Living pictures; their history, photoproduction and practical working. With a digest of British patents and annotated bibliography (1899)

PREFACE. In presenting this book to my readers I feel the necessity of making a few remarks with regard to its scope. The subject of which it treats is, in earher years, so bound up with researches on Persistence of Vision that I have been sorely tempted to stray into many seductively interesting bye-paths. Limitations of time and space have, however, exercised a certain influence, and I have been compelled to restrict my work in absolute con- formity with the title of my book. Therefore, none of the interesting apparatus for demonstrating persistence of vision find a place within these pages, nor have the various theories on the subject been discussed. I have somewhat reluctantly confined myself strictly to the description and history of apparatus for producing the illusion of motion. At the same time, my book (within its proper limits) commences early, and, at the conclusion of a review covering over two thousand years, will be found, I hope, fully " up to date." I have adopted the practice of italicising the name of each instrument when first met with in the Historical Section, and the Index will be found to include, in alphabetical order, not only names properly applied, but also such mis-spelled variations as I may have met with, and also many which have been erroneously used, they, like " the flowers which bloom in the spring," having " nothing to do with the case." The changes rung on Kine-, Cine-, and Vita- are so numerous—one might say irritating—that I am led to hope that the mathem^atical laws of permutation may break down, and, in defiance of arithmetical rules, thus create a necessity for radical changes in the naming of later machines. The descriptions in the list of British Patents must not be taken as full; I see no necessity to reprint a mass of Government Blue-book§