A condensed course in motion picture photography ([1920])

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Chapter I HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY IT is not impossible that some form of motion pictures was known to the Ancients. Titus Lucretius Carus wrote several volumes entitled "De Rerum Natura" at least sixty-five years before the Christian Era, wherein book four, verse seven hundred sixty-six appears the following, freely translated : "Do not think thou moreover wonder that the images appear to move and appear in one order and time their legs and arms to use for one disappearance, and instead of it appears another arranged in another way, and now appears each gesture to alter, for you must understand that this takes place in the quickest time." In the year A. D. 130, Ptolemy, a Greek philosopher, wrote a series of books on Optics, in which he not only described the phenomenon of persistence of vision, but also described a piece of apparatus in the form of a revolving disk with spots upon it, which demonstrated this phenomenon. Persistence of vision is a scientific term for the fact that the sensation of light coming from an object remains in the brain for an appreciable fraction of a second after the light has been extinguished. Whatever knowledge the Ancients may have possessed of motion pictures is too remote and too far buried in the murky depths of the past to be of more than momentary interest in the history of Cinematography. The first step toward modern Cinematography took place about the year 1833, when W. G. Horner patented the Zoetrope, or Wheel of Life, which consists of a hollow cylinder turning on a vertical axis and having its surface pierced with a number of slots around the interior. Between the slots is a series of pictures representing successive stages of such a subject as a galloping horse, and when the cylinder is rotated, an observer looking through the slots as the wheel is rotated sees the horse apparently in motion. The pictures were drawn by hand, but photography many years afterwards was applied for their production. This did not occur until about the year 1877.