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A BLIND MAN'S MOVING PICTURE 55
Yet, in its infancy, one man had seen the possibilities of using photographs in place of the artist's drawings.
He was Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau of Ghent.
To the cynical there may be something ironical in the fact that this man who first thought of the possibilities of making photographs move was for the greater part of his life and during the major part of his researches, blind.
Plateau's first device was similar to Horner's. Even his subject was the same — the Devil blowing up a fire. It had to be drawn to his suggestion, for he was, by the date that he made his researches into moving pictures, already blind. He was very proud of the sensation which it caused, although he could only learn at secondhand the effect that it had on the beholders.
At twenty-eight, through looking at the sun to test its effect on the retina of the eye, he had impaired his sight. Though he recovered temporarily, his sight became steadily worse and worse during the next fourteen years until, in 1843, ne na(^ become totally blind. It was six years later that he made his " Diable soufflant ", and, with the help of relatives who carried out his orders, kept up a neverending succession of experiments aimed at the perfect moving picture in peep-show form.
The advantages of photography occurred to him, but he did no more than lay down the form in which it could be applied. All of the early seen-through-a-slot movies suffered from distortion. The slits tended to elongate the picture. Plateau thought that purposelydistorted photographs could be made to compensate for this.
Until the age of eighty-three, this indomitable blind man kept up his researches into pictures which moved. The fact that he was blind and could not see the fruits of his labours, so far from discouraging him, seemed to add a spur to his endeavours. It was as though he were determined to leave his mark on the world by giving to others the delight of the thing which he himself most desired but which he would not, and could not, himself see and enjoy.
His actual mark on the screen's development is small. Never once did it occur to him to have his pictures made on transparencies, like lantern slides, and rotate them before a light and behind a lens in order to obtain a screened picture. A very great pity, for he would then have been the first to achieve projection of a moving picture, and would have had a far greater claim to importance in the development of the cinema.