Pre Cinema History 📷🎞️🇨🇦 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Documents show it suffered the same fate three times-- violent gales off the English Channel washed it to the ground--the 1st being 12 November 1840. Appeals for funding twice brought the camera back to life but in 1889 the Camera Obscura was demolished in the name of progress. This folded Panorama postcard shows Plymouth Sound, England in the 19th century with the Camera Obscura prominently displayed. Image Bright Bytes via Brian Moseley.

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST CAMERA OBSCURA IN PLYMOUTH One hundred and twenty-six years earlier in 1827, a machinist named William Sampson built the first camera in what is called Plymouth Hoe. It stood on top of what is now the Belvedere. An image of Plymouth Sound was projected from the mirror at the top and angled by another mirror onto a white surface within the dimly lit room below. The white surface was a table-cloth on a table. Pictured: an undated photograph of the Camera Obscura.

Left Figure 39 on page 62 of Moigno’s book. Children and adults being taught about the French gift to the US, the Statue of Liberty. Figures 86 and 87 on pages 110 and 112 of Moigno’s book in 1872. Today we will lean about insects.

Below, an excerpt from 'The Art of Projections,' 1872 by François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno, on his outlook on how the Magic Lantern could be used to teach;

1872 FRANÇOIS-NAPOLÉON-MARIE MOIGNO (1804-1884) Not the first (Kircher and Martini may have been), but one of the earliest to promote teaching using the Magic Lantern in the established age, was Moigno who gave us ‘The Art of Projections’ published in 1872. Moigno was a learned man of 19th century France. He wrote frequent scientific articles for the press. Persecuted by the church for not believing the right things, from 1843 on, he became scientific editor of the journal ‘Presse’ in 1850, focusing on modern optics.

Hayley Mills and Deborah Kerr in "The Chalk Garden", 1964

1890s THE THAUMATOGRAPH OSKAR MESSTER (1866-1943) The Thaumatograph was a commercial film projector developed in Germany and made by Oskar Messter’s firm (Ed. Messter / Messter-Projection) from the 1890s into the 1910s. It was a 35mm apparatus sold in a number of model versions over a number of years that used the standard intermittent / stop-frame mechanism (Maltese-cross / Geneva style) and a lamp-house for illumination. Light was modulated by counter-rotating shutter blades to expose frames sequentially and prevent flicker. Film was guided and protected by slide rails to minimize wear and jamming. Additional safety features included pre- and post-wind reels, pressure rollers for tension, and a fireproof drum enclosure to mitigate nitrate film risks. Messter’s line of Thaumatograph projectors became a standard German market model by the 1910s.

These two excerpts (pp11 and 12 below) are taken from ‘A History of Photography, Written as A Practical Guide and An Introduction to Its Latest Developments,’ by Jerome Harrison, Scovill, NY, 1887. Harrison ponders the very same question;

In 1760 when the de la Roche book Giphantie was written, photography had not yet become a name, coined by Antoine Hércules Romuald Florence when he called it "Photographie." And, it was still a dream, a thought, a hope. The need for an emulsion was just now beginning to be realised. Beyond photography, Giphantie contains other forward-looking ideas: 📺 Television-like Displays: The novel describes “mirrors” that project moving images of distant events, resembling live broadcasts.

GLUTINOUS SUBSTANCE The most celebrated passage in Giphantie is its description of a process that uncannily anticipates photography, 65 years before its invention by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1825-1826. In the novel, the Prefect shows the narrator a “faithful picture” created by fixing images from nature. The process is described as follows (paraphrased from the 1761 English translation): 📸 Light rays reflected from objects are collected on a specially prepared canvas. 📸 A “glutinous substance” on the canvas, sensitive to light, captures and retains these rays. 📸 The image forms instantly and remains fixed, creating a perfect replica of the scene.