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History of the Motion Picture
By C. Francis Jenkins
I HAVE .been asked by your Papers Committee to prepare a sketch of the conception, early history and development of the motion picture, but to compile an accurate account sufficiently complete without being too lengthy is not an easy task.
Where the motion picture idea originated I have not found out, though a hundred years before the Christian era, Lucretus strangely wrote his friend thus
"Do not thou moreover wonder that the images appear to move and appear in one order and time their arms and legs to use; for one image disappears and instead appears another arranged in another way, and thus seems each gesture to change ; for you must understand that this takes place in the quickest time."
This is an exact description of the motion picture of today, and if this is really what he meant, then it took two thousand years to get a suitable picture ribbon and a proper machine to handle it. And it will be noticed that the subject naturally divides itself into these two main elements, i. e., the picture-carrying vehicle and the handling mechanism therefor. The mechanism is of two kinds, i. e., one of them continuous movement, the other intermittent movement of the picture carrier at the illuminated aperture. The process, as we know it today, is likewise divided into two steps ; the first a photographic analysis of the animated subject, the second a synthesis of the elements into which the subject was divided by the analytical process.
The success of the attempt to simulate animation depends initially upon persistence of vision, that faculty of the human eye which enables the retina to hold onto a light sensation for an appreciable time after the light is cut oi¥. And curiously enough this phenomena seems to have been first mentioned by a blind man.
The motion picture is not a sort of Minerva-birth of inventive genius, but like all notable achievements in mechanisms has had a long line of predecessors, for the difficult problem of recording and reproducing motion did not yield without much preliminary fumbling.
Obviously it would lengthen this paper beyond acceptable limits if description were made of the work of all who have contributed to the result in the form finally adopted and practiced at this time. I shall therefore endeavor to confine myself as far as this may be done to mention of the contributions of those who in turn first added a new step in the development of the idea.
By a process of knowledge additions and eliminations the motion picture of today reduces itself roughly to six historical periods ; the first (1) a series of related picture elements; (2) the adoption of
^ De Rerum Nature, book IV, verse 766.
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