We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
56 THE PICTURES SCREENED
Concurrently with Plateau's experiments, a lieutenant in the Austrian army, Franz Uchatius, attempted to project moving pictures on a screen. The pictures were hand painted by an artist and were not photographs.
His first device followed Dr. Plateau's Phenakistoscope, the device already described in which the pictures were painted round the circumference of a disc and viewed through another slotted disc, both discs being mounted at opposite ends of a central axle. Uchatius caused his pictures to be painted on glass and put a light behind them. The slotted disc acted as a shutter. Using the same optical system as that in a magic lantern, he obtained a screened moving picture but it was a poor thing. The slotted disc cut off so much light that any picture bigger than six inches was practically indiscernible. That was in 1851.
Two years later he made another and more promising experiment. This time the disc containing the pictures remained still. In front of each picture was a lens. Behind the pictures was a light which went round and round, thereby illuminating each picture in turn. The lenses in front of the pictures were so tilted that each image was thrown upon exactly the same spot on the screen. In this way better illumination was obtained because there was no shutter to cut off the light. The apparatus was acclaimed at the Vienna Academy of Sciences, only to be forgotten as soon as its novelty waned.
The first use of photography to make a moving picture is claimed for Desvignes, who took Plateau's suggestion seriously and, in the last phase of the Zoetrope's development, used photographs in place of the customary drawings.
Likewise, photographic pictures were shown on the Phenakistoscope in 1852. They were taken by an Englishman named Wenham, who posed a workmen in a series of ' still ' attitudes indicative of progressive movement. The subject was shown pounding with a pestle in a mortar.
The result was only moderately life-like, apparently, for the sitter complained, when he saw the movie of himself on the toy, that ' he never worked like that ' !
When Desvignes tried out a similar idea eight years later he did not risk movement on the part of his sitter — exposures had necessarily to be very long in those days — but used a steam engine as his subject.
Desvignes produced and showed his pictures in i860. Naturally, his