout 1889.
Celluloid was crucial to the creation of the modern motion picture. Experimenters were limited by the possibilities of the substances available to them. Ridged, fragile or opaque substances like metal, glass, or paper, imprisoned moving images in the limited visual cycle of the Zoetrope. Although appealing, the fragments of motion recorded by the chronophotographers like Muybridge, Marey and Anschütz were also limited. Images endlessly leaping over fences, juggling balls or performing exercises intrigued scientists and amused children but there was very little future in them. Pliable, unbreakable celluloid offered new promise.
Eastman's flexible roll film
The advantages of these films to the photographer over glass dry-plates, and all other films on the market, briefly summed up are as follows: superior transparency, greater flexibility, lightness, compactness, practicability of printing from either side of the negative, and lack of halation.
Gustave D. Milburn, 16 August 1889.
The Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co. began experiments to produce a transparent photographic base in the early 1880s, not long after the company was established. Serious experimentation with celluloid began in the spring and summer of 1888 with Eastman's chemist, Henry M. Reichenbach in charge. After testing samples of celluloid from The Celluloid Co. and the Rev. Hannibal Goodwin, Reichenbach and George Eastman devised both chemistry and a system for applying liquid celluloid in thin sheets on long glass-top tables. Eastman applied for two patents in the spring of 1889, and in June 1889 announced that Eastman Dry Plate Co. would begin manufacture of transparent roll film. A new building was constructed for the manufacture, and in the summer Eastman's sales representatives, led by Gustave D. Milburn, began demonstrations and lectures to groups of photographers in major American cities.
After discussions with the Board of Directors, Eastman decided, for safety reasons, they would not manufacture all of the chemicals used to make a celluloid base. Although they made the final blend in their own factory, the company bought a chemical mix, which Eastman called 'dope', from suppliers, then added additional chemicals to produce a celluloid. It was slightly different from the product made by The Celluloid Co., and Eastman's method of applying chemicals to produce the base was unique. Eastman continued to purchase 'dope' from various suppliers through most of the 1890s. They began manufacture of the full chemistry at a date after the period covered by this essay.
Although the company's advertising was effusive and optimistic, Eastman was actually having problems producing transparent film as well as other products. Apologizing for not sending him a supply of the new film, on 16 June 1889 George Eastman wrote to William Walker, now in London: '... [for the] past six weeks it has been a succession of petty delays and mishaps ... We have been almost shut down for two weeks on A.M. Films [i.e. stripping film]. The film blisters in spite of everything we can possibly do.'15 In his otherwise upbeat talk to the Society of Amateur Photographers in New York, Gus Milburn confessed that they were experiencing 'something like a vine or tree' appearing in corners of the photographs. In spite of their early publicity, Eastman's new film was not widely available for sale until the spring of 1890. Even though Eastman had problems, there were photographers anxious to try the new film. One was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson.
Edison: cylinders and celluloid
I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear. Which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion ...
Thomas A. Edison, Caveat 110, filed 17 October 1888.
The exact date that serious experimentation on the Kinetoscope began is controversial, but by the end of 1888, some work was under way. Edison assigned the project to William Kennedy Laurie Dickson who had been Edison's photographer. In the early experiments Dickson was assisted by Charles Brown, who simultaneously worked on an improved version of the phonograph, a project which occupied much of Edison's time in the first half of 1889. Dickson had access to several machinists, labourers and pattern makers on the staff of the Edison Laboratory. The preliminary work was done in a photographic room in the new laboratory in Orange, NJ.
The Kinetoscope was a secondary assignment for Dickson. In 1887, Edison gave him responsibility for research on a process to separate iron, gold and other valuable metals found in low-grade ore. This was one of Edison's pet projects and during the 1890s it became an obsession. During the entire time that he worked on the Kinetoscope, Dickson was also deeply involved in ore-milling experiments and the large facility that Edison built at an iron mine in Ogden, NJ. The ore-milling project frequently interrupted Dickson's work on the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph, and it was partly responsible for the long gestation period of these machines. By 1898 Edison had spent more than $3,200,000 on ore-milling. By contrast, the company reported that the Kinetoscope experiment had cost $24,118.04 through 1 April 1894.19 Despite Edison's obsession, the ore-milling project was a dismal failure, while the Kinetoscope proved to be one of Edison's most profitable inventions.
Edison's first Caveat described a machine intended to be an addition to the phonograph (Fig. 3). Tiny images about 1/32nd of an inch wide would be recorded intermittently in a continuous spiral around a cylinder attached to a cylinder phonograph by a common drive shaft. The images would be viewed through a microscope-like viewing device while listening to synchronised sound. Although Edison grandiosely mentioned recording and reproducing Grand Opera, in late 1888, he actually assumed that the visual image would supplement phonograph recordings of official transactions, legislative and judicial proceedings, correspondence and other verbal affairs of business and government. It was a modest device, scarcely capable of lofty operatic ambitions. During the seven-plus years of experimentation on the Kinetoscope, Edison's original conception changed radically as the phonograph evolved into a commercial entertainment device and the difficulties of recording images on a cylinder and synchronizing the sound became more evident.
Dickson's early experiments were made for this cylinder. Surviving purchase records from West Orange as well as Dickson's own accounts of his work show that in October 1888, immediately after Edisonsent his initial motion picture Caveat, Dickson began experimenting with a variety of photographic methods, including Daguerreotype, wet collodion, and dry plate. These futile attempts to devise a way of recording microscopic images on the surface of a cylinder gave Dickson a chance to improve his understanding of photography.
Edison's cylinder scheme was impractical. It is uncertain how long the experiments continued before the cylinder was abandoned, but it is easy to imagine Dickson's delight on learning that strips of flexible, transparent photographically sensitive film were available. Dickson claimed that after some experiments with sheet celluloid, he received his first roll of Eastman transparent film from Eastman's representative at a demonstration in New York City in August 1889, and that it was immediately applied to experiments begun earlier in the summer on amachine using a strip or ribbon of film.
Following the lead of Gordon Hendricks, modern historians have argued that claims by Dickson, Edison and several of Edison's associates that work on a strip machine began in the summer of 1889 are false. Even though it does not prove there was work on a strip-machine by late summer or fall of 1889, there is evidence to support the Dickson–Edison claims. Edison began ordering rolls of Eastman's filmin September 1889, and continued to order film in varying quantities for the next three years. The earliest order was 2 September 1889, when Dickson paid for a roll and asked for more with 'your highest sensitometer'. November and six more of the same size arrived in December.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Moving Images: From Edison To The Webcam by John Fullerton, Astrid Söderbergh Widding. Copyright © 2016 John Libbey Publishing Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of John Libbey Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Part 1 Virtuality and the Ontology of the Digitalised Image
Part 2 Social and Cultural Implications of Cybervisuality
Part 3 Problematising the Prosthetic "Promise" of Optical Technologies
Part 4 Earlier Entertainment Forms and Moving Image and Sound Technologies