The Progression of Film

The biggest problem humans have been having since the dawn of time is, 'how do we entertain ourselves? '. One would assume it began with fire, something that aroused the eyes and entertained the mind.Though fire may have been the beginning, centuries upon centuries later a much more highly intelligent form of entertainment revolutionized the world, motion pictures. In the dog eat dog world of entertainment Film reigns alpha dog. Film has some of the biggest influence on the world around us. It shapes our adolescence, teaching foreign things to the young developing mind. Cinema has spurred riots, love, and murder. So the question is, whats are these powerful pieces of art? "I am going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear from me again." (Edward James Muggeridge). The first traceable form of anything relating to motion pictures was the "Magic Lantern" invented in the 17th Century by Athansius Kircher in Rome, Italy. The device had a lens that projected pictures from transparencies onto a screen, with a mere candle. This was the first step towards the revolution that would progress to a more advanced device in centuries to come. In 1831 the law of electromagnetic induction was discovered by an English scientist Michael Faraday, a major part used in generating elcectricity and powering simple motors and machines, including film equipment. In 1832 a Belgian inventor by the name of Joseph Plateau created a device called the "Fantascope" or "spindle viewer". Simple enough, it made a sequence of seperate pictures depicting stages or actions, like juggling or dancing. The images were arranged around the outter circle of a slotted disk. The disk required being placed in front of a mirror and rotated. Someone viewing through the slots saw a moving picture (Filmsite) In 1934 William George Horner, a British inventor, invited the "Daedalum". The Daedalum was a hollow, rotating drum with a crank, and had a strip of sequential photographs and drawings on