International photographer (Jan-Dec 1934)

Eighteen The INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER LEON GAUMONT By EARL THEISEN Honorary Curator Motion Pictures L A. Museum (Much of the material in this article was obtained from translations by M'lle. Andree Barlatier and Roger Loutz, of French documents written by Leon Caumont. For this service and cooperation the author wishes to express his gratitude. — Editor's Note.) March, 19?* Leon Caumont HEN considering motion picture inventors one naturally thinks of Leon Gaumont. That is a trite but justifiable way of summing up the contributions of this pioneer of the motion picture. Among his achievements may be listed everything from a new screw to anchor another gadget to a projector to color or sound pictures. To enumerate them all would require a volume. Gaumont had his start in photography before there were motion pictures. In 1885 he had a photographic establishment at No. 57 de la rue Saint-Roch, near the l'Avenue de 1'Opera in Paris. Here he gained a reputation of making a better grade of photographic apparatus and when the flare-up of the "living picture" came ten years later, Gaumont was one of the number who concerned themselves with the problem of making a projector. He tried to do something with an apparatus called the "Bioscope-Demeny." It was on the principle of the device that Demeny had been working on for a number of years, with which Demeny had tried in 1892 to make a form of pictures that talked by taking a series of photographs with a "photographic gun" and then they were to be synchronized to a phonograph record. The sequence of pictures were placed around the outer edge of a glass disc. In 1896, Demeny in collaboration with Decaux altered the Bioscope-Demeny and introduced another device which they called the "Chronophotograph." The Chronophotograph or, as it was later known, "the Chrono," utilized the Demeny cam intermittent and in it was a close alliance to the Lumiere Cinematograph. The Chrono was shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 where it attracted attention and, incidental to this display of what may be said to be the first Gaumont device, its popularity spread to the towns near Paris. The demand for the Chrono pictures was such that Gaumont organized a department to make cinematic subjects to sell. One of the more valuable of the early Gaumont subjects was the portrayal of the "Life of Christ." A catalogue of this picture which has the honor of a place in the Motion Picture Collection at the Los Angeles Museum, side by side with a handsome leather bound book on de Mille's "King of Kings," shows it to be a pretentious picture of de Millean settings. Both the Gaumont "Life of Christ" and the de Mille "King of Kings" followed a similar pattern, though one was only 2,000 feet in length while the other ran on for a length of 14,200 feet. Both were innovations and were the best the motion picture produced during their time. Because picture exhibitors did not believe in long pictures at that time, any part of the Gaumont picture could be bought by footage. Very few showed the entire picture at one time, but instead exhibited the sequence which they thought would be most interesting to their audiences. Gaumont had by this time invented his noted "BeaterMovement" camera which he patented in 1902. This camera was much smaller and lighter than the contemporary camera. In 1900 he started to develop a system of talking pictures and a year later he applied for patents. His first public demonstration was given of a synchronized talking picture on November 7, 1902, at the Societe Franchise de Photographie, when he presented his own talking portrait and a Gypsy dance. From the Bulletin of the Societe Franchise de Photographie, of this date, we have the following statement made by Monsieur L. Gaumont: "In course of a statement made to the French Photographic Society at the beginning of this year, we promised to give particulars of one of the methods of synchronizing gramophone and kinematograph. We are now going to redeem that promise ; but before we start we should like to ask you not to be too critical, especially as regards the gramophone. What you are about to hear from the sound part of the combination will, I am afraid, be somewhat poor in quality. We considered it advisable, however, to give the results hitherto achieved without delay, and leave it to some future occasion to demonstrate the improvements we hope to effect in sound registration and reproduction, remote as this particular thesis is from the special interests of the Society. "An examination of the various systems put forward would go beyond the scope of this talk. We hope to be able to deal with them at some future meeting. "The machine we have before us is the one we finally settled on after numerous experiments — how many Heaven alone knows! — in collaboration with our friend Decaux. "The gramaphone is the most delicate part of the mechanism and one that does not admit of the least flaw in its construction ; and what we had to do was to make it act like an orchestral conductor and operate the kinematograph ; in short, its movement had to control those of all the rest of the mechanical combination. On the other hand, seeing that gramophone and kinematograph could not be set up side by side, they had to be coupled by means of a flexible shaft. Flexible cable was quite suitable for the purpose, but it unfortunately seriously hampered working at any distance exceeding a few yards and was quite out of the question at the beginning of coupled movement. "You will by this time have guessed that electric transmission was the very thing for the purpose. The problem was solved for us. We coupled up a mains-fed motor to the grarnophone, regulating the speed of the former by that of the latter. Then we connected the electric motor coupled to the kinematograph with the current distributor fixed on one of the phonograph shafts, so Please mention The International Photographer when corresponding with advertisers.