The process was colloquially called 'tintype'.
Alma Davenport in The History of Photography: An Overview :
"A tintype could be coated, shot, developed and into the hands of the customer in less than six minutes."
Photography moved further ahead. If rigid and fragile glass plates were replaced, by tintypes or Xylonite, Herschel's motion picture camera could be realized.
The Belgian engineer Henry Désiré Du Mont had experimented with photographic devices for several years before he filed a patent for a camera that could move glass plates in quick succession in order to expose them for a photo sequence. It appears he never built a working moving pictures camera, but others soon did.
Around the same time, American John Hyatt (above) saw a newspaper advertisement for the billiard ball maker Phelan and Collender offering a $10,000 reward for a usable substitute for ivory, which was used to make billiard balls.
A printer by trade, Hyatt had knowledge of and access to chemicals and began experimenting with his brother Isaiah. The Hyatts knew of collodion but the results of their early experiments were only suitable enough to produce checkers and dominoes.
It is believed that one of the brothers accidentally overturned a bottle of collodion and the excess material congealed into a tougher film than expected. They used the discovery to make several billiard balls and added varying amounts of pyroxyline and camphor to the mix. The Hyatts had created a new product.
"...it was easy to mold under mild heat and pressure, and that, when cooled, became hard, strong, and easy to color. And, even better, it was cheap to produce."
The Hyatts added varying amounts of pyroxyline and camphor to a mix that in turn created a new product.
"...it was easy to mold under mild heat and pressure, and that, when cooled, became hard, strong, and easy to color. And, even better, it was cheap to produce."
They called the substance Celluloid from the chemical term Cellulose, and started to make false teeth and billiard balls. They formed the company, the Celluloid Manufacturing Company, and decided to concentrate on making bulk supplies of unprocessed celluloid. They sold celluloid to entrepreneurs, with sufficient capital, to make shirt collars, piano keys, brushes, mirror backs, billiard balls, cuffs and napkin rings.
However, it was another decade before a scientist at CMC made the discovery that linked celluloid to motion pictures.
Before 1871, Dr Richard Leach Maddox had used wet plates to record images of microorganisms in his laboratory but knew that the vapor from the chemicals was affecting his health. The other problem was that the process had to be undertaken in a dark room. If photographers went into the field, they needed to travel with a lightproof tent.
While Maddox decided to create a safer alternative that wet plates, he created the added benefit of portability. Maddox experimented with a different mix of silver nitrate and cadmium bromide to create a process that replaced wet plates with a “gelatin dry plate”. Like Archer before him, Dickson shared the knowledge of the dry plate process freely.
After further improvements were made to Maddox’s mix sensitivity by Charles Harper Bennett, the “dry plate” became an industry 'standard'. Not only were photographers now free from the wet plate fumes indoors but they no longer needed to take tents, chemicals and glass on location to prepare plates. They could buy pre-made dry plates, expose them at will and process them later.
Researcher Mike Kukulski notes:
"By happy circumstance, it was discovered that the gelatin (dry) plates were about 60 times more light sensitive than collodion plates."
The dry plates though were not easily produced.
George Eastman, a junior clerk at the Rochester Savings Bank (above), was obsessed with photography and bought a photographic kit with all the elements of the wet plate system. He described the size of the complete outfit in his diary:
"....it seemed that one ought to be able to carry less than a pack-horse load."
Eastman used his spare time to read publications like the British Journal of Photography and set up a workspace in his mother's kitchen. Over a two year period of "from 3 pm to breakfast" days, he created a better way to produce dry plates.
"At first I wanted to make photography simpler merely for my own convenience but soon I thought of the possibilities of commercial production."
Astutely he had identified that there was more money to be made in making plates than in taking photographs.
Reverend Hannibal Goodwin clergyman and amateur photographer, came to the same conclusion as Eastman.
Bulky and fragile glass plates were problematic. A native New Yorker, Goodwin graduated from Union College, Schenectady, then received training in a theological seminary. He became rector of the House of Prayer at Newark, where he used a stereopticon lantern while giving lectures to the 'young people' of his parish. He grew frustrated with the process of making new images for class, and as a self-taught chemist, experimented from a makeshift laboratory with nitrocellulose.
Goodwin's friend H.W. Hales wrote in Camera Craft (1900)
"...nearly all the time he could spare from his active duties were spent in his laboratory and here he often worked far into the night after a long day's work in the parish. I can remember his enthusiasm.
The research work was long and tedious, and the writer can well remember his delight when the first film with a good strong emulsion was produced."
The lure of solving photography's restraints had drawn in people as far apart and leading daily lives as different, as the clergyman Goodwin (above) and the sculptor Frederick Archer in London. However photography was still chemistry and mechanics. Henry Giardina wrote in The Atlantic:
"Before film was art, it was machinery."
In 1876, British political activist and inventor Wordsworth Donisthorpe tried to improve the machinery and built his own film camera. Author Stephen Herbert notes:
"Donisthorpe's Kinesigraph camera was evidently inspired by the 'square motion' wool-combing machine designed by his father, with the 'falling combs' replaced with falling photographic plates."
Donisthorpe (above) had a vision for the Kinesigraph:
"...to facilitate the taking of a succession of photographs at equal intervals of time, in order to record the changes taking place in or the movements of the object being photographed, and also by means of a succession of pictures so taken to give to the eye a representation of the object in continuous movement."
Donisthorpe, like Du Mont, had imagined a movie camera but was seemingly unable to build it. He needed a substance that could be produced in a continuous strip, loaded into a camera and then drawn past the lens to be exposed. The photo medium then needed to survive being taken out of the camera then developed, and printed without stretching and tearing.
The very product that was waiting to be discovered at the Hyatt's Celluloid Manufacturing Company.
Ever inventive, Donisthorpe suggested in Nature magazine that a combination