That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future (1923)

26 THAT MARVEL— THE MOVIE minds to perceive in instantaneous photography a valuable means of analyzing motion. If a single photograph reproduced the exact posture of a moving object at any given instant of time, they argued that a series of such photographs, if taken in sufficiently rapid succession, would form a complete record of the whole cycle of movements involved, for instance in the jump of a horse or the flap of a bird's wing. Thomas A. Edison, in an interview given to Mr. Hugh Weir and recently published in McClure's Magazine, enlightens us regarding Mr. Talbot's proposition. Asked what first suggested to him the idea of the motion-picture camera, Mr. Edison said: The phonograph. I had been working for several years on experiments for recording and reproducing sound, and the thought occurred to me that it should be possible to devise an apparatus to do for the eye what the phonograph was designed to do for the ear. It was in 1887 that I began my investigations, and photography, compared with what it is to-day, was in a decidedly crude state of development. Pictures were made by "wet" plates, operated by involved mechanism. The modern dry films were unheard of. I had only one fact to guide me at all. This was the principle of optics, technically called "the persistence of vision," which proves that the sensation of light lingers in the brain for anywhere from one-tenth to one-twentieth part of a second after the light has disappeared from the sight of the eye. In other words, the fact that the human eye is a photographic camera possessing memory may