Muybridge Research Paper

An encounter with the work and ideas of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge appears to have spurred Edison to pursue the development of a motion picture system. On February 25, 1888, in Orange, New Jersey, Muybridge gave a lecture that may have included a demonstration of his zoopraxiscope, a device that projected sequential images drawn around the edge of a glass disc, producing the illusion of motion. The Edison facility was very close by, and the lecture was possibly attended by both Edison and his company's official photographer, William Dickson. Two days later, Muybridge and Edison met at Edison's laboratory in West Orange; Muybridge later described how he proposed a collaboration to join his device with the Edison phonograph—a combination
The filmstrip, based on stock manufactured first by Eastman, and then, from April 1893 onward, by New York's Blair Camera Co., was 35 mm (1 3/8 inches) wide; each vertically sequenced frame bore a rectangular image and four perforations on each side.[28] Within a few years, this basic format would be adopted globally as the standard for motion picture film, which it remains to this day. The publication in the October 1892 Phonogram of cinematographic sequences shot in the format demonstrates that the Kinetograph had already been reconfigured to produce movies with the new film.[29] As for the Kinetoscope itself, there is a significant disagreement over the location of the shutter providing the crucial intermittent visibility effect. According to a report by inventor Herman Casler described as "authoritative" by Hendricks, who personally examined five of the six still-extant first-generation devices, "Just above the film,...a shutter wheel having five spokes and a very small rectangular opening in the rim [rotates] directly over the film. An incandescent lamp...is placed below the film...and the light passes up through the film, shutter opening, and magnifying lens...to the eye of the observer placed at the opening in the top of the case."[30] Robinson, on the other hand, says the shutter—which he agrees has only a single slit—is positioned lower, "between the lamp and film".[31] The Casler–Hendricks description is supported by the diagrams of the Kinetoscope that accompany the 1891 patent application, in particular, diagram 2. A side view, it does not illustrate the shutter, but it shows the impossibility of it fitting between the lamp and the film without a major redesign and indicates a space that seems suitable for it between the film and the lens.[32]