Hobbies And Interests
Identification
The Magic Lantern is reported to be the first projector device, invented in the 1650s by a Dutch scientist named Christiaan Huygens. Projected images were cast onto hand-painted, glass slides inside a wooden box. Levers were used to switch the images that made them appear to move. Showmen wore these boxes on their backs, and sold shows, or viewings, in inns and castles. The light source for the images was a lantern that produced a lime-like light through the use of limestone, hydrogen and oxygen. These lanterns came in small and large sizes, some of which were equipped with double lenses for viewings in large halls. The sound effects for the shows were made by the showman and a musician, with the audience joining along. The Magic Lantern served as the sole source of moving picture shows until the advent of "movies" in the late 1890s.
Features
It took the invention of a camera that used paper film to set off a chain of inventions that would bring about the making of a film projector. In 1888, George Eastman made this discovery and marketed the very first Kodak camera. Within that same year, Etienne Marey invented a moving picture version of Eastman's camera that used strips of paper film.
Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph, quickly associated his idea of continuous music with the idea of continuous pictures, and attempted to model a film projector device after his phonograph invention. The idea proved unsuccessful, so Edison--with much help from his assistant William Dickson--went on to invent the Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewing box, modeled after the Eastman and Marey inventions. By 1893, Edison conducted the first public showing of films using his Kinetograph device. This took place in 1893 in the Black Maria--the world's first film production studio--built on Edison's laboratory grounds in West Orange, New Jersey.
Function
Film projectors up until this point were made up of two parts--the Kinetoscope and the Kinetograph--and films could only be viewed by one person at a time. The two devices plus film materials were too expensive for it to become a marketable item. The invention of the Cinematographe by the Lumiere brothers in 1894 combined recording and projecting functions within one device. Improvements were also made on how the film material was cut and fed through the machine. The year 1895 saw the first film shot with the Cinematographe in Paris. This would be the first time a film was shown to a paying audience of more than one person.
Significance
The pivotal character who made the notion of moving pictures a possibility was a British photographer named Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge's Zoopraxinoscope projector, invented in 1890, served as the precursor to Edison's and Lumiere's successes. His device was the first one to "construct" movement on film using multiple, successive images. His invention combined the images of 12 cameras lined up in a row, recording the movement of horse hooves across the ground.
Potential
While each successive phase within the development of the projector has brought us to the cinematic experiences we know today, only a few of these past discoveries remain with us in their original form. The Latham Loop is one of these discoveries. Major Woodville Latham, in an attempt to market a version of his own projector, provided a mechanism that looped the film through the projector. This invention made it possible to produce films that ran longer than three minutes. Today's film cameras and projectors still use the Latham Loop.
The Lumiere brothers also provided us the 35mm film size in use today, as part of their conversion of the Kinetograph into the Cinematographe. Its use in motion pictures and photography remains an industry standard.