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

48 LIVING PICTURES. dry plates or, better still, films. But advances were nevertheless made, for the rise of chrono-photography afforded opportunity to work out mechanical details for obtaining rapid successive exposures, though the resulting views were not intended for subsequent recombination into motion. It was in the same year (1870) that Marey com- menced his researches on the analysis of motion, and the advance in sensibility of photo-surfaces has lent continual aid from that time onward. Marey in France and Muybridge in America soon entered mto com- munication; the latter started work in 1872, their common object being the discovery of the successive attitudes which collectively make up a given motion, though they worked by somewhat different methods. Marey confined himself from the first to the method of casting his series of momentary exposures on one plate by means of one lens, while Muybridge adopted an opposed course. Some consideration is necessary as to the results involved by these modes of proceeding. Both methods had their respective advantages as regards Chrono - photography pure and simple, but one was limited in its development, the other contained the vital elements of the modern living-picture machine. Briefly stated, Muybridge's plan was to take successive views of an object as it passed in front of a series of cameras ; Marey obtained a series of pictures by repeated ex- posures with one lens. Although Muybridge started work at a somewhat later date than Marey, he devoted greater attention to his subject, and it will be more convenient to first discuss his plan and all the battery forms of apparatus because they have not successfully emerged from the " struggle for existence "—as regards the modern living picture they have died out, though still of great service in pure Chrono-photography. In the year 1877 Muybridge, for the purpose of