Francis Ford Coppola
1. No Editing
In 1850 there were no cinemas.
No movie cameras. No rushes.
No editing. No editors.
Instead, audiences watched a Magic Lantern project one photograph onto a wall, that then dissolved into another. Viewers took turns to crank a small handle on a wooden box and stare through a slot to see a sequence of flickering still images. Typical were Philadelphians looking through Coleman Sellers' invention, the Kinematoscope. After recording images of his children working in his factory, Sellers mounted the photos on blades of a spinning paddle which, when spun, mimicked the motion of real life.
The lanterns proved popular, in part because they symbolized a growing belief in technology.
Innovation was a measure of national stature. During the late-nineteenth century devices like the electric furnace, the steam turbine, the automobile, wireless telegraphy, and the aircraft were invented.
Historians call it the 'golden age of invention'.
Author Peter Kobel notes:
"Something was certainly in the air. The turn of the century was a period of tremendous technological development, firing imaginations with visions of speed."
The English philosopher, Alfred Whitehead wrote:
"The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the method of invention."
Sir John Herschel, the son of respected British astronomer William Herschel, epitomized Whitehead's observation.
Kshitij Nagar described Herschel as:
"...the scientific superstar of the 19th century."
Herschel was a chemist and botanist when he started in an emerging field that the Scientific American (1862) called:
"Of all the arts, the one that seems miraculous is photography."
Writer Helmut Gernsheim concluded:
"Photography owes Herschel many valuable contributions..."
Even though the science, art, application, and practice of photography was invented cumulatively, Herschel is arguably the 'Father of Photography'. In rapid succession, he discovered that sodium thiosulphate stabilized a developed photograph and he then made the earliest extant photograph to glass. He even took time to clarify the words used by his peers to describe their work in patents and academic papers. Herschel coined the term photography as a more precise description and was the first to use the terms negative, positive and snapshot.
Among many ideas that he set forward was a device that could project a program of sequential images. Moving Pictures.
"What I have to propose may appear a dream, but it has at least the merit of being possible, and perhaps a realisable one...by an adequate sacrifice of time, trouble, mechanism and outlay."
He believed there were two major steps to make.
"1st..what photography has already realised, or we may be sure it will realise within some very limited lapse of time...and, 2ndly, that a mechanism is possible by which a prepared plate be presented, focussed, impressed, displaced, numbered, secured in the dark, and replaced by another within two or three tenths of a second."
Such an apparatus needed speed and flexibility, and the technology of nineteenth-century photography was neither. It was too rigid and too slow to rapidly expose a series of images. Let alone project them to an audience.
A key inventor in later years, Charles Francis Jenkins, recalls how many steps were actually needed:
"The motion picture is not a sort of Minerva-birth of inventive genius but like all notable achievements in mechanisms has had a long line of predecessors, for the difficult problem of recording and reproducing motion did not yield without much preliminary fumbling."
Jenkins was right.
The first to fumble was a sculptor. Frederick Scott Archer wanted a better photographic method than the existing calotype system, which used paper coated with silver iodide, to record images of his work. A typical single photographic exposure took him 40 minutes and produced a fuzzy image. After two years of experimenting, Archer debuted a new way to create a photo negative using the substance, collodion and wrote in a submission to The Chemist in 1851.
"My endeavour, therefore, has been to overcome these difficulties, and I find them from numerous trials that Collodion, when well prepared, is admirably adapted for photographic purposes as a substitute for paper."
Collodion consists of nitrocellulose (a flammable compound also called guncotton) dissolved in ethyl alcohol and then mixed with ether. It is transparent, membranous, and tough. Working in a dark room, Archer poured a collodion emulsion on to a glass plate and rocked it around to form a light-sensitive layer. In this method, the plate had to be exposed and developed within 20 minutes and kept moist throughout, or the collodion dried and produced a poor image. Archer's method became known as the 'wet plate process'.
"It presents a perfectly transparent and even surface when poured on glass, and being in some measure tough and elastic, will, when damp, bear handling in several stages of the process."
Archer's invention was the first practical, and reproducible photographic process. Author Séan MacKenna:
"Archer...understood the significance of collodion as a photographic binder and was the first to put together a workable method and publish it."
The process was much faster than the incumbent methods, delivering images in seconds rather than minutes. However, it was the quality of wet plate negative (above) that made them popular. Archer's invention became the dominant photo process for thirty years and was used by thousands of photographers across the world (below), but without a patent or financial backing, he died penniless.
Another Englishman, Alexander Parkes created a medium that eventually replaced Archer's wet plates, but that was not his original intent. Parkes set to create a substance that could be used to replace India rubber in hundreds of retail products. He experimented with nitrocellulose and created a plastic-like material that he called Parkesine.
"...my object is to employ collodion or its compounds for manufacturing purposes generally."
He also saw another use for Parkesine:
"...substituting for the sheets of glass a sheet of collodion of sufficient thickness to support the prepared film, a thick layer of collodion may be first formed on the glass and on this layer the film of prepared collodion may be produced and the picture taken thereon and suitably varnish or protected..."
Parkes started a company to produce Parkesine but poor pricing and product quality saw it bankrupt within two years. His works manager Daniel Spill continued research on Parkesine and patented a more stable version named Xylonite. Spill believed that if the product was 'whiter' it could be used as a replacement for ivory to make chess pieces and hair combs. Spill also saw a connection to photography and told the London Photographic Society that Xylonite could be:
...a flexible and structureless substitute for the glass negative supports...
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