The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era [1st ed. 2021] 1071609505, 9781071609507

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Lenny Lipton

THE CINEMA IN FLUX The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era

The Cinema in Flux

Lenny Lipton

The Cinema in Flux The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era

Lenny Lipton Los Angeles, CA, USA

ISBN 978-1-0716-0950-7    ISBN 978-1-0716-0951-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Science+Business Media, LLC part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

What is the future of the kinetograph? Ask, rather, from what conceivable phase of the future it can be debarred. In the promotion of business interests in the advancement of science, in the revelation of unguessed worlds, in its educational and re-creative powers, and in its ability to memorialize our fleeting but beloved associations, the kinetograph stands foremost among the creations of inventive modern genius. It is the crown and flower of nineteenth century magic, the crystallization of Eons of groping enhancements. In its wholesome, sunny and accessible laws are possibilities undreamt of by the occult law of the East; the conservative wisdom of Egypt, the jealous eruditions of Babylon, the guarded mysteries of Delphic and Eleusinian shrines. It is the earnest of the coming age, when the great potentialities of life shall no longer be in the keeping of cloister and college, sword or moneybag, but shall overflow to the nethermost portions of the earth at the command of the humblest heir of the divine intelligence. –William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, History of the Kinetograph Kinetoscope and Kineto-Phonograph, 1895, p. 52

Edwin Land was an extraordinary man who did extraordinary things like hiring women at a time when industry usually did not hire them for research positions. One of the women he hired was a chemist, Vivian Walworth. She was a friend and one of the few woman inventors (the co-inventor of Polacolor) included in these pages. It is to her memory that I dedicate this book, not simply to remember a gifted woman but to acknowledge that half of the human race has been denied an opportunity to participate in a great adventure.

Foreword

The technological development of the illusion of motion that creates “moving pictures” is at the core of this important book. Lenny Lipton brings tremendous clarity to this idea: “moving” being both apparent motion as well as an emotionally moving projected picture and sound, experienced together with others in a darkened theater. The Cinema in Flux is on the trail of a vitally important nexus between the illusion of motion and the story contained within that illusion. As cinema has improved itself over the years, adding sound, color, dimensionality, and now transforming itself into a digital medium, the vital core of why and how the medium has successfully persisted for such a span of time is a question that requires an answer. Will cinema survive by transforming itself into an even more high-powered juggernaut of immersive and experiential technical perfection or will it retain its ability to be dramatically moving and an emotional experience based on writing, directing, photography, acting, and editing, all in the service of illuminating the human experience while still preserving showmanship? The question before us is: will cinema lose its soul? I have been a lifelong proponent of the giant screen movie experience and have had the fortunate and wondrous opportunity to work closely with Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Sir Ridley Scott, Robert Wise, and others, discovering again and again that it is possible to fill the screen with epic spectacle and visual splendor. To me everything in a movie is an illusion, and the projected illusion of motion is at its core. The art form of cinema is boundless in its ability to transport audiences into unexpected realms of emotion, action, and wonder, by means of storytelling delivered by seasoned actors and actresses of all sizes, shapes, ages, and races. Sadly, our present obsession with spectacle and “high concept” (a simple and easily pitched story) is eclipsing the underpinnings of the medium itself and distracting us from the mysterious nature of the movie experience created only with the help of the cameras, lights, lenses, and projectors that deliver magic to the screen. The Cinema in Flux reveals to us the history of how motion picture technology changed and progressed through its various eras; such knowledge can inform filmmakers of the heritage behind the camera and the screen—possibly shining a light on the question of “what’s next?” Will cinema successfully retain its true and “moving” nature or become a theme park ride and gimmicky technology that has no heart? Lenny Lipton delivers the background we need to help make sure that our beloved art form does not go off the rails. Southfield, MA Nov. 16, 2019

Douglas Trumbull

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Preface

This book follows what I have come to think of as the unitary vision of cinema’s technological evolution, in alignment with that of a number of modern cinema scholars. But not so long ago, for most of those who have written about it, cinema begins with the inventions of Eastman’s film, Edison’s camera, and the Lumières’ Cinématographe, notions that have contributed to the popular view of the subject. This impression is conveyed by dutifully noting that the magic lantern is a preamble to the big event, relegated to the archeological nether regions of “precinema,” which include prehistoric cave paintings along with nods to Chinese, Indian, and Javanese shadow puppet shows. One can reasonably argue that their inclusion is a didactic tactic or definitional, coming down to the meaning of the word cinema. The words we use influence how we think and I therefore contend that creating this demarcation obscures a more constructive way of understanding the continuity of cinema’s evolution. The idea that the era of the magic lantern is not pre-cinema but cinema itself, and not some archaic backwater, is based on the most fundamental definition of cinema technology, which in my view is the projection of motion. In an essay, Huhtamo (2011) explains that the furtherance of the acceptance of the unitary view by some modern scholars may have been inspired by the 1995–6 exhibition mounted by the Cinémathèque Française Scientific Director and Curator, Laurent Mannoni, whose Trois siècles de cinéma de la lanterne magique au Cinematographe was similar to one of the same titles I saw at the Cinémathèque Christmas week 2009. Huhtamo writes: “Since then (the 1995-6 exhibition), there has been a flurry of books and articles that have…questioned and gone beyond prevailing ideas about moving images…The emerging picture is different from the one routinely found in cinema histories of just a few decades ago. The developments that preceded the appearance of the Kinetoscope and the Cinématographe used to be lumped together under the title ‘pre-cinema’ and briefly presented as a succession of steps leading to the climax: the classical cinema, epitomized by narrative feature film, movie palaces, the star cult, and the Hollywood dream factory.” The work of scholars like Mannoni (2000, 2009), Huhtamo (2011), and Rossell (1998), supports the position that cinema began with the magic lantern, to which can be added the voices of Tom Gunning and the editors of Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern (2001), David Robinson, Stephen Herbert, and Richard Crangle. By acknowledging that cinema originated in the mid-­ seventeenth century, a richer story emerges. Moreover, in addition to the technological linkages there are creative and aesthetic connections worth exploring between the cinema of real motion and the cinema of apparent motion – between the Glass (magic lantern slides were painted on glass) and the Celluloid Cinema Eras. Further, since we are now fully immersed in the third epoch of cinema, the Digital Cinema Era, it becomes even more apparent that we need a different and more inclusive view of cinema, precisely because its enabling apparatus has been so thoroughly transmogrified. The common syntactical linkages between magic lantern practice and the celluloid cinema have a relevance that somehow goes unrecognized. In fact, fades, dissolves, zooms, wipes, and pans were invented by the lanternists, as was the basis for cell animation. Even motion or performance capture, a mainstay of digital cinema effects, was invented in the twilight days of the Glass Era by chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey. In many cases these techniques and devices arrived a century or more before celluloid cinema filmmakers either emulated or rediscovered them. xi

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The essence of cinema narrative, the montage, was invented by the storytelling lanternists who used the temporal juxtaposition of slides to tell a story. Another link between the two eras, that of the Glass Cinema and the early Celluloid Cinema Eras, is that lantern projections of moving images were accompanied by musicians and actors voicing parts, who also sang and helped with sound effects. The magic lantern and the early celluloid cinema were live performance arts using the same presentation strategies. Their commonalities extend to the lanternists’ performance art and the operation of their slide projectors. They must have adjusted the rhythm of changing their slides to interact with audience reactions in a way that was, one day, practiced by early film projectionists who varied the speed of their handcranked 35 mm projectors. While it might be argued that these kinds of correspondences are the result of convergent evolution, lanternists’ performances continued into the first decade of the twentieth century and were seen by early celluloid cinema filmmakers. The definition of cinema as the projection of moving images can be modified in this the Electro-Digital Era to take into consideration the ubiquitous flat panel display. However, the definition of cinema as the projection of motion embraces most of the territory covered here and applies from its inception to the present. Based on this definition I subscribe to the belief that cinema began in earnest in the mid-seventeenth century with the invention of dioptric or refractive projection. Catoptric or mirror projection, which proceeded dioptric projection, involves images painted on reflecting surfaces, while refractive projection, as embodied by the magic lantern, the original slide projector, was used extensively to project images in motion from transparencies on glass. The reflection based projection technique has lain fallow for three and half centuries, but today underpins the image engine to be found in the great majority of theatrical projectors, the digital micromirror device (DMD). However, the dominant form of projection these past centuries, until relatively recently, uses the projection of transparencies, which was invented by Christiaan Huygens in 1659. Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), whose name will appear again in these pages, might well have been referring to the magic lantern when in 1832 he wrote: “Those mechanical wonders which in one century enriched only the conjurer who used them contributed in another to augment the wealth of the nation; and those automatic toys which once amused the vulgar, are now employed in extending the power and promoting the civilization of our species” (Walsh 1832). The magic lantern is the mechanical, optical, and aesthetic foundation of its successor, the celluloid cinema, but for most of its history, it used real motion, the motion that we perceive in the everyday world, as opposed to apparent motion, which is produced by a series of incrementally different related frames, the technique used in both the Celluloid and Digital Cinema Eras. From inception the magic lantern achieved motion on screen by moving all or parts of its colorful hand painted slides. The simplest example is based on the movement of the slide itself as it is slid through the projector’s gate in order to produce a pan; another real motion technique used two-dimensional puppets on what are known as mechanical slides. What became the most flexible approach for creating the projected illusion of motion, using a sequence of still images of the “phases of motion,” was suggested by Johannes Zahn in 1686 or 1687, and was actualized by Joseph Plateau in 1832, not for projection but rather for direct viewing using the spinning phenakistoscope, the progenitor of the more familiar zoëtrope, both of which became popular novelty items. The phenakistoscope was the basis for subsequent apparent motion technology including its adaptation to the magic lantern. In the 1850s photographic technology improved to the point where it was used for making slides for magic lantern projection, allowing it to replace drawings of the assumed phases of motion, an important step toward the creation of the celluloid cinema. These slides were projected with modified magic lanterns to produce the illusion of apparent motion, culminating in the remarkable big screen projections of Ottomar Anschütz to audiences of hundreds in Berlin, immediately prior to the invention of the celluloid cinema. By the later part of the nineteenth century, an era that film histories call the Victorian Cinema, Anschütz’s fellow inventors recognized they had a problem, saddled as they were with inflexible glass as a storage medium for ­apparent motion projection; like the glass slides used for Anschütz’s Projecting Tachyscope, they simply were not suited for extended projection time.

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The work of French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey contributed to the creation of the celluloid cinema and influenced the work of Thomas Edison who, at precisely the right moment, had the good fortune of having the first supply of thin and flexible celluloid in useable lengths coated with a photographic light sensitive emulsion – in other words film, supplied by George Eastman. Edison and his hands-on assistant and photographic expert, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, improved on Marey’s work by adding perforations to film so that their Kinetograph camera positioned each successively exposed frame in the same relative position, without which making prints and projection are impractical. Edison, at first, was only interested in exhibition based on his Kinetoscope peepshow machine, discounting projection because he (correctly) believed it would compete with Kinetoscope parlors. His resistance to projection was a gift to other inventors, entrepreneurs, and competitors, as was his disinclination to legally protect his work abroad. The 35 mm format designed by Dickson became the basis for an internationally acclaimed art form and a remarkably effective communications medium as well as a great industry. Celluloid as the carrier of information, in its 35 mm embodiment, was pregnant with possibilities agreeably lending itself to sound, color, giant and wide screen projection, and even a tentative stereoscopic cinema. The design of a good 35 mm projector like the Lumière Cinématographe (which was also a camera and a printer), was a genuine engineering contribution, but it was the invention of 35 mm film and the existence of the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope that led to its creation and other early celluloid cinema cameras and projectors. I discuss Edison at length because he is responsible for so much of the technology, above and beyond the movie camera, which made the celluloid cinema possible. He put into practice the centralized system of electrical distribution, invented a viable electric light, discovered the basis for electronics, and miraculously, as a man who was growing increasingly deaf, invented the phonograph, mankind’s first method for recording and reproducing sound. With these things Edison furthered the development and dissemination of mass entertainment, and his cinema became a medium that profoundly changed civilization, depending as it did on the phenakistoscope and its demonstration of apparent motion, the invention of a physicist who was losing his sight, Joseph Plateau. The phenakistoscope provided an inspiration for inventors who took apparent motion technology in two directions in the latter part of the nineteenth century: those who created the celluloid cinema, like Edison, and those with a different goal who explored “vision at a distance,” or television. Rather than storing the moving image information photochemically television inventors had, as their goal, the instantaneous transmission of moving images to a different location. It was Nipkow, who in 1884, conceived of a technology for scanning, transmitting, and displaying moving images as a succession of fields of scanned lines. At first early television workers used an electromechanical (electrical-­mechanical) approach, but by the 1930s far more promising results were achieved using rapidly advancing electronics technology. Television, or video, took most of the twentieth century to become transmogrified into the high definition electronic-digital medium that has all but replaced the photochemical celluloid cinema. Researching and writing this book has led to me to devise a classification system inspired by the way scholars look at historical epochs based on the metal that is descriptive of that epoch’s technology, leading them to the use of terms like the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. Accordingly, I organize cinema technology into The Glass Era, The Celluloid Era, and the Digital Era, to designate the carrier of information that materially distinguishes that period’s technology. A system of classification is useful if it is grounded in fact and clarifies the subject, and as a bonus leads to new insights. It’s my hope that the reader with agree that such is the case here, and it’s also my hope that the reader will agree that it is reasonable to assert that cinema began with the invention of projection in the seventeenth century, hundreds of years before the work of Muybridge, Marey, Demenÿ, Edison, Dickson, Jenkins, and the Lumières. This book, while focused on cinema’s technology does not ignore the personalities of those who were ­instrumental in its evolution. In order to provide context to the development of cinema technology, societal, business, and intellectual property factors are also called to the reader’s attention. My hope is that this book may be of interest, in addition to experts in the field, to people in the industry and

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anyone who loves motion pictures. One of my goals has been to bring to the readers’ attention my view that the history of cinema technology ought to be seen as part of the study of the history of science and technology. On a personal note, when I learned that my two sons, who graduated from college as film majors had not taken a course in the history of motion picture technology, I hoped that this book might become part of such a curriculum and remedy this oversight. The Cinema Eras and Milestone graphic reproduced here is designed to help the reader visualize the evolution of cinema technology using the classification system described, which divides cinema into three eras as represented by the top bar having segments labeled Glass Cinema, Celluloid Cinema, and Digital Cinema. The lower bar is labeled Real Motion and Apparent Motion, another way to classify cinema’s eras consistent with a system based on the storage medium. It turns out that the Glass Cinema Era coincides with the Real Motion Era, and the Celluloid Cinema and Digital Television Eras coincide with the Apparent Motion Era. The second from the top bar represents the development of television and the electro-digital cinema. The historical events that are depicted were chosen to provide context and are in no way complete. These and a great many other events are discussed in the text, whose chapters are also grouped into The Glass Cinema, The Celluloid Cinema, and The Digital Cinema. The graphic may give the impression that transitions from one era to another were rapid but that is not the case. It took six decades of inventive effort, after Plateau’s discovery of apparent motion, to apply it to the magic lantern to create a viable celluloid cinema. As far as the transition from the photochemical or celluloid cinema to the electronic-digital cinema is concerned, a period of hybridization can be considered to have begun in 1927 marked by the announcement of Hartley and Ives of their intermediate-film system. It used movie film to capture the image turned it into video for transmission and back into film for projection. It wasn’t until about nine decades later, in the early years of the twenty-first century, after substantial technological development, that the transition to the digital cinema was fully established. Los Angeles, CA Jan. 17, 2021

Lenny Lipton

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Contents

Part I THE GLASS CINEMA: The Cinema of Real Motion 1 Huygens and the Magic Lantern�������������������������������������������������������������������������������   3 2 The Magic Lanternists�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  15 3 Lantern Light and Glass �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  31 Part II THE GLASS CINEMA: Apparent Motion, Discovered and Applied 4 Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope�������������������������������������������������������������������������  43 5 A Persistent Myth�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  51 6 The Zoëtrope and the Praxinoscope�������������������������������������������������������������������������  55 7 Daguerre’s Photography �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  61 8 Fox Talbot’s Photography �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  67 9 Protocinematographers: Duboscq to Le Prince�������������������������������������������������������  75 10 Muybridge and Anschütz�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  85 11 Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ �������������������������������������������  93 Part III THE CELLULOID CINEMA: The 35 mm Medium 12 Edison, Dickson, and the Kineto Project ����������������������������������������������������������������� 105 13 The Kinetograph��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 117 14 The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration��������������������������������������������������������������� 127 15 Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer ��������������������������������������������� 137 16 Jenkins and Armat: American Projection ��������������������������������������������������������������� 151 17 The Lumières and the Europeans����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 161 18 Edison and the Trust��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 171 19 Porter the Filmmaker������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 177 20 Porter and the Simplex����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 183 21 Camera Design Before WWII ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 189 22 Camera Design After WWII ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 199 23 Ciné Lenses: Part I����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 207 24 Ciné Lenses: Part II ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 213 xvii

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Part IV THE CELLULOID CINEMA: Sound 25 Silent Sound����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 221 26 Synchronizing the Phonograph��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 229 27 Electronics for Talking Shadows������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 243 28 The Origins of Sound-on-Film����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 249 29 One Man Bands: Lauste and Tykociner������������������������������������������������������������������� 259 30 Tri-Ergon��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 263 31 de Forest and Case ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 269 32 Phonofilm��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 277 33 William Fox Hears the Future����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 285 34 Vitaphone��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 293 35 Movietone��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 303 36 RCA vs. ERPI������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 311 37 William Fox vs. the Industry������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 321 38 Optical Sound Evolution ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 327 39 Multichannel, Magnetic, and Digital Sound������������������������������������������������������������� 335 Part V THE CELLULOID CINEMA: Color 40 Applied Color ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 345 41 Color Elucidated��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 355 42 Color Photography Before the Movies��������������������������������������������������������������������� 361 43 Urban and the Origins of Kinemacolor ������������������������������������������������������������������� 371 44 The Rise and Fall of Kinemacolor����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 379 45 Additive Color After Kinemacolor ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 385 46 Subtractive Technologies ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 395 47 Kelley’s Color Microcosm ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 405 48 TruColor and Cinecolor��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 411 49 Two-Color Technicolor����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 423 50 Three-Color Technicolor ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 435 51 Agfa and Ansco Color������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 445 52 Eastman Color������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 451 Part VI THE CELLULOID CINEMA: Small Formats 53 Early Small Formats��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 463 54 16 mm��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 473

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55 Kodachrome ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 483 56 Double 8 mm and Super 8 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 489 Part VII THE CELLULOID CINEMA: The Big Wide Screen 57 The Shape of Screens to Come����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 503 58 Grandeur et al. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 511 59 Expanded Screen: The Interregnum Ends��������������������������������������������������������������� 521 60 This Is Cinerama��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 527 61 Cinerama After Waller����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 541 62 CinemaScope��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 545 63 ‘Scope Variations��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 555 64 Wide Screen and VistaVision������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 561 65 Todd-AO����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 567 66 65/70 mm and Technirama����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 573 67 IMAX and PLF Exhibition ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 579 Part VIII THE CELLULOID CINEMA: The Stereoscopic Cinema 68 Early 3-D��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 589 69 Polarization Image Selection������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 601 70 3-D in the Last Half of the Twentieth Century��������������������������������������������������������� 607 Part IX TELEVISION AND THE DIGITAL CINEMA: Television 71 Vision at a Distance����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 619 72 Jenkins and Baird������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 631 73 Farnsworth������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 645 74 Zworykin��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 653 75 Broadcasting Begins��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 663 76 Color Wars: CBS vs. RCA����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 673 77 High Definition Television ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 679 78 Film to Video and the VTR ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 683 Part X TELEVISION AND THE DIGITAL CINEMA: The Electronic Cinema 79 Early Adopters: Electronic Cinematography and CGI������������������������������������������� 691 80 Digital Technology������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 701 81 The Hybridization of Post-production ��������������������������������������������������������������������� 709 82 Electro-Mechanical to Digital Projection����������������������������������������������������������������� 713

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83 Digital Projection and 3-D Converge ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 725 Afterword and Acknowledgments������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 735 Bibliographies��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 737 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 759

Contents

About the Author

Lenny Lipton  an American inventor, author, and songwriter, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940. He was the lead inventor of the technology that enabled the film industry to project feature films in 3-D. Lenny founded StereoGraphics Corporation in 1980 and in 1981 demonstrated the flickerless stereoscopic projection technique that is the basis for 80,000 theatrical cinema installations. He is the primary inventor of the ZScreen electro-optical modulator, introduced in 1988 and used for molecular modeling and aerial mapping visualization. In 1996, Lenny was honored by the Smithsonian Institution for the invention of CrystalEyes, introduced by StereoGraphics in 1989, the first electronic eyewear for stereoscopic visualization such as molecular modeling, aerial mapping, and medical imaging. NASA used it to remotely drive the Mars Rovers and Lockheed to design the upgrade for the Hubble Space Telescope. He has been granted more than 70 United States Patents in the field of electronic stereoscopic displays. During his tenure as Chief Technology Officer of RealD, which acquired StereoGraphics in 2005, he helped adapt the ZScreen for theatrical projection, which is installed in more than 30,000 cinema auditoria worldwide. After more than a century of effort, 3-D has become an ongoing part of theatrical filmmaking. In 2007, Lenny was featured as the physicist of the month in Physics World magazine. In 2008, on behalf of RealD, he received an award from the Society for Information Display for the invention of the ZScreen. Lenny was invited to speak

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at the Cinémathèque Française in 2009; his exposure to the Cinémathèque’s collection led to the writing of The Cinema in Flux. He is a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and of the International Society for Optics and Photonics. In 2011, Lenny received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Advanced Imaging Society and was also profiled in The Wall Street Journal. As a college freshman, in 1959, he wrote the poem that became the song Puff the Magic Dragon. Lenny has independently produced 25 films, some of which have aired on PBS, Italian television, and the BBC, and are now in the Pacific Film Archive collection at the University of California. In the 1970s he received a grant from the American Film Institute to produce his film Revelation of the Foundation. His book, Independent Filmmaking, published in 1972, was in print for 20 years and he is the author of the standard reference, Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema, published in 1982. Lenny has written articles for American Cinematographer, The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Journal, and other publications. He has been a cultural representative for the United States Department of State to Venezuela and Brazil and has been a juror at film festivals in South America and Europe. His film, Let a Thousand Parks Bloom, was exhibited at the Tate Liverpool Museum (2005) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). Lenny Lipton graduated from Cornell with an A.B. in physics. He makes his home in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon with his wife Julie and family.

About the Author

Part I THE GLASS CINEMA: The Cinema of Real Motion

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Huygens and the Magic Lantern

Projection was invented by nature – witness the eye with its lens that projects an image of the world on the retina. Projection in this book (usually) signifies an optical process in which a two-dimensional transparency is illuminated so that the light passing through it is focused by a refracting lens (dioptric lens, in the literature of the seventeenth century) to throw an image on a screen.1 Aristotle (384– 322 BCE) noted that a beam of light, when it passed through a small opening no matter its shape, formed a circular image (Mannoni 2000, p. 4). This phenomenon is the basis for the camera obscura, which projects an image of the daylight world through a pinhole aperture into a dark room onto a white wall or screen, as described below and in chapter 7. In addition to a pinhole or a lens, projection with a mirror (catoptric projection) is possible and it may well be that projection technology was first attained in China more than 4600 years ago based on a truly uncommon phenomenon. The first mention of projection using mirrors or reflection may be attributable to Wang Fu, an art historian who wrote, in the twelfth century CE, that the invention, which is often called the Chinese magic mirror, was made by the Emperor Huang-ti, who lived sometime between 2704 and 2595 BCE (Hirth 1907). Although this provenance is probably apocryphal, the mirror is of ancient origin. However, a proper explanation of its optics has been given only relatively recently by physicist Michael Berry (2005). The usually circular mirror is made of cast bronze, a few inches or so across, relatively thin but not flexible, with a cast or engraved decorative figure, like a representation of the Chinese zodiac on one side, but it is the other side, the smooth and highly polished side without any visible mark, that is the image-­ forming surface. The effect is astonishing  – a novelty that doesn’t lose its luster with repeated viewings that is both easily demonstrated and mystifying: sunlight (or a small light) reflected by the featureless smooth and shiny metallic ­surface

produces a reflected image on a diffusing surface, like the palm of the hand, which remains in focus at any distance. James Prinsep (1799–1840), who worked in the Calcutta Mint, may have provided what was more or less the basis of the explanation of the Chinese magic mirror that was accepted for nearly two centuries. Writing in 1832 in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, he offers the following: “…the deception is produced entirely by irregularities in the surface, which are rendered the less perceptible to the eye, because the surface is convex instead of being plane…” (Hecht 1993, entry 140A). That this explanation is flawed is pointed out by Berry who writes that although the reflected image phenomenon can be approximated by geometrical optics, Prinsep’s explanation based on an image-forming reflecting concave surfaces does not apply because the surface would have to be concave rather than slightly convex as Prinsep asserts and the image remains in focus at any distance, which is uncharacteristic of an image-forming mirror (or refractive optics for that matter).2 Berry speculates that the casting process that produces the design is responsible for the mirror surface’s invisible pattern of 400 nanometer (a billionth of a meter) high lines whose “relief is generated while the mirror is cooling, by unequal contraction of the thick and thin parts of the pattern,” but there may be other explanations since the design may also be produced by engraving. Berry’s analysis makes use of Laplacian optics to explain how the exquisitely small declivities, impossible to see with the naked eye, are reflected by incoming rays of light by the polished surface to produce rays that add together to form the image. Almost certainly the mirror’s image-forming property was discovered and was not an intended attribute. I have no evidence that the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Europeans we are about to discuss were influenced by the Chinese mirror, but its

Projectionists use the word throw in two ways, as it was just used, as a synonym for the verb project and as a noun to signify the distance from the projector to the screen.

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As we shall see in chapter 71, the magic mirror was the inspiration for the work of English television inventors John Perry and W. E. Ayrton in 1879.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_1

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1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

Fig. 1.1  A Chinese magic mirror, showing its cast image side.

reflected image is suggestive of that of Della Porta, Schwenter, and Kircher’s catoptrics, the precursors of the magic lantern. Whatever the case, the magic mirror may well be mankind’s first projected image and therefore deserves to be brought to the attention of the reader. Athanasius Kircher (1601 or 1602–1680), an extremely well-educated Jesuit priest, born in Geisa, Buchonia, now Germany, has been described as the last of the “true Renaissance polymaths” (Rossell 2008, p.  24). He studied Hebrew, Egyptian hieroglyphics, mathematics, and geology; he was also a musical encyclopedist, inventor of a system of logic, museum founder, and a theologian who attempted to create a system of universal knowledge encompassing all disciplines. His interests and inclinations, especially his theological bent, were decidedly pre-Enlightenment, but his effort to find a unifying principal of knowledge, despite the fact that it attempted to codify magic, alchemy, and astrology, had as its goal one that is not unlike that of modern theoretical physicists seeking a unifying theory of everything. He was highly regarded by some, but not by the rationalists of the time, like Christiaan Huygens. Kircher was an expert on the use of the catoptric projection techniques that he employed for his lecture-performances. He wrote about them in one of his books, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, which was published in Rome in 1646. The second edition published in 1671, discusses optics and the new optical instruments like the telescope and projection devices. Kircher and his pupil Jesuit priest and astronomer Christopher Scheiner traveled to Syracuse to the site where Archimedes was said to have used burning mirrors, a solar reflecting weapon, to incinerate the invading Roman fleet. The scientist Sir David Brewster (2005) wrote about

Fig. 1.2  Athanasius Kircher

Kircher and Scheiner’s visit: “(They went to) examine the position of a hostile fleet; and they were both satisfied that the fleet of Marcellus could not have been more than thirty paces distance from Archimedes.” However, it’s unlikely that Archimedes’ mirrors, if indeed he built them, could set a ship ablaze. The Jesuit Kircher’s avowed goal was to use projection for a church-sanctioned message, to engender the fear of God in superstitious nonbelievers by vividly depicting the godless world of spirits and ghosts. The depiction of demons and spirits to frighten and entertain was to become the subject of magic lantern performances and persists as a major cinema genre to this day. Kircher’s practice was in keeping with the Jesuits’ approach to explain the church-sanctioned natural magic of the universe created by their God, by pressing into service man-made artificial magic, in this instance Kircher’s catoptric projections of spooks and numerological lore (Guynn 2011); the priest was a showman who set out to astonish and convert the heathen. Kircher’s method of mirror projection was an improvement over the technique invented by the German Daniel Schwenter (1585–1636) as given in his book Deliciae physico-mathematicae (Scientific and Mathematical Delights), published in Nuremberg in 1636. Hecht (1993, entry 15F), in his annotated bibliography, translates a heading in Schwenter’s book as follows: “How to project and display lettering by means of a mirror in sunshine, onto a wall which is in shadow.” Schwenter painted or engraved an image on a concave

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

­ irror’s surface in order to reflect its silhouette image onto m a wall or a screen, using the sun as a source of light that was reflected by the mirror’s surface. Hecht points out that Schwenter “knew little about the actual workings of the thing he describes,” but you don’t have to know how to

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make a plow to plant a field. Catoptric projection was improved when Kircher added a refractive image-forming lens between the mirror and the screen to produce sharper images, as described in his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae of 1646 (Mannoni 2000, pp. 25, 26).

Fig. 1.3  Kircher’s catoptrics. The sun was used as the illumination source and lenses enhanced the imaging properties of images painted on the mirrors, N, V, and R. (Cinémathèque Française)

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Hecht notes the connection between magic, the occult, and early attempts at projection, which was furthered by the advent of magic lantern technology and its superior imaging ability, so much so that in its early days, it was also known as the lantern of fear (la lanterne de peur) (Liesegang 1986, p. 11). The catoptric method, which projects a silhouette, is different from that of the magic lantern’s dioptric or refractive method, which projects light passing through a transparency rather than one that is reflected from the surface of a mirror. It is the refractivelens transparency-slide method that became the predominant projection method during the next three and a half centuries, until the advent of the Digital Era. Invention is usually a process of iteration, and Schwenter and Kircher’s efforts have antecedents, in particular the work of the Italian polymath Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1535–1615), a learned man whose understanding of optics was superior to that of Schwenter or Kircher, who described his experiments with catoptrics and the camera obscura in his Magia Naturalis, published in 1558 in Naples (Mannoni 2000, p. 8). Della Porta was accused of sorcery by Pope Paul V, as Mannoni puts it, due to his “inclination for the marvelous.” His projections were the precursor of future catoptric and magic lantern shows, as presented in the 1589 edition of Magia Naturalis, in which he describes the projection of images of a fantastical nature, featuring performers in the daylight, thrown on the inner wall of a camera obscura. Six decades later Kircher painted images on concave mirrors and illuminated them with sunlight or candlelight passing through a spherical water-filled glass globe

Fig. 1.4  Kircher’s plan for an elaborate projection “temple,” using his Metamorphosis machine. (Cinémathèque Française)

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

c­ ondenser to concentrate the light. The light reflected by the mirror next passed through a biconvex lens to help form an image on a screen in a darkened room, but only writing or silhouettes of objects could be displayed by this method. Kircher described a portable version, the barrel-shaped lucerna artificiosa or artificial light, a projecting lantern topped with a chimney, whose candlelight was reflected by a concave mirror through a biconvex lens. The description in the lucerna artificiosa deceived some scholars into thinking that Kircher invented the magic lantern. Kircher made claims about the inventorship of the magic lantern that gained strength due to Huygens’ virtual disavowal of inventorship. The lucerna artificiosa and the magic lantern have parts in common, but the lucerna artificiosa is an example of catoptrics that like early magic lanterns used a candle for illumination but the optics are different. Kircher’s handheld projector resembles a lighthouse light with an image painted on its reflector rather than a slide projector. However, his use of a focusing lens to sharpen the catoptric image was a significant improvement, and the magic lantern uses a similar arrangement but for light that has passed through a transparency. Since catoptrics predates Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern, there is the possibility that he was influenced by Kircher’s optical arrangement, but as Huhtamo pointed out to me by email: “as a scientist Huygens despised Kircher whom he considered a charlatan, so it is unlikely.” But it’s possible to be influenced by the idea of somebody you don’t respect.

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

Catoptric projection is the precursor of an important modern technology in which the image is made up of an array of a great number of tiny mirrors, the DMD image engine, one of the underpinnings of the digital cinema. However, catoptric projection lay fallow for three and half centuries because of the magic lantern’s vastly more flexible transparency projection method, giving sharper, brighter, and colorful images, an invention that scholars now attribute to Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695). Rossell (2008) makes a compelling case, both circumstantial and using direct evidence, that Huygens is indeed the inventor of the magic lantern, some of which is presented here. Huygens (1888–1950) describes a projection lantern in Vol. XXII of his Oeuvres Complètes (Supplément à la correspondence), where he uses the term la lanterne magique, and he reproduces drawings he made in 1659 of animated skeleton figures used for lantern slides (Mannoni 2000, p. 39). Christiaan Huygens was one of the most famous men in Europe in 1659, the year he invented the magic lantern. He was a brilliant mathematician and physicist and an astronomer who, with his brother Ludwick, built telescopes with which he discovered the rings of Saturn and its moon Titan. The magic lantern is a slide or transparency projector and the direct precursor of the twentieth century’s ubiquitous celluloid cinema motion picture projector. A motion picture projector can be thought of as magic lantern that advances slides rapidly enough to create the illusion of apparent motion. Laurent Mannoni (2000, pp. 38, 39) believes that at the very conception of his invention, Huygens projected moving images using slides that were based on Hans Holbein’s painting Dance of Death, poses of dancing stick figure skeletons. (Skeleton images would continue to figure in magic lantern content for centuries.) Mannoni speculates that Huygens superimposed two slides, a moving and rotating one with only a skull and a right arm plus a fixed slide of the rest of the body, to create real motion animation. It’s not hard to see Huygens might have come up with such an idea because the very act of transporting a slide through the projector’s gate produces on-screen motion. Huygens’ skeleton poses in his Oeuvres Complètes are shown on page 197 as ten figures in nine groups, four of which are circled and can be used to construct an animated sequence, which Huhtamo has arranged into an endless loop suitable for projection that can be viewed on YouTube. Over the course of the next three centuries, lanternists would devise new approaches for real motion movement, a specific solution for each motion ­problem, often using two-dimensional puppetry to create many effects including spinning globes, flying birds, blinking eyes, moving panoramas, and so on. Hecht (1993, entry 50) writes that the origin of this kind of “mechanically moved” slide was the year 1697 and attributes the invention to Jena physicist Erhard Weigel (1625–1699). The antecedent of Weigel’s technique was Kircher’s “articulated cut-out

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Fig. 1.5  Sketches by Huygens of his skeleton slides, perhaps the first projected moving images, reproduced from his Oeuvres Complètes, a portion of page 197. (Cinémathèque Française)

jumping-jack moved by means of thin threads,” as described in his Ars Magna of 1646, which Hecht (1993, entry 17) describes as a “primitive prototype.” Elaborate “moving slides,” titled working mill and lady with a curtsey, which were animated with mechanical puppet appliances, are to be found in the Musschenbroek catalog of circa 1730. Christian Gottlieb Hertel (1683–1743) cut slits in the lens tube for allowing the introduction of another slide to produce the effect of motion relative to the one in the gate, or for the use of a black slide for occlusion while a new slide replaced the previous one (Rossell 2008, p. 52). In this book I use a definition for cinema technology that consists of two elements: projection and motion. The projection of motion can use either of the two techniques: one that is not an illusion, but is exactly what it sounds like, real motion, and the other an illusion, called apparent motion. The first corresponds to what we experience in the everyday world and can be most simply replicated in the magic lantern by moving a slide in the projector’s gate whereupon the image on the screen will be observed to also move. Apparent motion wasn’t discovered or demonstrated until the early 1830s and is the basis for the modern cinema and television. It’s an illusion created by properly presenting incrementally different frames. For centuries the cinema of the magic lantern used real motion involving the movement of the slide itself, for example, with pans accomplished by moving a long slide through the projector’s gate and by means of mechanical appliances on the slide. The camera obscura is an early projector that was first described in a printed work in Cesariano’s translation and

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Fig. 1.6  A camera obscura being used by an artist to paint a scene.

commentary on Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s late first-century­BC Treatise on Architecture. It has similarities with the magic lantern in that it uses an illuminated subject, projection optics in the form of a pinhole rather than a lens, and a screen, which was plausibly of influence with regard to the design of the magic lantern, according to Hecht (1993, entry 3). In its original form, it consisted of a dark room having an aperture (pinhole) facing the outside world, the aperture casting an image on the facing wall, which is an arrangement identical that used for a pinhole photographic camera. The great advancement in its design, well-known by the time of Huygens, was made in 1568 by Daniello Barbaro (1514– 1570), architect and professor at the University of Padua (Newhall 2012, p. 9). He substituted a biconvex lens (magnifying glass) for the pinhole aperture to greatly increase the projected image brightness of objects illuminated by sunlight. In the case of the magic lantern, the painted slides were illuminated by a lamp or a candle that transmitted light through them; for both the camera obscura and the magic lantern, light passes through a lens to form an image that is thrown onto a screen. van Nooten (1972), in his article Contributions of Dutchmen in the Beginnings of Film Technology, has written that inventor and glass blower, the Dutchman Cornelis Drebbel (1572– 1633), has been cited in the literature as the inventor of the magic lantern. His name became associated with its invention as he demonstrated it in his travels throughout Western Europe, for the most part to London and Prague, where he was able to obtain financial support from royalty based on his reputation as an inventor and popularizer. Although he built projecting lanterns, they were shadow lanterns, a simple handheld

Fig. 1.7  A shadow lantern from the collection of Erkki Huhtamo. (Photo by the author.)

l­ensless lantern that used a light source, a candle, or lamp burning animal or vegetable oil, to shine through the cutouts in its wall, like a jack o’lantern. It could be used to cast images of objects or animals, like a bat with outstretched wings, a reverse silhouette, whose spooky fuzzy image was thrown on a wall,

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

as ­demonstrated for me by UCLA Professor Erkki Huhtamo, using a lantern from his collection. The image it cast, like that of a bat, could be animated by moving the lantern to create an illusion of flight, the perfect diversion for a cat. Huygens may have known about the shadow lantern, and his magic lantern may have been influenced by it, since it would have been turned into an even better shadow lantern with the addition of a lens in front of its cutouts. Huygens’ invention of projection, or more exactly projection by the subtraction of light by a transparency, set the pattern for projection technology for centuries. The magic lantern is a simple optical instrument, so simple that I built one similar to it, a postcard projector, at the age of 11 after seeing one at a science fair. Early magic lanterns consisted of a light-proof housing or cabinet of wood or metal containing a source of illumination, often an oil lamp; a chimney to ventilate the heat and gasses produced by the lamp’s combustion; a concave mirror (usually a polished reflective metal like copper) placed behind the lamp to concentrate the light rays; a convex condensing lens that further concentrated light onto the slide; a holder or gate for positioning the glass slide held within a carrier for keeping it in place and transporting it; and an image-forming lens. These parts must be properly aligned to throw the image onto a screen, which was as often as not a surface like a wall or a bed sheet, the final element of the projection optical system, if one discounts the human eye. Huygens’ was the basic projector design used from the seventeenth century into the Glass and Celluloid Cinema Eras until the advent of the Digital Cinema Era and the DMD image engine. The magic lantern was often finely made and Japanned or lacquered with an enamellayered paint finish that Europeans used to emulate Japanese lacquerware. Although it is highly probable that Huygens constructed his first magic lantern in 1659, his letter to his brother Ludwick, concerning a request for one by his father, is unequivocal proof that he was doing so by 1662 (Rossell

Fig. 1.8  This basic magic lantern is illustrated here with a reflector behind the candle, a slide of an upside down cross, and a two element projection lens. More advanced designs used condenser optics between the illumination source and the slide. Zahn’s design of 1686.

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2008, p. 19). It was Italian Jesuit mathematician Francesco Eschinardi (1623–1703) who in 1668 first attached the word magic to the lantern, as in Laterna Magica, but scientists and serious scholars disliked the terminology, seeking to distinguish themselves from its charlatan practitioners by calling it the megalographic or thaumaturgic lantern and by the mid-nineteenth century, the preferred usage for the erudite user was optical lantern. Huygens traveled to London in 1661 to demonstrate his improved telescope to scientists and instrument makers, amongst them optician and telescope maker Richard Reeve. The magic lantern was available for sale at Reeve’s shop by May 1663 when Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) bought one. Scientist Robert Hooke (1605–1703), the discoverer of the biological cell in 1665, which he so named, wrote a paper that appeared in the Royal Society’s widely read Philosophical Transactions in 1668, agreeing with Huygens that the lantern was a frivolous instrument misguidedly used to frighten the gullible and superstitious. Hooke was also expert in optics and succeeded in increasing the brightness and field of view of the microscope based on the planoconvex two-element eyepiece designed by Huygens for his telescope. In his day Christiaan Huygens would have been called a natural philosopher but that job classification has gone out of style having been made redundant by the specialist, who, as the cliché goes, is a person who knows more and more about less and less. Yet, the awareness of the growth of specialization came late, for it wasn’t until 1833 that the word scientist was introduced by the philosopher William Whewell, himself a polymath and natural philosopher, to create the distinction between science and philosophy (Sehgal 2018). Today we classify Huygens as a polymath who made contributions as an astronomer, as an inventor, and as one of our great physicists working in optics and mechanics. Huygens was dismissive of his creation of the magic lantern for two reasons: he thought it was trivial compared with his other accomplishments, and he deplored its application as frivolous popular entertainment, to wit, la lanterne de la peur. Due to his ambivalence about his magic lantern, he is partly to blame for the obscuration of his contribution. He was a Protestant but not a religious man and may have resented what he considered to be the misuse of his invention as an instrument bent to the purpose of proselytizing by invoking superstitious fears in an attempt to turn the ignorant into Christians, or, even worse, Catholics. As was the case for many an inventor, the uses of his invention were beyond his control, and an early use of the magic lantern was as the lantern of fear, a means to frighten the wicked and humble the foolish with visions from the netherworld. A letter written to Huygens in 1662 by the Parisian Pierre Petit contains what Liesegang (1986, p. 11) asserts is the first mention of “the lantern of fear,” in which

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Petit informs Huygens of the activities of the Dane Thomas Walgenstein. This probably contributed to Huygens turning his back on his invention to the extent that he indefinitely put off building the one he had promised his father Constantijn, eventually using the preposterous excuses that he had mislaid the parts and had forgotten how to build one. On August 12, 1662, in a letter to his brother Ludwick, Huygens wrote: “Perhaps father will have forgotten the whole thing. If not give him the above reasons and tell him that I am willing to build him a telescope and a microscope and anything else he would like, but not the lantern; he will just have to add this invention to the list of lost arts” (Hecht 1993, entry 328). Like other inventors of the time, Huygens had a business on the side selling instruments, which could be profitable, and in 1666 he was corresponding with French engineer Pierre Petit who requested advice about magic lantern optics. It seems that while Huygens had disassociated himself from the magic lantern, he didn’t mind if it was used in somebody else’s neighborhood. The magic lantern was not fated to become added “to the list of lost arts,” and it soon became a popular novelty as well as a visual aid for the scientific community. Huygens was born on September 4, 1596, in The Hague, into a family of considerable accomplishment. His father Constantijn was a poet, a scholar, and a diplomat who wanted

Fig. 1.9  Christiaan Huygens

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

Christiaan and one of his brothers, Maurice, to also become diplomats. While Maurice had a more literary and artistic bent, Christiaan was a prodigy who was encouraged by a family friend, René Descartes (1596–1650), to continue with his mathematical studies. Descartes is one of the inventors of analytical geometry which bears his name, and he occupies an interesting place in the history of science as a man poised between the system of Aristotle and the concept of modern physics originated by Isaac Newton (1642–1727). For much of his career, Huygens was a dyed-in-the-wool Cartesian who was consumed by a passion for math and science. With the help of Ludwick, he built increasingly large refracting telescopes improving their optics, which allowed him to discover the rings of Saturn and its moon Titan. He made advances in quantifying gravitational forces that led him to correctly understand the nature of centrifugal force and how it altered the shape of the Earth. Huygens invented the first accurate mechanical clock, a pendulum clock, which became an instrument crucial to the furtherance of physics and astronomy. In his book Horologium Oscillatorium, published in 1673, he described the physics of his clockwork escapement, a mechanism not unlike that of the intermittent movement used in celluloid cinema motion picture cameras and projectors, as noted by Mannoni (in conversation). Huygens developed the concepts of energy and work, which had also been of interest to Newton, and explained the nature of the collisions of elastic bodies which informed his construct of physical optics, of which he is the founder. His mechanically based wavefront model (based on touching elastic spheres) provided explanations for various phenomena such as the nature of double refraction or birefringence, first discovered in the crystal Iceland spar. The modern explanation, based on the electromagnetic nature of light, stipulates that a ray of light entering the crystal emerges as two polarized rays because the speed of light in the crystal is different in different directions (anisotropy), unlike glass, water, or air, in which the speed of light is the same in any direction (isotropy). Although his model is entirely different from today’s, Huygens was the first to explain polarization based on the wave nature of light, which would become the most widespread and I think most effective way for viewing plano-stereoscopic movies. His approach to physics was to mathematically solve specific problems rather than to arrive at general laws or theories, and it is for this reason that his reputation is eclipsed by that of Newton, who created the philosophical basis for modern physics in which it became a pursuit that at its most sublime is the quest to develop allencompassing general theories to explain the laws of nature. Newton’s invention of calculus provides far more elegant and powerful methods for solving problems in mechanics than the geometrical techniques used by Huygens. However, to make arguments that would be persuasive to a readership that was unfamiliar with calculus, Newton derived the laws

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

of mechanics using conventional math, in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which was published in Latin in three volumes in 1687. Both Huygens and Newton were inventors in the field of optics: Huygens invented the transparency projector and Newton the reflecting telescope, the basic astronomical instrument widely in use today. Newton’s conception of the laws of mechanics, from which Kepler’s laws of planetary motion may be derived, was the basis for the Enlightenment’s belief in the predictable clockwork nature of the universe, but fittingly it was Huygens who invented mankind’s first accurate mechanical clock. On a trip in England, Huygens shared a coach with Newton, but there is no record of what they said to each other. Alas, whatever Huygens may have accomplished, his work in physics is overshadowed by that of Isaac Newton. The biography of Huygens by A. E. Bell (1947) is, for the most part, a recitation of his professional activities and accomplishments rather than that of a personal life. Huygens was unmarried but was rumored to have had assignations with several women including his cousins. He was resolute in the face of adversity and carried on with his research despite prolonged bouts of depression with his work declining only in his last years. Some of his countrymen considered him to be unpatriotic since the Netherlands and France were continually at war but rather he was apolitical, spending much of his time in France in order to be in contact with its active scientific community. He returned to The Hague in August 1681, as a result of the hard line that was taken by the Netherlands’ new governor William III of Orange. Although he grew up in a Calvinist society, Huygens rejected the comforts offered by a Calvinist pastor; as he lay dying, true to himself to the very end, he remained skeptical of the Reformed Church’s doctrine of personal immortality. Whereas Huygens may have invented real motion projection, the German scholar and lanternist Johannes Zahn (1641–1707) may well be the originator of the concept of the illusion of projected apparent motion. Zhan was not a hands-

Fig. 1.10  Zahn’s projector with a disk (1686) demonstrates his understanding of the phases of motion.

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o­ n experimenter but rather served as a compiler of published information about optical devices, including ­variations on the design of the magic lantern (Rossell 2008, pp. 39, 40). Zahn used long slides with adjacent figures in different poses, but his major gift to posterity is a circular ensemble of six slides with poses arranged along the circle’s periphery. Zahn’s hand-drawn poses published in 1686 were designed to be rotated into place in the magic lantern’s gate. Zahn’s circular format became widely used during the transition between the magic lantern and the celluloid cinema; the radial image array was applied in the nineteenth century to the phenakistoscope and its adaptations to the magic lantern, and the disk also foreshadows the gramophone record and the various disk formats and magnetic drives that we now take for granted. Zahn’s seems to have made the original suggestion for creating the illusion of motion from a series of still images, the phases of motion, which served as the means for producing an endless loop of projected motion in the hands of Muybridge, Anschütz, and others (Hecht 1993, entries 36, 46). Zahn also extended the application of the lantern by using it as a microscope, circa 1685 (Hecht 1993, entries 36, 361). And he was an advocate of the lantern as an educational tool and projected images of live animals such as snakes, worms, and insects, trapped between the double glass walls of a slide. The earliest mention of a magic lantern projection clock was made in 1668 by Giuseppe Campani, according to Liesegang (1986, p.  11). In 1685 Bavarian mathematician Johann Christoph Sturm, who had invented a popular portable camera obscura in 1676, published plans for a lantern clock that used a circular slide painted with the image of a clock face, on top of which was placed another transparent slide with a clock hand that remained fixed. The circular disk had geared teeth that were driven by a clockwork mechanism at the base of Sturm’s bright portable lantern. Zahn, in 1685, came up the same clock application and also used a magic lantern to project a wind direction indicator mechanically linked to a weather vane. A magic lantern projection clock,

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built before 1700, is on display at the Orangerie, Kassel, Hesse, Germany, according to Huhtamo. While Zahn promoted the use of the magic lantern as a pedagogical tool, which he built and improved, Huygens, as we have seen, considered the magic lantern to have been a misplaced effort from which he sought to distance himself. The scientist Huygens considered the magic lantern to be an inconsequential invention compared to his work in mechanics and optics, and yet projection is one of the most important of Huygens’ contributions. He was prescient when it came to his trepidations about how projection was to be applied, and within a few decades, its popularity was based on its use for staging phantasmagoria performances designed to terrify the superstitious and delight skeptics (Hecht 1986, entry 334B, and numerous others). When his contemporaries learned of the magic lantern, they were motivated to copy the device and create their own slides and shows with the result that the magic lantern rapidly spread through Western Continental Europe and across the channel. Huygens provided the projector and Zahn suggested how to achieve frame by frame animation, two of the most useful inventions in human history, which go unsung: there is no Christiaan Huygens Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Academy or AMPAS hereafter), and there is no Johannes Zahn Theater at the Disney animation studio. Huygens is far from forgotten, and NASA named the spaceship that landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, after its discoverer. His projector and the remarkable work of Zahn are the beginnings of cinema’s motion technology. Theirs were the crucial and tangible steps in mankind’s quest to use science and artistry to project moving images of reality and fantasy, an endeavor that continues to this day. One of the most influential proselytizers of the new medium was the Dane Thomas Rasmussen Walgenstein (1627–1681), who was a mathematician, astronomer, teacher, and a glass grinding optician (Hankins 1995). Walgenstein traveled throughout Europe in the 1660s performing magic lantern shows, his first at a lecture in Lyon in 1665 and most prestigiously in 1670 for King Frederik III of Denmark (Rossell 2008, p.  22). His lantern peregrinations presaged those of the itinerant lanternists, and it was probably Walgenstein who demonstrated the magic lantern to Kircher. He may have been in contact with Huygens earlier when both of them lived in Paris at the same time, and they corresponded about Walgenstein’s experiences with the lantern in Venice in 1667. Walgenstein deserves credit for spreading the word about the new medium in the latter part of the seventeenth century, while Kircher has an outsized reputation based on his assertion that the magic lantern was his invention, and it is easy to see how scholars like Musser (1995) were moved to agree because of his impressive writings, a cataloguing of seventeenth-century wisdom. It was a bit more than a decade

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

after Huygens’ invention that Kircher published a description of what he claimed to have achieved with the magic lantern, in the second edition of his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, in 1671. In an illustration of the magic lantern, which he called the magic or thaumaturgic (wonder evoking) lamp, he makes an error that is well-known in the field by placing the projection lens between the light source and the slide, but for a projector to work, the slide must be placed between the light source and the lens. Several authors have pointed out that the mistake may have been made by the engraver. Kircher may have been frustrated to have been one upped by his contemporary Huygens and Hecht tells us that: “Kircher convinced himself, and succeeded in convincing his associates Kestler and de Sepi, that he was the inventor of the lantern and that others, particularly Walgenstein, had only improved on his invention.” The following from a letter dated March 1, 1660, to Huygens from a physician, Pierre Guisony, sheds some light on the state of Kircher’s knowledge and what he was up to: “The good Kircher continuously shows a thousand magic tricks in the Gallery of the Collegium Romanum…If he knew about the invention of the lantern, he would thoroughly frighten the cardinals with ghosts” (Hecht 1993, entry 328). Yet, just as he had convinced those close to him, Kestler and de Sepi, there are modern sources that credit Kircher as the inventor or co-inventor of magic lantern projection. Kircher’s reputation as the magic lantern’s inventor springs from self-promotion, his recognition as a scholar, and to a large extent from Huygens’ desire to hide his light under a bushel. In the history of technology and cinema in particular, Kircher is not a unique actor, and there have been other men like him who are passionate enthusiasts of a technology, whose love for it befuddles them into believing that they have created another man’s work, as if wishing could make it so. An art form was born, and a new profession came into being, that of the lanternist, an itinerant artist-performer traveling throughout Europe, the Savoyard, with his magic lantern strapped to his back, sometimes accompanied by his family on his peregrinations. Cinema is the art that combines projection and motion, and it was invented from whole cloth in the seventeenth century, and so it is an art of relatively recent origin giving us an opportunity to observe how, from inception, an artistic medium is created and becomes employed and developed by both technologists and artist-­practitioners, but if you ask just about anyone you know who invented projection, they won’t know the answer. Our culture has not given the same weight to the importance of the invention of projection even though it is one of the most powerful communication tools mankind has devised, arriving later but as important as Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century invention of the printing press and moveable type. Projection is so pervasive a boon that, hidden in plain sight, it is paradoxically visible and

1  Huygens and the Magic Lantern

i­nvisible, what with people now spending more time looking at it descendant, the display screen than any other waking activity. It is widely acknowledged that the invention of printing began the spread of literacy and its consequential ­enhancement and democratization of human knowledge. So triumphant is the printed word, so ascendant is the bias favoring verbal literacy that there is, for the most part, a disregard for the comparable revolution of visual literacy brought about by projection. Projection of motion and the display of informa-

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tion have revolutionized human communications and our ability to better comprehend the world we live in and to create worlds of imagination and fantasy. The image cast on a wall or a screen has been with us for more than three centuries and has become even more ubiquitous of late given its incarnation as the electronic display. It seems absurd to go on like this, making a case for the virtues of projection, since it has become so ingrained, but its importance is concealed by its ubiquity, and its significance is denied by the bias that the printed word is a more legitimate and authentic way to communicate.

2

The Magic Lanternists

Conditions in Europe immediately after Christiaan Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern contributed to its becoming a compelling diversion. London experienced a great outbreak of bubonic plague during 1665 and 1666, which was one of a series of outbreaks that had in the recent past killed tens of millions of Europeans. At the time of the introduction of the magic lantern, smallpox was killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans annually. In addition to plague and smallpox, famine was a commonplace killer. Most families lived in crowded vermininfested dwellings and worked from dawn to dusk to barely sustain themselves, yet they often went hungry. There was a notable lack of painkillers, and a bad tooth could kill you or make you wish you were dead. Child mortality rates are estimated to have been between 30% and 40% (Scheper-Hughes 1987). The wealthy, including the royalty, lived without good sanitation or sewage, and even Versailles did not have indoor toilets. The well-off were afraid to take baths because they believed it would open their pores to disease and infection, so they doused themselves with perfume. In recent memory the Church had burnt heretics at the stake, and belief in the supernatural, witches, demons, and possession remained widespread. The Enlightenment, grounded in evidence-­ based science and rational thought challenged irrational beliefs, and while it was the creation of science the magic lantern was taken up by both the superstitious and the enlightened. In this time of religious upheaval, the magic lantern became the lantern of fear, with performances that were designed to prey on the superstitious, but the same shows served as an amusement for the more sophisticated. In much of Western and Northern Europe, the power of the Catholic Church had been displaced by the Protestant sects, the Lutherans, and the Calvinists, and across the channel by the Church of England; it seemed as if Catholicism was being swept aside. Magic lantern performances became an entertaining diversion from daily cares and a medium of lasting influence as it became a window on the world for people who may have never been more than a few miles from home, and for many this new medium was brought to them by the wandering lanternist who toured Western Europe.

Although the magic lantern was also viewed as a kind of scientific instrument, according to Rossell (2008, p.  17), it was of second- or third-tier importance because it was not considered to be a “mathematical instrument,” since it was not designed for making measurements. However, at the close of the seventeenth century, the magic lantern was making a deep impression on the leading minds of Europe, like the instrument maker Johann Franz Griendel (1631–1687), who was known for his excellent slide shows and his microscope improvements, who is also mistakenly credited as one of the inventors of the magic lantern, which he named. Although it was useful for their presentations, savants were not hesitant to put it down because of the way it was used by itinerant showmen, like the Savoyards and the more sophisticated practitioners in the cities, who by the end of the seventeenth century were mounting elaborate phantasmagorias that appealed to an urban audience. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, optical and illumination technology advanced, as described in chapter 3, and the magic lantern’s uses expanded to education, thereby enhancing its status with the scientific community, which now preferred to call it the optical lantern. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who at the same time as Newton independently invented calculus, was so enthusiastic about the lantern’s prospects that he included it in his proposal for a conclave of scholars to scrutinize the latest scientific instruments. In 1675 he wrote: “The Representations could begin, for example, with the magic lantern; that is, with projections of attempts at flight, artistic, meteors, optical effects, representations of the sky with the stars and comets, and a model of the Earth…fireworks, water fountains, and ships in rare forms; then mandrakes and other rare plants and exotic animals” (Rossell 2008, p. 43). By no later than 1720, the leading European scientific instrument makers featured the magic lantern, but by the middle of the century, it may have lost its appeal to these specialists since it worked well enough with middling-quality lenses and it was becoming a commodity. If the specialist continued to offer the magic lan-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_2

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tern, they may have functioned only as resellers. The magic lantern entered service in Italy’s first physics lecture hall at the University of Padua in 1755 with an instrument made by Domenico Selva of Venice, where there was a thriving glassmaking industry where eyeglasses may have originated in the second half of the thirteenth century. Selva’s lantern was an elegant machine made of dark wood with a distinctive octagonal lamphouse (Rossell 2008, pp.  76, 77). By the end of the seventeenth century, the magic lantern was well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous tool capable of creating visions of the world for those who attended a performance and it remained in use even after the establishment of the celluloid cinema in the early twentieth century when slide projection remained an important instrument of education, religion, and government. A magic lantern slide show required the creation of a story, depicted in drawings, which were painted on slides, and of course a performance. The lanternist and his troupe of helpers experienced the anticipation of setting up and awaiting the arrival of the audience, performing the music and narration, making the sound effects, and creating motion by manipulating the slides. It was show business in which taking a bow at the end of the show was the kind of compensation not to be had if you were a baker or a farmer. If you had the talent and the personality for it, it was better than subsistence farming. The lanternists who roamed Western Europe

Fig. 2.1  A magic lantern with provision for slide storage. Made by Ernst Plank of Nuremberg, circa 1900. (Cinémathèque Française)

2  The Magic Lanternists

with portable gear strapped on their backs more than likely bought them, sometimes as a package with the lantern. Rossell (2008, pp. 46, 47) posits that at the end of the seventeenth century, and into the next, the manufacture of projectors was the domain of optical specialists, whereas the creation of slides was more likely to be in other hands, like those of painters, engravers, and artisans. By the early eighteenth century, modest-scale manufacturing of magic lanterns and slides had begun in the south of Germany. Quite obviously, making a magic lantern, with its requirements for precision optics and specialized illumination systems was a challenge, whereas the creation of the slides, while not without their own demands, was more likely to be within the sphere of expertise of craftspersons and artisans. The evidence pointing to this is that there are a large number of tracts providing methods and recipes for creating the transparent colored paints required for the slides, along with advice on protecting them by firing or coating. Roaming storytellers, peddlers, and performers from Savoy, Piedmont, and Auvergne became magic lantern showmen known as the Savoyards. They came from a territory contiguous to France, Switzerland, and Italy (Mannoni 2000; Rossell 2008). The people of this region were like other put upon minorities with a national identity whose land is impinged by larger and more powerful countries. This French-speaking territory was the subject of considerable conflict, even though it had been established as a political

2  The Magic Lanternists

entity in the eleventh century and ruled thereafter by the powerful House of Savoy. It was annexed by France and then returned to the House of Savoy and was involved in several armed conflicts from the early sixteenth century through 1815. The vagaries of fortune affected the lives of the people in this land of political turmoil and impoverishment, which may have led its people to seek an alternative means of survival as roaming salesmen and entertainers. They held sway as the preeminent lanternists for both the common folk and the middle class from the later part of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century when they began to fade out, their journey having run its course. Mannoni (2000, p. 103) writes that: “…the true travelling showmen, those who moved along the roads on foot with their poor lanterns on their backs, seem to have almost completely disappeared around the 1870s.” As lantern technology improved it progressed from the humble oil lamp for illumination, as used by the Savoyards, to more powerful ones, allowing the magic lantern to enter a different level of theatricality staged by a different class of urban showmen. While the Savoyards’ practice of the magic lantern began soon after its invention, how the calling originated is unknown. The peepshow, it might be supposed, was a stepping stone to Savoyard lantern practice. The peepshow was often an individual viewing experience, but boxes were built with multiple peepholes, and its presenters undoubtedly provided commentary and possibly music just as was done for lantern shows, but were the Savoyards “peepshowists”? While Rossell (2008) and Balzer (1998) believe that the Savoyards were, it struck me that the proof for this assertion was wanting, so I asked two experts, Laurent Mannoni and Erkki Huhtamo (by email, the end of June 2019) if this was so, and if so might it be seen as a bridge to the use of the magic lantern. I discovered there was a gap in the scholarship – they could not confirm that the Savoyards were peepshow practitioners. Hecht (1993, entry 540/8) notes that: “In spite of the widespread popularity of the peepshow, no expert work on the instrument had been published during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; only in belles-lettres of the period were there frequent illusion to the instrument....” The fact that the peepshow wasn’t properly documented at the peak of its popularity has contributed to this gap in our knowledge. It’s reasonable to suppose that the Savoyards were first traveling peepshow practitioners before their adoption of the magic lantern given that the devices were used for similar ends. But is it true? Oddly enough, the magic lantern was available as a compact device that was more easily carried from place to place than a bulkier peepshow cabinet. As far as I can tell, the Savoyards traveled on foot and are not depicted as having used a horse or wagon, so size and weight of the apparatus was an important consideration for them. As to the invention of the peepshow, Balzer (1998, pp. 10, 18, 20) tells us: “By the close of the sixteenth century all the ­elements of the

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peepshow were there….” Balzer also relates that two students of Rembrandt, Huygens’ fellow Dutchmen, Carel Fabritius (1622–1678) and Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627– 1678), are credited with the invention of the peepshow, but in 1473 the Italian architect, Leon Battista Alberti, created a box with a small hole in it for viewing perspective images with a depth effect. There were many kinds of devices that might reasonably qualify as a peepshow, with many different kinds of viewing arrangements. Some designs are open, without an enclosure, and the boxes themselves were made in different shapes and sizes. Various techniques were used to heighten perspective and to create the illusion of depth, with or without mirrors and refractive optics. Included amongst these methods is the precocious precursor of the infinity optical system, which is used in multimillion dollar simulators. In such peepshows a simple lens, a magnifying or close focusing lens, was used so the eye muscles accommodated to produce the physiological effect that the observed drawing was both magnified and apparently at some great distance. Huygens and others at the time were undoubtedly aware of them, but the best connection between the peepshow and the magic lantern is that they explored similar themes and subjects, not that one led to the invention of the other. They do have optics in common since there were peepshows that used refractive lenses, not for projection, but rather for eye accommodation for direct viewing. However the refractive eyepiece version of the peepshow is of great interest with regard to early apparent motion displays having the same viewing arrangement, the foremost examples of which are Anschütz’s Electrotachyscope and Edison and Dickson’s Kinetoscope. The Savoyards, today anonymous, had been performing functions that required their particular attention and expertise in the towns and cities of the nations of Europe, such as selling eyeglasses bought from Altare near Genoa and regions to the south, where glassmaking knowhow had escaped the secrecy imposed by the Venetian glass industry. The Savoyards were also chimney sweepers, jugglers, hand magicians, gossipers and tellers of scandals, organ grinders, hosts of the cabinet of curiosities, and possibly traveling peepshow practitioners, the latter a conceivable bridge to the magic lantern performances for which they became renowned. The Savoyards were considered to be dashing and romantic figures for the wanderer is associated with danger and adventure, and those who remained with the fields and the farms or streets of the city admired the courage of these entertaining rogues who lived a life of uncertainty, danger, and instability, so different from their own. On the streets of the cities and town, or on country roads, and at fairs, they were valued performers because they were fun, singing and telling jokes as they cranked their street organ, and showed off their exotic trained marmosets and trove of curiosities.

18 Fig. 2.2  A Savoyard with a lantern on his back. Shown in an engraving by Giovanni Volpato (1738–1803), after a painting by Francesco Maggiotto, circa 1770. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 2.3  A peepshow performance. Anonymous, circa 1780. From the collection of François Binetruy, Versailles. (Cinémathèque Française)

2  The Magic Lanternists

2  The Magic Lanternists

The Savoyard children livened up the performances with percussion instruments, dancing and acrobatics. They were the great proselytizers of the magic lantern, who celebrated the scope of its visualization and storytelling capabilities and in the process made it a part of European culture. While the magic lantern was in the process of establishing itself in Europe, in the United States, the first magic lantern show took place in Salem, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1743, which was billed as an “Entrainment for the Curious.” By 1895 there were tens of thousands of lanternists in the United States giving upward of 150,000 performances a year (WS: magiclanternsociety). Early attitudes toward the magic lantern were diverse: Huygens so totally disassociated himself from it that he refused to make one for his father, but the scientists of Europe were finding it to be useful for lectures and demonstrations, for example for the projections of tadpoles or other living animals. The Savoyards, on the other hand, embraced it to tell stories that appealed to the people, often satirical commentaries about the lives of the nobility or events of the day. By 1730 a tradition had been established in which solo performers or family groups of Savoyards, equipped with a wooden cabinet magic lantern with its crinkle-top chimney, had become the itinerant lanternists of the continent and its primary exponents. Around 1740, or shortly before that, the Savoyards began to buy both lanterns and slides from vendors like lens manufacturer Berkenstein, of southern Germany, who commissioned hand-painted slides from artists in Nurnberg or Augsburg. A contemporary source reported that “(Berkenstein) also puts together magic lanterns, camera obscuras and peepshows which he sells to the Savoyards” (Rossell 2008, p. 110). One format was the long slide with multiple pictures in a row, which Berkenstein and others sold in the late seventeenth century. A typical sample was about 3 inches wide by 14 inches long, with up to six hand-painted scenes or episodes to be slid through the projector’s gate to create a sequence, in effect through a series of wipes. One portable lantern that was made in between 1780 and 1800, which has come down to us, was carried in a wooden case about 22 inches high, 10 inches deep, and 17 inches wide. The projector itself was 5.7 inches square and 16 inches high including chimney; it shared one of its sides with a wall of the carrying case. Compartments in the case were provided for the lens, slides, and the oil supply. The design encouraged rapid setup and placed everything required for operating the projector at hand (Rossell 2008, p.  133). On occasion, Savoyards were invited into the homes of the middle class to entertain the children with a show; they were the movies, television, and the Internet of the age. The Savoyard lanternists and their activities were memorialized in European history by numerous drawings, paintings,

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d­ ecorations on cups and flatware, tea sets, bronzed s­ tatuettes and porcelain figurines, and they were written about by contemporary authors in plays and novels. This otherwise isolated group found a way to fit into the European social order by offering services and entertainment otherwise not easily obtainable. Others who practiced the art of the magic lantern did so at elaborate installations, with a different take on its use, fulfilling Huygens’ worst fears as the lantern found its destiny as the perfected lantern of fear. It became associated with what today we call horror shows, with projected images of ghosts and demons designed to frighten or amuse the audience. The versatile magic lantern served to enhance a theatrical spectacle, a performance art of spirits and goblins that persisted for about a century. The best known of these was the phantasmagoria, a word that has worked its way into the language to denote a dreamlike terrifying experience. The phantasmagoria had its origins in the latter part of eighteenth century in England and France and is associated with Paul Philidor (1785–1828), who was also known as Phylidor or Paul de Philipsthal. Of unknown origins, but possibly Belgian-Dutch or German, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, he enhanced the techniques of the spook shows originally produced by the German Johann Georg Schröpfer (1730–1774). Schröpfer was an illusionist and mountebank who used the lantern to project images of ghosts and spirits during the 1760s. Christlieb Benedict Funk, a professor at Leipzig University, described Schröpfer’s performances this way: “Schröpfer used magic lantern and concave mirror projection in his séances in Leipzig, Berlin, Frankfort, and Dresden…The ‘dead’ appeared projected into columns of smoke. The effect was heightened by sounds of thunder and eerie voices provided by hidden assistants. Schröpfer literally stupefied the participants by giving them adulterated drinks and by burning narcotic incense after first making them fast for twenty-four hours.” Except for the fasting, this sounds like backstage at a Grateful Dead concert in 1970. Funk concludes: “Schröpfer committed suicide on 8 October 1774” (Hecht 1993, entry 92). Philidor’s phantasmagoria or fantasmagoria shows (the spelling varied), as influenced by Schröpfer, began in 1789 with the projections of evil spirits, which were designed to frighten the unsophisticated but amuse the educated giving them an opportunity to scoff at the gullible. People paying to be frightened? For the cinema, little has changed. Paul de Philipsthal’s British Patent 2575, of January 26, 1802, Apparatus for Reflecting Optics, is characterized by Mannoni (2000, p. 173) as being “deliberately vague,” but it has specifications that tell us what he was up to: projection of frontally illuminated opaque objects, such as manipulated puppets, using a Megascope (an opaque or postcard) projector,

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Fig. 2.4  Long glass slides, panoramic or with multiple images. (Cinémathèque Française)

e­ nlarging or reducing projected images by means of a moveable lantern, projection on a transparent or rear screen, surrounding the slide images by opaque black to aid in their superimposition over backgrounds, and the use of a moveable screen (Hecht 1993, entry 111). The patent would not have been effective in legally stopping competition because

most of the techniques were known. Rear projection concealed both the performers and the lanterns, one of which might be used for background projection with moving characters superimposed over its image using a separate lantern that was mounted and mechanically swiveled or possibly handheld. Performances did not always go down smoothly

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Fig. 2.5  On occasion a Savoyard lanternist might be invited into a home to project. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 2.6  A phantasmagoria performance.

for in London in 1802 a phantasmagoria troupe was arrested after a show in which “…the principal part of the audience were young boys, girls, and women, who might be corrupted due to the ‘evil which arose from such amusements… (resulting in) great complaints…by the parents.’ The proprietor of the show was convicted as a rogue and a vagabond and committed to Bridewell” (Hecht 1993, entry 111B). Sir David Brewster described his visit to a Philidor show this way: “A thin transparent screen had, unknown to the

spectators, been left down…and upon it the flashes of lightning and all subsequent appearances were represented. The thunder and lightning were followed by the figures of ghosts, skeletons, and known individuals whose eyes and mouths were made to move by the shifting of combined slides. After the first figure had been exhibited for a short time, it began to grow less and less, as if removed to a great distance, and at last vanished in a small cloud of light” (Cook 1963). Charlatans like Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1742–1795)

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used the magic lantern to mystify, as did the fictional Albert Vogler, the protagonist of Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician (The Face, outside of the United States). The story involves an itinerant magician, possibly inspired by Cagliostro, who uses his magic lantern in a performance for the gullible burghers of a town, one of whom turns out to be a cynic who taunts Vogler only to get his comeuppance. Étienne-Gaspard Robert (1763–1837), Belgian physicist, had an interest in galvanism and optics and a passion for ballooning. He studied at Louvain University and furthered his education by moving to Paris in 1789, just before the start of the French Revolution. He returned to his birthplace Liège where he studied the work of Kircher and Zahn and experimented with magic lanterns. Mannoni (2000, p. 149) relates that Robertson appropriated Philidor’s work and that it was in Paris that he adopted the stage name Robertson.1 Hecht (1993, entry 138) writes that Robertson claims to have begun his phantasmagoria experiments while still in Liège. Robertson took up where Philidor left off and enhanced the art of the lantern of fear so much so that today his name is most closely associated with these spectacles. Robertson’s first phantasmagoria was in 1798 at the Pavillon de l'Echiquier in Paris, where he promoted the event with the ingenious conceit that its true purpose was to debunk fakers and supernatural beliefs; the performance was, after all, an artifice of smoke and mirrors designed to entertain. Robertson’s espoused goal was to educate by exposing the projected séances of the mountebanks who dared to misuse a scientific instrument, the magic lantern, to deceive the gullible for profit. This late eighteenth-century meta performance anticipated the exposé hook used by modern magicians like the Amazing Randi or Penn and Teller. Robertson cleverly assumed this pose to both disarm the authorities and maintain his credibility with the scientific establishment, a posture that was anticipated by Philidor. Robertson stated that his was “a plea for enlightenment” while attempting to “lift a cover off the iron curtain which has so long obscured the truth,” which may be the first use of the phrase later made famous by Winston Churchill, but it is unlikely that Churchill’s use derives from Robertson’s (Hecht 1993, entry 138). Although a contemporary account acknowledges Robertson’s purpose, using the word satirical to describe his performances, the authorities in Paris had a different opinion and closed down his show putting his papers under seal, as if they were quarantining the plague. Robertson’s elaborate shows took place in eerie settings like that of an abandoned Capuchin Monastery, where it had a long run. The performances included costumed actors moving through the audience, projection on walls and smoke, plus aural techniques such as ventriloquism and music by the

ethereal glass harmonica (for which Mozart, in 1791, had composed a haunting Adagio and Rondo). Robertson’s Fantascope magic lantern projector was mounted on a four-­ legged wheeled stand that ran on brass rails to move it closer to or further away from the screen to change the size of the image in order to give the effect that the object was changing distance from the audience. Mannoni (2000, p.  156), who has studied Robertson’s 52-page French Patent, No. 65, March 27, 1799, covering the art of the Fantascope lantern, reports that one of the cited projection lenses, probably made by Lerebours of Paris, had an optic consisting of three lenses in a tube, with a moving middle lens operated by a rack mechanism. The middle lens was slid to keep the projected image in focus as the projector moved on its copper rails toward or away from the screen. The approach is unusual since following focus might otherwise have been easily accomplished by moving the entire lens. Focusing using a handcrank became a standard feature of Fantascope lanterns. The account of Robertson’s arrangement of parts resembles the variable focal length lens introduced in 1901 by Clile C. Allen, which moved a negative element between two fixed positive elements as described in USP 696,788, Optical Objective, filed February 25, 1901, but Robertson was using the arrangement to change focus not magnification, or so it seems.2 The deluxe version of Robertson’s Fantascope, made by Lerebours circa 1840, permitted dissolving views. The improved version of the device used an Argand lamp plus the usual concave reflector, with the condenser having two closely spaced biconvex lenses. The projection lens had a variable diaphragm possibly to hold brightness constant for different distances. It might also have been used to increase sharpness of the image away from the center of the field by correcting for spherical aberration and curvature of field, and it might have been useful for fades and dissolves. (It’s believed that dissolves were introduced in London circa 1830.) The lantern’s housing was essentially a wooden box, about 3½ by 2½ feet, with a door in the rear, which was elevated 5 feet on a hardwood cart (Hecht 1993, entry 108E). The lantern’s lens was kept in focus as the cart rolled along its rails by means of a chain drive connecting the rotation of the cart’s wheels to the lens’s focusing mechanism. This anticipates the celluloid cinema’s zoom lenses where focus is kept constant by mechanically (or optically) linking it to changes in focal length. The twin lens Fantascope allowed one to be used for projection of a background on top of which superimposed figures were projected by the second projector (Liesegang 1986, p. 20). The Fantascope-Megascope could be adapted to project three-dimensional objects and the term Megascope refers to

It was the custom at the time for a son to append the suffix “son” to his family name if his father was alive, to avoid confusion.

2 

1 

Any USP cited in this book is easily referenced using its number by going to the patent office search engine at http://www.uspto.gov/.

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Fig. 2.7  A Fantascope projector and its accessories, circa 1853, probably made by Lerebours, a Parisian optician. (Cinémathèque Française)

its capability as an opaque projector or episcope. In this mode it used a four-burner Argand lamp and a different set of lenses. It projected images of solid objects, puppets, for example, rather than transparent slides, with the ability to rotate a model to achieve a three-­dimensional effect through the depth cue of motion parallax. The object, like a skeleton puppet whose limbs were manipulated, was placed upside down (the lens inverts the image) at the focal plane of the lens and directly illuminated. According to Liesegang (1986, p.  16), Robertson projected the images of living persons (probably hands and heads), which had been anticipated by Enslen in Berlin in 1797. Robertson’s Fantascope performances typically took place in a room between 60 and 80 feet long, a maximum of 24 feet wide, with the image rear projected onto a translucent screen about 5 × 4 feet positioned a few feet off the floor. Projecting in the rear screen mode concealed the apparatus and heightened the illusion and while rear screen projection can be quite good, given the screens of the time brightness would have fallen off sharply off-axis. In addition to the spooks of the phantasmagoria, magic lantern slide shows were a way to explore the mysteries of the world, a medium that taught by showing, by illustrating experiences ranging from the mundane to the cosmic, which were often beyond the experience of its audience. Few early lanterns survive, although many slides have come down to us the scenarios of the slide shows, for the most part, remain obscure.3 The shows dealt with the scatological and pornographic, with myths, fairy tales, comedy, satire, narrative Mannoni (2000, pp. 99–102) provides glimpses of magic lantern content and patter. 3 

adventures, novels, travel, current events, and illustrated Bible stories. The magic lantern was used to depict battles and natural disasters, such as major storms, and to illustrate expeditions to distant places like the Pacific islands and its native people, and the Arctic with its ice flows. With the rise of a middle class, people became more interested in science, and as is the case today, popularizers emerged who used the lantern for entertaining lectures to satisfy the needs of the curious or those with the desire to improve themselves. The Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700–1770) rose from humble beginnings to enter the clergy. He became the physics teacher of the children of Louis XV, and in 1735 his lecture series on experimental physics enjoyed a large following. Nollet extolled the didactic potential of the magic lantern, going into practical detail in L’Art des Experience: ou Avis Aux Amateurs de la Physique, sur le Choix, La Construction et L’Usage des Instruments (The Art of Experience: or Notice to Lovers of Physics on the Choice, Construction and Use of Instruments), published in 1770 as a supplement to his multi-volume Leçon de Physique Expérimentale, which was written for secondary school physics teachers (Rossell 2008, pp. 71, 72). Magic lantern performances were a group experience, reality and fantasy emerging from the lantern’s lens cast upon a humble bedsheet or wall. It was a new kind of theater mysteriously originating from little painted windows miraculously enlarged to give a luminous view of absolutely anything. The shows were adventures that could be enjoyed by everybody; literary tales could be appreciated by the illiterate at a time when most people were illiterate. The magic

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lantern was performance art in which the lanternist interacted with the audience and his slides: shows used music, narration, and sound effects, foreshadowing the days of handcranked silent celluloid cinema projection. Lanternists often used long slides that ran through the projector gate for panning across a scene or with multiple images painted to portray a sequence, while individual slides permitted more flexibility in assembling a narrative and creating montage. Cinema’s fundamental grammar is based on the juxtaposition of shots, the montage, and the magic lantern created the first projected montages. The comparison of magic lantern shows and movie storyboards or comic strips is obvious, but another comparison can be made with the paintings used to illustrate illuminated manuscripts. I saw a thought-provoking exhibit at the Cinémathèque Française in the winter of 2009 showing off dozens of magic lantern projectors, often elaborately decorated, as was the custom of the time, and hundreds of slides. Many of the slides were intricately painted, all the more impressive because of their small size, just a few inches across, with a wide variety of subjects and styles ranging from superb illustrations to charming or grotesque cartoons. The colored slides themselves, when held up to the light, gave the appearance of luminous stained-glass miniatures. Some of the slides were rectangular, others oval or circular, and all were mounted in wooden frames to fit in the projector’s gate. The artists had devised methods for painting on glass by priming the glass to hold pigments, often watercolors, which were applied to the correct density to promote transparency for light transmission and varnished for durability. Improvements in illumination greatly contributed to the saturation of the projected colors. At first each slide was created entirely by hand, often accomplished by tracing an underlying drawing on paper, but circa 1823 Philip Carpenter began to print outlines on glass slides using copperplate engravings, after which they were hand colored. This was still a labor-intensive technique but one that facilitated the publication or distribution of slide shows, prefiguring both the applied color processes of the celluloid cinema and the coloring of animation cells. The painted side of the slide was often overlaid with a cover glass for protection, with the standard size for a slide in Britain settling in at 3¼ inches square and in America 3¾ × 4 inches. Mass duplication of slides between the mid-1800s and the 1920s profited from improvements in printing on glass, and as a result there are many such slides available for today’s collectors. In addition to printing, another process was used, the transfer to glass of an image from a paper decalcomania, maybe a lithograph, a process used by amateurs as well as professionals. A technique peculiar to America was the printing of a glass slide from the photograph of a drawing that was colored. According to the Magic Lantern Society of the United States and Canada, from 1750 to 1940, more than 600

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entities produced what may have been more than a hundred thousand slides. The glass cinema was one of projected motion with the lanternists designing special purpose slides based on real motion techniques. The simplest effect to achieve used long slides designed as panoramas with motion created by sliding them through the projector’s gate. These elongated slides were painted with cityscapes or landscapes to produce an effect that, as they were moved, was the forerunner of the celluloid cinema pan. The pan was invented by lanternists, as a real motion rather than apparent motion effect, centuries before the advent of the celluloid cinema. Elongated slides like these sometimes had a series of views painted on them to permit rapid transitions from one character or scene to another. An important and frequently deployed kind of real motion slide used mechanical puppet appliances, a technique invented by Weigel in 1697, as noted in the last chapter, using pulleys or gears turned by small handcranks mounted on the wooden slide holders. Mechanical slides were designed to animate a character’s hinged arms and legs, like the limbs of shadow puppets. Some effects involved the movement of a character’s eyes, the movement of lips for speech, or, for the Pinocchio effect, the elongation of a character’s nose. Circular slides were designed to be rocked back and forth or rotated using a simple pulley or gear system and actuated by a handcrank as part of the slide carrier. A good example of such a real motion effect was of a ship on a storm-tossed sea that was created by a fixed and rotating slide. The ship and surrounding waves were painted on the slide that was rocked back and forth, while the waves and sky were painted on the fixed slide. When the ship slide is rotated to and fro, the painted wave patterns beat against each other to create the impression of a roiling sea. These real motion effects were designed on a case-by-case basis, although techniques could be emulated and applied to similar images; each slide was a discrete solution to the problem of depicting motion, unlike modern cinema in which the apparent motion process provides a generalized solution. It was important for the lanternist to find ways to obscure the real motion mechanism to preserve the illusion, sometimes by using opaque paint for the background surrounding the character (which was done for phantasmagoria projections), or by using juxtaposed slides in which one slide moved and one remained fixed. One on-slide effect I saw was that of a flying bat, against an opaque background, moving its wings amusingly, but like all other magic lantern mechanical real motion effects, it was a single-purpose effect requiring a special design. Coe (1981) gives several categories for mechanical slides such as slipping slides, rotary slides, and lever slides, names that are sufficiently descriptive to grasp their underlying method. It was possible to achieve the suggestion of apparent motion animation using slides with

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Fig. 2.8  An ingenious real motion mechanical slide. A crocodile silhouette moves as the plunger (lower right) is pushed, and two circular sides are rotated to produce a rippling waterfall effect as the crank is turned. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 2.9  A triunial magic lantern made by D.  Noakes and Son of Greenwich, London. (Cinémathèque Française)

drawings mounted on the periphery of a disk slide holder, the Zahn technique, or juxtaposed along the length of a long slide, to enable the images to be rapidly transported though the projector’s gate. Coe describes a slide covered with smoked-on soot that was used for drawing as the soot was scribed away by a ­stylus during projection, a magic lantern Etch A Sketch. In

their efforts to add motion to the glass cinema, magic lanternists anticipated a number of techniques that were rediscovered or more likely copied by early celluloid cinema filmmakers like pans, tilts, fades, dissolves, zooms, and wipes. Zooms were achieved by changing the distance from the projector to the screen, as described above with regard to the Fantascope. Magic lantern projection innately produced a wipe as a slide was moved through the projector’s gate, a fact that undoubtedly also suggested the pan to the early lanternists. By changing the amount of light that reached the screen, by means as simple as placing a hand over the lens, a fade-in or fade-out could be achieved, but there are no examples I can site that this was actually used. There were limits to what could be accomplished with a single projector, and in England the dissolvent biunial lantern was invented to produce one of cinema’s most familiar effects. Dissolves used multiple magic lanterns, two or even three machines, and four was not unheard of, usually stacked vertically but sometimes horizontally, dubbed biunial, triunial, and quadunial projectors, housed in one cabinet. The first dissolving lantern may have been demonstrated by Englishman Henry Langdon Childe (1781–1874) on March 31, 1830, according to Hecht’s (1993, entry 137A) interpretation of the playbill of the Adelphi Theater in London. The literatures’ more generally accepted time frame for the first public demonstrations is 1839–1840. It’s possible that the first use of the dissolve effect was in the peepshows that were common in European fairs. One common effect used a two-­sided colored engraving to show a building exterior making the transition from day to night, with the windows lighting up as the scene darkens. Some peepshows used candle or oil lamp illumination to control the lighting on the front and the back of the hand-colored engraving. The technique involved backing the engraving with a tissue printed with the lighted windows. When the front illumination was diminished, the rear with its tissue was illuminated to complete the night effect of a darkened building and glowing windows (Balzer 1998, p. 15). (The method is similar to the one used by the Diorama, as described in chapter 7.)

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Childe was a well-known painter of slides and the lanternist who invented the Chromatrope (Chromotrope), an apparatus that used a rotating slide in juxtaposition with a fixed slide for producing optical effects, creating moving moiré or colorful dazzling patterns referred to as fireworks, resembling an effect used in the 1960s’ ­psychedelic light shows (Hecht 1993, entries 204Q, 273). Childe was also known for slides of natural history, and one of his astronomy slides used a moving appliance to show the rotation of the globe. Childe called his double lantern the dissolvent lantern and used the word metamorphose for the effect. Liesegang (1986, 9. 20) wrote: “Dissolving views developed there (England) gradually with the participation of Philipsthal having originated in Robertson’s Phantasmagoria.” Multiple lanterns with bright Drummond limelight (described in the following chapter) enabled projection on big screens, and bright illumination helped to establish the magic lantern as a widely accepted performance art in large theaters. Dissolving lanterns included an 1839 design made up of side-by-side projectors that coordinated the covering of one lens (a fade-out) with the uncovering of the other (a fade-in) using rotating shutters located in front of the lenses. Some shutters used a crescent moon shape and some a serrated or comb-like design, but both styles depended on the shutters’ leading edges being out of focus to help gradually blend the fade-in with the fade-out. Another way to manage the coordinated fades required for dissolves was to reduce the limelight’s illumination by adjusting its flow of gas. One use for the dissolve is the transition of a scene using slides with similar images different only in their depiction of the time of day, or season, an effect adopted by the celluloid cinema. One dissolving pair I saw shifted from a view of a town occupied by troops to the next view from the same point of view but showing the town in flames. Another biunial effect

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was the projection of a background with one slide over which characters were superimposed with a second slide. This approach prefigured cell animation’s basic technique of a background overlaid with characters painted on transparent celluloid cells. An addition to magic lantern design philosophy was introduced in the last decade of the nineteenth century by the J.  B. Colt & Company of 16 Beekman Street, Manhattan. Colt offered modular component lanterns made out of metal, manufactured with interchangeable parts. These utilitarian devices were smaller, lighter, often more portable and possibly made with greater precision than their European predecessors, like the British and French machines that were wooden-bodied machines trimmed with decorative brass fittings. Colt’s system, allowing users to configure a lantern from stock components, resembles an optical bench with its add-ons, including a variety of illumination sources. In 1890 Colt released a lower-cost model, the Parabolon Oil Light Lantern, named after its lamphouse’s parabolic reflector, designed for enthusiasts, Sunday schools, and lecturers, as stated by the company (The American Stationer 1891, p. 1128; English Mechanic…. 1890, p. 374). Painted slide shows were losing their popularity by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries with photographic slides taking their place as evidenced by commercial slide catalogs. However, hand-painted slide lantern shows were practiced in the first decade of the twentieth century, to judge by David S. Hulfish’s (1913) comprehensive guide to cinema techniques, Motion-Picture Work, in which a 52-page chapter, out of approximately 600 pages, is devoted to the techniques of performing magic lantern shows. Hulfish describes how effects are achieved with a triunial lantern, made up of a stack of three magic lanterns, for the purposes of creating dissolves with the ability to superimpose foreground figures over a background; both

Fig. 2.10  A Chromotrope mechanical slide (artificial fireworks). Made by Carpenter and Westley, 24 Regent Street, London. Turning the crank produces a kaleidoscope-like effect. (Cinémathèque Française)

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Fig. 2.13  An advertisement for a Colt Parabolon lantern.

Fig. 2.11 The Pamphengos dissolving lantern made by Hughes, Kingsland, England. The outboard shutter with serrated edges is rotated to fade out one slide’s image and fade in another slide’s image. (Welford 1888)

Fig. 2.12  A pair of slides of Venice that produced a night to day dissolve. Made by Carpenter and Westley, 24 Regent Street, London. (Cinémathèque Française)

painted and photographic slides are discussed. Hulfish illustrates his book with pictures of combination dissolving slide and motion picture projectors sharing the same lamphouse, putting to rest any doubt about the continued use of magic lanterns in the early twentieth century. An example of the capabilities of the triunial machine is given by Hulfish who describes a sequence of skaters moving across a pond: after they move off-screen, the scene changes from winter to spring. The skaters’ movement is handled by one projector, possibly by moving it or by a panning slide, and the change of seasons, from winter to spring, is achieved by two of the three dissolving projectors. The seasonal dissolve is made up of a series of slides of the pond from the same point of view to illustrate the transition from snow to a verdant landscape. Since lantern shows of this kind endured into the early days of the celluloid cinema, there is every reason to believe that the motion picture directors of the celluloid cinema’s earliest days were exposed to magic lantern-created effects like fades, dissolves, and pans. The attribution of such effects to cinema pioneers probably constitutes giving credit for techniques that were invented many decades or centuries before the celluloid cinema. If we see the Glass Era and the Celluloid Era as part of the same technological and creative expression, they can be understood to be the story of one evolutionary path. The magic lantern fulfilled the two conditions of cinema, projection and motion, but the glass cinema, because of the specific nature of each real motion effect, could only begin to approach what the celluloid cinema was able to achieve by means of its generalized solution, apparent motion. Yet, when the celluloid cinema was introduced, something lovely was lost: the beautiful painted slides, with their novel ways to depict motion, which were compelling perhaps because of their limitations, could only be presented as part of a live performance. The glass cinema was a theater of projection and performance art and personal interaction by the lanternist/narrator and his troupe with the audience, but we know

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little about the scripts of the shows because, according to Mannoni and Rossell, few records survive of lantern performances. Although many slides do survive, we do not know how they were arranged to create narratives. We don’t even know the names of most early itinerant lanternists, but we believe they put on shows for small groups in informal venues using narration and actors to voice the characters, sometimes accompanied by music, singing, and sound effects. At a lecture given on December 2, 2016, in Paris at the Cinémathèque Française, sound designer and editor Walter Murch defined montage as cinema’s essential element  – based on this he stated his belief that cinema began with director Edwin S. Porter, or his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, in the first years of the twentieth century. Yet, it would seem that the first narrative lanternists working in the seventeenth century must have invented montage because of the inevitable associations produced by even a random juxtaposition of slides. Montage is defined as the creation of new associations, new ideas, and sensations, by means of the temporal juxtaposition of images, known as the Kuleshov effect, which is as true for the juxtaposition of slides as it is for the juxtaposition of shots. The human mind cannot resist making associations, and the better lanternists must have understood this principal even if there was no literature of film in the eighteenth century. Celluloid cinema montage, by Méliès, Porter, Griffith, et al., must have been influenced by magic lantern shows of the early decades of the twentieth century, since these directors had seen them, as one might reasonably believe based on Hulfish’s book and other evidence. Magic lantern technology, as a creative force, was rekindled by the Clavilux light organs of a latter-day lanternist, who like Huygens was a Dutch-born inventor. The American visual artist, and musician, Thomas Wilfred, né Richard Edgar Løvstrøm (1889–1968), created a device and associated techniques, which, like the glass cinema used the projection of real motion. Wilfred created a temporally plastic medium of light and color analogous to that of sound and music. Like the Chromotrope it was manipulated in real time but in Wilfred’s case with far more variability by means of a keyboard. The first in the Clavilux series was shown in 1922; Wilfred called the art of his moving color images lumia, but the term has come to be used to describe the electrical, mechanical, and optical devices he constructed that project hours-long cycles of continuously changing fluid shapes (Betancourt 2006; Orgeman 2017). There are precedents for Wilfred’s work: Louis-Bernard Castel’s suggestion for an ocular harpsichord in 1725, Alfred Wallace Rimington’s performance of his color organ at St. James Hall in London on June 6, 1895, and Alexander Scriabin’s symphony Prometheus, composed in 1911, that has a part written for the color organ that remains part of the concert repertoire (Hankins 1995, pp. 80–85).

2  The Magic Lanternists

Fig. 2.14 Thomas Wilfred playing his Clavilux. The projected Clavilux image has been added. (Inscribed on lower right: “Stuart Morris, from life, Seattle, Mar 4, ’24”)

As a boy I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan to stare at the tabletop Lumia in their collection, and as an adult I paid homage to the large rear screen Lumia light sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until it was removed. Wilfred’s devices project the images of moving transparent objects onto a rear frosted glass screen, using a hidden-from-view apparatus made up of lenses, reflecting surfaces, electric motors, filters, and pulleys. The light passing through these sources is mixed to produce waves of gossamer color shapes, using Maxwell’s additive color principle. The Lumia’s graceful projected moving images produce a different and sublime sensation because it uses continuous or real motion, unlike the celluloid cinema’s intermittent apparent motion projection with its relatively low sample rate, to which we have become accustomed. Wilfred was issued seven US patents covering aspects of the technology, filed between January 1919 and May 1931, with titles like Light Display Apparatus, or variations on it.4 He felt that the Lumia Richard Edgar Løvstrøm USPs: 1,406,663; 1,549,778. Thomas Wilfred USPs: 1,749,011; 1,758,589; 1,825,497; 1,908,203; 1,973,454 4 

2  The Magic Lanternists

Fig. 2.15  A Kodak Carousel slide projector. The Carousel slide carrier was an ingenious and simple way to store and project slides.

images could not be reproduced using conventional motion picture technology and was opposed to having his worked filmed, but a portion of Lumia Opus 161 was used by Terrence Malick in his 2011 film The Tree of Life. The magic lantern did not cease to exist in the twentieth century since it continued to be used in cinemas to project announcements, and in its earliest days since titles were not on film prints, rather they were projected using slides. To

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facilitate this, early theatrical projectors often used a simple mechanism to rackover between movie and slide projector heads using the same lamphouse. With the successful introduction of the rapturously vivid 35  mm color slide film Kodachrome by Eastman Kodak in 1936, which was introduced as a 16 mm movie film the year before, a new era for the magic lantern was born using 35 mm Leica-format still cameras and slide projectors. For decades Kodak, Bell & Howell, and other brands of slide projectors proliferated in the office, the classroom, lecturer halls, and churches and for snapshot slide shows in living rooms. People wound up with drawers full of memories made of cardboard mounted Kodachromes, Ektachromes, Anscochromes, and Agfachromes. Amateur photographers from all walks of life and all social classes took and projected slides, like Dwight David Eisenhower, who took 3-D Kodachromes with his 35 mm Stereo Realist camera, and my uncle Bernie who projected the occasional slide upside down to the laughs and groans of his family. The magic lantern, now called the slide projector, using the basic design that was unveiled in the seventeenth century, had been reinvigorated because of the invention of color slide film and for the better part of the twentieth century, it served as the enabler of a mass medium for recording family life, reaching unprecedented heights of popularity as Everyman became a lanternist.

3

Lantern Light and Glass

The magic lantern had to wait almost two centuries before it was able to project for large audiences on big screens; for the most part this was dependent on improvements in illumination technology. Candles, animal fat, and oil were bright enough for projection on small screens, and in the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries, that was all that was available. One solution was the use of multiple lamps to increase brightness so that painted slides might be seen with vivid colors rather than as monochromatic shadow images. In 1695, the priest M. I. L. de Vallemont mounted a parabolic reflector and its holder, located behind the lantern’s oil lamp, on grooves to permit backward and forward translation for focusing the lamp’s light on the condenser lens to increase brightness. In 1710 Johann Michael Conradi chose to keep the mirror fixed but move the oil lamp, which was mounted on two fixed tracks, to achieve the same concentration of light as had de Vallemont (Rossell 2008, p. 52). In 1721 Willem Jakob Storm van ‘sGravesande (1688– 1742), professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Leiden, introduced a four-wicked oil lamp in a configuration producing a square flame about 2 inches wide, with the position of both the lamp and reflector adjustable, apparently in both the vertical and horizontal, to optimize the illumination by aligning the flames with the condenser and projection lens. The lantern was built by the Leiden instrument maker Musschenbroek who added a diaphragm in the lens tube between its two air spaced elements. Rossell (2008, p. 64) writes that this prevented stray light reflected from the surfaces of the lenses making the image more finely detailed. This could have come about from a reduction of haze and an improvement in overall image contrast with the diaphragm acting like a lens baffle. Lens baffles are commonly employed to suppress reflections within photographic objectives; a series of these black knife-­edged circular rings may run the length of the lens between its elements. “Although these baffles do not prevent light from being reflected from the inside of the barrel, they catch the reflected light before it can reach the film,” according to Kingslake (1992, pp. 132, 133), referring to camera optics. The same comment would apply to

improving the contrast of a projected image. However, it is doubtful that a single, even well-placed stop (diaphragm or aperture) could achieve this end. Rather the explanation for any image improvement in this case must lie in the reduction of spherical aberration due to the occlusion of marginal rays and the effective reduction in curvature of field due to increased depth of field (at the plane of the screen) and depth of focus (at the plane of the slide). Photographic objectives frequently exhibit an improvement in sharpness away from the center of the field when stopped down; the price to pay is a reduction in brightness. In 1780 a major improvement in oil lamp brightness, the Argand pot lamp, was made by the Swiss physicist Aimé Argand (1750–1803), which was originally meant for indoor illumination but was successfully applied to the magic lantern (WS: magiclanternsociety). Prior to this, olive, wine spirit, and rapeseed (colza) oil in an open wick lamp were fuels that were bright enough to permit the projection of a circular image about 8 feet in diameter. Argand’s lamp did away with the open wick and used a circular wick enclosed in a glass chimney, a design that improved the flow of air through the wick to produce a light level equal to about half a dozen candles. It and other oil lamps were made obsolete by the introduction of the kerosene (paraffin) lamp whose fuel was less expensive and produced whiter illumination. Numerous references in Hecht (1993) affirm that the kerosene lamp was in use by the early 1860s. Kerosene illumination apparatus was conveniently portable and deemed to be safe enough to be used in the home and public venues like schools and churches. The article Photography and the magic lantern applied to the teaching of history was published on January 22, 1869, by magic lantern expert and supplier Samuel Highley (1869), in which he summarizes the improvements made to sources of illumination since 1863: paraffin, which gave a brilliant light, unfortunately covered the inside of the lantern with “oily dew,” leaked, and had a bad smell; solid paraffin was safe and gave a good light and took a long time to melt; house gas was convenient and gave a good light when

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_3

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3  Lantern Light and Glass

used in a “naphthalized argand burner”; magnesium lamps were commercially available in two versions but gave off dense fumes,were cumbersome to use producing light that flickered and was blue making for poor color reproduction; condensed gas, the use of which originated in America, was available in bottles and was safe, portable, and economical, but the bottles had to be returned to be refilled. Lime balls were used for limelight, but Highley could not get them to work properly until he designed his own oxygen apparatus. Highley says that electric carbon arcs are preferred for optical experiments and the lantern microscope, but for the magic lantern, he complains of the drudgery of setting up and charging the batteries. Hecht (1993, entry 249), notes that “Although the lantern had been employed in the institutions and schools in this country (England), it had never yet been used in Colleges, and he would be a bold man who would suggest to the dons of Oxford or Cambridge that they use the magic lantern for illustrating university courses on history.” The brightest lanterns in the nineteenth century used limelight, so called because a block of calcium oxide, or quicklime, was heated to incandescence by a gas flame. This required the combustion of gases under pressure, usually hydrogen or ether combined with a jet of oxygen, a mixture that was ignited to create the flame required to heat the

quicklime block, often cylindrical in shape, to intense brightness. American chemist Robert Hare’s (1781–1858) oxy-­ hydrogen blowlamp was the first lamp mixing and igniting oxygen and hydrogen to heat a substance for illumination. His invention was demonstrated on December 10, 1801, as given in the minutes of the Chemical Society of Philadelphia (Hecht 1993, entry 110H). However, credit for limelight is often given to Australian surgeon and polymath (yet another) Goldworthy Gurney (1793–1875), who did early work on the electric telegraph; he increased the pressure of the blowpipe jet, thus its temperature, to heat the block of calcium oxide, an advance he made the previous year that he first demonstrated publically at the London Mechanical Institute in 1823, during his A course of lectures on the elements of chemical science (Hecht 1993, entry 131; Liesegang, p. 19). Scotsman Thomas Drummond (1797–1840), of the Royal Engineers, published an account of his signal light based on heating lime to incandescence in an article published on April 14, 1826, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (that may be accessed online). Drummond used Marcet’s alcohol-oxygen jet to heat a ball of lime, after learning about limelight at lectures given by William Thomas Brande and Michael Faraday (Hecht 1993, entry 134A/2). The publication of his article about his ­signaling tests, which demonstrated that his light could be

Fig. 3.1  The two brightest lantern light sources at the end of the nineteenth century. Left: the oxygen-ether limelight. Illustrated here is a unit made by J. H. Stewart of England. Note the gas jet P and calcium block R (highlighted) (Welford 1888). Right: the electrodes of a carbon

arc produce ionized carbon vapor and air to create a bright light. While the lamphouses that used limelight were a potential combustible h­ azard, the safer carbon arc was used infrequently because of the inconvenience of battery power.

3  Lantern Light and Glass

seen a distance of 66 miles, ushered in the widespread use of limelight, or, as it became known, the Drummond light. Limelight was widely used for theatrical stage lighting, giving us the expression “in the limelight” to denote a person at the center of attention. Despite the fact that the electric arc was safer, limelight continued to be used because it was more convenient in the era before electrification. By the middle of the nineteenth century, limelight was the dominant light source for professional lantern screenings. During the late magic lantern and early celluloid cinema eras, the threat of fire, and even explosion, increased as limelight grew in popularity for large screen presentations. On May 4, 1897 in Paris, the cream of Parisian society attended a motion picture screening at the Bazar de la Charité. For the event, a Lumières Cinématographe, in its projector configuration, was fitted with the same kind of lamphouse used by the magic lantern, in this case a Securitas oxy-ether limelight; it may be inferred that it was common knowledge that this technology was potentially hazardous given the Securitas brand name. As a result of the projectionist’s error, 143 people were killed when the lamphouse exploded (Huhtamo 2013a, b, p. 328).

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The carbon arc was invented in 1809 by chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) and began to be used in public places as the earliest form of electric illumination in the 1870s. But dropping chancy chemical combustion for illumination could not become widespread until the electric power distribution infrastructure replaced less convenient storage batteries. Davy was famous for discovering several of the chemical elements, but perhaps his greatest discovery was the young Michael Faraday (1791–1867) whom he mentored and whose discoveries in field of electromagnetism ushered in the age of electrification, essential for the modern cinema and the civilization we usually take for granted. Davy’s arc was made of two pieces of charcoal (carbon) separated by an air gap through which an electric current was passed. The circuit was completed by producing ionized carbon vapor and air whose electron transitions create a bright light. Hulfish (1913) tells us that Davy used a battery composed of 2000 cells to produce an arc between two carbon points 4 inches apart. In the direct current arc, the current flows from the positive carbon electrode to the negative electrode, and most of the light energy is located at the tip of the positive electrode where it forms a crater. The carbons are burnt away by this process and must be advanced

Fig. 3.2  “The Corpses Removed from the Rubble.” An illustration of the aftermath of the Bazar de la Charité explosion. (Cinémathèque Française)

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to maintain a constant gap. The carbons must be replaced periodically, but whatever its drawbacks the carbon arc was a great improvement over chemical combustion and was the standard illumination source for the celluloid cinema for more than half a century; it was one of the celluloid cinema’s enabling technologies. A self-regulating carbon arc was designed in 1850 for the magic lantern by the renowned French optician Louis Jules Duboscq (1817–1886), but its use was the exception rather than the rule (Hecht 1993, entry 200). Duboscq’s device depended on an exotic power supply that precluded its general acceptance and the widespread use of the carbon arc for projection would not begin until the early 1900s for 35 mm projection when electrification was underway. Liesegang (1986, p.  21) comments that “Foucault (in 1849) and Duboscq (in 1850) in Paris construct(ed) a useful and serviceable automatic carbon arc regulator.” In 1843 tinsmith and tinkerer, Frenchman August Lapierre, seeking to entertain his children at home, created a lantern earmarked for non-professional entertainment, either the first or one of the first such devices designed and marketed for this purpose (Mannoni 2000, pp.  284, 285). His inexpensive devices soon inspired competition as lanterns made of enameled sheet iron, cast iron, brass, and ceramics appeared on the market, which were often highly decorated and used candle light or the kerosene lamp for projecting relatively small images. There were a number of similar designs in Western Europe and in the United States where Philadelphia optician Lorenzo James Marcy (1819– 1896) was granted a patent for a limelight projector using alcohol for fuel as described in USP 163,087, filed June 6, 1874, Lime-Light Apparatus for Magic-Lanterns. He also designed an improved lantern used by educators and clergy, with dual wicks in series for brighter illumination in a double-walled lamphouse that promoted the circulation of air within its walls to help the lantern stay cool to the touch. Fig. 3.3  Decorative magic lanterns for the home. (Cinémathèque Française)

3  Lantern Light and Glass

Marcy’s improved lantern was described in the Journal of the Franklin Institute devoted to Science and the Mechanical Arts, in 1869, with the comment that for school and home, it “may well take the place of the far more troublesome oxycalcium lantern….” Marcy (2012), used the term Sciopticon to describe his lantern and founded a company with that name. His magic lanterns went into production in 1871 and were widely used for almost a quarter of a century. Franz Paul Liesegang reports that the Sciopticon used paraffin fuel and was two to three times brighter than the usual oil-lantern and much safer than limelight. Hecht ( 1993, entry 523B) doubts that paraffin was used, and Marcy, who identifies himself as an optician in the Sciopticon manual, mentions gas, oil, alcohol, and limelight versions as well as a triple jet model. The issue of which fuel to use for combustive illumination was a vexing one due to the trade-offs of brightness, convenience of use, color of the light, excessive heat, and safety. Just as improvements in sources of illumination were made for projection, so were advances in the technologies of glass and optics. According to Mannoni (2000, p.  44), the major factor inhibiting the manufacture of early magic lanterns was the difficulty making its optics. A magic lantern needed a condenser, which might consist of one or several lens elements to concentrate the light on the slide, and one or more image-forming elements to project the image. Huygens’ lantern used one convex lens for the condenser, and his projection optics consisted of two biconvex elements separated by a long airspace (Mannoni 2000, pp. 43, 50). A water-filled glass sphere condenser was described in 1757 by C.  L. Denecke in his Lehrgebäude der Optik, to help dissipate heat before it reached the slide, a design which had been shown by Kircher for use with a catoptric projector. Edison shows a water-filled condenser in place between the film gate and light source in the patent for his Kinetoscope, although it was not used in production. Condenser design was actively

3  Lantern Light and Glass

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Fig. 3.4  A projector using the Zhan disk format with an electric arc lamphouse, listed as a Sciopticon machine. This magic lantern was made in Cincinnati by James Pettibone, circa 1888. The aluminum holder mounts ten circular slides. (Cinémathèque Française)

p­ ursued, and by 1836 British optician Andrew Ross showed a triple-lens condenser, and in the 1860s in America, multiple lens condensers were offered by several vendors (Liesegang 1986, p. 19). Each glass lens required casting, cutting, and precision polishing. Without glass there could be no magic lantern or, for that matter, modern technology. Flat glass free of bubbles, cosmetic inclusions, and striations was needed for the slides themselves (although some were painted on thin sheets of mica); flat glass free of inclusions was necessary for the artists to have a suitable medium for their paintings or drawings. The glass carrier of the images themselves is a key enabling component of the image-forming optical system and is the reason I call the days of the magic lantern’s preeminence the Glass Cinema Era. It’s thought that glass was not so much invented as accidentally discovered, and while the literature favors Egypt and Mesopotamia as the places of its origin, when and where it became a material made and used by humans is subject to speculation, but archeologists find a sudden increase in glass artifacts beginning about 1500 BCE. At this time glass was core-formed by dipping a stick coated with clay into a pot of molten glass. When withdrawn the clay encased stick was covered with glass that was next smoothed and manipulated to cover one end of the stick using a piece of slate; when cooled the glass was removed from the stick. At this stage glass was not necessarily transparent as it was cast or ground into shape for glazing pottery, jewelry, and vessels. During the first

century BCE, glass blowing was discovered. An approximately 3-foot-long tube of iron was dipped into a crucible of molten glass; its end was coated with a lump of glass that was then blown into a bubble, a process that needed hotter furnaces than had been used. In the West, glass came into its own as a clear and transparent or colored material reaching a peak in terms of its technology and craftsmanship by Roman glassmakers who set the standard for making decorative and utilitarian objects until the nineteenth century. The citizens of Rome used glass for dishes, cups, jugs, spoons, lamps, pavements, drainpipes, and inkwells. Glass was so inexpensive that chipped glassware was readily disposed of and replaced but the Romans did not use glass for windows. Glass never went out of style and continued to be used after the fall of Rome (MacFarlane 2002). Glass has curious properties, although it is made from common materials: sand (substantially silicon dioxide), soda ash or sodium carbonate, and lime, a formula that has remained unchanged for 4000 years but various ingredients have been added to enhance its properties, at first by alchemists and then by chemists. (Besides silicates other oxides are used for making optical glass.) The raw material is melted in a furnace and becomes, according to Bach (1995), “a fusion product of an inorganic material which is cooled to a solid state without crystalizing.” It is not possible to be able to predict which materials will form a glassy state by either chemical or physical tests; the glassy state requires a fast rate of cooling. Glass is an exotic substance that is a

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kind of ­liquid in an unstable state, an amorphous solid whose molecules are disordered but with the necessary cohesion for rigidity. Today’s window glass, float glass, is made by floating molten glass on molten metal, like tin or lead, to produce flat sheets of the desired thickness, but this process has only been practiced since the middle of the twentieth century, and other mechanized processes were not available in the early days of the magic lantern. Glass is used for windowpanes, drinking glasses, and cookware that must endure both the broiler and refrigerator without shattering, and it is used for electronic displays and in the manufacture of integrated circuits. Perhaps because of its ubiquity this enabler of our civilization is usually taken for granted, like the air we breathe. At the time of the invention of the magic lantern, the glass used for slides was the same kind as that used for windows, made by hand-blowing a molten bubble that after expansion had its ends cut off and formed into a cylinder. This glass was made of melted sand, soda, borax, calcium oxide, and magnesium oxide; cooling the mixture might result in streaks and flecks. Usually the soft glass was cut with a shears to open the cylinder and laid out onto a flat surface from which windowpanes were cut. This kind of glass is called crown glass because in the blown bubble phase it resembles a crown. Alternatively crown glass can be made by blowing the molten glass, and after it is expanded flattening it into a disk from which windowpanes or lantern slide glass can be cut. This early window glass was unsuitable for lenses because batches were made of different materials resulting in different properties that had many inclusions. Rossell (2008, p. 88) reports that one approach to lessen the air bubbles and striations that arose from the use of the blowpipe was to smash the molten glass between wooden plates to produce beads or chunks better suited for lenses. It helped the cause of the lanternists that their slides were just a few inches on a side making it easier to select pieces of flattened glass that were blemish-free. Early optical glass was made in small batches in crucibles, but modern tank melting allows for the continuous production of glass. Lenses need to be worked to a specified shape which was accomplished in the seventeenth century by polishing and grinding done using sand, but more refined materials, such as spoltiglia or fine abrasive consisting of small particles of emery in water, were favored by the Venetian mirror makers. The Netherlands, Italy, and Venice were the leading glassmakers at the time. Too bad for the lanternists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries since the best instrument manufacturers practiced triage prioritizing the glass used for their microscopes and telescopes. Rossell (2008, pp. 87, 89) writes that the best lenses were frequently produced by the scientists building their own apparatus, like Huygens for his telescopes and magic lanterns.

3  Lantern Light and Glass

The requirements for image-forming lanterns’ lenses are different from those used for slides. Lenses were known nearly four millennia ago in the days of the Greeks and Romans who used them for magnification for fine work and for burning glasses for fire starting and conceivably for correcting vision defects. Spectacles were probably invented in Italy in the thirteenth century, and the microscope and telescope were invented a few years apart, usually given as having taken place in 1595 and 1608, respectively, in Holland, with ambiguity with regard to inventorship. Fortunately flint glass, which was important for making good lenses because it has a higher index of refraction than crown window glass, was available because it was in demand for sparkling tableware. It was discovered, as we shall learn, that combining crown and flint lens elements could greatly improve a lens’s image quality. Improvements to optical designs were made heuristically until the middle of the nineteenth century, and lenses were worked or ground by opticians lacking a theoretical foundation for their designs. This included the design of magic lantern projection lenses, which in early days often used a single-element biconvex lens (essentially a magnifying glass). But improvement was required because this kind of a lens will produce images with color fringes, an artifact called chromatic aberration, which impairs the clarity of a projected image. This aberration is directly related to the observations first made by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666, when he passed white light through a prism and watched it form the rainbow caused by dispersion or the differential bending of colors by the prism. Dispersion is similarly produced by lenses that, in effect, have different foci for different colors, thus preventing the formation of sharp images, which is especially visible at the edges of objects as color fringing. As the market for good lenses increased, so did the appeal of lens making as a pastime activity amongst amateurs, just as grinding telescope mirrors is today. There were popular books on the craft written by several authors, one by Johann George Leutmann, a protestant pastor in Dabrun in eastern Germany, which was published in 1719 and went through four editions. Rossell (2008, p.  111) reports that Johann Conrad Beuther in 1740, who visited the Berkenstein optical shop, observed the process of lens grinding as follows: “A number of young boys, who worked for a small daily wage, grind (lenses) for a whole day at a fixed counter with large iron pans filled with the yellow sand brought from the dunes, and (then) they polish on felt with the red English earth they call Batich.” Lenses are worked to the proper shape and require surface grinding and polishing using successively finer abrasive, and in this case from yellow sand to red Batich, which may be another name for the fine abrasive called rouge. The lenses were mounted in tubes to function as projection objectives or as condensers located between the slide and the illumination source. In southern Germany, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, a magic lantern

3  Lantern Light and Glass

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Fig. 3.5 Prismatic dispersion. Newton’s experiment demonstrated that white light is made up of the colors of the spectrum.

p­ rojection lens reportedly cost two Gulden, which may have been about $100 in today’s money. One cure for chromatic aberration is the addition of a plano-concave lens to the biconvex image-forming lens but one whose index of refraction and dispersion are different from that of the convex lens. Combining the two elements reduces chromatic aberration because their optical power adds up to the required focal length but with equal and opposite dispersion characteristics. This kind of lens is called an achromatic doublet, and its invention is best attributed to the British lawyer, Chester Moore Hall (1703–1771), who, in the late 1720s or early 1730s, empirically decided upon crown glass for the positive and flint glass for the negative elements to improve the image quality of his refracting telescope lenses. Newton believed that it was impossible to correct for the chromatic aberration of refracting lenses, and this led him to invent and build the reflecting telescope, a design that is now widely used on Earth and in space (Darrigol 2012). Hall’s achromatic lenses were built and sold in 1733, and about 20 years later, British optician and self-­taught physicist John Dollond (1706– 1761) learned of the discovery, which may have been unnoticed due to Hall’s penchant for secrecy. It was Dollond who explained the achromat’s physics and patented it (Mannoni 2000, p. 125), a major contribution to lens design that will be further discussed in chapter 23. The technique of combining lens elements with different optical properties made it possible to improve the quality of magic lantern projection lenses, and it remains the principal contribution to the art of lens design. Just about all lenses for projection or photography use multiple elements with different optical properties and curvatures. But what was the source of Hall and Dollond’s flint glass? In 1674 George Ravenscroft (1632–1683) applied for a British patent for his flint glassmaking process, an invention that was influenced by the Italian glassmaking craftsmen

Fig. 3.6  Hall’s chromatically corrected telescope lens used crown (gray), and flint (white) glass.

working for him who were familiar with the techniques and practices used on Venice’s Murano islands where highly refractive glass was made and used to give sparkle and luster to decorative pieces (MacFarlane 2002). Ravenscroft used broken-up flint, the mineral quartz or silicon dioxide, also adding lead oxide to the melt creating a glass with high refraction (good at bending light) and dispersion (good at producing color fringing), which together produced glass that glittered when light passed through it. Ravenscroft was

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seeking glass with improved manufacturing properties plus shimmer and twinkle for goblets and the like, but it also proved to be useful for making lenses. An advance was made in 1774 by the Swiss clockmaker Pierre-Louis Guinand (1748–1824) who found that stirring molten glass in the pot eliminated striae, or nonhomogeneities. Guinand, who kept the process secret, joined the German optical firm, Reichenbach, Utzschneider and Leibherr in 1805, but in 1811 the German self-taught optical physicist Joseph Fraunhofer (1787–1826), inventor of the spectroscope, a director of the firm, became unhappy with Guinand’s methodology. He assumed direction of the manufacturing task and in short order was making glass that was greatly sought after by European opticians and scientists. After Fraunhofer’s work to systematize glass manufacture, a shift took place in the art as the properties of optical glass became quantified due to the work of the Germans Abbe and Schott that permitted large glassworks to make a consistent product. In 1866 the German Carl Zeiss (1816– 1888), the founder of the organization that bears his name, hired a 26-year-old physics professor, the gifted Ernst Abbe (1840–1905), who contributed to the theory of optical aberration and who reorganized Zeiss’ Jena optical shop putting it on a proper scientific basis. The major Zeiss product at the time was its microscope, and by 1880 Abbe had come to the conclusion that he needed new types of glass to make better instruments. He enlisted the help of Otto Schott (1851– 1935), a chemist and glassmaker from Witten who had developed a lithium glass with interesting characteristics and in 1884 they founded a glassworks in Jena, Glastechnische Laboratorium Schott & Genossen, or Schott & Associates Glass Technology Laboratory (Bach 1995). Schott developed new types of glass including barium crowns and borosilicate glass, the latter having the ability to withstand temperature variations and environmental abuse. Within 6 years, after founding the firm that bears his name, he and his colleagues had developed 44 new types of optical glass. For the first time, Schott’s catalog provided designers with the design specifications for the glasses listed. With the Russian occupation of Jena, at the end of the Second World War, the staff of the glassworks was divided with some remaining in Jena and some moving to the American-­ occupied city of Oberkochen and later, in 1952, to Mainz. Schott remains one of the premiere suppliers of optical glass. The United Kingdom was another important source of glass with a manufacturing capability that came about from a series of business combinations. In 1824 the English brothers Robert and William Chance bought the British Crown Glass Company near Birmingham. The British Parsons Optical Company was absorbed into the British Crown Glass Company in 1932, which subsequently combined with Pilkington to form Chance-Pilkington Optical Glass Works, now known

3  Lantern Light and Glass

simply as Pilkington and owned by its former rival, Nippon Sheet Glass Co., Ltd. In the United States, Bausch & Lomb began the manufacture of barium crown glass for photography, in a new factory in 1917, to meet the supply requirements for product that had been cut off by the war and within 2 years offered many types of optical glass with different properties. Other optical glass factories were built in the United States at this time including one in Washington, D.C., managed by the National Bureau of Standards. During the Second World War, Corning and Pittsburgh Plate Glass made what Kingslake characterized as “enormous quantities of optical glass” (Kingslake 1989). Eastman Kodak licensed the 1934 discovery of lanthanum crown glass by G.  W. Morely of the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C. This high refractive index glass (refractive index is a measure of how much glass bends light), according to Rudolf Kingslake (1903–2003), who was head of Kodak’s optical design department from 1937 to 1983, is used in almost every photographic lens. Methyl methacrylate (Lucite and Plexiglas), introduced in the 1920s, began to be used for spectacle lenses. Against prevailing wisdom, as to the limitations of plastic optics, the English company Combined Optical Industries was established in 1936 to make plastic lenses. Other useful materials are acrylonitrile-styrene copolymer and polystyrene (Kingslake 1978). After 5  years of using plastic for viewfinder lenses, in 1957 Eastman Kodak introduced injectionmolded plastic lenses for use in snapshot cameras.1 Unlike glass lenses they do not have to be worked and can be used right out of the mold. Two element lenses can be made and mounted using inexpensive fabrication methods. However, the types of plastic suitable are limited, and plastic lenses are easily scratched and with changes in temperature they can change focal length and can go out of focus. Plastic lenses may not have been used for ciné lenses since they usually require a large aperture, which plastic cannot achieve with good correction. Other non-­traditional materials that have been used for photographic objectives include crystalline fused quartz and fluorite. Advances in optical glass and lenses took place over centuries for applications other than the magic lantern. As noted, flint glass was developed to make goblets sparkle, not to eliminate projection lens chromatic aberration. Moreover, the first optical application for flint glass was for telescope lenses and not for projection lenses. Opticians manufacturing scientific instruments reserved their best product for microscopes and telescopes. For the magic lantern condensers and objectives, they believed their customers could get by In 1964 I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Kingslake about plastic optics, when he was head of lens design at Kodak, as part of research I was doing on the subject as an editor at Popular Photography magazine. 1 

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with second best. Nonetheless, the magic lantern profited from the technological developments made in lens design and optical glass. Although there were improvements in illumination using new designs for oil lamps, the truly major improvements, limelight and the carbon arc, were introduced

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with their inventors thinking about other applications, such as the optical telegraph or semaphore, street lamps, and stage illumination. But as soon as these new illumination sources appeared magic lantern specialist readily adapted them for projection.

Part II THE GLASS CINEMA: Apparent Motion, Discovered and Applied

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Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

Lanternists strove to project images in motion, but their work was limited to real motion effects, in which each effect required a specific solution. But every kind of motion could not be represented by the translation of slides or two-­ dimensional puppets on glass. The solution to the problem of creating any kind of motion did not spring from their efforts but rather from those of Brussels-born physicist Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (1801–1883), who discovered the principle of apparent motion. He was the first to demonstrate that the illusion of motion could be created by the proper presentation of a series of closely related incrementally different still images, an accomplishment that places Plateau in the company of the most significant inventors in the field of cinema technology, like Huygens and Edison, despite the fact that his work was limited to a direct view peepshow-type device rather than projection. Plateau’s father was an artist who wanted him to follow in his footsteps, but that was not to be. His father and mother died only a year apart, and from the age of 14, Plateau and his two sisters were raised by his lawyer uncle who wanted him to study law. While he dutifully pursued a law degree he remained driven by a love for mathematics and physics, which he went on to study at the University of Liège. Although he wished to obtain a doctorate, his plans were disrupted because of the need to provide for his sisters; after a delay he completed his dissertation in the field of visual perception and was awarded a degree in 1829. Plateau, in a truly ill-advised experiment, stared at the bright sun for almost half a minute permanently damaging his eyes leading to complete blindness by 1840 or 1841, a catastrophe that did not diminish his scientific output. His first major contributions were in the field of visual psychophysics, a term to describe the subject more often used then than now, in his case the perception of colors and the afterimages created by a moving bright light. However, he is best known for his later work in apparent motion, the illusion of motion, potentially indistinguishable from real motion (Quigley 1948). Physicists also know him for his work clarifying the ­geometry

of minimal surfaces known as the Plateau Problem, which began with observations he made of soapy water and glycerin films. The reader may be familiar with the streaking seen when Polynesian fire dancers twirl and throw burning torches: the effect on the eye is like that of a photographic time exposure. In 1765 Irish mathematician Count Patrick d’Arcy (1725–1779) sought to quantify the phenomenon, which he did by building a machine that rotated an iron rod with a burning tip at a precise rate. Plateau also attempted to measure the duration of the afterimage but for different colors, white, red, yellow, and blue, and in 1827 arrived at a figure of about a third of second for each (Hecht 1993, entry 134D). These e­xperiments, and the work of Peter Mark Roget and Michael Faraday, would later provide the basis for Plateau’s explanation of the phenomenon of apparent motion when he coined the phrase “the persistence of vision.” The January 1821 Quarterly Journal of Science, published in London, ran a note signed by J.  M., probably its chief editor, John Murray, calling attention to an unusual visual phenomenon he had observed: the spokes of carriage wheel, when moving rapidly, and seen through vertical fence posts, appeared to him to be a series of stationary curved lines (Mannoni 2000, p. 205). An explanation of Murray’s observations was given in an influential paper, Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures, written by English-Swiss polymath Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), which he read before the Royal Society in 1825. It was published in their Philosophical Transactions, wherein Roget (1825) writes: “The true principal, then, on which this phenomenon depends, is the same as that to which is referable the illusion that occurs when a bright object is wheeled rapidly round in a circle, giving rise to the appearance of a line of light throughout the whole circumference: namely, that an impression made by a pencil of rays on the retina, if sufficiently vivid, will remain for a

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_4

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Fig. 4.1  Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau. Photo taken in 1843. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 4.2  A Tahitian fire dancer in French Polynesia. (Photo by the author)

4  Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

an apparatus to demonstrate and study the phenomenon. Writing decades later, Helmholtz (2005, p. 223), following up on the work of Roget, notes: “Here also should be mentioned certain curves that are seen when two sets of straight and curved rods are moved one behind the other. The first case of this kind (referring to Murray) to attract attention consisted of certain figures that appear on a carriage wheel when it goes past a row of paling.” In 1828 Plateau built a laboratory device using vertical spinning counter-rotating disks to represent the “row of paling” and the carriage wheel in order to replicate Murray’s observation and to test Roget’s explanation, which led to his invention of the anorthoscope (described below) in 1836 (Hecht 1993, entry 137C). In 1830 Michael Faraday pursued the subject without knowing about Plateau’s work, which had been published in 1829. On January 21, 1831, in the lecture room of the Royal Institution, Faraday (1831) gave a demonstration of a similar apparatus that was dubbed the Faraday wheel (not to be confused with the Faraday disk, also sometimes called the Faraday wheel, the experimental device that led to the creation of the dynamo or electric generator) (Hecht 1993, entry 138B). The Faraday wheel worked on the same principle as Plateau’s device, which according to Hopwood (1899, p. 10) involved: “two disks with notched edges (that were) revolved at equal speeds in opposite directions by friction gearing.” When looking through the cogs of the nearest disks, it was perceived that the rear cogged disk appeared to be stationary. Faraday also explained that the effect could be achieved using a single spinning wheel’s reflection viewed through its cogs in a mirror, the arrangement used by the phenakistoscope, as we shall see. After having learnt of Plateau’s work, Faraday graciously acknowledged his priority. Helmholtz (2005, p. 223) describes the Faraday wheel (which applies equally to Plateau’s device) as follows: “The simplest illustration is the one observed by Faraday. He made two equal toothed wheels revolve rapidly in opposite directions one behind the other, their axes being in the same straight line. Owing to the rapidity of the motion, it was not possible to see the separate teeth of either wheel, but when he observed them so that one row of teeth could be seen through the other, he beheld a stationary wheel with double as many teeth.” Faraday continued to work in this area and produced several variations, which may have influenced both Plateau and Austrian mathematician Simon Ritter von Stampfer (1790 or 1792–1864); they announced what became known as Plateau’s phenakistoscope (to fool, to see) and von Stampfer’s stroboscope (whirling, to see).1 Plateau Today the word stroboscope is used for the class of devices for visually arresting and analyzing motion, often by means of a high-speed shutter, flashing electronic strobe, or flashing diode.

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c­ ertain time after the cause has ceased.” The paper was read by both Plateau and Faraday, which prompted each to build

4  Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

Fig. 4.3  A Faraday wheel from the collection of Will Day. Possibly the very one used in Faraday’s lab. (Cinémathèque Française)

o­riginally called it the Fantascope (the name used by Robertson for his projector) but yielded to popular usage based on a product of that name released without his knowledge or authorization. Plateau, unlike von Stampfer, did not patent the device or monetarily profit from it and publically deplored the cheap and inferior imitations of his invention on the market (Hecht 1993, entry 146B). Plateau’s work preceded that of von Stampfer by 2  years according to Helmholtz (1962, p.  218). In his monumental Treatise on Physiological Optics (Vol. II), he tells us, in a footnote, that Plateau sent a model of the phenakistoscope to Faraday in November 1830 and that von Stampfer completed his version in December 1832. (The date of the invention is given as 1833 in the literature.) The phenakistoscope is the device by which the natural phenomenon of apparent motion was first demonstrated, one of the technological underpinnings of the celluloid cinema. The phenakistoscope consists of a vertical disk, 6–10 inches in diameter, which rotates around its central axis (Hecht 1993, entry 139B). This spinning flat wheel’s periphery is arrayed with a series of, in some cases, 16 slightly different drawings of the phases of motion, often using figures of people, by Helmholtz’s account (who helped to associate the term phenakistoscope with Plateau’s invention) (Hecht 1993, entry 146A). This disk format is similar to that described by Zahn in the late seventeenth century. The disk, with the images of the phases of motion facing away from the user, is spun, and the images are viewed in a facing mirror through a series of narrow radial slits (shutters) located between each image. When so viewed the drawings are seen

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to have lifelike movement. The phenakistoscope was usually held by a handle or set on a stand and rotated. This simple device ­ that provided the first demonstration of apparent motion was superseded by the easier to use zoëtrope, to be described in chapter 6.2 Viewing the phases of motion through the radial slit shutters of the phenakistoscope, or the zoëtrope, produces images that are elongated or compressed. When the image and the slit are moving in the same direction, as is the case of the phenakistoscope, the image is elongated; when it is moving in the opposite direction, as is the case with the zoëtrope, the image is compressed. For this reason, to have the drawings appear to have normal proportions, they were often drawn geometrically distorted to compensate. The origin of this anamorphosis is that the sampling rate is different along the length of the slit shutter – if the shutter operated instantaneously to pass light, there would be no distortion. To eliminate the compression of the image and to increase its brightness in 1869 physicist James Clerk Maxwell used concave lenses in place of the zoëtrope’s radial slit shutters. With a properly chosen focal length, a virtual image of each drawing appears at the axis of the zoëtrope cylinder’s rotation thereby remaining motionless until it is swept away by a successive image (Hopwood 1899, pp.  26, 27). This approach to optical image stabilization may have been the inspiration for Reynaud’s Praxinoscope of 1877, which used mirrors rather than lenses. Plateau also invented the parlor novelty the anorthoscope (I straighten, I see), which was introduced in 1836, which looks like a manually operated motion picture rewind. It consists of two vertically mounted counter-rotating disks set a small distance apart on the same shaft. The rear disk has a greatly distorted image, and the front disk has four narrow radial slot shutters through which the picture is observed. The hand-drawn or printed images look like they have been liquefied and spread across a circular surface, but when rotated and viewed through the counter-rotating radial shutter slits, they are returned to their intended proportions and can be viewed as recognizable images. When the user looks through the rotating radial slit shutters at the counter-rotating distorted image, along the length of a slit, different arc lengths of the image are seen at the same moment. (The technique somewhat resembles Nipkow disk scanning, as described in chapter 71). The result is that the observer’s visual system integrates these scanned arc-elements of image into one undistorted image. The anorthoscope is a device that decodes a geometrically encoded image; it is not a moving image device. Roget’s (1825) explanation of why Murray Just as Plateau invented the phenakistoscope to demonstrate apparent motion, a few years later Wheatstone announced the invention of the stereoscope to demonstrate that binocular stereopsis was a discrete depth cue. 2 

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4  Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

Fig. 4.4 The phenakistoscope. The user spins the disk and looks through the radial shutter slits to see the reflected images of the phases of motion on its inside surface. When doing so the images appear to be animated.

Fig. 4.5  A phenakistoscope disk. (Cinémathèque Française)

saw the spokes of a wheel as curved as the wheel passed behind the openings of fence posts is also a temporal sampling phenomenon involving retinal retention, but it is often misstated as being the basis for the phenomenon of apparent motion. Nonetheless, it inspired the invention of the phenakistoscope and the discovery of apparent motion. It took a decade or so after Plateau’s discovery of apparent motion before inventors adapted his discovery to the magic lantern to project moving images. Some of these magic lanterns used a disk whose periphery contained painted lantern slides that rotated continuously as they passed through the projector’s gate. Inventor T. W. Naylor’s motion projection device of 1843 is notable because it may

be the first magic lantern design to adopt the phenakistoscope principal (Liesegang 1986, p. 35). However, there is no record of Naylor’s “Phantasmagoria for the exhibition of moving figures” having been built or demonstrated (Mannoni 2000, p. 224; Hecht 1993, pp. 177). Naylor suggested the use of a disk shutter rotating in the same direction as the image disk, both of which were operated by the same handcrank. Both image disk and shutter rotated continuously with the shutter designed to arrest the projected images, just as it did for the phenakistoscope. In the case of Naylor’s device, the image disk passed through the projector’s gate, but the radial shutter disk passed between the projector’s lens elements. Why place the shutter within the projection lens itself and

4  Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

not at some more convenient place? According to Hecht, the combination of a phenakistoscope and projector had been proposed earlier by both von Stampfer and Jan Purkinje (Purkyně) (1787–1869), the Czech anatomist who discovered that under certain conditions the eye can detect polarized light. In 1845 Imperial Austrian Army Artillery Captain (subsequently General) Franz F. von Uchatius (1811–1881) built a projecting phenakistoscope, but unlike the Naylor suggestion, its shutter was in close proximity to the image disk; both it and the image disk were operated by a handcrank. The slides were about 2.4 inches in diameter illuminated by either limelight or an Argand oil lamp (Hecht 1993, entry 210; Liesegang 1986, p. 35). Because of the radial slit shutter’s loss of light, the projected image was restricted to about 6 inches in width (Hopwood 1899, p.  17). Features of the phenakistoscope were adopted by Uchatius and other inventors in their quest to project apparent motion, efforts that endured until the last years of the nineteenth century. A circular array of images was used, as slides at the outer edge of the disk, which unlike the drawings on the phenakistoscope disk are transparent to permit projection. The phenakistoscope disk is a self-shuttering apparatus, with the shutter slits located between the phases of motion, but projection required a separate shutter. The disk format, with its peripheral array of drawings of the phases of motion painted on glass slides, lent itself to projection, just as Zahn had suggested in 1685, but some interesting projection devices departed from this approach, such as Uchatius’ next attempt. Fig. 4.6 Naylor’s Phantasmagoria. The radial shutter disk C passes between the lens elements. B is the Zhan disk. (Mannoni 2000)

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Uchatius constructed a more ambitious and unusual projector designed to improve image brightness. His new design used a motionless disk holding 12 painted slides of the phases of motion each one designed to project using its own lens. (This design has similarities to those later described by Le Prince and Jenkins.) Uchatius’ projector used a rotating limelight and condenser ensemble, driven by a handcrank located at the back of the projector, which swiftly moved behind the fixed radial array of slides and lenses. Each lens, as the light source passed behind its slide, projected an image onto a screen, with the lenses adjusted so that the images were superimposed on the screen. The projector was first demonstrated to the Vienna Academy of Sciences in 1853 and the magician Ludwig Döbler successfully toured Europe using one that was built by the Viennese optician Prokesh. Uchatius’ machine was capable of projecting an image about 2½ meters in width (Liesegang 1986, p.36). Lionel Smith Beale (1828–1906), an English physician and professor at King’s College London, in 1866 designed a slide carrier for the magic lantern, the Choreutoscope, which he did not patent (Liesegang 1986, pp. 31, 34, 36, 37). The Choreutoscope was popular enough to have become a generic term for similar devices offered for sale in the following years. It was appealingly compatible with existing magic lanterns turning them into apparent motion projectors. It consisted of a wooden frame slide carrier, which was designed to permit the horizontal travel of six hand-painted slides making up an animated sequence. With the continuous turning of a handcrank, the slides moved intermittently, each

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Fig. 4.7  Franz F. von Uchatius Fig. 4.8  Uchatius’ projector used a rotating limelight and condenser (highlighted). This side view shows only two of the fixed slides and lenses.

Fig. 4.9  A Choreutoscope slide carrier with an animation of a clown playing a banjo. Made by instrument maker C. Baker of 244 High Holborn, London. (Cinémathèque Française)

4  Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

halting in the projector’s gate to be moved along and replaced by the next slide. The Choreutoscope slide carrier fit into the gate of the projector without it having to undergo any modification and used a horizontally laid-out mechanism similar in function to a Maltese-cross movement (also called a Geneva drive after the clockwork mechanism) within the wooden carrier. During the time each slide was transported a vertical traveling or guillotine shutter occluded it to prevent image travel ghost (image smearing). One account has Beale performing a Choreutoscope projection at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, which was known for holding projection events, but Mannoni (2000, p. 233) believes it cannot be established for certain that this event took place. In November 2001, Christie’s (2001) auction house, only a few miles from Beale’s London birthplace, auctioned off a Choreutoscope for $1247. The animation of a crying baby, in various stages of distress, painted on six slides, was attributed to James Henry Stewart who was in the business of making Choreutoscopes. The notes of the sale state that the device lacked a handle, Maltese-cross movement, and metal shutter. There were not enough frames in the Choreutoscope’s carrier to provide more than a moment of animation, but integrated into a magic lantern show, it would have added an interesting element and the duration of motion could be extended if the sequence was properly designed for shuttling

4  Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

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Fig. 4.10  The USP cover sheet describing Brown’s intermittent action apparent motion magic lantern and slide carrier.

it forward and backward. In 1884 W. C. Hughes was granted British Patent 13,372 for a magic lantern slide carrier based on Beale’s Choreutoscope, an improvement according to

Hopwood (1899, p. 20), which is an indication of decades of continued interest. The Choreutoscope continued to be developed until a decade before the invention of the celluloid

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cinema; its intermittent movement anticipates that used by 35  mm theatrical projectors and also cameras, but it’s an open question as to whether or not celluloid cinema inventors were influenced by it. Therefore, however prescient its design may be, this invention’s role or influence in the evolution of the technology is unclear. American Obadiah B. Brown’s Optical Instrument, USP 93,594, granted August 10, 1869, describes a magic lantern projector using a similar approach. Brown’s patent does not give the filing date. (References to US patents are given as USP. The filing date is usually given since it gives a better idea of the date of conception than the date of issuance.) His Phoenocinopticon was based on a miniature Zahn polygonal disk array of paintings of the phases of motion. An intermittent mechanism stopped and started the disk’s rotation to momentarily halt the slide in the projector’s gate (Liesegang 1986, p. 37). The disk was, in effect, a rotated gear whose circumference was made up of teeth, edge driven by the stopstart mechanism. The disk and mechanism were built into a wooden slide holder, but despite this degree of compatibility, the Phoenocinopticon could not be used in a lantern unless it had a rotating shutter in front of the lens, namely, the twobladed shutter disclosed in ‘594. The Beale and Brown approaches anticipate the coordination of image intermittency and shuttering that is the basis for celluloid cinema projection. As such Beale’s invention deserves recognition as one of the most significant contributions in the history of cinema. It’s instructive to compare this method with that of Uchatius: Uchatius’ first machine used a continuously spinning radial slit shutter in conjunction with a continuously spinning image disk. While the moving slit shutter can provide an image of adequate sharpness, the brief duration of the image flash, something like a twentieth of the duration of an intermittently arrested frame, precludes the projection of the bright image required for a big screen. On the other hand, the Beale-Brown designs provide for intermittent motion of the

4  Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope

image coordinated with an occluding shutter to allow for far brighter projected images. While Beale’s Choreutoscope slide carrier, made by various suppliers such as Stewart, was successful in the marketplace, Brown’s projector was not, probably because it required the purchase of a special projector. Similar devices were made by Duboscq, François Binetruy, and others, which were generically known as the lantern wheel of life. Although both Brown and Beale demonstrated apparent motion projection using intermittency with coordinated shutter occlusion, efforts persisted based on the phenakistoscopic principle, notably by Muybridge with his Zoöpraxiscope. A strongly related method used by Anschütz’s successful Electrotachyscope (Elektrischer Schnellseher) used the flashes of a Geissler discharge tube to freeze the images, an electrical stand-in for the phenakistoscope’s radial shutter, but more elegant and without the anamorphic distortion artifact since the entire image was displayed at one instant. During half a century of experimentation Plateau’s discovery was adapted to projection, aided and abetted by the introduction of photography, during a hybrid period as inventors combined the old and the new, to finally achieve the celluloid cinema; the second half of the nineteenth century was an effervescent time of invention that led to the celluloid cinema of apparent motion. The basic principles of the cinema technology that prevailed during the twentieth century were demonstrated by ingenious inventors who used the magic lantern for their projection platform applying what they learned from the phenakistoscope. Fittingly the phenakistoscope’s shuttering technique was the basis for Edison and Dickson’s peepshow Kinetoscope, the original display device of the celluloid cinema. The experiments and apparatus of the Victorian cinema left a historical record posing a challenge for celluloid cinema inventors who sought to obtain strong patent protection since so much fundamental technology had already been described.

5

A Persistent Myth

The expression persistence of vision has been used as a catchall explanation for the illusion of apparent motion, but it is more appropriately applied to the determination of the efforts of Reynaud, Edison, Eastman, and other steadfast inventors who made significant contributions to cinema technology. The use the terminology persistence of vision is more of an obscurant than a concept that furthers understanding but it has been widely used as this excerpt from Edison’s Kinetograph camera patent (USP 589,168) bears witness: “In carrying out my invention I employ an apparatus for effecting by photography a representation suitable for reproduction of a scene including a moving object or objects comprising a means, such a single camera, for intermittently projecting at such rapid rate as to result in persistence of vision of successive positions of the object or objects in motion….” We are approaching two centuries since Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau, inventor of the phenakistoscope and discoverer of apparent motion, first used the phrase. It was his belief that the illusion of motion created by viewing the still images of the phases of motion was based on afterimage, which he called the persistence of vision. Plateau was led to this concept, at least in part, due to the fact that the phenakistoscope shutter interrupts successive images creating a temporal separation between them, but he conflated the interruption of the images with the process for perceiving motion. One of the innumerable examples of the phrase’s use in the literature of cinema (of which I am guilty in a prior book) can be found in the often reprinted A Million and One Nights, by Terry Ramsaye (1926) who gives the title of Roget’s well-­ known paper that launched Plateau on the path of discovery of apparent motion as: Persistence of vision with regard to Moving Objects, when in fact Roget’s paper, published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1824, is titled Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures. Ramsaye mentions persistence of vision more than 30 times in his approximately eight hundred page book. He perpetuates the misconception that Roget’s paper concerns the per-

ception of motion. Instead the paper’s subject is an explanation of what is seen when a moving spoked carriage wheel is observed through fence posts whose openings act like shutters, in which case the wheel appears to be both arrested and having curved spokes. The bending or curving of the carriage spokes is attributable to the vertical fence posts’ openings revealing different parts of the spokes at the same moment. Roget’s paper discusses what today we call stroboscopic analysis in which a usually cyclical movement, the rotating wheel in this case, is temporally sampled through a shutter or with a strobing or flashing light to give the appearance of arrested motion. For the rotating phenakistoscope disk images viewed through its radial shutter or for the celluloid cinema’s projector shutter that interrupts each frame during pulldown, a series of still images is perceived as a continuous image in motion. It’s true that afterimage plays a part in intermittent projection and Kaufman (1974) reports that it’s probably a “phenomenon largely due to photochemical properties of the pigments of the cones rather than the neural structures succeeding them in the retina.” But the perception of apparent motion takes place due to an entirely different mechanism, as we shall learn. The foggy catch-all concept, the persistence of vision, runs throughout the literature of cinema despite the fact that Kaufman tells us that since the 1920s perceptual psychologists have postulated that “the basis for apparent movement must be the same as that for real movement….” The distinction between real and apparent motion is as follows: real motion is what we see in everyday life; it’s not an illusion and it is the basis for magic lantern projected motion, whereas apparent motion is the illusion of motion, celluloid cinema motion, created by the proper display of a series of incrementally different still images, or what Victorian cinema inventors neatly labeled the phases of motion. There are two kinds of motion phenomena that are processed or mediated by two different regions of the brain, one called short-range apparent motion and the other long-range apparent motion and cinema’s literature so often conflates the two phenomena that it’s worth explaining the difference.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_5

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Short-range apparent motion is the basis for the motion picture illusion, usually simply known as apparent motion, but long-range apparent motion is different (Anderson 1993). The phi-phenomenon, which has been repeatedly misrepresented as the basis of motion picture’s illusion of apparent motion, is explained by the concept of long-range apparent motion. The phi-phenomenon was discovered by gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer in 1912 and was originally described in his article Experimental Studies on the Seeing of Motion. The classic experiment, as described by Wertheimer, involves subjects looking at two rapidly alternating images, a horizontal straight line in each, with the lines not spatially overlapping. When the rapidly alternating images reach a certain frequency a peculiar kind of movement is perceived occurring between the lines. The lines stay where they are but a phantom-like effigy appears to be moving between them, a phenomenon that has nothing to do with how we perceive movies, one that works only for images that are simple – without detail. The phi-phenomenon is usually only seen in psych labs or on electric signage. Typical motion picture images have far more complexity, and successive motion picture frames are similar; their images are only incrementally different – the amount of motion between the frames is relatively small. Unlike phi-phenomenon images that are simple, a motion picture is made up of a series of frames that are as complicated as those found in the visual world, like a couple strolling through a park in the autumn with leaves falling from trees blowing in the wind. This kind of imagery is different from two rapidly alternating black lines on a white field. The area of the brain that processes or mediates long-­ range apparent motion as produced by the phi-phenomenon, is not the same area of the brain that mediates short-range apparent motion. The area that processes real motion is also the region that processes apparent motion or the motion picture illusion of motion. The brain cannot tell the difference between the two kinds of inputs  – it cannot distinguish between real and (short-range) apparent motion. Seeing movies is surely an illusion because movies are made up of still images, but the brain can’t tell the difference between real motion and short-range apparent motion, a perceptual modality that does not depend on after-image or the persistence of vision. The precise explanation for how the mind processes short-range apparent motion, and is unable to distinguish it from real motion, is based on work done at the David Sarnoff Research Center (Adelson 1985). The concept of short-range apparent motion affords a basis for understanding the perceptual artifacts exhibited by motion pictures, like picketing (the choppy image of a fence seen during a traveling shot) or the wagon wheel effect (in which spokes travel backwards) or judder (a term used to described the jumpy appearance resulting from a rapid pan).

5  A Persistent Myth

Such artifacts are to be expected because a necessary ingredient for short-term apparent motion is that adjacent images must be sufficiently similar. These spurious motion effects are seen when the frame-to-frame images are insufficiently similar and these anomalies or artifacts (to which we have grown accustomed) are often to be seen in movies shot when projected at 24 fps (frames per second) because this sampling rate does not have a sufficient number of similar frames. That’s why filmmakers like Ang Lee, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Jonathan Erland, and Douglas Trumbull, advocate higher frame rates such as 48, 60, and 120 fps, which are impractically high for 35 mm but well within the reach of digital cinema technology. Time and again the phi-phenomenon, properly explained by long-range apparent motion, has been incorrectly used to describe the basis for motion picture motion. To add to the confusion, the Thaumatrope (wonder turner), has been used as an illustration of short-range apparent motion. Liesegang (1986, p. 24) attributes the Thaumatrope to Irish physician and geologist William Henry Fitton (1780–1862), but Brewster believed the inventor was British physician, John Ayrton Paris (1785–1856). The Thaumatrope was introduced in 1824, according to Helmholtz (1962, p. 218). The earliest description of the device was by Brewster, which was published in January 1825 (Hecht 1993, entry 237D). Recently new Thaumatrope claimants have been unearthed  – it has been alleged that the Cro-Magnons, who lived in the Chauvet Caves of France, were the inventors of a Thaumatrope-stone with images on both of its sides. Any patent they might have been granted would have expired a few tens of thousands of years ago. The simple Thaumatrope disk or paddle creates an optical illusion based on rapid changes between two images, an example of which is a bird on one side of a disk and a cage on the other. The disk is held on opposite edges by strings that are wound tight and pulled apart to spin it. When the spinning disk is observed, the bird appears to be in the cage, an example of visual latency, but not an illustration of the phi-phenomenon, since there is no illusion of phantomlike motion. It is also decidedly not an example of shortrange apparent motion, as is often asserted, since the illusion does not involve motion. I have run the risk of confusing the reader by describing a muddled didactic chain, a confounding of concepts, whose repetition has misled many generations, which might be amusing if such a conflation didn’t raise the suspicion that so much of what we believe is based on specious connections and dubious reasoning. Prof. Martin S. Banks, of the Visual Perception Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley School of Optometry, an expert on the perception of motion pictures, responded to my inquiries with regard to the efficacy of the

5  A Persistent Myth

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Fig. 5.1  The two sides of a Thaumatrope disk. (Cinémathèque Française)

concept of the persistence of vision. What follows is a condensed version of several of Banks’ emails: The latency from photon to brain isn’t relevant to apparent motion. It’s the temporal filtering by the retina and visual pathways that’s the cause of being able to see digital motion (individual frames) as smooth. If there were no filter, a brief impulse in time would lead to a brief impulse in the brain and digital motion would never look smooth….With temporal filtering the brain can’t appreciate very high temporal frequencies—can’t “see” them, if you will. And that inability to see high frequencies is what leads to the impression of smooth motion. The way to think of the “persistence” is as a temporal filter.

If the sampling rate is high enough, and the individual frames representing the phases of motion are incrementally different, the human visual system cannot see the difference between real and apparent motion. The concept of persistence of vision, which literally refers to visual latency, cannot possibly explain the illusion of motion

made up of a sequence of images, because if it did, if the perception of apparent motion depended on latency, how to explain the various motion picture projection systems that successfully convey the illusion of motion without any interruption between frames? to wit: Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope that used optical stabilization for a continuous flow of images; Mechau’s 35 mm projector that used the same principal; Anschütz’s Projecting ElectroTachyscope with intermittent motion having no dark time by using dual projection heads (Coe 1992, p.  37); and Skladanowsky’s intermittent dual film projector that used dissolving successive images without interruption. To this may be added the film editing tables that used image stabilization rather than shuttering. We might also consider the daily experience of observing the ubiquitous liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, a hold-type display without image interruption.

6

The Zoëtrope and the Praxinoscope

In the early 1840s inventors began to adapt the magic lantern based on Plateau’s discovery of apparent motion and the phenkistoscope, as described in chapter 4. Victorian cinema inventors also began to explore how to photographically capture and project the phases of motion. These efforts, and in particular the work of chronophotographer and physiologist Marey, laid the foundations for Edison’s Kinetograph movie camera and Kinetoscope peepshow viewer. Immediately before the advent of the celluloid cinema Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope was capable of projecting a motion picture narrative of extended length using hand drawn slides of the phases of motion. Unfortunately it was not a scalable technology, and in fact it had only one practitioner. It was the descendent of the daedalum and its improvement the zoëtrope (life-turning or wheel of life) that used the concept of the biunial magic lantern to combine moving foreground characters with a static background. The daedalum and zoëtrope can produce the same moving image effect as the phenakistoscope, but the images are viewed directly, without requiring a mirror, and several people at the same time can see the animation. The invention of the daedalum, which followed immediately after Plateau’s phenakistoscope, was the work of the British mathematician, painter, inventor, and showman William George Horner (1786–1837), which he described in an article appearing in the January 1834 issue of The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. The invention may be dated to 1833 since Horner gave a precise description of it to an optician prior to publication (Hecht 1993, entry 147D). The device, unlike the phenakistoscope disk, rotated in the horizontal plane, a cylinder with slots cut in it between inward-facing images of the phases of motion. Unlike the phenakistoscope it did not require a mirror, and its moving images were viewed directly through the slit shutters. Its horizontal cylindrical arrangement allowed for it use by several observers at a time. Horner (1834, vol. 4, p. 36) used the name daedalum “as imitating

the practice which the celebrated artist of antiquity was fabled to have invented, of creating figures of men and animals endued with motion.” He mathematically analyzed the optics of the device, how its rotation and the images on the inside of its cylindrical wall are each in turn arrested by being viewed through the shutter slits to produce the succession of images required for the illusion of apparent motion. The daedalum was the basis for devices designed by Czermak, Desvignes, Purkinje, and Lincoln, functioning by the same principal. Desvignes’ design of 1860 used miniature solid models rather than drawings to give a three-dimensional effect (Hopwood 1899, p.  25), an idea that the four aforementioned inventors similarly embraced, although Horner, according to Liesegang (1986, p. 28), first made the suggestion for the use of models in 1834. At the London Exhibition of 1862, architect Peter Hubert Desvignes (1808– 1883) also showed a vertically oriented hand-rotated cylinder with horizontal shutter slits cut between its image frames, one version of which was designed to be used by a single observer who looked downward at the images through a hood (Chambers’s 1889, p. 398). The arrangement permitted the use of a side-­by-­side stereo pair format; a surviving sequence of the phases of motion photographed for Desvignes is that of a steam engine in operation, as noted in chapter 9. The best known and most successful version of Horner’s daedalum was the work of William E. Lincoln, of Providence, Rhode Island, who was granted the patent succinctly titled Toy, USP 64,117, granted April 23, 1867 (no filing date is given), called a zoëtrope in the specifications and according to Hopwood (1899, p. 22), Lincoln was the first to use the name. Lincoln assigned his patent to Milton Bradley & Co. for $5000, and it achieved enduring commercial success (Kattelle 2000, p. 9). The zoëtrope is such a straightforward design and so easy to construct that it might have been built by the ancient Egyptians out of papyrus and wood. The zoëtrope’s rotation, like that of the daedalum’s, is in the horizontal direction about a vertical axis, but it moved the daeda-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_6

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lum’s shutter slits from between each image to above them, making it possible to easily change subjects by replacing the image bands of the phases of motion. Since the slits were now above rather than between the poses, the moving image was viewed looking downward through them. The zoëtrope (or similar daedalum) was the basis or inspiration for both Reynaud’s Praxinoscope and Anschütz’s Tachyscope. The mass manufactured zoëtrope was popular in the United States and Europe and remains in production, a novelty product and an inexpensive toy and teaching aid. The zoëtrope was the inspiration for Reynaud’s Praxinoscope, which it resembled in its original version but with a significant design difference; instead of slits it used an array of mirrors. The most advanced version of French artist-­ inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud’s (1884–1918) invention, the Projecting Praxinoscope, was a masterpiece of the twilight era of the magic lantern and the forerunner of the celluloid cinema’s cell animation, which could be seen in but only one venue, the Théâtre Optique in Paris. Reynaud, the son of a medal engraver, was born in Montreuil-sous-Bois near Paris, who at the age of 14 began a series of apprenticeships with experts in medical and scientific equipment design and photography. When he was 20, he attended lectures by Abbé Moingo, an advocate of Brewster’s lenticular stereoscope who illustrated his talks on scientific topics with magic lantern slides. Moingo was a lanternist par excellence who taught Reynaud its various techniques and along the way converted the secular Reynaud to Catholicism. Reynaud worked with Moingo for the next decade, eventually giving scientific lectures on his own using sophisticated magic lantern projections (Mannoni, p. 364). Reynaud built a phenakistoscope for his young assistant Pierre Tixier but was disappointed with the dimness of the images and their lack of color saturation, a result of the reduction in light reaching the eye through the narrow rotating shutter slits, a problem that afflicted the zoëtrope as well. Using the basic design layout of the zoëtrope, Reynaud made an impressive advance, which he described in a letter to the Académie des Sciences on July 20, 1877. He filed the French patent for the invention on August 30, 1877, and the British Patent 4244 on November 13, 1877, in which the word Praxinoscope (I look at action or action viewer) was used for the first time. The original Praxinoscope of 1877 was a device with an inner wall that was a 12-sided polygon arrayed with 12 (Hecht says 10) rectangular mirror segments, 2.2 inches high and 1 inch wide, each of which was glued to the straight sections of the polygon’s wall. The mirrors faced a band of 12 poses positioned on the surrounding cylinder’s inner wall. These inwardly facing drawings of the phases of motion were viewed when one looked into the rotating mirrors, which took the place of the zoëtrope shutter slits. The diameter of the image cylinder, about the size of a dinner plate, was about twice that of the central polygonal array of

6  The Zoëtrope and the Praxinoscope

mirrors (Hecht 1993, entry 286B). There were several versions of the Praxinoscope manufactured in large numbers between 1877 and 1879 (Hecht 1993, 632); these were a table model in which the cylinder was turned by hand, possibly made of metal, without a source of illumination; a wooden stand mounted model handcranked with a string pulley with a candle holder “and lamp-shade to clip onto candle”; and a metal clockwork model with a “large key to wind (the) clockwork motor” (Hecht 1993, entry 299A). Reynaud’s British patent states that the images become animated when the cylinder is rotated, and it is correctly asserted that they are brighter than prior devices that used slit shutters and that the Praxinoscope images did not flicker, (nor did they suffer from anamorphic distortion). The patent also suggests a stereoscopic version using a band of stereopair poses. While the Phenakistoscope and zoëtrope slit shutters arrested their rotating images, the Praxinoscope used a different method to create the illusion: each mirror, whose rotation followed the movement of its inward-facing image’s reflection, was optically steadied as it reached the eyes. In addition, each image was wiped away to be replaced by its succeeding image without interruption. The result is that the eyes see the series of still images blended together required to produce the illusion of apparent motion but without the shuttering and the interruptions produced by moving slit devices. Reynaud had created a method of viewing apparent motion based on optical image stabilization and the new device sold well. It was in 1879 that Reynaud announced his peepshow-­ style Lilliputian or Praxinoscope Théâtre, which optically combined character animation with a fixed background. The small peepshow Théâtre was housed in a mahogany cabinet and viewed through a rectangular opening, with the background scene mounted on the inside of its wall immediately below the opening facing a semi-silvered mirror onto which its image was reflected. The moving images of the phases of motion were viewed through the partial mirror’s image of the background and superimposed over it. The interchangeable band of figures printed against a black background stood out against the fixed scene. As in the prior versions of the Praxinoscope the band was wrapped onto the cylinder to face the mirror facets, and the cylinder was rotated to produce the illusion of motion. The new device also sold well and set the pattern for future variations that would combine animation with a fixed background scene. The effect of the Praxinoscope Théâtre remains a delight to this day, which is a notable feat in the era of high-­definition high-dynamic-range expanded color space digital movies. In 1882 a new version for the home market was introduced, maintaining the concept of combining animated figures superimposed over a separate fixed background, called the Projection Praxinoscope, or Theatriaxinoscope

6  The Zoëtrope and the Praxinoscope

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Fig. 6.1  Left: a zoëtrope, based on the phenakistoscope; it does away with the need for a mirror. Right: an early version of the Praxinoscope that substitutes mirrors for the zoëtrope’s slits. The mirrors, outward facing on the inner cylinder, reflect the images of the phases of motion facing them on the inner cylinder.

(Hopwood 1899, p. 30). Reynaud abandoned the direct viewing of printed images on an opaque substrate (paper) and adopted a projectable band of transparent images. The device used the mirror stabilization optics to protect lithographed images printed on glass slides whose images had black backgrounds enabling them to be superimposed over a fixed background scene that was projected by its own magic lantern. This two-projector version was of significance because Reynaud had found a way to project animation using image stabilization and he had anticipated a key component of the celluloid cinema, movie film; in addition, his technique anticipated cell animation. The Projection Praxinoscope’s 12 glass slides were held together by fabric strips to form bands that were wrapped against a polygonal wall that flared outwardly, narrower at the bottom than the top. A frustumshaped polygonal array of 12 mirrors was located within the band of slides, facing them. Light was projected though each slide by a ­lamphouse, which was then reflected by the mirrors into a lens to be projected onto a screen. A separate magic lantern projected the fixed background scene, but both used the same lamphouse. This was the most advanced projection animation device the world had ever seen. However, this solution to the flickerless projection of animated images did not do well in the marketplace because it was too expensive and complicated to operate. It seems that the purchaser required a course of instruction by Reynaud himself. Despite this setback, the Projecting Praxinoscope would be developed into Reynaud’s tour de force, the Théâtre Optique. The Praxinoscope’s principal virtue remained intact since each frame was optically stabilized by the action of moving mirrors so one frame replaced another, without interruption, to produce flickerless projected animation. In fact, there was no flicker at any frame rate, something that could not be done with intermittency and an interrupting shutter. With Reynaud’s accomplishment the world had been given a third technique for projecting apparent motion. The other techniques are Naylor and Uchatius’ adaptation of the Praxinoscope using continuously moving images of the phases of motion and an arresting radial shutter and Brown’s intermittent motion for arresting

each frame with a shutter to occlude them as they moved through the projector’s gate. Despite the failure of the Projecting Praxinoscope in the marketplace, other versions flourished, and in February 1887 Reynaud and his mother set up in two apartments to serve as living quarters and a workshop, at 58 Rue Rodier. Today a plaque commemorating Reynaud’s tenancy can be found mounted on the building’s gray façade. Mother and son farmed out Praxinoscope components to several vendors to begin manufacturing, and Reynaud drew three sets of lithographed bands 26 inches long and 2 inches wide that “showed short scenes in twelve images on a pale background, with bright clear colours…. Reynaud drew inspiration from the repertoire of the magic lantern slide: a little girl skipping, a watermill, clowns….” Thirty picture strips or bands of different subjects were offered for the Praxinoscope, which was first available in a lampshade configuration, and then for other models. All told it sold 100,000 units to well-off families, according to Mannoni (2000, pp. 368, 369). Reynaud’s triumph, invented in 1888 was a scaled-up version of his Projecting Praxinoscope that began and ended its life with performances in Paris in the Théâtre Optique in 1892 and ran for the next 8 years to a cumulative attendance of half a million. The original show was the world’s first hand-drawn animated narrative film, Pauvre Pierrot (Mannoni 2000, p.  381). The Théâtre Optique setup consisted of two separate projectors, one magic lantern and one Praxinoscope projector, each with its own lamphouse as was the case for a biunial lantern projection. Both projectors were aimed at a frosted glass for rear screen projection. According to Mannoni (by email, September 22, 2020) the theater probably originally had an audience of between 100 and 150 until 1900 when it was rebuilt and increased to 300. The screen was relatively small, and if a contemporary drawing can be used as the basis for an estimate, probably about 5 feet wide. The magic lantern projected the background (another magic lantern was used for announcements), and the Praxinoscope projected foreground characters on the static background image, anticipating celluloid cinema’s cell animation with its painted backgrounds and foreground celluloid cells.

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6  The Zoëtrope and the Praxinoscope

Fig. 6.2  Charles-Émile Reynaud (Cinémathèque Française)

The Projecting Praxinoscope used a horizontally traveling row of hand-painted transparent delicate gelatin slides, 2.36 inches on a side, held together with top and bottom bands of leather separated by leather interstices, each with a metal reinforced circular perforation or grommet. The perforations were used to advance the band, made up of up to 616 slides, and to locate or index each slide with respect to the mirror system and projection optics. The band of slides moved continuously with each projected image optically stabilized on the screen. Movement was supplied by two side-­by-­side handcranked cylindrical drums, located at two corners of the “films’” rectangular path. The drums were sprocket wheels with teeth to engages the perforations and drive the band of slides along a rectangular closed-loop path. An inner cylinder, made up a polygonal array of 32 outward-facing mirrors, after the fashion of the home Projecting Praxinoscope, was mechanically synchronized to the sprocket wheel drums. Light was projected through the slides, to provide optical image stabilization just as it had been for the other Praxinoscope versions. The animated images, which occupied only a part of the composition, were reflected onto the rear screen using a large mirror that could be adjusted to move the superimposed characters to the appropriate part of the scene. The background magic lantern was located above the Praxinoscope projecting its image directly onto the rear screen. In this way projected apparent motion provided by

Fig. 6.3  The Théâtre Praxinoscope displayed apparent motion optically combined with a background. Top: in use in a home. Bottom: a photo of the device.

the moving band of slides was combined with a still background image.1 Reynaud meticulously planned the action of his stories and performances, which lasted about 15 minutes, so that he could rock and roll the band of slides to change their direction seamlessly transitioning from forward to backward motion when required and to vary the tempo of action with the possibility of using extremely low frame rates or even holding a still image on the screen for any length of time. In this way he was able to design a narrative extending the running time that would otherwise have been limited by 600 or so frames. The projection rate of the celluloid cinema in its early days, like that of Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique, was also variable, ­creating Walt Disney may be seen in an accurate and instructive YouTube video demonstrating the Praxinoscope.

1 

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Fig. 6.4  A poster for the Théâtre Optique. (Cinémathèque Française)

an interactive inexpedience involving audience, musicians, and projectionist, but unlike the early motion picture projectionist Reynaud was both the artist who drew each frame and the master projectionist-­animator for every screening. Sound for the Théâtre Optique performances was provided by piano accompaniment and sound effects that were triggered by metal tabs on the image band. Unfortunately Reynaud signed an onerous contract with the owners of the venue, the Musée Grévin, that turned him into a virtual slave who had to present his new shows for their approval and refresh them so frequently that at one point he had to close down to complete the herculean task of hand painting hundreds of slides. In addition his compensation was signifi-

cantly reduced by various expenses required to run the screenings that took place in the museum’s first floor Cabinet Fantastique. Reynaud was an artist as much as an inventor; had his ability to focus on business been as great, he might have been a wealthy man. Reynaud’s theatrical projections were the first exhibitions of sufficient duration and complexity to demonstrate the concept that the cinema of apparent motion could tell stories and satisfy the expectations of an audience. He anticipated the drive and indexing functions of perforations and also understood the requirement for a flexible image-carrying medium, but his work just predates the availability of suitable celluloid substrate, and he had to rely on a storage medium of his own devising, easily damaged gelatin slides. The celluloid

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Fig. 6.5 Top: Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique used a Projecting Praxinoscope to animate figures superimposed on backgrounds projected by a magic lantern. The Praxinoscope image was reflected by a

mirror, and the images were projected rear screen. Bottom: Reynaud’s “film.” (Cinémathèque Française)

cinema was directly based on and derived from photographic technology, whereas Reynaud’s cinema was based on the drawing and painting techniques of the magic lantern. The difficulties in making copies of his slides prevented him from being able to distribute the technology to other theaters but he also doesn’t seem to have been willing or able to franchise his invention by training other artist and operators. Reynaud attempted to update the content by using photographic slides after he had seen the Lumières’ Cinématographe projections. In 1895 he projected images probably produced by photographing individual poses using a conventional still camera. His creation, the comedy, Guillaume Tell, which was stencil-colored, was projected in 1896 at the Théâtre Optique. But it was too late: he could not compete with celluloid cinema, and his

Théâtre Optique was shut down, doomed by the efforts of Edison, the Lumières, and other creators of the photographic celluloid cinema whose new technology competed for the same audiences. In despair Reynaud smashed his apparatus and drowned most of his equipment and slides in the Seine, an act of self-destruction, frustration, and anger, and an eerie foreshadowing of the fate of another French cinema pioneer who had fallen on hard times and whose work had become passé, Georges Méliès. In 1923 Méliès burned the costumes, sets, and all of the negatives of the films stored at his Montreuil studio. Although Reynaud’s work must have been known to contemporary inventors, it may not have directly influenced the work of Edison and Dickson, who were influenced by Muybridge, Anschütz, and most importantly Marey.

7

Daguerre’s Photography

The camera obscura (dark chamber) was the precursor of and inspiration for the photographic camera, and it might also be thought of as the antecedent of television because it displays a real-time real image on a screen. In one version the camera obscura was a dark room in which people looked at images of the outside world cast on one of its walls using pinhole optics that produced an upside down, backward, and dim image. Any effort to increase brightness by enlarging the pinhole makes the image blurry. The camera obscura was first described in print in Caesarianos’ early sixteenth-century translation of the Treatise on Architecture by Roman engineer and architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (circa 90–20 BCE), but it should be noted that the optical imaging properties of a small hole were probably known centuries before (Hecht 1993, entry 3). A major development was the replacement of the pinhole with a lens, as suggested by Giovanni Battista Della Porta, who also proposed using it as a tool for painting, in his Magic Naturalis, published in 1558 (Hecht 1993, entry 8). It was discovered that by adding an aperture or stop to the lens to reduce the diameter of its opening, image quality was improved, but while much brighter than the pinhole image, the addition of the aperture made the image dimmer. The camera obscura was known and used by Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists, and it’s possible that its projected image helped them to establish the rules of rectilinear geometric perspective. Vermeer and other artists and painters, it is believed, used optical devices when applying paint to canvas. The camera obscura was also used as a theatrical medium in which performances took place in the sunlight as audiences watched the images that would have been upside down and inverted left to right, so mirrors were needed to turn the image right-side up. Smaller portable versions of the camera obscura were designed to be drawing aids, which were used through the early nineteenth century, one of which was described by Johannes Zahn in 1685. The camera obscura provided artists and inventors with the motivation to find a way to preserve its images; in other words, it was a motivation for the creation of photography. The tech-

nology of photography is based on the light properties of silver halides, which was first studied by the German polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687–1744) in 1727 (Newhall 2012, p. 10). He observed that a suspension of chalk (calcium carbonate) and silver in nitric acid turned from white to dark purple when exposed to light (Coe 1976). Schulze also demonstrated the image forming property of silver halides by placing stencils of letters and black paper silhouettes on bottles containing the suspension, which produced images that disappeared when the liquid was disturbed. Because of these experiments, some sources list him as the father of photography. Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786), born in Pomerania, a chemist of considerable accomplishments, identified that the reaction responsible for the darkening was caused by the silver compounds produced in nitric acid that turned into metallic silver when expose to light. (See the next chapter for more about the chemical reaction that takes place during the development of silver halide compounds.) Circa 1800, Thomas Wedgwood (1771– 1805), the son of celebrated potter Josiah, was the first person to attempt to create contact printed silhouette images of objects laid on sheets of paper or leather that had been soaked in a solution of silver nitrate. He also unsuccessfully attempted to use the camera obscura to record images; this failure due to the rapid fading of his silhouette images discourage him from further experimentation. Sir Humphry Davy described Wedgwood’s work in 1802  in The Journal of the Royal Institution (Newhall 2012, p. 13). Photography began with two different silver halide chemistry-­based systems that were both announced in the year 1839. One, Daguerre’s system, was exceedingly popular for nearly two decades, but turned out to be a technological dead end. The other, Fox Talbot’s system, did not achieve the daguerreotype’s immediate popularity but it is the basis for the negative-positive system of silver-halide photography, one of the two leading image capturing and display technologies, along with television, until the relatively recent adoption of digital imaging. The daguerreotype is a photographic image on a metal plate that one might reasonably have assumed could not possibly be used for capturing

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_7

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phases of motion, but so it was by the astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen in 1874 to record the transit of Venus. This turned out to be a crucial step in the history of cinema, as described in chapter 11 Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ. Daguerre and Fox Talbot, both artists and technologists, each in his own way, solved the problem of freezing the camera obscura image. The daguerreotype’s development began with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), who in 1830 became a lithographer, but a lithographer who could not draw, which led to his interest in preserving camera obscura images. As a result he developed a process he called Heliography (sun writing) in 1822, which he used for making contact prints from line drawings. His earliest surviving photography using a lens was taken out his window in 1826 or 1827 with a camera whose lens was focused on a pewter sheet thinly coated with bitumen (asphalt) whose exposure may have taken several days (Liesegang 1986, p. 40; Newhall 2012, pp. 13–19). The heat of the light that stuck the bitumen hardened it so that when it was bathed in solvents, the hardened areas remained in proportion to their exposure, thereby forming an image. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) eventually joined forces with Niépce to perfect what became known as the daguerreotype. Daguerre had a passion for recreating reality, as evidenced by his panorama work, and his creation of the Diorama (through scene) with Charles Marie Bouton (1781–1853), and the completion of the work begun by Niépce with his daguerreotype. Before Daguerre’s collaboration with Niépce, he was the co-proprietor of the Diorama, a theatrical experience whose conception was influenced by his work on the panorama, a large mural designed to simulate important historical scenes such as cityscapes or landscapes. The panorama was designed to immerse those who beheld it so that they felt as if they were viewing the actual scene from atop a hill or tall building as they stood on a raised circular platform gazing at the painted inside surface of a cylindrical wall. The invention of the panorama is credited to artist Robert Barker (1739–1806) who patented the concept in 1787. Its first exhibition took place in Edinburgh the following year, titled a View of Edinburgh. It was moved to London in 1789, and in 1793 Barker created an event space called The Panorama in Leicester Square, which is in the heart of London’s theater district. A report in The Times of January 10, 1792 gives the area of the mural as 1479 square feet (Hecht 1993, entry 99A). Barker’s theater remained in business an impressive 70  years and the building is now a Catholic Church. Panoramas were usually exhibited in cylindrical spaces that were tens of feet in diameter within special purposed buildings; in addition to cityscapes, battle scenes were favored. The panorama concept was taken up by others like English inventor, land surveyor, and artist, Thomas Horner (1785– 1844), who in 1821–1822 began planning a panorama that

7  Daguerre’s Photography

was housed in the building designed to exhibit it, the Colosseum in Regents Park (Hecht 1993, entry 127 J/2). Its design was based on the Parthenon, complete with Grecian-­ Doric columns. The interior was lit by a glazed dome structure that was 112 feet high. Horner’s panorama was completed, after 4 years of effort, in November 1829. It offered a 360° view of London, painted on canvassed walls, as seen from the top of St. Paul’s. It’s impact was heightened by the use of complicated lighting effects (Cook 1963). A special feature was the “Ascending Room” decorated in the Elizabethan style, which lifted a group of about a dozen people by means of “secret machinery to the required elevation, or gallery, from which the group viewed the panorama” (Timbs 1855). The panorama is the antecedent of a family of big screen motion picture processes described elsewhere in these pages: Cinéorama, Polyvision, Cinerama, CinemaScope, Todd-AO, and IMAX, all of which attempted to create what today we call immersion. The word and the concept, panorama, spread worldwide, working its way into a great many languages, inspiring similar displays. Another prefiguring of big screen projection of moving images is described by Huhtamo (2013a), the now all but forgotten moving panorama. The moving panorama was a medium used to depict both spectacle and motion, in which huge scrolls of canvas were advanced to produce continually revealed vistas or to tell stories with sequences of images, bringing to mind the magic lantern effect achieved by the horizontal motion of long colorful hand painted slides. For a time the panorama and the circular panorama captured the public’s attention but interest in them waned and the Diorama became the next attraction of it kind that next captured the public’s fancy. Daguerre and his partner Bouton had both apprenticed with painter and panorama designer Pierre Prévost (1764– 1823). Pinson (2012), the author of a favorable biography of Daguerre, writes that he “struggled for appreciation as a painter” but was also a set designer who joined with Bouton to create the Diorama. The Diorama was introduced at 4 Rue Sanson in Paris on July 11, 1822, near what is now the Place de la Republique. It was a multistage theatrical spectacle with changing time-of-day and other lighting effects. The effects, said to have a three-dimensional appearance, were produced using a single canvas painted on both sides, and not with sets that were multilevel and volumetric although the Diorama did use some foreground props, but some accounts incorrectly state that the sets were threedimensional. Each side of the canvas was painted with different but related images using both opaque and translucent pigments and solvents that were applied to both surfaces to heighten transmission. Lit from the front one image showed up and when lit from the back the other dominated. It’s a technique that had been used for peepshows, which produced dissolving-type transitions of lighting changes to emphasize aspects of one side or the other. The volatile

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Fig. 7.1  Heliography. Top: A contact print Niépce made using the process he devised for his work as a lithographer. Bottom: The first existing photograph made with a camera is of a view from Niépce’s window at Le Gras, his estate in Saint-Loup-de Varennes.

material that was used to achieve translucency was responsible for the deterioration of the paintings but a more pressing issue at the time was that it was a fire hazard. Presentations took place in the daytime since the theater used natural lighting emerging through the roof to be directed at the stage by a multiplicity of reflectors. The audience of about 300 sat in relative darkness under a low ceiling or drop roof (Huhtamo 2013a). The stage was viewed from some distance through a funnel-­like proscenium, the section of a frustum, to heighten the effect of looking at a scene some distance away through a window. Seemingly an ordinary theater space the theater was anything but since the entire audience section was rotated to view, in turn, one stage and then another, each with its own well-crafted canvas 80 feet wide and 40 feet high, viewed from a distance of 30–40 feet. For 15 minutes

the audience gazed upon the scene as its lighting changed and it revealed itself to them. The movement of the seating area was achieved by a team of men rotating a turntable that resembled a train yard roundhouse platform. A third stage at the Paris location was used on occasion but was usually reserved for the creation of future attractions (Timbs 1855). The first two Diorama presentations were titled The Valley of the Sarnen in the Canton Unterwalden, Switzerland, by Daguerre, and The Interior of Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, by Bouton. The well capitalized enterprise and its well mounted productions remained popular for 8 years. The Paris Diorama no long exists, having been destroyed in a fire on March 8, 1839. It was inadequately insured and was not rebuilt but Bouton, without the participation of Daguerre, in 1843 built a new one on the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle that suffered the same fiery fate; yet again, the dauntless

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Bouton opened another Diorama on the Champs-Elysées (Olby 1967). The London Diorama building was a two-stage version built between Park Square East and Albany Terrace, at the south end of Regent’s Park, a handsome three-story arrow-­ head-­shaped structure, which still stands but is no longer a theater. It did not require a third stage for preparation since its paintings were made in Paris. British Patent 4899, Diorama, was filed by the painter and architect John Arrowsmith, Daguerre’s brother-in-law, on February 18, 1824, which was issued the following month on the sixth. The patent contains a wealth of detail in its architectural drawing. In 1823 Arrowsmith managed the first London presentation of the interior of the Canterbury Cathedral. Other Diorama theaters were opened in major European cities and Havana, Cuba. Current theme park dark rides follow in the Diorama’s footsteps, like Disney’s Pirates of Caribbean, transporting attendees passively from scene to scene. Daguerre heard about Niépce’s project from Parisian optician and lens designer Charles Louis Chevalier (1804–1859), both of whom had been buying lenses and camera obscuras from him. On December 4, 1829, Daguerre and Niépce’s signed a partnership agreement meant to last for 10 years to

7  Daguerre’s Photography

find a better way to preserve camera obscura images but in July 1833 Niépce had a stroke and died (Newhall 2012, p.  18). Daguerre continued on, working in great secrecy while maintaining a business relationship with Niépce’s son that began in 1835, but the son did not contribute to the technology. Daguerre invented what came to be known as the daguerreotype, a light sensitive plate made of a sheet of copper that was electroplated on one side with a coating of silver. Electroplating, in this case, involved immersing a copperplate in a solution of silver salt and electrically charging it to attract silver ions to thinly coat one surface of the plate. Before placing the treated plate in the camera, it was exposed to iodine vapor to chemically form a light sensitive surface of silver iodide, a light sensitive silver halide compound. Daguerre’s photographic plate initially required an exposure of tens of minutes in daylight in a camera that used a mirror to flip the image to correct the inversion produced by the lens. The image was developed using mercury vapor that formed a shiny reflective silver amalgam (once also used for dental fillings) coating on the image highlights. A positive image is seen when the plate is a tipped at the correct angle to reflect light from the amalgam. Astronomer John Herschel, who had become fascinated with photography,

Fig. 7.2  The diagram of a Diorama from Arrowsmith’s British patent. The rotating seating is to the left and the stage to the right.

7  Daguerre’s Photography

Fig. 7.3  A Daguerreotype of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre.

made a major and lasting contribution by suggesting the use of a bath of sodium hyposulfite to keep the image from fading, after which the plate was washed in water. Chevalier designed the first two element photographic camera optic, an f/15 achromatic landscape lens, which Daguerre used to take his first photographs. (See chapter 24.) The design was based on a drastically stopped down reversed telephoto design whose correction was adequate but whose speed was too slow for portraits. This 3.5 inch diameter lens was used for daguerreotype cameras that were sold by Alphonse Giroux in 1839. The desire to create portraits using the process led to improvements in the next few years including an f/3.6 lens, more than ten times faster than Chevalier’s lens, which was designed by Hungarian mathematician Joseph Max Petzval (1807–1891) and manufactured by the German firm Voigtländer. (See chapter 23.) The quest to

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design for speed (light transmission) with good correction became a central challenge for lens designers for both still and motion picture lenses. The daguerreotype process was also enhanced by resensitizing the plate with halogen salts before exposure to make it more sensitive to light and by a process called “gilding,” which was accomplished after fixing the plate by gently heating it in a solution of gold chloride that flowed over its surface. This “toning” process increased the brilliance of the image and made its otherwise fragile surface more durable. The size of daguerreotypes ranged from the Whole Plate, 6½ by 8½ inches, to the miniature Ninth Plate, 2 by 2½ inches (Newhall 2012, p. 27). In his native France Daguerre was given a lifetime pension of six thousand francs per  annum by the government, based on his agreement to disclose the nitty-gritty of his process and to make the information available on a royalty-free basis. The decree to that effect was signed into law by King Louis Philippe on August 7, 1839 (Olby 1967). However, Daguerre, who complied with the law in France, had patented the process in England where he sought to extract royalties. He wrote a how-to-do-it pamphlet describing the process that was published worldwide, Historique et description du procédé du Daguérreotype et du Diorama. In its first two decades, the daguerreotype achieved worldwide commercial preeminence. Whatever its drawbacks, daguerreotypes have a charm and beauty and appear to have crisp etching-like sharpness. For a generation, they were widely used and highly prized as a medium for portraiture. Fox Talbot’s Calotype process, as we shall learn in the following chapter, because it involved a paper substrate, a textured material through which light must pass to make the print, could not produce the same detail as the daguerreotype. While the daguerreotype’s favored application was portraiture, the Calotype was favored for architectural photos. Talbot, as brilliant as he was, as happens, lacked the business acumen required for marketing his invention, which fell behind the daguerreotype in popularity, but the daguerreotype dropped out of favor by the early 1860s because of the challenges of viewing it as a positive rather than a negative, making prints, its fragile image surface, and its cost. Although the two processes were technically and aesthetically different, it’s worth pointing out that photography was, from inception, a medium that in the right hands produced beautiful images.

8

Fox Talbot’s Photography

The photographic process that prevailed until relatively recently is based on the invention of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), who was born in Dorset in South West England. He was a brilliant man who studied the classics at Cambridge and contributed papers on mathematics and optics to the Royal Society and other organizations. In his early 30s, he became frustrated by his attempts to use the camera obscura as a drawing aid, which motivated him to figure out how to capture its image, a process he would call “photogenic drawings.” The medium for his effort was paper rather than Daguerre’s silver halide coated on a copperplate. In Talbot’s process of 1834, which he did not disclose at the time, the first step was to moisten paper in a dilute bath of silver chloride and then to wash it in a solution of silver nitrate. These experiments did not use a camera obscura but rather involved placing flat objects, such as leaves and lace, on the treated paper to produce reverse silhouettes that required many hours of exposure to sunlight. These photograms produced an image using a process called printing-­ out, which did not require chemical development but would fade with time and exposure to light. By February 1835, he realized that he could make positives from his negatives by contact printing the original on sensitized paper thus giving the world the negative-positive photographic process. He used a salt solution in an attempt to fix his images, a process that merely slowed the fading. He also found that repeated washes of salt and silver solutions increased the sensitivity of the paper, which he exposed in his camera obscura when still wet. During the summer of 1835 he was taking photos of buildings and had reduced the exposure time from hours to 10 minutes. Upon learning of Daguerre’s work in 1839, Talbot announced his own method (Newhall 2012, p. 20). Talbot, as a Fellow of the Royal Society, was well-­ connected; one of his friends in the society was astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had set about to do his own photographic experiments after learning about Talbot’s. Herschel, a linguist, coined the word photography and wrote a letter to Talbot in 1839 suggesting the use of the terms negative and positive for the camera original and print. Talbot was unable

to prevent his photographs from fading and therefore welcomed Herschel’s suggestion to use sodium thiosulfate to fix or chemically stabilize the exposed negatives and positives to prevent their fading. Sodium thiosulfate has since been called hypo by photographers because it was once known as hyposulfite of soda. In September 1840, Talbot discovered that a latent image existed after exposure that could be chemically developed, just as was the case for the daguerreotype. Now he prepared the negative using fine writing paper, by successively bathing it in two solutions, first of silver nitrate and then of potassium iodide, which produced silver iodide that was impregnated in the fibers of the paper. Immediately prior to exposure, the paper was made more sensitive to light by washing it in a bath of gallic acid and silver nitrate; the exposure still had to be made with wet paper. The exposure time was now only a few minutes, and the latent image was developed by bathing the exposed paper negative in another bath of silver nitrate and gallic acid after which the image was fixed in hypo. After washing and drying the negative, positive prints were made from it after it had been waxed to improve its transparency. The negative was held in contact with paper that had been soaked in a silver chloride solution, which was allowed to dry before its next soaking in a solution of silver nitrate. The paper negative and the printing paper were held in contact in a frame with sunlight passing through the negative to expose the print. After the exposure, the print paper was fixed in hypo. The negative-positive system’s printmaking capability provides an enormous advantage compared with the daguerreotype. However, Daguerre was on the right track with regard to the basic structure of a photographic material by coating a sensitized layer on a substrate. For the daguerreotype, the light sensitive coating was silver sensitized to light by exposure to iodine vapor on a base or substrate of silver-­ plated copper. For Talbot’s Talbotype, there was no distinction between the light sensitive surface and the substrate since the paper base was impregnated with silver salt. Paper is permeable so developing chemicals could reach the exposed silver halide to develop it but improvements in the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_8

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negative plates that could be prepared beforehand and stored but their camera plates were not sufficiently sensitive to light and thus never became widely used. However, their albumen light sensitized coating became a viable material for paper prints or slides. The same year Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857) of the United Kingdom, made glass plates coated with collodion, a material similar to cellulose, sensitized with a solution of silver nitrate. These plates remained wet for exposure giving the technique its name: the wet-plate collodion process or simply the wet-plate process. Archer came up with his own chemistry for developing the plates, which could then be used for making paper prints or slides. In the United States, in the early 1860s, Peter Abel and Thomas Leyland stirred up interest in photographic magic lantern slides by exhibiting popular subjects of scenery and statues. Abel and Leyland may have been first to use the word stereopticon for their projector to promote the concept of professional magic lantern shows with images having strong monocular depth cues and fine pictorial quality (Huhtamo 2013b). The word stereopticon is sometimes used to describe a stereoscopic magic lantern with two lenses, or any magic lantern, but the term originally had nothing to do with a device that can project stereoscopic images. In the Fig. 8.1  A Calotype of Fox Talbot by John Moffat, 1864. Frank Loesser (1949) 1948 musical, Where’s Charlie, set in Oxford University in the year 1892, the title character, in the negative-positive process depended on decoupling the two, song Make a Miracle, speculates about future inventions: and significant efforts were made in perfecting the materials wireless telegraphy, electric lights, fountain pens, lie detecfor both the light sensitive layer and the base. Thus negative-­ tors, horseless carriages that fly, and in addition Charlie sings: positive photography had two technological evolutionary “Someday they’ll have stereopticons that move…Stereoptipaths: one for the creation of the light sensitive surface and cons appearing in cathedrals larger than the Louvre.” the other for the substrate. The immediate motivator for Before the advent of dry gelatin plates, photographers improving the process Talbot called the Talbotype or the coated their collodion wet-plates in the field in a light-proof Calotype was to find a way to make prints free from the tent. That practice ended with the invention of Richard Leach imprint of paper’s texture. For that the switch to glass for Maddox (1816–1902), a British physician, who replaced colnegatives was obvious but a not so obvious idea was that lodion with gelatin. He added calcium bromide and then silsilver halide salts could be added to albumen, a transparent ver bromide in solution to wet gelatin to create what today permeable material, to create a light sensitive layer that could we call a photographic emulsion, a process Maddox made be coated on glass plates. public in 1871  in The British Journal of Photography This new approach was the invention of Claude Félix (Liesegang 1986, p. 41). The emulsion was allowed to flow Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (1805–1870), a cousin of Joseph or was spread by hand onto the glass plate; such a plate could Nicéphore Niépce, who in 1847 in his laboratory near Paris, be stored before use, unlike collodion wet plates, and theremade photos using light sensitized albumen coated glass fore could be manufactured, distributed, and sold to the phoplates (Newhall 2012, p. 59). The following year the German-­ tographer, with the additional advantage that the plates did born brothers Frederick (1809–1879) and Ernst William not require development immediately after exposure. Dry Langenheim (1809–1874), working in Philadelphia as por- plates also required shorter exposures permitting the photogtrait photographers and stereographers, made an important raphy of action that was also to the relief of portrait sitters improvement after they made the transition from the who had endured posing interminably. The process of makdaguerreotype to the Calotype. They are credited with hav- ing the emulsion was improved in 1873 by another ing produced the first positive photographic glass slides in Englishman, Richard Kennett, who forced the gelatinous 1848, with their Hyalotype process that also used albumen emulsion through a coarsely woven canvas to create noodles coated on glass, which they exhibited at the Crystal Palace that were then soaked in water. In 1878 Charles Harper Exhibition in 1851, in London (Liesegang 1986, p. 40; Hecht Bennett discovered that the emulsion’s sensitivity to light 1993, entry 202D). Their positive slides were produced from was greatly improved before washing by heating it to 90°

8  Fox Talbot’s Photography

Fahrenheit for several days to ripen it. Film is still being manufactured by extruding emulsion noodles and ripening by heating in the Eastman Kodak factory in Rochester New York, the only remaining plant that makes motion picture film (Shanebrook 2010). The photographic emulsion creates an image this way: the lens forms an image within the emulsion, which is made mostly of permeable gelatin coated on a substrate or base, such as glass, celluloid, or paper; when the emulsion is coated on celluloid, it is called film. The term emulsion is not an accurate one since an emulsion is a suspension of non-­ miscible droplets of one liquid in another whereas the light sensitive layer is a colloidal suspension of pale yellow silver halide salts, bromine and iodine, and other chemicals, such as dyes, all of which are dispersed throughout the gelatin. The dyes are used to extend the emulsion’s inherent blue-violet sensitivity to the entire visible spectrum. As the lens projects its image in the emulsion, an invisible latent image is formed by the silver bromide crystals when photons above a certain energy threshold strike and ionize them, serving to stimulate the reduction of the entire crystal to silver metal when immersed in a solution of developer. The emulsion also has silver iodide within it to assist the action of sulfur molecules that are within the gelatin to trap liberated electrons. Film manufacturers learned that some supplies of gelatin, which is made from collagen in animal body parts, had sulfur impurities that contributed to the performance of the emulsion by enhancing its ability to entrap electrons, which were freed as a result of the photon-induced ionization process. To bring up the latent image, the exposed film is bathed in a solution of developer, often hydroquinone, which chemically reduces the ionized silver bromine crystals by adding electrons to these crystals, which also removes the bromine of the exposed crystals leaving image forming metallic silver crystal grains within the emulsion. This chemical reaction has

Fig. 8.2  Film grain is made up of silver particles, as seen here as a low-power microscope image of an eye.

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been characterized as “a catalyzed reduction of silver halide” (Sturge 1977, p. 113). As the developer’s chemical reaction progresses, some of it gets exhausted and combines with the sulfur (in the form of sulfite) in the emulsion and becomes inactive. Next, an acetic solution called stop bath is used to halt the action of the developer that would, if left unchecked, reduce all of the remaining silver bromine crystals wiping out any image. The film is now immersed in a solution of fixer to remove or bleach away the unexposed silver bromine to prevent further chemical activity that would cause the image to fade. What remains is a negative image consisting of silver grains dispersed in gelatin. The film is then washed in water and dried. Examining the processed film under magnification reveals black particles of various sizes and shapes, grains of silver, which in the aggregate form the image, a shadow image of graduated density when light passes through them, which can be used to print a positive image using a similar photographic emulsion (The Focal… 1960). George Eastman (1852–1932) was a 23-year-old bank clerk in Rochester, New York in 1877, the city where he was born into modest circumstances. Young Eastman planned a trip to Central America after having heard that land speculation was a great opportunity, and he thought that it might be useful to take photos during his trip. After having turned his attention to it, Eastman became more interested in photography than a South American venture but found the shortcomings of the wet plate process to be vexing, given its burdensome preparations and associated paraphernalia. Eastman knew about Maddox’s dry plates, but he was unable to evenly hand coat the emulsion on glass, which in 1879 led him to devise a coating machine. He was successful in his efforts and the next year began to commercially produce dry plates, forming a partnership in January 1881 with Henry A. Strong, a friend of his family and owner of a company that made buggy-whips. Their new company, the Eastman Dry Plate Company, became successful based on both the quality of its product and good customer service. Three years later Eastman’s partnership with Strong was reorganized as a corporation to raise the capital needed to expand the business. The former bank clerk had become a full-time inventor and entrepreneur, establishing his company at 343 E. State Street, Rochester, New York, which became Kodak corporate headquarters and remains so to this day. In 1900 manufacturing was moved to what became known as Kodak Park near Lake Ontario (Brayer 2011). Despite the fact that he had the ability to manufacture good dry plates for the professional market, Eastman recognized that glass was not the ideal substrate but celluloid, the most likely candidate to replace glass, with the required characteristics did not exist. In 1883 he hired engineer William Hall Walker, an excitable man whose personality contrasted with Eastman’s reserved calm, and together they worked to improve and simplify photography. The hiring of

8  Fox Talbot’s Photography

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Fig. 8.3  A young and dapper George Eastman.

Walker, who had been manufacturing cameras and running his own company, was the beginning of a pattern that Eastman would follow in years to come in which he strategically acquired companies and hired the best talent he could find. Eastman believed that there was a market for a photographic system that would make taking pictures far more convenient but efforts during the past three decades to market what he had in mind, roll film and the roll film holder had failed. The roll film holder, intended for the serious still photographer, serendipitously advanced the creation of the celluloid cinema. In 1854 Parisian Maurice Lespiault described an adapter for plate cameras, a roll film holder that contained a cloth backed roll of light sensitive paper, which was offered for sale a year later. In 1875 Englishman Léon Warnerke began selling a roll film holder that used paper stripping film (Liesegang 1986, p. 41). Lespiault and Warnerke’s roll film and holders did not make much of an impact in the marketplace but Eastman and Walker revive the concept, as described in USP 407,396, Roll-Holder Indicator, filed July 13, 1885. Part of what Eastman teaches is a method for punching perforations between each frame. This method for indexing film, as it is advanced for the next exposure, was an aid in developing and printing negatives, and it’s undoubt-

edly the first description of film perforations, anticipating Edison’s filing of his August 24, 1891, disclosure, Kinetograph Camera. It also predates the use of perforations by Reynaud and Le Prince, but it was the paper film itself, within the roll film holder, that went on sale in 1888, which furthered the cause of those who were working to photograph the phases of motion. In 1888, the year that Eastman came up with the trademark Kodak, he offered a new kind of photographic system for the amateur market, an intrepid step to take when his prior experience had been selling to advanced users who had the expertise required by the technology of the time. For what came to be called snapshots, Eastman and Walker designed a new kind of camera, the Kodak No. 1, which was sold loaded with paper film 70 mm wide that could take one hundred 63 mm diameter snapshots. The film was structured with a thin coating of gelatin between the light sensitive gelatin emulsion and the paper backing in order to facilitate the stripping of the image bearing emulsion from the backing. Eastman successfully implemented the photofinishing business: the exposed and developed delicate emulsion was stripped from its paper support and laid on a glass plate to enable the printing of snapshots free of the texture of the paper.1 The choice of a circular photo may have been based on the fact that a lens forms a circular image and people were familiar with circular magic lantern slides. In addition, a photo whose horizon was tipped could be more easily corrected in printing than one with a rectangular format. The camera was sent by the user to the factory to develop the film and make prints, after which the prints and camera loaded with film were returned by mail. With this system Eastman created amateur photography and the photofinishing business, which according to Coe (1992, p. 30) “began to revolutionize photography.” In 1889 Eastman greatly advanced his system by doing away with clunky stripping film thereby streamlining his photofinishing service by offering the Kodak No. 2 camera loaded with cellulose nitrate base film. George Eastman, who had begun his photographic sojourn with a proposed trip to South America to make his fortune, was on the way to making a fortune, but in Rochester, New York, USA. Celluloid enabled modern photography and the cinema of Edison et al. The chemical processes for making collodion, which was used by Frederick Scott Archer’s plates, and celluloid are related. Collodion is a viscous solution made from pyroxylin (a precursor of celluloid nitrate) by dissolving Stripping film was also the basis for an obscure Eastman color process that was used for only one feature film, as described in chapter 46, Subtractive Technologies. 1 

8  Fox Talbot’s Photography Fig. 8.4  Top half of the cover sheet of Eastman’s roll film holder USP, the first device to perforate celluloid film for indexing.

Fig. 8.5  A photo of George Eastman taken with a Kodak roll film camera.

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pyroxylin in ether or alcohol or an ether and alcohol mixture. Pyroxylin is made by cleaning cotton in caustic soda and then nitrating it. According to Haynes (1953), the invention of pyroxylin, in 1846, by the Frenchman Louis-Nicholas Ménard (1822–1901) was described at the time as a feat of chemical engineering. In addition to being a precursor of collodion, pyroxylin is used to this day as a dressing for wounds. Celluloid, derived from pyroxylin, is considered to be the first plastic, or more properly the first thermosoftening plastic, a polymer or large molecule or chain of molecules with a repeated structure, which can be softened and then molded by heating that when cooled assumes a stable form. In 1855 the Englishman Alexander Parkes (1813–1890) patented a celluloid nitrate manufacturing process for a product he called Parkesine and in 1862 demonstrated the kind of molded plastic parts that are common today but by 1865 the process was a commercial failure. John Wesley Hyatt (1837–1920), a printer, entered a contest in 1863 in an unsuccessful attempt to win a $10,000 prize to create an ivory substitute, at that time in demand for billiard balls. Hyatt invented the first successful injection molding machine that he used for making billiard balls and he and his brother Isaiah Smith Hyatt, both living in Albany, New  York, were granted USP 105,338, Improvement in Treating and Molding Pyroxyline, on July 12, 1870. The patent describes a recipe that includes grinding wet pyroxyline into a pulp and expelling water, mixing it with finely ground camphor gum, heating to enable the camphor to act as a pyroxyline solvent, molding it under heat and pressure, and allowing it to cool. The brothers’ Celluloid Manufacturing Company was founded in 1872 and was financed by a group of investors, principally General Marshall C.  Lefferts, President of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company. Immediately after it was founded the company moved from Albany to Newark, New Jersey, in the winter of 1872–1873. Hyatt played an active part in the Celluloid Manufacturing Company as an inventor and was granted about 250 patents. During the next 40 years, the company’s products included combs, piano keys, collars, and thick slabs of clear celluloid that could be sliced and used as a replacement for photographic glass plates. Hyatt, who coined the word celluloid, devised the machine for slicing the celluloid slabs into thin sheets. Celluloid Manufacturing Company chemist John Henry Stevens and investor Lefferts anticipated Eastman and Walker’s continuous casting process for producing large quantities of transparent flexible film base, a matter that was decided by litigation. Eastman’s chemist Reichenbach also created a process for making nitrocellulose base, to replace the paper base roll film, as described in USP 417,202, filed April 9, 1889, Manufacture of Flexible Photographic Films. The manufacturing technique consisted of the spreading of liquid acetate

8  Fox Talbot’s Photography

called dope on glass plates that were 3½ feet wide by 80 feet long. Reichenbach calls for the addition of fusel oil to improve the physical properties of the dope mixture and coating the glass surface with a solution of wax dissolved in benzene to facilitate the removal of the acetate film from its surface. The volatile components of the dope evaporated overnight allowing the resultant cellulose nitrate film to be peeled from the glass table and spooled onto rolls, which were sent to another room to be coated with emulsion. Kodak maximized the throughput of this batch process by running it 24 hours a day and coating dope on 200 foot long glass tables, but the company could not keep up with demand (Brayer 2011). It was the ability to manufacture flexible celluloid in great lengths, some half century after Talbot’s invention that directly enabled Edison’s cinema system. The new film was also made by Eastman’s competitor, the Blair Camera Company of Boston, which in 1891 began manufacturing it by coating emulsion on celluloid base provided by the Celluloid Manufacturing Company. Blair was the only supplier for Edison’s 35 mm format for some of 1892 and 1893 during a period when Eastman experienced production problems. Blair made the diffusing base required for Kinetoscope prints, but it was only after September 1896 that Edison switched to the Eastman product when Blair itself had problems making the clear substrate required for projection. As a result of having lost patent litigation with Eastman, and other financial and organizational problems, in 1899 Blair sold out to Eastman and was relocated to Rochester (Herbert 1996). In 1890 Eastman hired Darragh de Lancey, a mechanical engineer just graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. De Lancey oversaw the planning and building of Kodak Park and successfully transferred Kodak’s manufacturing procedures to its plant in Harrow, England. His last job for Eastman, before leaving the company because of poor health, was converting Kodak Park’s manufacturing of substrate and emulsion coating to the new continuous web process, a task that was taken over by future Kodak president Frank W. Lovejoy. The web process is also known as continuous casting because it coats dope on the highly polished metal surface of a heated large diameter revolving drum. By the time the drum completes one revolution the acetate is dry and stripped from it and spooled onto a roll to be taken to another machine for emulsion coating. The resulting long sheets of film, which eventually were a mile or more in length, were cut down to the widths required for the required format. In his memorial to Eastman Kodak film, Shanebrook (2010) describes the process that continues to be used for making it in the only factory remaining for motion picture film, as described in chapter 52. Frederick A. Talbot (1926) in his book Moving Pictures, How They Are Made and Worked, describes a visit to Kodak’s celluloid manufacturing facility in Rochester; this is a

8  Fox Talbot’s Photography

s­ ummary of his report: The primary ingredient for cellulose nitrate is gun cotton or pyroxylin, which is made by thoroughly cleaning flax or cotton with caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) in large rotating vats after which the pyroxylin is dried. The next step is nitration, which is accomplished by dropping the pyroxylin that is stored in large perforated baskets, into a huge rapidly spinning vat where it is dissolved into a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acid that is streamed into it. At the conclusion of this step, much of the remaining acid is run off by spinning the mixture after which the nitrated pyroxylin is transferred to what Talbot calls “a capacious washing machine… a wringer” and drenched in a continuous stream of running water for a number of cycles to insure the removal of all the acid. What remains is cellulose nitrate, which is then dissolved in solvents, like wood alcohol, using large stirring paddles in the dough machine. (Ether, acetone, amyl acetate, and camphor are other solvents that have been used.) The result is a viscous dope, which is stored and then spread onto the surface of the polished drum using the continuous casting process, as described above. The drums Talbot saw were 3½ feet wide that cast sheets 2000 feet long 0.005 inch thick. George Eastman, in a letter dated March 18, 1925, confirmed that the width of the coated base was 41 inches (Richardson 1925). The cellulose nitrate film was next coated with light sensitive gelatin emulsion and cut to the width required for the product. Prior to this, instead of pouring dope onto long glass sheets or continuous casting, film was made another way: dope was poured to form large sheets that were stacked on top of each other and compressed into a solid block in a hydraulic press. To make the thin celluloid acetate base for photography, the block was sliced into sheets of the desired thickness using a planning machine, dried and cut to the required width (Jones 1915, Fig. 8.6  Tanks storing celluloid acetate precursors at the Eastman plant in Rochester. (Talbot 1926)

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pp.  21, 22). This is probably the way The Celluloid Manufacturing Company supplied celluloid to Carbutt who coated it with emulsion for the film he supplied to the Edison lab for Dickson’s early cylinder experiments, as described in chapter 12. Episcopal Rector Hannibal Goodwin (1882–1900), a photographer and lanternist, filed USP 610,861, on May 2, 1887, Photographic Pellicle and Process of Producing Same, a description for “making transparent flexible, photographic-­ film pellicles…” of nitrocellulose that had heretofore “been supported by glass plates.” Goodwin filed ten United Sates patents between 1881 and 1899, the first application was made on November 30, 1881, titled Phototypography, granted as USP 265,669, and his last, granted when he was deceased, was filed on April 22, 1899, USP 700,140, Camera. Goodwin was a practicing inventor in the photographic field; his interest in perfecting celluloid as a photographic substrate may have been influenced by living in Newark, the home of the Celluloid Manufacturing Company. Goodwin’s photographic film patent ‘861 languished in the Patent Office for 11 years before being granted on September 13, 1898. This turned out to be of great financial benefit to the patent’s owner since it remained enforceable for many more years than had it been granted in a timely way since at the time a US patent’s protection began on the date of its granting. Eastman chemist Reichenbach’s similar USP ‘202 (noted above) was filed on April 9, 1889, about 2 years after Goodwin’s disclosure was filed, but unlike Goodwin’s it was granted in a timely way, on December 10, 1889. If only one of Goodwin’s claims proved to be valid Eastman was infringing and possibly on the hook for substantial royalties. The disclosures of Goodwin and Reichenbach have a ­different focus and teach the use of different solvents for

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making film quality nitrocellulose, but both teach depositing dope on a glass surface. Reichenbach’s also describes a production process for manufacturing thin flexible film as given in a claim that reads, in part: “…a fluid solution of ­nitro-­cellulose and camphor and subsequently depositing and spreading such solution upon a rigid supporting-surface and drying it.” Adding camphor to nitrocellulose had been described by the Hyatt brothers in USP 105,338, Improvement in Treating and Molding Pyroxyline, filed on July 12, 1870. Eastman was blindsided by the granting of Goodwin’s submarine patent, leading to years of litigation and resulting in a settlement, in which Kodak paid Goodwin’s assignee, the company that became General Aniline and Film, $5 million in 1914 (about $125 million today). With that payment Eastman settled past royalties and got a license for the remainder of the patent’s life, through September 1915. Two years later Eastman settled another lawsuit with a payment of $1.5 million based on the priority of the invention of the continuous casting of film by John Henry Stevens and Marshall C.  Lefferts of the Celluloid Manufacturing Company (Haynes 1953). Eastman Kodak continually improved their photographic materials, and as noted, the company often relied on purchasing the assets of other companies to do so, including the aforementioned Blair Camera Company, and also Wratten and Wainwright of England. This acquisition, in particular, advanced Eastman’s research and development efforts with the hiring of Charles Edward (usually C. E.) Kenneth Mees (1882–1960), who in 1912, established the Kodak Research Laboratory. Another member of Wratten and Wainwright’s team was John George Capstaff (1879–1960), who perfected the reversal process, a major reason for 16  mm’s success. Kodak worked on non-curling celluloid film and a replacement for the combustible celluloid nitrate base and produced their first slow burning cellulose acetate safety film in 1908, but the material proved to be brittle, attributable to the tetrachloroethane used as the solvent in manufacturing. In his last days at the Edison studio, in 1909, Edwin S.  Porter tested Eastman’s nonflammable cellulose acetate stock reporting that: “After making several tests of the new Eastman negative and positive film, we find the speed, quality, and action, during the course of operation is about the same as our present

8  Fox Talbot’s Photography

film…The texture of the stock is much harder and not so flexible and (we) do not think it will stand the wear and tear as our old (film stock), but this can only be determined by time” (Musser 1991, p. 457). Seeking to improve the acetate base Kodak switched to acetone as a solvent in 1909, but production was halted in 1911 because of manufacturing difficulties. During the First World War the US government placed orders for acetate dope used for coating the cloth that covered aircraft. This spurred additional research and development, which was also motivated by the possibly of the market for home movies. George Eastman firmly opposed the use of flammable cellulose nitrate for this application and research continued in an attempt to find a method for improving the physical properties of the less flammable cellulose acetate base. Work on improving the base had been conducted on-­site at the manufacturing plants but after 1925 the Kodak Research Laboratory took over safety base research and development for 16 mm, which had been introduced in 1923. From that time onward, Kodak made an effort to make the transition to cellulose acetate safety base film for its entire product line, which was not achieved until 1950. George Eastman and his marketing people employed business practices that had the intended effect of stifling competition that caught the attention of the US Department of Justice. Eastman Kodak’s corporate management had aggressively built the company’s marketplace dominance. But Eastman was an enlightened industrialist who, as a result of hiring MIT graduate de Lancey, became so enamored of the school that over a period of years, he anonymously contributed many millions of dollars to it. He also made substantial contributions to medical and dental clinics for children and founded the Eastman School of Music. He initiated a system of benefits for Eastman employees including a stock option plan using shares taken from his personal equity and he created an annual profit-sharing plan. He took steps to build an organization and engender a corporate culture that virtually guaranteed lifetime employment to those who remained loyal. This recognition of the contribution of employees was as unusual in George Eastman’s day as it is today. A more cynical view is that Eastman and his executives used paternalism to forestalled unionization.

9

Protocinematographers: Duboscq to Le Prince

This chapter is about the earliest inventors who strove to create photographic sequences of the phases of motion. These efforts were taken on by two groups, differentiated by their motivations: the first I have dubbed protocinematographers, who attempted to photograph and represent quotidian action as an end in itself; and the second are described by a term of long standing, chronophotographers, who engaged in the scientific study of motion using photography. Hopwood (1899) may have been the first to lump both together into the category chronophotography. While subsequent writers have followed this broad classification the inventors discussed in this chapter, the protocinematographers, don’t neatly fit into this catch-all grouping. To clarify, the two groups can be distinguished this way: the early sequence photographers, the protocinematographers, attempted to capture the phases of motion for its own sake and to display or project their work, which is to be distinguished from that of the chronophotographers who were bent on measurement and the collection of data, without projection as their primary goal. In my view, protocinematography can be seen to derive from Plateau’s phenakistoscope of 1832, and the concept of apparent motion, while chronophotography is a continuation of the work of Janssen and his photographic rifle, an instrument designed to photograph and measure the transit of Venus of 1874, as described in chapter 11 (Hecht 1993, entry 274F). Both groups depended on the invention of photography and had challenges in common, in particular, with regard to camera design. Members of both groups contributed to the development of the celluloid cinema by providing a record of and demonstrations of their attempts, successful and unsuccessful, both being of value. In 1849 Sir Charles Wheatstone proposed that sequential photography could take the place of drawings of the phases of motion 17 years after Plateau’s invention of the phenakistoscope; by implication photography could also be used for magic lanterns adapted for projection like those designed by Naylor in 1843 or Uchatius in 1845 (Liesegang 1986, p. 43). As has been described in the chapter Plateau Invents the Phenakistoscope, the magic lantern was adapted to project

apparent motion using drawings of the phases of motion. It was the new technology and its improving capabilities that enabled replacing painted slides with photographs. The most successful instrument for capturing the phases of motion turned out to be the integral single-lens camera using a band of film. But before such an instrument was available inventors used the following techniques: posed motion, a battery of many cameras, and a multi-lens camera. Absent film, the ability to photograph a sequence was limited by the medium of image storage, the glass or metal plate. The arrival of a viable cinema of apparent motion largely depended on film, first roll film with a paper base, and then film with a celluloid base. It was Marey, the principal chronophotographer, who first created single-lens cameras using roll film for his locomotion studies. Coe (1981, p. 38) writes that the first suggestion for using photography to create a motion picture was made by Jules Duboscq, although he was anticipated by Wheatstone’s suggestion of 1849, as noted above. Duboscq, who is mentioned elsewhere in these pages in connection with his improvements to carbon arc light and his work in the field of stereography, filed a French patent on November 12, 1852, for a stereoscopic moving image device based on the phenakistoscope that he called the Stereo-Fantascope or Bioscope, which was meant to display 12 stereopairs of the phases of motion on a rotating disk. Hecht (1993, entry 204S) comments: “Unfortunately, Duboscq did not have any idea as to how his 12 pairs of phases of movement should be produced.” Duboscq, living in Paris, enlisted the help of photographer Antoine Françoise Jean Claudet, a Frenchman living in London, who followed through on the concept by designing and building a stereoscopic moving image system. For stereo photography he used two separate cameras mounted on a tripod, each camera having a rotating plate-holding disc, 25  cm in diameter; each disc held four plates, approx. 6 × 9 cm. “Each stereopair was exposed in sequence; allowing one second for the movement of the plate-holding disc, and less than one second for exposure, four pairs of the plates could be

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_9

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exposed in approximately eight seconds” (Hecht 1993, entry 204H). The stereoscopic daguerreotype plates were advanced by means of a spring-loaded mechanism that was a version of a magic lantern slide carrier. The images were viewed through left and right eyepieces and mirrors, according to Coe (1981, pp.  38, 39). A demonstration of this moving image stereoscope took place for the British Association at Belfast in September, 1852, and on March 23, 1853, Claudet filed for a patent that was granted as GB 711, Improvements in Stereoscopes. Liesegang (1986, p.  30) wrote that Claudet’s stereoscope was offered for sale over a period of time in various iterations (Claudet called it the Fantascope Stereoscope) and states that the invention was “the earliest known photographic instrument for the photography of stroboscopic pictures; in a certain sense as the ancestor of the film-camera” (Hecht 1993, entry 204H). Thomas Sutton, the photographer who took the slides used for Maxwell’s additive color demonstration, in 1860/1861 proposed a camera with a large number of lenses and a rotating shutter with many openings to take a temporal series of images on a large plate as a source for a stereoscopic zoëtrope (Stereotrope). According to Liesegang (1986, p. 43), the camera may not have been built. Cameras built along these lines had been available since 1860 for taking multiple portraits at the same time under the brand Diamond-Cameo-Cameras. According to Mannoni (2000, p.  252): “The essential principles on which present day cinematography is based were defined by the Belgian Henry Désiré Du Mont in 1861 and, three years later, by the Frenchman Louis-Arthur Ducos du Hauron.” Du Mont’s French Patent 49,520 filed on May 2, 1861, was titled Appareil photographique propre à reproduire les phases successive d’un mouvement (Camera to reproduce the successive phases of a movement). In one description plates were mounted on the surface of a stepped drum and rapidly brought into place for exposure by means of a shutter synchronized to the rotation of the drum. Du Mont’s camera was demonstrated for the Société Française Photographie on January 17, 1862. The details of what was actually demonstrated are ambiguous and his apparatus did not survive (Liesegang 1986, 44). In the patent, he describes photography of the phases of motion using several different means: first, a camera with photographic plates (as noted) attached to the outward faces of a polygon, which turned about its axis and advanced a plate at a time for exposure; second, photographic plates arranged alongside each other in a long frame or holder allowing for the plates to be moved either vertically or horizontally for successive exposures; and third, a system for advancing photographic plates and dropping them into a container after they’ve been exposed, an approach later used by Donisthorpe. Louis-Arthur Ducos du Hauron, a visionary inventor who made contributions to color photography and stereoscopic displays, as described elsewhere in these pages, also made

9  Protocinematographers: Duboscq to Le Prince

Fig. 9.1  A sketch of Dumont’s camera, illustrating the third method described in his patent. Plates were exposed in succession and dropped into the lower compartment.

suggestions in the field of the photography and display of motion. He is now highly regarded, as confirmed by CornwellClyne’s1 (1951, p. XVIII) opinion of his contributions: “(He was) a first-class genius who died, as other prophets have died, unhonoured and unsung.” At 2:00  PM on March 1, 1864, du Hauron filed a 19 page illustrated disclosure for a French patent for two cameras designed to photograph apparent motion, which issued as FR 61,976, Appareil destine à reproduire photographiquement une scène quelconque avecs toute les transformations qu’elle a subies, pendent un temp déterminé (Apparatus intended to photographically reproduce any scene with all the changes it has undergone, over a period of time). The first design taught is for a camera with 20 rows of alternating lenses: 10 rows of 14 and 10 rows of 15 lenses. These rows of small lenses are staggered horizontally and comprise a total of 290 objectives to sequentially expose a large collodion glass plate. The shutter for each row was composed of an opaque strip with a slit that moved from spool to spool as it passed behind the lenses. Each row of shutter bands was synchronized so that the adjacent rows of lenses were successively uncovered. The result is described as an array of 290 sequentially exposed frames, arranged in rows and columns. The French Patent, although issued, was not printed because du Hauron could not pay the required fees (Hopwood 1899, p.  46). For projection du Hauron wanted to use a method like that of Uchatius by moving a source of The author was also known as Kline.

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Fig. 9.2  Du Hauron’s multiple lens camera concept for photography of the phases of motion. A band with openings acts as a series of shutters passing behind rows and columns of lenses, A and B, to expose miniature frames.

i­llumination behind the images. This is an early suggestion for a class of devices based on arranging many small images on a large (usually) flat surface, like the formats designed by Kamm for his Kammatograph and Henry Joy for his Spirograph, which are described elsewhere. According to Liesegang (1986, p.  44), an additional du Hauron patent describes a continuously moving band of film exposed by an endless loop of lenses that move to track the band for a short distance so that there is no relative motion between the exposing lens and the band. The concept was also to be used for projection and is one that would reappear in the coming years. Work in the field of sequence photography was hampered by, amongst other things, the low sensitivity of the negative material and the available substrates. Improvements to negative and substrate materials were designed to benefit still photography without any thought of the requirements of the small and relatively unimportant market made up by a handful of protocinematographers. They needed to take pictures at a frame rate high enough to provide a convincing illusion of motion, which also required exposures of a fraction of a second and not, as was all that was possible at the time, minutes, as was usually the case because of the state of the art.

Sequential photography of any duration, experimenters came to realize, required a flexible transparent substrate rather than a disk format, tessellated frames on large plates, or a pile of glass plates. It was not obvious that the only effective motion picture camera design was one that was based on a single fixed lens and the movement of the light sensitive surface. In order to photograph and project more than the most fleeting glimpse of motion, hundreds of images are required, a fact that was apparent, at least to du Hauron. Two American inventors, Coleman Sellers and Henry Renno Heyl, who were on the Board of Trustees of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, apparently used the same technique for creating photographic content to simulate the actual capture of the phases of motion (Quigley 1948, pp.  112–114). Lacking a camera to photograph motion sequences in real time they used a kind of stop-motion animation by photographing people posed in positions presumed to be the phases of motion. Sellers was the first of the two to use the technique, one which had been proposed by Peter Hubert Desvignes, in British Patent no. 537, February 27, 1860, which describes a zoëtrope-like device rotating about a h­ orizontal axis that used stop-motion photography for content (Hecht 1993, entry 227E). To simulate the motion

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of a steam engine in operation, Desvignes probably photographed its pistons, which were moved incrementally to ­permit still photograph; it may be the first example of stopmotion animation. This technique was used about a century later for puppet animation for theatrical shorts and features, which Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren, working at the National Film Board, used for posing humans or life-­size objects in their supposed phases of motion, a process now called pixilation, after pixies, and not pixelation, after pixels. Sellers was an accomplished engineer who worked on complex projects like locomotive manufacture and the Niagara Falls hydroelectric power system. He filed USP 31,357 on February 5, 1861, Exhibiting Stereoscopic Pictures of Moving Objects, describing a peepshow viewer, the handcranked Kinematoscope, with six stereopairs representing the phases of motion arranged on a device like the paddlewheel of a steamboat. Sellers also suggested that an endless band could be used to provide a longer motion sequence and a slotted cylindrical shutter was suggested to occlude the continuously moving images; ‘357 foreshadows the peepshow Mutoscope viewer. In either case, each stereopair card was viewed through twin eyepieces. Sellers’ first pixelated subjects were his two sons, one looking on as the other hammered a nail. The word coined by Sellers, Kinematoscope, is by Quigley’s (1948) account, one of the first uses of the prefix kinema. Although the device was built, it did not go into production (Liesegang 1986, p. 30). In 1868 the inventor of the stereoscope, Sir Charles Wheatstone, built a handcranked combination phenakistoscope-stereoscope that was not marketed but a model of it can be found in the Science Museum in London. Mannoni (2000, p. 239) reports that the effect, as reported by a contemporary observer who was looking at images of a locomotive’s moving parts, was “truly amazing;” the stereopairs were probably photographed using pixilation. Sellers’ Kinematoscope influenced the invention of his friend and colleague Heyl who was also an engineer. Heyl’s projection system, the mellifluously named Phasmatrope, was demonstrated at a fund raising event announced as the Ninth entertainment of the Young Men’s Society of St. Marks’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, to be given at the Academy of Music by O.  H. Willard, Esq., on Saturday Evening February 5, 1870 (Hecht 1993, entry 257A). Coe and Mannoni think that this was, in all likelihood, the first instance of a commercial (charitable?) public screening of a projected photographed motion picture sequence. 1600 people attended with the event raising $850 for the young men of St. Marks; as well as Heyl’s demonstration there were performances that night. Heyl also showed off the Phasmatrope at the Franklin Institute on March 16, the same year, but like the reception of the first demonstration it did not evoke much interest. Heyl served as his own subject and

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was photographed at Willard’s photographic studio waltzing with a lady, probably photographed one frame at a time, for six poses. Mannoni (2000, p.  262) speculates that since one of the poses involves a leap, there is the possibility that Heyl used a true moving image camera (or a battery of cameras) given the difficulties of capturing such a pose using pixilation, a speculation that gains some credibility when one considers that another sequence was of a Japanese acrobat. But the sequences may have been assembled by selecting appropriate positions from a large number of exposures. The exposures were made using wet collodion glass plates and then printed onto small glass slides, coincidently the same size as Dickson’s 35  mm frame, ¾  in  ×  1  in. The Phasmatrope used a handcranked rotating disk and shutter incorporated into a magic lantern. The disk advancing mechanism was intermittent, and the shutter’s action was coordinated to occlude each slide while in motion to prevent travel ghost.2 Heyl’s disk was loaded with 18 slides but with only six poses: each slide was printed three times. Heyl may have used this approach because he was unable to devise a technique to capture enough poses for a sequence of any length. In addition, there was the challenge of creating an intermittent mechanism that would hold each slide at rest for an interrupting shutter to occlude it twice, which would have produced exactly the same flickerless effect as the triple printing of each slide, but 18 fresh poses would have produced more fluid motion. Heyl is probably the first intermittent projector inventor to decouple the frame rate required for the illusion of motion from the number of flashes required to mitigate flicker. The Englishman Wordsworth Donisthorpe filed for the provisional BP 4344, on November 9, 1876, for a camera that would: “facilitate the taking of a succession of photographic pictures at equal intervals of time, in order to record the changes taking place in or the movement of the object being photographed, and also by means of a succession of pictures so taken of any moving object to give to the eye a presentation of the object in continuous movement as it appeared when being photographed,” which is a fair description of how moving images work (Hecht 1993, entry 281B). Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph camera of 1876 was designed to expose a series of glass plates using a scheme in which they were exposed and dropped out of the way into a container, similar to a method proposed by Du Mont. Positives of the plates were to be printed spaced equidistantly on a paper roll that might have been viewed presumably in some kind of peepshow viewer that arrested the continuously moving frames using an electric spark or viewed using a zoëtrope or similar apparatus. The electric Apparently Heyl did not patent the Phasmatrope – the only one granted to him I can find is Improvement in Paper-Box Machines, USP 132,078.

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Fig. 9.3  From the USP cover sheet of Sellers’ stereoscopic “Kinematoscope,” which is essentially a handcranked flipbook stereoscope.

spark in place of the mechanical shutter was adopted by Anschütz for his peepshow Tachyscope, specifically with a Geissler gas discharge tube, as described in the next chapter. In the January 24, 1878 issue of Nature the visionary Donisthorpe proposed that his moving images might be combined with an Edison phonograph for synchronizing sound and images in which Prime Minister Gladstone’s “life-size photograph itself shall move and gesticulate precisely as he did when making a speech, the words and gestures corresponding as in real life.” This may be the earliest suggestion of the possibility of a lip synchronized sound talking cinema. Donisthorpe and his cousin, architect William Carr Crofts (1846–1894), describe another design in BP 12,921, filed on August 15, 1889, a combination camera and projector using a paper band that could be projected using opaque (front illuminated) projection optics (Hecht 1993, entry 340A). This is an early suggestion for the use of what today we could call film, but it was based on paper rather than celluloid substrate (Coe 1981, p.  58). Donisthorpe and Crofts were both involved in the textile industry, and their mechanism resembled “a shuttle carrying the film moved upwards as the film itself was pulled down, resulting in the film being stationary relative to the lens during each exposure” (Herbert 2000, p. 435). Liesegang (1986, p. 44) points out, as noted above, that du Hauron had described such an exposure system. The inventors turned to stripping film, offered for sale as part of Eastman’s snapshot system. Nine frames of

Donisthorpe’s and Crofts’ Trafalgar Square, shot between late 1889 and early 1891, are preserved at the Kodak Museum in Harrow. A notice in Photographic News reports that the rate of the Donisthorpe-Crofts machine was between 8 and 12 frames per second. Hecht (1993, entry 356C) reports that it seems that the projection function of the apparatus was never demonstrated so it’s probable that the inventors never saw their film projected but it is likely they observed it in motion using a phenakistoscope or zoëtrope. Donisthorpe’s efforts advanced from glass, as a carrier of information, to roll film and while this was one of the earliest uses of film for capturing the phases of motion, he and Crofts were anticipated by Marey the previous year. William Friese-Greene (1855–1921) was born in Bristol and entered the field of animated projected images in the 1880s as a photographic assistant to John Arthur Roebuck Rudge of Bath, an instrument maker who projected photographed motion using a sequence of fourteen dissolving slides. Rudge filed a provisional British patent for his Biophantic (also known as the Phantoscope) on November 12, 1884. His invention used glass slides of the phases of motion wrapped around the lamphouses of two magic lanterns, passing through the projectors’ gate. The slides were advanced by a kind of Maltese-cross intermittent, and the two projectors were used to create dissolves as the machines alternated frames. The dissolve projection technique can be traced to Childe’s dissolvent biunial projector that had been shown in England half a century earlier, as noted in chapter 2. Rudge’s technique brings to mind D. W. Noake’s dissolving

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Fig. 9.4  Heyl’s disk for his intermittent drive magic lantern in which frames were triple printed.

magic lantern show of the late nineteenth century, England Bisected by Steam Launch, which simulated a boat ride using hand-colored photographic slides. The concept was later adopted by Skladanowsky for celluloid film projection. Friese-Greene demonstrated Rudge’s Biophantic projector asserting it was his invention. By 1887 Friese-Greene had moved to London and was working on a moving image camera as a source for Rudge’s projector with the help of civil engineer Mortimer Evans, as described in chapter 13. Their camera was patented on June 21, 1889, and it is pointed out by Coe (1992, pp. 42, 43) that Evans’ and Friese-Greene’s work had features in common with cameras previously designed by Le Prince and Marey. The British cinema historian Wilfred E.  L. Day, in his book 25,000 Years to Trap a Shadow, published in 1933, contributed to the myth of Friese-Greene’s contributions, as did the 1951 patriotic and hagiographic Technicolor feature film, The Magic Box, featuring cameos by major British movie stars like Laurence Olivier and Peter Ustinov, based on Ray McAllister’s book, Friese-

Fig. 9.5  Donisthorpe and Crofts’ camera. While the film was being pulled continuously downward, it was encased in a holder that drove it a frame’s length upward keeping it motionless with respect to the lens (yellow).

Greene: Close-Up of an Inventor (McKernan 2013). Friese-Greene was once seen as a cinema pioneer, especially in England, but this view is no longer accepted as is evident from this excerpt from the Encyclopedia of British Film: “British cinema’s first historian, Will Day, knew many of the pioneers and did valuable work collecting testimony and artefacts, though his uncritical championing of Friese-Greene was unfortunate” (McFarlane 2013). His belief in Friese-Greene’s originality is especially puzzling since Day was well aware of the prior art. An inventor cannot be faulted for promoting his efforts or for painting a favorable picture for possible investors and the

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Fig. 9.6  Rudge’s Biophantic magic lantern. The slides encircling the lamphouse were advanced intermittently by handcranking. Butterfly shutter blades in front of the lenses of two such projectors produced dissolves to create smooth transitions and the illusion of apparent motion. This twin-projector approach foreshadows those built by Anschütz and Skladanowsky. (Cinémathèque Française)

fact that Friese-Greene’s reputation was inflated in Britain can only be partially blamed on his generous assessment of his abilities, but as McKernan (2013) put it, Friese-­Greene was “a man of scant technical genius, an opportunist, fantasist, and an incorrigible borrower of others ideas.” Scholars such as Mannoni (2000), Coe (1955), and stereoscopic cinema historian Ray Zone (2007) are doubtful of his having achieved anything substantial. Coe wrote: “The picture of the man that emerges…is of one lacking in method, dabbling in all kinds of fruitless experiments without plan or control… His ideas and his suggestions were always far ahead of his ability.” Friese-Greene was a man who loved motion picture technology, but it was a love unrequited. Nonetheless, BP 10,131, proved to be a thorn in Edison’s side and his efforts to establish priority for his Kinetograph camera, for which he filed a Caveat November 2, 1889, as described in chapter 12. Friese-Greene played a similar but even more destructive role in the patent battle that stemmed from his field-sequential additive color process, a knock off of Kinemacolor. (See chapter 44.) Spehr (2008) summed up his career after the issuance of BP 10,131 as follows: “Although he worked on a projector later on and experimented with color photography,

Friese-Greene was never again a major factor in the introduction of motion pictures.” An international patent data base search turned up that Friese-­Greene was granted patents in the fields of motion pictures, still photography, color cinematography, airships and aeroplanes, paper manufacturing, and a “cartridge fired by electricity.” Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1842–1890?), who attempted to create a system for apparent motion photography and projection, has achieved a cult-like following. His story has become fodder for conspiracy theorists and those identifying with a master who has been overlooked by history. Le Prince was born in Metz in Northeastern France and in his youth studied photography in the studio of his father’s friend Daguerre. His time with the world famous inventor determined his career and he became an expert in the art of printing photographs on metal and pottery. He studied painting and pottery in Paris and did post-graduate work in chemistry at the University of Leipzig. He was invited to join the brass foundry of Whitley Partners in Leeds, England, where he moved in 1869, and married Elizabeth Whitley, an artist and potter herself and the daughter of the firm’s proprietor. Le Prince and his wife became prominent for their photo-

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graphic prints on metal and pottery. On behalf of his fatherin-law’s business he and his family moved to the United States in 1881 where, in due course, he became the manager of a group of French artists creating circular panoramas of battle scenes that were exhibited on the East Coast; by way of example, one title was The Merrimac and Monitor Naval Engagement Illustrated (Spehr 2008). In 1886, while a resident of New York City, possibly inspired by Muybridge, he began to work on moving image devices. He applied for a United States Patent covering a multi-lens combination camera-­projector, which is described below. He and his family returned to England the following year where he continued his researches (Herbert 1996; Mannoni 2000). Le Prince’s camera designs progressed from a machine using multiple lenses and strips of paper film to a single lens and a continuous band of vertical traveling paper film resembling the arrangement used in future celluloid cinema camera. Few artifacts of his efforts survive, only some prints and a camera but he filed American, British, and French patents describing some of what he was up to. While living in New York City, he built the machine described in the filing made on November 2, 1886, under the name Augustin Le Prince, which resulted in the granting of USP 376,247 Method of and Apparatus for Producing Animated Pictures of Natural Scenery and Life. In this patent he teaches a

Fig. 9.7  Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince

9  Protocinematographers: Duboscq to Le Prince

motion picture system using a camera he called a ­photographic receiver having 16 lenses to expose two lengths of paper film. After eight pictures were exposed on a sensitized strip, the camera mechanism replaced it with a second strip to continue taking exposures. The camera, it was stated, could also serve as a projector, which Le Prince called a deliverer, with the addition of an “interchangeable film-box and reflector.” There are no claims covering the projector, but Le Prince states it will be described in a future disclosure. He contemplates projection on a ground glass rear screen using multiple lenses with each frame illuminated sequentially by its own electric lamp, a scheme like that proposed by Uchatius. There are scant details with regard to a one lens embodiment and claims for such a machine were disallowed by the American examiner, but these appear in British and French patents. A camera was built for Le Prince by H. Mackenstein of Paris in 1887 which is preserved in the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, in Bradford, UK. Amongst Le Prince’s concepts was a three-lens projector that used a Maltese-cross intermittent movement but the machine no longer exists. His patent of January 10, 1888, GB 423, Improvements in the Method of and Apparatus for Producing Animated Photographic Pictures, describes a single-lens camera, which he built. The machine intermittently advanced a strip of sensitized paper using a sprocketless approach somewhat similar to that of Marey who in 1888 also built a camera that used Eastman paper rolls. Le Prince’s method for stopping the film for exposure used the intermittent rotation of the take-up spool, which resulted in a variable distance between frames since the radius of the film on the spool increases as the camera runs (Coe 1981). The inconstant distance between the frames of Le Prince’s camera, an issue with Marey’s camera as well, meant that the frames were unequally spaced ruling out contact printing and necessitating remounting each frame for projection. In October 1888 Le Prince used the new camera to film the traffic moving across Leeds Bridge. Another film, probably the world’s first home movie, was shot in the garden of his father-inlaw, John Whitley, with the camera that is on display in Bradford. In 1889 Le Prince printed his exposed frames on glass slides and assembled them into a projectable band using fabric strips to join them together. Metal grommets were inserted in the fabric for advancing the band, anticipating the perforations used by celluloid motion picture film. Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope, introduced in 1889, used a comparable arrangement of frames made of hard gelatin rather than glass, with paintings rather than photographs, using leather rather than fabric strips, but like Le Prince metal grommets were used for indexing and transporting the “film” for projection.

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Fig. 9.8  The top half of the cover sheet of Le Prince’s USP describing a multi-lens camera.

On September 16, 1890, Le Prince was seen boarding a train to travel the 200  miles from Dijon to Paris but ­somewhere along the route Le Prince and his luggage disappeared. Although an extensive search and investigation was conducted his fate is unknown. Le Prince’s disappearance brings to mind a similar one that occurred on September 29, 1913, when another inventor, Rudolf Diesel, vanished while sailing on the steamship Dresden from Antwerp to Hardwick. While it seems likely that Diesel’s fate was an ocean grave, Le Prince’s case presents many possibilities, which have been explored in print. The missing luggage suggests the possibility that Le Prince ran off to start a new life, but who knows? Whatever his fate his disappearance ended the work of a talented inventor. Le Prince’s son Adolphe expended considerable effort in an attempt to prove that his father was the true inventor of the movie camera, which included his assertion that Edison had him killed to eliminate a ­competitor.

“As late as 1898 Adolphe Le Prince still clung to the hope that his father was being held captive some where” Spehr (2008, p. 115) relates. Le Prince’s movies looked good, according to the testimony of Ferdinand Mobisson, secretary of the Opéra Nationale in Paris, who references Le Prince’s French Patent 188,089, which was filed on January 11, 1888, Methodé et appariel pour le projection des tableaux animés (Method and apparatus for the projection of animated scenes) (Mannoni 2000). The declaration was probably written by Adolphe or the family lawyer given the reference to the patent, and M.  Mobisson, never previously having seen a motion picture had no basis for comparison. With regard to the Edison assassination theory, I subscribe to cinema technology historian Paul Spehr’s view that while Edison’s aggressive behavior was sufficiently suspect to make the assertion an appealing one, he probably knew little or

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n­ othing about Le Prince, whose work “attracted little attention from the press” (Spehr 2008, p.  117). Le Prince was only one in a field of rivals whose patents might have interfered with the priority of the claims granted in Edison’s motion picture patents. Le Prince had interesting ideas and features of his inventions that are of some importance were also demonstrated by his worthy contemporaries Reynard and Marey. There are those who are disposed to believe that Le Prince deserves a major share of the credit for the invention of the motion picture camera and projector. Le Prince’s advocates can point to

9  Protocinematographers: Duboscq to Le Prince

the digitally restored movies that he shot of his family, moving images of his son Adolphe and in-laws in a garden in Leeds filmed one day in October 1888, a melancholy testimonial to the man’s ingenuity, but it’s difficult to see how his efforts influenced the evolution of cinema technology given that his demonstrations seem to have been confined to his family and circle of admirers. Le Prince’s story is thoughtprovoking because of the questions it raises about what constitutes priority, the value of testimonials, and the criteria for evaluating the value of a contribution to the evolution of cinema technology.

Muybridge and Anschütz

Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), whose given name was Edward Muggeridge, was born in England. He found success in the United States as a photographer and lecturer, achieving fame with his equine locomotion studies, projections of apparent motion, and publishing collections of photographs of the phases of motion. He moved to California in 1855, after which he returned to England where he mastered the wet-collodion process. Back in the United States in 1867, he photographed the American West, specializing in stereography and panoramas using the non-de-lumière Helios. He cultivated the image of a flamboyant wizard; in later life he could have passed for Tolkien’s Gandalf, but there was substance to his self-promotion. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema technology, having directly inspired the work of Anschütz, Marey, and Edison (Hendricks 1975). His reputation as a photographer led to his being approached, in 1872, by Leland Stanford, former governor of California, railroad mogul, and race horse owner, to settle the question: do all four feet of a racehorse, in this case a trotter, lift off the ground while it is racing? The story that Stanford hired Muybridge to settle a bet to that effect is apocryphal and it has been conjectured that the original impetus for the project was suggested by the animal motion studies of Marey, but this is doubtful since Marey’s studies were, up until that time, dependent on measurement (chronography) and not photography; moreover, Marey’s La Machine Animale was published in France in 1873 and Muybridge’s experiments began in 1872. However, Marey’s influence helped to rekindle the Stanford equine project after its hiatus. In April 1873, using a dual lens camera with a 1/500 second shutter, Muybridge captured a silhouette photograph of Stanford’s horse, Occident, which seemed to have settled the matter, since all of Occident’s legs were shown to be momentarily lifting off the ground. Concerns arose with regard to the legitimacy of the heavily retouched photo and the loss of the negative itself. Therefore, Stanford wanted Muybridge to repeat the study, but years were lost before he returned to the project because Muybridge was arrested for having shot dead his wife’s lover, George Harry Larkins,

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who was the probable father of his child. Despite pleading guilty to murder, the jury found him to be not guilty by reason of justifiable homicide. Muybridge’s confession and hysterical fit “horrifying in its contortions as convulsion succeeded convulsion,” in the courtroom after having been let off might have ruined another man, but this only heightened his allure as an outlier and added to his flamboyant legend (Hendricks 1975, pp. 65–77). Stanford’s request that Muybridge return to the study in 1877 was triggered by his learning of the work of physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, and Muybridge set about to design a better method to analyze equestrian locomotion. This was the true beginning of his interest in apparent motion photography and its projection. As a result of Stanford’s commission, Muybridge, on June 11, 1878, in Palo Alto, California, using 12 equidistanced cameras arrayed in a line, was able to successfully photograph the phases of motion of a horse, the trotter Abe Eddington, as it raced against a background of white sheets (Mannoni 2000, p. 308). The cameras’ 1/2000th of a second focal plane drop shutters, of Muybridge’s devising, were electrically activated by means of switches that were tripped as the racing horse broke cotton or silk threads. The technique is described in USP 212,865, Method and Apparatus for Photographing Objects in Motion, filed June 27, 1879. Later on Muybridge substituted a clockwork mechanism for tripping the shutters, which he used for his renowned locomotion studies in later years. The results of his photography, on that day in June, revealed what the human eye could not perceive: when racing all four hoofs of a horse momentarily leave the ground. Given the layout of the camera array, the photographs progress through both time and space and comprise cinema’s first tracking shot. Muybridge set out to project his results as moving images with what he called the Zoöpraxiscope (also known as the Magic Lantern Zoëtrope and the Zoögyroscope) using a magic lantern modification based on the phenakistoscope. The first of Muybridge’s exhibitions was for an audience of friends and colleagues in the fall of 1879, either at Stanford’s Palo Alto or San Francisco home. On January 16, 1880, at

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_10

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has slots radiating around its outer verge (the shutter). On the outer verge of a similarly sized disc of glass (actually individual glass slides) are silhouettes of any one series of photographs. The discs are placed on the pivot of a delicately-constructed machine, which revolves them in opposite directions. A very perfect magic lantern, constructed for the purpose, cast the pictures the size of life on a prepared screen and across which the horses walk or trot, canter or gallop, even as they do in life.” Muybridge was believed by one and all to have invented the beautifully made Zoöpraxiscope; even historian Hendricks wrote that Muybridge invented it, calling it “revolutionary” and making the incorrect claim that: “These exhibitions may fairly well be said to mark the official debut of motion pictures on screen in America.” However, Muybridge was preceded by almost a decade by Henry Renno Heyl’s public screening of a projected photographed motion picture sequence. Heyl’s demonstration was more advanced because it used stop-start intermittency and photos rather than drawings. (See chapter 9.) Muybridge had produced an interesting demonstration of apparent motion, but not the first of its kind and one that failed to establish that photography could be the source of the phases of motion because of his need to use drawings. In fact, it was no more advanced than Uchatius’ demonstration before the Vienna Academy of Sciences in 1853. But whatever the projection technology that Muybridge used, he created a method for photographing live action apparent motion – his battery of cameras. It may be that the Fig. 10.1  Eadweard Muybridge most important image he projected was that of a larger than life magician-genius whose credibility was accepted by both Stanford’s home in San Francisco, Muybridge once again the public and the scientific community. This allowed him to showed off his Zoöpraxiscope, a magic lantern with a disk successfully proselytize the concept of motion pictures holding glass slides that passed through the lantern’s gate thereby playing a pivotal and inspirational role in the creation and a radial slit shutter that was located in front of the lens. of the celluloid cinema. The handcranked disk and shutter were counter-rotating, and In 1881, after Stanford and Muybridge’s publication of a the disk and shutter were synchronized to briefly uncover collection of Muybridge’s photographs, The Attitudes of each passing image, to flash it on the screen, as it sped Animals in Motion, Muybridge toured England and France through the projector’s gate. Muybridge resorted to drawings where he was greeted as a celebrity. As an example of how made from photos by his battery of cameras in order to elon- highly regarded he was, he gave a Zoöpraxiscope screening gate then to compensate for the anamorphic compression for a group of some of the most renowned European savants caused by the radial slit shutter, a phenomenon described in including Hermann von Helmholtz, Jacques Arsène chapter 4. Twelve photographs of the phases of motion of a d’Arsonval, and Gabriel Lippmann, on September 26, 1881, rider on horseback were turned into drawings by Erwin which Marey organized in his new house on the Boulevard F. Faber (Hendricks 1975, pp. 126, 127). (Other writers state Delessert in Paris. Marey and Muybridge established a corthat the drawings were silhouettes.) dial relationship and Muybridge’s work inspired Marey to The drawings were arrayed on the periphery of a large develop improved methods for chronophotography, as disk following the format first described by Zahn at the close described in chapter 11. Muybridge returned to the United of the seventeenth century. The lamphouse used a bright oxy-­ States and continued to lecture and in August 1883 received a hydrogen limelight, which was required because of the opti- $40,000 grant from the University of Pennsylvania allowing cal inefficiency of the rotating disk and shutter. The following him to carry on his work. At the University, using the new is an extract of a newspaper account of a Muybridge demon- gelatin dry-plates, a new shutter capable of exposures of one stration, which ran in the February 6, 1881, San Francisco five-thousandths of a second, and a battery of 24 cameras, he Examiner: “A disc of zinc about eighteen inches in diameter produced many studies of animals and humans, taking 20,000

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Fig. 10.2  Top: Leland Stanford’s Sallie Gardner, photographed by Muybridge in Palo Alto, on June 19, 1878. Bottom: A Phenakistoscope disk based on Muybridge’s studies. (Cinémathèque Française)

photographs during 1884 and 1885, which became the basis for his book Animal Locomotion, published in 1887. One unusual outcome of Dr. Muybridge’s (as he was then known) University chronophotographic unsung efforts was the discovery of “the significance of the skinfolds on the trunk of the hog.” (A Study of Animals… 1917, vol. 21, p.  159) Muybridge was truly both a protocinematographer and a chronophotographer, from his equine studies for Stanford to his porcine studies for the University of Pennsylvania and his collections of photographs that are considered to be works of fine art. Muybridge toured the United States with the Zoöpraxiscope and on February 27,

1888, finding his way to West Orange, New Jersey, and Thomas Edison, as described in chapter 12. His multi-camera technique has been applied to modern filmmaking for a completely different effect, using still image digital cameras arranged in a circle rather than a straight line, with simultaneous rather than sequential exposures, to create the effect of a frozen figure hovering in space as seen, for example, in the 1999 production, The Matrix. Prussian photographer and inventor Ottomar Anschütz (1846–1907) used Muybridge’s battery of cameras concept for capturing the phases of motion to create content for his various approaches for displaying motion, which included

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Fig. 10.3  A drawing by Jacques Demenÿ of Muybridge’s battery of cameras (within the shed at the right) photographing the phases of motion of a racing horse as it breaks shutter tripping strings. The cam-

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eras were spaced 27 inches apart and their shutters operated at a two-­ thousandth of a second. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 10.4 The Zoöpraxiscope. This is a photo of the apparatus actually used by Muybridge, from the Kingston Museum. (Cinémathèque Française)

his Projecting Electro-Tachyscope, a masterpiece of the glass cinema that greatly surpassed the Zoöpraxiscope and produced the best looking big screen motion pictures prior to the Lumières’ Cinématographe. Anschütz began with peepshow displays that he generically called Schnellseher, or Quick View, and his most advanced Electro-Tachyscope (ElectricalSwift seeing), directly influenced the experiments of Edison and Dickson. Anschütz was born in Lissa, now Leschnow,

Poland, where his father began a career as a painter of decorations (decorationsmalers) but later became a photographer. The young Anschütz apprenticed with accomplished photographers and became a meticulous craftsman with Berlin as his home base. Due to the excellence of his work he gained fame in Europe and America, becoming a favorite of Crown Prince Friedrich. He was an aficionado of the phenakistoscope and zoëtrope and photographed motion sequences, as

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an artist for his own satisfaction who also sought an audience, with little concern for motion analysis. His work as a photographer and protocinematographer attracted significant attention, although today he is known for the most part only by scholars. He became attracted to the art and science of apparent motion in the autumn of 1885 after learning of Muybridge’s multi-camera motion studies, whereupon he put together a similar ensemble of 12 cameras. He photographed the phases of motion of people, horses, birds, and other animals, using the newly available and more convenient dry plates, with their greater sensitivity to light (Coe 1981). He devised an instrument made up of 24 integrated cameras incorporating shutters capable of exposures of 1/1000th of a second. This high-speed shutter, which he perfected in 1888, was the first reliable focal plane shutter, which remained in production for three decades by C. P. Goertz of Berlin. In 1887 Anschütz designed what he called the Wundertrummel (Miracle tunnel), based on the zoëtrope, for which he produced and sold interchangeable bands of motion views. He built a massive version of the Wundertrummel, a step toward his more advanced moving image displays, using the Zahn disk format. If all he had accomplished was to emulate Muybridge and advance the art of the apparent motion peepshow, he would be a footnote in the history of cinema technology, but he influenced the early

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cylinder experiments of Edison and Dickson and the design of their peepshow display, the kinetoscope; as important, his Projecting Electro-Tachyscope decisively demonstrated the concept of the projection of photographed motion. His Electro-Tachyscope was designed to be viewed by several people at once; it used a continuously rotating disk made of steel between 4 and 5 feet in diameter that mounted 24 3.5 in × 4.7 in glass slides on its periphery, with the image sequences designed to form an endless loop. When a slide rotated into viewing position, it was momentarily backlit by a high-voltage high-brightness spiral wound Geissler gas discharge tube designed to cover the area of the slide with a flash of light on the order of 1/1000th of a second (Hopwood 1899, p. 50). The slides’ flashes were triggered by electrical contacts when each moved into viewing position, an elegant arrangement that took the place of a spinning shutter which eliminated the anamorphic distortion inherent in the phenakistoscope’s shutter since the entire phase of motion was illuminated and revealed to the eye simultaneously.1 Hopwood (1899, p.  51) points out that the use an electric spark, rather than a radial shutter, to arrest a continuously moving image in such a display was suggested by Desvignes in 1860 and Donisthorpe in 1876 for his Kinesigraph. A production run of at least 100 robust Electro-Tachyscopes was built by Siemens and Halske of Berlin in 1891, entering service as coin-operated devices designed for commercial exhibition in public places (Abel 2005). The motor driven peepshow Electro-Tachyscope premiered in Berlin displaying moving images of horses, gymnasts, and other subjects, from the 19th to the 21st of March 1887, at the Kulturministerium (Ministry of Culture). Dr. Franz Stolze, a photographer and a journalist, commenting on the equine studies in Photographisches Wochenblatt (Photographic Weekly Paper), reported that: “…In all these representations (living pictures) the most wonderful and truthfulness to nature prevails. The play of muscles, the movement of the ears, the fluttering of the mane and tail, the jumping of the rider in the saddle - in short, all those little individualities are reproduced in just such an extraordinary manner” (Coe 1992, p.  35). The Electro-­ Tachyscope was exhibited in Europe and the United States and Thomas J.  Armat, co-inventor of an important early 35 mm projector, was influenced by the device, which captivated him at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. In the years that followed tens of thousands of people saw the Electro-­ Tachyscope in operation at various exhibitions and venues including New York City as early as 1889. Edison biographer, Paul Israel (1998), writes that he was influenced by Although Edison and Dickson’s Kinetoscope peepshow viewer used a high-speed radial shutter for arresting its continuously moving frames rather than a Geissler tube, it’s a fair assumption that its design was influenced by the Electro-Tachyscope.

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Fig. 10.5  Ottomar Anschütz

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Fig. 10.6  Top: The peepshow Electro-Tachyscope. Bottom: Content that it might have shown. (Second frame from the right was partly reconstructed in Photoshop.) (Cinémathèque Française)

Anschütz’s invention, as was his assistant, W.K.L. Dickson. German physician Emil du Boise-Reymond (1892), the founder of electrophysiology, in an article in an 1892 issue of Popular Science, uses the terminology “instantaneous photography” (living pictures was also frequently used for what

today we call motion pictures) to describe the work of Anschütz and Muybridge. Boise-­Reymond was extremely well informed about Victorian c­ inema technology, an indication that the scientific community and members of the public, who read Popular Science magazine, wanted to keep

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up-to-date on the subject. Du Boise-­Reymond describes the application of instantaneous photography to studies of nudes, animals, lightening, clouds, and the stormy surf. Anschütz’s next living pictures effort was his masterpiece, the Projecting Electro-Tachyscope. Hans Köche (1966), writing in Bild und Ton, Zeitschrift fur Film und Fototechnick (Image and Sound, Journal for Film and Photo Techniques), Volume 19, 1966, cites a letter dated July 7, 1935, from Seimens engineer Anton Verständig to German cinema pioneer Otto Meister, which describes the design of Anschütz’s Projecting Electro-Tachyscope and the events surrounding its creation (Hecht 1993, entry 653). In 1894 Verständig was approached by Anschütz asking him if his peepshow disks could be used for projection. Verständig had previously designed peepshow Tachyscope models for Anschütz and suggested a fresh design using a band of film with a Maltese-cross intermittent movement. Anschütz rejected this because he thought that it would be difficult to accurately align the individual images. Although the two-­ disk projector described below was Verständig’s design, the machine was not built by Seimens but rather by a mechanic named Bödecker (Hecht 1993, entry 396). However, Seimens supplied the 40 ampere arc lamps and other structural components, as noted by Rossell (1998). Anschütz’s Projecting Electro-Tachyscope was a dual-­ projector design that synchronized two disks each holding 12 glass slides projecting at 16 images per second, first one image from one projection head and then one image from the other. In order to achieve a bright image, the flashing Geissler tube was replaced by high intensity Seimens carbon arcs and mechanical shutters. Each disk of 12 slides was advanced by a Maltese-cross mechanism using a rotating shutter occluding the frames when they were in motion. The shutter had broad sectors, like the ones that would be used by the soon to be designed 35  mm projectors (they were not of the radial slit phenakistoscope design). The alternating disk-­slide concept allowed Anschütz to achieve a high enough effective frame rate for a persuasive illusion of apparent motion, to mitigate flicker, and to double image brightness. The image was on the screen continuously, unlike the method that became the signature of the celluloid cinema in which image was on screen only half the time. The Projecting Electro-Tachyscope threw images

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on a big screen, 26.25 ft × 19.5 ft, at the Berlin Post Office Building on November 25, 29, and 30, 1894. Thereafter, from February 2, 1895, until March 30, Projecting ElectroTachyscope movies were shown on a regular basis in a theater with a capacity of 300 paying customers at the Old Reichstag Building on Berlin’s main thoroughfare, the Leipziger Strasse. According to Coe (1992, p. 37) the projector used dissolving shutters, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case since; motion would have been flickerless and smooth without dissolves. A similar alternating frame concept, definitely using dissolves, but designed for celluloid film projection, was employed by the Skladanowsky Bioscop projector of 1895, as described elsewhere in these pages. When the Berlin press first saw celluloid cinema projection in April 1896, they supposed they were seeing a new version of Anschütz’s invention (Herbert 1996). His Projecting Electro-Tachyscope anticipated 35  mm celluloid cinema projection, and in that sense he leapfrogged Edison’s peepshow Kinetoscope of 1894. His goal was to create a projection method the equal of his meticulous studies of the phases of motion. Toward that end, he perfected a system designed for one purpose only, to reproduce the visual world and the motion of living beings that came as close as possible, given the technology he could muster, to create the effect of absolute verisimilitude. At that moment in time, a century and a quarter ago, in a theater in Berlin, he succeeded. Anschütz’s accomplishments were almost immediately overtaken by the celluloid cinema, and although he had achieved much of what he had set out to do, after 1903, according to Rossell (2001), his automat (peepshow) Schnellseher business resulted in a large debt to the manufacturer of the instruments, Siemens & Halske. Both his North American and British operations failed, but in 1894–95 he pressed ahead with the Projecting Schnellseher (Electro-Tachyscope), undoubtedly his greatest technical accomplishment. But this effort also proved to be financially draining and he abandoned his moving image efforts. He continued to take photographs that were admired in Europe and the United States and at home in Berlin, where he operated a studio for high society clientele. In 1907 he died at the age of 61 having succumbed to appendicitis.

Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ

Chronophotography is a scientific measurement technique in which photography is used for analysis, often of the locomotion of living creatures. The technique is also described in chapter 28, in which the application of photography to the study of sound and speech is sketched; here our concern is with the study of motion. In 1850 Irish physicist John Tyndall used a rapidly repeating electric spark to visualize the phases of motion of a jet of water and the following year Fox-Talbot suggested that the method could be coupled with photography. In 1860 Desvignes, as noted earlier, took multiple exposures of a steam engine in motion using its cyclical nature to assemble a series of photographs of its assumed phases of motion (Hopwood 1899, p. 44). French medical researcher Alfred Londe, in 1882 in the photographic laboratory of the La Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, assembled a circular vertical stack of nine cameras, a design presumably influenced by Muybridge’s battery of cameras. In 1891 he improved upon it with a twelve-lens device made up of four cameras stacked three rows high with exposures made using electromagnetically tripped shutters. Londe’s apparatus was used to study “abnormal motions, such as epileptic fits, St. Vitus dance, etc.,” exposing 240 × 300 mm glass pales to take 70 × 70 mm images; photographs were taken as frequently as 1/10th of a second apart. The year before, Londe, working French General Hippolyte Sébert (an advocate of the standardization of camera parts), constructed a six camera battery to analyze the firing of torpedoes and large artillery shells (Hopwood 1899, pp. 52–55; Coe 1992, pp. 37–38). Chronophotography’s most prominent practitioner was physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, who coined the term. Marey, like his inspiration and predecessor Janssen, devised integral cameras, using a single lens and single imaging surface for the photography of the phases of motion. This turned out to be a crucial design decision that serendipitously furthered the development of the celluloid cinema, an approach that contrasted with that of others in the field who used multiple cameras or their functional equivalent, multi-lens cameras. As we have seen, protocinematographers were motivated to find a way to depict quotidian motion as

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r­ealistically as possible (without regard to measurement), using projection to display their efforts, just as photographers make prints. Lacking any other means, some protocinematographers like Sellers and Heyl, used pixilation to simulate the phases of motion to create content for their moving image displays. On the other hand, Anschütz, following the example of Muybridge, used an array of cameras to photograph the phases of motion. The result of either approach was often displayed using peepshow or projection phenakistoscopic technology. But Marey did not use pixilation, multiple cameras, or cameras with multiple lenses. Marey’s first chronophotographic apparatus was derived from the invention of astronomer Pierre-Jules-César Janssen (1824–1907), who was born in Paris and studied at the University of Paris. His photographic revolver is of great historical importance because it is the first machine to combine many of the major elements of a true ciné camera. Janssen taught science in the University of Paris’ school of architecture, but he became an astronomer because of his passion for observing eclipses (Herbert 1996). On August 18, 1868, in Madras, India, during an eclipse, Janssen detected a Fraunhofer line in the yellow part of the spectrum of the sun’s corona at a wavelength where none was known to exist. Initially thought to be that of sodium, it was soon confirmed that this line was the signature of a newly discovered element that was named helium. Janssen was nothing if not determined: his 1870 expedition to southern Africa, to observe an eclipse of the sun would have been thwarted had he not found an audacious escape route out of a Paris that was under siege during the Franco-Prussian War; he flew above and beyond the city in a hot air balloon. His photographic revolver was designed specifically for the chronophotography of the transit of Venus, which he observed from Nagasaki on December 9, 1874. The photographic revolver had a large cylindrical chamber for holding a daguerreotype plate, which with its magazine in place looked like a Thompson submachine gun. Designed by Antoine Rédier, a Parisian clockmaker, the photographic

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_11

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Fig. 11.1  Pierre-Jules-César Janssen

revolver used a circular metal daguerreotype plate driven by a clockwork mechanism to take its sequential exposures. The camera exposed 48 images in 72 seconds, with the images arranged near the circumference of the 18.5  cm (7.3 in) diameter plate. The clockwork movement continuously rotated the radial shutter, whose slit moved between the plate and the lens as the plate was momentarily arrested for each exposure by a Maltese-cross mechanism (Hopwood, p. 57). The trip to Japan to observe the transit of Venus across the sun’s face was not without incident: Janssen and his wife, while on shipboard in the bay of Hong Kong, endured a typhoon that resulted in the deaths of thousands on shore. In the days before the transit there were storms and high winds in Nagasaki, the preferred viewing location, which swept away astronomical instruments, but the weather cleared and the photographic rifle, aimed at a heliostat’s moving mirror to track the sun, accomplished its task. This expedition marks the first use of chronophotography, but photography as a method for astronomical observation had been proposed in 1849 by the French astronomer Hervé Fay (Mannoni 2000). Janssen’s photographic revolver was the first camera designed and built to capture the phases of motion using a single lens on one light sensitive surface, features that became part of every celluloid cinema motion pic-

11  Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ

Fig. 11.2  Janssen’s photographic revolver (or rifle) and it’s clockwork mechanism. (Cinémathèque Française)

ture camera. The daguerreotype plate normally required long exposures, but it was well suited for this application because the sun is such a bright object and Janssen’s purpose was to photograph the silhouette of Venus against it. Light sensitive collodion coated on a glass plate might deform, Janssen feared, and there was a concern about halation beclouding measurements. Halation might have arisen from the back scattering of light reflected from the glass-air interface where the collodion was coated on the plate. Both of these potential difficulties were avoided by using the metal daguerreotype plate with its thin light sensitive coating. On the other hand, British astronomers, on the day of the eclipse and from the same location, chose to use collodion coated glass plates. Janssen had shared the plans of his photographic rifle with his colleagues to help them make similar observations. The British instruments were made by the optician and lens designer John Henry Dallmeyer (Tosi 2005; Kingslake 1989). The chronophotographic method using multiple images to capture the transit of Venus was important because the exact moment its disk touched the solar orb could not be calculated. An international effort was made to make observations from several locations because it allowed astronomers to calculate the astronomical unit or the average distance of the earth at its furthest and closest approaches to the sun. The year after the Nagasaki expedition, in 1875,

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Janssen discussed his work at the Société Française de Photographie and again in 1876 at the Académie des Sciences where he suggested that his photographic rifle might be used for locomotion studies of animals, especially birds, as photographic materials improved to allow for exposures using high speed shutters (Coe 1992, p. 26). The suggestion was taken up by physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), who designed the first integral camera with a single lens that could photograph a relatively lengthy sequence of high-­quality still images, first on paper rolls and then using celluloid film. Any means for capturing motion that involved a multi-lens or multi-camera setup was not as effective an instrument for Marey’s analytical purposes. As his designs evolved, the cameras most useful for his chronophotographic requirements turned out to have many of the requirements required by a functional movie camera. His most developed cameras intermittently advanced the film and made exposures with a shutter synchronized to its arrested movement. This change from a battery of cameras to an integral camera was a crucial reduction of hardware complexity that has been recapitulated for the cinema modalities of sound, color, and widescreen. Marey’s first opportunity to create such an advanced machine depended on the availability of Eastman’s emulsion coated paper rolls that were meant for his snapshot box camera, the Kodak No. 1, and for use in a roll film adapter for cameras designed for exposing glass plates. What Marey’s designs omitted from a true cinema camera, the missing ingredient, was nothing at all: empty spaces or holes punched in the film. Perforations provide the indexing function for the printing or and the projection of steady images, but Marey was primarily concerned with a comparison of frames, although there were times when he sought to project his work for study or lectures. Marey was born in Burgundy and in 1849 studied medicine in Paris at the Faculté de Médecin. After completing his internship and his thesis, Researches on the Circulation of Blood in the Healthy State and in Illnesses, he received his doctorate in 1859. Like Marey’s great influence, Claude Bernard, the champion of applying the scientific method to medicine, he did not pass the agrégation, the examination for the highest qualification. (Creative geniuses don’t always get the highest marks; contemplation is different from checking a box or writing an essay in 20 minutes.) By 1863 Marey had lost confidence in the subjective methods that physicians used for diagnosis and wondered how it might be possible to teach medical students a method that went beyond “fleeting sensations.” By his own reckoning, in 1864, he became an independent “armchair physiologist” setting up a laboratory in a large attic on the fourth floor of a building in Paris that a century before had been home to the theater of the Comédie Française. The 40 by 50 foot room was filled with experimental apparatus, much of it devised by Marey and built for him by Parisian clockmaker Antoine Bréguet. The room was

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also inhabited by “pigeons, buzzards, fish, lizards, snakes, frogs….” (Mannoni 2000). Marey, who at that time lived with his mother, had many students to help him tend his laboratory and its creatures. He decided to specialize in measuring the movement of organs to help understand their functions, and in this he was following one of the most fundamental precepts of science, to quote Richard Feynman (2011): “One might say that the development of the physical sciences to their present form has depended to a large extent on the making of quantitative observations. Only with quantitative observations can one arrive at quantitative relationships, which are at the heart of physics.” He might as well have said science, but Feynman, a physicist, was thinking of physics. Marey wrote several books that were highly regarded, one published in 1863, Medical Physiology of the Circulation of Blood, and another in 1868, On Movement of the Vital Functions. His career flourished as he took a position as a physiologist at the Collège de France and continued to write books and articles. His book, Animal Mechanism, was published in 1873 and influenced Stanford and Muybridge’s second study of the horse in motion in 1877–1878. It was Marey’s chronographic determination that all four hoofs of a horse left the ground in a gallop that rekindled Stanford’s interest in the subject. To arrive at this conclusion, Marey employed chronography (time writing) using mechanical and pneumatically activated instruments to chart animal or animal organ motion as a function of time, in the case at hand, the horse’s gallop. To determine the facts about the locomotion of the horse, he used a rubber ball-shoe attached the horse’s hoof. As the hoof struck the ground the air in the ball-shoe was compressed and measured, and when the ball-shoe decompressed, it indicated that the hoof was off the ground. Marey captured and plotted physiological measurements of movement with instruments such as the polygraph and the sphygmograph, and he was not alone in such pursuits since other scientists had become interested in chronography. He designed the myographe to record the subtle movements of muscles by means of a lever system to transfer changes in position to a stylus or pen that inscribed on the surface of a rotating cylinder, producing graphic results that allowed Marey to visualize data. Marey heard of the work of Mathais Duvall, a professor of anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts, who built a sixteen-image zoëtrope to visualize walking and running. Working with Marey, Duvall worked up 16 poses of a horse in motion for the zoëtrope, whose rate of rotation could be varied to slow down the action for study, but this was an artist’s simulation of a running horse and not a record of locomotion. Then Marey did something exceptional: he used the zoëtrope for looking at his plotted data to view it dynamically change in time, a technique that foreshows the oscilloscope.

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11  Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ

Fig. 11.3 Étienne-Jules Marey (Cinémathèque Française)

In 1869, at the age of 39, Marey became a member of the faculty of the Collège de France, where he moved his lab to Room 7. As his activities expanded, he found the space to be too restrictive and in 1881 began to move his equipment to other locations in Paris. Marey’s efforts to induce the authorities to establish a station for the purpose of continuing his experiments in locomotion bore fruit and in March 1883, the city of Paris awarded Marey a grant and made arrangements for him to set up his Station Physiologique on the present site of Le Parc des Princes Stadium on the south edge of the Bois de Boulogne, near the Porte d’Auteuil (Coe 1992, p. 26). In 1880 gymnast George Demenÿ (1850–1917), who was born in northern France, became Marey’s student at the Collège de France and in the 1880s assumed the role of his hands-on associate at the Station Physiologique, which he helped to plan and launch. He aided the day-to-day chronophotographic studies and the development of hardware and played an important role in assisting Marey’s researches, helping him with the design of instruments. In 1873 Marey considered using what became known as his photographic gun for recording locomotion, which was based on Janssen’s proposal to use the instrument for animal studies, according to the recollection of his friend Alphonse Pénaud. Marey would later relate that his interest in chronophotography was due to du Hauron, Janssen, and Muybridge, but the proximate stimulation for his entering the field seems to have been Muybridge who visited Paris in September 1881, where he showed Marey sequential photographs of a bird in flight taken with his battery of cameras. Marey had

read about Muybridge’s work in the December 28, 1878, issue of La Nature and had contacted him requesting that he photograph the flight of birds because Marey lacked the chronophotographic apparatus to do so (Coe 1992, p.  24). But Marey was disappointed by Muybridge’s photographs because of their lack of detail, which motivated him to think about improving the technique. Toward the end of 1881, he approached Janssen for help, who replied that he would build a photographic revolver for Marey, a promise that was unfulfilled, which set Marey on the fruitful path of designing his own camera. Marey built a camera similar to Janssen’s that also looked like a revolver with a rifle barrel, his photographic gun, which was completed in the winter of 1881–1882. It used what Marey described as “a train of clockwork (that is) set in motion and communicates the necessary movement to all parts of the mechanism...A cam on a shaft produced this intermittent motion,” including a spinning shutter, “an opaque metal disc, perforated with a narrow window” (Coe 1992, p. 27). The mechanism rotated a round or octagonal dry emulsion glass plate capable of taking squarish or actually trapezoidal frames at rates reported to be either 12 or 19 exposures per second, exposed at 1/720th of a second. The new camera was used for Marey’s well-known study of a flight of gulls (Marey 1894, trans. 1895, p. 110; Braun 1992). The long barrel housed a lens with a long focal length, necessary for the photography of distance subjects. Marey’s bird locomotion studies were photographed at his villa in Naples, which he sent to the Académie des Sciences on March 13, 1882. The camera was pointed at the subject by

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looking through gun-type aiming notches at the top of the long lens barrel. The shutter release was a trigger in the usual location on the bottom of the rifle stock. Once the trigger was pulled, the exposure sequence was set in motion: the intermittent mechanism arrested the rotating photographic plate after passing through 30° at which time the rotating shutter exposed a frame. In some drawings of the device a cylindrical box, which stored 25 photographic plates, is shown. A developed plate looks like a View Master reel, with small images located at the disk’s periphery. In order to practice his aim and composition, Marey also built a single shot photographic gun that took images about 4 square centimeters in area. The advantages of the photographic gun, compared with Muybridge’s battery of cameras, are many, but the principal one was that it took images with a single lens from a single perspective. Muybridge’s method inher-

Fig. 11.4  Top: Marey’s photographic gun in use. Bottom: A photo of what may have been the single shot model of the gun, exposing its clockwork mechanism. (Cinémathèque Française)

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ently produced a moving or tracking shot because each exposure of the sequence was taken from a different position but his plates were large and potentially of higher photographic quality than Marey’s tiny frames. Much of Marey’s photographic and projection equipment, like the photographic gun and his large plate camera designed described below, were built by engineer Otto Lund. Ensconced in his Station Physiologique, sometimes referred to as the Institut Marey, which was in fact located in a nearby building, he began work on a new kind of camera with the help of Demenÿ, the first version of which was completed in 1882, and was used for locomotion studies between 1883 and 1888 (Coe 1981). It was a large wooden box-like cabinet fitted with a 4½ foot diameter shutter having ten narrow radial slots that, when rotated by handcranking, exposed a single large plate at a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second. The camera, which looked a like a little trolley car, traveled on rails to follow the subject, the lens at right angles to the direction of travel. The result of this combination of moving camera and moving subject placed a number of sequential exposures of the subject on a single glass plate, sometimes with a part of the subject superimposed on itself. The camera was successful for studying moving subjects, both people and animals, which were brightly lit and set off against a black background. This multiple exposure technique influenced paintings by Marcel Duchamp, and decades later was used by still photographers to capture the phases of motion on a single frame using sequential bursts of an electronic flash. Marey also anticipated the Digital Era’s motion or performance capture techniques by taking a series of photos of humans in motion, as illustrated in his book Le Mouvement, using black formfitting costumes with white spots at key bodily positions to track action (Marey 1894, trans 1895, p. 60). In 1888 Marey revisited the challenge of capturing sequences and decided to photograph individual frames because the overlapping double exposed images made with his trolley camera sometimes obscured detail. Marey returned to the concept of a frame-sequential camera as produced by the photographic gun, but with a crucial difference. He knew about the new paper roll film from the American Eastman Dry Plate Film Company, which had been demonstrated on January 7, 1887, at the Société Française de Photographie; with this materiel, his new technique was able to make a major advance (Mannoni 2000, p. 340). The new film, available in France at the end of 1888, part of the Kodak No. 1 snapshot camera and photofinishing system, consisted of silver bromide gelatin emulsion coated on paper. Instead of moving the camera, as Marey did with his trolley-like device, he would move the film to expose individual frames of improved clarity. Marey’s new camera rapidly transported paper film through it horizontally from feed to take up spindle to enable the exposure of many

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11  Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ

Fig. 11.5  Two views of Marey’s trolley camera.

Fig. 11.6  The phases of motion of a man on a bicycle taken with the Trolley camera (restored). (Cinémathèque Française)

frames rapidly. The film path was similar to that used by the Kodak No. 1, which made an exposure after the user manually transported the film and pushed a button to release the shutter. The camera Marey built, first called the Photochronographie and later the Chronophotographe, used paper roll film 3½ inches (90  mm) wide that came in two varieties: stripping film, whose emulsion was designed to be removed and adhered to a glass substrate for print making, or roll film with a non-stripping emulsion. Marey chose the non-stripping version. His camera took as many as 50 images

a second using a rotating disk shutter that opened to expose the paper film as a contact was tripped to send current to an ­electromagnetically activated clamping pressure plate that momentarily stopped the film in the gate. In a sense, the ­take-up reel mechanism and the clamping intermittent were fighting each other, but the camera was capable of taking excellent pictures. Unfortunately, the clamping design could not ­register successive frames in the same relative position, producing a frameline of varying width, but it did a good job of creating a temporal sequence of individual frames on paper film. In 1890, at the Paris Exhibition, Marey exhibited

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moving images photographed with this camera using a zoëtrope, which he showed to the visiting Edison (Hopwood 1899, p. 71). For projection, Marey had prints of the frames aligned for mounting on a disk. Marey was aware of the desirability of a new base material, celluloid, which by 1890 was going into production by Eastman and Blair in America and in small scale production in Europe. (See chapter 8 for more about the introduction of celluloid.) A celluloid factory in North Central France, in the city of Stains, was producing material that was of interest to photographers. In 1890 chemist Georges Balagny (1837– 1919) supplied Marey with celluloid film with a fast (sensitive) emulsion for stopping motion with high shutter speeds (Coe 1992, p.  32; Mannoni 2000, p.  342). According to Gernsheim (1962, p.  115), during the 1880s, the speed of negative emulsions increased 20-fold, an improvement in sensitivity that made Marey’s animal studies feasible. In 1889 Eastman began shipping celluloid film for the Kodak No. 2 camera and its photofinishing system, and on May 3, 1890, Marey demonstrated a new camera that used negative film, the new 90 mm wide celluloid nitrate base 1.10 m (43.3 in) long. Although Kodak celluloid film became available through retail channels in France somewhat later in 1891, early samples were supplied to Marey by his friend and Eastman representative Félix Nadar. Marey’s new camera designed for celluloid base replaced the electromagnetic clamp with a mechanical clamp intermittently actuated by a six-star Maltese-cross movement that was capable of a hundred exposures per second. Marey’s Chronophotographe exposed a comparatively lengthy sequence of frames on celluloid film, about 40 3½ inch square pictures (Hopwood 1899, p. 72). But the camera was not designed to be part of a printmaking-­projection system because the frames were not indexed and not exposed the same distance apart. Marey knew that the projection of sequences could help him visualize locomotion, and as noted previously, he used the zoëtrope for that purpose but it was a device of limited capability. Although motion analysis was his goal, which to a large extent could be accomplished by comparing frames, it also was tempting for Marey to be able to project movies of his work for colleagues. Marey was not interested in creating a technology to recreate the quotidian visual world, rather his goal as a physiologist and chronophotographer was to design a motion microscope, and although projection might help, it played second fiddle to his usual method of frame by frame analysis. In December 1891 Marey asked Demenÿ to print sufficient lengths of positive strips to provide him with material for projection experimentation. His ambition was to build a variable speed projector to enable slowing down motion so it could be carefully studied. He intended to devise a machine that was dual purpose, for photography and projection, but his frames, lacking perforations, needed to be cut apart, aligned,

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and remounted for projection, just as Le Prince or Muybridge had to, as Mannoni (2000, pp. 348, 349, 311) points out. In May of that year, Marey wrote to Demenÿ from Naples telling him that he had a solution for the equidistant spacing of frames, but such a solution, whatever it might have been, was not put into practice. He persisted by attaching cut apart celluloid frames and mounting them using strips of rubberized fabric. Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique opened in Paris in October 1892, and the Projecting Praxinoscope’s “film” made by mounting frames in flexible bands sounds a lot like Marey’s approach. Reynaud used leather and Marey used rubberized cloth, but Reynaud solved the problem of driving his film and frame indexing by insetting metal grommet perforations in the leather between his hand drawn cellulose frames. Marey designed and tried out different intermittent mechanisms based on electricity, clockwork, and gravity, probably motivated by the need to address the issue of frame alignment. In one design, after the film had been halted, it was restarted by a spring mechanism when the pressure on it was relaxed. In July 1892, he temporarily abandoned the project because he was unable to “obtain completely equal intervals between images….” Marey’s projector of 1892, built by Otto Lund, was based on his insight that a camera and a projector had similar mechanical and optical properties and is now in the collection of the French government’s Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (The National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts). In 1896 Marey finally produced a chronophotographic combination camera-projector but by that time he might have been better off buying an off-­the-­shelf Lumière Cinématographe. Marey’s experiments covered a wide range of subjects including human beings engaged in various activities. He photographed magicians doing their tricks, waves, animals, and people engaged in various activities. As Mannoni (2000, p.  343) put it: “With the assistance of Demenÿ and Lund, Marey now entered the true ‘filmic’ period of his work.” Today these studies, like the work of Muybridge, are considered to be fine art and are preserved in several archives in France and America. Indeed, his locomotion studies influenced modern art, as Braun (1992) convincingly describes, especially the striking resemblance of Marcel Duchamp’s well-known Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2 with chronophotographs made using Marey’s trolley camera. However, Marey would never have photographed a woman (nude men were OK) in such a state (as Muybridge did), in McMahan’s (2002) opinion, writing that Marey was “ever sensitive to public opinion.” Marey remained indifferent to any non-­ scientific applications for his work, which was radically different from the position taken by his associate, the inventive Georges Demenÿ (1850–1917), who was enthralled by the concept of the projection of moving images and its many applications. Alas, although Demenÿ made progress in applying what he and Marey had discovered to educational

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and consumer applications, as we shall see, his vision was unfulfilled in part because his work was eclipsed by the arrival of the 35 mm cinema invented by Edison in America with projection implemented by the Lumières in Europe. His contribution has been denigrated by the followers of Marey and the Lumières, according to Herbert (1996), but this is unfair. For one thing, Demenÿ invented the beater-cam projector intermittent that was used for low cost projectors into the second decade of the twentieth century. On July 27, 1891, before the Académie des Sciences, Demenÿ projected moving images using his Phonoscope projector, part of his Phonophone system, designed to help deaf children learn to lip read by “watching the lips of the chronophotographed subject,” according to Mannoni (2000, p. 354). To demonstrate the process Demenÿ used a Marey camera to photograph a close-up of himself exaggerating his facial expressions while speaking these two sentences: “je vous aime” and “Vive la France.” Up to 30 frames were mounted along the circumference of disks of either 42 or 50 cm (16.5 or 20 in) in diameter. The disks were projected using a Molteni lantern modified with a radial disk shutter rotating coaxially with the image disk. This kind of projection, using phenakistoscope-disk technology, was in keeping with the approach demonstrated by Muybridge, which as Mannoni

Fig. 11.7  Georges Demenÿ (Cinémathèque Française)

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points out was a dead end, not simply because it was only capable of projecting fresh content for a few seconds, but also because it was so wasteful of light, limiting projection to small screens. Miniature Phonoscope disks were also made that were used for Demenÿ’s peepshow-style viewing device. The Phonoscope was presented at the Exposition Internationale de Paris in 1892, where it was warmly greeted, which motivated Demenÿ to implore Marey to embrace projection and non-chronophotographic applications. Demenÿ also described a display method that was not publically exhibited, using a cylindrical format in which the minute views are arranged in a spiral. The arrangement appears to have been identical in concept to the early experimental devices used by Dickson in Edison’s lab, which also used a pulse of illumination in place of a shutter to arrest the continuously moving frame. Mannoni (2000, pp. 354–360) characterizes efforts to market the Phonophone system as half-hearted, which reduced the effectiveness of Demenÿ’s appeals to Marey since it was a commercial failure. Demenÿ yearned to go beyond chronophotography, the Marey laboratory mandate, and to expend the scope of their endeavors to projection. Marey and Demenÿ in France and Edison and Dickson in America had remarkably similar conflicts: both Demenÿ and Dickson had a vibrant vision that went beyond that of their masters, resulting in both of them breaking away to invent projection technology. Demenÿ’s aspirations also diverged from his boss’s with his desire to create non-­scientific moving image applications, such as education, entertainment, and what was later called home movies. The split between Marey and Demenÿ grew as Demenÿ independently patented improvements to Marey’s inventions, many of which were in the public domain. At first Marey was supportive and proud of what his disciple achieved and pleased with the public attention Demenÿ’s Phonoscope attracted, which he probably viewed as an honorable attempt to help the disabled, but Marey, with an attitude reminiscent of Huygens centuries before, was first and foremost a physiologist who disdained commercialization and his inventions, non-scientific applications. Although Marey had been pleased with the Phonoscope, he could not abide what he viewed to be frivolous uses based on developments made in his lab. Despite the fact that Marey needed Demenÿ’s help at the Station Physiologique, they parted ways in 1894 and Demenÿ moved to a new location in Paris where he continued to make Phonoscope films. Demenÿ was succeeded by Dublin-born Lucien Bull (1876–1972), who was trained by Marey and became well-known for his work in ultra-high speed cinematography. Demenÿ had been working on a projector, his celluloid film Chronophotographe, which he redesigned turning it into

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Fig. 11.8  Demenÿ’s Phonoscope peepshow viewer (left) and projector (right).

FIg. 11.9  The Demenÿ-­ Gaumont Chronophotographe-Biograph camera-projector – the later model used perforated film but retaining the downward dog drive.

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a convertible 60  mm camera-projector after seeing the Lumières’ multipurpose Cinématographe. Demenÿ was in a race against history, set in motion by inventions in West Orange that leapt across the Atlantic to Lyon. On August 22, 1895, Demenÿ signed an exclusive licensing arrangement with Léon Gaumont, inventor and head of the newly formed L. Gaumont et Cie, which until that year had been known as Le Comptoir Général de Photographie (literally: The General Counter of Photography). Demenÿ was to receive royalties from sales and received an advance against them of 6000 Francs, in exchange for giving Gaumont complete control of his inventions’ exploitation. Toward the close of 1895 Gaumont began to market the Chronophotographe, renaming it the Biographe (it came equipped with a 120  mm Zeiss Anastigmat), anticipating that it would be used by amateurs for personal films. From 1896 to 1897, Gaumont made a number of short films in the 60  mm format, whose frame size was 45  mm  ×  36  mm, four times the area of the Edison 24 mm × 18 mm frame. Some of these films may have been directed by Demenÿ, and some were later reprinted for 35  mm distribution (McMahan 2002; Tümmel 1973). The Biographe, which in Mannoni’s (2000, pp. 442–450) opinion was a beautifully made machine, performed well. It used the beater-cam movement for intermittent film advance, which was a necessity for a projector-camera that used film without perforations. Demenÿ added perforations to the 60 mm film and modified the projector-camera accordingly. To be com-

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petitive with Edison’s 35 mm system that had been adopted and adapted by the Lumières, he designed a 35 mm version that was offered in 1897, which retained the beater movement. Projectors fitted with the beater-cam sold well and remained “appreciated by operators all over the world until 1914” (Mannoni 2000). The beater-cam movement was used by the Americans Jenkins and Armat for their first version of the Phantoscope projector, despite the fact that it was designed for 35 mm perforated film. The ingeniously simple beater-cam, located below the gate, advanced film intermittently by pulling on it with a finger mounted on the periphery of a constantly rotating cam. As the cam rotated, the finger pulled the film through the projector’s gate but when the finger was disengaged from the film, which it was for most of the cam’s rotation, the frame came to rest in the gate. A beater-cam or something like the Maltese-cross stop-start mechanism was needed to turn the rotational motion supplied by handcranking or an electric motor into intermittency. When the Demenÿ-­Gaumont Biographe camera-projector was put on the market Edison’s 35  mm format was taking hold, and the Lumières’ Cinématographe, a simple and excellent machine, had already been introduced. As a result the Gaumont-­manufactured product did not long endure in the marketplace. Demenÿ retreated from the life of a motion picture inventor to return to his first love, gymnastics, which the reader will allow involves a considerable amount of motion.

Part III THE CELLULOID CINEMA: The 35 mm Medium

Edison, Dickson, and the Kineto Project

Two MGM1 feature films about Thomas Alva Edison (1886– 1931) were released in 1940: one cast a puckish Mickey Rooney as Young Tom Edison, portraying him as a manic, bumbling, but ingenious and heroic all-American lad. The second film cast an earnest Spencer Tracy as Edison, the Man, depicting him as an amusingly avuncular deaf codger reminiscing about his life as an all-American genius. The handsomely made hagiographic films furthered the Edison myth, and intriguingly the films’ sophisticated filmmaking technology calls attention to how much progress the cinema had made in the half century since Edison and his gifted assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, invented the 35 mm movie camera. The portrait these films paint are in stark contrast to that of Edison in Wyn Wachhorst’s (1981, p.  209) book, Thomas Alva Edison, An American Myth, which supports the opinion of Edison denigrators that he was: “…(an) antisocial egomaniac to whom close personal relationships meant almost nothing including those within his family. He was demanding, impatient, tactless, and given to extreme tantrums. He felt awkward with emotions and considered the expression of feelings a weakness…. He was hard-driving, opportunistic, and as ruthless as any robber baron; he befriended those who were useful to him and discarded those who were not.” But his contemporaries had a different point of view: George Bernard Shaw (1905), in 1879 at the age of 23, worked for the Edison Telephone Company in London. In the American preface to the 1905 edition of his novel, The Irrational Knot, he remarks that his fellow workers, who were American: “…adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible department of science, art and philosophy….” Thomas Alva Edison’s story is well traveled and the biographical background given here is brief and does not concentrate on personality; rather some attempt is made to shed light on Edison’s process and the work he did that materially contributed to cinema technology: his creation of the research Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, also written as M-G-M, and frequently referred to as Metro. 1 

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and development laboratory, the phonograph, the carbon microphone, his version of the electric light, electrical distribution from a central generating plant, the Edison Effect that led to the creation of electronics, the 35 mm movie camera the Kinetograph, and the movies’ first display device, the peepshow Kinetoscope. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, after which his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where he grew up exhibiting an independent, inventive, and entrepreneurial spirit. When he was a young man, between 1863 and 1868, he set out as an itinerant telegraph operator following the telegraph lines, which followed the railroad tracks, from telegraph office to telegraph office, finally winding up in Boston (Israel 1998, pp.  21–34). The go-getting Edison greatly increased his skills as an operator and began to look beyond his day-to-day job, which served to stimulate his insights into optimizing and improving telegraph technology, the era’s high tech, and an active field for inventors. His fellow operators teased him about his ambitions, but he would go on to invent a number of telegraph enhancements, the best known being the quadraplex telegraph that sent four signals down the line at the same time, saving Western Union the expense of adding new lines, and he developed specialized telegraph-based systems such as an automatic vote counting machine and a fire alarm system, as recounted by one of his biographers Paul Israel (1998). Edison continued to work on telegraph systems for decades, and both it and his phonograph informed his approach to his celluloid cinema research program. In Boston and then in New York, Edison gained first-hand experience seeking out sources of funding, patent law, and working for the communications corporations, as a result of which he came to recognize the advantages of having his own lab and staff. Edison fit in with the American corporate system that had begun to take shape based on two monolithic businesses, the telegraph, and the railroads. The Edison of modest origins found ways to obtain funding from powerful corporate entities and doing business with them. The boy raised in Port Huron became a self-confident, persuasive man comfortable dealing with men of wealth and power.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_12

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Fig. 12.1  Thomas Alva Edison (photo by W. K. L. Dickson)

Edison is credited with creating the first research and development laboratory, which opened in 1876, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he invented both the phonograph and a system for the distribution of electrical power. Because of these accomplishments, and a chauvinistic press hungry for an American hero, he became known as the Wizard of Menlo Park. In 1887 he moved his lab, vastly expanding his operations to include manufacturing, to a campus in West Orange New Jersey where for the next 40  years, with the help of scientists, inventors, and machinists, as many as 200 at a time depending on the workload, he pursued many projects simultaneously, most interesting for us is the 35 mm motion picture system (Wirth 2008). Edison’s spacious and lofty wood paneled office, in his main lab building, contained an extensive library whose bookshelves were two stories high. A measure of his wealth and success is that a book cost an average person a week’s wages, and he had many thousands of books. The lab had, on its third floor above his office, a sound studio for mastering recordings for the Edison cylinder phonograph. The long wooden lab building is entered through a vestibule with its time clock and punch cards, after which one enters the first floor shop that had the heavy metalworking machines with the lighter machines assigned to the second floor. The lathes, drills, chippers, grinders, and other tools look much like their modern counterparts with this excep-

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tion: they were powered by only a few large electric motors and driven by belts that ran over ceiling pulleys, just as torque was delivered to machinery in the days of steam power. Edison had a private open-cage elevator marked with a sign cautioning that it was for his use alone. The West Orange campus, now reduced to a couple of acres, in its heyday included a manufacturing facility, which between 1910 and 1915 had an annual payroll of $2,500,000 and employed 3600 people making Edison products including batteries and kitchen appliances, and the 1915 juke box, Edison’s Multiphone, using 24 phonograph cylinders mounted like Ferris Wheel cars, which I saw at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles (Simonds 1935). Edison founded companies with investment partners to exploit his inventions and he also licensed technology to major corporations like Western Union. His approach differs from how most R&D organizations came to operate, focusing on product development for their parent companies, rather than for the benefit of the head of the lab. In 1877 Edison invented the phonograph, as described in chapter 26; unlike most of his other inventions it was a non-electrical mechanical device. Edison’s approach to the phonograph became the model for his initial motion picture design concept and also for the sales and marketing efforts for his new system. The phonograph was used in a failed attempt to bolster sales of the peepshow Kinetoscope, and was also the basis for his attempts to add synchronized sound to the movies (McGee 2001, p. 143). Other cinema pioneers, like Léon Gaumont, also made valiant efforts to create a cinema of synchronized sound which, after three decades, culminated in 1926 with the introduction of the first sound-on-disk system using electronic amplification, Vitaphone, developed by Western Electric, as we shall learn in these pages. While still at Menlo Park Edison filed a disclosure for his electric lamp, the first of many applications he devoted to the subject, on November 4, 1879, USP 223,898, Electric-Lamp, issued January 27, 1880, describing an evacuated glass envelope using a carbon filament heated by current to emit light.2 Other inventors had been working on perfecting the electric arc, which was in widespread use for illuminating city streets and large indoor spaces, but more to the point, English physicist and chemist Joseph Swan (1828–1914) on December 18, 1878, at the Newcastle upon Tyne Chemical Society, demonstrated a working incandescent carbon filament electric lamp. Swan had begun working on the electric lamp in 1850 and by 1860 had both demonstrated a device and been granted a British patent covering the technology. Swan was Bamboo was needed for the lightbulb filament, with Edison employee Frank McGowan given the assignment to find it in the jungles and mountains of South America. McGowan disappeared without a trace, but not in some far away perilous place, but after being seen on a Manhattan street on a sunny afternoon in March 1890 (Spehr 2008, p. 250). 2 

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Fig. 12.2  Edison’s West Orange Lab: the ground floor with the heavy machines. (Jason Goodman)

Fig. 12.3  The West Orange campus, 1923.

issued BP 4933, on November 27, 1880, based on a carbonized filament of parchmentized thread and in 1881 he founded The Swan Electric Light Company to manufacture lightbulbs. Although Swan and Edison had operated independently of each other, they combined their business interests in 1883 to form the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company to manufacture lightbulbs using the extruded nitrocellulose filament that Swan had invented. Hughes (1983) makes the point that Edison, unlike Swan, conceived of the incandescent lamp as part of a system of electrification. The lightbulb itself is but one part of what Edison put into place on an industrial scale, the centralized distribution of electric power by an electric utility company.

His systems approach is also reflected with his phonograph and motion picture activities as he moved into the content production and distribution business for records and film prints. The Kineto project was monetized by manufacturing hardware, Kinetoscopes and projectors, and content, film prints. The system was designed to generate revenue the moment a customer dropped a coin into the Kinetoscope, but the revenue went directly to the operator and not Edison. Edison was selling both the Kinetoscope and the prints outright to the distributors and Kinetoscope parlor operators. A modified Kineto model of manufacture, distribution, and the retail of content became the basis for the celluloid cinema’s business model.

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Edison built his own improved steam-powered electric generators, one of which was called Jumbo, after P.  T. Barnum’s celebrity elephant. It was installed in the steam powered coal fired electrical distribution plant, the Pearl Street Station, at 255–257 Pearl Street, which started operation on September 4, 1882, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, providing lower Manhattan with direct current. The next day the New York Times had this to say about electric light: “The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight.” Earlier the same year, Edison had installed the first steam-powered electrical generating plant in London. Edison, a stubborn man who had a strong belief in the virtues of direct current, lost his enthusiasm for electrical distribution as Westinghouse prevailed with Nikola Tesla’s alternating current. The company he cofounded in 1889, the Edison General Electric Company, became his lab’s major client on October 1, 1891, when Edison signed an agreement with it that would pay his laboratory expenses as long as he devoted half of his time to improving electric lighting but when it began to manufacture alternating current hardware, which he opposed, he sold his stock in it to finance his ore mining development program and the company was renamed General Electric (Thomas Edison:…, date uncertain). William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860–1935), who would play a decisive and far reaching role in the invention of the celluloid cinema, was born in Brittany, France, at Château St. Buc near Minihic-sur-Rance, and although his family traveled extensively he was raised, for the most part, in England. He was not to be referred to as Bill or Willy or some such, preferring to be known as William Kennedy Laurie, or just plain Dickson, but Edison, to needle him because he had once misspelt Edison’s name, in memos to him spelled Dickson as “Dixon” (In later life Dickson played with inserting and moving a hyphen between the parts of his full name.) Dickson was the son of a Scottish astronomer, linguist, and artist, and as a young man, with his American mother and two sisters, he moved to Virginia hoping that he would someday find work with Edison. Dickson remained a British citizen and would eventually return to that country where he retired. When living in London in February 1879, Dickson had written to “Eddison,” seeking employment, but was turned down by return post in March. One day in 1881, as given in Dickson’s probably apocryphal account, he showed up unannounced at Edison’s office at 65 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, at which time Edison allegedly said to him: “But I told you not to come didn’t I?” At that unscheduled and informal meeting Dickson (1933) wrote that he presented Edison with a summary of his education and work experience. After having read it, sizing up the man who stood before him, Edison purportedly said: “I reckon they are all right; you’d better take your coat off and get to work.”

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What happened is somewhat different: Dickson had a letter of recommendation from an artist who had done work for Edison, and he most probably began to work for Edison in April 1883, according to Spehr (2008). (Dickson was notoriously poor at accurately remembering dates.) Dickson arrived at an opportune moment because Edison was hiring, engaged as he was in rapidly expanding his manufacturing capacity, having put research on hold for the time being. He was busy financing and organizing several entities to manufacture light bulbs and power stations and to electrify lower Manhattan, creating the model for the electric power distribution infrastructure that would play such a part in modernizing the world. Dickson was engaged in the Testing Room of the Edison Machine Works, at 104 Goerck Street, now Baruch Place in Lower Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge (WS: www.boweryboogie...). After 1885 he was transferred to a temporary lab in Newark, and in 1887 to West Orange, New Jersey, where he began to work with Edison on his iron ore extraction program; he also became Edison’s official photographer, soon setting to work on “his favorite scheme of joining his phonograph to pictures taken photographically with a device like a Zoetrope.” On February 27, 1888, Edison met with Eadweard Muybridge in his West Orange laboratory 2  days after

Fig. 12.4  William Kennedy Laurie Dickson

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Muybridge had given a Zoöpraxiscope (see chapter 10) demonstration and lecture at the Music Hall in Orange, New Jersey. It’s not known if Edison attended the demonstration but it’s probable that Muybridge brought his Zoöpraxiscope to Edison’s lab; based on a comment Edison made, he had seen Muybridge’s demonstration of projected apparent motion. Muybridge’s account was that they talked about combining projecting moving images with the phonograph but Edison would later deny that this was a subject of their conversation. In a letter dated January 24, 1925, Edison strove to make clear that the idea for his celluloid cinema efforts preceded his meeting with Muybridge, in this often quoted passage: “In the year 1887 the idea occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combination of the two all motion and sound can be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. This idea, the germ of which came from a little toy called the zoëtrope and the work of Muybridge, Marey, and others has now been accomplished…” (Dickson 2000). Edison ought to have also included Anschütz in this list of influences because he saw a Tachyscope demonstrated in Paris, and either acquired one or had Dickson build a replica of it, and it’s likely that the peepshow Tachyscope and its Geissler tube for arresting images informed his research efforts and the development of the Kinetoscope (Israel 1998). Edison further avowed that his experiments began early: “When I first turned my mind the subject in 1887, it was with the thought of creating a new art…I took up my experimental work late in 1887 or early in 1888. As a preliminary and to test out the feasibility of my ideas, the first photographs were made on a cylinder (somewhat resembling a phonograph record) turning continuously, the pictures being of small or almost microscopic size and being arranged in a continuous spiral line on the cylinder” (Richardson 1925, p. 66). Edison’s dating of events can be self-serving and it has been noted that some of his recollections on the subject of his motion picture efforts were aimed at bolstering the precedence of his inventorship, and both Edison and Dickson’s recollections are often suspect when it comes to describing their contributions. The detailed history of Edison’s Kineto project is fraught with inconsistencies; however, according to Spehr (2008, p.  125), Dickson probably started his first Kineto work testing photographic emulsions, in this case using wet plates, at the end of 1888. In December 1888 Dickson purchased gun cotton from Charles Cooper & Co., which together with the nitric acid stored in the Edison stock room, allowed him to make his own emulsions. After Edison expressed interest in the Kineto project work advanced only intermittently because his major focus, and money pit, was the development of an electromagnetic separator to extract iron from low grade ore. Toward that end, he had set up two pilot mills close to existing mines near

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Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania, in 1886, and again in 1889  in Ogdensburg, in northwestern New Jersey, where Dickson spent most of his time on the ore separation project until June 1889. Edison’s iron ore project encountered many difficult engineering problems but it came to an end with the opening of the Great Lakes Mesabi high grade iron ore range (Israel 1998). The effort wasn’t entirely in vain because the rock crushing machinery was used to make Portland cement for construction projects like the building of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. However, the iron ore experiments had served as a distraction from the Kineto program. Dickson later cooperated with Edison’s version of the Kineto chronology during patent litigation and in his writing, in part because he was attempting to get back into Edison’s good graces after a falling out, but he may have come to believe his own dissembling. However, he had another agenda that was in conflict with Edison’s, his belief that the acknowledgment of his contributions had been shortchanged. There may never be a completely reliable account of what went on in West Orange during the time of the Kineto program; there may be no other area of cinema history, scholarship, or litigation, which has had more investigation and been more contentious than the events surrounding Edison’s invention of the celluloid cinema.3 Having said this, there is reason to believe that Edison may have indeed begun moving image research as early as he asserts since his lab records reveal that he had Dickson purchased photographic materials from the Scovill Manufacturing Company in December 1887 and a letter from Scovill to Edison dated the same month, according to Bowen (1955), “is direct evidence that systematic experiments were to be started in Room No. 5 of the West Orange laboratory….” On the other hand, Edison may have been using the materials for other purposes since he had become interested in photography for his personal use. Like so much else in this history, the interpretation of a seemingly simple action is equivocal. After considerable rumination Edison chose the term Kineto to describe his cinema experiments, which compared with the alternatives he considered, was “…shorter, simpler and covers camera, viewer and projector,” according to Paul Spehr (2008, p.  85). It was a different world at the time Edison began his Kineto work, so different that terminology had to be invented for new concepts, some of which have fallen by the wayside, such as “instant photography,” to denote moving images, or “phases of motion,” to denote frames. Edison’s grappling with language was part of the inventive process  – with the right words, cognition is expanded. Edison had Dickson worked on both the iron ore and the motion picture projects, but in June 1889 Edison A good account of the historical farrago surrounding these events can be found in Spehr’s (2008, chapter 33) The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson.

3 

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Fig. 12.5  The cover sheet of one of Edison’s USPs teaching a method for magnetic iron ore extraction. Dickson is listed as a co-inventor on this and another such patent, supporting the notion that he was given credit when Edison deemed his contribution merited inclusion.

gave the 29- year-old Dickson, an expert photographer, the reassignment to be his chief Kineto experimenter and to create a moving image prototype using the phonograph cylinder as a model for the developmental apparatus. Dickson was joined in Laboratory Room 5 by Charles A.  Brown, who became his chief assistant, and as needed the two men received help from others, chiefly Frederick P. Ott and Eugene Lauste (Musser 1991, pp. 29, 30). The proper start date for the project can be said to have been some months earlier when it was given official status on February 1, 1889, and an accounting number so that Edison’s bookkeepers could track its expenditures (Spehr 2008, 119). Edison and

Dickson had studied the prior art and were not satisfied with the motion effect that was produced by the limited number of exposures for a given interval by Muybridge with his battery of cameras, whose images Edison thought “were very jerky, and only a few pictures in a single movement, and they produced no illusion except they merely illustrated motion” (Spehr 2008, p. 85). In addition, Edison rejected Muybridge’s multi-camera approach and understood that instant or animated photography had to be taken with a single camera and a single lens. For their initial attempts, he and Dickson knew that the cylinder apparatus had to rotate intermittently so that each

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image was captured when the light sensitive surface was at rest. In their final cylinder iteration it rotated continuously, relying on the flashing Geissler tube method used by Anschütz (see chapter 10) to arrest the images, an approach that also informed their Kinetoscope design. Dickson spent considerable time and effort on the cylinder or drum as it was often called, as an image capture, storage, and playback contrivance. Brown described their early efforts this way: “We first took the phonograph and coated a cylinder and put onto it and had a lens taken out of the microscope and rigged onto it, and then they had a coarse feed onto to it so as to run slower, and that fed the lens along in front of the coated cylinder; but we made great many experiments during that time in trying to see how small pictures we could get” (Musser 1991, p. 30). Dickson (1933) recounts that his first tests used a metal cylinder with a daguerreotype surface to produce tiny photographs using a lens from his microscope, but daguerreotype technology was soon abandoned since it was not sufficiently sensitive for the relatively brief exposures required for moving images. Moreover, it’s difficult to see how it could have served as the basis for a practical system that would require making prints. Unlike Muybridge’s approach, a single camera using a light sensitive surface coated on a cylinder was used to expose successive images. Initially it was Edison’s hope to record a minimum of 8 exposures per second but preferably 25 exposures per second, which he calculated would give 28 minutes of action using a 3-inch-diameter cylinder with 42,000 1/32nd-inch-wide frames spiraling around it. In Edison’s first Kineto Caveat No. 110, the 1/32nd inch frame was rejected based on early experiments. Dickson adopted a larger 1/8th inch wide frame, and eventually a ¼-inch frame. For viewing, pins at the end of the drum were used to trip electrical contacts to trigger a Geissler tube to illuminate the little frames with flashes of light as they were viewed through a microscope eyepiece, which as noted, is similar to the method Anschütz used for arresting his continuously advanced peepshow Tachyscope slides, but it’s also a reversion to the phenakistoscopic shuttering of a continuously rotating images. According to Bowen (1955), a Kinetograph cylinder that was on display at the Library of Congress in 1954 had “one edge studded with pins for making electrical contact. These pins are ¼-in. apart, and may have served as circuit-closers for illuminating, by electric spark, the ¼-in. pictures....” In Edison’s day invention priority could be established by filing a Caveat with the United States Patent Office, a description of the invention that served as protection for a year until a formal or utility filing was made. Today, priority can be established by filing a similar document, a provisional disclosure. On October 17, 1888, Edison’s first of four caveats, Caveat No. 110, written in his own hand, Improvement in Photography, was placed in the United States Patent Office

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archive describing the cylinder format apparatus for “photographing continuously in a series of pictures greater than eight per second….” But Edison never followed through with filing a utility patent for what he called the Kinetograph. This Caveat, the first cylinder attempt, also contemplates the addition of sound by mechanically linking a phonograph to the Kinetograph (Bowen 1955). This suggestion is the antecedent of subsequent attempts at phonographic cinema sound and its commercialization as the Vitaphone in 1926. Edison filed his second Kineto Caveat, No. 114, on March 25, 1889, describing the use of a drum with a cylinder-­like surface with a polygonal cross section, with thin flat surfaces on which the frames are imaged; the motivation for the flat surfaces was to improve image sharpness. The first two caveats were based on having light-sensitive material coated directly on the mediums’ surface, but in practice this did not work well. The second Caveat is an omnibus filing that covers several ongoing projects unrelated to Kineto but it describes the polygonal cylinder’s mechanism for intermittent advancement and coordinating that with the shutter’s action to expose the frames. The exposure rate was reduced from the 25 per second called for in Caveat No. 1, to 10–15 images per second. The 35 mm Kinetograph camera would actually run at about 40 exposures per second. On August 5, 1889, Edison filed his third Kineto Caveat no. 116, in which he describes using a glass cylinder. In practice it appears that the glass cylinder was wrapped with emulsion-coated celluloid. The shutter is dispensed with and the cylinder rotated continuously with the exposures made using the light of a flashing electric spark, probably a Geissler tube, to illuminate the subject. Provision was made for bright outdoor photography to be done with a mechanical shutter. For spark exposures, contacts on the cylinder closed a circuit to trigger current supplied by a Leyden jar (battery) to produce 15 flashes a second to expose 1/8th inch images. For viewing the image through a microscope lens, an electric spark tube was to be placed within the glass cylinder to illuminate each frame as it came into viewing position. The caveat was filed 2 days after Edison left for his triumphant trip to Paris, and according to the testimony of Edison staff members the cylinder concept was abandoned before he left (Spehr 2008, p. 123). Dickson’s assistant, Charles A.  Brown, asserted that the device had been built and operated prior to Edison having left for Paris. Brown, testifying in an infringement conflict between Edison and American Mutoscope said: “Yes sir; we had a transparent drum with a light inside of it, and then we put these on that drum and looked at them through a microscope.” The “these” and “them” of his ­statement refer to the celluloid sheet of images wrapped around the face of the glass cylinder. The light refers to an electric spark used to view each frame. Brown’s recollection is bolstered by that of Edison mechanic Charles Ott who relates that the frame rate of the device was restricted to eight or ten frames per second and that the curvature of the cylinder limited the size of the frames (Spehr 2008,

112 Fig. 12.6  Edison’s first cylinder concept, October 1888, was influenced by his phonograph. Continuously rotating tiny images are viewed through microscope optics that were visually arrested by brief flashes of light.

Fig. 12.7  A drawing from Edison second motion picture caveat of March 1889, teaching a cylinder with flat stepped faces to improve image sharpness.

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12  Edison, Dickson, and the Kineto Project

p. 140). Musser (1995) writes that Edison had hoped to use a larger transparent cylinder allowing him to project the images. Dickson (1933) recounts that he had been experimenting with strips of stiff celluloid supplied by John Carbutt, which were wrapped around the cylinder as early as 1887, but this date is undoubtedly incorrect. Nonetheless, this approach would have been a good way to make contact prints in quantities for distribution. So it is that the accounts of what went on in West Orange, of which the events surrounding the third Caveat are an example, are not always in agreement and the narrative of the sequence of developments surrounding the first functional movie camera, its display device, and 35 mm film, the basis for the celluloid cinema, are ambiguous. The different accounts of the participants may be based on faulty memories, or possibly efforts to support their own contributions, or simply prevarication to protect a proprietary positon. Unfortunately, perjury in commercial litigation testimony is common and rarely if ever prosecuted. At the time of the Kineto experiments, less than 400 miles away in Rochester, New  York, George Eastman had been seeking a better way make prints from his customers’ snapshot negatives. The Kodak No. 1 camera, introduced in June 1888, used rolls of emulsion coated paper. The camera with its exposed film was returned to Rochester for processing, which included development and stripping the emulsion from the paper and laying it on a glass sheet to provide a clear negative for contact printing the rolls 100 2½-inch-­ diameter snapshots for $25. The stripping film was also available for an adapter for glass plate cameras but it was for the amateur market that it made its mark, making photography simple for the non-expert. It turned out to be a step in the right direction for Le Prince, Friese-Greene, Marey, and Skladanowsky, who needed film  – flexible strips of light-­ sensitive material to advance their experiments, although Edison and Dickson were disinclined to give it a try since its use posed “…many mechanical difficulties…” (Spehr 2008, pp. 91, 152). Only a year or so later the superior alternative to paper “film” would be offered (Spehr 2008, p. 223). This new kind of film was the basis for the Kodak No. 2, which made the same number of circular pictures as the No. 1, but 3 ½ inches in diameter. The exposed and developed celluloid film was used for direct contact printing on paper, and it could also be used for printing glass lantern slides. The first batches of roll film cellulose nitrate base coated with emulsion were made in August 1889, and Eastman promised that production would commence in the fall but there were delays while manufacturing problems were worked out (Spehr 2008, pp.  153, 159). Serious or professional photographers had been using emulsion coated plates of glass, dry plates, to be exposed in view cameras. The term referred to the recently introduced product that could be stored and used with a dry emulsion, unlike prior photographic plates that had to be coated with emulsion immedi-

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ately before exposure. Celluloid sheets coated with emulsion were offered in 1887 in England by Vergara and in France by Balagny (Spehr 2008, pp. 136, 137). Although the celluloid plates were lighter and less fragile than glass, they had a serious drawback that prevented them from becoming accepted: they became limp and difficult to handle during development. Late in 1888 John Carbutt, under license from Hannibal Goodwin, began to offer an improved celluloid plate that gained acceptance. But it wasn’t suitable for Edison and Dickson, who needed long strips of flexible transparent celluloid film with good physical properties, as did other inventors like Le Prince, Friese-Greene, and Marey. On May 30, 1899, Edison wrote to Eastman seeking pricing information about Kodak paper roll film products indicating that he may have been considering using it for his Kineto experiments (Bowen 1955). Edison must have thought this was an important communication since he wrote it himself because it’s a routine purchase inquiry that might have been left to a subordinate. However, it’s possible that Edison, who had become interested in taking pictures, ordered it for his own use and may have also been considering photography for other applications in the lab. Since this predates Edison’s trip to Paris in the beginning of August it may indicate that he was thinking along the lines of film replacing the cylinder prior to his visit with Marey. Dickson visited Rochester on more than once occasion to discuss Kineto’s celluloid requirements with Eastman and others and to request the early delivery of film. Apparently Dickson had learned of its imminent release though an Eastman company representative in July 1889, in New  York City, where he may have obtained a sample. Dickson also may have shown the sample to Edison prior to his departure for Europe to attend the Exposition Universelle (Spehr 2008, p. 158). We know that in 1889 Edison’s lab was ordering and receiving celluloid from several different manufacturers (Spehr 2008, p. 138). Dickson’s persistence paid off, and he received a supply of film for testing in August 1889, although the gelatin emulsion tended to peel off the base. On Monday, September 2, 1889, Dickson sent the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company payment for the 1-inch-wide strip of 50 feet of film the lab had received, writing: “Enclosed please find sum of $2.50 P.O.O. due to you for one roll of Kodak film for which please accept thanks – I shall try same today & report – it looks splendid – I never succeeded in getting the substance in such straight & long pieces….” Eastman’s recollection of the order is given in a letter dated March 18, 1925: “I received a call from a representative of Mr. Edison’s who told me of Mr. Edison’s experiments in motion pictures and how necessary it was for him to have some of this film. The idea of making pictures to depict objects in motion was entirely new to me but of course I was much interested in the project and did my best to furnish him film as near to his

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specifications regarding fineness of grain and thickness as possible” (Richardson 1925). A significant change in direction took place, leading directly to the invention of Kinetograph camera and the design of 35  mm film, probably based on Edison’s experiences in Europe; however, there is sufficient evidence to cast doubt on this statement and it may be that Edison decided to abandon the cylinder approach and use film before leaving for Paris. Dickson, Ott, and Brown made the assertion that on July 31, 1889, 2 days before Edison sailed to Europe, they showed him the culmination of 6 weeks of effort that they were determined to present to him before his departure: a prototype camera that used strips of film. If what they claim is correct, Edison was shown a horizontally travelling film strip using Carbutt celluloid that was intermittently advanced using notches cut into its top surface so as to be gear driven (Spehr 2008, pp. 141,141). But there are experts who doubt this version of events, which is the case for many aspects of the Kineto project’s history. Edison left on his trip to Paris on August 3, 1889, only days before Dickson was able to obtain celluloid film from Eastman. He attended the Exposition Universelle where his company had, on a one-acre site, set up an entire steam-­ powered electric generating station. 1889 was an important year for Edison: several of his companies were combined, with the help of financier Henry Villard, to form the Edison General Electric Company; in addition his visit to Paris was a triumph, literally so as he was cheered by throngs in the streets and honored by society, the government, and scientists. Marey escorted Edison on a tour of the 300 exhibits where he saw Anschütz’s Tachyscope and viewed Marey’s studies in motion using a zoëtrope (Spehr 2008, p.  144). Edison may have visited the Théâtre Optique to see Reynaud’s projecting Praxinoscope (see chapter 6). Edison may have gone to Marey’s Station Physiologique and studied the chronophotographic apparatus that was used for making studies of animal locomotion, photographed with cameras making successive exposures using the rolls of emulsion coated paper designed for Kodak No. 1 snapshot cameras.4 Spehr (2008, p. 145) finds a lack of evidence that such a visit actually occurred. 4 

Fig. 12.8  Dickson made this drawing four decades after his experiments, asserting that he had the concept prior to Edson’s trip to Paris in 1889. Celluloid supplied by John Corbett was edge notched to be advanced for each exposure by an intermittently driven gear.

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In his later experiments, Marey used film with a celluloid substrate but without the indexing function provided by perforations, as recounted in chapter 11, Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ. Edison and Dickson had been following the literature and were aware of Marey’s work (Bowen 1955). Before Edison returned to America, according to inventor Eugene Lauste, who was working at the West Orange lab at the time, Edison sent telegrams from Paris to Dickson telling him to abandon the cylindrical experiments and to expect that there would be a change in direction based on what he had learned from Marey (Spehr 2008). In yet another version of the events surrounding what happened in West Orange, some scholars think that it is likely that when Edison returned from Europe in October 1889, he was ready to follow the new and more fruitful path based on capturing the phases of motion on celluloid film. According to Musser (1995, p. 10), during his time away in Paris, little was accomplished in West Orange; however, we know that a new Kineto facility was built in that time. Edison filed the fourth Kineto Caveat no. 117, on December 16, 1889, the basis for the first movie camera the Kinetograph and the 35 mm film it used. Edison’s now well-known sketch for the Caveat shows a camera using horizontally going film perforated with circular holes along both edges, traveling reel-to-reel, that was advanced a frame at a time by a stop-­ start sprocket wheel intermittent mechanism. On the other hand, there is the evidence that Edison had changed direction prior to his trip to Paris and that the reel-to-reel film approach began before his trip. The question of when Edison or his colleagues in West Orange hit upon the idea of using perforation cannot be pinned down. How likely is it that Edison had to travel to Paris to be inspired to use film and perforate it? There is evidence that he was thinking along such lines prior to leaving for Paris and he and his mechanics were thoroughly familiar with the perforated tape that he had used for some of his telegraph inventions (Spehr 2008, p.  157). Nonetheless, what Marey had to show him may have been of great influence; after all, seeing is believing. Just as Marey had been inspired by Muybridge, Edison was inspired by Marey. Dickson (1933) writes that while Edison was away he had the space for the Kineto project greatly expanded, but this

12  Edison, Dickson, and the Kineto Project

addition is not to be confused with the Black Maria building that was built later (Dickson’s memory may have conflated the two building projects). The new Kineto lab was approved by Charles Batchelor who was in charge of the lab and empowered to approve such a project in Edison’s absence. The photo “building” was a shed attached to the side of the ore mining building with a glass wall that had good exposure to the sun for natural light photography. Two darkrooms and improved electrical service and water supply were added (Spehr 2008, pp. 160–164). Dickson (1933) provides more information about the laboratory practices that were originated and carried out in the photo building, as covered in chapter 48 and by Crabtree (1955). Some of the events that Dickson reports occurring in that new structure may be apocFig. 12.9  Edison’s sketches, made upon his return from Paris in 1889, illustrate the concept of perforations for celluloid roll film.

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ryphal rather than epochal and there is considerable ambiguity about what exactly happened upon Edison’s return from Paris. Dickson relates that he took Edison by the arm as soon as he returned to the laboratory on October 6, 1889, and led him to the new facility. Upon his arrival Edison was taken aback by the existence of the structure that had been built in his absence without his approval, reportedly saying: “Well, you’ve got cheek; let’s see what you’ve got.” Dickson says that he had prepared a proof-of-concept demonstration of a synchronized sound motion picture projection of himself tipping his hat and speaking these words: “Good morning, Mr. Edison, glad to see you back, I hope you’re satisfied with the kinetophone.” To confirm that the synchronization was perfect, he (Dickson) counts

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to 10 using his fingers. Dickson relates that he was pleased to introduce Edison to what he called his first “talky.” Edison, by Dickson’s account, watched the film on a screen that was only 4  feet across, because of the space’s size limitations, and listened to the sound using ear tubes hooked up to a phonograph. The wealth of detail Dickson provides about the technique used to film, record, and play back his demonstration is truly impressive. If this account is factual, it also means that a remarkable technical advance, not simply with regard to synchronized sound, had taken place, but also with regard to the camera and projection capability. Dickson may well have worked on synchronized sound and he is shown playing the violin in a film made in 1894 in the Black Maria. His fiddle-playing provides the music for two

12  Edison, Dickson, and the Kineto Project

Edison workers who are dancing together, but for years only the film had been located, and it was questionable if it actually had an accompanying sound recording. A sound cylinder of a violin recording of music from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana was found at the Edison National Historic Site in East Orange. The film accompanying the recording had been stored at the Library of Congress in Washington. The discovered cracked cylinder was repaired and the sound was scanned using a laser. Walter Murch, working at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, was able to synchronize the image and track. He showed me the film on his laptop during our visit to the warehouse of the collection of the Cinémathèque Française early in the first week of December 2016. Murch gives an account of his restoration effort in Ondaatje’s (2002) The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.

13

The Kinetograph

There was a 1  year hiatus while the Kineto experiments were on hold, which resumed when Dickson returned to them from the iron ore extraction program. Even after Kineto was reinstated in October 1890, Edison expected Dickson to be working on both projects. On the 13th mechanic William Heise was assigned part-time to the Kineto project. The sprightly Dickson and the deliberate Heise worked together for 4 years and after January 5, 1891, Heise worked full-­time on Kineto, continuing filming movies for distribution after Dickson left Edison. Another mechanic, Charles H. Kayser, also came on board, who would later attempt to design a projector in a clandestine project for Edison. It was a remarkable stroke of good fortune that these technicians had been experimenting with telegraph equipment using perforated paper tape for recording messages, for this most likely was the inspiration for adding perforations to motion picture film. In 1869 Edison introduced the Universal Stock Ticker for reporting the price of securities, an important application of perforated telegraph tape (Spehr 2008, p. 201). Edison’s singular contribution to packaging the elements of the first successful movie camera was the addition of perforations, as illustrated in the sketch he used to explain the camera mechanism and film in Caveat No. 17. Spehr (2008, pp.  171, 172) points out that the Edison Kinetograph camera is similar to the spool-to-spool roll film concept used by Marey. It also has design aspects in common with the Kodak No. 1 snapshot camera with its layout of film fed from a feed to a take-up reel as it passed the film gate for exposure. A distinction between the Kodak snapshot camera and those designed by Marey and Edison is that theirs advanced film very much more rapidly in order to capture the phases of motion. The Kinetograph’s inspiration can be found in the work of Muybridge and Marey, but Muybridge’s battery of cameras could never have become a practical device for motion pictures, and Marey’s chronophotographic camera lacked perforations (Mannoni 2000, p. 342).

Cellulose nitrate base film was available since October 1888, when John Carbutt, working in Philadelphia, using stock supplied by the Hyatt Brothers’ Celluloid Manufacturing Company of Newark, began offering emulsion coated celluloid but many professional photographers rejected it, preferring to continue using glass plates. (See chapter 8.) Carbutt probably made film base by shaving slices of material from blocks of celluloid producing a material that was thicker than Eastman’s celluloid film. The stiff support allowed for an indexing approach using serrations along its top edge because it could be engaged and advanced intermittently with a rotating toothed gear (Spehr 2008, p. 142). As noted above, it’s possible that his staff demonstrated the concept to Edison, using horizontally travelling film, prior to his trip to Paris in 1889. Thereafter, Heise built a perforator to punch round holes in strips cut from 18-inchlong Carbutt film, as the Edison sketch illustrates. The team in Room 5 built a camera that used a Maltese-cross movement to drive horizontal traveling strips of film ¾ inch wide (19  mm) perforated on one edge running horizontally through their new camera, which exposed successive frames through a rotating shutter. A year later an improvement was made, according to Dickson (1933), and a new mechanism designed by Edison replaced the Maltese-cross, as described below. The camera’s lens had a 1¼-inch focal length and exposed frames ¼ inch square. Dickson next tried 13/8-inch wide film strips, using two rows of perforations, which became the basis for the 35 mm format, as illustrated in the Edison sketch included with Caveat No. 117. While concurrently working on what became the Kinetoscope in the spring of 1891, using Eastman celluloid film, Dickson and Heise made short films of athletes and a close-up that immortalized Fred Ott, Edison’s chief mechanic, smoking a pipe in a snippet titled Record of a Sneeze. The clip appeared as a sequence of stills in the January 1894 Harper’s Weekly, in this way qualifying as the first film to be copyrighted (Musser 1995). Only after having been adopted by France and other European countries that

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_13

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used the metric system of measurement was the 13/8-inch-­ wide emulsion-coated celluloid strip called 35  mm film. Edison and Dickson determined that the vertical traveling film had an image that was ¾-inch high and 1-inch wide, with four perforations on either side of each frame, which they identified as “one-inch” film, after they settled on it in the early autumn of 1891 to distinguish it from their prior cylinder and film frames. In metric terms the Dickson frame was 24.92 mm × 18.67 mm. 35 mm film became the principal standard for theatrical filmmaking for more than a century. On May 20, 1891, Edison’s wife Mina held a luncheon for the 147 presidents of local Women’s Club of America at the Edison home at Glenmont after, which they followed her down the hill to tour Edison’s laboratory to see his latest inventions. There, one at a time, they looked through the peephole of a prototype Kinetoscope viewer (probably using horizontally moving film) housed in a wooden crate and a film of Dickson tipping his straw hat, which according to Spehr (2008, p. 210), the lab staff characterized as “monkey shines.” A week later, a group of reporters from major newspapers were shown the same demonstration and a few months later, August 24, 1891, Edison filed the patent applications for both the Kinetograph camera and his Kinetoscope peepshow viewer. Although the club members and the reporters had seen a demonstration, considerably more work on the design of the Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope, and the film format needed to be undertaken. It was only at this time that Edison gave Dickson permission to add a second row of perforations to the film to make it wider and to enlarge its frame size. Edison had grown confident that his invention was about to become a product (Spehr 2008, p. 288). In the spring of 1891, he seemed interested in designing a projector but put no effort into it, a mistake that put him at a serious disadvantage when later attempting to inforce patent protection. Another omission was Edison’s failure to file patent applications for various Dickson inventions related to the processing of film, which would prove to be vital for the motion picture industry and thereby possibly blocking competition; according to John Crabtree (1955), of the Kodak Laboratory, the “birthday of the motion-picture laboratory” was August 1889, when George Eastman supplied celluloid film to Dickson who then set about to invent film perforating, processing, and printing machines. (See chapter 48.) Three Edison patent applications were made on August 24, 1891, which were granted as USP 491,993 Stop Device; USP 589,168 Kinetographic Camera (Kinetograph) and USP 493,426, Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects (Kinetoscope). Edison’s patents, fortified by the work of his attorney and the reissues they crafted, provided him with intellectual property ammunition in the nascent motion picture business of the early twentieth century, as we shall learn in chapter 18. With Edison’s camera,

13  The Kinetograph

we see for the first time, in once device, the key elements required for celluloid cinema cinematography. It was a single-lens camera that took a rapid sequence of the phases of motion for instant photography, to use the phrases of the time, and the addition of perforations crucially enabled printing and projection; in other words, Edison had in effect invented the celluloid cinema’s enabling technology. The camera used a toothed sprocket wheel to engage and advance the celluloid film’s fileted rectangular perforations for the exposure of one picture (or frame) at a time (intermittently). The advancing and indexing the film using perforations is a requirement for locating each frame in the same relative position for making prints and for steady projection, which had been missing from prior approaches. While sprocket intermittent advance was generally adopted for 35  mm projectors, shuttle (claw) intermittent advance was generally adopted for 35 mm cameras; Edison’s camera was like a projector in another way: its pulldown was very rapid. The patent drawing shows horizontal-travelling film, reflecting earlier experiments, but the claims are agnostic as to whether the film traveled horizontally or vertically, as was the case for the 35 mm format that has four perforations for each frame near both edges of the film. Kinetograph Camera was granted on August 31, 1897, and Edison is listed as the sole inventor. The 35 mm film format itself, designed by Dickson, has prevailed for more than a century, with only minor changes to perforation specifications. The recommended running speed for the Kinetograph camera, as given in its patent application, was between 30 and 46 fps, a rate required to mitigate flicker based on the technology used by the Kinetoscope. The camera used 50-foot lengths of film 35 mm wide, supplied by Eastman on special order, to be perforated in Dickson’s lab. Edison would later use film supplied by the Blair Camera Company, which Eastman purchased in 1899. Edison’s Stop Device, USP 491,993, concerns a ratchet-­ type intermittent for advancing the film, similar to a clock escapement, which was granted on February 21, 1893. It describes the camera’s mechanism, in part, as follows: “The main object of the invention is to provide such a device which shall operate with unerring certainty and with great rapidity, the construction preferably being such that the periods of rest shall be longer that those in which the device is moving forward.” According to Dickson they had originally used a Geneva cross intermittent rather than the clockwork-­ style ratchet. The recommendation made in the Kinetograph patent was that the film be exposed for as long as 90% of the intermittent cycle. This was a tactic to increase exposure due to the relatively high frame rate combined with the insensitive photographic emulsions of the time. The film was intermittently advanced by means of the sprocketed “stop wheel,” adjacent to the camera’s gate, activated by a clockwork

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Fig. 13.1  The cover sheet of Edison’s Kinetograph USP.

escapement of the kind that Edison describes in his USP 134,866, Improvement in Printing-Telegraph Instruments, granted on January 14, 1873. The shutter, whose opening was coordinated with the stop wheel action, was a continuously rotating circular disk with slot openings (or opening – there are two versions described). The film moved from a feed to a take-up reel by way of the gate and the take-up reel

was driven by a slipping belt to take into account the increase in the radius of the exposed film. One practical problem with Edison and Dickson’s Kinetograph was that, according to Spehr (2008, p. 214), it used two electric motors (other sources imply a single motor, as shown in the patent drawing), requiring a power supply limiting its portability because of the lack of electrification

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and the great weight of the Gibson storage batteries that were used to run its direct current variable speed motor. The camera was made to be heavy to reduce vibrations to produce a steady image and its movements were limited: it could not be moved while running but it was mounted on rails and could be moved away from the subject for long shots and toward it for close-ups. Its height could be adjusted but it could not be readily taken out of the Black Maria. Almost all of the cameras following Edison’s first Kinetograph were handcranked and could be used in the field while for the most part, the world had to be brought to Edison’s camera entrenched in the Black Maria, but once Edison got into production he had a portable handcranked camera built. Edison stated that “I had always had in mind the projection of motion pictures on a screen even before the completion of my first successful camera in 1889” (Richardson 1925). And it is worth noting that his camera design, like any camera design in principle, allows for it to be converted into a projector, and camera-­ projectors were to follow, notably from the Lumières. There are differences between practical camera and projector designs. One difference to emerge is that 35 mm celluloid film cameras use a shuttle or claw intermittent to engage the film’s perforations to advance it the height of a frame; on the other hand 35 mm projectors invariably use an intermittent sprocket wheel drive. Edison’s camera resembles a projector because of its rapid pulldown and film dwelling in the gate for most of the intermittent cycle. Despite the Kinetograph’s design details given in the issued patent we do not know exactly what Edison’s first camera was like because the camera, as built, may have departed in some details from the disclosure’s specifications. A Kinetograph was built for the purposes of adjudicating a legal dispute with the Biograph Company but its mechanism may not have been the same as that of the original; it can be seen at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey.

Fig. 13.2  The top half of Edison’s USP cover sheet describing the ratchet intermittent used for the Kinetograph.

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The concept that film should be advanced rapidly, in particular just a quarter of the intermittent cycle, eventually became an established projector design feature for maximizing screen brightness, one which was advocated by Vitascope co-inventor Thomas Armat (1935). 35  mm motion picture cameras, as they evolved, used a duty cycle in which the duration of the film’s transport was about the same as its exposure time. Edison’s Kinetograph camera was an utterly different design from his peepshow Kinetoscope, which has one foot in the era of the phenakistoscope. Kinetograph became a generic term and there are scores of movie camera patents by organizations other than Edison’s using the name, a number by one of the founders of Sears, Roebuck and Company, Alvah Curtis Roebuck. The same holds true for Kinetoscope, which was used for similar peepshow devices and projectors, and sometimes both Edison and Dickson used one term when they meant the other. In the summer of 1891 Dickson went to Rochester to visit with Bausch & Lomb and the Gundlach Optical Company. He was seeking a lens for the Kinetograph camera and was having difficulties finding a suitable optic. He needed one with the right focal length that would cover his 1-inch wide frame and required a focal length that would give him a convenient working distance for cinematography (2008, pp. 222, 224). The problem Dickson faced was that lenses of the time were designed to cover large glass plates and the designs he believed he needed were more like microscope lenses. He finally wound up with a lens designed for photography of the rapid rectilinear type made to his specification by Gundlach with a 3-inch focal length, longer than the so-called normal lens of about 2 inches, which was later adopted by the film industry. Cinema technology historian Dave Kenig estimates that the 3-inch lens had a speed of about f/6 and told me that Dickson rejected lenses using the Petzval design because of their curvature of field. It is his belief that the Gundlach

13  The Kinetograph

Fig. 13.3  A simple dual finger shuttle mechanism for engaging perforations to intermittently advance one frame at a time.

objective led to Dickson’s choice of the 35  mm format’s dimensions that resulted in its 1.33:1 aspect ratio because of his preference for the landscape format combined with a lens’s circular coverage. In 1891 Dickson was also working closely with the Kodak people in Rochester reporting deficiencies in their celluloid film and advocating for its improvement (Spehr 2008, p. 222). He had spent 2 years using Eastman’s film and in effect testing it for the betterment of the product for other photographic purposes, but in particular for Kineto he required a tougher base because the perforations became worn and torn resulting in unsharp and unsteady images. Dickson required what was called “double-coated” film, made by laying down a second layer of dope on top of the first 0.005 inch coating. George Eastman agreed to make a run of double coat, and it was ordered by Dickson on November 2, 1892. Prior to this Eastman cherry-picked single-­coat celluloid film that was thicker than the nominal 0.005 inch.1 Dickson also required an emulsion that was more sensitive to light for better exposures with less light and Eastman improved the product in that regard, but its initial slow speed led to the strategy of shooting against a black background in the Black Maria studio in order to more easily distinguish the subjects in the foreground. However, Eastman The thickness of acetate base has remained pretty much the same. For today’s color camera negative, the thickness of the acetate base is 0.125 mm (about 0.005 inches) and the emulsion is 0.025 mm, according to Shanebrook (2010), with the base accounting for 90% of the weight of the film.

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did not succeed in making the double-coated film, and in fact, even had difficulties in making good quality celluloid film. Still photographers were reporting streaks, spots, and bubbling, so troubling that after the winter of 1892 production was halted for a time and Dickson was unable to obtain any film until the spring of 1893 when it was probably obtained from the Blair Camera Company. Printmaking proved to be another problem since there was no specialized stock with suitable contrast and density. Initially Dickson had to make prints from the camera negatives on the only available stock, the same on which it was shot. He was able to use chemical intensification (dichloride of mercury) to bring up the image to make it dense enough for viewing as a positive print (Spehr 2008, p. 209, P. 256). Early in December 1892, under the supervision of John Ott and using Edison employees, construction of a motion picture studio began but the word stage may be more appropriate given the appearance of the building, which looked like a shack and doesn’t conform to today’s use of the terminology “motion picture studio” (Musser 1991). The studio was designed by Dickson and nicknamed the Black Maria (rhymes with pariah) after the police paddy wagons that Edison employees thought it resembled, covered as it was by black tarpaper. The building was 48 feet long, almost 11 feet wide, 16 feet high, and had a drawbridge-like hatch on the roof, which was operated with a pulley system to swing it upward to admit the light needed for cinematography; the building rotated on rails so its stage could follow the sun. The studios that were built in the years immediately thereafter used glass walls to optimize lighting for exposure. The Black Maria, which Edison employees also thought resembled a big coffin, was built near the middle of the West Orange campus; it housed the first motion picture camera and had a darkroom for film processing. It was ready for operations in May 1893. Prior to the Black Maria Dickson and Heise worked in the nearby main lab building and in the photo building add-on to the ore mining building, which had been built during Edison’s trip to Paris, as noted in the prior chapter. In April 1893 the first film meant for commercial use, the twenty-second Blacksmith Scene, was shot by Dickson and Heise in the Black Maria, in which three men hammer iron and then drink beer. The Black Maria was demolished in 1903, but a working replica was built at the request of Edison’s son Theodore in 1954. In a letter written for the Transactions of the S.M.P.E. Edison’s recollection of events was different: “Hundreds of films were made from 1890 and even earlier, for which purpose the first motion picture studio was erected, known as the Black Maria” (Richardson 1925). The fact is that the Black Maria was completed in February 1893. Edison was not alone in his instant photography endeavors and one invention in particular proved to be a thorn in his

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side. With civil engineer Mortimer Evans, William FrieseGreene applied for BP 10,131, Improved Apparatus for Taking Photographs in Rapid Sequence, on June 21, 1889, which was granted on May 10, 1890, for a camera taking a series of frames on a band of sensitized material. Edison and his patent lawyers had to overcome this prior art, which was brought up in litigation, in order to establish the priority of the Kinetograph, whose Caveat was filed on November 2, 1889, months after BP 10,313. Henry Vaux Hopwood (1886– 1919) (1899, p. 65), an expert on Victorian cinema apparatus, was a generous observer when commenting on Evans and Friese-Greene’s BP 10,131: “… (to them it) must be adjudged the honour of having first introduced a practical instrument of securing a record of any event and suitable for subsequent reproduction of a moving picture of the past occurrence.” However, this assessment does not fit the facts since BP 10,131 does not describe a functional device. (See chapter 9 for more about Friese-Greene.) In 1888 Friese-Greene attempted to use Eastman stripping film, meant for the Kodak No. 1 snapshot camera (see chapter 8), for cinematography but found it was not suited for the purpose. He set about to make his own celluloid and Fig. 13.4  Top: The first photo of the Black Maria, taken by Dickson. Bottom: A sketch Dickson made in 1933 to illustrate his design effort. (Cinémathèque Française)

13  The Kinetograph

claimed that he succeeded, but because of the difficulties involved in making such a material suitable for cinematographic proposes, this is doubtful. Spehr (2008) examined a sample of a Friese-Greene film of a scene taken in Hyde Park, purportedly photographed in October 1889, which was exhibited at the Photographic Convention in Chester in 1890. It’s now in the collection of the Archive françaises du film du CNC in Bois d’Arcy outside of Paris. According to Spehr: “…it looks suspiciously liked a strip of Eastman celluloid roll film.” (Eastman announced the availability of cellulose roll film in July, 1889.) In his later years Dickson spent a considerable amount of time and emotional energy defending the precedence of Edison’s work, and by inference his own, against Friese-Greene’s alleged priority. The introduction of photographic emulsion coated “film” first on paper and then on celluloid, led to similar sequential photography solutions at about the same time, but it would prove be difficult to claim priority for some of the features central to the design of a movie camera after there had been so much work in the field, to my mind especially that of Pierre Jules César Janssen and his photographic revolver of 1874, a functioning (albeit time-lapse) movie camera with an

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Fig. 13.5  The Vitagraph studio entered service in 1898; like the Black Maria its stage was rotated to follow the sun. Presumably the camera is in the shed. The studio was built on the roof of 140 Nassau Street in lower Manhattan. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 13.6  William Friese-Greene

intermittent frame advance and shutter coordinated for exposing a succession of frames on one sensitized substrate, as recounted in chapter 11, Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ. Although there is quite a difference

between evaluating the importance of an invention in terms of its relevance with regard to the history of cinema on technological and scientific grounds and how the patent office looks at it, it’s interesting to compare the second claim of Friese-Greene’s BP 10,131 with the functioning of Janssen’s photographic revolver: “In a camera, the combination of an intermittently opening shutter with means of giving an intermittent motion to a sensitized strip, the whole being actuated from a common shaft or its equivalent, in a such a manner that the opening of the shutter takes place during a period of rest of the strip.” Moreover, a movie camera must have a high enough frame rate to achieve a convincing illusion of motion, and it’s doubtful that the mechanism described could have exposed more than a few frames a second. The definition of a sensitized strip, in the context of Friese-Greene’s claim, is a long narrow piece of paper or plastic, different from the circular disk used by Janssen, but nonetheless ought not to have been granted since the claim language exactly describes Janssen’s embodiment. In addition, the invention was already disclosed in Le Prince’s filing made on November 2, 1886, which was granted as USP 376,247 on November 2, 1886, Method of and Apparatus for Producing Animated Pictures of Natural Scenery and Life. Moreover, as Cricks (1950) relates: “The detailed description of the apparatus makes it plain that the film was fed frictionally, by means of a drum which at each turn moved the film the space of one frame.” This patent describes a rotating feed roller designed to “pay out” film as needed, with film drawn through the “exposure screen,” what today is called the aperture of the gate, where it is halted for each exposure after leaving the feed reel by the action of “an intermittently acting drum.…” The invention lacks the crucial

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Fig. 13.7  Upper and lower views of Friese-Greene’s 1889 camera mechanism. (Cricks 1950)

feature of Edison’s system, the use of perforations for indexing the film, allowing for the accurate positioning of each frame in the gate of both the camera and projector insuring the ability to make prints. Edison’s invention became the basis for future motion picture systems, while Friese-­ Greene’s, like Le Prince’s, was in all likelihood either of little or without any influence. However, these inventions remain a noteworthy part of the history of cinema technology. As far as the United States Patent Office was concerned, the patent issued to Friese-Greene was relevant to Edison’s Kinetoscope application. In patent jargon, his claims could be “read on” Edison’s, but Janssen’s work could be read on Friese-Greene’s. All of Edison’s Kinetograph patent application claims were rejected on January 2, 1892, by Examiner William H.  Blodgett. This is not an unusual occurrence since the examiner often rejects or requires the applicant to defend some or even all of the claim by citing the prior art, especially if they seem overly broad or obvious. Blodgett’s rejection, in part reads: “The claims are anticipated by patents to Le Prince, 376,247, 10 January 1888; Donisthorpe, 452, 966, 26 May 1891, and British patents to Greene, 10131, 21 June 1889 & Dumont, 1457, 9 June 1861….” (Spehr 2008, p. 230) As is usual, this resulted in a back and forth, a negotiation between the examiner and the applicant, or as was the case,

Edison’s lawyers. This process often results in the drafting of new claims that are acceptable to the examiner. Edison’s attorneys also tried to overcome the result of Edison’s failure to file Kineto patents for a projector. The prior art, the history of Edison’s prosecution of the three Kineto patents, and other factors were crucial in the infringement law suit Edison brought in 1889 against The American Mutoscope Co., which ended in 1902 in Edison’s defeat. The case was part of what has been called the patent wars, which led to the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), as described in chapter 18. The Kinetograph was the first functioning movie camera, the machine that is the basis for the celluloid cinema infrastructure with the optical and mechanical components necessary to photograph apparent motion, no matter what the patent examiner or the courts may have decided about the validity of Edison’s claims, no matter what was said by his opponents to invalidate his work during infringement litigation, no matter what has been written by those bent on disparaging his originality, no matter the chauvinistic arguments advanced against his cause, Edison performed the function that is common to much of what we call invention by using the prior art, the truth be told, as Lewis Dartnell (2018) wrote: “A new invention is rarely completely innovative: most often it is a rearrangement or an embellishment of

13  The Kinetograph

p­reexisting technologies.” Intellectual property ownership issues aside, this absorption of prior technology is all to the benefit of humankind. As we shall see in the next chapter, Edison planned to obtain the financial return on his Kineto investment by selling Kinetoscopes and its prints and not by theatrical projection, and in this he failed. He was influenced by his phonograph experience both in terms of his initial inventive approach, a cylinder wrapped with a spiral of miniature images, but also by the example of his attempts to monetize the phonograph with pay-to-listen phonograph parlors. Others who had a different vision for the cinema, foresaw that projection and not a peepshow device was its future. The prior chapter began with a quotation from Wachhorst’s, Thomas Alva Edison, An American Myth, in which Edison is called an “antisocial egomaniac,” and it concludes now with a brief discussion of even more aggressive disparagement and denigration of Edison by Gordon Hendricks (1961) in his book The Edison Motion Picture Myth. As Spehr puts it, the book “is seriously flawed,” despite Hendricks’ exemplary research because he simply hated Edison, which colored his opinion of his contribution leading him to insist that the inventions were the work of Dickson, which is a position that may seem temperate compared with European writers who credit the Lumières or Friese-Greene. Unfortunately, according to Spehr (2008), none of Dickson’s lab books on the subject survive. Debunking the myth of Edison, the flawed inventor and entrepreneur, was a reaction, no doubt, to his self-­aggrandizement and the world’s acceptance of his self-­ evaluation as exemplified by the two mythologizing MGM feature films described at the beginning of the prior chapter. The phrase, the Wizard of Menlo Park, embodies the myth of the Yankee lone wolf inventor who rose up from the middle of nowhere to become a worldclass genius and millionaire, so it may have been inevitable that the legend has been challenged by a historian like Hendricks who vituperatively condemned Edison for robbing Dickson of the credit for the inventions of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and 35 mm film. Of course, such a misappropriation of credit would matter not at all had these inventions been unsuccessful, since no one takes credit for failure. It is important to point out, given Hendrick’s

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i­nsistence that Edison robbed Dickson of credit, that when Edison felt credit was due to him, Dickson was listed as an inventor as he was on the iron ore extraction patents. This passionate sense of injustice may be understandable, if unjustified, since Hendricks had assistance in coming to this position based on Dickson’s remembrances despite the fact that Dickson continued to pay lip service to Edison’s contribution. Then as now, it is the job of the heads of research and development organizations to hire people who are smarter than they are in their areas of expertise. Edison once remarked that some of the engineers and scientists he hired knew a lot more about electricity than he did and that they exceeded his ability at mathematical analysis; for that matter Dickson knew a lot more about photography than Edison, but as Charles Musser (1995) put it in his antidote to Hendricks’ (1961) vilification, Thomas A. Edison and His Kinetographic Motion Pictures, Edison came up with the wherewithal, set the agenda, provided guidance, and in the final analysis his researchers, like Dickson, were working for the boss. Edison lived for the lab (he often slept there) and the thrill that comes from the creation of new machines and processes and however he treated those around him he was inventing for the betterment of civilization. But he wasn’t entirely an ogre, since he fostered a creative collegial atmosphere. The great majority of patents that came out of Edison’s laboratory have his name on them as sole inventor but a number of cinema and other patents from his organization have the names of his employees as sole inventors. Unlike the usual contemporary R&D lab, Edison’s was set up for the purpose of furthering his creative vision and not that of the bosses at corporate headquarters. As the corporate R&D culture became established, the researchers who labored in its cause were not called inventors but rather were identified as engineers and scientists. For the corporations to label these creative men inventors would have deemphasized the notion that they were team players and might have imperiled a fundamental corporate truism: managers have more power and make more money than creators. The word inventor has taken on a connotation influenced by the life and work of Thomas A. Edison: to be an inventor one must also be independent.

The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

The Kinetoscope presents us with the paradox of a machine having one foot in the past and one in the future, combining peepshow and phenakistoscope display technology and 35 mm film. Its content also presents us with a conundrum because Kinetoscope 20  second snippets have an early YouTube aesthetic, more than a century ahead of their time with titles like: Trick Dog Teddy and other Dog and Trick Cats; Madame Bertoldi, Contortionist; Colonel Cody’s (Buffalo Bill) Shooting Skill; Sioux Ghost Dance; Sandow and Feats of Strength; Mexican Knife Thrower; and Boxing Cats (Dickson 1933). Some of the films made for the Kinetoscope were odious, such as those that feature animal violence like cock fights and a rat killing dog, and some reflect the prevailing racism. To add to its mystique, while undoubtedly a Victorian era device, it incongruously evokes the future with its functional resemblance to a virtual reality headset. The Kinetoscope peepshow viewer was the celluloid cinema’s first commercial display device, an invention for which Edison filed a patent application on August 24, 1891, which was granted on March 14, 1893, USP 493,426, Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Object. The description of how it worked given here is based on that disclosure and I believe the differences between it and the production units were relatively few (Spehr 2008, 226). I examined a Kinetoscope at the American Society of Cinematographers Clubhouse in Hollywood, but it may not be representative of production units because it was rebuilt and possibly modified. The Kinetoscope’s wooden cabinet stands about 4 feet high with its topmost surface resembling that of a peaked flattopped roof. The user looks vertically downward through the hood built into the flat top of the cabinet that shields the eyes from ambient light. A magnified image is seen of a 35 mm print through optics providing accommodation to focus the eyes at a close distance. Although the Kinetograph camera used an intermittent movement for exposing each frame, the Kinetoscope hearkened back to the phenakistoscope and its continuously moving frames that are frozen for the eye when seen through the slits of a rotating shutter.

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Between the viewing lens and the frame the Kinetoscope uses a radial shutter with narrow slits that open briefly to arrest each image. Edison probably decided on this approach because it makes for a simpler mechanism that is less expensive to build than a machine requiring an intermittent movement, and it was likely more dependable and easier on the 35 mm celluloid film prints. The Kinetoscope’s design may have been influenced by Anschütz’s peepshow Tachyscope and its continuous film drive, even though the Kinetoscope uses a phenakistoscope shutter to perform the same function; recall that Dickson used a Geissler tube for shuttering cylindrical format images and he may have experimented with a Tachyscope of his own construction in January 1890. At that time he ordered two dozen 3¼ in × 4 in glass slides that were possibly used for a Tachyscope, and he had taken several days in the darkroom to prepare Tachyscope slides, in Spehr’s (2008) opinion, based on his reading of Hendricks. Hendricks (1966) surmised that photography of the phases of motion for Dickson’s Tachyscope was accomplished using pixilation, the method used by Heyl, and Hendricks thought a Dickson-built Tachyscope may have been exhibited in April 1890 at the Lenox Lyceum in New York, which Edison may have also demonstrated at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 (the Lenox Lyceum Tachyscope may have been made by Siemans in Germany). The Kinetoscope uses a series of rollers over which the film is looped, known as a spoolbank, which is shown in the patent drawing having five rollers below and four above. In production more rollers were used to hold a longer length of film, about 50 feet, which ran for about 20 seconds at 40 fps. The film was spliced head to tail to form a loop to be ready for the next viewing without rewinding. Near the roof of the cabinet, the film made its way across the drive sprocket wheel and then through the gate area onto an idle roller and back to the spook bank. A snubber holds the film in contact with the driving sprocket wheel to insure that it engaged the film’s perforations. The film passes through the gate area directly between the viewing optics and the illumination system, which uses an 8-volt lamp with a dish-shaped reflector

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_14

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Fig. 14.1  A man wearing tails viewing Kinetoscope movies, elevating the pastime to one suitable for the cream of society.

Fig. 14.2  William Heise (left) on the set of What Demoralized the Barbershop, produced in 1898, one of the many silent shorts he directed. Heise worked for Edison as a mechanic and served as Dickson’s assistant. He completed building the first production run of Kinetoscopes early in 1894.

14  The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

behind it. The patent drawing shows that the lamp’s light passes through a container of alum water for cooling but this turned out to be unnecessary in practice because the lamp was not hot enough to damage the rapidly moving film. Although the Kinetoscope disclosure is hazy on this point, the shutter disk was placed between the film gate and the viewing optics in production. The shutter was an 11-inch-­diameter five-spoked flat disk with rectangular slotted 3/16-inch openings near its circumference, and the shutter disk and drive sprocket wheel were belt driven by the same electric motor. The Kinetoscope instructions specified that when changing a film, the operator is required to align the positions of the shutter opening and the frame in the gate to ensure their synchronization (WS: Rutgers University Libraries 2018). The shutter speed was 1/6000th of a second, according to Louis Lumière (1936a). In the patent disclosure a ground glass is shown positioned directly behind the moving film to help with cooling, but it would have been even more important as a means for providing even illumination. However, the ground glass was not necessary in production because the release print stock had a frosted diffusing base, as initially supplied by the Blair Camera Company (Stephen 1996). As the start of production was nearing Dickson (1933) fiddled with the final dimensions of the frame. After several iterations, he settled on 24.89  mm  ×  18.67  mm (0.980 in × 0.735 in) giving an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, pretty much the same as that of the American lantern slide. The film was 35 mm (1.38 inch) wide with each frame four perforations high, which became a de facto worldwide standard from 1909 onward. Specifications for perforation and sprocket pitch vary for camera film and release prints and there were other variations having to do with the changes to the shape of the perforations, with a major change occurring in the early 1950s for the original CinemaScope format that used narrow perforations. The area of the frame itself also changed, initially to provide room for an optical soundtrack that runs between a row of perfs and the frames and later to accommodate changing fashions in aspect ratios. It’s interesting to compare the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope in terms of their design philosophies. The Kinetograph is a machine combining the elements needed for the world’s first general purpose camera for the photography of moving images, which was designed to be part of a system of distribution and display based on the single-user peepshow Kinetoscope. It was the precursor of a century of celluloid motion picture cameras that were designed to use flexible celluloid film incorporating the drive and indexing perforations that enabled duplication and projection. Fortune smiled on Edison since Eastman had just begun to make suitable lengths of flexible celluloid base film, intended for the snapshot market, just at the moment he needed it (Richardson 1925). The Kinetograph stopped the motion of each frame for exposure, with the shutter opening synchronized to the

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Fig. 14.3  The Kinetoscope USP’s cover sheet clearly illustrates the spoolbank concept.

frame’s intermittency, using a clockwork stop-start ­mechanism devised by Edison. The Kinetoscope, as noted, displayed an arrested frame not by means of intermittency, but rather through high-speed shuttering. What ought not to be overlooked is that Edison created a system – he was an expert at infrastructure compatibility and design. He designed his telegraph inventions to function within an existing infrastructure, and he created the electrical

distribution infrastructure from scratch. His cinema effort took into account both photography and exhibition: a way to manufacture content to feed the Kinetoscope parlors with product, which was modeled on his prior experience with the phonograph. No one before him had attacked the problem in Edison’s particular way with his particular gift. To flourish, the celluloid cinema had to become a successful business, and that meant establishing a sales and distribution channel.

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Fig. 14.4  The 35 mm format.

Ultimately the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope were links in a chain that depended on the appetite of the retail customer. Edison may have gotten the importance of projection wrong, stuck as he was with the model of phonograph parlors, but he got the overall business concept right. Although Edison had publically stated that one of his goals was to offer sound to accompany the image, he did not get around to adding sound to the Kinetoscope, rechristened as the Kinetophone, until his failed last ditch effort to extend the product’s life. After the advent of projection he would seriously tackle sound for film but like all other efforts to couple the phonograph with projection prior to Vitaphone in 1926, his attempts failed to become an enduring addition to the celluloid cinema. The Kinetoscope, which was manufactured in the Phonograph Works on the Edison campus, unlike the Black Maria’s Kinetograph, had to face the rigors of untrained users in chancy environments. Only Edison lab workers operated or maintained the Kinetograph, but in the field the Kinetoscope was confronted with an uncertain fate. The Kinetoscope was electric motor driven at a fixed rate that was not under the control of the operator or the public and it was important that the rate was maintained high enough to prevent flicker. By projecting a sample of more than a dozen Kinetoscope movies Gordon Hendricks (1966) subjectively determined that the rate of Kinetograph cinematography was approximately 40 fps. It is reasonable to expect that content would be shot at or near the Kinetoscope’s intended frame rate. The Kinetograph camera was driven with a variable speed motor that would allow shooting at different frame rates with facility, but the films could not exceed 700–800 frames in length  – short movies, 50  feet in length that ran about 20 seconds.

14  The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

After projection became established Edison complained about the adoption of the 16 fps frame rate, which he thought compromised quality compared with the 40 fps required by the Kinetoscope. He was correct about the impairment of quality in terms of image sampling, especially for rapid motion at 16 fps, which was adopted for both mechanical and economic reasons for much of the silent era. Kinetoscope films had to be played back at a high frame rate to prevent flicker since its radial shuttering technology was incompatible with the flicker suppressing Pätzold-Pross interrupting shutter (described elsewhere in these pages). In the late 1920s, the industry standardized on 24 fps but even this rate, while an improvement over 16 fps, is not sufficient for artifact-­free photography and projection of rapid action or camera moves. Generations of filmgoers have become so acclimatized to a low sampling rate that for most people, it has become indelibly linked with the theatrical motion picture experience. Higher frame rates lacking judder, picketing, and the wagonwheel effect, have been met with resistance because at high rates, 60–120 fps, there is little difference between the perception of real and apparent motion. Early in 1893 Thomas B.  Lombard, head of the North American Phonograph Company, was given a private demonstration of the Kinetoscope. After viewing Edison mechanic John Ott dancing and sneezing, he decided that the new invention was a good business opportunity and put together a group of investors to exploit the Kinetoscope at the soon-to-open Chicago World’s Fair. But the production of Kinetoscopes was delayed for more than a year and the Chicago Fair opportunity came and went (Nasaw 1993). The Kinetoscope required finishing touches before its introduction, but they were delayed, in part because of a mysterious, alarming, and serious illness that afflicted Dickson. At Edison’s direction Dickson recuperated at the Edison home in Ft. Myers, Florida, from early February 1893 until he returned to West Orange in the middle of April. One speculation is that Dickson suffered from a nervous breakdown. The Kinetoscope was first publically exhibited at the Department of Physics of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893 (Herbert 1996). The subject of the demonstration was Blacksmith Scene, one of the first shot in the Black Maria that was meant for commercial distribution, with photography by Dickson and Heise. Musser (1991, pp. 32–38) points out that the same people who designed and built the hardware continued on as filmmakers, which would remain the case for some time. Blacksmith Scene shows a blacksmith and his two assistants using an anvil to forge iron, pass around a bottle of beer, and then resume work. Musser believes the blacksmith was played by Edison engineer Charles Kayser, and the other two in the cast were almost certainly lab employees. The film was the first publically exhibited example of the 35 mm format. The lecturer at the Brooklyn Institute was George M. Hopkins, president of its

14  The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

Department of Physics, who described the concept of apparent motion to provide insight into the workings of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope machines. This was accomplished by projecting images of a skeleton dance using a magic lantern equipped with a Choreutoscope, which had been invented in 1866 by Lionel Smith Beale (see chapter 4). Hopkins presented the technology of Edison and Dickson as being within the framework of the discipline of chronophotography, noting that what those present were witnessing was a work in progress and that Edison’s intention was to reproduce both image and sound. Using a magic lantern, a handful of frames from Blacksmith Scene were projected individually for the examination of the audience of 400 scientists and technologists. After the lecture the attendees queued up to look through the eyepiece of the Kinetoscope; it took more than 3  hours for everyone to take a peek at the 20-second film though its eyepiece. Up until a month before the Brooklyn demonstration expenditures for the Kineto project were part of the laboratory budget but after April 1, 1894, the Kineto program became a business that was part of Edison’s wholly owned Edison Manufacturing Company. After having strongly rejected the notion of popular entertainment as an opportunity (in the context of his phonograph marketing effort), Edison came to believe in it. The vehicle for collecting revenue, he hoped, was the Kinetoscope, a low-maintenance coin-operated machine designed for collecting money every hour of the day and every day of the week (Spehr 2008, p.  199). Edison had undoubtedly seen coin-operated machines for taking photos at the Paris Exhibition and in 1889 candy-vending machines were installed on New York’s commuting railway, which may have provided an inspiration for its application to the Kinetoscope business. At the end of 1890 and the beginning of 1891, Dickson worked on such a device and mechanic John Ott was the named inventor of a coin-drop patent for the phonograph, and he worked on a version for the Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope was viewed as an opportunity by several companies and individuals, which led to territorial and other conflicts that had to be smoothed out requiring considerable finesse. Edison hired William Edward Gilmore, who had once been the assistant to one of General Electric’s founders, Samuel Insull, to become the Edison Manufacturing Company manager, a position he assumed in April 1884. His job was to oversee film production and the delivery of the Kinetoscope machines to customers, which sold for $250 each, with a print costing $10. The first shipped units were modified to not function as coin-operated machines but rather to have a manual start, since tickets would be sold at their public debut. They were shipped on April 6, 1894, to Lombard’s syndicate and then delivered on the 9th to the Holland Brothers’ venue in Manhattan. The Kinetoscopes were installed there under the direction of Dickson, at 1155

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Broadway, which had been a shoe store, where they remained in operation for 2  years. The Holland Brothers were Canadians who operated a stenographic service, which led to their interest in the phonograph as a dictation machine and was the basis for their relationship with Edison. They had joined the Lombard syndicate to market the Kinetoscope and its films (Spehr 2008, p. 306) but they remained at home in Ottawa for the grand opening. The store was rented for the Holland Brothers by its manager, Edison’s former secretary, Al O.  Tate who, with his brother, did the work of installation and day to day operation. The Kinetoscope parlor, which was adorned with potted plants and a bronze-painted plaster bust of Edison mounted on a Doric column, had 10 machines, each playing a different film, placed back-to-back with a service space between them, in two rows of five. Patrons bought tickets for 25 cents allowing them to view five of the ten brief novelty films. On Saturday, April 14, returning from lunch at 2:00  PM, Tate saw a large crowd gathering at the store. Although he had not planned to begin operations that day, he opened the doors and due to the rush of customers kept them open until 1 o’clock the following morning. For the effort the enterprise was “enriched by the sum of one hundred and twenty dollars” (Spehr 2008, p.  308). In the next month-and-a-half additional Kinetoscope, parlors opened, one in Chicago and another in San Francisco (Musser 1990). The Kinetoscope was immediately popular and its image quality was praised in The Scientific American: “In the picture exhibited in the kinetograph (sic), every movement appeared to be perfectly smooth…” (Musser 1991). For the Broadway Kinetoscope opening Dickson (1933) and Heise shot a number of simple subjects, like German-­ born celebrity strongman Eugene Sandow filmed flexing his muscles in the Black Maria on March 6, 1894, and also a contortionist, a horse being shoed, and boxing cats. With Eastman having suspended making celluloid film while ironing out production problems, the Blair Camera Company sent samples that were received on April 14, 1893, the day Dickson returned from his recuperation in Florida. Blair supplied both camera negative and print stock but its film snapped under tension when both the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope got up to speed. Dickson appealed to them to obtain better celluloid from their supplier, the Celluloid Corporation, which had a “leathery consistency…” (Spehr 2008, p.  298). In March 1894 Dickson was ordering large quantities of film from Blair, fast negative film for cinematography and a hundred rolls of slow emulsion stock for printmaking plus large quantities of chemicals for processing the film (Spehr 2008, p. 307). Production ramped up and a number of male-oriented films were shot in the Black Maria, like boxing, a cock fight, the Spanish dancer Carmencita, Annabelle Whitford doing her serpentine and butterfly dances, Buffalo Bill Cody and

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American Indians from his Wild West Show, and Annie Oakley. At the end of June 1893, the Kinetoscope had not yet been turned over to the Phono Works for manufacture and 25 machines were built in the lab by machinist Hames Egan who required the help of John Ott and William Heise. Egan couldn’t finish the project because of his drinking problem, and Ott, due to a back injury, continued working in a wheelchair (Spehr 2008, p. 298). During this time, Edison, who by some accounts spent wantonly on his experiments, was short of funds, a problem brought on by his iron ore extraction experiments, which were conducted on a massive scale. At the moment the phonograph business was in a decline, plagued by management difficulties, its painfully slow acceptance as a business tool, and poor performance of the coin-operated part of the business. Edison unwisely dismissed the viability of Berliner’s gramophone disk format, and believing in the cylinder’s superiority refused to reduce design or manufacturing expenditures. He also stubbornly put off the phonograph’s entertainment opportunity and resisted selling it for home use. Needing cash, he borrowed using the lab as collateral, his life insurance policy, railroad securities, and also got a loan from Drexel Morgan & Co., for a total of more than $100,000 (about $3,000,000  in today’s value). Edison was not alone in his financial misery since the United States was going through an economic downturn that has been compared to the Great Depression. Selling Kinetoscopes directly to end users proved to be a burden, so Edison’s company established a distribution channel using Norman Raff and Frank Gammon’s Kinetoscope Company for America and Franz Z.  Maguire and Joseph D.  Baucus’s Continental Commerce Company for Europe. These distributors bought machines for between $200 and $225 and resold them for $350. (Raff & Gammon would play a role in the marketing of the Jenkins-Armat designed and Edison manufactured Vitascope projector.) By March 1, 1895, more than $180,000 in Kinetoscope-related sales had been made for a profit of about $89,000, based on Edison Manufacturing Company’s accounting. Edison hoped that a demand would be created for a steady stream of 35 mm prints, which were sold outright to the Kinetoscope parlors, despite the fact that he believed that his inventions were meant to serve a higher purpose for the benefit of civilization; providing mere amusement was beneath him, an attitude that mirrors that of Huygens, who had been disinclined to advance the cause of the Magic Lantern for similar reasons. Edison was accustomed to selling-business-to-­business and did not have a feeling for mass consumer retail but he hoped the phonograph would be the vehicle for funding his lab operations. However, his North American Phonograph Company was unsuccessful in its efforts to persuade businesses to adopt it for dictation. At first he disdained popular entertainment, believing only that highbrow culture like opera was worthy of his attention. He encouraged others to produce phonograph records, with

14  The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

mass entertainment appeal, despite the fact that his associates viewed this as a promising opportunity for his company. Only after many years did he pursue phonograph parlors and the distribution of popular recorded entertainment. He had a reason for this choice that went beyond his personal taste because the surface material for the early records deteriorated after a few plays, which may have been acceptable for dictation but was hopeless for the mass distribution of canned content. In addition, he had to work out a way to manufacture duplicate recordings from a master. Edison grew increasingly upset by the perception that he was not sharing in the great sums of money that went to others who manufactured and marketed his electrical inventions. Faced with a loss of the revenue from this “great industry,” after having dropped out of the Edison General Electric Company, he turned to his costly iron ore-mining experiments but that was a financial disappointment, and so he became motivated to try his hand at the entertainment applications for both the phonograph and Kineto both of which would hopefully replenish his coffers (Spehr 2008, pp. 195–199). It’s an irony that Edison, who had disdained the popular entertainment business is the founder of modern mass communications technology, which is based on his inventions of the electric light, the electrical distribution system, the Edison Effect (the basis for electronics), the phonograph, and the movie camera. The public, with no regard for the Kinetoscope’s place in history, soon lost interest in it as the novelty wore off; the Kinetoscope was only a passing fad. After little more than a year, with about 1000 Kinetoscopes and many films manufactured, sales fell off drastically but Edison’s peepshow device opened the eyes of inventors and businessmen to the projection opportunity, which for a time, as was his wont, he didn’t see as a promising prospect. However, others did and in Paris in 1894, the Kinetoscope caught the attention of the Lumières, who had demonstrated an interest in moving image projection with their repeated visits to the Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grévin on the Boulevard Montmartre to see Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope. The Kinetoscope sparked the Lumières’ inventiveness and directly led to their developing the Cinématographe projector-camera-printer. According to Hopwood (1899, p. 73) the first Kinetoscope machines were shown in London on Oxford Street in October 1894. This led to its being knocked-off by British instrument manufacturer Robert W.  Paul (1869–1943), who has been described as the father of the British film industry. He was legally able to duplicate six of the machines for the parlor’s operator, unencumbered by patent restrictions because of Edison’s failure to file outside of the United States (Paul 1936; Herbert 1996). Afterward he built machines for his own efforts and was soon designing and building other cinema hardware. By 1885 Paul began making cameras with the help of American-born British photographer Birt Acres (1854–

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1918). Paul’s Theatrograph was the first 35  mm projector manufactured in Britain that was demonstrated on February 20, 1896, at Finsbury Technical College in London. Paul revised the design to emulate the steady image of the Lumière Cinématographe by adding a Maltese-cross intermittent, as described in BP 4686 of March 2, 1896. This intermittent was the basis for Paul’s Theatrograph No. 2, Mark 1, which was widely used in Great Britain. In addition to these projectors Paul designed and built perforating, processing, and printing machines and produced films. He designed and built a movie studio, an open-air stage, in 1899 at Muswell Hill in North London, making films that incorporated effects and miniatures. Similar activates were taking place in France, Germany, and in the United States, as will be noted in these pages. How did Edison let the European opportunity slip away? One notion is that he was too tight-fisted to pay the filing fees and another is that he anticipated that he would face vexing objections based on the prior art. Perhaps he would have gotten some claims, if only of minor scope, enough to create a patent fog to fend off the competition and provide a basis for infringement suits. It may have been that Edison had little confidence in realizing a return on the Kineto project’s R&D investment, or perhaps he had so many inventions to patent and so many countries in which to file that he was put off by the effort. Perhaps there was no single decisive reason for declining protection abroad, or maybe Edison was so focused on his iron ore extraction experiments that the Kineto project was simply a subordinated activity. Alas, he had no way of knowing that he had created the basis for a major industry that would flourish and become an all-pervasive part of the world’s culture. According to Hendricks (1966), Edison’s bookkeeping accounts of August 1895 reveal that there were no Kinetoscope sales barely a year and a half after the first shipments. The business was over, but Edison sought to breathe new life into sales with a modification he called the Kinetophone, which required users to wear ear tubes to listen to sound accompanying the moving image. Only 45–50 Kinetophones were built, Kinetoscopes modified by adding cylinder phonographs coupled to their motors’ drive belts, a method that did not allow precise synchronization. The phonographs were placed in the bottom of the Kinetoscope cabinets where the batteries had been housed. Despite substantial productions like the finale of the first act of Charles H. Hoyt’s patriotic musical A Milk White Flag, directed by Dickson in December 1894, which featured 34 performers in costume, it was too late for the Kinetophone version of the Kinetoscope (Ramsaye 1928). People had grown tired of dropping nickels (often they bought five viewings in different machines for a quarter) into the Kinetoscope to look at brief novelty acts. Moreover, at the turn of the nineteenth century, a 5-cent piece was not casually spent when one considers that the average worker made less than $10.00 for a 48-hour week, a

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figure estimated based on published data (Twelfth Census… 1901–1902). One could spend the nickel to see 20 seconds of boxing cats or buy a meal. Beginning in 1895, projectors designed and marketed by a number of inventors on both sides of the Atlantic would entirely supplant Kinetoscope exhibition. Between 1896 and 1906, the primary venues for projected motion pictures were vaudeville houses, a nationwide network of 200 theaters that featured a variety of acts such as singers, comedians, trained animal acts, magicians, jugglers, and contortionists. Movies, which became part of the show, were considered to be novelty acts, and the films shown in these theaters were known as automatic or advanced vaudeville, whose exhibition gave stage managers a chance to change scenery between acts (Ramsaye 1926; Chicago Reports… 1916). These projected films were considered to be another act by the theaters and the public and reviewed as such by the newspapers of the day. They were also used as show openers as stragglers took their seats and closers to clear the house for the next audience. It’s safe to assume that most of the time vaudeville-exhibited films were accompanied by orchestras, a practice that changed during the depression that lasted from 1893 to 1895, at which time pianists replaced orchestras. Exhibition in specially built movie theaters began circa 1910, supplanting the nickelodeon, the exhibition mode that came after automatic vaudeville.

Fig. 14.5  The Kinetophone. The man wearing a bowler is viewing images and listening to phonograph music through ear tubes.

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14  The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

Fig. 14.6  A nickelodeon storefront theater.

The nickelodeons (odeon from the Greek theater) were the first venues to specialize in motion picture exhibition, which were also known as electric theaters and nickelettes; the cost of entry was usually a nickel, but longer shows were a dime. The word nickelodeon has also been used for Kinetoscope parlors and even jukeboxes, as in the song lyric “Put another nickel in/In the nickelodeon/All I want is loving you and music!” (Weiss 1949). The first nickelodeon opened on June 19, 1905, operated by Harry Davis and John P. Harris, penny arcade proprietors, in a storefront theater having 95 seats rescued from a former opera house. It was located at 433–435 Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it projected movies with nonstop piano accompaniment (Fell 1983). Intimations of the first dedicated nickelodeon were the areas within penny arcades devoted to the screening of film for standing audiences of a few tens of people (Aronson 2008). These ad hoc projections became the inspiration for the nickelodeon venues whose typical layout was on the order of 50 feet long and half as wide, with a projection booth at the rear and screens up to 15 feet across at the front, in spaces that held audiences of up to 200 people. Russell Merritt writes: “The nickelodeon itself was a small, uncomfortable makeshift theater, usually a converted dance hall, restaurant, pawn shop, or cigar store, made over to look like a vaudeville emporium” (Balio 1976, pp. 60, 61). Such prac-

tices, introduced by William Fox and Marcus Loew in 1906, were continued by many operators who enhanced the moviegoing experience with slide shows, vaudeville acts, and singalongs illustrated by magic lantern projected hand-colored slide shows. The business model was so successful that both the name and the methodology were copied by hundreds of like-­ minded entrepreneur-exhibitors. In New  York there were between 300 and 400 nickelodeons in 1907 (Bowser 1990). Alberti (2015) writes that by 1908 there were about 8000 nickelodeons, a number which rose to almost 14,000 by 1918. By 1910, it has been estimated, 26 million people in the United States visited nickelodeons weekly. The business peaked between 1908 and 1911 after which the storefront theaters were overtaken by other venues (Slide 2013). The basic equipment to launch a nickelodeon operation included the projection head, the lamphouse, magic lantern, a phonograph, and a piano, all costing totaling several hundred dollars, a figure that does not include other capital expenditures. Performances lasted from 10  minutes to half an hour, a much better deal than the Kinetograph parlors, and unlike the peepshow device it was a social viewing experience. In 1905 and 1906 the typical weekly routine was to have two program changes of the spliced-together fifty-foot films that were assembled onto 1000-foot reels; by 1907 daily program changes were common. Although Edison had

14  The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

ignored the commercial possibilities of projection, he woke up to its potential and offered the Jenkins-Armat Vitascope projector, but his organization sold less than 80 of the machines, which were outmoded by 1896 (Musser 1991). His engineers created better machines and Edison sold 1500 of them in 1906 and 3500  in 1907. Although he captured 30% of the market in the United States he failed to keep up with design advances, and as Musser tells us, in the context of the projector introduced in 1911 by Edwin S. Porter and Frank Cannock: “The rise of the Simplex projector coincided with the decline of the Edison counterpart.” The nickelodeon transformed mass entertainment: people could take in a show at lunch hour or take nickelodeon breaks at any time of the day, with the storefront theaters often remaining open from 8:00  AM to 11:00  PM.  Groups of friends formed nickelodeon parties strolling from one to another. The screenings were interactive: the projectionist could adjust how fast he handcranked the film to vary the pace of the action based on his sensibility and audience reactions, and the addition of live music and voice actors recalled the days of magic lanternist-­performers. (Nickelodeon performances are discussed in greater detail in chapter 25.) While it has been asserted that the attendance was made up of the lower economic classes, it is probable that nickelodeons were also frequented by the middle class and upper classes in some locations. The demand for films was so great that the studios could not produce enough. Domestic monthly production rose from 10,000  feet in November 1906, to 28,000  feet in March 1907 and European imports were required to keep up with demand (Altman 2004). But nickelodeons began to suffer the fate of the Kinetoscope parlors as content veered toward longer narratives and they were replaced by more capacious theaters that were a better setting for innovative staged news and narratives. It’s possible to learn a great deal about the state of the exhibition business at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century by reading Hodges’ (1912) Opening and Operating a Motion Picture Theatre, a handbook written for the benefit of would-be theater owners. Hodges is plain-­ spoken: “The Motion Picture business, being primarily an artistic one, should be governed with an eye for artistic effect. The business is now being hurt, unfortunately, by a lot of ignoramuses, but these will not last.” He provides insight into exhibition practices and the health of the industry when he reports that there are approximately 14,000 theatres in the United States, giving at least two shows an evening, to an audience of up to 500 people. Assuming this maximum figure, this works out to 7,000,000 attendees at a “combination of picture and vaudeville theatres each evening.” Hodges estimates the average ticket price to be 7½ cents for a nationwide take of more than half a million dollars each evening, but he points out that a number of theaters opened for business in the late morning or early afternoon and that this fig-

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ure might low. He writes that between 75 and 100 films are produced each week from which 3000 prints are made for distribution to the 14,000 theaters (prints circulated). He recommends that the theater owner: “include songs and vaudeville in your program. Watch the effect.” He tells the prospective exhibitor that he will be supplied with films from a “film service” and that the weekly price for first run pictures (usually reserved for the largest houses) will cost between $300 and $400. The same films, after 3 or 4 months, will cost less than a tenth of that. Hodges also notes that the trend in the public’s acceptance of content is changing: “Many of the more advanced picture theatres today show what is known as a feature film production. This differs from the ordinary film in that it will run from 2,000 to 5,000 feet.” He mentions the importance of stars (a term carried over from vaudeville) such as Sarah Bernhardt, and that the trend in feature production is growing in “Continental Europe.” He points out that the ability of the feature to hold the attention of the audience, compared with the shorter subjects, discourages the practice of “people (who) drift in and out and carry away no decided impression of what they see.” He believes the feature film encourages its patrons to form a more positive opinion of what they have experienced, enabling them to convey excitement to their friends thereby encouraging attendance. Hodges gives weekly salaries for theater employees, some of which are machine operator, $15–$25; musicians and singer, $10–$20; ticket seller, $6–$8 (but the ticket taker gets $2 more); and usher, $3–$8. Turning an existing store front theater into one that is “very pretentious and attractive” can cost between $2000 and $5000. Sloping floors are favored with an incline of 1 foot for every 8–10 feet. Theaters that exceed 299 seats, in many states, will incur increased license fees. The recommendation for the best and most economical screen is “a plain white plastered wall, calsomined (painted with a mixture of lime and water, with whiting, size, or glue).” Canvas covered with aluminum paint (often called a silver screen) and stretched thin muslin over a white wall were also recommended. Hodges puts down commercially available screens, writing that their value is only for the purpose of promotion. The magic lantern continued to play a part in the new motion picture venues as described in Chap 14, The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration. Hulfish’s 1913 book, Motion-Picture Work, has a chapter devoted to dissolving the biunial magic lantern used in combination with 35 mm projection. There is every reason to believe that early silent filmmakers saw magic lantern shows that used what today we call montage. It may sound outlandish to some ears but early filmmakers were undoubtedly greatly influenced by the art of the lanternist. The idea may be more readily digested if the magic lantern is seen not seen as pre-cinema but rather as part of cinema itself, its first era, the Glass Cinema.

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14  The Kinetoscope: Projection’s Inspiration

Fig. 14.7  A combination motion picture projector and magic lantern, made by Wrench of Great Britain. (Cinémathèque Française)

Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

Dickson, who was the fervent and knowledgeable implementer of Edison’s cinema efforts, was transferred from the laboratory to the Edison Manufacturing Company to direct Kinetoscope shorts, where he became increasingly unhappy working under the tough William Gilmore, Edison’s new vice president and general manager for the Kinetoscope operation. At the same time, in the summer and autumn of 1894, Dickson grew increasingly friendly with the Latham family, Kinetoscope parlor operators, who had come to believe in the future of projection for the exhibition of boxing matches. He agreed to attempt to influence Edison to supply them with projectors, which meant that Edison’s team would have to design and put one into production. However, Edison intransigently believed in the Kinetoscope parlor business model and refused because he did not want to jeopardize sales of the peepshow devices. Edison was an entrepreneur determined to recover his development cost and make a profit from his invention. Had he the same desire that consumed the protocinematographers like Le Prince, Muybridge, Anschütz, and Friese-Greene, he would have pursued projection. Dickson’s was more than a lone voice crying in the wilderness, for according to Spehr (2008, p. 360), Kinetoscope distributor Raff & Gammon was making the same appeal, since by the summer of 1885, it had become evident that the Kinetoscope business was in sharp decline, making projection an alternative worthy of consideration. Oddly, Edison did not seem to recognize, as did the Lumières, that having successfully designed a camera he had created the basis for a working projector, and both he and Dickson had the mindset that the display of moving images required continuous drive rather than frame intermittency. Gilmore accused Dickson of having a sub rosa relationship with Edison’s customer, the Lathams. He believed Dickson was working against Edison’s Kinetoscope interests, but at the time the only barrier to an employee sharing company confidential information was ethical. Dickson described Gilmore as being his “arch enemy” and an “evilminded man,” feelings that may have incubated at Edison’s

15

Georck Street Machine works where both men once worked. Gilmore has been called the “éminence grise” of Edison’s empire and “a tough and frequently brutish character” (Robinson 1996; Herbert 1996). Gilmore had run the North American Phonograph Company, an Edison phonograph licensee, before joining Edison. Beginning in April 1894, Gilmore took over the task of overseeing Edison’s extensive network of businesses, but his influence may have been counterproductive as far as Edison’s long-term motion picture interests were concerned because his actions sowed, rather than squelched, competition, most significantly with regard to Dickson’s later activities. Gilmore uncovered that Dickson was combining the company’s orders for photo supplies with his own. His careless accounting failed to separate the two, which Gilmore pounced on, but this peccadillo was only a minor contributor to the schism that followed. The Latham brothers operated a Kinetoscope parlor at 83 Nassau Street in Manhattan. Their father, Woodville Latham (1837–1911), a former chemistry professor, had reached the rank of Captain in the Confederate Army but was known as Major Latham. The Lathams became interested in exhibiting boxing matches using the Kinetoscope, the kind of content that Edison had publically suggested. The success of the first boxing film they produced and exhibited convinced them there was an opportunity for “screen machines.” In this they were not alone, for as Musser (1995, p.  91) expressed it: “The idea of adapting Edison’s moving pictures to the magic lantern or stereopticon was so simple and straightforward that it undoubtedly occurred to hundreds, probably thousands, of people who peered into the kinetoscope.” Moreover, projection made economic sense from the point of view of the exhibitor because only one projector was required for a number of paying customers and the cost of a projector would turn out to be far less expensive than outfitting a kinetoscope parlor with half a dozen machines. But from Edison’s point of view, projection meant selling fewer kinetoscopes.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_15

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Fig. 15.1  Woodville Latham

Dickson initially had innocent enough open and aboveboard discussions about the possibility of projection with Otway and Gray, but he thought the conversations extended only to attempting to persuade Edison to supply projectors. Spehr (2008, pp. 357) reports that the Lathams may have misinterpreted Dickson in the belief that he had made a deeper commitment, but they assured him that they would ask him to do nothing unethical. However, it seems that after Edison refused to develop a projector they attempted to inveigle Dickson with their plan to create one. In October 1894, Dickson showed Professor Riborg Mann of Columbia College in New  York City, an early model Kinetoscope. He hoped Mann could help modify it to project, but it is not certain that the ensuing tests were actually conducted at Columbia College, and the date of the tests is not precisely known. It’s possible that this was part of a design study that Dickson was undertaking on behalf of the Lathams, but whether his motivation was to provide them with the basis for an Edison-built projector or the basis for their own design, as Musser implies, is unclear (Musser 1990). According to Ramsaye (1926), Edison may have seen the Kinetoscope as projector ­demonstration, in which case Dickson was clearly operating on behalf of his employer. The challenge was to modify a machine designed to be a peepshow device using the phenakistoscope radial shutter, for directly viewing a continuously moving magnified 35 mm frame, to function as a projector that threw a bright image on a screen. The direct viewing optics used by the Kinetoscope and a projector are somewhat similar since both involve the illumination of transparencies and focus-

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

ing lenses, but the projector lens forms an image on a diffusing screen whereas the Kinetoscope lens, in combination with the eye’s lens, forms an image on the retina. Steps were taken to adapt the machine for projection: to improve brightness a Zeiss arc lamp was used for illumination, the radial slits of the shutter were enlarged, a condenser lens was added between the arc and the frame, and a projection lens replaced the focusing eyepiece optics. Dickson’s Kinetoscope modification did not perform well but Woodville Latham viewed the outcome of the experiment as positive and was determined to go forward creating a projector based on this modification. If Edison saw the demonstration it may have added to his motivation for beginning a projector project, but one at a low level of effort, which as an indication of the deterioration of their relationship, he kept secret from Dickson. Edison assigned one of his engineers, who had been involved in the Kineto project, Charles Hugo Kayser, to design and build a projector away from the West Orange lab. Kayser’s prototyping was performed in the Postal Telegraph Building in Manhattan, in a room adjacent to that of Raff & Gammon’s Kinetoscope distribution business. Ramsaye proposes that this effort was designed to placate Raff & Gammon who were requesting a projector product. Kayser failed to come up with a good design, most likely because he used the Kinetoscope as a starting point for development, whose continuous movement and radial shutter were a blind alley. Ramsaye (1926), who may have been using license to give voice to Edison, quotes him as having said: “I could go in there and make that thing work inside of a week, if I wanted to take the time to do it myself.” But in the winter of 1894, Edison thought that the Kinetoscope opportunity was the only one that made business sense and he felt no sense of urgency to pursue projection. Edison’s expectations had shifted: he initially believed the entire market for the Kinetoscope was only fifty units, but at this moment he was taking orders for hundreds. The Latham Brothers and their father Woodville had become interested in exhibiting boxing matches with each round having a dedicated Kinetoscope at their parlor at 83 Nassau Street. In order to see the complete fight, the patron would be required to move from machine to machine ­spending a dime to watch each round (Musser 1990). To have enough running time for a round, in May 1894, Otway ordered ten machines with enlarged spool-banks with bigger cabinets having a 150-foot capacity and Kinetoscopes that ran at a reduced frame rate of 30 fps. Since 35 mm film has 16 frames to the foot, each round could have lasted 80 seconds. (An unmodified Kinetoscope, as determined by Hendricks, ran at 40 fps, so its normal 50-foot load would

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

have lasted only 20 seconds.) The first fight was filmed by Dickson and Heise, a six-round match between Michael Leonard and Jack Cushing, shot in the Black Maria on Friday, June 15, 1894. The rounds were abbreviated in length to accommodate the Kinetoscopes’ extended but still limited capacity. The event was well publicized and the Lathams’ parlor drew a crowd leading Otway to order an additional 72 machines at $300 per machine in August (Spehr 2008, p. 314). The Lathams now felt even more strongly that projection was a great opportunity, but after learning of Edison’s disinclination, they determined that their only option was to sway Dickson to their cause. Perhaps the time was ripe for Dickson to make a change after 12  years with Edison because at this time he was no longer functioning as the boss’s right-hand man. He had invested considerable intellectual and emotional energy in the Kineto project and his relationship with the Lathams was almost certainly an expression of the frustration he felt having to deal with his nemesis Gilmore. On the other hand, Dickson must have had some considerable satisfaction directing Kinetoscope shorts, and he was receiving bonuses or royalties for Kinetoscope sales on top of his regular salary. Spehr and Musser take the view that Dickson recognized that he had a growing ethical problem and sought to hide his activities from Edison. But Dickson slid down the slippery slope from friend of the family to outright collaborator, goaded by Edison’s disinclination to tackle the projection project, and Gilmore’s tightening reins and growing hostility. In a broader sense, Dickson’s defection served the greater good because this gave him an opportunity to engage in a projector project independent of Edison’s strictures. He continued to work for Edison for something like half a year while providing technical assistance to the Lathams. The Lathams raised the capital required to create an entity that was independent of their Kinetoscope Exhibition Company, an attempt at being a vertically integrated film producer, distributor, and hardware manufacturer, called the Lambda (the Greek letter L, for Latham) Company, which was formed in December 1894. Prior to leaving Edison, Dickson introduced the Lathams to the inventor who would one day create one of the earliest sound-on-film systems, his down-on-his-luck friend Eugène Augustin Lauste (1857–1935), who had been born in Montmartre. Lauste met with Woodville and Otway in September or October 1894 to discuss designing and building camera, projector, and printing machines. He was hired as Lambda’s chief mechanic and gave the Lathams a list of the machine tools and other requirements needed for the project, which began late in 1894. Lauste had been laid off by the Edison organization in 1892 after 8 years on the job,

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Fig. 15.2  Eugène Augustin Lauste, years after leaving Lambda, working on his optical sound system in 1906. (Cinémathèque Française)

part of the time having been engaged in the development of the Kinetoscope (Eugene… 1935). Both Dickson and Lauste were offered stock in the new Lambda enterprise, which was founded late in 1894. Dickson’s stock was potentially extremely valuable, having a paper value of $125,000, or 25% of the company. The stock was held for him by his lawyer, Edmund Congar Brown, but he never accepted it, and it seems that he did not formally became part of the Lathams’ organization, although he materially aided their cause (Spehr 2008, p. 370). Musser’s (1990, p. 94) view is that this holding of the stock by Dickson’s layer was a subterfuge to technically avoid the unseemly entanglement of a formal relationship with the Lathams while working for Edison. The new organization was located at 35 Frankfort Street, where the machine shop and other facilities were set up, just a stone’s throw from New York City Hall in lower Manhattan. Dickson gave the fledgling organization a substantial advantage given his experience as a cinematographer, director, and the world’s most knowledgeable and experienced celluloid cinema engineer. Lauste was a talented engineer who could build his designs with his own hands; he began his work for Lambda before Dickson left Edison, in the last months of 1894, experimenting with both 35 mm and a 51 mm format,

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with an eye on skirting the Edison patents. Perhaps Lauste witnessed the Columbia College Kinetoscope-as-projector experiments and even helped Dickson with them, since the project would have benefited from his skills. Lauste and his teenage son Emile lived in a room that was part of the Frankfort Street lab, at first working on a 35 mm projector, which was completed at the very end of 1894. The device was similar to the Kinetoscope in that it used continuous film motion and a radial shutter. Work then began on a camera, but one that would use a frame bigger than Edison’s, possibly in an effort to increase both image quality and screen brightness. The Lathams hired machinist Emil W. Kleinert, who had worked in Edison’s Phonograph Works on building Kinetoscopes, to help Lauste create the new large-format camera. Work began at Christmastime 1894 and was completed by February, 1895 (Spehr 2008, pp.  368, 369). The new camera ran at 20 fps, according to Dickson, half the rate of the Kinetograph when preparing films for the Kinetoscope. Dickson’s first suggestion for the intermittent, a clockwork mechanism, was probably based on his experience with Edison’s Stop Device, USP 491,993, but it did not work well and a Geneva or Maltese-cross movement was substituted based on an existing design. Lauste’s format was 51  mm wide film, with a 37  mm  ×  20  mm frame size (1½ in × ¾ in), having 50 percent more area than the 35 mm frame. It departed from 35 mm’s 1.33:1 aspect ratio with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the same as modern widescreen (Gregory 1930).1 The choice of the format may have been favored by Dickson to avoid infringing Edison’s patents according to Musser (1990), or it’s possible the desire was to have a format that was incompatible with Edison’s content for purely commercial reasons. Another motivation may have been to create a larger format with a better image. When the camera was completed an attempt was made to use it as a projector but that was abandoned, according to Woodville Latham, because it was thought that its intermittent action would harm prints with repeated projection. The 51  mm projector’s development took up where the Columbia College experiments left off by using continuous drive to create a celluloid film projecting phenakistoscope. To improve screen brightness, the print film that was used for the Kinetoscope, having a light-diffusing base, was substituted by print film with a clear base supplied by Kodak (Musser 1990, p. 94). Woodville Latham managed to locate a fast projection lens from J. B. Colt & Co., New York (manufacture of ­precision modular magic lanterns and illumination hardware). But neither of these measures helped enough and Lauste was unable to solve the problem of getting enough light on a screen more than a couple of feet across for the projector that In this book the term wide screen designates wide aspect ratios that are usually 1.66:1 to 2.4:1, with the term widescreen is reserved for 1.85:1, and ‘Scope is used for 2.4:1 or thereabouts. 1 

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

was first called the Panoptikon and then the Eidoloscope. It also proved to be hard on prints according to Lauste, because shrinkage in development reduced the pitch of their perforations so that they no longer matched that of the projector’s sprocket drive. This issue was taken into account by the industry later on when different perforation pitches were adopted for camera and print film. Dickson was terminated as of April 2, 1895, after a showdown meeting with Gilmore present when Edison was challenged by Dickson to choose between the two of them. Edison chose Gilmore, whose suspicions about Dickson’s disloyalty were justified. Kineto’s experimental phase was over and done with, as far as Edison was concerned, and he needed a business manager more than a creative engineer. During patent litigation, in 1911, Dickson testified: “…it was my intention with Mr. Edison’s approval, to go into or participate in the exhibition business, Edison manufacturing, Latham to have the right. This… could not be granted owing to a contract Mr. Edison made with Raff & Gammon” (Spehr 2008, p. 370). On July 4, 1932, in an attempt to justify his behavior, Dickson told Earl Theisen: “My only connection with the Lathams was to try to find out what they were doing  – Mr. Edison only laughed when I told him what they were doing as ‘we had patents’ – my espionage (of which I wasn’t particularly proud) was misconstrued.” Spehr (2008, p.  364) uncovered this Dickson rationalization in the AMPAS Library, in the Theisen Collection. Dickson continued to make films in the Black Maria until the end of April, according to Spehr (2008, p. 391); after Dickson’s departure, Heise, who had assisted him with cinematography, continued to shoot Kinetoscope movies. To help fill the void created by Dickson’s departure, Raff & Gammon assigned their employee Alfred Clark, to work with Heise to produce additional Kinetoscope titles. Today, an employed engineer like Dickson signs an agreement assigning rights to anything he invents during his tenure with the company. But whatever formal relationship Dickson may have had with “the Boss,” the issue is a moral one.2 The issue of loyalty lies at the heart of the break between Edison and Dickson and is especially troubling when one considers that Dickson may have been Edison’s closest collaborator. Despite this, Edison asked Dickson to return to the fold, but he refused to do so as long as his archenemy Gilmore remained. Lambda went into production shooting the Young Griffo-­ Battling Barnet boxing match on Madison Square Garden’s rooftop on May 4, 1895, a four-round fight, with each a minute-­and-a-half. Dickson had just left Edison’s employ and was free to openly participate with the Lathams. To

2  Inventor Freeman Harrison Owens, who designed an optical sound system while under contract to Lee de Forest, lost his case in a landmark decision made by the New York State Supreme Court in the 1920s that stated that a company owned all rights to the inventions that were made by an inventor in its employ. See chapter 32.

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

shoot the entire fight in one take, Lauste and Dickson modified the 51 mm camera to have a large film capacity. To prevent the projector’s bigger and more massive load of film from tearing due to intermittency, a loop of film, sometimes called the Latham Loop, was formed by the operator between the feed sprocket of raw stock and the intermittent mechanism to buffer its yanking action to prevent the film from snapping. The Eidoloscope projected the Griffo- Barnet fight for the press on April 21, 1895. The New York Sun of the following day favorably reported on the screening and estimated that the image was: “about the size of a window sash.” Edison was reported to have denigrated the effort. Screen size, which was brightness dependent, was greatly increased with the change from continuous drive to intermittency. The Eidoloscope projected the Griffo-Barnett film in a storefront theater in Lower Manhattan at 156 Broadway on May 20, 1895, where the public was free to walk in to watch the reportedly dim image; Luaste ran the projector and Dickson also attended the screening, which according to historian Paul Spehr (2008, p. 362, p. 399), “was the first motion picture projected for the public.” Other historians credit the March 22, 1895, screening in Paris projected by the Lumières’ Cinématographe, Male and Female Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (sortie des ouvriers et ouvrières de l’usine Lumière) for the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale. Apparently, Spehr’s definition of a public screening excludes one held exclusively for specialists or the press. The Young Griffo-Battling Barnet fight film was exhibited during the summer of 1895 on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, and its success led to the filming of other events like that of the match between wrestlers named Ross and Roeber (Theisen 1941). The Eidoloscope was the featured act at Chicago’s Olympia Theater in August 1895, where it was billed as the “Wonder of the Age,” but it was withdrawn after only a week because of poor quality, possibly its dim image (Balio 1976, pp. 46–48). There was only one functioning Eidoloscope projector for all of 1895, which was used for screenings at other venues after the Olympic Theater. Dickson’s participation in the project was significant, but years later he, Lauste, and the Lathams, took pains to deny that this was the case, but Spehr points out that these denials were self-serving. Testifying during litigation in 1911 Dickson claimed: “I did not enter into any agreement with the Lathams… I soon became disgusted with their business methods…Had they behaved as gentlemen I most likely would have thrown myself heart and soul into their work…” (Spehr 2008, p. 370). But it’s hard to believe that Dickson was anything but Lambda’s technical advisor; he didn’t necessarily have to be hands on, he could have simply made suggestions, which would have been the most informed suggestions that anybody at that time could have made. Even if he wasn’t a Lambda employee, had a formal agreement with the

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Lathams, or used the dodge of having his lawyer hold Lambda stock for him, he probably was the project’s technical guru. Dickson’s participation in the design of the Lambda machines was a contribution to the development of the celluloid cinema, which continued even after the end of his relationship with the Lathams, as we shall learn. Despite the problems with the Eidoloscope’s performance, its existence helped to create a major shift in the perception of the moving image medium, for the movies had emerged from their enclosure, a wooden peepshow cabinet, to become a theatrical experience. The projector was behind the audience and out of sight, its image divorced from its instrumentation. It had become the magic lantern of apparent motion, seemingly independent of technology, connected only by a beam of light to a screen of living images. Additional subjects were filmed, notably different from the Black Maria efforts since the Lambda handcranked camera could be used in the field. Edison now had a taste of competition for the motion picture market in the United States, but the Lambda Company was running short of cash and their projector could only be used for small screens. Lambda’s agent, who had introduced the Eidoloscope to Europe, reported that the Lumières’ Cinématographe projected better looking images. Everyone involved in the project must have realized that low brightness was the product’s Achilles’ heel. With the goal of improving it, Lauste redesigned the projector to replace continuous film drive with intermittency, as described in USP 707,934, Projecting-­ Kinetoscope, filed on June 1, 1896, which was granted on August 26, 1902, with Woodville Latham as the named inventor to secure his ownership; the machine incorporated the socalled Latham Loop. (The French inventor Henri Joly filed for a version of the loop in Nouvel Appareil (New Device), on August 26, 1895, in FP 249,875.) Dickson later recounted that the Latham Loop was Lauste’s idea and the fact that Lauste was the inventor of the loop was also brought to light in 1898 during Edison vs. The American Mutoscope Company, tried in the United States Circuit Court, Southern District of New  York, a well-known case that was not entirely settled until 1908. (More about the Edison-Mutoscope legal conflict can be found in chapter 18.) The validity of the Latham Loop patent might have been challenged on the grounds that it was obvious, that it had been anticipated by Joly, and that it was technically invalid because Lauste, the true inventor, was not the named inventor. Latham’s ownership, due to his failure to assign the patent to the Lambda Company, became a source of frustration for the company’s shareholders. The revised Eidoloscope’s film was driven by two continuously rotating sprocket wheels, one above and the other below the gate (the feed and take up sprockets). Another sprocket wheel beneath the top sprocket wheel, in the case of Lauste’s design, immediately above the gate, is driven to stop and start each frame of film in the gate. A loop of film,

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the so-­called Latham Loop, is formed by the projectionist between the top continuous drive sprocket wheel and the intermittent sprocket wheel above the gate. The top continuously driven sprocket wheel isolates the mass of the film from the intermittent action. The loop is necessary to keep the film from being damaged by the intermittent sprocket wheel’s stop-­start action. A similar arrangement is required below the gate, but the Latham Loop is often identified only with the upper loop in the literature. The loop is the kind of invention that the first inventors in the field discover is a necessity. Here is a passage from the patent: “Because of the rapid interruptions and resumption of the movement of the picture-­film it is necessary to provide means for reducing the strain on the same to prevent it being ruptured by the teeth of the sprocket-drum 50, which actuates or feeds the film intermittently by engaging in holes at its edges, and it is also necessary or desirable to provide means for maintaining uniformity of tension of the film as it unwinds upon the receiving reel.” Later projectors usually placed the intermittent sprocket drive wheel directly below, rather than above, the gate. Projectors designed for short lengths of film, like the Cinématographe, did not need a loop. As noted, the original Eidoloscope’s brightness was inadequate because of its inefficient continuous motion and the required rapid radial slit shuttering. Based on Louis Lumière’s (1936a) assertion that the Kinetoscope radial slit shutter opened for 1/6000th second (presumably when running at 40 fps), given that the Eidoloscope ran at 20 fps, and making other assumptions including that its shutter angle was increased to transmit more light, I estimate a 1/1000th second opening for the original version of the Eidoloscope. Given the usual fifty-fifty duty cycle assumed for Lauste’s intermittentaction Eidoloscope, running at 20 fps (lacking a Pross interrupting shutter), the image would have been on screen for about 1/40th second, producing 25 times more illumination than the continuous drive method, an estimate provided to give the reader a feeling for the improvement in brightness made by intermittency, an approach that became nearly universal for motion picture projection. Early American cinema projector inventors Dickson, Lauste, Armat, and Jenkins were obviously influenced by the Kinetoscope’s continuous dive and its phenakistoscope-like image-arresting shutter. They may have been concerned that the stop-start action, necessary for cinematography would prove to be too taxing on the film causing unacceptable wear and tear with repeated passes through the projector, especially if they accepted a the Kinetoscope running rate of 40 fps. European designers did not venture down this path, following the example of the Lumières who accepted flicker, settling on 16 fps for cinematography and projection. But then again flicker perception quadruples for a doubling of brightness (and increases linearly for image size) and the

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

Cinématographe projected images may not have been bright or big, but its flicker was noted at the time. Another point worth considering is that the Kinematoscope had an asymmetrical duty cycle, with very long periods of darkness and brief bursts of image, which may have exacerbated the perception of flicker at low frame rates, which is unlike the symmetrical duty cycle of shuttering and image that became the norm for intermittent projection. Mitigating Kinetoscope flicker, more than anything else, led Edison and Dickson to choose a rate in the range of 40 fps rather than the need to capture and display smooth motion. The new Eidoloscope was introduced on May 11, 1896, at a Manhattan vaudeville theater, the Olympic Music Hall, using Lambda’s new intermittent. Soon after, the first Cinématographe screening in the United States took place at Keith’s Union Square Theater in Manhattan, on June 29, 1896, and on December 18 a Cinématographe projector began a two-month run in the 2000-seat Winter Garden Theater in Manhattan. The Eidoloscope was unable to compete with the image quality of the Lumières’ Cinématographe and the Jenkins-Armat Vitascope marketed by Edison, crippling the Lambda Company (Robinson 1996). In the first months of 1896 the Lambda Company was reorganized as the Eidoloscope Company, and turned to building additional projectors and selling exhibition rights, entering a field competing against more advanced machines (Musser 1991, p.  90; Musser 1990, p.  100). We recall that Woodville Latham had not assigned the Latham Loop patent to the Lambda Company, which so irked Lambda’s shareholders that the Lathams were removed from their management positions. The shareholders sued for ownership of the patent but Latham prevailed in New  York State’s Supreme Court. The patent was acquired by E. & H.  T. Anthony & Company, who held it as security for supplying funds for the Lathams’ failed attempt to market a product based on it under the tradename Biopticon, a combination camera and projector (Ramsaye 1926, pp. 290, 291). The patent rights, which were of some significance, were all that remained of the Latham’s effort, as described in chapter 18. Dickson, who ran side businesses while employed by Edison, including selling photos of Edison he had copyrighted, was also working with inventor Herman Casler of Canastota, New  York, a relationship that proved to be of great significance. In December 1893, through EliasBernard Koopman’s Manhattan-based Magic Introduction Company, they introduced the modestly successful Photoret “detective camera,” which looked like a pocket watch (Spehr 2008, p.  290). The still camera is described in USP 509,841, Photographic-Camera Shutter, filed March 1, 1893, with Casler as the named inventor with a one-half interest assigned to Harry Marvin, with whom he had formed The Marvin and Casler Company of Canastota, New York (Hendricks 1964, p. 3). In production the Photoret made six exposures ­touching

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Fig. 15.3  The USP cover sheet of the Lauste designed projector which was attributed to Latham. The Latham Loop is highlighted.

the circumference of the circular film, just as they had been arranged on the chronophotographic plates of Janssen and Marey. Hendricks (1964, p. 1) points out that the omission of Dickson’s name, from this and other patents, was a decision made to protect the inventions from legal action by Edison. To further conceal his involvement with what came to known

as the Mutoscope, while working on it in Upstate New York, Dickson apparently used the nom de plume H.  J. Dobson, according to Hendricks (1964, p.22). Prior to the financial collapse of the Lambda Company, Dickson, along with inventor Henry (Harry) N.  Marvin, inventor Herman Casler, and businessman Elias Bernard

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Fig. 15.4  An 1885 photo of the founders of American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, from left to right: Marvin, Dickson, Casler, and Koopman.

Fig. 15.5  A restored stereopair of Dickson (left) and Koopman (right) and a Mutoscope. (Cinémathèque Française)

Koopman,3 late in 1895, formed the K. M. C. D. Syndicate (or Association), which on December 27  in Jersey City, New Jersey, founded the American Mutoscope Company. The rights to all the company’s patents were used as collateral for a $200,000 loan from the New  York Security and Trust Company. Casler assigned his existing Mutoscope patent (USP 549,309) to the company and the others agreed to assign their rights to any future invenKoopman had assisted the Lathams and through his Magic Introduction Company sold the Viviscope, a “Kinetoscopic machine” using an intermittent advance (Hendricks 1964, p. 4). 3 

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

tions. The company’s purpose was: “The Manufacture and the sale of photographic, mutographic and mutoscopic implements and apparatus…” (Hendricks 1964, P. 30). Twenty-thousand shares of stock with a par valuation of $2 million were equally dived among the members of the K. M. C. D. Syndicate. The American Mutoscope Company initially designed a system consisting of a 68 mm film format, the Mutoscope peepshow viewer, the camera required for producing its content, the Biograph projector, and the printer required for making release prints. Although the original intention was for the company to make peepshow viewers and its content, it branched out to 68 mm projection and then to 35 mm cinematography, producing movies in its studio, and also building 35  mm hardware. The American Mutoscope Company became American Mutoscope and Biograph, and then was known as Biograph Studios, which was first located in Manhattan and then in a studio it built in the Bronx in 1912. Any fears that Edison or Gilmore may have had about competition from the Lathams were misplaced and would have been better focused on Biograph, which, before its dissolution in 1916, released more than 3000 shorts and 12 features, in the process attaining worldwide esteem. Dickson’s friend and Photoret miniature camera co-­ inventor, Herman Casler of Canastota, New York, a skilled machinist and draftsman, who had worked for the Edison General Electric Company in Syracuse (Hendricks 1964, p. 6), carried out his suggestion for the design of the ubiquitous Mutoscope, whose models were sold for more than half a century, which surpassed the limited success of the Kinetoscope. The Mutoscope viewer is described in USP 549,309, Mutoscope, filed November 21, 1894, by H. Casler. (See also USP 683,910.) According to Ramsaye (1926, p. 211), Dickson first made the suggestion for a peepshow device, based on the flip book, to Marvin and “made up an experimental pack of cards and drew a series of crosses varying in positon on them. When the cards were thumbed the cross seemed to whirl and dance.” The coin-operated Mutoscope, which wound up in a great many penny arcades and other public places, was a mechanical version of the flipbook, similar to the Lumières’ Kinora, which appeared on the market circa 1895. The invention of the flipbook (or flick-book) itself, although commonly assumed to be of ancient origin, is attributed to the 1868 invention of Englishman John Barnes Linnett who called it the Kineograph; it became a popular toy and was also known as the pennybook (Guynn 2011; Liesegang 1986, p.  31). Although Linnett suggests a mechanical arrangement for advancing the cards he does not illustrate the embodiment in his patent (Hopwood 1970, p.  35). The Mutoscope provided an experience similar to that of the Kinetoscope but unlike the Kinetoscope, which was electrically driven, the user cranked the Mutoscope’s

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

Fig. 15.6  The Mutoscope peepshow viewer in one of its many versions. (Cinémathèque Française)

handle to create the illusion of motion using a series of about 1900 photographic cards that were bound along an edge like the cards of a Rolodex file, which is now as much of a relic as the Mutoscope. Casler also describes an ingenious spiral arrangement of the cards that would have greatly extended the Mutoscope’s playing time. Dickson’s name is omitted from the patent undoubtedly because of fears of clouding ownership due to his relationship with Edison. As the Mutoscope crank was turned a new card was released by a prong to enable the presentation of a series of images to the eyes of the user, who controlled the speed of motion, which if judiciously cranked lasted about a minute. The sturdy metal Mutoscope was a much simpler mechanism than the Kinetoscope, which did not require motor drive, an electric lamp or batteries, since the cards were rotated into place by hand, mechanically restricted to forward motion. While making duplicates using contact printing for distribution for the Kinetoscope was straightforward, Mutoscope prints required a more complicated manufacturing process, involving mounting hundreds of prints onto a central core. The cards were illuminated by available light reflected onto them by a mirror placed at the opening at the top of the cabinet. Having a significantly lower cost of goods, and requiring far less maintenance, the Mutoscope continued to be manufactured until the late 1940s, whereas the Kinetoscope was entirely gone from the commercial world 6  years after its introduction (Hendricks 1964). As a boy I used a Mutoscope in arcades in Times Square and Coney Island and recently at the American Society of Cinematographers Clubhouse in Hollywood, which was in good working order despite the fact that the cards themselves were showing a great deal of wear and tear. The Mutoscope is fun to use – basic, effective, and charming.

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Obviously the Mutoscope was useless without a camera to supply it with content. The Mutoscope cards were 6 x 4 inches enlarged from negatives photographed with the 68 mm Mutograph (Hopwood 1899, p. 38), also called the Mutopticon, but later generally known as the Biograph camera, which was designed by Casler and Dickson, working in Canastota, New  York in 1895. According to Malkames (1999), the design was attentive to avoiding Edison’s Kinetograph patent and according to Hendricks (1964, p. 9), work on the camera, done under contract to Koopman, began by December 1894. The camera was tested on March 2, 1895, not with celluloid film but rather with a roll of paper to determine how well its perforation punching function worked, which is described below. The camera, with film in it, was tested in Syracuse, New York in mid-June 1895, by shooting a sparring match between Casler and Marvin (Spehr 2008). The film of this mock boxing match was uncovered in Casler’s effects after his death in 1939 (Hendricks 1964, p.  15). Casler filed the disclosure for the Biograph or Mutograph camera, on February 26, 1896, which was granted as USP 629,063, Kinetograph Camera. The heavy battery-powered Mutograph electric drive camera held 160 foot loads that could be extended for greater lengths and (possibly) could be run at 100 fps for slow motion. A striking aspect of the Edison-­avoidance design was the use of a “spring-catch” friction drive mechanism, to arrest each frame for exposure along the lines of the approach of one of the cameras used by Marey. Perforated film and an intermittent shuttle or sprocket drive were eschewed due to fears of infringing Edison’s claims that specified a drive scheme using “equally spaced perforations.” The film stock had no perforations, but the indexing function, required for printing (but not used for projecting), was performed the moment of exposure by punching two holes on either side of the frame using twin punches located on a vibrating plate above the aperture at the gate. The camera ran at 30 fps, as related by legendary cameraman Billy Bitzer (1973), who operated both the Mutograph (also known as the Biograph) 68  mm camera and its projector. According to Hendricks (1964, p. 20), the size of the Mutograph frames that are on deposit at the Library of Congress are 2 11/16 × 2 1/8 inches, quite a bit bigger than the Edison 1  ×  ¾ inch frame. The Biograph frame had an aspect ratio of 1.25:1, close to the Edison aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with 3.26 times its area. A great number of Biograph negatives are in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which it acquired in 1939, prints of which, when screened, confirm the claim that the format was “the Imax of its day” (WS: kottke). D.  Karl Malkames (1999) made the prints for MoMA, using a modified original Biograph printer from original nitrate negatives that were in surprisingly stable condition,

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15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

Fig. 15.7  Part of the 1882 USP cover sheet for a flipbook design by Henry Van Hoevenberg of New Jersey. It teaches a multiplexing technique for having more than one animation sequence included in a single flip book.

including early work of D. W. Griffith shot by Billy Bitzer. According to Malkames, the printer was built in 1899 and “sought out the random spaced perforations with springloaded pilot pins that slid into ­position to mate with the standard print stock.” He found that the images were remarkably steady since the perforation punching system effectively served as pilot pins. Casler also designed a projector for the large format. The first sentence of Billy Bitzer’s (1973) unassuming autobiography reads: “When I started out as a cameraman in 1896 the Biograph camera weighed close to a ton.” Cinematographer Billy (Johann Gottlob Wilhelm) Bitzer (1872–1944) was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and after a long and fruitful career died in Hollywood, California. In his youth he took up the family trade, silversmithing, but had other ambitions and enrolled in night classes in electrical engineering at Cooper Union Institute in Manhattan while taking a job working at Koopman’s Magic Introduction Company on lower Broadway. One of the novelty products that Bitzer was given to work on was the Mutoscope peepshow movie viewer, and in March 1895, Bitzer was ­transferred to the American Mutoscope Company. He became Dickson’s primary assistant, operating the Biograph camera for more than 100 films, and referred to Dickson as his mentor. Bitzer characterized

Dickson as the world’s first cameraman because of his work using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria. In fact, Dickson was also the first motion picture director. The young Bitzer emulated Dickson’s style in many ways, to the extent of having a moustache. Bitzer shot films for the Mutoscope peepshow viewer, at the time content considered be risqué, but today it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Bitzer also filmed news events with Dickson, beginning in 1896 with President-elect McKinley at his home and then of his inaugural parade. Biograph films were first screened publically for a week beginning on September 14, 1896, at the Alvin Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The projection came as a surprise to the audience at the conclusion of a performance by the Sandow (the strongman) Troup. The Pittsburg Post of September 15 reported that: “The biographe shows a picture that is nearly twice as large as the similar machines in the other houses, and the impression is clear-cut and distinct” (Hendricks 1964, p.40). The machine toured the East Coast and on October 12, 1896, Bitzer was the projectionist for the Biograph projector’s exhibition at the Olympia Music Hall in Manhattan, which was owned by one of Biograph’s ­investors, Oscar Hammerstein. Bitzer wrote: “The film ran at 320 feet per minute compared with 90 feet per minute for today’s film.” He also reports that

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Fig. 15.8  The USP cover sheet for Casler’s Biograph camera. Hole punches, on opposite sides of the frame, perforate the film at the moment of each exposure. The closest of the two punches (37) is shown in the highlighted area.

access to the Biograph projector was restricted to prevent Edison’s spies from studying it. It was a hellishly finicky machine to operate and Bitzer relates that the frameline drifted, which was caused by the friction drive movement. Given this it makes sense that the projector was offered to exhibitors along with the services of a projectionist when it was introduced in 1896. The company used a lease model for its projectors and films. Bitzer writes that the projected image was impressively better than that of the 35 mm competition, good enough to have motivated the Mutoscope principals to shift their emphasis from peepshow productions to making films for projection. The projector’s mechanism is described in USP 666,495, Consecutive View Apparatus, filed February 26, 1896, by H. Casler, on the

same day as its companion camera. It uses what is described as a “spring-­catch” to stop the advancement of the film using a clamping action in order to hold each frame at rest during exposure, the same method was used for intermittency in the camera, which is properly described as a friction feed. The feed and take rollers are designed to have a flexible advance to allow for the rapid interruptions of the film in the gate area. In 1898, Bitzer at Biograph, became the first cameraman to shoot actual war footage, in Havana Harbor of the USS Maine. Perhaps his best known assignment was as the lighting cameraman for the Biograph film of the Jeffries-­Sharkey 25-round fight in Coney Island on November 3, 1899, an effort that required three cinematographers; the 68  mm

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15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

Fig. 15.9  Billy Bitzer in 1908, at the age of 36, with what appears to be the Biograph 68 mm camera.

37,000 foot print ran 2.5 hours (WS: McKernan). This effort was the most extensive use of artificial illumination for cinematography. That same year the company built five or six 68  mm cameras, which were used by Bitzer for shooting D.  W. Griffith’s early productions (Malkames 1999). For release, optically-reduced prints were made from the 68 mm negatives for 35 mm release because few exhibitors embraced the 68 mm projector. Biograph’s use of the 35  mm format led to litigation with Edison, with Biograph prevailing in March 1902. However, in 1908 Biograph joined with its former foe to become part of Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, as recounted in chapter 18. 68  mm production was initiated in 1896 and discontinued in 1889, according to Bordwell (1985). The Biograph 35  mm projector used the interrupting shutter invented by their engineer John Pross, which substantially eliminated flicker. Prior to 1903 most of Biograph’s output was what are known as actualities, or documentaries, which for the most part was what occupied Bitzer. However, in 1901 Bitzer began to write, direct, and film fictional shorts, as the studio’s output transitioned to narrative productions by 1908. As Biograph’s head cameraman, Bitzer continued to make films for both projection and the Mutograph. Initially these were shot in a studio that was similar to the Black Maria on the roof of 841 Broadway in Manhattan, now known as the Roosevelt Building, near Union Square (Musser 1991). In 1906 the ­company moved to a brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street and beginning in 1912 operated a studio in

the Bronx at 807 East 175th Street. Biograph played a significant role in the early days of motion picture production having launched the careers of director D.  W. Griffith and cameraman Bitzer. Bitzer’s work with Griffith is covered in chapter 21. Obviously, Dickson was far more than Billy Bitzer’s mentor. If he had been turned down by Edison when he applied for a job in Manhattan, the history of motion picture t­ echnology would have been radically altered. Dickson was, after Edison, the single most influential technologist contributing to the evolution of the early celluloid cinema. His guidance continued to be felt after leaving Edison, most keenly in his participation in the influential American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. His fate was to live in the shadow of Edison and his efforts to claim his fair share of the credit for the invention of the Kinematograph and the Kinetoscope were clouded by his faulty memory, his efforts to support both his and Edison’s version of events, and his need to assert his own contribution. His inventions helped to establish filmmaking techniques for the next century with his creation of the first motion picture studio and film laboratory that included printing and processing machines. He conducted early experiments with sound for film and helped to design the first successful large format exhibition system. His work is either forgotten or not understood by the general public and regretfully by the film industry. He deserves recognition for his brilliant work and it ought to be recognized that he was the world’s first cinematographer and director.

15  Dickson Moves on: Lambda, Mutoscope, and Bitzer

Fig. 15.10  USP cover sheet for Casler’s Biograph projector.

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Jenkins and Armat: American Projection

Charles Francis Jenkins (1867–1934), grew up on farms, one near Dayton, Ohio, and then as a teenager near Richmond, Indiana. He spent a year at Earlham College in Richmond, a school founded by the Quakers, where he became interested in electricity. When he was about 20 years old, he headed West and worked in lumber mills in Washington and Oregon and he may have worked as an accountant for silver mines in Arizona and New Mexico. As a member of a search party looking for a lost miner in the desert near Cookes Peak, he was wounded in an attack by an Apache hunting party. He took a civil service exam and moved to Washington, D.C., in 1890, where he worked as a clerk for the US Life-Saving Service, now the US Coast Guard. Jenkins became interested in photography and began to dream of living the life of a full-time inventor (Godfrey 2014). In Jenkins’ (1970) book, self-published in 1898, Animated Pictures, after giving a historical sketch of technology from the phenakistoscope to the Mutoscope peepshow, he describes his own work in a chapter titled The Phantoscope, a word he used to describe all of his moving image inventions, no matter their design. His book is important for the exposition of his camera and projector design principals. His biographer Godfrey (2014) attributes to Jenkins early demonstrations of projected moving images to his family in 1890–1891, an assertion that raises some doubts. Better substantiation of his interest was Jenkins’ attempt to seek funding for the development of a movie camera, with an offer to demonstrate a work in progress in 1892 to Alexander Graham Bell. He built a Phantoscope projector that was funded by James P. Freeman in 1893. Kelkres (1984), the author of a thorough study of the Jenkins-Armat relationship, writes that the likelihood is that the business arrangement with Freeman involved two designs, one for a rotary lens camera and the other for the peepshow viewer that is described in USP 536,569, a Kinetoscope variation, Phantoscope, filed November 24, 1894. Its principal distinction is that it used spinning electric lamps in place of the radial slit shutter, but it has no obvious advantage over the Kinetoscope. The

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design was used for cabinet viewers for the Pure Food Exposition in November 1894, in Washington, D.C.  Also that year the device was deployed alongside of Edison’s machines in Kinetoscope parlors by the Columbia Phonograph Company. (Mannoni described Jenkins as one of Edison’s counterfeiters.) In order to have content for his peepshow device, Jenkins designed a camera, for which he filed a patent application on December 12, 1894, issued as USP 560,800, Kinetographic Camera. The patent illustration shows four rotating lenses, and the disclosure mentions “a number of lenses revolving around a common axis.” The patent teaches that the frames photographed by the machine can be viewed on a ground-glass or other kind of screen using the camera as a projector. Each rotating lens, in turn, when functioning as a camera lens, follows the continuously moving film to expose a frame with the axes of a lens remaining centered on the center of the frame without relative motion between the two. The machine was designed to also function as a projector. Hopwood notes the similarity between Jenkins’ device and Uchatius’ lantern projector of 1853, only Uchatius kept the lenses stationary, moving the light source. Hopwood believed that Jenkins successfully operated the camera-projector. On the other hand, Mannoni (2000), p. 430) believes that it is not known if the design was successfully implemented. Jenkins was a prolific inventor and over his lifetime was granted about 264 US patents (from lists complied by Abramson and Godfrey subtracting trademarks, design patents, and reissues) covering a wide range of subjects, many on motion picture and television technology and also inventions for aircraft, packaging, and a lawn mower. In 1916 he made a lasting contribution by founding the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), today the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). In 1894 Jenkins decided to learn more about electricity and enrolled in the Bliss Electrical School in Washington, D.C., where he met his inventing partner, Thomas J.  Armat. It was that year that Jenkins (1894) publically expressed interest in electrical imaging communications in an article written for Electrical

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_16

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Fig. 16.1  Charles Francis Jenkins, circa 1910, in his early 40s.

Fig. 16.2  Jenkins’ Kinematographic Camera from his USP. Parts 2, 3, and 4 are three of the four camera’s rotating lenses. Lightbulb 16 was to be used when the machine functioned as a projector, which Jenkins called a deliverer or stereopticon.

Engineer, a small step on the path to his eventual pursuit of mechanical scanning television systems, as described in the chapter Jenkins and Baird. Jenkins may well have the unique distinction of making historically important contributions to the development of both early motion picture and television technology.

16  Jenkins and Armat: American Projection

Thomas J. Armat (1866–1948) was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia; his only formal early schooling was at the age of 16 when he attended the Mechanic’s Institute in Richmond, Virginia, for a year. (The name was later changed to the Virginia Mechanic’s Institute.) In his youth Armat worked as a clerk in a hardware store and then as a bookkeeper in a railroad treasurer’s office. His patent, USP 521,562, Conduit Electricity Railway, filed March 23, 1893, granted on June 19, 1894, describes ways to prevent short circuits. As a boy he was fascinated by the zoëtrope and he and his brother Hunter, in September or October 1893, visited the Chicago World’s Fair where he was captivated by a demonstration of Anschütz’s direct view or peepshow Tachyscope, which is described in chapter 10. Years later Armat (1935) wrote: “My first thought upon seeing the tachyscope was of the possibilities that would be presented if its pictures could be projected upon a screen. The tachyscope was a peepshow apparatus, and the picture I saw was that of an elephant trotting along in a most realistic manner.” In the summer of 1894, Armat saw the first exhibition of the Kinetoscope in Washington where a boyhood friend, H. A. Tabb, who was associated with Raff & Gammon, Edison’s New  York-based exclusive agent for Kinetoscope machines and prints, unsuccessfully attempted to induce him to join the Kinetoscope Company. Instead, in the fall of 1894, Armat joined his cousin, T. C. Daniel, in a real estate business. Kelkres (1984) writes that in US Patent Office Interference No. 18,461, Armat v. Latham v. Casler v. Armat, Daniel testified that “…I have been considerably handicapped by his (Armat’s) bent in that direction (an obsession with motion picture projection); he being more of an inventor than a real estate man.” Armat’s heart was not in real estate – he was a cinema inventor. Armat, like Jenkins, enrolled as a student in the Bliss Electrical School in Washington, D.C., to learn more about arc light technology, which he expected to use for the motion picture projector experiments he was planning. It was there, in October 1894, that Professor Louis D. Bliss introduced the two to each other, knowing of their passion for moving images. After daily discussions on the topic of mutual interest, on March 25, 1895, Jenkins and Armat formed a written partnership, giving it the rights to Jenkins’ patent application for a “stereopticon phantoscope,” a motion picture projector by another name. Armat was responsible for funding the building of the device and its sales and marketing, and Jenkins for the design; the contract was written ambiguously, which led to difficulties as the relationship unfolded. The projector in question used rotating mirrors, probably with a continuous film drive, perhaps using a version of Reynaud’s image stabilization, and was completed in April 1895, but it did not function, Musser (1995) states, and a patent did not result from Jenkins’ application. During their brief working relationship, Jenkins and Armat co-invented two projectors,

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Fig. 16.3  Jenkins and Armat’s projector, from their USP, eliminated the shutter and had a very rapid pulldown. Some of the parts are: lamphouse A, motor H, feed reel D, film C, drive sprocket E, lens B, take-up reel I.

the first with C.F. Jenkins and T. Armat as listed inventors, USP 586,953, Phantoscope, filed August 28, 1895, and the second patent listing only Thomas Armat as inventor, USP 673,992, Vitascope, filed February 19, 1896. Their first effort together, ‘953, was based on the concept that they could achieve a bright and flickerless image by eliminating the interrupting shutter and having a very rapid pulldown. In Jenkins’ Animated Pictures, he goes beyond what is in the patent specifications and gives the timing for the pulldown and dwell periods. Jenkins wrote that (his parenthesis) “…if twenty-five pictures per second are being projected (which is quite enough) each picture is held stationary in the axis of the lens 11/12 of 1/25 of a second, and is fed forward the width of one picture in the remaining 1/12 of 1/25 of a second.” The rapid 0.003  second pulldown of Jenkins and Armat’s first attempt used a mutilated or Boston gear (in the patent drawing, it looks like a kind of Maltese-­ cross intermittent), which was part of the sprocket drive wheel. (The pulldown established for 35 mm projectors running at 24 fps was 0.01  second.) According to Richardson (1925), the Phantoscope projector was a mechanical failure because the mutilated gear tore itself apart under the stress of operation. Hopwood in his book Living Pictures, published in 1899 (1970, p. 208, p. 15), describes the concept as having originated with Wheatstone and relates: “…several makers (of projectors) have proposed to do away with the shutter, substituting…a period of very rapid travel—so rapid, indeed, that a general blur takes the places of that darkness which is in other cases caused by the shutter.”1,2 The “general blur” to which Hopwood refers is called travel ghost, usually an unpleasant artifact. Abandoning their first approach, they adopted Demenÿ’s beater-cam, as described in ‘992, but it was the Hopwood (1899) provides a fine account of early cinema devices. The toy 16 mm projector I received as a gift at the age of 7 or 8 did not have a shutter.

1  2 

Maltese-­cross sprocket drive that eventually prevailed for theatrical cinema projectors. Mannoni (2000, p.  430) implies that the American inventors took up the design after having read about it in the January 1896 American journal Photographic Times. Mannoni comments: “The two Americans had no hesitation in taking up this excellent drive mechanism for their projector. Demenÿ had no chance: misunderstood in his own country, and pirated by the Americans.” Demenÿ had patented it in France on July 27, 1894. (See the chapter Chronophotographers: Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ.) The beater-cam intermittent is particularly well suited to unperforated film, which explains its application to the Lauste-designed 68  mm Biograph projector. (The perforations punched by the Casler camera served as a guide for registration during printing but not for projection.) Demenÿ had patent protection in the United Kingdom, BP 24,457, but I cannot find any patent issued to him in the United States, and his invention, which was offered for years as the low-cost alternative to the Maltese-cross sprocket drive, required careful adjustment of gate tension. It was knocked off with impunity in America as was Edison’s Kinetoscope in England. It was a scramble to get the new Jenkins and Armat machine (three were built) ready, but the Phantoscope was demonstrated at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, from about September 25 until December 31, 1895 (Pennsylvania at the Cotton States… 1897). Jenkins and Armat built a theater to house the demonstration that was not well attended, but during the screenings Armat had an epiphany that turned out to be extremely valuable, as we shall learn. On October 14 Jenkins returned home after explaining to Armat he had to attend to family affairs for a few days and took one of the three projectors with him to show it off in Richmond, but he never returned. The day after he left, a destructive fire broke out in adjacent exhibits and damaged the theater. The subject of who did what, who contributed

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Fig. 16.4  Figure 2 from Jenkins and Armat’s second patented effort, USP 673,992, filed in Armat’s name alone, by agreement. This projector used a beater-cam intermittent pulldown (highlighted).

which aspects of the invention, has been an open question in the aftermath of the conflict that arose between the two inventors. Kelkres’ study of the matter, published in 1984, A Forgotten First: The Armat-­ Jenkins Partnership and the Atlanta Projection, makes it clear that in terms of invention, up until this point, both men had contributed equally. Jenkins had second thoughts about the partnership contract and became troubled about Armat taking credit for the invention of the new projector, and Armat came to believe that Jenkins was attempting to make off with the invention and/or hog credit for it. Armat and Jenkins parted company at the Cotton Exchange (as the Exposition was also known) with their dispute soon leading to litigation, and in settling the matter, Jenkins made the mistake of a lifetime and sold Armat the rights to the machine for $2500. The design was subsequently granted as the aforementioned ‘992, Vitascope, granted in Armat’s name alone; Jenkins accepted a deal in which he forsook both credit for the machine and the wealth that came to Armat from licensing fees. Armat’s Vitascope used a beater-cam intermittent movement implemented as a continuously rotating drum on whose periphery was mounted a prong or dog to pull the film downward once for each rotation. This produced the fairly rapid frame pulldown and long dwell time required to increase projected brightness that is a feature that distinguishes projection intermittent action from

that used by cameras, since it provides more light on the screen. (The usual pulldown of projectors is a quarter of the duty cycle, whereas that of cameras is half the duty cycle.) Armat’s epiphany occurred this way: during the Atlanta projections, he needed to give the feed reel a helping hand so that the film didn’t snap due to the yanking of the intermittent mechanism. This led to his adding a continuous driving sprocket wheel between the feed reel and the gate isolating the feed reel’s mass from the beater’s stop-start action. Given this arrangement, the projectionist’s job was to form a loop of film between the sprocket wheel and the gate to provide a buffer to prevent breaking the film due to the action of the beater-cam, or in later designs to the Maltese-cross activated sprocket wheel, both of which are (usually) located after the gate. Armat’s design was similar to the Latham Loop, which was invented at about the same time. Woodville Latham filed the patent application describing the loop in what was granted as USP in USP 707,934, Projecting-Kinetoscope, on June 1, 1896; Armat filed Vitascope, on November 25, 1896, which issued as USP 580,749. Armat’s claim 3 refers to “a feed-drum adapted to be continuously rotated and to provide slack in the film between the drum and the tension device….” Armat had a “refined” prototype of the Vitascope projector in October 1895 (Card 1959). At that time, as far as US patent practices

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were concerned, priority was established by the inventor who could prove that he had first begun to work on the invention and diligently pursued it. With Jenkins out of the picture, Armat got in touch with the New  York-based Kinetoscope distributor Raff & Gammon in December 1985, and told them about the projector, but they were dismissive explaining that if Edison couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done, an opinion probably based on the failed efforts of Edison’s mechanic Charles Kayser, whose unsuccessful experiments took place in their building. Raff & Gammon’s Kinetoscope business was in decline and they sought something to enhance it. Finally Gammon was persuaded to accept Armat’s invitation to visit his office on F Street in Washington, D.C., after Armat offered to pay for the trip. Gammon reacted favorably to the projection demonstration, which was held in the basement of the building in which Armat’s office was located. Gammon and Raff negotiated a relationship with Armat with the condition that they not sell the machines but rather use a lease model to create a revenue stream that was potentially more lucrative. The partners wished to approach Edison to see if he would agree to manufacture the projector but they had trepidations about receiving a friendly reception due to his known reluctance to vigorously pursue projection, and the fact that the machine had not been invented in his lab. Gathering their courage they set up a demonstration for Edison in West Orange and to their surprise he was delighted by the Vitascope’s performance agreeing to manufacture and market it. By Armat’s (1935) account the parties decided Edison’s name would be associated with the machine for marketing purposes. The projector was presented as the Edison Vitascope to the public on the evening of April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in Manhattan, the present site of Macy’s department store (Richardson 1925). Edison grandly held forth, implicitly taking credit for the projector’s invention. Surprisingly, the highpoint of the evening wasn’t any of the Edison-produced Kinetoscope films but rather Rough Sea at Dover, a 50 foot loop of waves crashing on the shore, the work of Englishman Robert W. Paul. Unlike the other films projected that night they had been photographed indoors (but lit by the sun in open or glassed-in studios) of novelties and vaudeville acts, Paul’s film of waves was shot outdoors and brought the elemental power of nature to the theater screen. Other films included The Milk White Flag and the hand-colored Annabelle Butterfly Dance, which were both filmed for the Kinetoscope. Unless the Vitascope was running at high speed, these projections would have been in slow motion since they were shot at about 40 fps. The films were accompanied by Dr. Leo Sommer’s Blue Hungarian Band, a portent that motion picture exhibition would have live musical accompaniment for the next two decades. The Vitascope projector was equipped with the spoolbank mechanism that was used by the Kinetoscope to repeat the films without r­ ewinding

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and rethreading. In Europe, machines like the Lumières’ Cinématographe dropped the film directly into a basket; the first projectors were simple machines: there was no need to add the more robust and complicated mechanism or take-up reel required to handle longer lengths of film since they projected only short lengths of the films. Reports from Paris and London confirmed that audiences were enthralled by the Lumières’ Cinématographe projections and in 1896, the year of the Vitascope premier, more than a dozen of their machines were in use in American cities. Only a few months after the Vitascope premier, the Cinématographe premiered in Manhattan at Keith’s Union Square on June 29, 1896. It was accompanied by both music and sound effects, as was its screening at Keith’s Bijou in Philadelphia that August. To catch up with the Lumières, Armat replaced the beater-cam with what became the ubiquitous intermittently driven sprocket wheel that served to more precisely locate each frame in the gate and mitigate frameline drift. Edison manufactured and sold only a small number of Vitascope projectors and began to make his own model, which led to litigation with Armat but there is some irony to their conflict because the Lumières had been first to produce an elegant and compact machine. The inventorship dispute between Jenkins and Armat carried on for decades extending to Armat’s protesting The Franklin Institute’s award of the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1922 “for the invention of the moving picture machine of today…” which “…after a careful investigation, however, the medal was awarded to Mr. Jenkins,” as related in an article by Ben Lubschez (1922) in the American Cinematographer magazine. Jenkins’ biographer Godfrey (2014) points out that Jenkins lost a fortune in royalties that Armat collected through the Motion Picture Patents Company. Or, as has been written, in a field in which humor is decidedly intermittent, Jenkins got the medals and Armat got the money. And yet, Armat clearly invented the loop design, and neither man, working independently, would again create an invention of such significance. Edison’s Vitascope flyer convinced him that projection was a worthy opportunity, and, as noted, he decided to create a projector for manufacture and sale, dropping the JenkinsArmat machine even before the Vitascope patents had issued. Of the 80 Vitascopes called for in his contract with Raff & Gammon, he built 73 . Edison offered his own product, the Projectoscope or Projecting Kinetoscope, which was first shown at the Bijou Theater in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on November 30, 1896 (Musser 1991). It’s possible that this screening was anticipated by James  Stuart Blackton’s (1875 -- 1941) exhibition of films using Projecting Kinetoscope #13 earlier that month at a theater in Manhattan run by impresario Tony Pastor. Blackton’s screening came about this way: in the spring or summer of 1896, the British-

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Fig. 16.5  Opening night for the Vitascope at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall.

Fig. 16.6 Edison’s Projecting Kinetoscope with its spoolbank. (Cinémathèque Française)

American ­ producer and animator and co-founder of Vitagraph Studios, met with Edison at West Orange and attempted to acquire a Vitascope projector but was told to wait for the new Projecting Kinetoscope, which could be purchased outright, unlike the Vitagraph that could only be

leased. As a result Blackton bought Projecting Kinetoscope #13 for $100 and ten films for $700 (Dewey 2016). According to a Projectoscope brochure, published by resellers Maguire & Baucus of New York, when set up the projector was 4½ feet long, 3 feet wide, and 5½ feet high, weighed 200 pounds, ran on 100–120 volt DC, and was powered by 8 volt batteries (in series) with a 7 amp capacity. The machine came with a carbon arc lamphouse and was suitable for throws of 60–90 feet and for throws of 35–60 feet a wideangle lens could be used “only if absolutely necessary.” Like the Kinetoscope, the Projectoscope (and the Vitascope) could be outfitted as a spoolbank machine but could be used with reels to handle up to 300 feet of film “one and one-half inches in width.” The brochure sates that “our standard film lengths are 50 and 150 feet, and they contain 700–2250 photographs” (WS: Rutgers…, 23,936). The reference to the number of photographs (frames) gives us a feeling for the embryonic nature of the medium. The Projecting Kinetoscope was well received. Edison’s approach for getting into the projector business followed what is now a commonplace pattern: to test the waters, he mitigated risk by manufacturing and marketing a licensed design and, through the direct experience of what he learned about the machine and the market he designed an improved product and adopted what he considered to be a better marketing strategy, selling outright rather than leasing. A good part of Edison’s Kineto project profits came from the sale of prints and his company also continued to improve its

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projector designs. As part of the program to improve its Kinetograph Department, the mechanically adept Edwin S.  Porter was hired by the Edison Company’s operating officer Gilmore, at the end of November 1900. Porter had built good cameras and printers, and his projector design had been used at the Eden Musée, but after a fire at his shop that devastated his business he was at loose ends and took the job with Edison for $15 a week. Porter was able to improve the Projectoscope by using what he had learned at the Eden Musée and added a new gear train mechanism to the machine. The Porter machine had a 1000 foot reel capacity, provision for a magic lantern, an adjustable arc lamp, and it could be operated by one person. Porter would go on to become an important and innovative film director, while he worked for Edison’s studio, and was one of the designers of the influential Simplex projector (Musser 1991). Porter’s upgraded Projecting Kinetoscope was introduced circa 1901 and was followed in 1904 by Edison’s Universal Projecting Kinetoscope, a lightweight machine that could be used with magic lantern lamphouses, which was designed for the semi-professional and lanternist markets. The Projecting Kinetoscope of 1910 was designed to satisfy the new safety requirements in response to the recognition of the flammable nature of nitrate print stock; the Underwriters Model, or Type B machines, introduced in 1912, like other machines of its time used a shutter located in front of the lens. It carried the Underwriters Laboratories imprimatur; UL was founded in 1894 as the Underwriters’ Electrical Bureau, which specialized in safety testing and certification of electrical product. The final Edison machine in the series was the Super Kinetoscope that flopped in the marketplace because its features and price were not competitive with new machines such as Porter’s Simplex, Nicholas Powers’ Cameragraph, and Alva A. Roebuck’s mail-order Optigraph and Motiograph (WS: ProjectorScreen.com). But for a time, Edison’s Projecting Kinetoscopes had 30% of the market in the United States. This rest of this chapter sketches the development of early motion picture projection technology. (The history of the Simplex projector, which was widely used and a standard for performance, is given in chapter 20.) The collective activities of various inventors and organizations working on projector design led to solutions to the problems fundamental to celluloid film exhibition, to a large extent related to the changing aesthetics of filmmaking. Projection technology evolved rapidly in the years following its introduction with a proliferation of activity in the United States and Europe, and in many cases it’s difficult to pin down who did what first, but in a sense it doesn’t matter since collectively the inventors and designers, observing each other’s work, advanced the technology.

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Fig. 16.7  The Edison Projecting Kinetoscope of 1912, Underwriters Model Type B.

In the earliest days of the celluloid cinema exhibition was a hybrid medium combining magic lantern slideshows and the projection of short films produced for the kinetoscope. But this gave way to the projection of collections of short novelty or actuality films produced for vaudeville houses, special venues, and nickelodeons. Up until the early 1920s, of the so-called silent cinema, projectors were usually handcranked, fostering the possibility of interactive performances with the frame rate or even direction of motion varied by the projectionist in coordination with a lecturer and musicians and in synchrony with audience reactions, which resembles a magic lantern show or Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope performances, which is described in greater detail in chapter 25. Porter, who put together shows at the Eden Musée, created themed assemblages of shorts, the precursor of narrative film editing. In the early days of the celluloid cinema, even the most thoughtful observer might not have suspected that the narrative long-form would prevail. Two examples of early filmmakers who made longer and more complex films and helped change the aesthetic are Georges Méliès (1861–1938), who began directing films beginning in 1896, and Porter, who was greatly influenced by Méliès’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon. These filmmakers are

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amongst those who took the first steps in constructing longer narrative through the juxtaposition of shots to build scenes. It was projection itself, taking over from the Kinetoscope peepshow, which motivated and permitted such changes. The theatrical setting of projection encouraged narrative that stimulated filmmakers like David Wark Griffith, Thomas Harper Ince, and Cecil Blount DeMille, to make longer and more intricate films using match cutting and parallel construction; the length of these films put demands on the early projectors that had been meant to only handle short lengths of film. The Griffo-Barnett boxing match, shot by the Lambda Company in its entirety, which premiered in New  York on May 20, 1895, may have been the first to greatly expand the running time of a single subject for projection (Streible 2008). Projection design kept pace with the following as filmmakers and exhibitors changed their concept of cinema: longer shows did away with spoolbanks and take-up baskets leading to the addition of take-up reels; more massive print reels for longer running time required the addition of the buffering loop and associated continuous drive sprocket to isolate the film on the feed reel from the action of the intermittent; longer shows increased the demand for a flicker-­ mitigating shutter, like the multi-bladed interrupting shutter invented by Pross et  al.; improved instrumentation was required for controlling the machine’s functions, like frameline adjustment, while it was running; good image steadiness became more important for longer screenings leading to improved intermittents and more massive machines to dampen the vibration that showed up on the screen as image unsteadiness; lamphouses were optimized for movie projection due to the smaller size of its frame, as opposed to the much larger magic lantern slides; arc lamps were greatly preferable to dangerous chemical combustion for illumination; protection against the fire hazard of nitrate print film was critical, leading to the use of automatic dowser; as the duration of shows increased, machines had to become more robust; and projectors had to protect the prints that ran through them, to minimize breakage and wear and tear. Intermittent projection can be hard on film, and a single pass through a machine that wasn’t properly designed, cleaned, and adjusted can ruin a print the first time it is screened (Pylipow 1991). There were several different approaches to obtain intermittency: at first, by the beater-cam movement; by the shuttle or claw to engage perforations at the gate; and by the intermittent sprocket wheel drive, usually located below the gate, actuated by a Maltese-cross movement. The latter was most commonly used for 35 mm projectors, while smaller-gauge machines relied on shuttle advance. The beater-cam achieved frame intermittency even though it rotated continuously, unlike the Maltese-cross movement that stopped and started the drive sprocket. The beater-cam, also known as the dog

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Fig. 16.8  The Lumières’ Cinématographe used as a projector. The film is shown dropping into a lower compartment.

movement (the downward dog?), was offered as an option through the first decade of the twentieth century because it was less expensive to manufacture and therefore cost less. While used early on and offered as an option for some projectors, Demenÿ’s invention was out of fashion by the second decade of the twentieth century, as noted in Jones’ (1917) manual, How to Make and Operate Moving Pictures. The beater-cam could result in a less steady image and frameline drift. As Bennett (1911) put it, in a handbook published in 1911, although it was a practical low-cost alternative, it was inferior to the Maltese-cross, in part, because “the dog movement depends entirely for its steadiness on the friction of the gate spring tending to prevent after-slip….” In other words, if the gate tension wasn’t adjusted properly the image was unsteady. The beater movement was originated by Demenÿ for his 60  mm Cinématographe projector, renamed the Biographe by Gaumont, as described in the chapter Chronophotography. The Biographe is an early example of a projector that used feed and take-up reels, unlike the first shuttle-driven Cinématographes that fed film from a spool and collected it in a basket or sack. Following the practice of his one-time mentor Marey, the first version

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Fig. 16.9  Top: beater-cam. As the cam B’ rotates, the dog B pulls film through the gate. Bottom: sprocket drive. Pin 2 rotates at a constant rate. It is attached to disk 1 that is attached to disk 4. The pin engages and then disengages the slots of the Maltese cross, 3. When engaged the film is pulled down one frame through the film gate by the intermittent sprocket. When disengaged, the frame remains at rest in the gate.

of Demenÿ’s projector did not use perforated film and for this reason was required to have a beater-cam. The Biographe was both precocious and obsolete the moment it was introduced, in the closing days of 1895, because it was such an early and interesting design and because of the rapid acceptance of the 35 mm format with its indexing perforations. In the early days of the celluloid cinema, as it was in the days of the magic lantern, chemical combustion was the most common source of illumination, especially for the lecturer-­projectionists who traveled from place to place to set up in barns or other locations that lacked electric power. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, a common source for projection illumination was limelight, a block of lime heated to incandescence using a hot flame usually created by the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen. The technology became more sophisticated: the gas bags that had been used for storing fuel and oxygen were replaced by a saturator tank that supplied hydrogen by vaporizing sulfuric

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ether, and a tank with a mechanism within it for the controlled dripping of water onto an oxygen-­releasing compound (Plakun 1957).3 The acetylene generator was an alternative way to produce combustible gas in situ and was claimed to have an advantage because the flame ran at a lower temperature (Herbert 2000). Limelight and chemical combustion were replaced by the carbon arc as electrification became widespread. Often the same lamphouse was used for both the magic lantern and motion picture heads, which were mounted on rails and slid into or out of juxtaposition with it. This dual-function capability was important for exhibition because the earliest films were distributed without titles and required the use of magic lantern slides. The lamphouse provides light plus a great deal of unwanted heat directed at the frame and the metal gate itself. As a result some handcranked projectors took steps to prevent the heat from producing buckling, blistering, or burning film; even worse celluloid nitrate film was highly (the invariable adjective) flammable. As long as the film moved through the gate fast enough, the possibility of heat damage was eliminated but many early projectors were handcranked making the rate subject to the whims of the operator. Some projectors used a device to sense the film’s rate so that when it was not up to speed, a heatshield (dowser) was automatically positioned between the lamphouse and the gate. By way of example, a patent for a Kinetoscope projector was assigned to the Edison Manufacturing Company by Edward L. Aiken, describing a mechanism for accomplishing this. USP 967,293, Kinetoscope, filed April 12, 1905, teaches a dowser activated by a centrifugal governor that sensed the projector’s speed and actuated the heatshield if the frame rate fell below a safe value. The nominal speed for cinematography was 16 fps but it was recommended running projectors at 18 fps, which was chosen to reduce flicker and/or heat damage. Other reasons for running faster than the rate of cinematography were to improve the tempo of the film or to allow the exhibitor to increase revenue through additional audience turns. Early projectors usually had an outboard rotating shutter that was placed in front of the lens, but a projector made by J.B.  Colt & Co. introduced circa 1897 the Criterioscope, introduced the rear shutter, interposed between the light source and the film gate (Plakun 1957). This is an important design feature because it reduces the amount of heat reaching the film and gate allowing for brighter (and hotter) light sources, like high-intensity carbon arcs. This became especially important for big screen projection, and also as the size of the frame devoted to picture area decreased, which occurred in the late 1920s with the addition of the optical soundtrack. A 1920 machine from the respected firm AEG in Germany used what became commonplace, a conical rear Details of the limelight with saturator tank are given in the April 17, 1891, issue of The Photographic News: A Weekly Record of the Progress of Photography. 3 

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Fig. 16.10  A projector design by Edison engineer Edward Aiken used an automatic dowser controlled by a centrifugal governor (highlighted).

shutter in which the axis of the cone is tipped at an angle to the plane of the film gate to improve illumination efficiency, a design that resembles that of the barrel or cylindrical shutter, which looks like a beer can with slots cut out of opposite sides. Exhibition often combined elements of the glass and the celluloid cinemas, and Edison’s Projecting Kinetoscope,

designed by James H. White, USP 714,845, which was filed April 16, 1902, the first Edison projector to be made out of metal, is illustrative of this (Hulfish 1913). Its motion picture head could be rapidly interchanged with the magic lantern head. Both were on rails to be slid into and out of position in juxtaposition with the lamphouse.

The Lumières and the Europeans

Carl Antoine Lumière (1849–1911), born in Ormoy in eastern France, was a carpenter with an interest in science, painting, and photography. He married, had a family, and set up a small factory to manufacture photographic plates in Lyon in 1883 called Antoine Lumière & ses Fils, but manufacturing difficulties arose that jeopardized the fate of the business. His sons, Auguste Marie Nicolas (1862–1954) and Louis Jean (1864–1948), worked to save the family business when, in the mid-1890s, the 17-year-old Louis devised a gelatin bromide dry emulsion for the glass plates (Abel 2005). In September 1894 a Kinetoscope was installed in Paris where père Lumière viewed its moving images. Returning home with a length of 35 mm film to show his boys, he suggested that they build a camera and a projector. Here was proof positive that it was possible to create photographic living images by properly displaying the phases of motion, and he proposed to do one better than Edison by projecting. The Lumières had demonstrated their interest in moving images with visits to see Reynard’s Projecting Praxinoscope at his Théâtre Optique in Paris, and in 1892 they purchased the rights to the projector designed by inventor Léon-­ Guillaume Bouly. Georges Demenÿ presented his Phonoscope, first shown publically in 1892, to the Lumières, hoping to make a commercial arrangement with them, but they declined. The Phonoscope, a device meant for the education of the deaf, used phenakistoscope-like magic lantern technology, as we learned in the chapter Chronophotography. Whatever their acquaintance with other attempts, it was the Edison-Dickson Kinetoscope that led the Lumière brothers to devise the Cinématographe, a combination camera, projector, and printer, for which they filed a patent on February 13, 1895, which was granted as FR 245,032, Appareil servant à l’obtention et à la vision des épreuves chonophotographiques (Apparatus for obtaining and viewing chronophotographic tests). Whether or not Carl Antoine Lumière presented 35 mm film to the boys, or the details of what Spehr (2008, p.  378) characterizes as the traditional story are absolutely correct, at least one of the Lumières

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probably experienced the Kinetoscope, which for individuals with their level of interest and accomplishment was all that was required to inspire and execute the design of the Cinématographe. The Cinématographe, like the Edison Kinematograph and Kinetoscope, used film 35 mm wide, but the Lumières’ version used two round perforations per frame on opposite edges of the film, located about a quarter of a frame height from the frameline. The Cinématographe used twin pins, called tines or claws by Louis Lumière, also known as shuttles, to enter the circular film perforations from the lens side of the machine. The up-and-down-moving pins were driven intermittently by a triangular eccentric cardioid cam, which entered the pairs of perforations below the frame and halted when each unexposed frame was in position for exposure (based on an examination of a machine at the Cinémathèque Française). The film was pulled down in a third of the intermittent cycle (Hopwood 1899, p.  96), somewhat rapid by modern movie camera standards that use a more or less 50-50 duty cycle (modern projectors pull down the film in a quarter of the intermittent cycle). The claw intermittent pulldown mechanism disappeared from 35 mm projectors, which settled on the sprocket drive actuated by a Maltese-cross mechanism, but it was employed for cameras and small format projectors. The Lumièr’s mechanism is described in USP 579,882, Kinetographic Camera, filed September 6, 1895, by A. and L. Lumière. Like most of the other projectors (or combination machines) of the time, it was handcranked. The intermittent mechanism of the Cinématographe may have been much steadier than that of its contemporaries and set the standard for performance. Since the Cinématographe could be used as a camera, printer, and projector, the machine required a glass pressure plate since light had to pass through it to fulfill its printer and projector functions. In 1890 the concept of a camera-projector had been suggested by Frederick Henry Varley (1842?–1916), British inventor of electrical instruments and the sequential camera copied by Friese-Greene (Obituary Notices… 1916, p. 688).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_17

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Fig. 17.1  Louis (left) and August (right) Lumière

Varley may be first to have proposed the convertible machine concept and the use of t­ransparent stock for both negatives and prints (Coe 1981, p. 60). (See chapter 9.) So highly regarded is the Cinématographe’s role in the history of cinema that in 2014 one sold in Europe for €150,000 (Mannoni, in conversation). The small 16 pound wood-body machine used brass fittings and without a magazine was 190 mm × 191 mm × 140 mm. With its external magazine, it measured 284 mm × 191 mm × 157 mm, and the particular machine from which these dimensions were taken had two interchangeable lenses, with focal lengths of 18  mm and 40 mm. These measurements are based on body number 254, built circa 1896, which is in the collection of the British Science Museum. About 450 Cinématographes were built (WS: collection.sciencemuseum). Because of the short length of the film the machine used, not more than 18 meters, the intermittent pins, without sprocket wheels, were all that was required for driving the film and; feed and take-up reels were not used, but a spring-loaded lever was used in the supply magazine to keep the film from unraveling. Since short rolls of film were contemplated for projection the wooden Cinématographe used a simple spool holder mounted on top of its body; after the film traveled through the projector, it was dropped into a wooden box or basket. Louis Lumière (1936a) noted that the camera he and his brother designed was meant to run at 16 fps with an exposure of 1/25th second.

Fig. 17.2  The Cinématographe in projection mode.

As noted above, the Lumières had previously purchased the rights to the Bouly projector, which some accounts incorrectly maintain is the basis for their successful Cinématographe. The projector was designed by the financially compromised Léon-­Guillaume Bouly (1872–1932), but only the name, Cinématographe, remains of his effort, since the Lumières’ design is original (Mannoni 2000). Bouly’s is an unusual machine, once thought to have existed only as a patent disclosure that was filed in France, FR 219,350, on February 12, 1892, but one is in the Eastman House collection in Rochester, New York. In his discussion of the Bouly machine, James Card (1959), the then curator of Eastman House, challenged the attribution of projection’s origins with this comment: “It is curious that French historians give priority to the Lumières for their Cinématographe which did not appear until 1894, at the earliest.” The Bouly machine accommodated film widths between 38  mm and 48  mm and used a cylindrical shutter with an intermittent mechanism derived from Marey’s chronophotographic camera. Coe describes the intermittent mechanism as a “mutilated roller,” a cylinder partly cut away to relive friction, while running in contact with another roller. Card surmised that it is improbable that the design could have functioned and wrote that there is “no available record of the practical

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use of this apparatus.” On the other hand, Coe (1992, p. 46) is of the opinion that Bouly’s apparatus was a practical and sound design. Another Bouly patent that was filed December 27, 1893, FR 235,100, describes an instrument for both cinematography and projection, possibly the inspiration for the dual-function design of the Lumières’ Cinématographe. Louis Lumière (1936a, b) worked on the Cinématographe’s intermittent drive system and Auguste on the lamphouse with Alfred Molteni, a manufacturer of high-quality magic lanterns. Louis suggested using an intermittent based on the fabric advancing mechanism of a sewing machine; according to him the first working model of the Cinématographe, using his drawings, was built in 1894 by the chief engineer of the Lumières’ Lyon factory, Charles Moisson (1864–1943). On March 22, 1895, the now-­ celebrated Male and Female Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, was photographed with the new machine that was operated by Louis who thereafter directed many films. Male and Female Workers… was projected at the lecture he gave before the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, in Paris. The first production run of 25 Cinématographes was made by Parisian engineer Jules Charpentier (1851–1921) under the supervision of Louis. The Cinématographe, as projector, was next demonstrated on September 28, 1895, at the theater L’Eden in La Ciotat on the Mediterranean coast, east of Marseille. The first commercial Cinématographe screening took place in Paris on December 28, 1895, at the Salon Indien du Grand Café (Herbert 1996). As projection’s popularity grew, the Lumières’ format variation became an impediment to the Cinématographe’s acceptance since Edison’s 35 mm film had established itself as the de facto standard. The Lumières were persuaded to abandon their circular perforations and adopt the two columns of filleted rectangular perforations, four per frame, on either edge of the film. Herbert (2000) writes that “… Arthur S. Newman, a designer of film mechanisms since 1896, (explained that the) Edison format succeeded over the Lumière variation and became universal. Exact specifications were yet to be decided, but would be agreed later that year (1909) at a European trade convention; an important technical advance.” But apparently everything wasn’t locked down as far as Europe was concerned: one pair of their perforations straddled the frameline, whereas the American preference was to have the frameline located halfway between perforations. Circa 1888 a model of the Cinématographe, designed specifically for projection, was offered with a redesigned intermittent and a frameline control that did not require tilting the machine to keep the image centered on the screen (Hopwood 1899, p. 160). Astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen, one of the origiFig. 17.3  The Lumières initially used round perforations, two per nators of chronophotography and inventor of the first single-­ frame as shown, but the 35 mm Edison rectangular perforations became lens integral camera capable of photographing the phases of a de facto standard. (Cinémathèque Française) motion (described in the chapter Chronophotographers:

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Janssen, Marey, and Demenÿ), was the chairman of an event in which eight short Cinématographe films were screened in 1895 at the Lumières’ headquarters in Lyon. During his speech, at the closing banquet, he noted steps that needed to be taken for a “final perfecting of their (the Lumières’) method,” by which he may have been alluding to the elimination of flicker (Tosi 2005). The images projected by the machines made by the Lumières and their contemporaries flickered because of their low frame rate of about 16 fps, but the flicker may have been ameliorated because the image probably wasn’t very bright. The flicker problem was solved using a shutter with an extra blade to occlude the frame when at rest in the gate; it was invented at about the same time in the early 1900s in Germany by Theodor Pätzold and in America by John A. Pross (Narath 1960). The Cinématographe was influential as both a camera and a projector and was followed by many wooden-bodied handcranked machines like the Pathé camera, which was introduced in 1905, and became widely used in America. Unlike Edison’s motor-driven Kinematograph, these were lightweight handcranked portable machines that did not require batteries; they could be used with facility in the field as well as in the studio. Designing the Cinématographe to be multipurpose was a good idea since it was introduced into a world without a celluloid cinema infrastructure and it was necessary to supply the user with everything required for shooting, printing, and projecting, but the advantages of specialization soon became manifest. The Cinématographe was designed for short lengths of film but soon projectors were required to handle greater lengths of film. The Cinématographe didn’t need sprocket drive or feed and take-up reels, or a buffering loop. Designs like the Vitascope and Projectoscope had to take into account new requirements as films grew in length. There are conflicting opinions about the Lumières’ place in cinema technology history and what they actually accomplished with their Cinématographe. There are some who believe that the Lumières independently invented their own 35 mm format and are the principal inventors of the celluloid cinema, somehow ignoring that their format remarkably happened to be so similar to the one designed by Dickson. These advocates discount that the Lumières had certainly used a Kinetoscope, may have had a sample of film, and certainly read about the work of Edison and Dickson. Then there is the interpretation of Marta Braun (1992), who writes: “In fact, the Lumières did not need to have seen the Kinetoscope at all; what they needed was the two things that Demenÿ had needed, Marey’s camera and a way to stop and start the film that would insure the equidistance of the images so that they could be projected.” This assertion trivializes the problem of registering each frame in the camera, projector, and printer, a process called indexing by motion picture engineers. The addition of perforations is the heart of celluloid cinema ­technology because it made it a practical industrial process.

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Its invention was far from trivial, but some inventions are deemed to be obvious after they have been invented; ask an inventor who has been challenged by a patent examiner. The appearance of being obvious is related to the fact that many great inventions are the putting together or packaging of known technology to solve a problem. In fact, this is the basis for much technological progress. For cinema, Edison had the gift of coming up with the right package. The Lumières had what they needed to go forward with the design of a movie camera and projector after Edison’s work, knowledge that they lacked based on the work of Reynaud, Marey, or Demenÿ.1 The Kinetograph and Kinetoscope arrived on this planet before the Cinématographe. The Lumières had no access to the Edison camera, so it is true that they independently invented their combination machine. The Cinématographe is a lovely design with a fine intermittent, according to the Lumières (1995)), based on “a claw mechanism similar to the presser-foot on a sewing machine… Charles Moisson, Chief mechanic in the Lumière factory… then transposed the idea to a camera.” The design finally settled on was “a device known as a ‘Hornblower’s eccentric,’ which had operated in sewing machines since 1877. Such was the principal innovation in the Lumière camera….” The Lumières also had the gift of packaging existing technology to come up with a new invention. The Cinématographe’s intermittent was influential and was the basis for that used by cameras such as the Pathé Pro and the Bell & Howell Filmo and Eyemo cameras. But most importantly, the Cinématographe demonstrated the potential of projection. Other interesting French designs include the camera/ viewer Kinetographe, which was designed by Rider De Bedts, whose patent was filed on January 14, 1896. It was a camera that could be used for viewing images Kinetoscope peepshow-style. It used film 35 mm wide with Edison perforations, which was advanced intermittently using sprocket wheel drive. Intermittency was accomplished using an oscillating escapement with a notched sector that engaged the sprocket wheel. Another sprocket wheel drive French-­ designed camera-projector that used the Edison format was the Photoachygraphe designed by Raoul Grimoin-Sanson, inventor of the Cinéorama, which is described in chapter 60. The Photoachygraphe performed well at the Rouen Exposition in May of 1896, and was a competitor of the Cinématographe (Card 1959). The German Vitascope projector, not to be confused with the Jenkins-Armat machine of the same name, made by Deutsche Bioscope Gesellschaft in the late 1890s, used an intermittent arrangement in which the film was halted for exposure by gripping it between rubber Although the Lumières nosed around Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique, it might not have been apparent that his “film’s” perforations might be used for a stop-start mechanism since the Projecting Praxinoscope used continuous motion.

1 

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rollers and advanced as it relieved the tension, a design suggestive of what had been advocated by Bouly and Le Prince, and similar in concept to one of Marey’s later camera intermittent mechanisms. In Berlin a singular celluloid cinema design effort was carried forward by Max Skladanowsky (1863–1939). In this youth Skladanowsky worked for his father, Carl, a glass craftsman with a small manufacturing company, who also toured with a magic lantern dissolving view show with the help of Max and his brother Emil. Skladanowsky also apprenticed with a photographer, a glass painter, and a manufacturer of theatrical lighting (Herbert 1996). In 1891 he began touring with his portable Théâtre Mécanique, one of the last traveling theaters using mechanical figures (about which relatively little has been written), which played in Europe and New York. Skladanowsky added the dissolving magic lantern technique his father had taught him to his show’s repertoire (Karel 1992). Inspired by a toy he used in childhood, the wonder drum or zoëtrope, which used drawings to depict the phases of motion, he set about to create photographed moving images. Fortunately for him, in the late 1880s, roll film became available, and so he was able to slit 89 mm Kodak #2 camera celluloid film in half to use in the camera he designed. By August 1892 he was using a 44.5 mm-wide format without perforations to shoot film at eight frames per second make prints on collodion paper for flipbooks. Pleased with the result, he began to manufacture these in quantities, which became commercially successful in Germany and other countries. Skladanowsky’s Bioskope I system was exhibited publically November 1, 1895, at the Berlin Wintergarten using his twin projector design. The 44.5  mm frames were 40 mm × 30 mm (with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio) printed on two rolls using stock with round perforations. The Bioskope I projector was twin-headed to dissolve back and forth between the images of the two prints. What Skladanowsky had learned about dissolving images from his father he used for his Théâtre Mécanique magic lanterns. For cinema Skladanowsky made two identical prints from the camera original, one for each projector, to achieve the dissolving effect he supposed was necessary to create a flickerless projected movie image, along the lines of Anschütz’s dual-disk projectors. Both the Skladanowsky and Anschütz machines, kept an image on the screen all the time to achieve flickerless apparent motion without the shutter interruption that became the standard practice for celluloid cinema projection. The Bioskope projector is covered by German Reich Patent DE 88,599 of November 1, 1895, Vorrichtung zum intermittirenden Vorwärtsbewegen des Bildbandes für Photographische Serien-Apparate und Bioskope (Device for Intermittently moving an image band forward for a photographic series with the Bioskope Apparatus). It describes a side-by-side arrangement, with one head projecting the odd

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Fig. 17.4  Skladanowsky’s Bioscope I 44.5 mm film with round perfs and a 40 mm × 30 mm frame and a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Depicted is a serpentine dance. (Cinémathèque Française)

frames and the other the even frames printed from the camera original. The frames were projected more or less out of phase (there had to have been some overlap for the dissolves to work) with the projector lenses covered and uncovered alternately using an outboard semicircular spinning shutter with sawtooth edges sweeping in front and out of the way of the lenses so that frames were blended together producing a continuous on-screen image. Hopwood (1899, p. 107) states that later Skladanowsky machines used only one projection head. In 1896, Skladanowsky introduced a second version, the Bioskope II, which used 62.5  mm film with a 50 mm × 40 mm frame having a 1.25:1 aspect ratio.

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Fig. 17.5  Max Skladanowsky and his handcranked Bioskope projector. Images from the dual projectors are dissolved by the serrated edges of the rotating disk shutter following the method originated by the dissolvent magic lanterns introduced in the 1830s. (Cinémathèque Française)

Narath (1966) asserts that Skladanowsky’s designs were original and that they were accomplished “without being able to benefit from the experiences of others….” However, Anschütz’s Projecting Electrotachyscope, also a twin projector that alternated frames, was demonstrated a year earlier than the Bioskope in Berlin on November 25, 1894, and on a regular basis beginning in February 1895 to paying customers. Narath tells us that Skladanowsky, in later life, exaggerated claims of his accomplishments leading to his work having been discounted or unjustly dismissed. In addition to the work of Anschütz, the concept of the projection of two out-of-phase streams of images other inventors predated Skladanowsky’s use. It’s described in Le Prince’s 1888 USP 376,247, and was also taught in Gray’s 1895 USP 540,545, Friese-Greene’s 1893 BP 22,954, Messter’s 1896 German Patent 70,971, Prestwick’s 1897 BP 103,159, and later in Lumière’s 1907 French Patent 204,310. All of which are preceded by Rudge’s Biophantic phases of motion dissolving lantern of 1884. Early cinema projectors, with few exceptions, used an intermittent movement and shuttering, whether using the

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Demenÿ beater-cam, a shuttle, or a stop-start sprocket actuated by a Geneva drive, but Oskar Messter (1886– 1943) used a concept along the lines of Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope. Messter was a prolific cinema inventor and one of the founders of the German motion picture industry who, in the first years of the new century, applied the principal of optical image compensation (image stabilization) to 35 mm projection using methods that included a rotating polygonal prism ensemble and another system using tilting and rotating mirror segments. Messter worked on the technology with a physicist and ophthalmologist, Dr. Walther Thorner, and was issued a number of German patents between 1908 and 1920 (Loiperdinger 1994). The machine they devised was used as a special effects projector in the German film industry, which is a good application since the projector and camera did not need to be synchronized since the projected image had no dark intervals. Messter was also a pioneer in motion picture sound, as described in chapter 26. Messter directly influenced the work of Emil Mechau (1882–1945), who was born in the small German town of Seesen in Lower Saxony. He apprenticed as a precision mechanic and then joined the Astro Experimental Department at Carl Zeiss in Jena. Mechau became interested in the problem of flicker suppression and achieving smooth motion picture projection after overhearing his boss and Messter discussing the subject. Mechau decided to tackle the problem that had occupied inventors for more than a decade and in 1910 built and tested his design for a shutterless continuous drive 35  mm projector that used image stabilization. He moved to Wetzlar, encouraged by his friend Oskar Barnack, who invented the Leica camera in 1912, and joined Ernst Leitz as the foreman of the microscope research department shop (Barnack’s Leica 2015). Leitz became interested in his projector design and established a factory for building it in Rastatt. The Mechau Model 3 Projector was premiered in 1923 at a newly built theater. It was lauded and cited as a “masterpiece of the German optics and precision mechanics industry.” Mechau left Leitz and joined a division of Telefunken in 1935 to work on a television flying-spot (spot-light) scanner, and the BBC used Mechau projectors for the world’s first broadcast television service. Mechau was killed immediately after the end of the Second World War attempting to disarm a hand grenade (WS: Dungate). USP 1,584,317, Motion Picture Apparatus, filed August 30, 1922, and granted to E. Mechau, describes the Model 3 Projector. Although Mechau used the same general principal established by Reynaud for his Projecting Praxinoscope, a major difference is that Reynaud placed the optical ­stabilization mirrors between his “film” and the lens and Mechau placed his after the lens. Mechau’s design transports the film within a concave gate in a housing holding the lens.

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The image is reflected upwardly from one of the eight mirrors on the surface of a rotating ring; the mirror surfaces are in close proximity to the lens and at 45° to the lens axis. The image-­forming light rays are reflected to a fixed mirror that directs them to the screen. The film is transported by a continuously rotating sprocket wheel immediately below the gate, which is driven by the shaft that rotates the mirror ensemble. As each frame is moved through the gate, its image is reflected by one of the rotating mirrors and thereby stabilized because there is no relative motion between it and the image of the frame. Each mirror serves to project a frame that is swept or wiped out of the way of the next frame for flickerless projection without a shutter interruption. Although there will be light losses for surface-coated mirrors at about 12% per surface, for a total loss of about 25% for two mirrors, this compares favorably with the 50% light loss attributable to the shutter action of an intermittent drive. With antireflection-­coated mirrors, the loss would be negligible. By 1934 more than 500 of the Mechau Model 3 Projectors were installed in cinemas, mostly in Germany. A Mechau projector was added to the projection booth at the Capitol

Fig. 17.6  Mechau’s rotating stabilization mechanism from his USP. The projector’s mirror assembly shaft is highlighted cyan. Optical stabilization took place after the image light left the lens. The lens, film, and gate are highlighted yellow.

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Theater in Manhattan in 1926 where it was used for several months. Jacob Frank Leventhal (1928, May) reported that the machine did not have any “irremediable faults…” and that “the screen image was generally no better (than conventional machines).” This is a reliable opinion since Leventhal was an expert in the field and he and a few other American inventors in the 1920s explored the use of optical stabilization projection, but as far as I know, their designs did not go into production. Leventhal, in 1928, described an optical compensation system based on “revolving plano-parallel plates,” a rotating rectangular prism block. During the discussion following his presentation at an SMPE meeting, Vladimir Zworykin pointed out that the optical system, as described, would reverse the projected image, to which Leventhal (1928, September) replied that it could be corrected. Leventhal lists the advantages of optical image stabilization, some of which are reduction of wear and tear on the film and the projector, quiet running, and ease of adding sound-on-­film capability. Leventhal’s observations make me wonder why these machines were not more widely deployed outside of Germany. Intermittent projection’s momentum,

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Fig. 17.7  Casler’s image stabilization projector mechanism. The carbon arc is highlighted. (Hopwood)

established from the infancy of the celluloid cinema, may have prevented an unbiased evaluation of the advantages of continuous drive and image stabilization. Even if the Mechau projectors were more costly, it’s probable that they were easier on film than intermittent machines, which would have saved on print costs in the long run, but such an advantage would have accrued to the distributor providing little incentive for the exhibitor to purchase such a projector. Hopwood (1899) gives two examples of projectors using optical stabilization: Maskelyne’s Mutagraph, which used the principle of refraction rather than reflection, and Casler’s design using an oscillating mirror.2 He also describes a parlor peepshow device that used mirrors for image stabilization filed on June 1, 1896, and designed by Stewart and Frost described in their USP 588,916, Kinetoscope. The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) considered the invention to be of significance since its patent is part of the pool that made up the intellectual property of the Trust. As unlikely as it may seem, as we shall see, an entirely different technology came out of the quest for optical stabilization for motion picture projection. A Boston consulting firm was given the task of evaluating such a device but deemed it to be unworkable, offering their client the alternative opportunity of funding what, after 14 years of effort, became three-color Technicolor. The number of celluloid film projector models made by various manufacturers in the first 10–15 years of the celluloid cinema is awe-inspiring and a clear indication that there were many inventors and entrepreneurs who believed in the future of 35  mm projection (Theisen 1936; Plakun 1957). Hopwood (1899) describes a number of these machines in detail in a 77-page chapter titled Present-Day Apparatus, Hopwood reproduces what appears to be an illustration from a Casler patent, but it does not appear to be from an issued USP. 2 

including the Warwick Bioscope, Casler’s Biograph, the Moto-Photoscope, the Moto-Pictoroscope, the Rosenberg Cinematograph, the Joly-Normandin Cinematograph, Skladanowsky’s machines, the Lapiposcope (which Hopwood characterizes as having a somewhat “gruesome title”), Demenÿ’s machines, Rigg’s Kinematograph, the Heliocinegraphe, the Rateaugraph, and many more that were offered for sale in a few years prior to 1898. The matter of priority is of some interest, so an abbreviated discussion of public demonstrations of early cinema projectors is given: On March 22, 1895, there was a public screening in Paris of the Cinématographe film Male and Female Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. The Lambda Company’s Eidoloscope projector, designed by Lauste in consultation with Dickson, was used to publicly premiere a boxing match film, Young Griffo v. Battling Charles Barnett, in a storefront theater in Lower Manhattan on May 20, 1895. The Eidoloscope was previously used to project the film to the press on April 21, 1895. Jenkins-Armat’s Phantoscope was first publicly exhibited to paying customers at the Cotton States Exposition, presumably screening films made for the Kinetoscope (Pennsylvania 1897). The Exposition opened on September 18, 1895, but the Phantoscope theater building was not ready until the 25th or a day or two thereafter. Demenÿ’s Chronophotographe, manufactured by Gaumont as the Bioscope, which was introduced at the end of 1895, used the beater-cam movement and was designed for 60 mm film without perforations. (Jenkins-Armat’s Phantoscope also used the beater-cam movement.) Max Skladanowsky’s Bioskope double-headed projector was first shown publically on November 1, 1895, at the Berlin Wintergarten Theater, which Mannoni (2000, p. 457) credits as the “first public commercial showing of films in Europe.” Skladanowsky’s Bioskope was different on two counts: it

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Fig. 17.8  Stewart and Frost’s stereoscopic apparent motion peepshow device used optical stabilization for viewing frames that were mounted on a continuously rotating drum.

was a dissolving shutter machine with 44.5 mm rather than 35  mm film. Sidney Brit Acres’ Kineopticon was demonstrated on January 14, 1896, at Queen’s Hall in ­ London, and Robert Paul’s Theatrograph was demonstrated on February 20, 1896, at Finsbury Technical College in London. The Edison-marketed Jenkins-Armat Vitascope was first publically demonstrated on the evening of April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in Manhattan. The Historical Committee of the SMPE in its 1930 report affirmed that the earliest public screenings of Edison format film in the United States (and possibly the world) had been achieved by Jean Acme LeRoy (1854–1932?), born near Bedford, Kentucky (Committee Reports 1931, January) (Jean-Aimé LeRoy, according to Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema). Possibly influenced by Heyl’s efforts of 1876, LeRoy posed two dancers to photograph 200 frames of a waltz projected using a crude magic lantern device. By 1887 or 1888, he realized that glass slides would not suffice

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for his experiments and like others in the field at that time, sought a flexible material. In 1893 LeRoy obtained unperforated film photographed by Donisthorpe, probably printed on stock made by the British firm Thomas H. Blair & Co. LeRoy created a makeshift projector using a friction intermittent advance. He attended a Kinetoscope demonstration put on by Edison sales agents Raff and Gammon at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace in December 1893 and based on this experience modified his projector design to accept perforated 35  mm stock. The machine was completed on February 3, 1894, and two days later, in the showroom of Riley’s Optical Shop at No. 16 Beekman Street in Manhattan, 25 booking agents and theater people witnessed what is quite possibly the first public projection of motion pictures. The SMPE Committee reported that all previous displays of motion pictures had been by means of peepshow or imperfect projections using adapted cameras. The author of the report, Merritt Crawford, interviewed several witnesses who had seen the Beekman Street projection. LeRoy toured with his projector but did not patent his work, and Crawford commented that his work “cannot be said to have exercised any considerable influence on the development of the early art.” Using the definition proffered in this book, that cinema is the projection of moving images, the celluloid cinema, in the strictest sense, cannot be said to have begun with the Kinetoscope, a peepshow viewer. If we believe Dickson’s account, the earliest celluloid cinema projection in a laboratory took place in the Black Maria on October 6, 1889, or alternatively, late in 1894, at Columbia College in New York City, where he demonstrated a Kinetoscope modified for projection. It’s important to consider the criteria used for making a judgment about priority: Did the first celluloid cinema projection happen in the lab witnessed only by the inventor(s), or was it a screening for the press or a small audience possibly of investors, or might it have been a public screening for paying customers, or was it for members of the public who did not pay for the privilege? One might further require that the projected image meet a reasonable standard of quality, with a big image that was bright and steady and sharp, but what is the standard and whose account are we to believe? If the criterion is projection in public of good-­ quality images, whether or not the screening was for customers who paid admission, then this may have been first accomplished by the Lumières with their Cinématographe. On the other hand, Anschütz’s double-headed Projecting Electrotachyscope was publically exhibited on November 25, 1894, throwing images onto a 26-foot-wide screen at the Berlin Post Office Building. While it is true that it used the Zahn disk format with glass slides, it was the world’s first projection on a big screen of high-quality photographed apparent motion to paying customers.

Edison and the Trust

Thomas Edison was the first motion picture producer whose studio was the Black Maria, operated by the Edison Manufacturing Company whose Kinetoscope Department was organized in April 1894 to create content for Kinetoscope parlors (Israel, 1998). Soon others would copy the projection prints that Edison sold outright, which they could do with impunity because copyright law made no provision for motion pictures. In Europe, where Edison had not filed for patent protection the importation of Kinetoscope machines led to them being knocked off by the owners of England’s first Kinetoscope parlor in London in October 1894. According to Hopwood (1899, p.  73), the parlor was on Oxford Street but other sources locate it on Old Broad Street. The London parlor charged its patrons twopence per view to use one of their six machines; when it became apparent that the demand was significant the parlor’s owners employed English electrical instrument maker Robert William Paul (1869–1943) to copy the design and build six more Kinetoscopes. During 1895 he built an additional 60, and he and American-born photographer Birt Acres designed a camera to photograph content using negative and print stock they bought from Kodak and Blair. Paul (1936) would go on to improve his camera, build projectors, perforating and printing machines, open a motion picture studio, sell prints of his films internationally, create post-production methods, and devise visual effects. In 1910 he left the film industry and returned to instrument-making, as he engagingly describes in an article he wrote a quarter-of-a-­century later. Edison’s marketing plan seemed viable at first but as Kinetoscope parlors lost their audience and projection gained in popularity the brilliant inventor who once thought that the worldwide market for projectors totaled 50 units, was unprepared to enter the market with his own machine. Competitors began to make cameras and projectors to produce films they sold to vaudeville houses and other venues and even copied prints of film he produced, but a deeply frustrated Edison, who had let the genii out of the bottle, was being bypassed.

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The setback was temporary and he would go on to build a studio production company to service vaudeville theaters, nickelodeons, and dedicated cinemas, and successfully manufacture 35 mm projectors to replace the Vitascope he had licensed from Armat, but he didn’t stay focused and directed his engineers in a different direction believing there was an opportunity in homes, churches, schools, or other such venues, for the Home Projecting Kinetoscope he introduced in 1912 which was on the market for only 2 years. As it became evident that the movie business was burgeoning, Edison realized that he might be able to enforce American intellectual property rights and block competitors or extract royalties from those in the business of manufacturing cameras, projectors, and prints, as well as from the exhibitors themselves. However, there was little he could do about the rest of the world because of his failure to file patent applications abroad (Musser, 1991). Edison had a raft of possible infringers like C.  Francis Jenkins, Armat’s erstwhile inventing partner, who was marketing his own projector and distributing unauthorized duplicates of Edison’s movies, and Biograph which had become Edison’s major competitor. Biograph was distributing films it produced with its big format for the limited number of theaters able to project the higher-quality images, but of necessity for wider distribution, they also released films in 35 mm by reduction printing and also by producing films in the 35  mm format (Hendricks, 1964). Other producers were shooting their own films using cameras that may have infringed the Kinetograph. One of them was a former associate, London-born inventor Charles E. Chinnock (1845–1915), who was working in Brooklyn in 1894 when he designed and built his own versions of the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope with the help of Frank D.  Maltby’s machine shop in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. Chinnock had been a superintendent at the Pearl Street Station in 1882, a manager of the Edison Electric United Manufacturing Company and a trustee of the Edison Illumination Company of New  York City.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_18

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Edison had paid Chinnock a bonus of $10,000 as a reward for his excellent management of the Pearl Street Station. Chinnock, an inventor with eclectic interests, was granted patents for a machine for teaching telegraph operators how to improve their skills, a way to measure the quantity of beer as it is dispensed, an improved corkscrew, an injector for insect powder, a shoe-fastening device, and an improved oil can, as one can learn using the United States Patent Office and Google search engines. According to Herbert (1996), Chinnock lost a patent infringement case against Edison involving electric lighting because of Dickson’s perjury. Chinnock’s variant of the Kinetoscope was introduced in early 1895 and widely used on the Eastern Seaboard, especially in bars and cafés and at the Eden Musée (Musser, 1995). Rossell (1998) writes that it was patented in Great Britain by James Edward Hough in 1894, a customer of Chinnock’s prints. Chinnock’s moving image peepshow device has been described as using paper prints mounted on a canvas tape spirally wound on a rotating handcranked drum. The continuously moving prints, illuminated by an electric lamp, were viewed through a rotating shutter. According to Spehr (2008), Chinnock was inspired in this effort by discussions that took place between American Mutoscope founders Dickson, Marvin, and Casler with regard to their Mutoscope flip-book-style peepshow viewer. Chinnock first used the Maltby-built camera to film a rooftop boxing matching in the last months of 1894. In addition to the boxing film, Chinnock distributed films of a cockfight, a blacksmith, and “skirt” dancers, which Rossell notes was imitative of Edison’s Kinetoscope content. Chinnock lived in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn at Sixth Avenue and Saint John’s Place, not far from Grand Army Plaza. The studio he put together for shooting his peepshow viewer films was located on the rooftop of 1729 Saint Marks Avenue (WS: The Bowery Boys, 2013). Chinnock, in all likelihood, produced the first movies made in Brooklyn, establishing the first movie studio there, which was soon to be followed by Vitagraph’s studio. Despite Chinnock’s attempt, his peepshow movie viewer did not succeed in the European marketplace, but in America it must have presented a source of frustration for Edison. On November 15, 1901, Thomas Armat, apparently harboring no ill will for the substitution of the Projectoscope for his Vitascope and subsequent litigation, wrote to Edison suggesting a pooling of interests in what he called “a trust.” One day the words the Trust would be used to describe the tribute-­ seeking monopoly that consolidated the motion picture patents of Edison and his former rivals. Armat (1935) wrote: “Years have gone by and your proper profits in the business have not yet I believe materialized. The same is true of me. Every year cut off from my enjoyment of the fruits of my toil is a matter of loss.…” Armat suggested “the formation of a

18  Edison and the Trust

trust into which you will throw your film patents, the Armat Company and Armat patents, and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company its patents…This combined action would establish a real monopoly as no infringer would stand against the combination of all the strong elements” (Report of the Historical and Museum…, 1934). It would be several years before Armat’s strategy was realized, one that would profoundly alter the development of the motion picture industry. When Edison decided to get into the motion picture production business with some vigor, his West Orange Black Maria, which began manufacturing films for the Kinetoscope in 1894, was not up to the task. When it was clear that there would be a suitable return on the investment, in 1901 Edison built a glass-roofed and glass-walled studio atop 41 East 21st Street in Manhattan. It lacked electricity and was dependent on the sun for illumination, which resulted in uneven photographic quality and frequent halts in production. Edison soon found he needed to build a much better studio, and in June 1905, for $15,000, he bought a plot of land at 2826 Decatur Avenue in the Bedford Park neighborhood of the Bronx. “Four years, three architects, and numerous revisions later, the studio was completed, with a stage sixty feet square and forty feet high, and an additional extension (probably for office space), at a total cost of approximately $48,000,” according to Jacobson (2015). Edison was a hands-off manager, at the time primarily concerned with the development of the Edison-Lalande large current capacity storage battery. The studio, which was run by William Gilmore, was called the Edison Manufacturing Company, whose name was changed in 1911 to Thomas A. Edison, Inc., which in its time made 1200 shorts and more than 50 features. One point of view has it that the films were mundane commercial product, for the most part uncreative, but with the restoration of some of the studio’s output scholarly judgment changed and it was realized that it produced a number of creative works, such as those by Edwin S.  Porter, despite the fact that Gilmore emphasized efficiency and profit over creativity. The fruits of the Kineto project plunged Edison into persistent litigation as the movie business became a lucrative industry, providing a significant motivation for asserting his intellectual property rights. Edison’s intellectual property position was to be subjected to the tribulations of many lawsuits in which there were twists and turns – wins, losses, appeals, and even judgments that were reversed by the courts. In an appeal that was but one act in the ongoing drama, Judge William James Wallace overturned a prior decision that had found in Edison’s favor. In the notable Thomas A.  Edison v. American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, the judge ruled on March 10, 1902, that features of Edison’s Kinetograph camera had been anticipated. As relevant prior art Judge Wallace cited du Cos (he is proba-

18  Edison and the Trust

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Fig. 18.1  Edison’s Bronx Studio with its glass-walled stages to the left, in the early 1910s. (Reconstructed in Photoshop)

bly referring to Ducos du Hauron) and Marey. Judge Wallace also opined that taking a series of exposures on a single sensitized surface was well understood and that Edison could not be granted broad camera claims reasoning that had the prior workers access to film they would have achieved the same results. Further, the judge noted that: “Undoubtedly Mr. Edison, by utilizing this film and perfecting the first apparatus for using it, met all the conditions necessary for commercial success. This, however, did not entitle him, under patent laws, to a monopoly of all camera apparatus capable of utilizing the film. Nor did it entitle him to a monopoly of all apparatus employing a single camera” (Musser, 1991). Judge Wallace was correct in that Edison took advantage of the advent of film and was thereby able to package the elements required for the first working movie camera that launched an industry and an art form, but his lawyers wrote new claims that were granted in reissued patents. In a lecture designed to lay out the legal issues created by the nascent film industry, which was presented at the College of the City of New York on November 28, 1916, Gustavus A. Rogers (2018), William Fox’s personal and business lawyer, wrote that: “what is known as the ‘Edison Film patent’… was rejected by our courts as being untenable” (Edison v… Rep. 926; Edison v…Rep. 767; Motion Picture Co. v. Chicago, p. 285). A verdict under the legal system is not the same as the judgment made by engineers, scientists, or historians, but it has this advantage: it’s a means to settle the argument whatsoever the reasoning. But can a judge or an inexpert jury unschooled in technology make a valid judgment under patent law? The first American patent examiner and the founder of its patent system was Thomas Jefferson, who based the US system on that of the British. Jefferson

envisioned an agrarian economy and consequently inventions of mechanical design, which at the time would have usually been the effort of an individual inventor. The spirit of the system was to afford a measure of protection for the inventor’s innovation for a period of time in exchange for sharing the invention’s recipe with society. Thus a person skilled in the art might, one day, have a head start in using the technology to society’s benefit. A patent is not a monopoly as the word is commonly used, as Judge Wallace mischaracterized it, rather it is a right, limited in time and scope, granting to its owner standing to sue a possible infringer: a person or entity that makes, sells, or uses the invention without the patent owner’s permission, which may be in the form of a license or a sale of goods. In the United States, the holder of a patent must be a person or persons, and not a company. An organization can own the intellectual property but only if the inventor or inventors assign it. A patent application is made up of three parts: drawings, a disclosure that is often a detailed description of the drawings, and claims that are expressed in patent legalese to delineate the invention’s unique protectable features. A granted patent becomes property, intellectual property. A ­filing becomes a bona fide utility patent only after the patent office grants the application, which requires the acceptance of at least one claim. The patent office and its actions can be a drawn-out process involving a dialog between the patent examiner and the inventor to determine the scope of the ­intellectual property. The examiner must make sure that the description before him or her has not been previously disclosed and is not obvious to someone skilled in the art. Whether or not a prior invention blocks the granting of claims because it describes all or part of the invention at hand can be the subject of a heated, but almost always polite dis-

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cussion. A most vexing aspect of the discussion can be whether or not the description of the invention would have been obvious to a knowledgeable worker in the field. After all, once a concept is revealed, it is only human nature to believe it is as obvious as the need to peel a banana before it’s eaten. In Edison’s day, to help the inventor establish priority, a Caveat was filed with the patent office, prior to filing the formal or utility disclosure. Today inventors are able to file a provisional application, which is less costly to file than a utility patent. The utility patent must be filed within a year of the provisional to get the benefit of its filing date. The inventor and his lawyer try to obtain the broadest claims covering the disclosure’s technology, and the patent examiner tries to make sure the claims are properly restricted to reflect what’s in the disclosure and represents an advance over the prior art. This can be a formidable task because the examiner, to make a faultless judgment, would have to be conversant with all of the prior art in the field. Even if the field is a new one, like motion pictures were in the earliest days of the twentieth century, the examiner’s job isn’t easier because there had been significant activity in photography and attempts to capture the phases of motion prior to its celluloid embodiment. When Edison received the appellate court defeat noted above, he and his lawyers revisited the original patent(s) and crafted new claims that were resubmitted, based on the unchanged disclosure, which were once more subjected to an examiner’s scrutiny. The results of these efforts were reissues that had newly granted claims that gave Edison another opportunity to press his case against alleged infringers. These reissues, using the same drawings and disclosure as the original application, had new claims that retained the advantage of the original filing date. They became the basis for Edison either licensing his technology or blocking others from using it during the remaining statutory life of the patent, which in Edison’s day was 14 years from the issuance of the patent; in 1861 the term of a patent was extended to 17 years. Edison expressed reservations about the patent system because the burden of proof in an interference action is on the inventor, but in this case the patent system favored him as he aggressively used the law to file suits against perceived infringers, thereby changing the direction of the motion p­ icture industry. As in all property law, those with the deepest pockets have the advantage, especially so with regard to patent litigation because it is so expensive. Jefferson had hoped that the system he was nurturing would benefit the individual inventor, but as inventor Ernst Alexanderson, head of research and development of GE/RCA, put it: “The patent system was established, I believe, to protect the lone inventor. In this it has not succeeded” (Washington, 2012).

18  Edison and the Trust

As Spehr (2008, p.  115) wrote: “Because many  – no most film historians – have accepted that Edison was one of the darkest figures in film’s earliest years, it deserves some clarification. After 1897 Edison’s company used almost every available device to monopolize motion picture business in the U.S….” Spehr also mentions that Edison was fully aware of and approved the ruthless tactics used by his agents but that this kind of behavior “was far from unusual during Edison’s time.” According to Musser (1991, p.  4): “The number of court cases involving motion pictures during this period was truly staggering.” Edison zealously sued American motion picture producers for infringement in the years between 1902 and 1905, using the reissued patents as ammunition, and paradoxically, as the result of his legal battle with Biograph that he lost, the Court of Appeals found that others were infringing, giving Edison the ammunition he needed to pursue additional lawsuits. He set about to do so with a vengeance strongly motivated by the potential rewards afforded by the rapidly growing new industry he had helped to create feeling that it was unjust that others should handsomely profit from his labors. He was vexed by what he perceived to be a loss of substantial licensing fees – if he couldn’t beat them in the marketplace, he would drag them into court. The point came when Edison’s weary rivals were ready to negotiate with his legal team, which offered to cease its incessant actions if the producers would pay a royalty of half a cent per foot of the prints they sold; in those days prints were sold outright to the exhibitors. Between 1907 and 1908, Edison agreed to license only seven producers, Essanay, Kalem, Lubin, Méliès, Selig, Polyscope, and Vitagraph. Pathé Frères was licensed to import from France and George Kleine of Chicago was licensed to import from Gaumont and Urban-Eclipse (Ramsaye, 1964). According to Klingender (1937, pp.  64–66), the first phase of the American film industry took place between 1908 and 1912 and was characterized by “primaeval chaos, marked by mushroom-growth….” George Kleine, who was the leading importer of foreign films and motion picture equipment, was instrumental in forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in January 1909. As Rogers (1916, p. 8) put it: “The market was comparatively open and free until the Spring 1908, when the manufacturers divided into rival factions, one known as the Edison group, who sought protection under the Edison Film Patent and patents upon the parts of the camera; the other, the so-called Biograph group, who sought protection under the patents upon the part of the projecting machine.” It was then that the major holdout to the ambitions of the newly created Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), or the Trust, American Mutoscope and Biograph, capitulated after a bitter legal struggle. Biograph,

18  Edison and the Trust

founded by Dickson and others, was a remarkably successful studio that held key intellectual property they developed and the motion picture projector patents they licensed from Thomas Armat. With the acquiescence of Biograph, the Trust began the second and most powerful phase of its nearly decade-long monopoly on December 18, 1908.1 The Trust attempted to extend its reach to Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy, claiming patent rights in those countries. In America it restricted the manufacture, distribution, and exhibition of movies, set onerous rules that capped the fees to be paid for a scenario at $62.50, restricted films to two reels, prohibited screen credit for performers, set rentals at ten cents a foot, and only Trust-sanctioned films could be distributed and played in licensed theaters. The Trust formed the General Film Company, the first national distribution organization in the United States, created to buy up the lion’s share of film exchanges that supplied movies to the great majority of theaters in the United States. All licensed distributors and theaters had to pay a flat $2.00 per week license fee. These tactics earned the Trust $1.25 million per year (Solomon, 2014). The Trust also limited production to one- and two-­ reelers, while the independents began to explore the possibilities of feature-length films and the star system, both of which were an anathema to the Trust. Other stipulations were made regarding control of the importation of European films, a provision that encouraged production of American films and reduced the number of foreign films that had dominated American exhibition. An exclusive arrangement for the supply of film was made with the Eastman Kodak Company that shut out non-Trust producers with the exception that three percent of Kodak’s film manufacture could be sold for scientific, government, and educational uses. Only the Trust members could buy film stock (Rogers, 9), but this restriction was abandoned in 1911 because of fears of anti-trust prosecution. As might be expected there were many people in the motion picture business who bridled at the Trust’s draconian approach to commerce. Out of 58 extant film exchanges only the determined contrarian and technology visionary William Fox successfully fought back, suing the Trust and prevailing in a settlement. Other producers such as print exchange owner Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, headed west to Los Angeles to avoid the clutches of the Trust and to enjoy the benefits of a climate and locations suited to motion picture production. Slide (1994) makes the point that the Trust may The major USPs controlled by the Trust were: 578,185; 580,749; 586,953; 588,916; 673,329; 673,992; 707,934; 722,382; 744,251; 770,937; 771,280; 785,205; 785,237 and reissue 12,192.

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have actually “achieved little in its attempts to impede progress” and helped the independents by motivating them to flee to California. However, many companies were ground down by the Trust; as Rogers (1916, p. 10) wrote: “This company proceeded to, and did, successfully, absorb or put out of business all of the then existing rental companies, with the exception of Mr. William Fox’s company...” This was the bare-knuckles era: the Trust became more aggressive in consolidating its position, employing thugs who used vicious tactics including destroying equipment to enforce its dominance (Starr, 1985; Marx, 1977). The Trust’s egregious practices were met by a lawsuit filed by the US Justice Department on August 15, 1912, under the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, asserting that the Trust was an illegal monopoly. On October 1, 1915, Oliver B.  Dickerson, US District Judge, found for the independent producers, declaring that the Motion Picture Patents Company, which had been highly profitable for Edison and his associates during most of its lifetime, was liable for treble damages. The decree became operative on February 24, 1916 (Starr, 1985; Unites States v. Motion…225 Fed. Rep., p. 800). The court decided that although the members of the Trust were the owners of their camera and projector patents, as Rogers (1916, p. 12) put it, this was “no defense to an unlawful conspiracy or a monopoly creating a restraint of trade.” The Trust was broken. Klingender (1937, pp. 66–67) marks the second phase of the American film industry as beginning in 1912, with the gradual eclipse of the Trust, to the late 1920s with the introduction of sound. This period saw the emergence of the major studios and their holding companies: Paramount, Loews/MGM, First National, Warner Bros., Universal, RKO, and United Artists. Klingender (1937, p.  65) also remarks that: “It is a remarkable fact that, almost without exception, the founders of the concerns (the independents) later fused in the eight major companies of today (1937) were in the vanguard of the struggle against the monopoly.” Edison, since he was in the business of manufacturing motion picture films, was also involved in copyright litigation. He sued Siegmund Lubin in 1902 for copyright infringement in an attempt to prevent Lubin from making unlicensed duplicate prints of the film Christening and Launching Kaiser Wilhelm’s Yacht Meteor, photographed on February 25, 1902, by Edwin S. Porter and Jacob Smith (Arguments Before the Committees…, 1906; Musser, 1991). Lubin’s lawyers argued that copyright protection could only be obtained if each and every frame of the film was submitted. Lubin won the first round in court, but the verdict was overturned on appeal with the ruling that the entire film could be ­copyrighted as if it were a single pho-

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tograph. In the early days of the twentieth century, it became evident that in addition to the technology to make them, motion pictures themselves were potentially valuable intellectual property, although it took years for the copyright laws to catch up with the new medium and its business practices. Initially companies submitted entire films, usually in the form of paper prints, single frames, written scenarios, or even published descriptions of titles, in order to secure protection with the copyright office. Between 1904 and 1905, American Mutoscope and Biograph attempted to copyright several films as stage or dramatic works, in particular one film, The Suburbanite. The copyright office refused to grant the request, but eventually Biograph prevailed, and thereafter only a scenario or manuscript was required to secure a copyright (Price, 2013). In 1909 a new copyright law was passed allowing films to be protected as either dramatic compositions or as photographs, and by an amendment, in 1912, a new category was created that allowed for the copyright of motion pictures (Marke, 2005). Despite the change in the law producers continued to supply paper prints to the copyright office until 1916 (Niver, 1966). Soon after the dissolution of the Trust, Edison faced another reversal since his studio was unable to compete with other studios like Biograph and Vitagraph despite the fact that it employed talented people, notably Edwin S. Porter, who early in his career made films that were both enjoyed by the public and made major contributions to motion picture storytelling techniques. William E. Gilmore, who ran Edison’s studio, seems to have been an able profit-and-loss manager, but his focus overly emphasized organization over a creative environment. “Of film production itself he knew little and cared little,” according to McKernan (Herbert, 1996), a comment consistent with

18  Edison and the Trust

Edison’s lack of interest in popular culture. However, it was Gilmore who hired Porter, but this was to help with projector design. In addition, the European export demand for American films dried up during the First World War, which ought to have troubled all American studios equally, but Biograph and Vitagraph continued to do well, whereas Edison’s studio did not. As described in chapter 53, in 1912 Edison offered his Home Projecting Kinetoscope system (the Home P.  K.). Although it used an ingenious and efficient technique for cramming a large number of frames (and running time) onto a short length of film, it was only on the market until 1914. This consumer market effort diverted engineering resources away from the simpler task of selling a projector business-to-­business, which rather than selling a concept into a new market had the built-in advantage of the growing demand for theatrical exhibition (Musser, 1991). Geduld (1975, p. 36) reports: “In the period between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) the standard length of the dramatic motion picture increased from the thousand-foot single reel (twelve to fifteen minutes) to features of six to ten reels (sixty to ninety minutes).” This created a demand for new, more robust projectors sold into an increasingly competitive marketplace where designs were evolving, but Edison failed to keep abreast. By 1918, three decades after having introduced the motion picture camera and the 35  mm format, Edison was out of the movie business for these reasons: the dissolution of the Trust; his failure to concentrate on improving his 35 mm projector product line caused by the distractions of his storage battery and Home P.K. programs; his unsuccessful attempts to synchronize the phonograph and projector (discussed in chapter 26); and the decline of his studio.

Porter the Filmmaker

Cinema was invented by scientists and engineers, whether during the Glass, Celluloid, or Digital Eras, and yet there were noteworthy contributions from filmmakers, none more important than those of pioneering filmmaker Edwin Stanton Porter (1870–1941). As Musser (1991, p.  1) expressed it: “The first fifteen years of commercial motion pictures were extraordinary: film practices and the films not only differed fundamentally from today’s counterparts but also underwent an unparalleled series of changes. During this formative period, Edwin S. Porter emerged as America’s foremost filmmaker.” Porter’s work to develop the seminal Simplex projector will be described in the next chapter; his early career will be reviewed in this chapter for he worked at a pivotal time in the history of the development of cinema, one that placed new demands on the development of its technology. As Musser (1991, 2012) points out in his study of Porter’s contributions, he was in the right place at the right time; given his innate talent, he was able to significantly influence both cinema’s art and its technology. Edwin S.  Porter was born Edward Porter in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, on April 21, 1870. He trained as an electrician while serving in the US Navy, and when he took up the celluloid cinema as a vocation, it was just a few years old, and filmmaking was an unsophisticated medium compared to what it would become only a decade or so later, which was to a large extent, due to his creativity. Porter, when stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, traveled to Manhattan to install the Edison Vitascope projector at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, and on April 23, 1896, he operated the new projector at its historic public introduction. The Vitascope itself was received with acclaim and high praise was given to two of the actualities shown: Paul’s simple film of waves, Rough Sea at Dover, and the Edison-­ produced The Kiss (described as a luscious osculation), featuring actress May Irwin. Porter left the Navy and traveled from California to Central America as an itinerant projectionist showing films of natural wonders and railroads of the American Northeast. In 1897 he returned to New  York and a job at the Eden Musée to guide its motion picture exhi-

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bition program. The Musée, after the public’s waning interest in the Kinetoscope parlors, was one of the few places in New  York City where they could see movies. It was there that Porter and his colleagues began to assemble the Kinetoscope-style short films into themed omnibus presentations spliced together on one reel, and to design improved projectors to handle the longer reels; this was the beginning of film editing in the United States. The Musée had its own cameraman, Englishman William C. “Daddy” Paley, who photographed short, usually one-­ shot-­ long films, which were collected into thematically coherent presentations by Porter (Slide, 2015). These collections of short film were Porter’s first step toward the editing of shots to create scenes to build a narrative. In this way Porter was functioning in accordance with current practice in which, as Musser (1991, p. 6) expressed it, “Editorial decisions …were initially the exhibitor’s responsibility;” but it would be Porter himself who helped to transform the celluloid cinema and put editorial decisions into the hands of the filmmaker. Paley left the Musée and went to work for Edison’s production company in 1898, which assigned him to cover the Spanish American War where he joined a group of journalists who sailed on a yacht outfitted with a still photography darkroom for developing plates. The wherewithal for this expedition was provided by the jingoist publisher William Randolph Hearst who took snapshots with his Kodak box camera on the deck of his yacht in Cuba’s Santiago Harbor (Collins, 1990). Paley’s most notable footage was of the Maine, a badly damaged American battleship in Havana Harbor. Paley’s films were sent to New York for processing and printing and hand coloring, for customers willing to pay extra, where they were sold by the firm Maguire & Baucus, Ltd. (Musser, 1995). Porter was one of the exhibitors who acquired Paley’s footage, which like other early newsreels greatly contributed to the growth of the film exhibition industry. Porter did something extraordinary with the half-minute films by editing them together to form a thematically coherent report of the War. His editing of the footage gave context to the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_19

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Fig. 19.1  Edwin Stanton Porter, circa 1905.

sinking of the Maine in a way that no single half-­minute Paley actuality could, for example, with the juxtaposition of film of the Main before and after its sinking. More than a historical record, the Porter version gave vitality to the events that no amount of newspaper copy could provide. The discovery that Porter was making, about building a narrative by collecting short films on a single subject, was probably being made by others in the United States and Europe at about the same time. Porter’s assemblage of Paley’s footage was so popular that patrons had to be turned away; the Musée’s theater was filled to capacity with five hundred cheering patrons who attended the screenings each day, many of whom were servicemen. Presentations like this filled a void after the decline of the Kinetoscope and materially added to the acceptance of the projected celluloid cinema. Edison’s cinema organization reached what Musser characterized as its nadir in 1900 and reorganized its Kinetograph Department. Part of the effort was devoted to upgrading the company’s technical capability, and Porter, right before Thanksgiving Day 1900, was hired based on his experience manufacturing cameras and projectors, as noted in chapter 16. With the increasing importance of longer shows, exhibition required projectors that could reliably handle 1000-foot reels while performing for long hours, day in and day out, which was a major goal of Porter’s design efforts. In addition it was important for the lamphouse to be able to use different kinds of illumination systems and the ability to offer lantern slide capability (Musser, 1991, pp. 156, 157). A month prior to Porter’s joining Edison, the Kinetograph Department began construction of a rooftop studio above its top floor ­headquarters at 41 East 21st Street in Manhattan. Porter

19  Porter the Filmmaker

recalled that “after being with the (Edison Company) a short time they were in need of a cameraman and producer. I was given charge of the first skylight studio in the industry.” Twoand-­a-half years later he became Edison’s “head of negative production,” a position he retained for 6 years (Musser, 1991, p. 1, p. 160). Porter’s ability to do his job was facilitated by Edison’s development of a portable handcranked camera. Edison trusted Porter because of his background as an electrician, his mechanical ability, and the fact that he was self-effacing and trustworthy. Moreover, he had the ability to keep the studio in running order while improving the operation of the cameras and the projectors. Porter directed hundreds of films during the next several years and in the process become one of the most influential filmmakers in cinema’s history. Porter and his colleagues realized that the public preferred visualizations of the day’s events instead of fiction. For these staged dramatic reenactments of newspaper stories, he came to grips with the challenges of dramatic construction, and when he turned to narrative fictional films, he used the directing and editing techniques he had learned that worked for his news of the day recreations. Both the factually based and fictional films shared this in common: the audiences knew the stories, and in this way their comprehension of the films was assured. And as noted in chapter 25, theater owners added narration, sound effects, and music to their screenings to heighten the dramatic effect and the audience’s enjoyment. Porter also shot one-reel half-minute films of New York’s rich and poor neighborhoods, including dynamic traveling shots filmed from a wheeled conveyance. Studio head Porter had valuable experience as an exhibitor, and he would use the knowledge gained to create films that went beyond the confines of the then-customary single shot. He was now participating in what was an unacknowledged effort to place editorial control in the hands of the filmmaker rather than the exhibitor, which he had enjoyed when he had been an exhibitor. His most basic montage technique was the discovery of the elemental juxtaposition of two shots to produce an effect that was greater than the sum of them separately, allowing the audience to participate by providing the implicit connection between them. He had moved beyond assembling 20-second films into the single-themed omnibus presentation he had put together for the Musée. The early Porter films were commentaries on political figures like Teddy Roosevelt’s that spoofed his self-promotion and rugged outdoors image. Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, 1901, was probably America’s first political motion picture satire, lampooning Roosevelt’s mountain lion hunt, which in Porter’s film turns out to be a domestic cat hunt. The construction of the staged film is in two shots the first of which shows the shooting of the cat (an obvious doll) falling out of a tree, which is followed by the second shot of a presumably self-satisfied Roosevelt, with his publicist and photographer,

19  Porter the Filmmaker

heading toward the camera. Porter was politically conscious, as evidenced by his changing his birth name from Edward Porter to Edwin Stanton Porter in honor of Lincoln’s Secretary of War. The events surrounding the assassination of President William McKinley and his funeral, in September 1901 at the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo, New York, were covered by Porter and the Edison cameramen. Exhibitors snapped up the short films, which received a tremendous box office turnout. Porter then staged a reenactment of the execution of the assassin, a dramatization whose effectiveness was heightened by footage of McKinley taken on the day he was killed, but unlike the unedited snippets originally sold by the Edison Company to exhibitors, Porter’s dramatic reenactment Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, released 1901, allowed the public to participate in vicarious revenge by depicting in grim detail the final walk of anarchist assassin Leon Czolgosz, followed by a cut to the electric chair (Abel, 2005). In 1901 Edison won what turned out to be only a temporary legal victory against Biograph, which he touted in the New York Clipper of July 27 (P. 480) in an ad for the Kinetoscope that, in part, read: “WE HAVE WON. Decision Handed Down by JUDGE WHEELER, of the UNITED STATES CIRCUIT COURT, sustains THOMAS A.  EDISON’S Patents on the Art of Producing Animated Pictures, and Grants MR. Edison the Only Right to Manufacture Motion Picture Machines and Films” (Musser, 1991, p. 177). For a brief period, he was the only film producer in America, which directly led to a shortage of product for exhibitors. But the demand for subject matter had changed, and the days of cinema as a vehicle solely for the conveyance of news had come and gone, and the industry experienced a slump as one theater after another closed its doors. Biograph returned to production and distribution after its injunction was overturned on appeal, and Porter, at Edison’s studio, addressed the changing tastes by filming comic and dramatic narratives constructed using a handful of shots whose juxtaposition and realism of sets were a step in the direction of more sophisticated narrative filmmaking. By 1902 magician Georges Méliès had become film’s most highly regarded auteur, a practitioner of what many would argue was the most realistic medium, but one who exploited the medium’s powerful ability to depict fantasy. In the late eighteenth-century, Paul Philidor, another magician and one of the creators of the Phantasmagoria, the Glass Cinema Era’s spook or horror show, had also discovered that the magic lantern, the era’s advanced technology for depicting the visual world, was well suited to the creation of fantasy. Méliès made his films in his glass-walled studio on the outskirts of Paris, produced with beautifully painted sets and comical stories, using some of cinema’s most basic visual effects like objects and actors appearing out of nowhere by stopping and restarting the camera and making double expo-

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sures by running the film through the camera twice to add ghosts. In using effects like these, he is sometimes credited with having been their inventor, but at least one such effect, the stopping and starting of the camera to replace one object with another, or make it appear or disappear, had already been used in the Black Maria. Méliès had a penchant for linking shots with dissolves, which had to be carefully planned since they were done in the camera. His use of them did not necessarily indicate the passage of time (Salt, 1992); rather he was attempting to achieve a smoother transition than afforded by a straight cut. The use of the dissolve for temporal transitions had been demonstrated by the early part of the nineteenth century in dissolvent magic lantern shows. In 1902 Méliès released his Trip to the Moon in France, the film that most directly influenced Porter who had a chance to study its structure while making duplicate prints of the film for Edison. It was by studying Méliès that Porter came to dedicate himself to the narrative cinema. He was particularly influenced by the landing of the rocket that is shown first in a long shot including the entire moon, after which Méliès cuts to a closer view, repeating the landing on the surface with the astronauts exiting the space ship. Overlapping action became a signature of Porter’s films. Later that same year, Porter used both visual and practical effects for his production of Jack and the Beanstalk, a film that took 6 weeks to shoot. In other films Porter also emulated Méliès’ use of forced perspective and clever practical effects for animated backgrounds. Like Méliès Porter filmed every shot with a locked-down camera producing the point of view of a theater stage photographed from the middle of the house. Porter had begun to grapple with parallel construction a year earlier, with the depiction of two related events occurring simultaneously but separated by space or shown from different viewpoints, a technique that had been attempted by others and was afterward actualized by filmmakers like Griffith, Ince, and DeMille. Porter made two structurally significant films, How They Do Things on the Bowery (1902) and Life of an American Fireman (1903), both of which use overlapping action rather than the modern technique of matched shots in which the shots covering progressive action are linked without repetition. In Fireman he sometimes closely approaches matched shots, although entire sequences, not just shots, are repeated. Since prints of the film have so much coverage, from a modern point of view too much coverage, later efforts to recut the film to create matched cuts were easy to do but give a misleading impression of the nature of Porter’s technique. It’s interesting to note that overlapping action has found a place in modern narrative, in which it is often used to emphasize explosions though repetition from different points of view as a means to extend the spectacle. With films like the popular and successful 1903 Great Train Robbery, Porter became America’s most impor-

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19  Porter the Filmmaker

Fig. 19.2  Georges Méliès’ studio in Montreuil, circa 1897. Méliès is to the left. (Cinémathèque Française)

tant director. His work helped to spark a renaissance in the public’s demand for cinema, which undoubtedly contributed to the establishment of the many nickelodeons across the United States. Musser’s Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S.  Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, establishes that Porter, like many filmmakers of his day, was greatly influenced by his exposure to magic lantern slide shows, as the Glass Cinema Era began its dissolve into the Celluloid Cinema Era. Technology is more than devices: Porter was a human embodiment of the transition. Although Porter grew up in a town some 50 miles from Pittsburgh, Connellsville, with a population of 1292 at the time of his birth, it was as Musser (1991, p. 15) notes, “a small industrial center,” and the producer of highly regarded coke (fuel used in the manufacture of iron and steel). Porter enjoyed a cultural life and worked in the local theater managed by his brother and was exposed to popular theater at the Newmeyer Opera House, where he

may have acted in his youth. Uncle Tom’s cabin played at the Opera House, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were also staged, and Barnum’s Circus visited the town. Lantern slide screenings in the churches were a part of the town’s cultural life, with shows given by the various denominations with titles like Paradise Lost, The Customs and Times of Washington, and Sights and Scenes in Europe. Painted panoramas with scenes of America and Europe were also exhibited in churches according to Musser (1991, p.  23). It’s probably a safe assumption that the magic lantern shows used diurnal lanterns enabling dissolves and were accompanied by lectures and music. The subject matter of Life of an American Fireman had already been used for a magic lantern show, a further affirmation of the connection between it and the celluloid cinema. A popular twelve-slide show of British origin, Bob the Fireman, made in pre-Edisonian cinema days, was still being sold in the United States at the time of Porter’s production.

19  Porter the Filmmaker

Musser (1991, p.  218), referring to Bob the Fireman and similar magic lantern shows, comments: “The narratives and highly conventionalize imagery of these innumerable shows were transferred to the cinema largely intact….” The subject matter of firefighters was a popular one at the time and it’s possible that Porter also drew on other sources. As Musser (1991, p. 9), who rigorously describes the early days of the celluloid cinema in America, wrote in his book’s introduction: “The history of projected images and their sound accompaniment has its origins in the mid-seventeenth century…The history of screen practice prior to 1896 has been neglected by film historian.” He goes on the write: “Precinema exhibitors, for example, were the ones who had the ultimate control over the editorial process; they acquired slides from a variety of sources (including often making the slides themselves) and juxtaposed one projected image against the other.” Porter, Méliès, and other early celluloid filmmakers were not rediscovering glass cinema techniques– rather they were transferring and adapting the techniques and content of the slide shows they had seen to the celluloid cinema. During Porter’s tenure as the head of production of the Edison studio in the Bronx, William Gilmore began to manage the studio for throughput rather than artistic expression, but theatrical filmmaking is, like it or not, a creative endeavor. Gilmore was vice president and general manager of the Edison Manufacturing Company between April 1895 and June 1908, and between October 1896 and August 1915, Porter, in succession, directly reported to James Henry White, William Markgraf, Alex T.  Moore, and Horace G.  Plimpton, all of whom reported to Gilmore (Musser, 1991, p.  12). Porter contributed to the effort to streamline production mandated by Gilmore by coming up with film production techniques that would become part of the Hollywood studio system by segregating tasks and employing a stock company of actors. Edison’s studio was making two 15-minute pictures a week, a far more demanding schedule given the many weeks that Porter had once spent shooting a single film. Porter bridled at the assembly-line practices he helped to create, but in creating them he made himself redundant. Demand for film soared and Edison viewed the studio solely as a factory in which production was to be maintained and costs kept down. Unfortunately for Porter he was losing his prominence at the box office at the time as exemplified by his 1908 film

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Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, which was ravaged by critics because of its dated look. After 6 years, he was still using overlapping action cutting, and the production values of the film were wanting, possibly due to Gilmore’s restrictions. Porter’s failed attempts to match outdoor shots with indoor sets were decried and they ravaged a key shot that used a truly incongruous eagle puppet on a wire; Porter had failed to maintain the suspension of disbelief. On March 27, 1909, Horace G. Plimpton, a former rug merchant was hired as the ­studio’s manager of negative production, who as Musser puts it “was a devotee of scientific management.” Plimpton would serve in the position for 6 years and demonstrated a willingness to learn about the business by traveling to Europe to study their studio and exhibition methods. Porter was demoted, as memorialized in a memo dated March 27, 1909, written by Edison Vice-President Frank L. Dyer, but he continued on at his relatively high weekly salary of $75. As the Dyer’s memo states: “He (Porter) will act solely as a consulting and advisory man” (Musser, 1991, pp. 453, 454). For 6 months in 1909 Porter worked on several projects, one of which was the testing of Eastman’s new nonflammable cellulose acetate stock. Porter found that it lacked the flexibility of nitrate stock, and he doubted it would hold up in daily use. His cautionary words were on the mark, and it wasn’t until January 1923 that Kodak first used the so-called safety stock for its new 16 mm format but acetate base didn’t replace 35 mm nitrate stock until 1950. Porter was fired, unable to fit into the Edison organization that had developed around him, due to his inability to adapt to the new narrative techniques and his resistance to filmmaking as a commodity. Firing a director like Porter was almost the equivalent of exiling a Roman nobleman for beyond its boundaries there could be no meaningful existence. In Porter’s case a secret agreement amongst the members of the Trust would have excluded him from future employment but he persisted as a filmmaker with the unsuccessful Defender Film Company and the Rex Motion Picture Company. In 1912 he left Rex to become chief director of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company where he directed the 3-D anaglyphic film Niagara Falls, his last film, which was premiered on June 10, 1915. His major contribution to the technology of the celluloid cinema was yet to come: his participation in the creation of the Simplex projector, as described in the following chapter.

Porter and the Simplex

In 1908 Edwin S.  Porter, Frank B.  Cannock, and Mike Berkowitz, regulars at O’Keefe’s Saloon at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, adjacent to New  York’s Grand Central Terminal, gathered in its backroom to have a few drinks and to chew the fat about projectors, and it was on O’Keefe’s menu cards that they sketched the design for what would become the 35  mm Simplex “which became the industry standard during the 1920s and is still considered by some to be the best machine of its kind ever made” (Musser, 1991, p. 7). Porter had previously designed a projector for William J.  Beadnell, director of publicity for the Eden Musée but after it went into production in 1900, its manufacture was halted due to a fire in Porter’s shop that put him out of business. In the winter of that year, Porter went to work for Edison Manufacturing to improve the Projecting Kinetoscope, which was a prelude to his heading up production at Edison’s studio and making his mark as a director. Cannock, who had previously designed two projectors, the Cinematograph and the Edengraph, had been trained as a mechanic in the Singer Sewing Machine Factory in his native Scotland, and Berkowitz was a machinist who built Cannock’s plans. In 1908 Porter, Cannock, and Berkowitz, by dint of their experience, understood the shortcomings of the contemporary crop of projectors and sought to create a machine better than anything else on the market at the right price, and with the Simplex they succeeded in creating a solid design that was the basis for improved versions for many decades (WS: Film-Tech Cinema Systems). Cannock met lathe operator Berkowitz in 1896 when he ran the machine shop at Vitagraph’s manufacturing facility and in June of that year Cannock became the chief projectionist at the Eden Musée where Berkowitz assisted him. The Eden Musée, founded by French entrepreneurs in 1884, was located at 55 West 23rd Street in Manhattan where it was home to amusements like waxworks, puppet shows, and magic lantern projections; it had also became an important venue for motion picture exhibition. Together, Cannock and Berkowitz worked on the unsuccessful Cinematograph projector of 1896 that was developed into

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the well-made Edengraph projector but which was too expensive for the market. When Porter, Cannock, and Berkowitz had their design doped out Porter put up the money to develop the prototype, after which he raised $80,000 from wealthy investor James A.  Stillman of the National City Bank. The first Simplex came off the production line in 1909, with Porter becoming the president of the company founded to manufacture it, the Precision Machine Company. In 1910, its first year of production, machines were installed in many parts of the United States as well as England. Patent applications were filed on the same day, March 4, 1911, for two inventions: Lens-­ Adjuster, USP 1,041,346, and Kinetoscope Casing, USP 1,190,582, which were granted to Edwin S.  Porter who assigned a one half to Francis B.  Cannock. Lens-Adjuster provides a means for conveniently focusing and Kinetoscope Casing deals mainly with mitigating the dangers of combustible cellulose nitrate film. Other patents would follow for improvements that were made in the ensuing years to an increasingly well-received machine.1 The first Simplex machines were handcranked but in 1920 a variable-speed electric motor was added. In 1925 the Precision Machine Company and two other projector companies combined to form the International Projector Corporation based at 90 Gold Street at the foot of the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. 35  mm projector design follows in the footsteps of Huygens’ mid-seventeenth century magic lantern, for as Henry Vaux Hopwood (1899, p. 188) remarks in his book, Living Pictures…: “A film for projecting a Living Picture is nothing more, after all, than a multiple lantern slide.” A projector, like a magic lantern, must have a source of illumination, ventilation for dissipation of the heat produced by the source, a reflector and condenser lenses (the latter not always required for carbon arc lamphouses) for concentrating the light on the frame, a gate for optically positioning the frames, 1  Early Simplex granted USPs: 745,956; 1,041,345; 1,041,346; 1,059,067; 1,075,692; 1,190,582; and 1,225,925.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_20

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20  Porter and the Simplex

Fig. 20.1  A Simplex projector made between 1921 and 1922. The motor is at the center and the outboard shutter to the right.

and a projection lens. The theatrical projector is made up of these major components: the projection head, the lamphouse, and the pedestal. Projector components can be mixed and matched; for example, a head made by one manufacturer can usually be used with a lamphouse made by another. A welldesigned 35 mm projector can be repaired or rebuilt time and again, remaining in service for decades. A visit to a secondrun theater’s projection booths back in the day might have revealed projectors put together from the parts box of the cannibalized components of various brands, with oil drippings on the cement floor. In 2008 I visited the projection booth of Los Angele’s Fox Theater in Westlake Village, built in 1931, and was delighted to find big knife switches mounted on the wall like props from James Whale’s Frankenstein. Projectors evolved to be massive machines when compared to the relatively tiny 35 mm frame, only an inch wide. In the two first decades projector designers confronted the evolving requirements for the exhibition of narrative cinema. For example, the intermittent had to be durable, which the Simplex accomplished by encasing it in an oil bath. The projector head had to accommodate 2000-foot print reels with-

Fig. 20.2  The threading path for the Simplex XL is similar to that of other 35 mm projectors. The dotted line represents the film. The intermittent sprocket (9) is located below the gate, and continuous drive sprockets are 1 and 7.

out snapping the film due to the intermittent’s yanking action, which required a buffering loop between the continuous drive sprockets and the intermittent sprocket. Image steadiness was improved in part by using a heavy pedestal, a component easily taken for granted, but its mass serves to dampen vibration because even the smallest are magnified hundreds of times on the screen. Immediately below the Simplex’s gate is the intermittent drive sprocket that engages the perforations on both edges of the print. The intermittent’s sprocket is actuated by the Geneva drive, so named because it has been used in Swiss watches, but it has also been called a star-wheel and a Maltese-cross drive because of its shape. The electric motor that runs the projector intrinsically produces continuous circular motion, and the purpose of the Geneva drive is to periodically stop the rotation of the drive sprocket wheel and hence the movement of the frame in the gate. There are two

20  Porter and the Simplex

parts to the Geneva drive mechanism, the first of which is a continuously rotating disk with a circular pin at its periphery. The second component resembles a slotted cross and moves intermittently as one of its slots is engaged by the pin. This component connects to and actuates the sprocket drive. The Simplex frameline control, unlike those found in some other machines, did not require realigning the projector head during operation since the entire intermittent mechanism moved upward or downward to adjust the frame’s location relative to the gate’s aperture. The ability to adjust key projector functions, without having to realign the projector while the film was projected, such as the frameline control and adjustment of the shutter to prevent travel ghost, were important additions to insure a good audience experience. Early uses of the Geneva drive for motion picture projection occurred in 1896 and are attributed to Oskar Messter working with Max Gliewe in Germany and Robert W. Paul in England, according to Narath (1960). The following year Armat abandoned the Demenÿ beater movement and added the Geneva drive to the Vitascope projector. Early celluloid cinema practitioners settled on 16 fps as adequate for capturing motion. However, at this rate projection with a single-bladed shutter to only occlude the film during pulldown results in a flickering image. The shutter works in synchronization with the intermittent mechanism to prevent a streaking image called travel ghost, which otherwise would be projected when the film is advanced through the gate. The choice of 16 fps was motivated by the desire to reduce the costs of camera film and print stock, to relieve stress on projector mechanism, and possibly to reduce print wear rather than the desire for good image quality. In part, to reduce flicker, the industry moved to the practice of running the projector at 18 fps, as described by Richard Rowland, the President of First National Pictures (1926). Machinist John A.  Pross, working for the American Mutoscope Company, invented one of the most important improvements to the celluloid cinema as descried in Animated Picture Apparatus, USP 722,382, filed on January 19, 1903. According to Narath (1960), mechanic Theodor Pätzold of Berlin also invented Fig. 20.3  Two versions of the Pross-Pätzold non-flick shutter. Pross’ was first used in Urban’s Bioscope projector and Pätzold’s in Messeter’s Model X1 projector.

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the “non-flick” blade at about the same time. These inventors found a way to decouple the flicker rate from the frame rate with a shutter that interrupted the projected frame while it was at rest. (See the chapter A Persistent Myth.) The ProssPätzold shutter adds another shutter blade to occlude the frame while it remains stationary in the gate to increase the effective flicker rate. Some early projectors used a non-flick blade made of either celluloid or gelatin that was violet or other colors and other designs used a blade that was narrower than the pulldown blade, and yet other designs had shutter blades with perforations (Narath, 1960; Hopwood, 1899). Depending on how you look at it, the new shutter, with a sector or sectors that occluded the moving frame during pulldown and also interrupted the frame at rest, eliminated flicker or was a film conservation technique. (Television interlace performs an analogous function.) At the 18 fps practice for silent projection, the two-bladed shutter produced 36 image “flashes” of equal intervals per second, sufficient to mitigate flicker for relatively low-­ brightness projection. For brighter projection, a three-bladed shutter interrupted the frame at rest twice, producing 54 effective images per second. The 16 fps rate may have been adequate for filming and projecting many kinds of motion but a higher frame rate is required for flicker suppression. However, such low frame rates do a disservice to fast action and camera movement. For motion pictures projected at the sound speed of 24 fps, the interrupting shutter is usually two-bladed, one for occlusion during pulldown and one for occlusion when the frame is at rest, resulting in a flicker rate of 48 flashes per second. The SMPTE recommends a screen light level of 14 foot lamberts, a light level at which, for most people, the Pross-Pätzold shutter produces little or no flicker, but some people may be aware of it when looking at bright areas like the sky or when looking away from the screen. Before examining the intermittent duty cycle that was adopted by the Simplex and motion picture projectors of all formats, a brief review of other projection schemes, as noted elsewhere in these pages, is warranted. Perhaps the mechanically simplest approach was to adopt the technique used by

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the phenakistoscope/zoëtrope that influenced Edison and Dickson for their Kinetoscope peepshow design, which used continuously moving film and a fast shutter. Edison and Dickson had been exposed to or had knowledge of Muybridge’s Zoöpraxiscope and they used the same kind of spinning shutter with radial slits. They were well aware that Anschütz produced the same result using a flashing Geissler tube for the peepshow version of his Tachyscope, which is the technique they used for their cylinder experiments. Dickson experimented with the technique for projection by adapting a Kinetoscope, and Jenkins and Lauste designed projectors using the scheme but it proved to be optically too inefficient and was abandoned circa 1895. As far as I have learned, continuous film motion coupled with fast shuttering for 35 mm projection was attempted only in America. Another approach to continuous film drive involved optical stabilization as first demonstrated by the projecting versions of Reynaud’s Praxinoscope, which used moving mirrors to track the frame to arrest their motion. This technique created a continuous train of uninterrupted images on the screen, unlike the phenakistoscope methods in which each frame is briefly flashed on the screen with lengthy the intervals between them. Image stabilization was used for a time for 35 mm projection in Germany, as noted in these pages, first by Messter and then Mechau, but it was not taken up commercially elsewhere; however, it was used for editing machines with prism rather than mirror optics. A different and interesting approach used a very rapid pulldown that omitted a shutter, as employed by Jenkins’ early Phantoscope. The idea is that a moving frame rushing through the gate briefly (without occlusion) would make a negligible contribution to the projected image. But what succeeded in the marketplace is the 360° duty cycle described next, which provided a reliable mechanical design and flicker mitigation without travel ghost. The projector’s 360° duty cycle, with a two-bladed shutter, has four phases for the projection of a single frame of film: during the first phase, for a quarter of the cycle (90°), the shutter blocks the frame’s image as it is pulled down through the gate; for the second quarter of the cycle (90°), the shutter is open and the image is projected as the frame is held at rest in the gate; for the third quarter of the cycle (90°), the frame remains at rest in the gate, but its image is blocked by the shutter; and for the fourth quarter (90°) of the cycle, the frame, while still resting in the gate is projected for a second time; the cycle repeats. In brief, the cycle of four equal intervals is: pulldown of the frame, projection of the frame, interruption of the frame, and the frame is projected again. (Each 90° phase of the cycle, at 24 fps, is 1/96 or 0.01 second.) Thus half the time the celluloid cinema audience sees no image – half the time the screen is blank. The heart of the lamphouse is the carbon arc, and for decades the 35 mm projector used this 1890 invention of Sir Humphrey Davy, as noted in chapter 3. The output of the ­carbon arc is similar to the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody

20  Porter and the Simplex

radiation curve for the continuous distribution of wavelengths of the visible spectrum, emulating the color temperature of the sun. The arc itself is an in-the-air electric spark created by current between two carbon electrodes. A large mirror surface in the shape of a concave bowl, a reflector on the order of a foot across, sits at the end of the lamphouse facing the arc to concentrate its light on the gate area and the frame. Changes were made to the lamphouse that had been designed for the relatively large magic lantern slide (about 3 inches on a side) by concentrating the light on the smaller area of the 35 mm frame (about an inch wide). The 35 mm frame and the rolls of film on the reels, made of flammable cellulose nitrate, had to be protected from the heat of the arc. Protection against fire hazard was afforded by the (sometimes) automatic dowser, which was invariably required at changeover to rapidly cut off light and heat to the gate. The dowser is positioned between the arc and the gate, and projectors employed different kinds including flaps made of metal or asbestos. The dowser was useful for changeovers because the waiting projector’s arc needed time to achieve optimum brightness after striking it and the machine had to get up to speed before its image replaced that of the operating projector. At changeover the action of one projector’s dowser was coordinated with the other. Some dowser mechanisms, especially useful for handcranked machines, were designed to block light and heat from reaching the frame if the projector did not maintain speed to prevent burning the film. Later models of the Simplex had a water-cooled gate to mitigate damage to the film and protect the projectionist’s fingers during threading. The shutter in later designs was located between the lamphouse and the gate rather than in front of the lens, which reduced the heat reaching the film and the gate (Hulfish, 1913). Steel magazines were added to contain the take-up and feed reels for fire protection. By the 1960s carbon arcs were replaced by xenon arc lamps whose electric arc is contained within a glass bulb filled with xenon gas under high pressure (Anderson, 1954). The xenon arc was invented in 1947 by Paul Schultz in Germany; although it has similarities with the mercury vapor lamp, which outputs blue-violet and ultraviolet light, its wavelength distribution favors the visible spectrum and like the carbon arc, it can provide a facsimile of sunlight’s color temperature. The transition from carbon to xenon arc was of concern to cinematographers, but color timing changes in post-production addressed the issue. Xenon arcs can operate to specification for hundreds of hours, unlike the much shorter duration of carbon rods, affording an opportunity to eliminate changeovers, but in practice exhibitors can chose to run the Xenon arc lamps beyond their rated life ­resulting in dingy images. For decades prints were supplied by the distributor on 1000-foot reels (10 or 11 minutes of running time) and the projectionist assembled them onto 2000-­foot reels to reduce the number of changeovers, but new mechanisms obviated the need for the changeover.

20  Porter and the Simplex

The transition away from changeovers occurred in stages, first with 6000-foot reels that further reduced the number of changeovers, then with a single 14,000-foot reel that entirely eliminated it. The Christie Autowind platter system, introduced early in the 1970s, was a device that eliminated rewinding and changeover as depicted in an ad in the Motion Picture Herald in 1972 (p.22). At the end of the print the film ran backward through the projector non-intermittently at high speed, which unfortunately led to print wear and tear. The final touch came when a platter system with a closedloop film path was put on the market reminiscent of the Kinetoscope spool-bank, at least in intention (Gitt, 2007). The platter became ubiquitous, thereby contributing to the elimination of many projectionists’ jobs. However, the projectionist did more than enable a smooth changeover and rewind the film because he kept the image in focus, adjusted the frame line should it drift, changed the lens and gate aperture for different aspect ratio prints, monitored image and sound to keep them optimized, oiled, serviced, and adjusted the projector, not to mention all of the housekeeping chores involved in handling incoming and outgoing reels of film. It was the human touch that kept the show on the screen the way it was meant to be seen, which became even more critical as the screen size increased in the early 1950s because a more magnified image exacerbates imperfections. As this is being written, xenon arcs may be facing the stage direction “exeunt,” but it may take many years before costs come down, and they are replaced by laser lamphouses. Lasers last tens of thousands of hours and are much brighter. Projection itself is under threat as the light-emitting diode display screen, which is bright and has extremely high dynamic range, takes its first stabs at entering the marketplace. In the late 1920s, seeking a source for his 70 mm Grandeur projector, William Fox met with Harley L. Clarke, who at the time controlled the International Projector Corporation, manufacturer of 75% of the world’s projectors, including the Simplex. Krefft (2017, p. 523) points out that, despite having been warned about Clarke’s proclivity for sharp practices, Fox accepted his partnership offer and formed Grandeur, Inc., to market and manufacture large-format products. (Clarke would take advantage of Fox’s eventual reversal of fortune to help engineer the loss of his empire, as related in chapter 37.) Simplex undertook building 70 mm projectors for the Fox Grandeur big screen system but they were used for only a handful of films and projected in only a few theaters between 1929 and 1931, as described in chapter 58. The format differed from the modern 70 mm design introduced by Todd-AO in 1954, principally by having four perforations to a frame instead of five and the use of optical rather than magnetic sound. The Simplex Grandeur machines could project both 70 mm and 35 mm film prints and had a triplelens turret to accommodate the different formats’ magnification needs with different focal length lenses.

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The Grandeur projectors also had additional fire prevention technology and the ability to control the frameline position without having to readjust the projector’s tilt. These features worked their way into Simplex’s 35 mm machines. By the early 1930s, Simplex machines had rear shutters located between the arc source and the gate or exhibitors’ existing projectors could be converted to add the feature. Notable improvements were made with the XL model in 1950 using a conical shutter placed closer to the gate to improve its optical efficiency and reduce light leakage, thus improving image contrast. The gate was also curved to decrease film buckling and focus drift and an improved selflubricating intermittent mechanism was added. Simplex also added slide-in aperture plates to make it easy to mask the frame properly, a feature that would be especially useful for the ‘Scope and widescreen formats of the 1950s. The projector was also redesigned to increase ease of threading, a new framing knob was added to the area where the other controls were to be found, and the intermittent was redesigned with double bearings for improved steadiness. Simplex added a feature to allow for horizontal lens recentration to take into account the 1 mm horizontal shift of the center of the frame necessitated by the addition of sound track to the silent format, a measure that prevented asymmetrical vignetting of the projected image’s corners. When optical sound was introduced, both Western Electric and the Radio Corporation of America considered the Simplex to be the only projector capable of using their sound-on-film playback kits and would not install them on other brands until the machines met their specifications. The standard for placement of the optical sound reader, established by Case and Sponable, was below the gate with the track advanced with respect to the image by 14.5 inches or 20–21 frames. The lower loop could be adjusted for the length of the theater to compensate for the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light to maintain good lip sync. The projected frame moves intermittently as the film is driven by sprocket teeth, which is unsuitable for optical sound-on-film reproduction. For good sound, free of wow and flutter, the film’s motion must be smoothed out, for example, by using spring-loaded rubber snubbers holding the film between them and an idler roller connected by a shaft to a large flywheel that adds its angular momentum to the linear momentum of the film. Other techniques used viscous couplings or magnetic damping. The optical sound reader used an electric lamp, the exciter lamp, whose light is focused on the track area, which is modulated by its density or area. The resultant changes in illumination are converted into an electrical signal by a photocell or similar device whose current is amplified to drive the theater loudspeakers. These subjects are covered in greater detail in the following section, Sound. Over the years there have been many 35  mm projectors brands, some of which were Strong, Brenkert, Motiograph,

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Ballantyne, Wenzel, Philips, Edison, Gardner, Century, Powers, Peerless, Kineton, and Christie. The Simplex was chosen as the didactic exemplar because of its pedigree and ubiquity. The International Projector Company, which had been manufacturing Simplexes since 1925, became part of National Screen Services Corporation in the early 1980s, the major distributor of movie posters for theaters, and in 1983 National Screen Services was purchased by Ballantyne of Omaha, the manufacturer of Strong and Ballantyne projectors. In the 1990s the Simplex continued to be the world’s most widely used projector but by the early years of the twenty-first century all celluloid cinema projector manufacturers would cease their production with the ascendancy of digital projection. At the finale of the Celluloid Cinema Era, in the early years of the twenty-first century, there were more than 130,000 theatrical screens in the world using at least that many 35 mm projectors, but there were far fewer theaters than screens because multiplex or multiple screen theaters had become commonplace. Simplex co-designer and the first president of its manufacturing company, Edwin S.  Porter, was an unusual man who as a technologist furthered the art of projection design and as a director furthered the art of filmic construction. There were other filmmaker-inventors like him: in the Glass

20  Porter and the Simplex

Cinema Era, we have the examples of Étienne-Gaspard Robert (Robertson) whose late eighteenth-century Fantascope magic lantern projector was capable of in-focus zooms, and Charles-Émile Reynaud who invented the precursors of film indexing perforations and cell animation. In addition to Porter, other Celluloid Cinema Era inventor-­ directors who come to mind are Edward Hill Amet, inventor of the Magnascope projector of 1895, and an early user of models for visual effects (Fielding, 1972); Georges Méliès, who helped to design an iron camera-projector in 1896, and created many visual effects; D.W. Griffith, who in 1919 patented a method for toning a projected image during projection using colored lights; Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), a talented still photographer who pushed photo-optical visual effects to their limits for his 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey; Douglas Trumbull (born 1942), director and inventor of Showscan and the Magi high frame rate stereoscopic cinema technology; and James Cameron (born 1954), who fashioned a production and post-production workflow for his 2009 liveaction and computer-generated three-dimensional film Avatar; and cinematographers Joseph B. Walker, who in the late 1920s devised a zoom lens attachment, and William T. Crespinel, who spearheaded the development of bichromatic Cinecolor.

Camera Design Before WWII

The first 35 mm movie camera, Edison’s Kinetograph, was a specialized instrument designed to shoot short duration films of a single shot in a studio that was built to house it, the Black Maria. The Kinetograph was part of a system that included making prints from its negatives that were distributed to Kinetoscope parlors. In this way Edison and Dickson not only invented the celluloid cinema, they also invented a template for its commercial infrastructure. The first few European cameras were combination machines, camera-projectors, and in the case of the Cinématographe, a printer as well, but the trend in America, from the beginning, was to design and build single-purposed machines. Unlike the battery-powered Kinetograph and Biograph cameras, other early cameras were handcranked, a better alternative in an age in which electrification had barely taken hold, which allowed them to be readily used on location. By the mid-to late 1920s handcranked cameras, like Bitzer’s Pathé, described next, began to be replaced by machines that could be augmented with add-on electric motors. Cameras used sprocket wheel drive for film transport with intermittency achieved by means of a shuttle (claw) engaging the perforations, usually located below the gate. In 1899 Billy Bitzer (1973), working for Biograph, was sent to Cuba to film its revolt against Spain where he shot the sinking of the Navy’s USS Maine. The electric motor-driven Biograph 68 mm camera, heavy all by itself, required one ton of storage batteries to power it. (See chapter 15.) It was an unfortunate design choice for filming outside of the studio, following the example of the electric motor-powered Edison-­ Dickson Kinetograph. Although a number of films were made using the Biograph 68 mm camera and some theaters were equipped for the format, it had a relatively short lifespan pitted against the de facto 35 mm standard. Other movie cameras of the early silent period were portable and handcranked, encouraging cinematography in the field, away from the power lines and not requiring batteries. In 1908 when Biograph actor David Wark Griffith (1875–1948) was given a chance to direct a picture for the studio, the Adventures of Dolly, it was shot in 35 mm. At the time Bitzer continued

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to shoot what he describes as “off-color” subjects, although Bitzer advised Griffith on filmmaking methodology and going about shooting location for Dolly. Griffith and Bitzer joined forces on A Calamitous Elopement in August 1908, and worked together for 17 years thereafter for a memorable collaboration. Bitzer switched to the Pathé Professional studio camera, introduced in 1905. Pathé Frères was founded by Charles Morand Pathé (1863-1957) and his brother Emile on September 28, 1896, as Société Pathé Frères; it grew through consolidation in 1900 with the addition of Française d’Appareils de Précision as well as the purchase of the Lumières’ cinema business, to create a French movie empire consisting of a color stencil print process, theaters, professional camera manufacturing, a movie studio, and film distributorship. Later cameras, projectors, and film for amateurs were added, but the First World War resulted in the breaking up of the firm (Herbert, 1996). The Pathé Professional studio camera’s wooden body was 4¾ in × 8 in × 12 in, weighing 22 pounds without film or the top-mounted 400 foot magazine. It had a bright supplementary optical finder mounted on the cameraman’s left with the handcrank at the rear. A long film channel and a good intermittent encouraged a steady image, and the camera had a two-bladed variable shutter for creating fades and dissolves. It came equipped with a 51  mm f/4.5 Voigtländer Heliar. The 50 mm focal length remained a frequent lens choice for 35 mm cinematography, and by some accounts, it was the “standard” lens. Bitzer ordered a Zeiss Tessar for shooting The Birth of a Nation and he continued on with the Pathé Professional for the rest of his career, even after the Pathé had become passé; he was teased by his fellow cameramen clinging to an old-fashioned machine. A viewing of The Birth of a Nation, shot with 15 Pathé cameras, demonstrates that it was up to the task. Bitzer dearly loved his Pathé and kept it close by his side even when it was not in use. Bitzer also used moving iris vignetting mattes of his own devising to selectively reveal portions of the composition. It’s hard to imagine how he could have handcranked the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_21

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Fig. 21.1  Billy Bitzer and D. W. Griffith, 1920

Fig. 21.2  The Pathé Professional studio camera with its 400 foot magazine. (Cinémathèque Française)

c­amera, panned, and achieved iris effects or fade-ins and ­fade-­outs and dissolves without having extra hands, but he undoubtedly had assistance. A simple wire frame device, a

21  Camera Design Before WWII

sports finder, like that used for the Lumières’ Cinématographe, was not sufficiently accurate for composing for theatrical features and obviously could not be used for focusing. By today’s reckoning one method that was used with the Pathé for composing and focusing is offbeat: the cameraman viewed the lens’s image on the film’s emulsion through the celluloid base. The image, like that of a view camera, was upside down and backward, but Bitzer was able to visualize how the image would look when projected, or he could also use the direct optical finder on the side of the camera. To prevent fogging film, using the emulsion viewing method, a red filter was added to the eyepiece, an effective measure since the so-called color blind (blue-violet sensitive) film was insensitive to red light. Salt (1992) writes that critical focusing could also be achieved between shots by removing the film from the gate and inserting a thin ground glass in the aperture. Viewing the image directly on the film went out of fashion, I had incorrectly assumed, due to the antihalation treatment of negative film, which blocked any on-film image, but that cannot be the case because this stock was not available as an off-the-shelf item until the late 1920s. Antihalation was achieved by either adding a black light absorbing backing to the celluloid substrate or as a dye added to the substrate, turning it gray, both designed to prevent haloes or flare around highlights caused by reflections at the cellulose-air (or cellulose-base) boundary. Halation is described by Mees (1917), in the context of glass plates, as being “caused by light which passes completely through the emulsion, and also through the glass on which the emulsion is coated, and is then reflected back into the emulsion from the back of the glass.” Substitute celluloid for glass and the explanation remains correct for cinema. The haloes themselves are caused by rays of light that are reflected back through the emulsion at various angles. According to Salt (1992), the first negative camera film to have antihalation treatment was Eastman Supersensitive Negative, which Raimondo-Souto (2007) identifies as Super Sensitive Panchromatic Negative 1201, introduced in 1931, a film whose gray base absorbed light. Its introduction corresponded with the discontinuance of Kodak orthochromatic negative, but Kodak panchromatic stock with sensitivity extended to the yellow, orange, and red, had been introduced in 1922 as a special order product. Improved versions, Type II and Type III Cine Negative Panchromatic films, were introduced in 1928 as standard order products (WS: Chronology of Kodak Cine films). My supposition is that emulsion view finding was abandoned because it was harder to use than focusing by scale or less convenient than looking through an optical finder because the image had to have been far dimmer, especially as film got faster and the lens was stopped down for daylight cinematography. In addition to the Pathé other early 35 mm cameras, like the Debrie Parvo, used direct viewing of the film emulsion before or during exposure. The Parvo used an optical system

21  Camera Design Before WWII

designed to view an image that was both magnified and upright and its viewfinder’s eyepiece automatically closed when not in use to prevent film fogging. The ability to see exactly what the camera lens is seeing permits achieving accurate compositions and focusing during a shot, and providing this capability was one of the persistent challenges of movie camera design. The Pathé may have been Bitzer’s favorite but, in addition to the Parvo, he could have chosen one of the English wooden so-called uprights like those made by Prestwich, Moy and Bistie, Williamson, and Darling. The Pathé ruled in the American film industry, but the Debrie Parvo, especially the aluminum body Model L, was commonly used in Europe after its introduction in 1908. It was relatively compact because, unlike the Pathé, it did not use a top-mounted magazine but rather had an internal coaxial 400 foot load magazine. The Parvo wooden version was 11  in × 8  in × 6  in and was made of walnut plywood and weighed 17 pounds without film (Raimondo-Souto, 2007). The handcranked Parvo had a film counter, a speedometer, and a bayonet mount for interchangeable lenses. Provision was made for the cameraman, who stood behind the camera body, to set focus and aperture while operating. Other viewfinder solutions were devised such as an adjacent optical finder like that used by the Eyemo turret or the Akeley with its dual lens board, both of which used a second lens of the same focal length as the taking lens. Although this does not solve the parallax problem, created by the difference between the viewpoints of taking and viewing lenses, it allows the cameraman to usually achieve a serviceable framing of the shot. Another approach used the taking lens for focusing and composing through its own optical viewfinder system before running the camera, at which time the lens was repositioned for cinematography, as was done with turret rotation for the Bell & Howell 2709, introduced 1912, and the more convenient

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Mitchell rackover, shown as a prototype in 1917. A solution that allowed through-the-lens viewing during cinematography was introduced in 1937 by Arnold and Richter with the Arriflex. It used a behind-the-lens rotating mirror to reflect light to an optical system with a focusing screen, an approach known as reflex viewing. Cinema Products, three decades later, used a method that didn’t require moving parts by modifying Mitchell BNC studio cameras with a pellicle beamsplitter positioned between the lens and film gate to siphon off light for reflex viewing. Unlike the Arriflex system, the pellicle solution did not flicker during photography. The arrangement for loading and unloading the camera film is a key parameter that occupied engineers and determined its basic design. The film path, the layout of take-up reels or cores, determines the camera’s overall design and appearance. Feed and take-up reels or cores can be located in the same plane, the reel-to-reel design, or a coaxial arrangement can be used with film supply and take-up rolls lying in parallel planes. Film rolls can be contained within the camera body or within an external magazine. The most straightforward design is reel-to-reel, within the camera body, requiring threading the film to engage the drive and intermittent mechanisms, but it presents an opportunity to fog the film especially in bright daylight. The Bell & Howell 35 mm Eyemo and 16 mm Filmo are examples of this kind of design wherein the film travels from reel-to-reel. Another approach uses an externally mounted magazine, like that of Bitzer’s Pathé or the Bell & Howell and Mitchell studio cameras whose magazines used a reel-to-reel design. A loop of film extends from the magazine through a light-tight trap to be pulled into the camera’s body for threading. To speed up changing loads the Éclair Camerette, introduced after Second World War, used reel-to-reel magazines that contained the intermittent mechanism and gate. The reel-­to-­reel 16  mm

Fig. 21.3  Right: One of Méliès’ custom built cameras that used two driving sprocket wheels, one before and one after the gate. Left: More typical is the British Williamson’s film path with the film threaded before and after the gate on the same drive sprocket. In either case a shuttle near the gate engages the perforations to achieve intermittency. (Cinémathèque Française)

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demonstrated a double-headed projector, the Bio-pleograf, which like Skladanowsky’s always kept an image on screen to prevent flicker. Proszynski halted his studies at Liege Polytechnic to develop cameras and projectors and returned to the school to complete his engineering degree in 1908. He demonstrated a flicker-mitigating shutter, apparently the same as the Pätzold-Pross shutter, which was taken up by Gaumont and others. The Aeroscope (first named the Autopleograf) user required a bicycle pump to fill its six internal cylindrical chambers with compressed air, sufficient to drive 600 feet of 35 mm film, which according to Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot (1913), author of Practical Cinematography, was small and light enough to be handheld at 12 in × 8½ in × 6½ in and 14 pounds. At first its reliability was in doubt, but its reputation was enhanced after a well-­ known British nature cinematographer of the time, Cherry Kearton, used the machine on one of his expeditions. The Aeroscope is also notable for quite possibly being the first camera to attempt image stabilization by mitigating camera shake when handheld by means of a small gyroscopic “equilFig. 21.4  The Debrie Parvo. (Cinémathèque Française) ibrator.” The camera was successfully used for aerial cinematography and shooting newsreels. While working in Kodak Cine Special magazine, introduced in 1936, used a Warsaw on the “autolektor,” a recording device to help the similar magazine. blind, Proszynski was arrested by the Germans and died in Newman-Sinclair (sometimes written as Newman & the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945. Sinclair) 35  mm cameras, introduced with wooden bodies, The Akeley Camera, introduced in 1915, was a radical circa 1910, and later with aluminum alloy bodies, were design concept that found acceptance and was nicknamed designed by Arthur Samuel Newman and handmade by the the Pancake. It was invented by the founder of modern British firm James A. Sinclair & Co. One of the first Newman-­ taxidermy, explorer, inventor, and Curator of African Sinclair cameras was taken on the ill-fated 1910 Antarctic Animals at the American Museum of Natural History, Carl expedition of Captain Robert Scott (Herbert, 1996). Models E.  Akeley (1864–1926) (Gregory, 1921). Its design was of the cameras used coaxial magazine loads with both 200- motivated by the need to film Akeley’s expeditions, and and 400-foot capacity. Studio models and field models were throughout the 1920s and 1930s his hatbox-shaped metal offered like the notable Autokine, similar in its applications camera remained a favorite of documentary filmmakers, to the Akeley (Coe, 1981). Robert Flaherty substituted the explorers, and scientists, and was used for features shot Newman-Sinclair for the Akeley for his 1934 Man of Aran. under difficult conditions such as aerial cinematography The boxy Autokine was machined from aluminum alloy by the United States Signal Corps and for William stock, and its 200-foot magazines were loaded in the dark- Wellman’s Wings. It was also widely used by newsreel room permitting them to be quickly inserted in the camera cameramen for the Pathé and Fox Movietone services. The body. The fully wound dual-spring clockwork intermittent unique machine, which measured 9 in × 14½ in × 15½ in, drove almost an entire magazine. Both lenses were mounted used a 200-foot internal coaxial magazine with an internal on an interchangeable lens board, one lens for cinematogra- sprocket wheel for driving the film; the film was intermitphy and the other for the parallax correcting optical finder. tently advanced using a single-­fingered shuttle. A loop of Through-the-lens composition and focusing were made pos- film extended out of the magazine to allow it to be threaded sible for setting up the shot by means of a prism viewfinder through the gate. It used an unusual focal plane shutter in unit inserted into the gate area. the form of a cylindrical band with a slit in it that rotated In 1912 Newman-Sinclair began initial production of the within the camera body determining the body’s pancake Aeroscope camera, quite possibly the only one that used shape (Lescarboura, 1921). compressed air to power its drive; production was later conIts interchangeable lens board was mounted with a pair tinued by F.  Van Neck (Herbert, 1996). The Aeroscope of matched lenses, one for photography and one for the 35  mm camera was designed in 1910 by Polish inventor ground glass focusing viewfinder. The swiveling finder Kasimir (de) Proszynski (1875–1945), who had, in 1898, tube ran to the rear of the machine was built with an erect-

21  Camera Design Before WWII

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Fig. 21.5  An Australian cinematographer using a Newman-Sinclair camera during WW II. (Australian Dept. of Info.)

Fig. 21.6  The Aeroscope with its loading door removed to show its compressed air cylinders. (Cinémathèque Française)

ing prism to keep the image right-side up. The Akeley gyroscopic tripod head made it easy to achieve smooth one-handed pans (Alvey, 2000). The camera enabled the cinematography of wild animals by celebrity explorers and filmmakers Osa and Martin Johnson, and by Robert Flaherty for Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926). From his SMPE obituary: “Mr. Akeley died on November 17 last, on the slopes of Mt. Mikeno, in the

FIg. 21.7  The one of a kind Akeley Pancake camera with its twin matching interchangeable lenses mounted on a lens board, one for photography and the other for composition. (Cinémathèque Française)

Belgium Congo, where he was studying and taking motion pictures of gorillas for the New York Museum of Natural History” (Rowland, 1926, p. 79). The Pathé remained the standard Hollywood studio camera for years before it was supplanted by the arrival of the all-metal Bell & Howell 2709, circa 1912, an instrument

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based on a different design philosophy (DiGiulio, 1976). Until that time, movie camera bodies were usually patterned on the manufacturing technique used by still view cameras made of wood. Bell & Howell was founded in 1907 by two projectionists, Donald Joseph Bell and Albert Summers Howell (1879–1951), which was based in Chicago, Illinois, beginning in 1914. In 1921, Bell, who would be granted almost 150 patents, and other shareholders, bought out salesman Bell (Robinson, 1982). It was Howell who designed the pin registration movement that was the heart of the Bell & Howell 2709 (Wilson, 1983). For a time it was the most prestigious manufacturer of motion picture equipment including cameras, printers, film perforators, and later cameras and projectors for 16 mm, 8 mm and Super 8. Although it took a while to catch on with cinematographers, partly because they thought it did not look like a Pathé and other wooden-bodied machines, the handcranked 2709, with its four-lens turret and Mickey Mouse ears magazine, became widely used and highly respected and was purchased by movie stars like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford and director D.  W. Griffith. Camping buddies George Eastman and Henry Ford owned 2709s with successive serial numbers. The 2709 became widely accepted after the First World War and was used for decades by the studios, a highly influential camera design because of its solid construction, superbly steady intermittent mechanism, and straightfor-

Fig. 21.8  The Bell & Howell 2709. (Cinémathèque Française)

21  Camera Design Before WWII

ward form factor. As the sound era approached, an electric motor was substituted for handcranking, but it was too a noisy machine for sound stages (Coe, 1981). The body weighed 16 pounds and was about 7 in × 14 3 8 in × 15 in. The variable shutter could be operated automatically to produce in-camera fades and dissolves. It was possible to view and focus through-the-­lens when the camera was not operating by rotating the four-­lens turret through 180° to look through the taking lens. A lens identical to the taking lens or of the same focal length could be mounted in the turret position opposite the taking lens for viewing and focusing through a right-angle optical finder on the same side of the body as the handcrank. When the camera was running the image viewed through the finder flickered because it was interrupted by the large disk shutter behind the turret. Before the addition of antihalation backing to negative camera stock, the cameraman could also view the image through a magnifying viewfinder. Cinematographers preferred the Mitchell side-mounted optical finder because its image was erect, unlike the 2709’s optical finder, and they also preferred the Mitchell matte box. Special effects cameramen like Richard Edlund, who showed me one of his 2709s at his studio in Santa Monica, California, continued to use both the 2709 and Mitchell bodies for visual effects half a century after they were introduced because their pin registration intermittents produced extremely steady footage. The intermittent shuttle’s action was similar to that of the influential Cinématographe, but it added fixed registration pins for precision indexing of each exposed frame and some experts believe that it was the steadiest intermittent ever devised. Two sets of pins in the gate were used: a reciprocating set to advance the film, called pins in the patent, but more familiarly called a shuttle or a claw, and a stationary set of pins, on the lens side of the gate. The mechanism is described in USP 1,038,588, filed on October 25, 1911, Motion Picture Machine, by A. S. Howell. As the film advanced, it was lifted away from the front of the gate and onto the two fixed pins where it rested during exposure; the film was lifted off the pins and advanced for the next exposure by the shuttle’s two fingers. The BH negative perforation became the standard for negative stock, in part because of the acceptance of the camera and its registration pin design and in part because of Bell & Howell’s superior perforation machine. Film from the reel-to-reel magazine was threaded into the camera box and to the top of the 32-toothed drive sprocket wheel to move it through the gate. The film then returned to the bottom of the same sprocket wheel to draw it through the gate, a design used by many other cameras. In 1925 the company introduced an entirely different camera, the 35 mm Bell & Howell Eyemo, a scaled-up version of the 16 mm Filmo, which had been introduced in 1923 based on a design that began life as a 17.5 mm camera when

21  Camera Design Before WWII

it was prototyped in 1921; it was modified to run 16 mm after Kodak introduced that format. The camera used internal reelto-reel loading, and the body was bereft of fancy controls. Like the 16 mm Eyemo, the 35 mm machine was rugged and straightforward to use, and like the 16 mm Filmo, the cameraman sighted through an optical finder that used turretmounted interchangeable objectives to match the focal length of the taking lens (Lipton, 1972, 1983). A leather strap and the contour of the viewfinder tube itself helped the cameraman to hold the camera steadily (Kattelle, 2000). The Eyemo, often loaded with Kodachrome, was used by the Armed Services to cover combat in the Second World War. The camera was favored by the film industry when a small or expendable machine in harm’s way was required. Cinematographer James Wong Howe entered the boxing ring on roller skates using an Eyemo to film prize fighting in the 1947 Body and Soul, directed by Robert Rossen. The B&H 2709’s position as the Hollywood industry’s workhorse status was challenged by the introduction of the Mitchell Standard camera, whose appearance was similar to that of the 2709. In 1917 cameraman John E. Leonard presented a working model of his new camera to the Hollywood industry at Universal, the Static Club,1 and undoubtedly other venues in an effort to drum up interest (Kerns, 1968). The wooden prototype demonstrated a solution to a problem

Fig. 21.9  The 35 mm B&H Eyemo, with direct optical and reflex finders, a model made for the US Signal Corp during WWII. The Static Club was the forerunner of the American Society of Cinematographers. It was based both in New York and Hollywood and was founded to investigate and find a remedy for the branch-like static electricity-induced marks that sometimes appeared on developed camera negative.

1 

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central to the concerns of cinematographers, namely, how to accurately compose and focus the image, which was best accomplished with a through-the-lens finder. Leonard achieved a more convenient method than that used by the 2709 with his rackover design, which is described in USP 1,297,704, Finder in Combination with Camera Shifting Mechanism for Focusing, filed on April 20, 1917. The original Leonard camera used stationary registration pins, required because the camera was designed specifically for double exposure trick photography. Leonard earmarked Universal Pictures as a customer because it was producing a cartoon series that combined animation and live action requiring both steady registration and accurate composition to line up shot elements. The year before machinist George Mitchell had gotten a job at Universal running its camera service shop and when he saw it, he was impressed by Leonard’s camera. Mitchell sometimes filled in for cinematographers and became a second cameraman shooting serials and newsreels. After being laid off at Universal, he went back to his job as a machinist at which time he was contacted by Leonard who asked him to improve the movement of his rackover camera. Leonard used the improved camera to shoot a 1920 feature directed by William A. Seiter, The Kentucky Colonel, which was produced by William Parsons of the National Film Corporation of America. Leonard and Parsons formed the National Motion Picture Camera Corporation to manufacture the new camera; the first one was built by the Hunt Machine Company of Los Angeles. After trying out the camera, Leonard and Parsons asked Mitchell to further improve it and join their company. Mitchell improved the fixed registration pins design that was described by Leonard in USP 1,390,247, Film Moving Mechanism for Motion Picture Cameras, filed on March 30, 1920, with his own design for what became known as the AA movement, as described in USP 1,403,339, Kinetograph Movement, filed on May 12, 1920. This machine’s two registration pins moved perpendicular to the film plane with a reciprocating piston-like action in and out of the film’s perforations as it came to rest after having been positioned in the gate by the shuttle pins. (Recall that the B&H 2709 used fixed pins.) Parsons raised money from a group of ranchers in the Pacific Northwest, one of whom took over the company after his death, an event that left Leonard with worthless stock, which led him to leave the company. Mitchell agreed to run the company as a repair shop, and the venture proved to be profitable enough to fund a design effort and the building of a new model of the camera that he completed in October 1920. Charles G.  Rosher, Mary Pickford’s cameraman, allowed Mitchell to use his prototype as a second camera on Pickford’s 1921 feature The Love Light. Henry F. Boger, a retired lumberman, invested in the company and reorganized it giving Mitchell a significant equity interest and renaming

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it the Mitchell Camera Corporation. The enduring success of the Mitchell was attributable to both Leonard’s rackover and Mitchell’s improvements. The rackover works like this: the camera box or body (and magazine) is able to slide sideways riding on an “L”-shaped bed (Anderson, 2000). The upright portion of the “L” holds the four-lens turret, which remains in place while the box is slid out of the way to enable the chosen camera-mounted lens to be placed in juxtaposition with the long tube-like focusing viewfinder built into the side of the camera box. A “T”-shaped handle, at the rear of the bed, is unlocked by pushing a button and then rotating it 90° to shift the position of the taking lens to either the viewfinder or the box for photography. The rackover action is smooth and takes surprisingly little effort. The cinematographer was thus able to see an accurate parallax-free image of what was to be photographed, including filters and mattes, and was also able to focus accurately. For the shot the camera operator racked the box and its lens into exposure position losing the advantage of through-the-lens viewing but remaining able to follow the action through a lens of the same focal length as the taking lens that was fitted to the parallax-compensating upright-image optical finder mounted on the side of the box. In 1927 a new and upgraded version of the machine, the Mitchell Standard, was ready for sale, which was capable of running up to 128 fps, a feature useful for the cinematography of miniatures (DiGiulio, 1967). Slow motion was required to make some model shots appear to have convincing movement, like the photography of scale model boats in a tank. The new camera introduced a mechanism with a dual-­forked shuttle that engaged four perforations at once, which was activated by a heart-shaped cam; the piston-action registration pins remained. The camera it was replacing, the Bell & Howell 2709, was much noisier with its electric motor drive. For this reason the 2709 was sidelined for sound filming but used for other applications. To make the Mitchell more acceptable for shooting sound, fiber gears were substituted for steel gears, and sleeve bearings were substituted for ball bearings, but the internal changes to quiet the Mitchell were insufficient for soundstage shooting. Therefore sound-­ deadening housings such as blimps, barneys, booths, and bungalows were used to enclose it. The Mitchell FC 70  mm Fox Grandeur Studio Camera made for William Fox’s Fox-­Case Corporation in 1929, was based on the Standard (see chapter 58). The Mitchell remained the standard studio camera for years but not at Fox, which used the Twentieth Century Camera, a well-regarded machine introduced in 1940 and built by the Cine-Simplex Corporation of Syracuse, New  York. The Fox camera substituted rotation for rackover by turning the camera body through 75° for throughthe-lens viewing and focusing (Clark, 1941). It was designed to be noiseless without a blimp, and offered pin

21  Camera Design Before WWII

Fig. 21.10  The Mitchell Standard. (Cinémathèque Française)

registration; it was also relatively lightweight, had a miniature slate mechanism located in front of the matte box, a variable shutter, and its side-mounted optical finder had automatic parallax correction. Contributions to the design were made by D.B. Clark, G.  Laube, Charles Miller, and Robert Stevens. In 1934 the quieter running self-­blimped Mitchell BNC (Blimped Mitchell Newsreel Camera) was introduced featuring superior access to instrumentation compared with the Mitchell when housed in the studio-built blimps.2 Some of the first commercially available antireflection coated lenses were the Bausch & Lomb Baltars, which were offered for Mitchell cameras beginning in 1939–1940 in seven different focal lengths, from 25 mm to 100 mm; other 35 mm ciné lens could be used in the Mitchell mount. According to DiGiulio (1967), the first two BNCs were sold to Samuel Goldwyn Productions in 1934 and 1935. Although it was not deployed in significant numbers until after the war, early adopters include Orson Welles, who used it for Citizen Kane (1941), and Sergei Eisenstein, who used it for Ivan the Terrible (1944). In addition to the Standard and the BNC, Mitchell produced a number of camera models to suit the needs of its expert and demanding clientele. Other models include the

2  Mitchell built the first three Technicolor three-strip color cameras, all of which were completed by the spring of 1934. The first three-strip camera they made was used by Disney for his 1932 Flowers and Trees, and one or both of the others for the 1934 live action short La Cucaracha. This is described in the chapter Three-Color Technicolor.

21  Camera Design Before WWII

Fig. 21.11  A Mitchell BNC self-blimped camera, made in 1938. (Cinémathèque Française)

GC made to military specification in 1940, the Mitchell VistaVision camera in 1956 (see chapter 64) and the Mitchell 65  mm FC/BFC for Todd-AO in 1957 (see chapter 65). Mitchell also made 16 mm cameras and the Mitchell S35R with reflex video assist (see chapter 78). The Mitchell Camera Corporation was late to add through-the-lens reflex viewing during exposure, possibly because its rackover finder was so good or perhaps it was too great a leap for the company to abandon its signature technology.3

Other professional cameras that came and went on the American market in the first decades include models by Russell, Pittman, and Burke & James. 3 

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The Cinématographe of the Lumières established the level of quality for an intermittent movement; in a world in which the celluloid cinema was being introduced, it made sense to provide an all-in-one machine because of the lack of an infrastructure, but only relatively briefly did manufacturers emulate the Cinématographe’s camera, projector, and printer combination, and single-purposed machines became the order of the day. Professional movie cameras progressed in many ways, perhaps most noticeably advancing from wooden to metal bodies. Various means for powering cameras were used including handcranking, spring or clockwork drive, even compressed air, and as a necessity for synchronized sound, electric motor drive. Cameras arrived with registration pins in addition to shuttle advance to provide the steadiest possible images. Sound recording necessitated ways to quiet cameras’ running noise, as will be described in the next chapter. Designers sought to provide compositional and focusing accuracy in the early days by permitting the user to view the image the lens cast on the film’s emulsion during cinematography. Direct view optical finders provided a brighter image, but compositional accuracy required parallax compensation, especially for filming subjects close to the camera. A popular design approach involved using separate taking and viewing lenses of the same angle of view, turretmounted, or as part of a lens board. Approaches were tried for through-­the-­lens (reflex) viewing prior to actual cinematography. Rapid loading of film without fogging was essential for both field work, and in the studio and several different kinds of internal and external magazines were designed. By the late 1920s, the requirements for lip-sync sound recording led to a definitive change to electric motor drive and the quieting of cameras, at first by placing them in restrictive sound isolating booths but soon thereafter in blimps. The persistent problems of quiet running and reflex viewing, the latter becoming especially important for zooming, were further addressed after the Second World War, as described in the following chapter.

Camera Design After WWII

Arnold & Richter Cine Technik GmbH, or Arri, was founded by August Arnold and Robert Richter in 1917  in Munich (WS: FascinatE Project); its now the major manufacturer of professional motion picture equipment and accessories, according to Bloomberg.com. In 1924 Arri produced its first 35 mm camera, the unassuming Kinarri 35. The Arriflex 35, designed by Erich Kästner, was introduced at the 1937 Leipzig Fair; its outstanding feature was a through-the-­lens reflex viewing system based on a rotating mirror-shutter. The camera, which required a blimp for sync sound studio work, wasn’t used for the principal photography of a Hollywood feature until after the war. The 13 pound Arri 35 used a singlefingered shuttle for pulldown without a registration pin; the lack of this refinement may have been partly responsible for the camera’s slow acceptance by the Hollywood film industry. The shutter-mounted mirror was oriented at a 45° angle to the lens axis and reflected image-­forming light to the viewfinder optics allowing the operator to accurately observe the composition and focus even when the camera was running. The mirror-reflected light forms an image on a ground glass, and although the resulting image flickers when the camera is exposing film it has a lot to recommend it compared with a parallax compensated optical finder or the Mitchell rackover. The Arri rotating mirror design, since it is out of the optical path during exposure, does not reduce exposure and there is no flicker before the camera runs. It took about a quarter of a century before American professional camera manufacturers added through the lens reflex viewing, in part motivated by the zoom lens’s increasing popularity. (The lack of this feature spawned a conversion business in which 16 mm soundon-film and 35 mm Mitchell studio cameras were modified for reflex viewing.) The Arriflex 35 II (or simply the Arri Model II) began production in 1946 despite the destruction of the Arri factory during the war. Circa 1955 the camera’s intermittent was redesigned using a cardiod-shaped cam to drive the shuttle to increase registration precision by adding to the time it dwelled in the perforation (American Cinematographer Manual, 1966; Pope, 2013). Four-hundred and 1000 foot

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magazines were available as was a synchronous motor and a factory-supplied large blimp (Raimondo-Souto, 2007). Model II iterations continued to be manufactured until 1979 for a total build of 17,000 cameras. An effort to introduce the camera to the Hollywood industry was attempted by one of Panavision’s founders, Richard Moore, and Tahitian-born cinematographer Conrad Lafcadio Hall,1 but without success. However, the Arri eventually contributed to changes in filmmaking style, a notable example of which is the 1947 Hollywood feature Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The film’s first act is shot from the point of view of an escaped convict, played by Bogart, an application for which the camera was well-suited since it could be handheld and offered reflex viewing. It was also used for Robert Flaherty’s 1948 documentary, Louisiana Story, and for the Dennis Hopper’s 1969 feature, Easy Rider. In 1952 Arri produced the reflex 16  mm camera the 16ST, which became a workhorse for industrial filmmakers (WS: Lusznat, 2010–2018). Many different 35 mm movie cameras were made for professional cinematography before and after the Second World War, including those in England, Germany, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Italy, and Russia, but of these aside from the Arri, only the French Éclair Caméflex, also known as the Camerette or CM3, was used to any extent in the United States film industry. According to Raimondo-Souto (2007, pp. 252–254), during the occupation the Nazis, to aid their war effort, ordered Éclair-Coutant in Paris to develop the camera. Éclair-Coutant delayed producing a finished design until the war was over to thwart the Germans and the camera was released in 1947. The CM3 became popular in Europe, and a blimp was designed for it for shooting sound. Despite the fact that it did not use a pilot pin, it was reputed to produce extremely steady footage. The camera was used by French filmmakers like the New Wave auteurs Agnés Varda and François Truffaut. Some Hollywood studio camera departments, like that of MGM, purchased both Arriflexes The son of the coauthor of Mutiny on the Bounty, James Norman Hall

1 

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_22

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Fig. 22.1  Inventor Erich Kästner shown in 1937 with his prototype of the Arriflex 35. (Arri AG)

Fig. 22.2  The Arriflex 35 II, 1946. (Arri AG)

and Caméflexes, but they used the Arris more frequently than the Caméflexes because the Caméflex was considered to be a delicate machine. Not every filmmaker agreed with that verdict, and the Caméflex was a favorite of filmmakers like cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who used it for many films and director Francis Ford Coppola who used it for his 1969 The Rain People. The reflex camera used external magazines with 100, 200, and 400 foot capacities with the pressure plate and drive built into them to permit rapid loading. The body had a divergent three-lens turret that allowed for the mounting of both wide-angle and long lenses. Deschanel, who owned two Caméflexes, by email (August 29, 2019) told me: “I used the Eclair CM3 a lot on The Black Stallion for sure and on Fly Away Home because Carroll Ballard and I are big

22  Camera Design After WWII

fans. It is the best handheld camera ever. Nothing ever came close to this design – I have also used it as an extra camera on many movies (for) American Graffiti, Being There, The Right Stuff, The Patriot, Anna and the King, and The Hunted ….” Introduced in 1963, Éclair’s 16 mm NPR (noiseless portable reflex) used an external magazine that positioned the film feed and take-up compartments coaxially, a design that encouraged shoulder-mounting. The external magazine, an integral part of the camera, was loaded with 400 foot cores with the film following a twisted path from one side to the other when threaded over the drive sprockets. The pressure pad was built into the magazine, with the film extending over it to be engaged by the shuttle when the magazine was attached to the camera head that contained the intermittent, motor, and lens turret. The twolens turret allowed for the mounting of high-­speed well-corrected primes, but it was often used with a zoom lens. The NPR was widely used for vérité (or fly-on-­the-wall) cinematography. This kind of external coaxial magazine arrangement was also used for 35 mm cameras like the 1965 Arri 35BL. Another design approach used magazines that fit in the camera body like that used by the Akeley Pancake or Super 8 cameras with their plastic cartridge (a magazine by another name). The quiet-running Arriflex 35BL production camera was introduced in 1972, an outstanding industrial design whose external coaxial magazine was an extension of the body (like that of the NPR), a very different approach from the top-­ mounted reel-to-reel magazines used by the Mitchells. The 35BL’s design encouraged shoulder mounting for vérité-style cinematography. The camera was used for features by cinematographers such as Jack Priestly, Michael Chapman, Vittorio Storaro, John Alcott, Nestor Almendros, and Sven Nykvist. In 1986 a new version was introduced, the 35BL-4, that had a brighter viewfinder and in 1988 the 35BL-4 s with an even quieter movement (Arri Centennial…, 2017, pp. 8, 9). In keeping with the vérité style, with the camera freed from a tripod, dolly, or a crane, but required to make shots with smooth on-screen motion, the Steadicam camera stabilizer was introduced in 1975 by Ed DiGiulio’s Cinema Products Corporation. The original design is described in USP 4,208,028, Support Apparatus, filed June 28, 1976, by its inventor, filmmaker Garrett W.  Brown of Philadelphia. The engineering effort to develop the product is described by John Jurgens (1978) of Cinema Products who calls the apparatus a “personal camera mount.” Its prototype consisted of a vest, worn by the operator, to which a support arm was attached and to which (as Jurgens describes it) an Arri IIC was mounted with the operator viewing the camera’s image using a video monitor. The prototype was used in the ring for the filming of Rocky (released in 1976) and the Steadicam became a widely used camera accessary. Its ability to p­ roduce smooth cinematography without a dolly or crane, or the need to lay down tracks, significantly changed the look of theatrical films thereby making an important contribution to cinema aesthetics by allowing for fluid and flexible camera movement.

22  Camera Design After WWII

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Fig. 22.3 Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel holding a Caméflex CM3 in the museum warehouse of the Cinémathèque Française, April, 2016. The camera pictured has the Kinoptik lenses Deschanel used for shooting features and commercials.

Fig. 22.4  The Éclair 16 mm NPR . (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 22.5  The Arriflex 35BL. (Arri AG)

In the early 1990s, Arri introduced the 535 and the 535B using coaxial magazines like the 35BL. In the late 1990s, Arri joined forces with Zeiss to offer a line of high-­ performance lenses, the Ultra Primes, and purchased the Viennese company Moviecam F. G., designers and manufacturers of an advanced 35 mm camera system. The Moviecam team, which had been led by Fritz Gabriel Bauer, became part of Arri and integrated their system concept into the product line creating the Arricam cameras in 2000, which emulated the Moviecam’s modular concept. The world’s largest customer for Arriflex cameras, which are deployed in its rental fleet, is its major competitor Panavision, which was founded by Robert Gottschalk three and a half decades after the founding of Arnold & Richter. While Arriflex in Germany was busy designing and manufacturing cameras from scratch, a different engineering and business model for supplying the film industry was devised in Los Angeles. In the early 1950s, Chicago-born Robert Edward Gottschalk (1918–1982) was the proprietor of a camera shop in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood Village (Samuelson, 1996). In the days before massive traffic snarls, it was a short drive from Westwood to any one of the many studio lots like Fox or MGM to the South, or due east to RKO and Paramount, or north and east through the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains to the Valley and Universal. Some of Gottschalk’s customers were cinematographers who worked for the studios and Gottschalk himself was making 16  mm films and experimenting with underwater cinematography. He thrived on their gossip and technical

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Fig. 22.6  The Steadicam being used by Stanley Kubrick and Garrett Brown in the Shining (1980) maze.

talk as he sold them a Leica. Gottschalk wasn’t technically trained, but he was tech-savvy and a born promoter, a salesman of concepts. He gathered from conversations with the cinematographers that there was a bottleneck with regard to the introduction of Fox’s new CinemaScope. Bausch & Lomb, Fox’s supplier in Rochester, upstate New York, was unable to build enough of the CinemaScope projection attachments for theaters’ existing lenses. This was a good kind of problem for Fox because the new process was a box office success and the demand for outfitting theaters was great. Hopeful entrepreneur Gottschalk saw that Fox’s problem was his opportunity, a chance to get out from behind the counter selling Kodachrome in bright yellow boxes. He gathered together a small group of investors in 1953, and in 1954 Panavision was incorporated to supply anamorphic projection lens attachments, which is discussed at greater length in chapter 63. Gottschalk, the promoter, had a reputation for taking credit for Panavision’s inventions, but the reputation may have been undeserved since Gottschalk is the sole listed inventor of eight US patents for camera and lens technology.2 As important as any of his other abilities, USPs 3,419,324; 4,015,113; 4,118,720; 4,121,886; 4,246,766; 4,298,255; 4,362,366; and 4,420,231 2 

22  Camera Design After WWII

Gottschalk was able to attract talented engineers like the much-admired Takuo Miyagishima and the highly respected Al Mayer, Sr. In the mid-1950s Panavision had a major break with the help of Douglas Shearer, the head of the sound and R&D departments at MGM. The film industry had just been shaken up by the success of Cinerama, a 35 mm tryptic that added spectacle to exhibition by projecting a panorama on a huge wide screen. Cinerama’s healthy box office transmogrified the cinema experience motivating Shearer to seek a workflow based on a master negative from which MGM could make release prints in any format, new or old. Shearer’s solution for the production of the master camera film was to emulate Todd-AO and its 65  mm negative as the master. He engaged Gottschalk to provide MGM with 65 mm cameras (as described in the chapter 65/70  mm and Technirama), modified machines that were built in the Grandeur Era, which MGM called Camera 65 that became rebranded as Super and Ultra Panavision. This was an important step for Panavision, which had heretofore been a supplier of anamorphic lenses, for it would become a major supplier of cameras for the film industry by providing them with features that Mitchell did not. In the late 1950s, Mitchell introduced a reflex camera, a design motivated in part by the need created by the growing use of zoom lenses. The camera was designated the S35R, later known as the Mk II but like other Mitchells, it required a bulky blimp for sound stage use. The Mk II became popular in Japan and the United Kingdom and was used for second unit photography in Hollywood. Blimped and fitted with an optical tap using its reflex system for video assist, it was designated the Mitchell System 35 with applications similar to those of Du Mont’s Electronicam, as described in chapter 78. The Electronicam was used for sitcoms with a three-­ camera setup, as was System 35 originally for the 1966 production of the musical film Stop the World I Want to Get Off. In 1967 Mitchell offered the BNCR, a reflex version of the BNC, which had to be blimped for sound stage filming (DiGiulio, 1967, 1976). Mitchell had been the industry leader, but its reflex and quiet running camera efforts were one-upped by Panavision’s modifications of its own ­products. Panavision adapted the Mitchell BNC by adding a rotatingmirror reflex viewfinder with variable magnification focusing, a lightweight blimp of advanced design, a crystal sync motor, and electronic instrumentation including zoom lens control. Panavision modified Mitchell bodies or movements for quiet running by quieting the mechanism or by selfblimping the camera to isolate camera noise. Reducing the size and weight of cameras to allow for operator holding was another design goal, for this would give the operator the ability to hold it steady without the use of position equipment like tripods, dollies, or cranes, possibly in conjunction with Steadicam.

22  Camera Design After WWII

The PSR (Panavision Silent Reflex), designed by engineer Takuo Miyagishima, was introduced in 1967 with the Panaspeed crystal sync motor, which may well have been the first of its kind. It allowed camera and recorder to be synchronized without any physical connection (providing the recorder had a crystal sync oscillator), which circumvented the requirement to run both machines from the same AC power supply. Panavision made 67 PSR cameras, 12 of which were made from BNC bodies, the remainder from NC bodies, according to Panavision historian Dave Kenig. Prior to this, Panavision had foreseen the need for 35 mm camera lenses that incorporated anamorphic capability based on the growing demand for films shot in ‘Scope. By the mid-1960s, the Auto Panatar anamorphic camera lenses replaced the Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lens attachments. Panavision optics, primes, and zooms, with and without anamorphic capability, and the upgraded Mitchells, became popular with the industry. According to Pope (2013), in 1970 MGM decided to sell off its camera department, which Panavision purchased, thereby acquiring 14 Mitchell BNCs, 12 Mitchell NCs, 3 Mitchell high-speed cameras, a Bell & Howell 2709 that had been used for animation, and 7 Arriflexes. The Mitchell cameras were ripe for reflex and quiet running conversion, and like the Arris would enter Panavision’s rental pool. Panavision was able to pay off its purchase price for these cameras by leasing the equipment back to MGM and in the following years it purchased the assets of the Warner Bros. and Columbia studios camera departments. Gottschalk shifted the sales business model to a rental model that better suited both Panavision and the industry and

Fig. 22.7 A Panavision Super Silent Reflex with a zoom lens. (Cinémathèque Française)

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Fig. 22.8  Cameraman James Wong Howe peering through the viewfinder of a blimped studio camera while director Howard William looks on. They made several films together. (Cinémathèque Française)

negotiated screen credit for his products. Panavision was now in a better position to monetize the research and ­development effort that went into designing or modifying cameras and lenses, in relatively limited quantities, to suit the needs of cinematographers. A business like this has a high cost of goods, and applying the usual profit margins would have resulted in high sale prices; thus a rental policy was advantageous not only for long-term development efforts but also for customizing hardware for particular projects. The company might have been classified as a systems integrator or a value-­added reseller, but labels aside it was harvesting parts of manufactured devices and rebuilding them to add features or improve performance. The efficacy of any requested effort was easily evaluated by paying attention to Cinemtographers’ experience; if successful any change or modification could become part of the product line. The support of cinematographers by having backup units on hand for replacement in emergencies was a key to Panavision’s growth. Panavision also provided cinematographers with advice about the best hardware for a project and had no qualms recommending Arriflex’s cameras or other brands. Panavision was so secure in its place in the industry that for many years it did no advertising and did not appear at tradeshows. Despite the strength of its business model, the desire of founder Gottschalk to sell his equity interest, while remaining active in management, and the requirements for working capital led to problems. A company like Panavision needs a certain kind of enthusiastic investor who loves the technology rather than a financial investor who is solely in it for profit, but Panavision was not purchased by an enthusiast. The company survived only

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because it provided an important service transcending the vagaries of several changes in ownership. It’s interesting to compare the two most important providers of gear for cinematographers, Panavision and Arnold & Richter. Arri has been a company that has grown in measured steps and for the most part, it has offered its cameras on a sales basis while Panavision turned to a rental model. Panavision, unlike Arri, went through many changes in ownership. Both companies needed to be closely in touch with filmmakers, but Arri’s penetration of the American market was limited by its distance until in 1951, Kling Photo Supply Corporation, became the company’s agent in the United States; Arri would eventually establish its own operation in Los Angeles. The supply of Arriflexes had been limited to cameras “liberated” from the defeated Germans at the end of the war, which were briskly traded on the American market as their reputation grew despite the studios favoring Mitchell cameras. Arri innovated camera designs, from the ground up from its earliest days, but Panavision piggybacked its development efforts on modifying Mitchell cameras. Arriflex combined forces with the prestigious Zeiss to produce a line of lenses for its cameras, while Panavision produced lenses based on products often manufactured for still cameras, repurposing them for ciné applications. The result of these different approaches was that both companies produced world-class cameras and lenses. Counter intuitively, Panavision was Arriflex’s major customer modifying the cameras to expand the choice of lenses, which was known as Panavising the Arris. In 1968, the year after the introduction of the PSR, Panavision offered a handheld 65 mm camera and in 1972, under the project management of Albert Mayer, Sr., the 35  mm Panaflex camera was introduced, a quiet-running camera that did not require an add-on blimp, which became extremely popular. Other camera models include the Panaflex Lightweight, introduced in 1975, which was designed for operator-held stabilization systems such as the Steadicam. The Panaflex Gold II became available in 1987, with a crystal sync oscillator for double-system sound recording (also available for the PSR and Panaflex models) as did the MOS (without sound) Panastar models in 1977 and 1987, both capable of running at 120 fps for slow motion. Gottschalk was murdered in Bel-Air Los Angeles, 1982, at the age of 64 (Slain Inventor’s…, 1983), but the company did not lose direction with his absence, and under the leadership of Mayer in 1997, it introduced the Millennium, subsequently replaced by an entirely different design, the smaller and lighter camera, Millennium XL, in 2004. The most obvious departure from prior models is that the camera abandoned the usual single-­sprocket drive and used two sprockets, one before and one after the gate, like the 1898 Prestwich. Other equipment rental houses designed their own BNC-­ modified reflex versions like F&B/Ceco, General Camera

22  Camera Design After WWII

Corp., Camera Service Co., and ECE in Rome, according to former Mitchell engineer and vice president, the mustachioed and genial Ed DiGiulio (1967, 1976), who founded Cinema Products in 1968. Cinema Products’ BNC modification used a behind-the-lens fixed-in-place semi-­silvered mirror or pellicle (pellicule) that diverted a portion of the image-forming light to the viewfinder optics. While the moving-mirror approach produced a flickering viewfinder image, the pellicle did not, but lost 30% of the exposure light, to which some cameramen objected. Nonetheless, more than 125 of the conversions were built. Both reflex methods, moving mirror or pellicle, require retrofocus lens designs, especially for short focal length lenses, because the pellicle or moving mirror might interfere with the rear element of a lens of conventional design. In 1972 Cinema Products introduced its XR35 with a Mitchell intermittent using a rotating-mirror reflex viewing system whose weight had been reduced by using a magnesium displacement magazine. Whether moving mirror or pellicle, the advantages of seeing through-the-lens while shooting are evident, but why the heightened interest in the mid-1960s when the technology had been offered by Arri since the late-1930s? It may be that the introduction of the reflex Asahi Pentax still 35  mm (Leica format) camera in 1957 followed by the esteemed Nikon reflex cameras of the mid-1960s played a role in demonstrating the effectiveness of the concept, but the imperative need was the growing use of the zoom lens. In the early 1980s, Panavision made a premature stab at creating a high-performance video camera for electronic cinematography, the Panacam (see chapter 79). Two decades later in 2006, Panavision offered the electronic Panavision Genesis, produced in cooperation with Sony using their sensor; the camera was designed by a team led by Al Mayer, Jr. It was n­ otable for the use of a single sensor the size of the Super 35 mm format allowing it to accept standard 35 mm lenses that had familiar optical characteristics. This is impor-

Fig. 22.9  The Panavision Genesis SSR electronic camera in its tripod configuration. (Panavision)

22  Camera Design After WWII

tant because it was an electro-digital camera that was not based on an ENG (electronic news gathering) three-CRT design that used small pickups, like its prior Panacam effort. ENG cameras and their small images surfaces produced more depth of field than many cinematographers were accustomed to, based on their 35 mm experience. At the time Arri also began to offer products in recognition of the fact that the industry was facing a probable transition from film to electro-­digital media. Arri announced the digital cameras the D-20 in 2005 and the upgraded D-21 in 2008 both of which were superseded by its successful Alexa line of digital cameras introduced in 2010, as described in chapter 79. The Genesis was superseded 4 years later by the

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Arriflex Alexa, a camera that had better dynamic range and a remarkably good-looking image when used at a relatively high 800 ISO (Vision3 500 T, Kodak’s fastest 35 mm negative, is rated at ISO 500). In 2009 or thereabouts, Panavision made a temporary decision to more or less halt development efforts. It had been outmaneuvered by the accelerating move to digital cinematography and may have been unable to respond given the inability to develop or access the key component of a digital camera, the sensor. But it returned to camera development and in 2016 announced the Millennium DXL, using a 24.92 mm × 48.59 mm sensor, about the same size as the 65 mm negative, which is supplied by Red Digital Cinema Cameras.

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Ciné Lenses: Part I

Introduction Kingslake (Henney, 1939, p. 10) summed up the theoretical and practical basis for lens design this way: “The original corpuscular theory of Newton (1642–1727), in which light was supposed to consist of a hail of small discrete particles, was abandoned in favor of the wave theory of Huygens (1629–1695), Young (1773–1829) and Fresnel (1788–1827), because it did not adequately explain the phenomena of polarization, interference, and diffraction…At the present time, we have two incompatible theories of light (electromagnetic waves and discrete quanta) in use together, the physicist choosing to adopt whichever theory best fits his experimental conditions. Fortunately, in discussing lens action we need consider only the simple wave theory of light….” So it is that the wave theory has been used by lens designers, which has led to many fine lenses. However, after light passes through the camera lens, the designers of digital sensors rely on the physics of discrete quanta or photons. Lenses for cinematography have their own set of design requirements and priorities that can be somewhat different from lenses for still photography. Since the frame rate is usually fixed, so is the exposure time and because long exposures are not possible high speed optics are desired such as lenses f/2.0 or faster for good results under dim lighting conditions, and also for controlling depth of field. After the Second World War, zoom lenses became increasingly popular because of their ability to continuously vary image magnification and because they facilitate rapid setups by avoiding lens changes. In other words, they are used for varying focal length for exact framing without moving the camera. Ciné lenses for cameras that use lens turrets or through-the-lens reflex viewfinders require a long back focus, the distance from a lens’s rear element to the film plane. To satisfy this need, a reversed or inverted telephoto, also known as a retrofocus lens, is required. For projection optics, which usually have longer focal lengths to permit a long throw, good correction and high speed are also important, plus the ability of the cemented lens elements to

­ ithstand heat. Anamorphic lenses have been widely used w since the early 1950s for both cinematography and projection, but are rarely used for still photography. Although the concentration in these pages is on the evolution of cinema optics, lens design for still photography came first and will be covered accordingly. There have been so many different lens designs that only a handful of important ones are considered here. Jay Holben and Michael McDonough of the ASC Motion Imaging Technology Council, Lens Subcommittee, have compiled a list of 3455 past and current ciné lenses. Holben, in notes to the author, points out that while there are thousands of different lenses, “most can trace their genealogy of design back to six or seven designs that start in the 1860s into the 1930s.” A lens must produce a point-for-point effigy of an object in the visual world on a light sensitive plane surface, and although impossible to perfectly achieve, it can be adequately approximated. The lens does this by bending rays of light that originate from each point in the scene so they will ideally meet at points on the light sensitive surface without color fringing and by maintaining the same image magnification across the entire surface. Any departure from these conditions is called aberration, like chromatic aberration, in which a single image point of white light is surrounded by a ring of colors, or distortion where there is a departure from geometric linearity so that a rectangle is imaged either with the shape of a barrel or a pincushion. It can be a substantial challenge to design a lens that has an acceptable reduction in aberration given its requirements for speed and focal length, and when this is accomplished, the lens is said to be well corrected. Despite many challenges during the past 165 years, lens designers have succeeded in improving lenses incrementally, building on what came before and adding refinements. They have done so at first heuristically and later by tracing individual rays and by using the math created by German mathematician Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, German lens designer Ernst Abbe, Hungarian mathematician Joseph Max Petzval, German mathematician Philipp Ludwig von Seidel, and others (Kingslake, 1989).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_23

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Hall and Dolland In chapter 3, eighteenth-century glass manufacturing was described, as was the very early state of the art of lens design beginning with the work of two Englishmen with entirely different approaches, lawyer Chester Moore Hall and physicist John Dolland (Kingslake, 1989, p. 69). Hall heuristically created the first two-element lens, a doublet, in an attempt to correct for chromatic aberration (WS: Britannica). This is caused by dispersion, the phenomenon that produces the visible spectrum’s rainbow that Newton demonstrated with his prism experiment. Hall’s achromatic doublet, made of crown and flint glass, was used for refracting telescopes, which were sold by his optician George Bass, possibly beginning in 1733, but for only a short while thereafter. Twenty years later Dolland learned of Hall’s invention from Bass (Dokland, 2006, p.23). Accordingly, he was motivated to perform experiments to determine the efficacy of Newton’s corpuscular construct as given in his lectures and then Opticks (1704). As a result of his work with doublets, Dolland became convinced that Newton was incorrect and that it is possible to chromatically correct refractive optics (Darrigol, 2012, p.  245). Dolland filed a British patent for the achromatic lens, teaching Hall’s design, a double convex crown glass element in juxtaposition with a plano-concave flint glass ­element and by explaining the physics of the doublet. In

Fig. 23.1  Hall’s achromatic doublet, below, corrects for the chromatic aberration produced by a simple biconvex lens, above.

23  Ciné Lenses: Part I

1758 he began to make and sell telescope doublets made of a crown biconvex element and a plano-concave flint element. Physicists may be more impressed by scientist Dolland who explained chromatic aberration correction than the tinkerer who first achieved it, while inventors may be more likely to favor the pragmatic Hall’s inventorship. At the time, inventorship of the achromatic doublet was a matter of contention that preoccupied Dolland and his son Peter for years after having been sued by optician Bass and others claiming priority, including Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and Swedish professor of geometry and physics Samuel Klingenstierna. Klingenstierna, some 50 years after the publication of Opticks, pointed out that Newton’s theory of refraction was wanting and shared his observations with Dolland (Darrigol, 2012, p.  96). During his lifetime, Dolland did not enforce the patent, but upon his death it was by his son Peter, which for a time inhibited the development of optics in Britain; accordingly the art of making lenses and optical glass was taken up on the Continent (Mannoni, 2000), as described in chapter 3. Chevalier’s landscape lens design, described below, the first photographic objective designed specifically for that purpose, is similar in construction to Hall’s telescope lens.

Chevalier: The First Camera Lens Circa 1812 British scientist William Hyde Wollaston (1766– 1828) improved upon the single-element biconvex lens used in camera obscuras with a meniscus-shaped lens whose concave side faced the subject, with a small circular aperture in front of it. This produced a flatter field than the biconvex lens and it covered a better field of view with a sharp image. However, its chromatic aberration, or the inability to bring all of the visible colors of the spectrum in sharp focus at the film plane, wasn’t adequate for photography because the daguerreotype and Fox Talbot’s negative-positive systems (both introduced in 1839) were sensitive only to blue-violet light, whereas the eye is more sensitive to the yellow and green. Thus an image that appeared to be in focus on the ground glass might be out of focus on the exposed plate. Despite this defect, the Wollaston Landscape lens was reintroduced in 1890 for a box camera as a fixed-focus lens. According to Kingslake (1989, pp. 26–28), the first photographic lens was one used for daguerreotypes in 1839, the “landscape lens,” an achromatic (color corrected) f/15 objective, designed by telescope and microscope maker Charles Louis Chevalier (1804–1859), the man who introduced Daguerre to Niépce. (See chapter 7.) Like Wollaston’s camera obscura lens, a small aperture was located in front of the lens, in this case a reversed doublet whose negative (diverging) lens faced the subject. This arrangement served to correct for curvature of field, keeping the image in focus over

The Petzval Lens

Fig. 23.2  Chevalier’s landscape lens with a stop in front.

the surface of the daguerreotype plate. The Chevalier lens was achromatic for visible light, which according to Kingslake, illustrates that aperture placement is a key design consideration. The lens, whose focal length was 15 inches, had a diameter of 3½ inches and a one-inch stop and covered a 6½ × 8½ inch plate. When it was used by Daguerre for his first photos, its f/15 slow speed exacerbated the challenge of exposing relatively insensitive plates. Chevalier created a new objective, through trial and error, by using lenses he found on the shelves of his shop. His faster, but mediocre f/6.0 portrait lens, based on his original landscape design, consisted of two doublets, which he and his sons manufactured for 20 years. The design used widely spaced doublets with the flat sides of their negative elements facing each other. Known as a Photographe à Verres Combinés, or combination lens, its individual sections could be used alone at their focal lengths. In 1841, Fox Talbot, who announced the more useful negative-positive system of photography the same year as Daguerre, used a three-element or triplet lens constructed with a negative element between two positive (converging) lenses, designed by Andrew Ross, a maker of microscopes reputed to be the best in the world.

The Petzval Lens In 1841 a much faster lens for portrait work was offered for sale that was designed by Joseph Max Petzval (1807–1891), a professor of higher mathematics at the University of Vienna, who had not previously designed a lens. At the time “…neither he nor anyone else knew anything about lens design,” to quote Kingslake (1989). Petzval succeeded in obtaining the help of eight gunners from the artillery corps of the Austrian Army, experts at ballistic computations, and in 6 months they helped ray trace a design using Petzval’s predictive lens formulae. In this way Petzval designed an f/3.6 long focal length lens with a flat field suitable for portraits, and a wide-angle lens with an f/8.7 aperture. The portrait lens was made and sold by his friend Viennese optician Peter Wilhelm Friedrich Voigtländer (1812–1878) who had taken over his father’s company that made precision instruments. Both

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Fig. 23.3  The Petzval portrait lens.

lenses used a doublet as the front element, a biconvex lens cemented to a thin plano-concave lens whose negative lens’s flat side faces the aperture. These parts are followed by the aperture and two negative and positive or positive and negative lenses, respectively. Two air gaps separated the three elements. By 1862 Voigtländer had sold 60,000 Petzval portrait lenses, which made him, but not Petzval, a great deal of money. The design is the basis for what is known as the Petzval projection lens, which became widely used for the celluloid cinema; it was improved with additional elements to flatten its field and to provide greater speed. Petzval, who failed to patent his invention outside of Austria and received only a one-time payment for his design, was frustrated by Voigtländer’s withholding the royalties he believed were due him and died an embittered old man, Kingslake tells us. Petzval’s lens, called the German System, was copied and widely used for magic lantern projection lenses. Petzval made an important contribution when he discovered how to predict the ability of a lens design to have a flat field using a calculation to determine what is now called the Petzval sum, which is a function of the refractive indices of all of the lens elements and their curvature. A simple lens will form an image that is sharp on a concave surface, but film and sensor surfaces are flat, so it is the job of the designer to find ways to adequately flatten the field. Computational design was furthered in 1857 based on the work of German mathematician Philipp Ludwig von Seidel, with his codification of lens aberrations, which are spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, coma, astigmatism, curvature of field, and distortion. Nonetheless, lenses continued to be designed by trial and error, and obviously, before designs are committed to production first articles are made to be evaluated and modified to improve their quality and manufacturability. In 1878 Friedrich Ritter von Voigtländer (1846–1924) improved the Petzval design, by cementing the rear two elements together and reversing the combination, which produced an optic similar to that of the 1866 objective made by John Henry Dallmeyer (1830–1883) that became the basis for Bausch & Lomb’s f/2.2 Series B lenses. Voigtländer’s improvement became the starting point for f/1.6 lenses widely used for 8 mm and 16 mm projection, and the Petzval design was the basis for Kodak’s widely used 16 mm 25 mm

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Fig. 23.5  Rudolph’s Zeiss Tessar.

focal length camera lens with an f/1.9 aperture. It was also the basis for the 50 mm f/1.9 16 mm Kodak projection lens (Kingslake, 1989. P. 43). Liesegang (1986, pp. 40–42) lists the Petzval lens as one of the three noteworthy optics designed for photography in the half-century between 1840 and 1890. The second is the Aplanat, designed in 1866 by Carl August von Steinheil, a student of Gauss. Aplanat is a term once used to describe a lens corrected for spherical aberration. The final of Liesegang’s three is by Paul Rudolph of Zeiss, who designed the Protar Anastigmat in 1890. An Anastigmat is a lens corrected for astigmatism, an aberration that is seen in the outer parts of the lens’s field in which image points are reproduced as perpendicular lines rather than points.

performance and because it was the basis for later higher-­ speed designs like that designed by Taylor. It can also be considered to have been derived from Rudolph’s Unar with its four uncemented elements. The Tessar’s front element is a plano-convex lens followed by an airspace, then a double convex lens followed by the aperture, followed by a group made up of a plano-concave element cemented to a double convex lens; this design allowed for front element focusing. The Tessar, and its offspring, were in production for a century and may still be in production for all I know. The name Tessar has been used for different designs, and lenses with other names have used the basic Tessar design. In 1916 Zeiss made a Tessar for D.W. Griffith’s cameraman Billy Bitzer for the shooting of Intolerance (Bitzer, 1973). It was usually offered as a general-purpose lens covering a normal angle of view and appeared first with an f/6.3 aperture (USP 721,240) that was improved to have a speed of f/2.8 by Zeiss designers Willy Merté and Ernst Wandersleb in 1930 (USP 1,849,681). It was widely used for still photography, in part because it has high contrast due to its few air-to-glass surfaces, which was important in the days before antireflection coating.

Rudolph’s Tessar

Taylor’s Triplet

The renowned Paul Rudolph (1858–1935) designed the Zeiss Protar Anastigmat, said to have little astigmatism, which was introduced in 1890 and used for magic lantern slide projection. It consisted of a two-element front group and a two- or three-element rear group and was also known as the Triple Protar (Johnson, 1960). According to Liesegang (1986, p. 42), it opened up “a new era for optical projection.” Rudolph also calculated the Zeiss Tessar in 1902, one of the most widely lens designs of all time based on the variations that have been manufactured and how many have been made. The Tessar, with four elements in three groups, has a cemented doublet rear group and can be considered to be derived from a triplet (three elements with two airspaces). It’s one of the most important designs because of its good

Harold Dennis Taylor (1862–1943) began his career with telescope makers T.  Cooke and Sons in York, England. He designed his well-known triplet, which is made up of a planoconvex first element followed by an air space and a biconcave lens followed by the aperture and then another plano-convex lens. The curved surfaces of the convex lenses face away from the aperture. The United States Patent he filed for the design on November 30, 1892, Lens, which was granted as USP 568,052, was for an f/4 portrait lens with a narrow angle of view made of crown (convex elements) and flint glass. Other variations followed such as a triplet that was faster, f/3, with a wider field of view. Cooke did not want to enter the photographic lens business, and as a result Taylor took his design to Taylor, Taylor, and Hobson (no relation) in Leicester to

Fig. 23.4  The five-element (parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 7) Kodak f/1.9 camera lens from USP 1,627,892, Lens, filed June 5, 1922, by C. W. Frederick.

T Stops

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surfaces, would have such low transmission and contrast they might not be worth making. From 1938 onward, antireflection coatings became common. Kodak initially deferred using coatings on exposed surfaces because of their fragility but they learned how to improve their hardness.

T Stops

Fig. 23.6  H. D. Taylor’s triplet, from his USP filed in 1892.

­ anufacture his triplets. The triplet, made up of three elem ments with two airspaces, is an important designs because of its good performance and that it was the basis for later highspeed designs, like those designed by Taylor himself.

Antireflection Coating In 1896 Taylor made an important discovery by observing that a lens with a tarnished surface transmitted more light than one with a pristine surface. In 1904 he patented the use of acids and other chemicals to treat lens air-to-glass surfaces, but the process could not be made to work consistently. Taylor’s discovery led to the development of antireflection coating for lenses, which in its first iteration consisted of coating a film whose thickness is one quarter of the wavelength of green light on a lens’s surfaces; sometimes the cemented surfaces are also coated. Typically the light loss at a surface is reduced from 4% to 1%; image flair is also reduced and contrast increased. In 1916 F. Kollmorgen used hydrofluoric acid vapor to produce a silicate coating on the lens surface, but the method did not work on all types of glass. Alexander Smakula of Zeiss, in 1936, invented the widely used method of coating optical glass surfaces with thin films of calcium or magnesium fluoride using vapor disposition. Multiple and gradient coatings were perfected in later years to further improve performance. Lenses without antireflection coatings, like zooms with many air-to-glass

The use of light meters became mandatory in the sound era after the adoption of the time and temperature method for negative processing, but lenses were marked with f stops that did not necessarily accurately represent their transmission. To give cinematographers a precise way to expose film, in 1949, a group of scientists and engineers formed a Subcommittee of the SMPE Standards Committee to “established a method to establish a standard method of photographically calibrating diaphragm openings for motion picture cameras…” Members included Chairman Rudolf Kingslake, Head of Kodak lens design, Frank Back, Zoomar lens designer, and I. C. Gardner of the National Bureau of Standards (Report of Lens-­Calibration Subcommittee, 1949, pp. 368–378). They devised the T stop, or T number, based on the f stop system, but taking into account light losses; the T stop can be thought of as the effective f stop. For example, an f/2.0 lens with a 50% transmission loss would be marked T/2.8 to allow the cinematographer to accurately set exposure. The T stop was designed to take into account light losses attributable to internal reflections and the shape of the diaphragm, which can depart from circular. The Subcommittee found that using T stops in place of f stops as a depth-of-field guide remained adequate. It’s uncommon for photographic lenses used for purposes other than cinematography to be marked with the T stop scale. A cinematographer’s livelihood has been, in part, based on his ability to accurately expose film, and the craft’s methodology was different from that of still photography. In the studios’ heyday and through the 1960s, cinematographers working on-set lit to an f stop that might very well remain the same for an entire scene or the whole production. The belief was that a constant photographic look was achievable by using a fixed aperture because some aberrations are f stop dependent. Indoor on-set exposures were based on choosing the correct exposure for the key light that was used, for example, for the most important face in the shot (Clark, 1939).

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Ciné Lenses: Part II

A 1916 Opinion Bernard E. Jones (1915, p. 29) advises the readers of his The Cinematography Book: A Complete Practical Guide to the Taking and Projecting of Cinematograph Pictures, that: “High-class cinematograph lenses are of the anastigmat type, giving good definition and a flat field at a large aperture, usually f/3.5, f/4, f/5.6, or thereabouts. Mention must not be omitted of Dallmeyer’s f/1.9 objective, with which the exposure is less than one-­quarter of that needed with f/4, and it becomes possible to do satisfactory work in a poor light or late in the day.” The term anastigmat applies to a lens corrected for astigmatism, just as the term achromat applies to a lens corrected for chromatic aberration, but the designations were often used to describe lenses that were well corrected for other aberrations.

Fast Lenses In 1900 a method for improving the speed of the triplet design was devised by Edward Bausch (1854–1944), the eldest son of the founder of the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, who took over running the company upon the death of his father. Kingslake (1989, p.  108) describes Bausch’s method, which is taught in USP 660,747, as being obvious, in which he split the strong positive rear element into two elements. Horace William Lee used the same approach for his Speedic lens of 1924, which achieved a speed of f/2.5. W. F. Bielicke of the German Astro Company also used the design. In 1922 Rudolph, after having been forced out of retirement by the punishing German inflation after the First World War, returned to work at the firm Hugo Meyer where he designed two cinema lenses, one with an f/2 and the other with an f/1.5 aperture, the latter called the Kino Plasmat (USP 1,565,205). In 1925 Zeiss produced their Tachars with maximum apertures of f/1.8 and f/2.3, the latter being preferred by cinematographers, Salt (1992) observes.

In 1916 Chicago optician Charles C. Minor added a meniscus element to the front airspace of a triplet to produce the four-element Ultrastigmat that was manufactured for 35 mm movie cameras by Gundlach, in three focal lengths, 40, 50, and 75 mm, with apertures of f/1.9. Minor filed for a patent in 1924 (USP 173952) for the design, which caught on for small-format cameras; it was emulated by manufacturers like Bell & Howell (Lumax), Agfa (Prolinear), and Angénieux (Y-type). Ludwig Jakob Bertele (1900–1985), a self-taught optical designer, in 1911 at the age of 23, began working on the design that became the highly regarded Ernostar f/2.0 lens. It was used for the Ermanox camera introduced in 1924, which used 4 ½ cm × 6 cm glass plates; in 1925 the speed of the lens was increased to f/1.8 (Gernsheim, 1962, p. 209). Kingslake (1989, pp. 110–113) credits the Ernostar with being the first to permit “available Light” photography, which was used to great effect notably by photographer Eric Salomon. The lens design was completed while Bertele worked for the German manufacture of cameras and lenses, Ernemann, and is described in USP 1,584,271, Photographic Lens, filed on January 13, 1923. Ernemann was bought by Zeiss for whom Bertele went to work in 1931; in 1932 he designed the famous Sonnar f/2.0 and f/1.5 50 mm lenses for the Contax, a competitor of the Leica that used the same 35 mm film’s 24 mm × 36 mm frame (twice the size of the Edison frame). By Raimondo-Souto’s (2007) account, in the 1920s, competition existed between European and American designers to produce the best quality ciné lenses. He also reports the following: although a wide range of prime lens focal lengths was available for the 35 mm format, from 32 to 270 mm, in the late 1920s wide-angle lenses less than 32 mm in focal length were unable to cover the full frame adequately, and many telephoto lenses did not perform well at maximum aperture. In addition, lenses of the period tended to flare excessively in backlit situations due to internal reflections, a problem that was mitigated as lens coating arrived in the coming years. Raimondo-Souto also notes that originally lens mounts were made of brass, which is insufficiently robust to provide ­precision with repeated use as lenses were repeatedly i­ nterchanged; accordingly, stronger metals began to be used during this period.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_24

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Fig. 24.2  Lee’s Speed Panchro.

Fig. 24.1  Bertle’s Ernostar f/2 lens of 1923 that ushered in available light photography, from his USP.

In the late 1920s Bausch & Lomb produced the Rayar f/2.3 lens, but soon thereafter Zeiss was making f/1.4 lenses using the double-Gauss design, about as fast as ciné optics can be while maintaining good correction. Bausch & Lomb also produced their Baltar and Super Baltar lenses, setting the industry standard for many years. Horace William Lee of England (1889–1976), acknowledged as a brilliant lens designer, was with the Taylor-Hobson Company when he created a series of photographic objectives known collectively as the Lee Opic. He also designed the f/2.0 Speed Panchro, USP 1,955,591, Lens, filed on November 11, 1932, which in the late 1920s was the most widely used lens for Hollywood features, according to Kingslake. A number of different focal lengths, under the Speed Panchro brand, were available for many years. The prime (non-zooming) Panchros are classified as unsymmetrical double-Gauss lenses, a design type that was also used by other manufactures notably by Leitz for their fast Summar, Summarit, and Summicron lenses that were designed between 1933 and 1968 for their Leica cameras (Thorpe, 2016).

Portrait Techniques The studios stars (a term retained from vaudeville) were highly valued commercial assets, and accordingly extraordinary care was given to their photography, especially that of actresses. Cinematographers’ careers were based on their ability to deemphasize facial flaws and heighten actresses’

apparent beauty to create an ideal of perfection only occasionally glimpsed off-screen. Both lighting and lens craft were necessary to achieve perfection. Lenses were “detuned” by shooting through Vaseline-smeared glass, silk stockings, gauzes, and filters that had surfaces treated to diffuse the image to decrease cosmetic imperfections and to create romantic highlights. Typically longer-focal-length lenses were used for close-ups, a technique borrowed from still portrait photographers. After the First World War, with the rise of the star system in Hollywood and the rest of the world, lens designers were given a motivation for creating optics that did not correct for aberrations; they even increased spherical aberration in an effort to produce pleasing portraits by adding a softness to the image. Such special purpose lenses were the Wollensak Verito, the Dallmeyer Kalostat, the Carl Struss Pictorial, the Optis Effligior, and the Astro Kino Portrait. Portrait lenses originally designed for still photography were also used (Raimondo-Souto, 2007). By fiat, at MGM during its heyday, it was forbidden to photograph its stars with a focal length of less than 40 mm (Brideson, 2017). The 50 mm lens was considered by some to be the “standard” focal length.

Retrofocus Lenses All long-focal-length lenses, like those favored for portraits, are not telephoto designs. A telephoto lens is physically shorter than a conventional design of the same focal length, a property it achieves by using a front positive image-forming component and a negative power component between it and the film or sensor. The retrofocus lens, also known as the reversed telephoto, is a variation of the telephoto design that places a negative component in front of the ­image-­forming

Zooms and Varifocals

component. An early application of the retrofocus principle was the so-called amplifier lens used by magic lantern projectionists to increase image size without having to move the projector further away from the screen. The amplifier attachment is a negative power lens, at its simplest a double concave optic mounted in front of the projection lens, but it can need to be large and require several elements in order to achieve good correction. This combination of lens and attachment becomes a retrofocus optic that spreads its rays to form a larger image. Integral lenses of this type for projection were also designed, as noted by Kingslake (1966), who tells us that lenses of the reversed type telephoto were designed about 1929 by Ball, Bowen, and others for close-up projection of motion pictures on a wide screen. One purpose of the retrofocus lens is to increase the back focus of the lens, the distance between the film plane and the rear element of the lens, which turns out to be of importance for turret-mounted lenses and cameras with reflex viewfinders using mirror shutters or pellicles. A noteworthy use of a reversed telephoto design is Lee’s 1931 design of the f/2.0 35 mm wideangle lens for the three-strip Technicolor camera that was manufactured by the Taylor-Hobson Company. According to Kinglake (1992, p. 50) this is the “earliest application” of a retrofocus design. It was required because of the space taken up by the camera’s beamsplitter cube, which was located between the lens and the film planes. Kingslake notes that after the Second World War, the retrofocus principle was used for the Elgeet Golden Navitar, designed for the 16 mm format, a 12 mm focal-­ length lens with a speed of f/1.2, made of nine elements whose last one was aspherical. British lens designer Arthur Cox (1974) lists over 30 manufacturers and 130 designs for these lenses including 8  mm, 16  mm, and 35  mm lenses by Angénieux, Berthiot, Elgeet, Ichazuka, Kinoptic, Kodak, Taylor, Taylor and Hobson, and Wollensak.1 Retrofocus lenses have been widely used for Leica-format 35 mm and medium-format single lens reflex cameras using swinging mirrors for reflex viewing. From the 1960s ciné lenses required a back focus long enough to allow for a reflex mirror.

Zooms and Varifocals Varifocal (variable focal length) lenses that change magnification but do not maintain focus and f/stop were introduced in 1891 by Thomas Rudolf Dallmeyer (1859–1906), the son of John Henry Dallmeyer, and by Adolph Miethe, who independently simultaneously presented similar designs

I met Cox in 1965 at Bell & Howell in Chicago when he was the head of optical design for their new line of Super 8 cameras and projectors. His mandate was to make the lenses he designed in the United States at a cost competitive with that of Japanese vendors, but after a few years B & H shifted its production to Japan. 1 

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(Kingslake, 1989, p.  134). These telephoto varifocals consisted of a front section composed of a cemented doublet with a cemented triplet behind it, with the distance between the two changed by means of a bellows. A varifocal lens introduced in 1901 by Clile C. Allen used a moving negative component between two fixed positive components, which is described in USP 696,788, Optical Objective, filed on February 25, 1901. Although it did not maintain focus with changes in magnification, its construction is the forerunner of mechanically compensated zooms, the now standard method of construction. The Traveling Lens, a varifocal lens used for shooting features films, was designed by the accomplished Hollywood cinematographer and inventor Joseph Bailey Walker (1892–1985). It placed a large negative lens in front of an ordinary camera lens. When the negative lens was moved the image size changed as described in his USP 1,898,471, Camera, filed on September 21, 1929, in which the negative lens is mounted on a rail attached to the camera body and is handcranked away from or toward the taking lens. A zoom lens is distinguished from the related varifocal lens by its ability to maintain focus throughout its range of focal lengths, although some designs do not maintain constancy of transmission with the speed of the lens falling off at the long end of its range, which cinematographers have called ramping. A varifocal lens must be set at the desired magnification and then focused since changing the focal length may change focus. A varifocal lens was designed in 1931 by Helmut Naumann (1903–1985), of the Busch Optical Manufacturing Company of Chicago, by applying a concept proposed circa 1880 by Dutch ophthalmologist and professor of physiology Franciscus Cornelius Donders. This optic was a varifocal telescope using two elements with the outer positive power elements fixed and the middle negative element sliding between them. A variation on the Donders design places negative elements at the ends of the tube with a positive image-forming element sliding within it. Naumann used two- or three-tube mounted positive components actuated by a pin-and-slot mechanism to move at different rates to change focal length, a design that is the basis on the now widely used mechanically compensated zoom lens. Naumann also designed the f/2.8 Vario-Glaukar zoom lens for a 16  mm Siemens movie camera with a range of 25 mm to 80 mm. In 1932 Taylor-Hobson’s Arthur Warmisham (1891–1962) designed the Vario, a zoom lens for the 35 mm format, which was sold as the Bell & Howell-Cooke Varo Lens, whose construction is described in USP 1,947,669, filed on September 28, 1931. The f/3.5 lens ranged between 40 and 120 mm and used three sections that moved at different rates: a high-­ speed double-Gauss objective in the middle, a retrofocus component in the front, and in the rear a telephoto component. This was the first zoom lens for the Bell & Howell 2709

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but focusing required the use of add-on close-up (positive) lenses (Schuller, 1998). There was a hiatus in zoom lens design with the onset of the Great Depression that lasted until the end of the Second World War when Viennese mechanical engineer and scientist Frank Gerard Back (1902–1983) designed the Zoomar brand of lenses for 16 mm and 35 mm Leica-format cameras. They were manufactured by his Long Island-based Zoomar Corporation, which he founded in 1951. The use of Back’s lenses was so pervasive that for a time Zoomar was a generic for zoom lens. Back (1981, pp.  760–761) points out that prior zoom lenses were known as “rubber lenses” and were difficult to manufacturer and of poor quality. To overcome the problems, which Back attributed to the mechanical compensation technique, he and his colleagues spent 2 years working on the mathematics of designing an optically compensated lens. Thus, his Zoomars were optically compensated and did not require mechanical means for the image to remain in focus or to maintain f/stop, as described in USP 2,454,686, Varifocal Lens for Cameras, filed on July 30, 1946. Another similar design was the Pan Cinor of 1949, by R.  H. R.  Cuvillier of the French company SOM-Berthiot (Société d’Optique et de Mécanique-Berthiot), who built their Cinor primes and Pan Cinor Zooms for the 16 mm format. Angénieux, founded in 1935 in France, offered prime ciné lenses in 1951, and in 1956 a 16 mm 17–68 mm zoom, and later a 16  mm 12–120  mm lens. Although Angénieux also made fast lenses of different focal lengths and retrofocus wide lenses it concentrated on Donders zoom lenses for 16 mm and 35 mm. Zoom lens designers like Back, for a time, preferred optical compensation because they feared that the mechanical wear and tear of cams would reduce their accuracy and reli-

Fig. 24.3  Drawings from Back’s USP Varifocal Lens for Cameras.

24  Ciné Lenses: Part II

ability, but such concerns were overcome and mechanically compensated zoom lenses became dominant. Hollywood at first was hesitant to use the zoom lens, but the television industry accepted designs like Walker’s f/3.0 Electrozoom with motor-driven zooming with a range of 52  mm to 152 mm, because real-time television required zooming for live coverage since switching between turret-mounted lenses would have been obtrusive. The humongous Schneider Variogon 30 element television zoom lens of 1973 followed the Donders principle and zoomed (in two separate stages) from 20 mm to 600 mm, with an f/1.6 aperture at wide angle dropping to f/6.0 at the longest focal length.

Anamorphic Lenses Anamorphics are used to change the aspect ratio of photographed and projected images without making a change to the film gauge, thereby maintaining a high degree of compatibility for cinematography, release prints, and projection. There are three types of anamorphic optics: cylindrical lenses, prisms, and mirrors.2 (The subject is taken up again in connection with CinemaScope and Technirama.) Cylindrical lenses:  Paul Rudolph, the designer of the Tessar, describes a lens attachment that uses cylindrical surfaces to create an anamorphoser, which he patented in BP 8512, filed in 1898. The Swiss Ernesto Zollinger, a resident of Turin, in USP 1,032,172, Process for Reducing the Size of A fourth kind of anamorphoser uses a set of vertical and horizontal slits to form images without a lens, essentially a kind of pinhole optic (Kingslake, 1992, pp. 64–66). 2 

Schade and OTF

Pictures on Kinematograph Films and of Projecting such Pictures to their Normal Proportions, filed on March 22, 1910, teaches how to reduce the amount of 35 mm film stock, for cinematography and release prints, by anamorphosing the image to half height and then expanding it to normal proportions during projection, using either prism or cylindrical anamorphic optics. The work of French astronomer Henri Chrétien, and how his Hypergonar cylindrical anamorphic lens adapter was developed into CinemaScope, is described in chapter 62. 20th Century Fox’s CinemaScope, introduced in 1953; it originally used Chrétien’s cylindrical lens attachment that was added to the front of camera and projection lenses. Panavision camera lenses incorporated cylindrical elements into their camera lenses eliminating the need for an add-on convertor. Anamorphic lenses were used in the Grandeur projectors to shape the lamphouse’s illumination to an ellipse to cover the wide aspect ratio frame and anamorphics were part of the light valve optics that were used to record optical sound-on-film tracks.

Prisms:  Sir David Brewster (2005), in his Treatise on Optics, which was first published in 1831, explains that two prisms can be positioned to squeeze or expand an image. The amount of anamorphosing can be controlled by rotating the prism with respect to each other. Brewster points out that the incoming rays must be parallel to avoid chromatic fringing as a result of dispersion. Harry Sidney Newcomer, in USP 1,898,787, Prism Anamorphoser, filed on February 25, 1932, describes how to correct for this aberration when prisms are used as an integral part of a photographic objective. In the early 1950s Panavision introduced the Panatar variable attachment for the projection of films shot in ‘Scope and other wide aspect ratios. It used two isosceles prisms whose rotation was mechanically varied to change the amount of anamorphosis.

Mirrors:  Technicolor’s Technirama, introduced in 1959, was based on the 8-perforation horizontal-traveling 35 mm VistaVision format using an add-on reflection optic constructed from mirror-coated prisms, as designed by Albert Bouwers, founder of the Old Delft Optical Company. Bouwers’ design is described in chapter 66.

Projection Lenses With regard to the state of projection lens supply Glenn Berggren (2007) wrote: “By 1955, there were hundreds of American f/2.0, f/1.9, f/1.8, and f/1.7 lens designs of focal lengths from 2 in. to 9 in. By 1961, ISCO of Germany had designed f/1.6 and f/1.5 lens series. As of 1963, there were

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over 400 different lens designs among all lens makers and focal lengths…All American design efforts had ceased by 1955,” because after 1955 the Japanese and Germans supplied America with projection lenses. Berggren, a student of projection and its optics, became the director of sales for the Kollmorgen projector lens line in 1962, where he was confronted with lenses that tested well at the factory but performed poorly in the theater, a complaint that existed for other brands as well. He reported that a problem with achieving sharp focus across the screen was attributable to the horizontal frame offset establish with the 1929 introduction of the 2-mm-wide optical sound track. Lenses have symmetrical focus (and aberration) about their lens axis, and the buckling of heated film during projection is symmetrical with respect to the width of the entire film, not simply the projected frame; the combination of the two factors was responsible for uneven focus. Berggren’s recommended fix was to use lenses with a numerically greater f/stop, thereby increasing the depth of focus at the gate, but which would have reduced the brightness of the projected image.

Schade and OTF Otto H.  Schade (1903–1981), born in Schmalkalden, Germany, joined the Radio Corporation of America in 1931 where between 1944 and 1957 he developed analytical tools for evaluating the performance of lenses and imaging systems that transformed the science of imaging optics. His concept of optical transfer function, OTF (similar to MTF or modulation transfer function), was a major step in understanding the contributions of system components and how they interact, a technique that correlates well with the human visual system’s perception of image sharpness. Schade (1975) noticed that good-quality high-resolution 35 mm cinema lenses did not perform as well as expected when used with the comparatively low resolution NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) system, but that lowerresolution lenses with high contrast produced sharper-­ looking TV images. He realized that the standard resolution test, performed by photographing increasingly closely spaced line pairs, told only part of the story and developed the more sophisticated and predictive model OTF, which uses the photography of sine wave varying spatial patterns of different frequencies. Lenses well matched to the ­comparatively low-resolution NTSC television were able to image low frequency sine wave patterns even if their response fell off sharply for the higher special frequencies. In other words, high image contrast for low-frequency sine patterns was more important for relatively low resolution television than high-frequency response or the ability to capture fine detail (Boreman, 2001).

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Fig. 24.4  A drawing from Newcomer’s Prism Anamorphoser USP.

Twenty-First-Century Technology Ian Neil (2014), designer of the Leitz Summilux-C prime lenses for digital cinematography, with focal lengths from 16 to 100 mm all at T/1.4, had this to say about the goals he had in mind with this series of lenses: “…we looked for high contrast at medium resolution and medium contrast at high resolution, slightly warm color balance (slightly higher for digital than film lenses), blackest blacks, low glare and low veiling glare, low halo or halation… High contrast and resolution are required as before, but now some previously less noticeable things are becoming more important… A considerable number of lens elements need to be employed, many of which comprise exotic glass types.” This kind of design goal particularity, fostered by OTF and computers, was unknown to prior generations of designers. The Summilux-C 40 mm lens has 16 elements (the published lens diagram does not clearly differentiate the air spaces from the elements), a number usually associated with a zoom lens rather than a prime. Lenses like these from Leitz, Zeiss, Canon, Cooke, and others, have reached new heights of quality and complexity as designers address the tastes of an expert clientele, professional cinematographers, who must adjust to changes created by the introduction of high-performance digital cameras whose sensors and electronics have different characteristics from that of film; in fact, the best are better than celluloid cinema cameras and film. Although one might suspect the

following to be apocryphal, cinematographers are known to reject lenses that are too sharp and retired ciné lens are being remounted for use in digital cameras. Lens designers now have a number of tools at their disposal that are a far cry from what Rudolph and his compatriots brought to bear to design lenses like the relatively simple Tessar. Today’s designers have new types of glass or other transparent refractive materials, multi-layer or gradient index antireflection coatings, gradient index refraction glass, aspheric lens surfaces, plus computers and software to rapidly explore different design concepts, and Schade’s OTF. Also of note is that lookup tables in digital camera image processing computers can make corrections to distortion and chromatic aberration on-the-fly, which can similarly be corrected in post-production. Although digital still cameras and broadcast video cameras often use on-the-fly internal algorithmic aberration correction, ciné cameras may not offer this. Movie camera lens technology has become refined in ways that would have surprised and possibly delighted the earlier generations of optical designers. Tracing a large number of individual rays was once done by using logarithm tables, which were replaced by motor-driven desktop calculators in the 1930s, and in turn by lens tracing software and electronic computers, but senior designers like Willy E. Shade, who worked for Zeiss and Kodak and other companies between 1926 and 1958, continued to wear out books of log tables, as Kingslake witnessed.

Part IV THE CELLULOID CINEMA: Sound

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Silent Sound

During the first three decades of the so-called silent cinema, theatrical exhibition was often accompanied by live sound but the first celluloid cinema exhibition, Edison’s peepshow Kinetophone, introduced the concept of using a phonograph to accompany the image (but without synchronization); this was the first of the many determined attempts to add phonographic sound to the movies by a number of inventors, as described in the next chapter. This chapter explores the practice of live sound combined with early celluloid cinema projection, which is especially interesting because it’s a continuation of the practice that began with the glass cinema, one indication that the terminology pre-cinema for the centuries of the magic lantern medium misses the mark. One of the basic tenets of this book is that cinema is a continuum of technology spanning three eras, the Glass, Celluloid, and Digital Eras, which is different from the view that cinema began with the work of Edison et al. at the end of the nineteenth century. The concept of cinema used in this book is based on the definition that it is the projection of images in motion, which began soon after Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern in 1659. Live sound for magic lantern shows may have begun even before Phantasmagoria performances in the late seventeenth century, using music, narration, and sound effects. While we don’t know with certitude the extent of the use of sound during the magic lantern era, it is reasonable to assume it was widespread, a technique that continued into the twentieth century when lecturers accompanied photographic slide projections. One undoubtedly typical example of a twentieth-­ century performance took place in Placerville, California, in March 1904, combining narration and music with a slide show of the chariot race from Ben-Hur, which was projected in a Methodist Church “assisted by local musical talent” (Fuller-Seeley, 2008). Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, latter-day lanternists toured with their photographic slide shows just as the itinerant European lanternists did with their painted glass slides. One might speculate that the use of live sound for magic lantern shows and early motion picture exhibition are examples of convergent tech-

nological evolution in which similar environments led to similar results, but it’s more likely that there’s a continuity between magic lantern shows and early celluloid cinema performances. Hulfish (1913) in his manual Motion-Picture Work illustrates early combination magic lantern and celluloid cinema projectors using a common lamphouse, indicating that the two coexisted for a time and were used together for performances. Given that this was the case, it is to be expected that these kinds of shows set audiences’ expectations for the continuance of a tradition of live sound and narration during projection. The fact that the silent cinema was anything but silent is well appreciated by cinema historians like Geduld (1975) who writes: “The silent film was not silent. Before 1928 movies were customarily accompanied by one or more of the following: sound effects; music played by live performers; live singers, speakers, or actors; and phonograph recordings.” According to David Thomson (2017, p.64): “For twenty years audiences had shouted out what they thought characters were saying…the audience was ready to add sound effects: a ‘bang’ for a shot, plaintive weeping for sorrow, and feet drumming on the theater floor for scenes of pursuit.” Rick Altman (2004), in Silent Film Sound, explores this link between the Glass and Celluloid Cinema Eras and demonstrates how the need for sound was addressed in much the same way by both. This commonality between the eras has not been sufficiently emphasized in the literature, perhaps stemming from the lack of documentation of the use of sound for the magic lantern, whereas there is documentation for its use during the so-called silent film era. Although the silent cinema was silent in name only, writers, reviewers, and commentators of the time, as noted at the end of this chapter, did not always mention that there was sound accompaniment, which might indicate that it was so ubiquitous that it was taken for granted, or indicate that it was nonexistent. However, we know that meaningful efforts were made to supplement motion pictures with mechanical sound, even before theatrical projection began, with the Kinetophone variation of the Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope was rapidly

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_25

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replaced by projection in theatrical venues, first vaudeville theaters and then in nickelodeon storefront theaters. Vaudeville projection used the house orchestra (or quite possibly the piano on occasion) for musical accompaniment of single act movies, and nickelodeons projected compilation reels of shorts subjects using live music, the phonograph, sound effects, actors, and narration (Musser, 1990). The complication reels of novelty films were a stepping stone to narrative cinema that employed voice actors attempting lip sync with the projected image. I believe that this practice was one that continued from magic lantern shows that used slides of faces with moving mouth appliances for real motion animation. The early celluloid cinema audience experience was enhanced by adding sound but that does not preclude the notion that films were sometimes shown silent in some theaters based on economic exigencies. The phonograph was also used as an inexpensive way to create mood music and to draw people into the nickelodeon. It ought not to be overlooked that audiences also supplied their own sound since they were most likely far from silent, but when sound, especially speech was added to the action on-screen, they had a motivation for ceasing their chatter. Although they had a great influence on the history of the celluloid cinema Kinetoscope parlors flourished for little more than a year. At the end of their tenure Edison added phonograph sound to extend the viability of the business, an effort that failed. By the spring of 1895, 45 Kinetophones were made, possibly fewer deployed, using cylinder phonographs linked to the electric motor of the Kinetoscope by belt-drive. The phonograph players, whose sound was heard through ear tubes, were added to the bottom of the cabinet in what had been the Kinetoscope’s battery compartment. The combination of image and phonographic sound playback, while it may have been satisfactory for accompanying movies of dancing or for setting a mood, was not designed to provide accurate synchronization. The Kinetophone’s initial cost was $400, while a Kinetoscope was $350, but both prices soon dropped by $100 due to lack of demand (Musser, 1991). Edison reintroduced the Kinetophone brand in 1913 for a unique 28  mm audiovisual phonograph synchronized sound system, and in the same year, he also used the same name for a 35 mm synchronized sound system for the theatrical cinema. Beginning in 1896, and for the following decade, the major venue for cinema projection was the vaudeville theater, a nationwide circuit of about 200 theaters that offered shows made up of variety acts that circulated from theater to theater on a regular basis (Musser, 1991). In these theaters the celluloid cinema was, at first, considered to be another act by the theater managers and the public and reviewed as such in newspapers. A good assumption is that the orchestra played for the projected film shorts just as it would have

25  Silent Sound

accompanied any other act, just as live music had played for the Lumière Brothers’ Cinématographe screening at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, or for Edison’s presentation of Jenkins-Armat’s Vitascope at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall. Vaudeville’s adoption of the cinema quite probably contributed to its acceptance and to expectations of musical accompaniment but as Everson (1998) has written, the day came when 35 mm vaudeville projections were considered to be a “chaser” to clear the house for the next show, but the day was also coming when vaudeville acts would be subordinated to the projection of motion pictures in movie palaces. Vaudeville acts participated in singing their own swan song since they were popular subjects for early sound-­ on-­disk and sound-on-film shorts. After a decade, the exhibition of cinema in vaudeville houses was superseded by the nickelodeon in which 35 mm projection was more than an act, it was the main attraction. As noted, Hulfish (1913) describes that early exhibition used both motion picture and magic lantern projection using the same lamphouse for both glass slides and celluloid cinema. The slide projector and motion picture heads moved on rails and slid into or out of juxtaposition with the lamphouse that provided illumination for either. The slide projector was used for titles before they were part of the 35 mm print, and it was also useful for announcements using hand-colored drawings or photographs. A popular form of entertainment used magic lantern slides for sing-alongs with audience participation assisted by on-screen lyrics. To compete with each other, in their heyday, nickelodeons used the player piano (Geduld, 1975, p.  37) and increasingly elaborate means to create sound coordinated with the projected image with actors voicing parts, sound effects, and live music, which in some venues were more likely to be used only for weekend performances. Cue sheets with suggested musical passages for a film’s scenes appeared circa 1910 and collections of mood music for cinema were introduced in 1913 with the publication of the Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Volumes. Some performances included small musical ensembles, often a piano and a trap drum set outfitted with sound effects gadgets, whose overuse became annoying as overly enthusiastic drummers earned their keep by punctuating any and all action; by 1915 audiences found sound effects to be tiresome and their use declined (Altman, 2004; Geduld, 1975). Recreations of news events and narrative films of increasing length were gaining currency, and the wrong sound cue broke the mood. The next transition in exhibition occurred when the nickelodeon storefronts were supplanted by the conversion of existing theaters or the building of new ones for motion ­picture exhibition, which led to a furtherance of the requirement for sound accompaniment. The American Fotoplayer, one of several similar products, was a premium musical

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Fig. 25.1  Musical motifs were used by pianists to accompany “photoplay” screenings, like those reproduced here from the collection Sound for the Silents; Photoplay Music from the Days of Early Cinemas, collected by Daniel Goldmark. (Dover Publications)

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instrument and sound effects machine for medium size theaters that gave the leader in the field, Wurlitzer, significant competition (Bowers, 1986; Altman, 2004). Approximately 4500 Fotoplayers were made between 1912 and 1925 in factories in Berkeley and beginning in 1917, in Van Nuys, California, by The American Photo Player Co. (Bowers, 1986, p. 146; End music worry…, 1921, p. 373). One version of the instrument, the Fotoplayer Model 45 (generically called a photoplayer), the company’s most elaborate, similar to its competitor, the Wurlitzer Motion Picture Orchestra (Style H), consisted of three cabinets, each about the size of an upright piano, with two outside sound effects cabinets flanking the central piano-organ that could be played manually or by using two piano roll mechanisms. The piano roll devices were designed for changeover, like the changeover for film reels, for uninterrupted play. Hundreds of “Picturolls” were made for it to set the mood for chases, romantic scenes, marches, and so on, and it could also play any of the thousands of the available 88-note player piano rolls. Sound effects included horses’ galloping, gun shots, sirens, trolley sounds, tambourines, klaxon horns, etc. At the Reel Thing film, preservation and restoration conference in August of 2016, Joe Rinaudo, in the lobby of the Linwood Dunn Theater of the Pickford Center of AMPAS on Vine Street in Hollywood, played the fine-looking Fotoplayer he had restored. Its engaging and robust music and effects reminded me of a merry-go-round calliope. Some sound effects devices were simple and single-purposed such as boat whistles or telephone ringers, which were supplied by organizations like the Yerkes Manufacturing Company of New York City, whose production line in 1911 ran 24 hours a day to meet demand. There were also multipurpose contraptions like the “air cabinet” of Pittsburgh’s Excela Soundograph Company that reproduced the clatter of horses’ hoofs on various surfaces, as well as trains, thunder, rain effects, bells, gongs, glass breaking, and more, all for

25  Silent Sound

$150. The similar Allefex, advertised as being capable of making 50 different sounds, was imported to the United States from England. Other machines with guilelessly descriptive names were the Noiseograph, Dramagraph, Soundograph, and Kinematophone. Sound effects for the early cinema were the antecedent of radio sound effects and the sound effects created in today’s Foley post-production studios. Zone (2007) reports that sound effects produced by the phonograph were used by phantom rides such as Hale’s Tours railway car ride simulations, as noted in chapter 60. Musser (1991) recounts that Pennsylvanian Lyman H. Howe (1856–1923), who had staged phonograph concerts in 1896, moved on to adding sound to projection. By 1899 he had recruited several troupes of pianists, projectionists, and monologists to service the nascent exhibition industry with what was sometimes known as the “talking picture play,” whose popularity peaked between 1908 and 1912 (Geduld, 1975, p. 42). While Howe’s troupes were acknowledged to be outstanding, he had competition, amongst them the future founder of Paramount, Adolph Zukor with his Humonova troupes, 22 in all made up of 3 players each. Other troupes that practiced the art were the Actologue and Dramatone groups but these did not have the critical acclaim of Howe’s performers, especially that of his lead “lecturer” Leroy Carleton (1880–1910), who had been hired by Howe when he was 23. Carleton was the most famous voice artist of his time or perhaps of any other. In America he was known by name to one and all; the only contender who comes to mind is Mel Blanc, who was celebrated for performing the voice of Bugs Bunny. Carleton had the ability to mimic an extraordinary range of human voices and animal sounds and was able to vocalize other amusing sound effects. He added to the flexibility of his efforts by engaging helpers who relied on conventional sound effects devices. The appreciative and mournful obituaries that appeared after his untimely death in 1910 were a testament to his singular skills as the maestro of

Fig. 25.2  The American Fotoplayer Style 45, pictured here, consists of three cabinets. It is almost 18 feet long, consisting of a piano, player piano, and organ. It had 244 pipes, 195 reeds, a xylophone, orchestra bells, and about 2 dozen drum traps. It was capable of producing many sound effects. (Sotheby’s)

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Jones Lost His Roll, which used animated unscrambling words superimposed over the action. A similar technique was attempted in the 1906 Biograph film Looking for John Smith, in which words flew out of the mouths of the actors (Walls, 1953). The use of comic strip “speech balloons” for cinema is described in USP 1,240,774, Motion Picture and Method of Producing the Same, filed July 19, 1917, by Charles Felton Pidgin of Massachusetts, an inventor who earlier in his career had a passion for statistical data and calculating machines using punched cards (Heide, 2009). During the filming of the scene, the actors inflated balloons on which their dialog was inscribed. Regretfully, the innovation did not take off. As the narrative cinema grew in stature and films became longer and more sophisticated, the studios offered recommendations for music and then supplied cue sheets and scores composed for the production. Prestige movies were expected to have prepared scores, an early example of which, in the later part of 1908, was L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise that premiered in France with a score by Camille Saint-Saëns (which became cataloged as his Opus 128), but the following month, when the film was shown in the United States as The Assignation of the Duke of Guise, Saint-Saëns’ music was dropped. For the February 8, 1915, opening of The Clansman,1 a score of familiar classical selections was put together by conductor Carli D. Elinor that played during its 22-week run at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. The compilation was performed by a 40-piece orchestra, vocal soloists, and a chorus of 12. For the film’s performances that commenced on Fig. 25.3  A poster for one of Howe’s Animotiscope performances, March 3, 1915, at the Liberty Theatre in New York, where it September 27, 1897. played for 44 weeks, it was retitled The Birth of a Nation. A new score was assembled with the help of director D.  W. mimickery (Altman, 2004). In Japan the counterpart of Griffith by Joseph Carl Breil that included Dixie and The Ride America’s movie lecturer was the benshi, who sat beside the of the Valkyries, which helped to establish the use of leitmoscreen and dominated the performance becoming a bigger tifs for cinema (Geduld, 1975, p. 38; Marks, 1997, p. 131). box office attraction than the film (Geduld, 1975, p. 40). It’s unclear whether or not the theme, The Perfect Song, comIn each of the early applications of the celluloid cinema, posed by Breil, was used for the Los Angeles performances peepshow Kinetoscope parlors, vaudeville houses, storefront but the song became a mainstay during the film’s exhibition. nickelodeons, repurposed legitimate theaters, and newly-­ (Breil’s score survives but Elinor’s does not.) By the midbuilt cinemas, sound was added to the image, either live or 1920s, special films, a category of prestige production, were by mechanical means, which required accurate synchroniza- accompanied by orchestras in movie palaces and for road tion for certain kinds of on-screen action and certainly for show engagements, by which time intertitles supplanted the speech. Mood music or environmental sounds, like that of use of actors attempting lip synchronization. Grand first-run waves or wind may not have required precise synchroniza- picture palaces were built in Manhattan, like the Palace, the tion, whereas the sound of a breaking dish did. Actors behind Capital, and the Roxy, which became the studios’ flagship the screen attempted lip synchronization to match the action theaters. These ornate citadels set the style for theatrical exhiof filmed actors, but these efforts were thwarted because the bition architecture in other big cities. The tradition of live peron-screen players frequently did not speak enough, more formances and a prescreening organ recital is a practice that often than not relying on pantomime, denying the live per- persisted through the 1960s and lives on today at Disney’s El formers their opportunity. In addition the films were changed Capitain Theater in Hollywood. too frequently to allow for the voice actors to perfect their parts. Some diverting attempts at speech simulation were created by the inventive Edwin S. Porter with his 1905 How 1 The film was to have been produced by American Kinemacolor.

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Fig. 25.4  The layout of a typical storefront nickelodeon. The piano is in the upper right corner, the screen on the right wall.

Fig. 25.5  Sound effects artists behind the screen, 1908.

By the 1920s musical scores were written for films and composed and/or conducted in the United States by musicians like Max Steiner, Joseph Carl Breil, Victor Herbert, and Ernö Rapée. Scores were also being written by European composers such as Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, Jacques Ibert, Paul Hindemith, Dimitri Shostakovich, and the aforementioned Camille Saint-Saëns. In America, road show

companies with orchestras, lighting and sound effects technicians and their gear, toured from city to city. It was a matter of studio pride to repeat the excellence of performance that was achieved in New  York’s first-run houses as the show moved to major theaters in different parts of the country, as exemplified by the attention MGM lavished on the 1925 productions of The Big Parade and Ben-Hur. But as desirable as

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Fig. 25.6  Pidgin’s USP cover sheet teaching his speech balloon invention . Whispers might have been conveyed by partially inflated balloons and shouting by breathing so much air into them that they popped.

it might have been as an audience experience it would have been unprofitable and impractical to deploy the same costly effort for the many second-tier theaters, the great majority of theaters in the country, which were not responsible for the lion’s share of box office revenue that came from the far smaller number of movie palaces. Despite the fact that by 1921 the movies were generating significant revenue, as affirmed by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which reported a total revenue of $880,000,000, with the industry employing half a million people, reducing exhibition expense was an industry goal; most of the investment in and costs of running a vertically organized company consisting of a studio, distribution, and exhibition businesses, was in exhibition (Adams, 2012). The ability to replicate

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the orchestral experience at a lower cost in any theater was a primary motivation for the first successful theatrical synchronized sound systems, like Warner Bros.’s Vitaphone sound-on-disk process, introduced in 1926, and Fox’s Movietone optical sound-on-film system, introduced in 1927 (Solomon, 2014). A sense of how early cinema sound, through 1926, was regarded by contemporary writers in the field may be appraised by reviewing film manuals for professionals or accounts of motion picture technology meant for a general audience. The way in which several such books considered the question of sound is therefore summarized: Motion-Picture Work by David S.  Hulfish (1913). Hulfish’s book (approximately 600 pages counting plates) is an authoritative manual covering a broad range of motion picture technology and practices. It provides a scientific background for cinema technology and served as a practical handbook. Hulfish devotes 20 pages to sound (pp. 241–262) and describes several systems in detail with considerable enthusiasm. His accounts concerning both the recording and especially the exhibition of phonographic processes is historically of great value. How to Make and Operate Moving Pictures, by Bernard E. Jones (1917). Jones’ 216-page book is a well-illustrated thorough guide to cinematography, processing film, printing, optics, projection illumination, projection screens, additive color systems, and so on, without a word about sound. The lack of any mention of cinema sound might possibly be attributed to the author’s view of the tentative nature of phonographic sound or an indifference to performed sound, thus disqualifying it from a book that recommends established practices. The writer was an expert observer, and the omission is interesting. Moving Pictures, How They Are Made and Worked, by Frederick A.  Talbot (1926). Talbot’s 427-page book is an expert account of cinema technology for a general audience covering a wide range of topics including special aspects of cinema such as visual effects. It has an eight-page chapter titled Pictures that Move, Talk and Sing, in which Talbot describes the synchronized sound efforts of Edison and Gaumont and the attempts to have the projectionist use dial indicators to achieve synchronization (also covered in Hulfish), as described in the next chapter. At the conclusion of the brief chapter devoted to sound, he writes: “What is the future of phono-motion-pictures? If the truth be told it is not very promising.” Talbot’s position is that speech for film would be a disaster for the industry, and the art of the silent cinema, because it would destroy its universality. Motion Picture Photography for the Amateur, by Herbert C. McKay (1924). McKay was a respected and knowledgeable writer whose articles and columns appeared in photography magazines for decades. His 220-page book for amateur

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filmmakers comes closest to a discussion of sound in three paragraphs with the heading The Spoken Title in which he advises actors to look into the camera lens and to carefully enunciate so that words spoken correspond to those that will follow on the intertitle card. He also cautions actors to be careful about what they say because some people can read lips. A Million and One Nights, by Terry Ramsaye (1926). Ramsaye’s 868-page book has been reprinted many times. His self-appointed role was as the Suetonius of America’s early celluloid cinema, writing an engagingly, frequently gossipy, and sometimes apocryphal popular account. He notes that Edison’s phonograph work was the inspiration for his

25  Silent Sound

initial efforts to record and playback images using the cylinder format, but says nothing about de Forest’s Phonofilm sound-on-film system that was introduced in 1923. Perhaps the omission can be accounted for by the fact that it was installed in only a few dozen theaters. The Kinetophone version of the Kinetoscope is briefly described with Ramsaye telling the reader: “The talking pictures of 1895 had the brief life of a novelty, and in their short day, only a matter of weeks, ran down the scale of diminishing interest which has characterized every subsequent advent of a talking-picture effect.” That’s an accurate appraisal of sound-on-cylinder and soundon-disk efforts, which are described in the next chapter.

Synchronizing the Phonograph

Edison’s 1877 invention of sound recording, the phonograph, may have been his most extraordinary feat: he seemingly pulled it out of thin but vibrating air. In this case there was no competitor, no other inventor who was close to coming up with a practical means for recording and playing back sound, although there had been efforts to record sound as a visible pattern in order to study its nature, as described in chapter 28. Edison’s invention consisted of a transducer that turned changes in air pressure into a record of sound’s waveform on a deformable medium, originally tin foil wrapped on a spinning cylinder (Geduld, 1975). Sound was recorded by creating grooves in the foil using vibrations transmitted from a sound-collecting horn to a diaphragm to move a stylus (needle) in an up-and-down direction, which came to be known as the hill-and-dale method. These deformations on the moving surface of a cylinder create a pattern analogous to the original waveform (Frayne, 1976). Gramophone disks, on the other hand, are made with a side-to-side or lateral groove. The sound recorded on Edison’s cylinder was played back by means of the inverse process, which resembled (or in fact could be) the one used for recoding. Edison was known as a master of electrical inventions but the phonograph, at least in its first incarnation and for years thereafter, used a springwound rotating cylinder and purely mechanical transduction without electronic amplification, which had yet to be invented. Edison (1878) described the mechanism as follows: “The general principles of construction are, a flat plate or disk, with spiral grooves on the face, operated by clock-work underneath the plate; the grooves are cut very close together, so as to give a great total length to each inch of surface – a close calculation gives as the capacity of each sheet of foil, upon which the record is laid, in the neighborhood of 40,000 words.” This account appeared in an article that was a promotional piece laying out proposed uses for the phonograph, and Edison was especially keen on its use for dictation. It’s of note that he describes a “flat plate or disk” and not the cylinder he actually offered for sale as described in USP 227,679, Phonograph, filed March 29, 1879. The p­ honograph

26

was an invention that people marveled at, which turned Edison into one of the most famous people in the world. However, unable to turn the invention into a healthy enough business to satisfy him, despite promoting it as a dictation machine, using it as a component in a talking doll, and setting up phonograph parlors for paid listening experiences, distracted by his work on other inventions, he let the phonograph lie fallow for about a decade. The methodology of sound recording information storage and playback designed for the phonograph informed Edison’s attempts to create synchronized sound moving images. Edison rebuffed Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell’s (1847–1922) offer to combine forces to improve the phonograph, but his interest in the device was rekindled after Bell manufactured an improved version (Geduld, 1975). Bell’s Volta Laboratory created a more durable phonograph cylinder with better sound quality, the Graphophone, using a wax formulation rather than foil. The Volta Graphophone Company was formed on February 3, 1886, to which Volta’s patents were assigned. The following year it merged with a Philadelphia entity to become the American Graphophone Company, which was thereafter controlled by Columbia Records in 1893 (Miles, 2017). In response to Bell’s improvements, Edison came up with a superior formula for the cylinder’s coating and for a time his product bested the Graphophone in the marketplace. Edison and Bell had a reciprocal and competitive relationship, with Edison improving the telephone and Bell improving the phonograph. Their inventive efforts became the foundations of commercial giants that changed American industry and civilization, Edison with General Electric and Bell with American Telegraph and Telephone. Bell’s telephone, invented in 1875, lacked a sufficiently sensitive microphone but Edison’s carbon or carbon button microphone was far more efficient and turned the telephone into a better product. Other people in the field, notably Emile Berliner (1851–1929), German-American inventor of the Gramophone, came up with the carbon microphone concept at more or less the same time but after drawn-out litigation,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_26

229

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Fig. 26.1  The top portion of the USP cover sheet describing Edison’s phonograph.

Fig. 26.2  A phonograph recorder made by de Hardy, Paris, 1878. (Cinémathèque Française)

Edison was deemed to be its inventor, based on his Improvements in Telephones or Speaking-Telegraphs, USP 203,018, filed on December 13, 1877. The carbon microphone is made up of a sandwich of carbon granules held between two parallel metal plates; the thin and outer plate, the diaphragm, pushes against the carbon actuated by changes in air pressure. The rarefactions and compressions of air move the diaphragm, varying the electrical resistance of the carbon granules, hence its ability to conduct or modulate the direct current running through it. The fluctuating current produced replicates sound’s waveform as a signal that is transmitted through wires to a telephone receiver where an inverse process turns electricity into sound. Edison’s carbon microphone continued to be a part of the standard telephone instrument for the next century.

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

Berliner’s Gramophone used the disk embodiment that Edison described above, which was superior for handling, storage, and manufacturability, compared with the Edison or Bell cylindrical records. The disk embodiment is described in USP 564,586, Gramophone, filed November 7, 1887. (The British Patent, 15,232, was issued the day before in England.) Edison initially ignored the commercial possibilities of the disk format because the cylinder offered recording and playback at constant linear velocity, whereas the radial velocity of the disk’s grooves decreases with radius, thereby lowering its potential high-frequency response. It’s not evident that this might have been important for Edison’s first intended application, dictation, and in practice it apparently did not detract from the quality of Gramophone disks. Berliner’s Gramophone record, a seven-inch disk made of hard rubber, was first shown in the United States at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on May 16, 1888. It would be several years before it was marketed and distributed in America but it became the basis for sound reproduction for decades and the model for future data disks. Urged by his colleagues Edison gave in and introduced disk recordings in 1911, and late in 1915 he touted the improvements of his Diamond Disk, promoting it in what he called his tone tests. The public demonstration consisted of a theatrical comparison of the recording artist and the Diamond Disk, both hidden behind a curtain from the audience’s view. Morton (2004) relates that the artists and the disks were hard to tell apart because the devilish Edison used singers who could mimic their recorded voices. Cylinder sales grew between 1900 and 1910, but except for the dictation application, the cylinder version of the phonograph disappeared from the marketplace. There were many attempts to use the cylinder or the disk in conjunction with the motion picture projector to achieve synchronized sound, but only an important handful will be described. Geduld (1975) lists more than 125 sound-on-disk patents filed or issued (it’s not clear which) between 1897 and 1927 in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, but some of these may be duplicates filed in more than one country. A review of issued US patents reveals that some appropriate patents were omitted from the list and there were undoubtedly many other attempts all over the world. Recorded sound for film can have as its goal something less that lip synchronization but inventors sought to create the technology to achieve verisimilitude. The technology requires devising means to record image and sound in synchronization and the inverse function of projecting and playing back image and sound in synchronization. The earliest commercial use of recorded sound for the celluloid cinema was Edison’s 1895 combination of his cylinder phonograph and the Kinetoscope, the Kinetophone, which was not intended to reproduce lip synchronized sound. A device similar to the Kinetophone is described in USP 576,542, Picture-Exhibitor filed on December 12, 1895, by George W. Brown, of Colorado, which

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

231

Fig. 26.3  From the cover sheet of Berliner’s Gramophone USP. His efforts led to the acceptance of the disk format. In this embodiment the recording stylus (29), remains in place and a glass mastering disk (13) is moved past it while rotating. The bottom of the disk is coated with lampblack and oil, and the stylus scribes an analog of sound’s waveform by cutting away material. An engraved copper plate is made from the recording from which pressings are made for sale.

describes a peepshow combination movie viewer and phonograph. I have no information as to fate of Brown’s invention. With hindsight, it seems obvious that given that live musical accompaniment had become essential for exhibition in the 1920s, some kind of a sound-on-disk or soundon-film solution would be highly prized, but recorded motion picture synchronized sound requires both electric power and electronic amplification. In the earliest days of the celluloid cinema electrification was not a given, and electronics had yet to be invented; projectors were usually handcranked and used chemical combustion for illumination. Even the most dutiful projectionist was challenged by the task of starting both the film and the disk or cylinder at the same moment and maintaining them in sync given the best available technology, and sound emanating from the projection booth, behind the audience, was undesirable and unconvincing; it had to come from the screen to be a convincing illusion. In addition, phonograph disks or cylinders typically had a run time of up to 3 minutes but with the growth of narrative cinema films were many times that in duration. Until the introduction of Vitaphone in 1926, about three decades after the first attempts to create phonograph-based synchronized sound, no sound-on-­disk system attained more than middling marketplace acceptance, but even Vitaphone was an incompletely engineered product and at best an interim solution. Before Vitaphone sound recording posed difficulties since cameras were commonly handcranked and phonographs were spring-wound, not a good combination if the expectation is to have synchronized sound with a steady pitch. Camera noise and the insensitivity of state-of-the-art microphones meant that they had to be placed close to the person or musicians being recorded, which presented a challenge to exclude them from the composition.

The initial attempt to combine synchronized phonograph sound and movie projection was in France by Auguste Blaise Baron (1855–1938). Its possibility dawned on him after experiencing an Edison Kinetophone in operation at the Casino de Paris in 1895. Baron and Fréderic Bureau filed for patent protection on April 16, 1896, for an apparatus to synchronize a wax cylinder with a movie camera. Baron built a related design based on French Patent 276,268, filed on April 4, 1898. His assistant, Algerian-born cameraman Félix Mesguich, a former employee of the Lumières, in his 1933 memoir Tour de Manivelle: souvenirs d’un chasseur d’image (Turn of the Crank: memories of an image-hunter), affirmed that he and Baron had achieved synchronization in 1897– 1898 in Baron’s Graphophonoscope studio in Asnières-sur-­ Seine, a northwestern suburb of Paris (Riordan, 2011). Mesguich wrote that they filmed dance and music sequences, as well as a lip synchronized film, of Baron’s wife. Some of the experimental work was photographed on 50 mm film and projected using a dual-lens projector to eliminate flicker, which was apparently similar to Skladanowsky’s approach. The motor-driven camera was electrically slaved to the recorder, and four carbon microphones were used to provide the signal to drive an electromagnetic needle to cut a wax cylinder (or possibly a disk). The four microphones’ outputs were mixed together to create a strong signal. Baron showed the system to Marey in 1898 and in 1899 he synchronized projection of a singer, Mademoiselle Duval of the Lyric Gaiety Theater. A demonstration also included film of the magician Trewey, which was put on at the l’Académie des Sciences in Paris, but the inability to attract investors and Baron’s failing eyesight led to the abandonment of the ­project. He patented a number of motion picture inventions in France including one for a film perforating machine, and I found two US patents granted to him, one for a film slicing

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26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

Fig. 26.4  Cameraman Félix Mesguich (lower left) and a technician in Baron’s sound studio. (Cinémathèque Française)

machine and the other involving aerial photography. Baron died blind at the age of 83, in an old folks’ home in Neuilly, a fate similar to that of two other French film pioneers, director Georges Méliès and animator Emile Cohl, all of whom died in 1938  in reduced circumstances (Herbert, 1996). Several other French workers were active in the field in this period, for the most part with inventions that were not demonstrated. An exception to this was the Phonorama by L. A. Berthon, C. F. Dussaud, and G. F. Jaubert, which was used to advertise the General Transatlantic Company of Le Havre (Compagnie Générale Transatlantique) in a booth at the Paris Exposition of 1900. The film was shot by Mesguich with an apparatus using a motor-driven shaft to run the camera and 12 recording phonographs, according to Geduld (1975). Exposition-goers visiting the booth listened to the recorded sound through earphones, each hooked up to one its 12 phonographs. The films were hand colored by Gaumont. A notable synchronized sound motion picture phonograph system, which for a time was a commercial success, the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, premiered on June 8, also at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Cinematographer ClémentMaurice Gratioulet shot the films and its inventor, clockmaker Henri Lioret, designed and built its recording machine, the Lioretographe, an attempt to improve Edison’s phonograph. The Lioretographe, which Lioret patented, was on sale during the 1890s. Gratioulet, who introduced ClaudeAntoine Lumière to the Kinetoscope, managed the legendary Cinématographe screening on December 28, 1895, at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café. The Gratioulet-Lioret

s­ ystem used a phonograph with oversized cylinders that ran for 4 minutes, and the camera used a variation of the 35 mm format (Abel, 2005). Singing and speech were pre-recorded. Sarah Bernhardt was one of the performers who lip synced to projected film, today called post-production synchronization or dubbing, which solved the problems caused by the camera’s noise and the relative insensitivity of the microphones. During performances the playback phonograph was located under the screen with the projector in a booth to isolate its noise. The projectionist listened to the sound from the phonograph’s horn by telephone as he handcranked the projector (Gitt, 2007). He would have been prodigiously gifted to have been able to maintain synchronization using such a rough and tumble method. Whatever the result, the Paris press was enthusiastic, and the show, which continued on tour and then returned to Paris, played to full houses for a couple of years after which the novelty had worn off. It was reported that the sound was strident and synchronization was hit or miss (Geduld, 1975). The most relentless sound-on-disk system inventor of the early decades of the celluloid cinema was the ingenious Léon-Ernest Gaumont (1864–1946), manufacturer and movie producer. He had been a good science and math student who, at the age of 16, was forced to suspend his studies due to his family’s financial difficulties but managed to continue to take courses in science and got a job with Jules Carpentier (1851–1921), a manufacturer of electrical, scientific measurement, and photographic equipment. Carpentier was present at the Lumières’ Cinématographe

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

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Fig. 26.5  A 1900 poster for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre. (Cinémathèque Française)

premier, which inspired him to design his own Cynégraphe camera-­projector. In October 1895 he built the preproduction model of the Cinématographe for the Lumières, eventually manufacturing about 1000 of them under contract (Herbert, 1996). Carpentier met Gaumont at a series of astronomy lectures and in 1881 hired the 16-year-old to work in his factory where Gaumont worked for 9 years, becoming head of the operation (McMahan, 2002). He left for military service after which he returned to Carpentier’s shop for a while, before finding employment at Comptoir Général de Photographie, which he purchased in 1895, naming it L. Gaumont & Cie. Mannoni (2000) compares Gaumont to his major competitor Pathé and points out that unlike Pathé he was a man of great technical skill and an outstanding cinema inventor. As described in chapter 11, that same year Gaumont licensed Demenÿ’s 60  mm camera-­ projector, the Chronophotographe, which he manufactured under the name the Biographe. Although a number of short subjects were produced for it, it was not successful in large part due to its use of non-standard unperforated film but it introduced the beater-cam intermittent mechanism that was deployed in a number of early projectors. In 1897 Gaumont embraced

Edison’s 35 mm format, manufactured cameras and projectors for it, and went on to create versions of his Chronophone synchronized sound system. He later designed the additive three-color Chronochrome system, which is described in chapter 45. Gaumont also became a major producer of films in France and established a British subsidiary (Abel, 2005). The conundrum that faced Gaumont, and every early soundon-disk inventor, was the need to devise a way to have the sound come from the direction of the screen while driving the phonograph and projector in synchronization; the former required the phonograph to be near the screen, and the latter required the phonograph to be near the projector. Geduld (1975, p.  44) wonders why the distance problem wasn’t solved using rear-screen projection to allow the camera and projector to be in close proximity; the Austrian Ferdinand von Madaler, living on Long Island, came up with something along those lines as described in USP 1,408,620, Combined Picture Projecting Machine and Phonograph, filed August 24, 1920. The projector-phonograph is located behind the screen, and its image is thrown onto a mirror located on the audience side of the screen, which is reflected back onto the front of the screen, with the phonograph horn located under the screen facing the audience. I have no i­nformation

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Fig. 26.6  Léon-Ernest Gaumont, circa 1920.

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

the most prolific and determined inventor-entrepreneur of early sound-on-disk systems, and it is often difficult to ­differentiate amongst them given the plethora of brand names and versions of his Chronophone. At the Paris Exposition of 1900, he displayed, but did not demonstrate, a projector and phonograph arrangement with purported synchronization capability. This was Gaumont’s first concept, which he later disavowed as primitive (Geduld, 1975). Several British patents were granted to Léon Gaumont and H. H. Lake between 1901 and 1903 describing systems for synchronizing projectors and phonographs, some of which covered electrical synchronization methods. In a foreshadowing of object-based surround sound, like Dolby’s Atmos, a Gaumont stagehand moved the (presumably) behind-the-screen loudspeaker to follow the projected action. His first operational Chronophone system was publically demonstrated on September 10, 1902, and again on November 7, 1902, at the Société Française de Photographie, which included projection of a talkie of the inventor himself; for this demonstration Gaumont (1959) acknowledged the participation of Baron. The system proved to be unreliable and Gaumont assigned two of his people, Laudet and Frély, to improve it, according to McMahan (2002). Theisen (1941) writes that the system used a “specially designed gramophone from which a projector was operated by means of a flexible shaft.”

Fig. 26.7  The sound projection conundrum: the projector and record player are most easily started and synchronized from the projection booth, but sound must originate from the direction of the screen. In Madaler’s solution, as taught in his USP, both machines are in close proximity behind the screen and mechanically interlocked. The gramophone’s horn emerges from the bottom of the screen and the projector’s beam is reflected from a mirror onto the front surface of the screen.

as to whether or not this arrangement was commercially employed. Many sources have been used in this account of Chronophone efforts including Gaumont’s (1959) paper discovered amongst his effects after his death, which was published in the Journal of the SMPTE. Gaumont was certainly

Soon after the Société Française de Photographie screening Gaumont abandoned this flexible shaft method and switched to a “current distributor” attached to the ­phonograph player shaft to start it and the projector together to keep them in sync. Gaumont describes variations of the concept of electrical synchronization, in his article, based

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

Fig. 26.8  An illustration of a Gaumont projector-gramophone setup.

on his recognition that the projector’s speed had to be regulated by that of the phonograph disk in order to maintain constant pitch. Of the nine US patents granted to Léon Gaumont I found, seven cover sound for cinema, of which five deal with synchronizing the phonograph and projector.1 On July 17, 1902, Gaumont presented nine films using what he considered to be the culmination of his electrical synchronization efforts but the essential design challenge was unsolved: the projector and the gramophone had to be close to each other while the sound had to come from the screen. In 1903, in an attempt to solve this problem, Gaumont used a telephone system, a microphone at the phonograph near the projector to transmit the sound to the speakers at the screen. Cinematography involved filming the performers lip syncing to a phonograph record, a technique that, with few exceptions, became the mainstay of Hollywood musical numbers. Gaumont’s approach was a precursor of electronic amplification that made it possible to separate the loudspeaker from the playback instrument; this effort may have been the Phonoscènes system exhibited at the Musée Grévin and then at the Théâtre Gymnast. The Chronophone was improved by Gaumont engineer Georges Laudet in 1906 and marketed under the brand Elgéphone using compressed air amplification. Gaumont (1959) wrote: “The volume was so great that the phonograph recordings could be heard in halls seating several thousand persons.” The amplifier was part of the phonograph itself, which was placed at the screen. Like other disk gramophones, the needle followed the side-to-side or lateral oscillations of the disk’s grooves but in this case, the Gaumont cinema sound USPs: 759,639; 1,053,946; 1,074,943; 1,144,339; 1,163,079; 1,538,319; 1,584,170. 1 

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needle was part of a suspended shaft that vibrated to and fro in a chamber of compressed air between two apertures. The side-to-side motion of the needle’s shaft modulated compressed air that escaped through the apertures to exit the sound horns. This method is known as siren amplification. Gomery (2005) tells us that from 1905 to 1907 the Chronophone was frequently used as part of vaudeville or variety acts, which he classifies as the first stage of its commercial deployment. The next stage is characterized as Gaumont’s attempt to extend its vaudeville application to the American market beginning in 1908. Gomery (2005, p.  25) also asserts that Gaumont, as a member of the Motion Picture Patents Company (the Trust), in an effort to conform to their strictures of product standardization, abandoned the Chronophone in 1908, but continued to work on the process. The subjects chosen for Chronophone were highbrow performances and variety acts, the same kinds of shorts as those produced in later years by Phonofilm, Vitaphone, and Movietone. On December 27, 1910, Gaumont projected a lip sync film of physicist and inventor Jacques-­Arsène d’Arsonval at the Académie des Sciences, and in 1911 Gaumont showed sound moving images at the Gaumont Palace, formerly the Paris Hippodrome, to an audience of 4000, using the Laudetand Frély-designed Chronomégaphone system (patented in 1905) using siren amplification, possibly the same device used in the Elgéphone. In 1900 Sarah Bernhardt had been called upon to perform for the Phono-CinémaThéâtre motion picture sound system and once again for Gaumont’s Phonoscènes, and a dramatic production, with actors from the French stage, was filmed as a 20-minute play in 1912 (Geduld, 1975, p.  58). Gaumont describes what may have been the basis for Phonoscènes, in Synchronizing Device, USP 1,053,946, filed February 17, 1909, in which the projector motor is slaved to the phonograph motor. The phonograph’s motor operated at four times the speed of the projector motor, and its current was sent to the projector motor’s commutator to drive it in synchronization. The projector was a Gaumont-manufactured machine, and by 1910 Gaumont was using gramophone disks up to 16 inches in diameter (Crafton, 1997). Geduld (1975) writes, at odds with Gaumont’s account: “Gaumont never satisfactorily solved the problem of amplification any more than he was able to refine the sensitivity of the phonograph. His most advanced technique for increasing the volume of sound was to use several loudspeakers or morning-glory horns while also intensifying the sound waves by means of compressed air. This method was basically one adopted from the Auxetophone of C.  A. Parsons.” During 1912–1913 Gaumont mounted a tour combining the Chronophone and the Chronochrome (later renamed Gaumontcolor and also known as Trichrome) and exhibited novelty numbers and the aforementioned sound film of a play. From June 5 to June 7, 1913, a Gaumont sync system was used at the 39th Street Theatre in Manhattan projecting

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Fig. 26.9  In USP 1,503,946, Synchronizing Device, Gaumont takes advantage of AC current to slave a projector motor to a phonograph motor.

Filmsparlants, or Phonoscènes, about 4 minutes in length, variety or cabaret acts and opera arias. Gomery (2005, p. 25) writes that Gaumont used a mechanically linked ensemble of two phonographs to achieve the desired level of sound for Chronophone screenings. The Chronophone family of sound-on-disk technologies had the greatest longevity of any of the pre-electronic amplification synchronized phonograph motion picture technologies, but Chronophone never went beyond its novelty phase and was probably a financial disappointment to Gaumont and his backers. Of the 150 synchronized sound Chronophone Phonoscènes distributed by Gaumont more than 100 were directed by Alice Guy Blaché working both in Bellville, France, and for English language Phonoscènes in the Gaumont Studio in Flushing, New York (McMahan). Kellogg (1955) relates that after 1926, Gaumont experimented with a double-system magnetic ­recording technique invented by Peterson and Paulson, but

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

Gaumont (1959) relates that this work involved optical sound recording using a multistage amplifier to drive a mirror galvanometer using film that was 25 mm wide run at 500 mm/sec. The First World War halted Gaumont’s phonographic cinema sound work, which he returned to but without the same gusto; nonetheless he gave a demonstration in Paris of two short subjects in June 1922 that Geduld (1975, p. 59) reports was said to have been of good technical quality. The Laudet and Frély Chronomégaphone or Elgéphone siren or compressed air amplifier, according to Geduld as noted above, was inspired by the Auxetophone, invented by Horace Leonard Short and Sir Charles Algernon Parsons (1854–1931), the latter the inventor of the steam turbine (Parsons, 1942). Parsons bought the rights to the invention described in Short’s USP 677,476, Sound Increasing Device, which had been applied for on April 29, 1899. Using the fortune earned from his turbine invention, Parsons perfected the Auxetophone as a pastime. The device used a conventional spring-wound phonograph whose stylus drove a diaphragm that was mechanically coupled to a moving comb that passed across a fixed comb to modulate a stream of compressed air provided by an electric motor-driven air pump. The invention is disclosed in two patents granted to Charles Algernon Parsons of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, USP 816,180, SoundProducing Instrument, filed April 12, 1904, and USP 817,868, Sound Reproducer or Intensifier Applicable to Phonographs, Gramophones, &c., filed April 12, 1904. In the first disclosure, Parsons cites the use of the device for amplification of the recordings of musical instruments, and in the second, he states that others, such as Edison, had and were attempting to use similar pneumatic amplification techniques. Parsons sold the talking-machine rights to the Gramophone Company who had machines made for them by the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey. Siren amplification was apparently used for the cinema by both Gaumont and Messter, and while their efforts seem to have been inspired by the Auxetophone, I can find no account of it itself having been used for cinema. Prolific German cinema inventor Oskar Eduard Messter (1886–1943) is described by Albert Narath (1960)2 as the founder of the German motion picture industry and was of great influence in “the first sound film epoch in Germany (that) lasted from 1903 until 1913.” Messter demonstrated a sound system using a version of three-phase alternating ­current to keep the motors of the projector and phonograph in synchronization; despite a problem with speed ­variations, said to have been due to changes in line voltage, Messter publically demonstrated his Kosmograph on August 30, Albert Narath (1900–1974), born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was an expert in photochemistry who worked in the German film industry mathematically analyzing optical sound technology in order to improve it.

2 

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237

Fig. 26.10  Alice Guy Blaché is possibly the woman standing in the center directing a Chronophone scene in Gaumont’s Bellville studio. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 26.11  Oskar Eduard Messter

1903, at the Apollo Theater in Berlin and at the 1904 World Exposition in St. Louis in his Biophon Theater. Narath describes Messter’s method of 1904 as follows: “An improved version, with the addition of a Wheatstone bridge hookup and galvanometer… became the most used instru-

ment in the following years.” More details are needed to understand how this worked but the addition of the galvanometer implies that synchronization was operator monitored and controlled. A remarkable 1500 sound films were shot by Messter’s studio with an average length of about 220  feet. By 1913 Messter, who owned a theater chain in Germany, installed 500 Biophon projectors in his and other theaters. Messter and Gaumont agreed to confine sales of their films to their respective countries but co-marketed a system as the Gaumont-Messter Chronophon-Biophon (McMahan, 2002). Messter, like Gaumont, used a pneumatic amplifier for exhibiting these films. Despite their popularity Messter’s (1936) films of arias and theater sketches lost money, and he eventually settled on producing only silent films, but he didn’t lose interest in sound and continued to patent approaches for synchronization described in German patents that issued through 1930, including methods for sound-on-film (Bock, 2009). In America in 1908, the National Cameraphone Company of New  York City began to lease its system to theaters, a product designed by Eugene Earl Norton and promoted by entrepreneur Carl Herbert (Gomery, 2005). Norton had previously been an engineer with the American Gramophone Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. As usual, the films consisted of short variety acts including singing, comedy, and drama. The Cameraphone used gramophone recordings, sometimes purchased off-the-shelf, which were played back

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as actors were filmed attempting lip sync. According to Geduld (1975), the system was initially in high demand; it’s described in Norton’s USP Synchronizing Apparatus, USP 1,190,943, filed April 14, 1909. Cameraphone exhibition used numerically indexed prints and depended on the projectionist eyeing an indicator displaying the rate of the behindthe-screen gramophone to maintain synchronization by varying the rate at which he handcranked. Such an exertion must have been beyond the capability of any but the most fit and determined projectionist. Gomery (2005) points out that Norton did not solve such vexing issues as the cost of the system, low sound volume, the ability to maintain synchronization, and the use of a dingy porous screen behind which the gramophone was located. Nevertheless, for a time, the Cameraphone was the Chronophone’s competitor in the United States. According to Gomery (2005), “…by the end of the 1909-1910 season, the Cameraphone Company was out of business, remembered only for the large amount of money it lost.” At about the same time, another attempt at marketing a phonographic synchronized sound system was taken on by German-born Carl Laemmle (1867–1939), who immigrated to the United States in 1884, and would one day found Universal Studios. While working out of Chicago, Laemmle put on impressive demonstrations of the Synchroscope, which had been invented by American Jules Greenbaum, general Manager of Deutsche Bioscop GmbH., of Berlin (Billboard, 1908, p.  33). Greenbaum’s USP 923,511, Checking Apparatus for Synchronously Running Kinematographs and Talking Machines, was applied for on September 17, 1907, teaching the synchronization of the two machines by having the projectionist observe dial indicators, “like the hands of a clock,” and a signal from an electric lamp from the assistant at the phonograph indicating the moment the needle dropped. Once again the projectionist had to match the rate of the projector to the gramophone by changing the rate of handcranking. The approach is similar to Norton’s Cameraphone and suffers from the same kind of limitations. The Synchroscope underwent further engineering development by J.  A. Whitman. One of the Synchroscope demonstration films was of tenor Enrico Caruso, which was screened at the Majestic Theatre in Evansville, Indiana, in the summer of 1908 (Quarterly Journal…, p.370). Audio technology inventor Edward Kellogg (1955) writes that a number of film-sound records were produced of “the era’s most celebrated musical entertainers in their best known routines.” Aside from synchronization issues, the device’s acceptance suffered from the disk’s short playing time, the expense of installation, and lack of content. Other attempts were made in America, such as one method by prolific Philadelphia inventor Isidor Kitsee as given in USP 1,083,498, Synchronizing Picture-Exhibiting

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

and Sound-Record Machine, filed August 5, 1911. The ­disclosure describes communicating the rate of the phonograph cylinder’s rotation electrically using current modulation to electromagnetically actuate a friction break operated by solenoids to slave the projector’s rate to the phonograph. This is a more sophisticated approach than the mechanical breaking system devised by Edison for his Kinetophone theatrical projection system, described below. I have no information about Kitsee’s device having been deployed. Another American effort was that of the Motion Picture Company of New York, formed in 1913, which offered the Synchronophone and the Cinematophone (Slide, 2013). European attempts include the British Anamatophone Company that went out of business in 1911, which was based on the 1910 Simplex Kinematograph Synchronizer from Thomassin; Alfred Dusker competed with Messter’s Biophon with his Cinephone in Germany; Karl Geeyr designed, for Deutsche Mutoskop und Biograph, the Ton-biograph; and cinematographer Guido Seeber of Berlin created the Seeberphon (McMahan, 2002). Edward Hill Amet (1860–1948), born in Philadelphia, was an active inventor who had worked for Edison, with whom he had a contentious relationship. He filed diverse patent applications such as those for sound recording devices, a fire alarm, and a coin-operated peepshow. In 1895 Amet approached George Kirke Spoor (1871–1953) seeking backing for a motion picture projector design. Spoor, who was then the manager of the Grand Opera House in Waukegan, Illinois, would found Essanay Studios (Ramsaye, 1928, Chicago Reports…, 1916, p. 413). He put up some money, and in 1896 Amet completed his Magniscope projector (not to be confused with Paramount’s Magnascope projection process). Spoor continued his interest in projection with his Natural Vision large format process, as described in these pages. I cannot find a patent granted for the Magniscope projector, which might mean that Amet did not file an application because he felt there was not sufficient novelty (or that I failed to find it). It was a successful machine that was sold at a reasonable price and Musser (1995, p.  162) tells us that: “the seventy-pound magniscope was portable and designed for work with touring companies. Many itinerant showmen, particularly in the Midwest, eagerly purchased the screen machine and toured the smaller cities and town,” continuing in the tradition of peregrinations established by the lanternists in Europe some two centuries before. Amet and Spoor made films together to promote the machine, and after a few years, in 1900, Amet sold his interest to Spoor. From 1911 to 1913 Amet, through his American Talking Machine Company, of Waukegan, worked on solving the problem of synchronized sound filing three applications on the subject of combination projector-phonographs, USPs 1,065,576; 1,162,433; and 1,221,407, but he appears to have made little headway with the system, which he called the Audo-Moto-

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

239

Fig. 26.12  Kitsee described a friction break (yellow), actuated by electromagnets to control the rate of rotation of the shaft of the projector sprocket drive based on the rate of rotation of the phonograph motor. The projector ran at a slightly faster speed than its nominal rate in order for the break to slow it. From USP 1,083,498.

Phone, a name that cannot be confused with that of any other synchronized sound system, or anything else. Amet is better known as a filmmaker than an inventor because he is one of the creators of the fake newsreel (Fielding, 1972). Denied permission to film the Spanish-­ American War in Cuba in 1898, he staged the battle of San Juan Hill and Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Rider’s victory charge with the help of his Waukegan neighbors. He is one of the first filmmakers to use miniatures, and with the help of a single assistant, William H. Howard, shot model ships in a water tank against a painted backdrop using charges set off electrically that were visually enhanced by puffs of cigar smoke. In this way Amet simulated the sinking of Admiral Cervera’s Caribbean Squadron as it attempted to run the American blockade at Santiago de Cuba (Herbert, 1996). Georges Méliès also engaged in a documentary simulation with his 1898 film about the Spanish-American War by staging the aftermath of the sinking of the USS Maine, Visite sous-marine du Maine (Divers at Work on the Wreck of the Maine) (Ezra, 2000). In 1909 Charles Urban’s Warwick Trading Company introduced the British Cinephone to New York, the invention of W.  C. Jeapes described in BP 10,543, which like the Cameraphone and the Synchroscope required the projectionist to watch indicators to guide handcranking to maintain synchronization. The Cinephone system is clever insofar as no physical connection, no shaft or belt and pulleys, or electrical signal was required between the two machines. Its principle was its flaw: it used a photographed dial indicator in the lower left hand corner of the projected image and a dial indicator on the front of the spring-driven phonograph’s cabinet. The projectionist’s task was to compare the on-screen

image of the indicator with that on the phonograph cabinet to determine how to vary the cranking rate. The on-screen indicator was purposely and inescapably obtrusive. Moreover, like all such systems, it must have been an exercise in futility to consistently achieve synchronization with handcranking. The theater pianist’s job was to help the projectionist by setting up the phonograph: the pianist turned off a light bulb to tell the projectionist to start cranking. It’s pointless to describe all of the many details of the system as given by Hulfish (1913), an acute observer who viewed the Cinephone with some enthusiasm. Cinephone had an arrangement with the Victor Talking Machine Company to provide phonographs and records for the process, but despite this valuable commercial link the company went out of business in 1911 (Gomery, 2005, P. 27). The Photo- (or Phono) Kinema, devised by an inventor with eclectic interests, Orlando Kellum, was used for several short films most notably by D.  W. Griffith for his 1921 Dream Street for least one scene and Griffith’s spoken introduction. Two USPs by Kellum, 1,292,798, Synchronizing Apparatus, filed June 28, 1914, and 1,294,672, Method of Producing Assembled Synchronous Kinetograph and Phonograph Records, filed April 28, 1915, describe the system. Synchronization was achieved by using a commutator with six brushes linked to six electromagnets attached to a crankshaft that looks like the innards of an internal combustion engine. The commutator was driven by the phonograph, and the crankshaft was used to drive the projector’s Maltese-­ cross sprocket drive intermittent. Edison’s initial foray into phonograph sound for film was the Kinetophone modification of the Kinetoscope peepshow, the original 35  mm motion picture display device; the

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Kinetophone was a failed attempt to salvage the declining Kinetoscope business by adding a phonograph within its cabinet (see chapter 14). In 1911 Edison introduced the Cinephonograph, boasting that he had solved the problem of synchronized sound. It worked well under lab conditions but had to be withdrawn after a lack of exhibitor acceptance. Sponable (1947, April–May) reports that it was called the Cameraphone and introduced in 1908, but he may have confused this with the National Cameraphone product (Geduld, 1975). One problem was that the sound was tinny and not sufficiently loud for theatrical use, and another problem was that its cylinders ran for about 5 minutes, not enough playing time as narrative films were gaining interest. Apparently, this was Edison’s trial balloon to gauge the engineering difficulties of projected cinema phonographic sound, for in 1913 he reused the name Kinetophone for his reintroduction of a hopefully better-­ performing theatrical sound-on-cylinder

Fig. 26.13  The USP cover sheet of Kellum’s Phono-Kinema sync system, which was used for some performances of Griffith’s Dream Street.

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

system. To add a bit of confusion, the same year he also used the Kinetophone brand for his 28  mm audiovisual format (see chapter 53). The theatrical Kinetophone’s phonograph was placed behind the screen and used an oversized cylinder that had up to 6 minutes of running time, with a horn and diaphragm that were also bigger than those used for home machines. A mechanical sound amplifier was part of the system, designed by Daniel Higham, as described in Phonic Apparatus, USP, 1,036,235, which was filed April 17, 1908. Higham’s amplifier used a continuously rotating electric motor-driven amber cylinder and a hard rubber shoe, with one end of the shoe attached to the phonograph stylus. The up-and-down (hill and dale) motion of the cylinder’s stylus changed the pressure applied to the hard rubber shoe to control how much it rubbed the amber cylinder. At one end of the shoe, a connection was made, by means of a slender rod, to the horn’s diaphragm to vibrate it to produce sound as the shoe’s motion pushed on it. In this way the device added amplitude to the hill-and-dale motion of the stylus to provide more energy for the diaphragm’s vibrations (Kellogg, 1955). The sound maintained correct pitch by slaving the projector’s rate to that of the phonograph. Small changes in the frame rate were hard to see but small changes in the sound cylinder’s rate would have been easily heard. The motor-­ driven phonograph drove a string belt over 3-inch pulleys and idler rollers running above the ceiling or through the walls of the theater. Gomery (2005, p.28) describes the belt as a black waxed silk cord, about the thickness of heavy fishing line. The belt was connected to an apparatus at the motor-driven projector in its booth at the rear of the house. The projector was run a bit fast so it could be slowed down, to keep pace with the phonograph, by using a mechanical friction break whose pressure was controlled by the string belt. The system required the projectionist to keep an eye out for synchronization errors and make adjustments as required. After experimenting with other methods the Edison Studio shot film and recorded sound at the same time, tolerating the noise of the camera, the crackling of arc lights, and traffic noise. Eyman (1997) writes: “The spring-driven recording unit with a large recording horn was placed alongside the set and was connected by a belt to the camera. To mark the start of synchronization, the two halves of a coconut shell were knocked together….” The oversize horn allowed for the recording machine to be placed far enough away from the actors so that it would not intrude into the composition. Edison filed a patent application for a version of the theatrical Kinetophone on February 8, 1908, which was granted as Apparatus for Recording and Reproducing Motion and Sounds, USP 1,182,897. Generally speaking there were two electrical methods inventors used to synchronize the phonograph and the projector: firstly, by running the projector at a fast rate and breaking the rotation of its direct current motor using feedback

26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

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Fig. 26.14  From Higham’s USP teaching mechanical phonograph amplification. The speaker diaphragm (24), is driven by a mechanism that uses mechanical advantage to actuate it by following the hill and dale motion of the cylinder’s (yellow) groves, which are imparted to it by the stylus 14.

from the phonograph, or secondly, using alternating current to slave the projector’s AC motor to the phonograph’s rotation. Edison had boxed himself in with his irrational contempt for AC and did not avail himself of the second method, which led to his adoption of the first, but in an inelegant embodiment. On August 25, 2017, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood, I saw a minute or so of a Kinetophone film, possibly recorded using the method described by Eyman. The digital restoration was by George Willeman, of the Library of Congress, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, who commented to my email inquiry on August 28, 2017, with this response: “This film was shown as part of the grand inaugural showing in New York in February of 1913. In the Edison Co. ledger, it is referred to as  The Lecture, but the title on the film is The Edison Kinetophone. We are not 100% sure of the speaker, but believe him to be Allan Ramsay, a Canadian actor who was hired as staff director for the kinetophone project.” Ramsay’s booming oratorical style helped the horn to be out of the shot, and his voice was clear, without camera or other noises. If truly representative of what was heard back in the day, the sound quality was good enough to have allowed the Kinetophone to succeed. Ramsay’s introduction served the same purpose as Lowell Thomas’ orotund introduction to This is Cinerama.

Edison’s theatrical Kinetophone was distributed in the United States by the American Talking Picture Co., Inc., located on Broadway in Manhattan, which advertised to the trade: Talking Pictures. A Fact! A Reality! Thos. A. Edison startles the civilized world and revolutionizes the picture business with his latest and greatest invention The Kinetophone. Absolutely the first practical talking picture ever made. Perfect synchronization and illusion. Voice and action taken simultaneously. Any first class operator can handle. (Altman, 2004)

Edison persuaded vaudeville impresarios John J. Murdock and Martin Beck to install the Kinetophone in four of their theaters, with the premiere occurring at Keith’s Colonial Theater in Manhattan, part of the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit, where it ran for several months (Weis, 1985). A lecturer appeared on screen to demonstrate the prowess of the system by smashing a plate, playing a violin, a piano, and a bugle, and a barking dog was added to the mishmash, which was followed by a minstrel act, a singing tenor, and a chorus of the Star Spangled Banner  – later performances added dramatic sketches. The astounded audience applauded for 15 minutes at the premiere (Gomery, 2005, p. 28). However, the spell was broken during one performance at the Keith-­ Orpheum’s Palace in Manhattan when synchronization was lost by as

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26  Synchronizing the Phonograph

Fig. 26.15  A version of Edison’s theatrical Kinetophone, from a USP filed February 8, 1908.

much as 12 seconds, leading to audience catcalls and boos. This was not an isolated incident, with the result that Murdock and Beck paid off Edison to terminate the contract. Similar failed Kinetophone performances occurred in other American cities, and in other countries, but Edison was unable to engineer a solution. A fire in 1914 at the Edison campus, where the system was built and recordings were made, was the final stroke that led to his withdrawal from the field. A chagrinned Edison derided other inventors’ efforts, but this deflection did not absolve him of having committed the same sin: the Kinetophone was a poorly engineered synchronized sound phonograph system that performed reliably only in the lab. As we have seen, in the first decade and a half of the celluloid cinema, no long-term commercially viable synchronized sound projector-phonograph system was developed. Handcranked projectors, bound to fail for this purpose, were pressed into service; even though Gaumont, Messter, and Edison used motor-­driven projectors, they failed to achieve a level of technical competence that would insure ongoing acceptance. Perhaps none of these designs should have left

the laboratory, but the desire for a solution was great and for the inventor, as the saying goes, hope springs eternal. Many attempts to synchronize projector and phonograph were made in America, Great Britain, France, and Germany (and undoubtedly other countries), using similar techniques, most notably by the indefatigable Gaumont with his many versions of the Chronophone. Remarking on the termination of Edison’s Kinetophone theatrical exhibition efforts, Kellogg (1955), one of the inventors of sound-on-film technology for GE/RCA, wrote: “So far as I have learned, there were few further efforts, (at least in the U.  S.) to provide sound for pictures by means of phonograph (mechanical) recording until the Warner Bros. Vitaphone system of 1926.” (The parentheses are Kellogg’s.) Vitaphone sound-on-disk, using electronic amplification for recording and playing back, was appreciably more advanced than the phonograph technology of a decade earlier, but its most important contribution was that it got the ball rolling while serving as an example of what not to do.

Electronics for Talking Shadows

By the mid-1920s, feature films were commonly accompanied by live music but attempts at voicing parts by behind-­ the-­screen actors had become passé. The celluloid cinema had crystallized into an art that audiences appreciated and enjoyed. The silent cinema, at its peak, was a cinema of pantomime and montage, the visceral connection produced between shots. Understanding the silent cinema required the ability to read the thoughts and emotions of actors by studying their faces and body language, but it was also a literary medium requiring reading intertitle cards, the use of which enabled the silent cinema to be a universal medium realized by the expedient of inserting new intertitles in the language of the country in which the film was distributed. Sound-ondisk and sound-on-film did not disrupt the essence of the cinema of pantomime in its first years because synchronized sound was used for one-reelers of entertainers and for feature films as a substitute for musicians in the orchestra pit. Live music had been used to enhance the audience’s experience of silent cinema drama, and the desire to use lip-synchronized sound beyond variety acts or short subjects was not the initial primary application. Rather, it was a widely held belief that lip-synchronized dialog would rupture the visual language that had taken decades to evolve. The silent film was so entrenched with both the public and filmmakers that it was all but impossible for most people, including those who controlled the studios, to imagine the possibilities of sound and its potential benefits aside from its substitution for vaudeville one-reelers or costly orchestras in the pit. Adolph Zukor and Nicholas Schenck, who controlled the two most successful motion picture entities, Paramount and Loew’s/MGM, had the resources to allow them to play a waiting game as they watched Fox and the Warners take the risk of selling a concept and being first in a market (Gomery, 2005). In addition, the Phonofilm optical sound-on-film system that had been marketed by de Forest flopped, having been deployed in only a few tens of theaters in America beginning in 1923. It was the first of its kind in the American marketplace but confined to popular entertainment short subjects. de Forest (1926) eschewed its use for narrative f­ eatures,

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undoubtedly voicing the feelings of many in the industry when he wrote: “If you ask whether the ordinary silent drama with which we are all so familiar can in general be improved by the addition of voice, the answer is unquestionably ‘No’.” Yet, Phonofilm optical sound-on-film was a clue to a new direction, a technology that was different from the phonographic efforts of Gaumont, Edison, and Messter, and the cagey de Forest may have been deflecting possible fears that his process would upset the conventional order. The theatrical film industry in the early to mid-1920s viewed synchronized sound solutions with caution and as an unnecessary accoutrement that would endanger the prevailing esthetic, rooted in the belief that the silent cinema, with its live musical accompaniment, was the highest possible state of cinema’s artistic achievement. In 1928, Mordaunt Hall (1928), critic and Motion Picture Editor of The New York Times, reacting to early sound systems, challenged the notion that synchronized speech was viable, with this opinion: “The sound effects, such as the galloping of horses, the blowing of a whistle and the report of a pistol, are effective, for one is accustomed to have these supplied by orchestra and invariably not synchronized. Through the medium of Movietone and the Vitaphone these efforts are synchronized and therefore quite helpful to the silent picture, but the idea of giving characters a chance to articulate when they have been silent in the early chapters, and then as suddenly depriving them of speech, may be a novelty, but in a really worth while screen vehicle it is a mistake.” Hall might have been writing about the Vitaphone sound-on-disk film The Jazz Singer, which appeared late in 1927, which was essentially a silent film augmented with a score and a handful of segments of synchronized sound for songs and occasional dialog. In their initial use for feature films in the late 1920s, Vitaphone sound-on-disk and Movietone sound-on-­film features were augmented with recorded musical accompaniment substituting for live orchestras with occasional sound effects, an irony of sorts since the Holy Grail for the inventor had been to create a reliable product for s­ ynchronizing sound and image for a lip-synchronized imitation of life (Weis, 1985).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_27

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Phonographic sound for cinema began with Edison’s Kinetophone, a peepshow device that required users to wear earphones, which were undesirable in a theatrical setting. For theatrical projection, two related major impediments to the successful deployment of the phonograph for motion pictures were the requirements that sound had to be amplified and originate from the direction of the screen, both of which were addressed with the development of electronics. Vitaphone, which was introduced in 1926, was the first commercially viable sound-on-disk cinema system, and is described in the chapter of that name. Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T, had been focused on applying the new art of electronics to improving the de Forest audion tube, public address systems, telegraphy, telephony, radio, and the acoustical-mechanical disk phonograph. It may be that the company became fully aware of the possibilities of optical sound only after seeing demonstrations by Case Laboratory and the introduction of de Forest’s Phonofilm, which was based on Case’s inventions. Vitaphone sound-on-disk premiered on August 6, 1926, with the release of the musically augmented feature Don Juan, which did not use lip synchronization, but it was preceded by musical film short subjects that did. Movietone sound-on-­ film premiered 7 months later, on January 21, 1927, also with a program of lip sync short subjects and the musically augmented feature What Price Glory. Lipsynchronized sound was used for Warners’ popular Vitaphone short subjects, usually vaudeville acts; on the other hand, Fox aggressively turned their silent newsreel operation into a Movietone series. These Warners and Fox efforts gave the studios practice using synchronized sound and sold the concept of talking and singing movies to the public. While Vitaphone was making an impact and gaining acceptance, the Movietone optical sound-on-­film system was also being adopted by a number of studios, which they greatly preferred. As Krefft (2017) wrote: “No studio except for the Warners wanted Vitaphone. All the other majors wanted Fox’s Movietone.” Movietone would be further developed by Western Electric, becoming widely accepted, despite competition from the somewhat late to arrive RCA system. Offering sound-on-disk and sound-on-­film, Western Electric’s ERPI sales and service division, took an eclectic approach by converting theaters for both. Sound for film was impossible to achieve without the technology that was in the act of being born, electronics. The Western Electric audio-electronics development program began before the World War I as its engineers and scientists applied both electronic and acoustical-mechanical technology to phonograph recording and playback. Edison’s cylinder player and Berliner’s disk player were introduced before electrification, let alone electronics. But when Bell Labs/Western Electric began to tackle the task of improving the medium, electrification was still underway, therefore the

27  Electronics for Talking Shadows

phonograph was mechanically and acoustically redesigned to produce good sound quality and adequate volume in the living room, without the benefit of electric power, based on the work of engineer Henry C.  Harrison. While electronic amplification was applied to the recording of phonograph records in the early days of the art, electronics were too expensive for products in the home. Western Electric’s enhancement, the Orthophonic phonograph, which could fill a living room with better sound than previously possible (when combined with new recording techniques), was ready in 1924 (Gomery, 2005, p.  32), but substantially greater amplification was necessary for theater sound (Kellogg, 1955). Electronics technology was being developed for communications, not for cinema, but the effort would contribute to Vitaphone phonograph and Movietone optical sound technology. Although Vitaphone fell by the wayside, it was proximate cause for the film industry’s acceptance of optical sound-on-film. Electronics sprang from experiments by Edison and Dickson with a discovery they made on February 13, 1880, while studying the properties of the electric lamp. (Sixteen years later to the day the Lumières filed their patent application for their Cinématographe.) Edison’s lamp used an evacuated glass bulb with a carbon filament that glowed when a current passed through it, heating it to incandescence. Edison and Dickson asked themselves two questions: why did the inside of the lamp blacken, thereby diminishing its illumination efficiency, and was it possible to improve the longevity of the carbon filament? In their experimental bulb they added a negatively charged electrode, an anode, a metal plate or a wire that did not touch the filament (Morton, 2004; Kellogg, 1955). They observed that by applying a positive electrical potential to the anode, with respect to the filament, a current flowed through the vacuum from the negatively charged hot cathode filament to the anode but current would not flow in the other direction. Edison filed USP 307,031, Electrical Indicator, on November 15, 1883, to protect the discovery, which became known as the Edison effect, also known as thermionic emission. According to Webb (2005, p. 18): “His discovery of this effect brought him the only lukewarm recognition he ever received from the professional scientific community.” In 1897 British physicist J. J. Thomson experimentally verified the existence of the electron at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University, after which the Edison effect was explained by the flow of negatively charged particles, electrons, passing from the heated cathode to the positively charged anode. British electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming (1849– 1945) had consulted for an Edison subsidiary in London; when going to work for another company he was given the problem of turning a weak alternating current into directcurrent to drive a mirror galvanometer. He recalled the Edison effect and realized that it could be applied to solving

27  Electronics for Talking Shadows

Fig. 27.1  The basis for electronics, the cover sheet for Edison’s Electrical Indicator. Although he didn’t understand its physics or its application, Edison had invented the diode.

the problem. Fleming was the first to describe the use of what is called a valve in England and a diode in the United States, an electronic tube to rectify current (to turn AC into DC). Fleming called it the “oscillating valve” because it could also detect wireless signals (Hijiya, 1992). In 1906 Fleming recognized that the explanation for how the device functioned was based on Thomson’s description of the electron. Fleming’s diode consists of a heated filament or cathode and a plate or anode within an evacuated glass bulb. Electrons or current can pass from the heated cathode filament to the plate anode but not in the other direction. Fleming patented the diode tube on November 16, 1904, in Britain, which was granted in America as USP 803,684, Instrument for Converting Alternating Electric Current into Continuous Currents, filed April 19, 1905, and assigned to the Marconi

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Fig. 27.2  The USP cover sheet for Fleming’s diode. Fig. 1. illustrates the diode’s construction, and Fig. 3. shows diodes in series to improve their ability to rectify AC.

Wireless Telegraph Company of America. Marconi used Fleming’s valve as a radio wave detector since it was better for that purpose than anything they had previously used and installed it in all of their wireless telegraph stations (Webb, 2005, p. 19). Although one could argue the point, it seems that Fleming did not invent the diode due to Edison’s priority, but he put it to a novel and valuable use, a point of view that others have expressed (Hijiya, 1992, p. 74). American physicist Lee de Forest played important roles in the development of electronics and sound-on-film. He added an electrode to the diode, a grid located between the cathode filament and the anode plate, creating the electronic amplifier tube, the triode, which he called the audion, as described in USP 879,532, Space Telegraphy, filed January 29, 1907, one of the most important inventions in the history of technology. The amount of current that flows from the

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cathode to the anode depends on the positive electrical ­potential of the grid. In this way a small signal applied to the grid can be amplified by controlling a larger current flowing between the cathode and the anode. (The subject is taken up in greater detail in chapter 31.) AT&T purchased some rights to the audion from de Forest and had a cross-licensing agreement with GE and Westinghouse so they might avoid litigation and benefit from mutual advances in the art of the amplifier tube (Crafton, 1997). The labs organized by these companies made great improvements to the design of tube amplifiers and circuits for sound amplification; they developed the transducers that were required for cinema and other sound systems, like microphones and loudspeakers. AT&T, the first major American corporate contributor to the theatrical sound effort through their Western Electric division, began in 1875 as the vehicle to finance Alexander

Fig. 27.3  The cover sheet of USP 879,532, for de Forest’s Space Telegraphy, his first description of a true electronic amplifier tube. Audion tube D has parts cathode F, grid a, and anode b.

27  Electronics for Talking Shadows

Graham Bell’s efforts to invent the telephone. Bell and the two investors who formed AT&T founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877 to commercialize the telephone (WS: The History of AT&T). AT&T was incorporated in 1885 as a subsidiary of the American Bell Telephone Company. In 1882 Bell Telephone acquired the Western Electric Manufacturing Company of Chicago, which became the manufacturing arm of AT&T.  In 1899 AT&T, in a corporate reorganization, acquired American Bell. As the outcome of litigation, in 1879 the Bell Telephone Company prevailed against Western Union in a patent suit that changed the course of the American telecommunications industry, driving Western Union out of the telephone business. This allowed AT&T to grow into a nearly ubiquitous and technically excellent national telecommunications service capable of advancing the science of electronics with its Bell Laboratories. The research divisions created by AT&T, GE, and Westinghouse employed a professional class of inventors given the title engineer, both well-­educated and credentialed, who traded the upside potential that came from owning and directly profiting from their creations for the supportive infrastructure and steady income provided by their corporate employers. General Electric’s RCA played an equally significant role in creating sound-on-­film technology for the movie industry, and its role is examined in chapter 36. Harold Arnold, who became the director of research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, made substantial improvements to the de Forest audion as a result of certain rights to the invention that had been acquired by Western Electric in 1913. A key to Arnold’s improvement was his creation of a manufacturing process to achieve high order vacuums within the triode tube (Kellogg, 1955). Arnold went on to design sound amplifiers based on the improved vacuum tubes. Also at Bell Labs in 1913, Joseph P. Maxwell’s group improved phonograph sound reproduction using an electromagnetic pickup to read the disk’s grooves, a major step in turning a mechanical device into one enhanced by electronics. The new pickup used the stylus to generate a small current for amplification instead of using the grooves’ deformations to directly mechanically drive the speaker horn. The microphone, at that time called a transmitter, was also improved as described in USP 1,333,744, Telephone Transmitter, filed December 20, 1916, by physicist Edward Christopher Wente (1889–1972).1 (Crabtree, 1935) The disclosure covers the invention of the first wide frequency response low distortion condenser microphone, a significant advance over the carbon microphone with its limited frequency response and noisy signal. Wente’s microphone technology is one of the phenomenal improvements in sound recording and reproduction made possible by electronics. The condenser, or to use its modern term capacitor, is a device that holds charge, which for Wente’s microphone used two parallel Wente rhymes with plenty.

1 

27  Electronics for Talking Shadows

247

Fig. 27.4  A cross section of Wente’s condenser microphone from its USP. The diaphragm is 6. The back electrode 7 is attached to a nonconductive plate 14. 6 and 7 form the two plates of a condenser. Changes in

air pressure impinging on the diaphragm causing changes in capacitance that produce voltage changes that are then amplified.

metal plates oppositely charged and separated by a narrow air gap. The front metal plate vibrated as sound waves impinged on it, which in its first iteration was made of a stretched steel diaphragm .002 in thick that was spaced only .001 in from the more massive inert back plate. A later version used an aluminum alloy diaphragm half the thickness that increased power output with a frequency response to 15,000 cycles. The distance between the diaphragm and the fixed back plate varied with changes in air pressure resulting in capacitance changes. The fact that the narrowing gap between the plates compressed air helped control the inertial characteristics of the diaphragm that overemphasized the energetic low frequencies. The rapid changes in capacitance were measured as voltage changes across a resistor producing an analog of the sound’s waveform. Wente’s condenser microphone’s amplified signal was used for recording phonograph records, and optical tracks, public address systems, and radio broadcasts (Hilliard, 1985). A version of Wente’s condenser microphone was sold to the film industry as the Western Electric 394-W in 1926. The microphone’s low-­power output required additional amplification so the 394-W, and its pre-amplifier, were packaged together as one unit. Wente was a gifted inventor who also designed the electromagnetically modulated slit opening light valve (ribbon light valve) for optical track recording, and advanced loudspeakers, described in chapter 36. After a hiatus caused by the World War I, work was resumed on the audio projects. In October 1923, Edward B.  Craft, the assistant chief engineer of Western Electric, wrote to his boss, Vice President Frank Baldwin Jewett, pointing out that Western Electric was well-positioned to develop synchronized sound products for the film industry based on their program to improve the phonograph. In October 1924, Craft demonstrated sound-on-disk movies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Craft (1926) can be seen and heard explaining the sound-on-disk system, in Audion, made by AT&T, presented at Yale’s Woolsey Hall on October 27, 1922 (Gomery, 2005, p. 32). On February 13, 1924, a sound-­on-­disk industrial film with improved synchronization, Hawthorne, was shown at a dinner given by Charles G.  DuBois, the president of Western Electric, for

250 Bell System executives in Manhattan’s Astor Hotel. Despite ­having what they felt was an impressive demonstration, probably with the best quality recorded sound at the time using Harrison’s Orthophonic phonograph technology, the company was unable to scare up any interest at the studios (Gomery, 2005, p. 32, p. 64). George Cullinan, Western Electric’s General Sales manager sought the help of independent promoter Charles S. Post, who was equally unsuccessful despite the use of demonstration reels of vaudeville musical performers. Notwithstanding the lack of interest expressed by the major studios, Western Electric succeeded in gaining the attention of a second tier but well run and profitable studio, Warner Bros., as described in chapter 34. In 1925 Bell Labs was given the mandate to consolidate the research and development activities of Western Electric and AT&T, at which time Craft assigned Maxwell to manage a group to develop an electromagnetic version of the phonograph system, a project that would create products for both the home and motion picture theaters (Hochheiser, 1992). Craft also assigned physicists Wente, Irving Crandall, and Douglas MacKenzie to study the possibilities of sound-on-­film. With the consolidation of research efforts at Bell Labs, Craft became its executive vice president and remained the guiding force behind the sound-on-disk and the sound-on-­film projects he had begun at Western Electric, but his emphasis remained on the phonograph as a consumer product. Under Maxwell’s leadership, improvements were made to the recording mastering process using an electromagnetically driven cutter rather than a needle driven by a diaphragm. Edison had tried to master cylinder recordings using an electromagnetically rather than an acoustically driven stylus but had failed because of an insufficiently powerful signal (Morton, 2004). Other advances were made including redesigning the mechanical parts of the playback system, especially improving the acoustical characteristics of the tone arm for the purely mechanical consumer Orthophonic phonograph. Early in 1925 both Columbia and Victor, major recording companies, licensed the new recording and disk mastering technologies. Although Western Electric concentrated on the phonograph much of the technology it developed could be applied

248

27  Electronics for Talking Shadows

Fig. 27.5  A visualization of a sound wave, traveling left to right. The vertical axis represents the wave’s energy. A sound wave is made up of air molecules that vibrate in the direction of its travel. That’s hard to depict visually, so the wave’s amplitude is depicted in the vertical.

to optical sound because both sound-on-disk and optical sound-on-film required microphones, sound amplifiers, and loudspeakers. RCA would enter the sound-on-film arena with its own optical variable area recording technology, which ultimately proved to be superior to the Western Electric system that was based on Theodore Case’s variable density recording system, as described in chapter 33. Sound-­on-film, sound-on-disk’s successor, is an absorbingly complex subject because of its interdisciplinary nature involving electronics, acoustics, sensitometry, and optics. Its history will be traced in chapter 28, and further discussed in subsequent chapters. As we shall learn, inventors Case and Sponable, de Forest, Lauste, the Tri-Ergon Group, and Tykociner were actively engaged in optical sound-on-film efforts, which had great potential advantages compared with sound-on-disk (de Forest, 1926). By creating an optically encoded sound track positioned alongside the picture, sound and image could be played back in synchronization without the travails associated with sound-ondisk. This was made possible by electronic amplification that was still in its early stages of development. In 1923, Lee de Forest, the inventor of the electronic amplifier tube, the audion, introduced an optical sound-on-film system, the Phonofilm process based primarily on the work of Theodore Case and Earl Sponable, but it failed to achieve wide acceptance. Fox Studio’s Movietone, also a product of the research done at Case Laboratory, became the Western Electric optical sound system, a commercially successful system that endured for decades. To better appreciate the following chapters, the physics of sound will be briefly described. Sound is made up of vibrations or waves of air pressure called rarefactions and compressions. The sensation of sound is produced when vibrating air enters the ear and is turned into a signal to be interpreted by the brain. Sound, unlike light, requires a medium, air, to carry its waves. The amplitude of sound waves moves in the same direction as its travel: it’s a longitudinal wave. By

c­ ontrast the amplitude of light moves at right angles to its direction of travel: it’s a transverse wave. At normal temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure, sound travels about 770  miles per hour, whereas light travels at about 671,000,000 miles per hour, or 871,000 times faster, a difference that has practical consequences in a large theater since sound can arrive at the ears later than the image at the eyes, thus disturbing the illusion of synchronized speech. The delay depends on the distance from the screen, and 35 mm projection may require an adjustment to the size of the loop between the projector gate and the sound reading head. Young people can hear a frequency range of from 20 to 20,000  Hz or the number of rarefactions or compressions that pass by a point in a second. Human speech is confined to about 100 to 5000 Hz, and a symphony orchestra can have sounds ranging from about 40 to 16,000 Hz. Sound recording requires the transduction or the turning of sound energy into an electrical signal; an inverse process turns the signal back into sound. The microphone turns sound wave pressure into electrical energy so that when amplified it can be used for recording. For sound-on-disk a phonograph record is produced by using the electrical signal to electromagnetically drive a stylus to cut grooves in the moving disk’s surface, and for the recording of an optical sound track, the signal modulates the intensity of the Illumination required to expose continuously moving film to create a photographic record of sound’s waveform. Both sound-on-disk and sound-on-film systems were introduced in the late 1920s, but optical sound prevailed. Microphones, electronic vacuum tubes, amplifiers, light modulators, light sensors, the design for the projector sound head, loudspeakers, fine grain film stock for recording optical track, and ways to edit and mix optical sound were improved over the course of decades. The first major success for synchronized cinema sound was sound-on-disk, as described in chapter 34. In the following chapter, the historical origins of sound-­ on-film are summarized.

The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s French Patent 19,457, of March 25, 1857, describes his phonautograph, which conceivably is the first attempt to record sound, but de Martinville had no thought of playing back what he recorded, rather he was seeking to study the nature of the sounds made by the voice by visualizing their vibrations in air. His phonautograph used the mechanical advantage provided by a series of levers connected to a pig bristle stylus for scratching away lampblack coated on a moving sheet to record an analog of sound’s waveform (Sponable, 1947). This is the recording of sound by physically deforming a surface, just as Edison was to do with the phonograph. de Martinville’s method for scribing material on a moving surface was also the precursor of the PhilipsMiller sound recording system, which was used by the BBC prior to the Second World War, as described below. In one version of de Martinville’s device, the carbon-coated paper was attached to the surface of a cylinder driven by a clockwork motor or rotated by handcranking, another similarity with Edison’s phonograph. Viennese doctor Jan N. Czermak, in 1862, photographed vocal cords while they were in motion producing sounds, an interesting use of chronophotography, but he did not attempt to record the sound of the voice itself (Theisen, 1941). What is probably the first attempt for producing a photographic record of sound using the manometric flame, or flame manometer, a flame modulated by sound vibrations, was invented by German physicist and violin maker, Rudolph Koenig, which he demonstrated in 1862 at the Exhibition in London (Loudon, 1901, pp. 989, 990). A cone, similar to the sound horn used for phonographic recording, collected changes in air pressure to push on a diaphragm, which in turn pushed on the gas line of a Bunsen burner constricting its flow. The changes in the flame’s intensity became a representation of sound amplitude but they were too fast to be observed by the unaided eye so Koenig devised a handcranked rotating mirror stroboscope for direct observation and photography (Greenslade, 1981). Koenig also anticipated the compressed air siren amplifier, devised by Parsons,

28

with his wave siren of 1867 (Loudon, 1901, p.  991). (See chapter 26.) According to Ruhmer (1908, p.  14), Andrew Jamieson of Glasgow was one of the first to suggest the use of the manometric flame for the transmission of sound by light, which he described in an issue of Nature in 1881, with further efforts of the kind taken up by J. W. Giltay of Delft.1 According to Crawford (1931), R. W. Wood, using a chronophotographic camera in 1899, recorded images of sound waves. An otologist, Dr. Marage at the Sorbonne in 1898, used an acetylene manometric flame to help make a photographic record of the human voice, and the American Edmond Kuhn used a mirror diaphragm system to record sound on motion picture film in 1900. The manometric gas flame was used in 1908 by J. F. Child who applied it to making recordings that could be played back by using a selenium cell, as described in BP 4391 (New Patents…, 1908). Theodore Case, inventor of Movietone, more than a decade later, attempted to use the manometric gas flame for a sound-­ on-­ film camera as given in Method and Apparatus for Translating or Transmitting Sound Waves, USP 1,718,999, filed on October 7, 1922. Case’s efforts are described in some detail in these pages in chapters 31 and 32 (Sponable, 1947). At the beginning of 1873 English telegraph engineer Willoughby Smith (1828–1891) (1888), p. 303). reported his experiments establishing the photosensitivity of selenium in a letter published in Nature. Smith describes that in the course of experiments in connection with laying “long submarine cables,” he placed small bars of selenium, “a metal of known very high resistance,” in hermetically sealed glass tubes. He found that “the resistance altered materially according to the intensity of the light to which it was subjected.” Smith had discovered photoconductivity, in which light modulates the resistance (brighter light lowered the resistance) of a metal, thereby able to control an electrical signal, one of the most important discoveries in the history of 1  In the play Pygmalion, Shaw calls Henry Higgins’ manometric flame the “singing flame.” The device is shown in the 1938 film of the play.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_28

249

250

Fig. 28.1  Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph recording device. It looks a lot like Edison’s phonograph, but it was used solely to visualize sound vibrations.

Fig. 28.2  Jamieson’s audio transmission by light using a manometric flame modulated by breath. A person talks into the cone (right) and the varying intensity of the flame is seen by the selenium cell B creating an electrical signal.

telecommunications. In America in 1883, inventor Charles Edgar Fritts (1850–1903) improved the sensitivity of selenium metal by coating it with gold (Sponable, 1947), creating the first photovoltaic cell in which a current is generated in the metal. In 1888 Wilhelm Hallwachs, an assistant of Heinrich Hertz, hypothesized that ultraviolet light acted on the electrons of selenium to emit them from a metal’s surface, a process called photo-emission (Cleveland, 2014, p. 290). The term photoelectric effect refers to all three phenomena. Selenium’s response to changes in light energy can be relatively lethargic making it far from ideal for resolving sound frequencies, for example, for playing back optically recorded sound. Fritts’ “bars of selenium” undoubtedly set him on the path of thinking about optical sound recording, as he describes in Recording and Reproducing of Pulsations or

28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Variations in Sound and Other Phenomena, USP 1,203,190, on filed October 22, 1880, which was granted a tardy 36 years later, on October 31, 1916, when Fritts had been deceased 13 years. The disclosure is extremely detailed and has 96 claims, which is not unheard of but it’s a large number. Inventor Lee de Forest (1941) expressed amazement that it took so many years (decades!) for the granting of Fritts’ Recording and Reproducing of Pulsations… patent, and somewhere in the bowels of the Patent Office in Crystal City, Virginia, there may be other such cases whose prosecutions took many years. At the time the life of a patent was 17 years from the date of its granting so Fritts’ claims would have been enforceable throughout the formative years of soundon-­film, and that’s precisely what de Forest attempted to take advantage of when he bought the Fritts patent. (Today the enforceability of the claims of a patent begins at the date of filing and lasts for 20 years.) The disclosure describes, in both general and specific terms, many of the basic principles of optical sound recording and playback. Fritts’ concepts include the focusing of a light source onto film through a slit to image the track onto film, and using a light sensitive selenium cell for turning the “patterns” produced on the film into electrical energy to produce a signal that is the analog of the recorded sound. Theisen (1941) commented about this remarkable disclosure as follows: “The brief of the Fritts patent – twenty-six pages long – covers the basic elements of sound recording as we now know them, and shows a deep insight into the problems that have presented themselves subsequently,” Fritts did not build a working model. In April 1877 Émile-Hortensius-Charles Cros, French poet who is known for his precocious photographic inventions, conceived of a way to record and reproduce sound that was inspired by de Martinville’s phonautograph of 20 years early. Cros deposited a sealed packet containing a description of his invention with the French Academy of Sciences with instructions that it be opened in December 1877. The document disclosed a method to turn the waveform of sound scribed on a smoke blackened surface into grooves on a hard surface, like that of a steel plate, through a process using photoetching. A pointed instrument, attached to a diaphragm, was to have tracked the grooves of the moving surface and played back the sound by actuating a diaphragm. Cros did not build his paléophone. In May 1878 he applied for a French patent, but by then Edison had demonstrated a working phonograph as recounted in chapter 26 (Hope, 1977, p. 797). In 1910 Swedish engineer Sven Berglund devised a method, related to Cros’ photoetching concept, for making gramophone masters by recording a spiral variable area track on a photographic emulsion-coated glass plate, which after development was turned into a chrome-gelatin plate, presumably by toning, from which a galvanized copper matrix master was made for shellac disk pressings as described in BP 12,161 (Hedvall, 1922, p. 108).

28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Fig. 28.3  Drawings from Fritts’ USP granted 36 years after it was filed. Lee de Forest acquired the patent hoping that its claims might prove to be useful to him in litigation. Fig. 28.4  Blake’s recordings of the waveforms of different sounds.

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Professor E. W. Blake, Jr., of Brown University, recorded sound by exposing a photographic plate of ferrotype iron (a polished plate coated with a collodion emulsion also known as a tintype) mounted on a carriage that was moved in a straight line at a constant rate by a descending weight pulley system. A hinged mirror was attached to a telephone diaphragm by a rod, and when sound impinged on the diaphragm, it caused the mirror to vibrate in a direction perpendicular to the hinge’s axis. A beam of sunlight was reflected from the surface of the vibrating mirror onto the moving photographic plate focused by a lens to form a fine spot of light that traced the waveform. The exposed and processed photographs reproduced in Blake’s (1878) article in The American Journal of Science and Art are clear representations of waveforms of the human voice. Blake’s vibrating hinged mirror is a mechanical version of the electromagnetically actuated mirror galvanometer; the electromagnetically actuated variable slit light valve would become the basis for the most commonly used sound-on-film recording systems in Germany and the United States. On December 7, 1880, Alexander Graham Bell filed USP 235,199, Apparatus for Signaling and Communicating, called Photophone, which describes a method for “controlling a beam of rays” with sound information transmitted through space by a modulated a beam of light to be detected by a photosensitive semiconductor selenium cell whose electrical output was turned back into sound using a device like a telephone receiver. Ruhmer (1908, p. 6), whose work is discussed below gives a detailed description of the Photophone in his book Wireless Telephony, In Theory and Practice, in which he notes that Bell and Tainter came up with 50 ­different ways of transmitting speech by ­modulating light. Ruhmer also includes many examples of similar experiments

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by other inventors, work that was often sponsored by the military. On November 18, 1885, in USP 341,213, Transmitting and Recording Sounds by Radiant Energy, Bell, his cousin chemist Chichester Alexander Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter, describe a method for optically recording sound. Bell et al. make reference to their experiments modulating light with sound to expose a rotating glass disk coated with a light sensitive photographic emulsion. A nozzle attached to a soundboard produces a thin jet of opaque liquid whose wiggles are modulated by the vibrations of the soundboard. The opaque liquid is sprayed onto a brass plate with a slit, through which a concentrated beam of light is passed. The light modulated by the changes in the opaque material pass through the brass plate’s slit to expose a pattern on a rotating disk, or photographic tablet, as the inventors called it. After exposure the disk was developed by the usual means and copies were to be made by contact printing. A key point is that the invention specifies passing the recording light through a slit cut in the brass plate, a technique to sharpen the image of the waveform, which became part of sound-on-film recording devices thus anticipating the work of Tri-Ergon and Case by four decades, but 5 years after Fritts’ disclosure of such a slit. Kellogg (1955) reports that many decades later, it was possible to playback a recording made by Bell et  al. to hear (possibly Bell’s voice): “This is…I am…in the…laboratory,” plus the date, “eighteen eighty-eight.” Carl J.  Hohenstein of New  York, in USP 356,877, filed Sound-Recording Apparatus, on August 10, 1886, anticipating the mirror galvanometer optical sound-on-film technique that became the heart of the GE/RCA sound-on-film recording system invented by Hoxie (see chapter 36). The patent describes a light source reflected from a mirror attached to a diaphragm, or a reflecting diaphragm itself, activated by a phonograph speaker horn, which brings to mind Professor Blake’s method. The light of a candle’s flame is reflected from the vibrating mirror onto another reflector “which is parabolic, upon photographic film.” The parabolic mirror focused the light onto a moving strip of photosensitive film. According to Wohlrab (1976), Professor Simon of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in 1898, learned how to vary a DC arc’s intensity by modulating it with a sound signal, an approach that recalls that used by Koenig who modulated a manometric flame by controlling its gas supply. Simon controlled the electric arc’s brightness by varying how much current it received. For playing back an optical track signal, J. Poliakoff in 1900 filed USP 680, 614, describing a beam of light passing through a photographic sound track that was turned into an electric signal by a photocell. The disclosure also makes a distinction between a negative and a positive track (Sponable, 1947). Similar disclosures were filed by Hulsmeyer, BP 19,901 and Duddell, BP 4661, in 1902. Experimenters at Siemens in Berlin, in the early

28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Fig. 28.5  The cover sheet of Bell and Tainter’s USP describing a way to record an optical sound track. Shown are: soundboard (261), jet tube nozzle (260), reservoir of opaque liquid (263), and brass plate with slit (255).

Fig. 28.6  Modulating an electric arc by sound. (Ruhmer)

1920s, worked on an oscillating mirror galvanometer for variable area recording with a track that occupied the entire width of 35 mm film.

28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Berlin born scientist Ernst Walter Ruhmer’s (1879–1913) “speaking arc light” photographophone used the intensity changes of an arc to transmit sound over a distance on land and water, and to make photographic recordings. In 1901 he focused the image of a modulated arc light onto moving film moved by a tape recorder-like drive in a lightproof enclosure to produce a record of sound, but telecommunications rather than sound-on-film was his aim. Whatever his goal, Ruhmer’s photographophone was “the first device successfully to reproduce sound photographed on film,” according to Crawford (1931). Ruhmer, who is mentioned above in connection with the book he wrote describing contemporary optical telecommunications, which is worth reading today, may be the first person to recognize the utility of cylindrical (anamorphic) optics when exposing optical tracks, which concentrates the track to a smaller area. The processed film’s sound recording, which ran at the high speed of three meters per second as reported by Sponable (1947) and Crawford (1931), was played back by passing light through it onto an “exceedingly sensitive selenium cell” to produce a current, proportional to the intensity of the light, played back though a telephone earpiece. Ruhmer demonstrated his system for his colleagues at the Berlin Polytechnic on December 12, 1901. He also helped Eugène Lauste with optical sound recording in the years right before his (Ruhmer’s) death (see the chapter 29). His Photographophone recordings, covering the width of 35 mm film, resemble the variable density tracks used by Movietone and Western Electric. The Fox Film Corporation studied Ruhmer’s technology and recordings, which were judged to be good, but nothing came of it. Ruhmer (1908), commenting on his experiments with recording and playing back photographic sound, mused: “It is truly a wonderful process: sound becomes electricity, becomes light, causes chemical actions, becomes light and electricity again, and finally sound.” With elegance and simplicity, he describes the art of optical sound recording. Another class of device takes a page from Edison’s phonograph by applying acousto-mechanical technology to single-­system synchronized sound that Geduld (1975, p. 72) calls groove-on-film, which attempted to turn the flexible medium of celluloid film into a phonographic medium. In USP 823,022, Combined Phonograph and Stereopticon, filed on September 11, 1905, John Ballance of Manhattan describes a perforated “tape,” the edges of which are cut to represent sound’s waveform so that a phonograph stylus can ride up and down on the serrations to play back sound (Geduld, 1975, p. 72). Sponable (1947, April) mentions that Ballance’s disclosure recalls Demenÿ’s Chronophotophone that “combined a disk phonograph and a magic lantern arranged with slides.” Katherine Von Madaler, a Hungarian living in England, in USP 1,204,091, Apparatus for Preparing Combined Cinematographic and Phonographic Records, filed on October 14, 1911, describes her

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Fig. 28.7 One of Ruhmer’s photographophonic variable density recordings. (Ruhmer)

Projectophone, which in one embodiment uses a heated wire to melt the edges of celluloid film by directly transferring the side-to-side vibrations of a gramophone disk’s grooves. She points out that both edges of the film may be so inscribed leading to the unmentioned possibility of binaural sound. Presumably a mechanical pickup would ride in the groves for playback but, at least in this disclosure, no mention is made of how that might be accomplished or how the sound might be amplified. A. C. Rutzen, in USP 1,275,189, Means of Recording and Reproducing Sound and Motion in Synchronization, filed on July 16, 1914, describes a rear projection console using a sound track engraved in the film adjacent to the picture.

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28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Fig. 28.8  From the cover sheet of Von Madaler’s Projectophone disclosure. O (highlighted) holds a vibrating heated wire driven by a stylus N that tracks the grooves of a gramophone record. The wire melts the edges of the celluloid film into a hill-and-­ dale pattern to mimic sound’s waveform.

Austrian Ferdinand von Madaler, living on Long Island, on June 1, 1923, filed USP 1607, 026, Combined Motion Picture and Sound Recording and Reproducing Apparatus, which describes using a diamond stylus to compress the celluloid base side of film, running along its edge, to produce hill and dale recordings. E.  H. Foley, in USP 1,589,139, filed on April 4, 1924, proposed engraving celluloid film with an electromagnetic transducer for single or double-system sound. Similar concepts were offered by A.  L. Curtis and J. Kaiser. The linear speed of the gramophone disk’s stylus in its groove is roughly the same as that of 35 mm film at 24 fps; perhaps similar sound quality could have been achieved if other engineering problems were tamed. The selenium cell that was used by early inventors was not ideal for the task of reading a soundtrack due to its slow response but due to its sensitivity to the visible spectrum, it was a good part for a light meter for determining photographic exposure. However, what was needed for playing back or reading optical tracks was a light modulating or current producing device with the ability to respond to the rapid vibrations of sound. One such device is the photocell, based on the physics of certain metals that generate electricity when struck by light, which was discovered by German physicist Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857–1894) in 1887, while working with ultraviolet radiation. It took years to develop the theory of the photoelectric effect, but another German physicist, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (1858– 1947) in 1900 quantified the relationship between the energy striking a photoelectric metal and its output, and in 1905 German-born physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) described the photoelectric effect in terms of photons, discrete particles, an explanation that flew in the face of the accepted wave theory of light. Photocells generate electricity from light, but other photoemissive devices have been

s­ uccessfully used for reading optical tracks such as the infrared sensitive cesium phototube and the photodiode. The development of transducers for optical tracks profited from advances in physics and also advances in materials science, electronics, and sensitometry. A key development in the ability to record optical tracks occurred in England in 1921, with Professor H. O. Rankine’s design for a mechanical light valve. Rankine’s invention passed a steady source of light through the gap between one fixed and one moving vane whose motion was actuated by the diaphragm of a microphone. The light passing through the valve was used to modulate the exposure of moving film to produce an analog pattern of sound’s waveform. Rankine demonstrated the approach in his laboratory and wrote about it, but he was academically oriented and disinclined to c­ ommercialize his work. Inventor Theodore Case visited him in London and Bell Labs physicist Wente read of his work, which led to his design of the electromagnetically activated double-string light valve for variable density recording (MacKenzie, 1928). The term light valve can be applied to any device that modulates a constant source of light, but in this field it’s often used to describe the kind of device invented by Wente. In the summer and autumn of 1923 Western Electric lab staff talked and sang in test films using the technology developed by Wente and MacKenzie and in November 1923 they made a short optical sound-on-film comedy (Gomery, 2005). Two pertinent disclosures were filed by Elias E. Ries of New  York City on May 21, 1913: one was granted on November 13, 1923, USP 1,473,976, Sound-Recording Method, and the other was granted on November 16, 1926, USP 1607,480, Method of Reproducing Photographic Sound Records. These patents were in force during the motion picture industry’s introduction of sound-on-film. Ries lays out a method to modulate a tungsten lamp’s light that is focused

28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Fig. 28.9 Reis’ Sound-Recording Method USP filed on November 13, 1923. (I remind the reader that almost all of the patents cited in these pages are readily obtained from the USP Office’s web site.)

through a horizontal slit to expose a variable density soundtrack located between the image frames and perforations of motion picture film, its eventual location in commercial practice. Ries’ specifications predate the sound-on-film systems devised by Tri-Ergon, Case Research Lab, Western Electric/Bell Labs, and GE/RCA, but Ries’ method is unworkable because an incandescent lamp’s change in illumination does not respond quickly enough to the voltage changes representing sound’s waveform. de Forest purchased Ries’ patents, as well as those of Fritts, for ammunition in the prosecution of litigation against his opponents. These patents were potentially valuable because their specifications include the use of the indispensable slit through which light must pass to expose a sharp track. After the Second World War, magnetic recording was adopted for recording and mixing sound for theatrical motion pictures, while optical sound continued to be used for the great majority of 35 mm release prints. Magnetic sound was

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introduced for exhibition as part of the Cinerama process and was also used for the original CinemaScope format (and a variant that used both optical and magnetic sound), and for Todd-AO and 70 mm release prints, as described elsewhere in these pages. The concept of magnetic recording was first published in the British journal Electrical World, on September 8, 1888, in the article Some Possible Forms of the Phonograph, by Oberlin Smith (1840–1926), an American mechanical engineer. Smith was influenced by Edison’s phonograph, which led him to suggest using a thread or ribbon impregnated with iron filings for a magnetic recording medium (Morton, 2004; Camras, 1988, p.  651). Engineer Valdemar Poulsen (1869–1942) of Denmark may have been inspired by Smith’s idea, which Smith never put into practice, when he filed a patent for the Telegraphone on July 8, 1899, in USP 661,619, Method of Recording and Reproducing Sounds or Signals, describing the first magnetic recording machine using metal wire as a recording medium. According to inventor Marvin Camras (1988, p.  2), Poulsen demonstrated the concept of magnetic recording to his friends by stringing a steel wire from one end of his lab to the other to run a carriage on pulleys that contained a recording electromagnet, in lieu of the reel to reel arrangement that later became commonplace. Circa 1925 German inventor Curt Stille licensed his version of Poulsen’s process, using a steel ribbon in place of wire, to Echophon that manufactured and marketed a diction machine based on the technology, called the Dailygraph. At the same time motion picture producer Louis Blattner, a German living in Britain, also licensed Stille’s technology. Blattner made some improvements to what he called the Blattnerphone but it was a commercial failure. He sold the rights to the Marconi Company in 1933, and they produced an improved machine called the Marconi-Stille recorder, which used 3 mm wide steel ribbon and ran at 1.5 meters/ second (Wohlrab, 1976, p. 533). It was adopted by the BBC and remained in use through the 1940s. The steel ribbon moved at such a high speed that, had it broken, it would have been a danger to the machine’s operator, who accordingly wore protective gear. The recordings the BBC made using the process are of good quality and considered to be a historical treasure. The Selenophone was a light valve recording system that produced a variable density optical track. The machine was developed by Oskar Czeija, who founded the Austrian Radio Corporation in 1924 (McCormick, 1991). The Selenophone U7 sound-on-film recording system was developed in the 1930s. It used 7 mm wide tape or sprocketless film cut down from 35  mm motion picture stock (probably positive print stock). The machine ran at a rate of between 20 and 25 inches per second using a capstan drive similar to that used in magnetic tape recorders. Recordings were played back using the usual method of a focused light source modulated by the

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28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Fig. 28.10  From Poulsen’s first filing teaching magnetic recording, Danish Patent No. 2655. Fig. 2. Illustrates the reel to reel configuration for the recording medium, and Fig. 3. is the electromagnetic recording head.

p­attern of the moving track read by a photocell. Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter made Selenophone recordings in 1937 (and possibly earlier) during the Salzburg Festival opera broadcasts. The only surviving machine was donated to the New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Center. The Selenophone served much the same purpose as magnetic recording: both had better sound and were better at recording long compositions than the phonograph disk. James A. Miller, of Forest Hills, N.Y. followed in the footsteps of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, creator of the first sound recording technique in 1857. Miller’s was an attempt to fill the requirement for long playing recordings of good fidelity and is described in Miller’s USP 1,905,732, Sound Record Blank, which was filed on October 7, 1931, which succinctly described the process: “The sound track is of the hill-and-dale type due to the fact that the wedge-­ shaped cutting stylus is vibrated in a direction normal to the surface of the blank but this movement of the stylus will also vary the width of the sound track, the width being greater when the depth is greater and vice versa.” Miller’s invention was marketed as the Philips-Miller sound recording system, and was used by the BBC before the Second World War (Street, 2009). Philips of Eindhoven manufactured the recording and playback machine (the same machine was used for both). Its perforationless 7  mm wide tape was .18  mm thick composed of a celluloid substrate that was coated with a layer of gelatin and then mercuric sulfide, an opaque material. A sapphire cutting tool with a wedge-­ shaped tip, driven electromagnetically and modulated by sound, vibrated up and down as the tape moved past it to chip

Fig. 28.11  From Miller’s USP, showing a hill-and-dale recording cut into an opaque surface coated on a clear substrate.

away the .003 mm opaque coating creating a sound recording that, by the inventor’s account, had features of both variable density and variable area optical tracks, which required no chemical processing. The tape ran at 32 cm/sec that was later reduced to 20 cm/sec for economy. For playback a photocell read the light of an exciter lamp that passed through the tape, the same method used for photographically produced sound-on-film. Wohlrab (1976) believes that the system was not deployed for motion pictures because it was not possible to make good quality photographic prints from the tapes but electrical copies ought to have been possible. Miller shows perforations in his drawings indicating that he was

28  The Origins of Sound-on-Film

Fig. 28.12  Optical tracks compared. 35 mm prints with variable density (left) and variable area (right) sound tracks. The variable area (also called variable width) track is of the duplex type designed to reduce background reduce noise. The prints have the wide framelines required for the 1.37:1 Academy format.

contemplating a motion picture application since tape drive would have been preferable for a dedicated sound recording system. In this chapter inventions that are the precursors of optical sound recording for cinema have been presented. The earliest such attempts belong to the field of chronographic or chronophotographic measurement, efforts to understand physical phenomena, in this case sound, by producing visualizations. de Martinville and Koenig were chronophotographers, both of whom created techniques for the photographic visualization of sound’s waveform. They preceded the work of Marey whose use of sequential photography to study animal locomotion was one of the influences that led to the invention of Edison’s 35 mm movie camera. (See the chapter 11.) Thus there is a connection between the work of these early investi-

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gators of sound and the creation of the celluloid cinema, not only for optical sound but also for apparent motion. Some background on optical sound-on-film prints is given here to help the reader better understand the chapters that follow, which discuss the predominant synchronized sound technique used by the celluloid cinema in the twentieth century. The industry standardized an optical track running between the picture frames and one of the rows of perforations but for dramatic productions, image and sound were captured separately, using a synchronized camera and recorder. The image and sound were printed, or married, to make release prints. Holding a 35 mm release print, with the celluloid base facing you, the optical track lies between the left edge of the 22 mm wide picture frame and the left row of perforations. For playback the 2.54 mm wide track passes by the sound head at 90 feet per minute or 24 fps. Before reaching the head the intermittent motion required for projection is smoothed out. The sound head (or reader) consists of an exciter lamp whose associated optics focus its light through a narrow horizontal slit onto the soundtrack; the light passes through the track to be read by a photosensitive device, which produces a modulated electrical signal, an analog of the recording’s pattern representing the original waveform of sound. This electrical signal is amplified and used to drive loudspeakers. There are two kinds of optical sound tracks: one that varies the photographic density of the track, called variable density soundtracks, looks like a series of parallel lines running perpendicular to the direction of the film’s travel, somewhat resembling barcode, but on closer examination these “lines” are of different densities. The other kind of track is the variable area or variable width track and is high contrast, made up of clear and black wiggly patterns, which like the variable density track are a representation of sound’s waveform; the simplest kind of variable width track looks like a graph of sound’s waveform. Industry efforts were made to permit these two recording methods to be read by all projector sound readers; this required just a minor reduction in the width of the variable area track. The methods had different sound levels and noise characteristics, and the companies that provided their technologies were their advocates, ERPI (a division of Western Electric) for variable density and RCA for variable area (or width), until it was accepted that due to the exigencies of release print production, given their greater sound volume, variable area tracks produced better results.

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Fig. 28.13  The projector optical sound reader. Sound from the exciter lamp (left) passes through an optical system (middle) to be focused on and then through the track. The light modulated by the track is then seen by the photocell (right). Changes in the brightness of the light caused by the changes in the track’s area or density are electronically amplified and played back through loudspeakers. (Cinémathèque Française)

One Man Bands: Lauste and Tykociner

In 1892 French inventor Eugène Augustin Lauste (1857– 1935) began to think about photographically reproducing sound after reading about Bell’s proposal for transmitting sound by means of light, the Photophone, in the Scientific American Supplement published on May 21, 1888 (Crawford, 1931). His initial concept was to use photographic paper to record sound’s vibration, but the next year, working in Edison’s lab under Dickson, he learned of the availability of celluloid film, which he realized was a superior medium; but more than a decade passed before he actively took up sound-­ on-­ film experiments. In 1892 Lauste left the Edison Laboratory to design an internal combustion engine with a fellow French engineer but the venture didn’t pan out. In 1894 Lauste joined the Lathams’ Lambda Company to work with Dickson on the Eidoloscope projector where he was responsible for the design of the so-called Latham Loop (Crawford, 1931). After the collapse of the Lambda Company, he worked for American Biograph and Mutoscope for a few years. Lauste again turned his attention to optical sound-on-film in 1900, devising a light valve transducer for recording sound on film and in 1904, while associated once again with Dickson, attempted to convince him of its value by demonstrating a crude proof-of-concept, which Crawford comments was similar to Blake’s apparatus of 1878 (see the prior chapter), using a glass rather than a metal plate. Given Dickson’s approval, Lauste continued with his experiments, and in 1905 made variable density recordings that showed promise. Lauste returned to Europe in 1906 and worked with Australian inventor Robert Thorn Haines and British engineer John St. Vincent Pletts. They filed a British provisional patent on August 11, 1906, with specification attempting to describe a camera that recorded sound-on-film. It was granted to Haines, Pletts, and Lauste, as BP 18,057, on August 10, 1907, titled A New or Improved Method of and Means for Simultaneously Recording and Reproducing Movements and Sound. It lays out a list of ten components requiring development to make an optical sound system practical, including a better quality microphone, a microphone diaphragm whose attached mirror reflects light to

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expose (or “translate,” as they term it) photographic film, and with point number 10: “A horn, or spreader or other arrangement for amplifying or increasing the loudness of the sounds.” The list serves to point out that they required electronic amplification, but the disclosure was too general in nature because a patent must be able to teach a person who is well-versed in the art how to build what is disclosed. Surely its lack of specificity meant that nobody could use what was described to make a working sound-on-film system. In 1908 Lauste obtained backing from the General Manager of the London Cinematograph Company, George W.  Jones and that year visited Ernst Ruhmer in Berlin to study his photographophone. Lauste’s visit led him to believe that Ruhmer’s speaking arc light was not suited for recording sound on film and he turned his attention to a light valve design using a moving mechanical slit, which Ruhmer believed would react too slowly to properly modulate the vibrations of sound. Circa 1909 Lauste hits upon the idea of using a diamagnetic wire vibrating between the poles of two magnets for a light valve and he also conceived of using a mirror galvanometer. He ultimately dismissed the galvanometer design because his focus was on a single-system sound recording camera; he felt the vibrations produced by an intermittent’s action would interfere with the mirror’s vibrations. The lack of a good loudspeaker system confined Lauste’s efforts to a telephone-style earpiece for playback. Lauste purchased a photographophone from Ruhmer and worked on his diamagnetic wire light valve. He obtained a superior selenium cell for playback from Bronk of Berlin and filmed thousands of feet of sound film between 1910 and 1914. According to Crawford (1931), Lauste’s most successful electrodiamagnetic recorder used a double vibrating wire light valve. The optical sound tracks he produced occupied half the width of the 35  mm film, and the other half was occupied by image. Lauste built a projector with two arc lamps, one for projection and the other to project a bright beam of light through the track onto the sound cell. He worked on a method for amplifying sound, but the approach he chose is not known. In 1910 Lauste was discouraged by

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several European experts in the field who were of the opinion that his efforts were futile and he briefly accepted their judgment. However, in 1911 he traveled to the United States to demonstrate what he had achieved with a single-system camera, a concept that would be used by de Forest’s Phonofilm and Movietone newsreel cameras. During the visit, he shot a short film using his camera, and Crawford (1931) gives him credit as having been the first to have done so in the United States. The start of the World War I curtailed his efforts. Lauste was chronically short of funds, a crippling disadvantage for an individual inventor in a field where so many components had to be developed. The magic lantern, the Praxinoscope, and the phonograph might have been cobbled together by a lone worker on a limited budget, but not a complete solution to the demanding technology of optical sound-­ on-­film. Lauste became a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1929, given the task of reproducing the system he had created in the early 1900s and assisting the Lab’s patent department with his knowledge of prior art; his work for Bell Labs was meant to help the company with patent litigation. His apparatus and writings were given to the Smithsonian (Eugene…, 1935). Lauste was, as the expression goes, ahead of his time, but the degree to which Lauste’s work influenced subsequent optical sound technology is unclear. Because of these efforts and his invention of the projection loop, he is one of the significant creators of early motion picture technology, although credit for his projector work was usurped and his sound-on-film work has been overlooked. Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner (1867–1969) gave what may well have been the first demonstration of its kind, projection of 35  mm double-system synchronized image and sound, his Phonactinion, on June 9, 1922, to the Urbana Section of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Electrical Engineering Society (Kaganovsky, 2018, p.

Fig. 29.1  Left: Lauste’s optical track shared equal area with the picture frame. Right: Lauste’s sound-on-film projector. (Cinémathèque Française)

29  One Man Bands: Lauste and Tykociner

XV). Tykociner was born in the Polish town of Wloclawek in the Pale of Settlement, at the time under the control of czarist Russia, where Jewish families like his, were considered to be legal residents but whose opportunities were restricted by law and custom, with the latter circumstance providing a motivation for his leaving home. Another motivation for his departure was his father, a grain broker, who wanted him to pursue the family business and discouraged him from becoming a scientist. But Tykociner defied him, deciding to pursue science after his sister translated a French magazine article for him describing the telephone. Afterward, he traveled to Warsaw where he experienced telephones and electric arc lamp street lights (McCullough, 1958). At 18 Tykociner left home and traveled to New  York City, hoping to study science, where he first listened to Edison’s phonograph and, by Kaganovsky’s account, met Nikola Tesla and “became an expert in shortwave radio.” In 1897 in New York he saw his first motion pictures and realized the possibility of combining them with sound, which led to his first experiments in the field using the manometric flame. In 1900 he returned to Poland where his father had a change of heart and allowed him to begin “formal scientific training” (McCullough, 1958). I have not been able to learn what school he attended, but it was not for a lengthy span, since in 1901 he became a junior engineer working for Guglielmo Marconi in London and then as an engineer for Telefunken in Berlin. He next became the chief engineer for Siemens & Halske in Russia where he managed equipping its Baltic and Black Sea fleets with radio telecommunications in 1904, prior to the SinoRussian war. In Russia, during the World War I, he met television pioneer Vladimir Zworykin, who would become a lifelong friend. At the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Tykociner fled to Poland and organized its first wireless telecommunications network where he remained during the Polish-Russian War, Poland’s war for independence. In 1920 he returned to the United States, to stay, where he worked at Westinghouse for 1 year meeting up with fellow émigré Vladimir Zworykin, with whom he shared a common background and fate: having defied their fathers by pursuing careers in science; the disruption of their lives due to the World War I and the Russian revolution; their peregrinations between Europe and the United States; their interest in moving images; and their attempts to reestablish their lives and scientific careers on a foreign soil. In 1921 Tykociner became the first research professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana, an institution that determined it would become a leader in teaching the discipline. He was given an opportunity to choose a personal project, and he decided to experiment with optical sound-on-film, which led to the aforementioned demonstration for the Electrical Engineering Society in the summer of 1922. Tykociner (1923) wrote an article based on the talk he gave at the demonstration and with this and his four granted US

29  One Man Bands: Lauste and Tykociner

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Fig. 29.2  Lauste (center) directing a test in Brixton, South London, sometime during 1912–1913. His son Emile is operating the sound-on-film camera. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 29.3  Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner. (The photo on which this drawing is based was published in Popular Science, October, 1922.)

patents, he provides a good description of his sound-on-film efforts. The article explains the design of his recording and playback apparatus and his careful measurements of their

characteristics. He describes ways to turn sound information into light energy to record photographic film using a mirror galvanometer, a Geissler tube, the mercury-vapor lamp or carbon arc, the vacuum tube glow lamp, the gas discharge tube, the fluorescent vacuum tube, and a hot cathode tube producing florescent emissions. He omits any description of the light valve using electromagnetically actuated vanes or the Kerr Cell. He recorded double-system variable density sound with his optical sound recording camera sitting atop a Bell & Howell 35 mm movie camera, with which it was interlocked1. Tykociner also turned a standard Bell & Howell 35 mm camera into a single-system camera by adding a sound recording head to the upper part of its film loop. For this kind of recording, he used a mercury-vapor arc lamp projecting light through an optical system with a narrow horizontal slit onto a track area that ran between the picture and one row of sprockets. The mercury-vapor arc’s illumination was modulated by sound picked up by a carbon button microphone to produce a variable density recording. Tykociner also suggested using a glowing discharge between two electrodes for exposing the sound track in two patents with the same title, Method of and Means for Transmitting, Recording, and Reproducing Sound, in USP 1,640,557, filed February 1, 1923, and USP 2,098,364, filed May 11, 1929. Sponable

Wohlrab (1976) relates that the first sound recorder coupled with a camera was built by Berglund in 1911, who between 1918 and 1921 made variable area multiple channel tracks that look like the ones made by RCA. 1 

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Fig. 29.4  A diagram of Tykociner’s sound-on-film recorder from his USP 2,098,364. The film (8) is exposed by a 500 volt glowing discharge between the stainless steel flexible electrode (14) and the plate (13).

(1947) remarks that Tykociner did not build the glowing discharge apparatus. Tykociner modified a Pathé and then a Simplex projector to playback his single-system sound-on-film movies. He called his device the Actinophone-Apparatus, which was attached to the projector by placing it in the penthouse position above the gate. The optical track was played back by illuminating it with a 35 watt straight filamented tungsten lamp using a microscope objective and a condenser lens to project a reduced image of the filament onto a photocell. Tykociner was unusually fortunate because of the availability of an advanced photoelectric cell invented by his Department of Physics colleague, Jakob Kunz. Kunz designed his photoelectric device for measuring starlight; he and Tykociner coinvented improvements to enhance the cell’s ability to read optical tracks, as taught in USPs 2,185,531. Some of Tykociner’s recordings were duplicated by Joseph E.  Aiken (1958) of the Naval Photographic Center, Anacostia, District of Columbia, who attempted to put them in shape to be played, but in 1957, when Aiken began his attempt, the original nitrate stock was badly damaged. Aiken,

29  One Man Bands: Lauste and Tykociner

who knew Tykociner as a student at the University of Illinois, projected these restored sound films on October 8, 1957, at the SMPTE convention in Philadelphia. Aiken had seen a demonstration of Tykociner’s system in July 1922 when an undergraduate that he describes this way: “there is a distinct recollection that the speech was intelligible throughout.” Aiken reports that Tykociner borrowed two 50 watt vacuum tubes for his amplifier from him for the campus radio station one day, with the agreement that he was to return them for the evening broadcast. One evening Aiken had to burglarize the professor’s lab to retrieve the tubes so the station could go on the air. On August 25, 2017, as part of the Reel Thing Conference devoted to the conservation and restoration of film, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood, Joshua Harris of the University of Illinois demonstrated the result of a project funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, taking up where Aiken had left off, attempting to reproduce sound from Tykociner’s single-system recordings. Although it was possible to make out some words, a violin, and a clanging bell, the noise level nearly overwhelmed the content. The variable area track appeared to be badly underexposed, which may have been intentional in order to transmit enough light to the photocell for playback. Harris’ opinion is that the recordings did not sound much better in 1922. A dispute arose over the intellectual property Tykociner had developed with the University’s president David Kinley, who asserted the school’s ownership. Tykociner’s relationship with the university was strained over the issue, as further funding for the project was withheld. Tykociner tried to license the technology but was turned down by movie studios, Westinghouse, General Electric, and Kodak. However, Eyman (1997) reports that Tykociner sold the rights for $50,000 in 1927, but gives no source and doesn’t mention the licensee and I cannot find another reference to the assertion. With a budget reportedly of about $1000 Tykociner accomplished a great deal but he lacked the organization, the funding, and transducers required to produce good-quality optical sound. A significant bottleneck was that only AT&T or GE/ Westinghouse, in the United States, had the rights to the audion tube allowing them to supply the electronic amplifiers needed to fill a theater with good-quality high-volume sound. At the same time, two other independent efforts, but with far better funding, Tri-Ergon in Germany and Case Laboratory in Upstate New York, were on the verge of offering creditable optical sound systems.

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Tri-Ergon

Tri-Ergon (three-work, from the Greek) was a group of three German scientists who in 1918 joined forces to create a sound-on-film system, Hans Vogt (1890–1979), Josef (Jo) Engl (1893–1942), and Joseph Massolle (1889–1957). Vogt was known for having invented improvements to the telephone, and Engl had worked for Siemens & Halske on X-ray technology. In the summer of 1918, they began working on the project, and in the fall of that year, Vogt’s friend, Massolle, a radio engineer, was asked to join them. Using their savings they established a laboratory in Berlin, but quickly realized that the scope of the project required raising additional funds, which they succeeded in doing with the help of banker Robert Held who formed an investment group for the purpose. Experiments continued in their lab, in southeast Berlin, where they were able to hire research assistants for their newly equipped the lab. By the spring of 1921, they achieved demonstrable results that they and their investors hoped were good enough to permit them to raise additional capital for another round of financing. This led to a screening of the TriErgon motion picture optical sound-on-film system at 11:00 AM, on September 17, 1922, at the Alhambra Theater in Berlin. Short films were projected that included variety acts, speeches, and portions of the play Der Brandstifter (The Incendiary), according to Gomery (1976), to whom we owe an enlightening account. The sound quality was uneven, yet good enough to attract additional German and Swiss investors, who in 1923 formed Tri-Ergon A.G., as a Swiss corporation. The company promptly received 29 installation orders from Swiss and German exhibitors including orders from UFA (Universum Film A.G.), a major German film studio that owned theaters, which also acquired the German phonograph rights for the process. Tri-Ergon used a lease model receiving 15% of a theater’s gross, with the exhibitors paying for the hardware installation. To fill the hardware orders the lab was turned into a factory, and in 1924 Tri-Ergon produced 3 hours of variety act shorts. Although the films drew crowds, the process soon wore out its welcome, which likely was due to a combination of factors: indifferent films, m ­ ediocre sound

quality, the appalling German inflation inhibiting business and financial activity, and Tri-Ergon’s non-standard 42 mm wide film whose track was located between the sprocket holes and the edge of the film, which may have inhibited exhibitor acceptance. Tri-Ergon had created a format variation that preserved the picture area by adding 7 mm to the width of 35  mm film. This retained image quality but precluded the simpler projector conversion later used in America that retained the 35  mm format’s width, which located the track between the frame and a row of perforations, resulting in a reduction of the frame’s width and image area. Inventors of the caliber of Vogt, Engl, and Massolle had to have known about the prior efforts described in chapter 28, and in Narath’s (1960) opinion, the Tri-Ergon group must have been familiar with Messter’s Biophon sound-on-disk system that had been installed in 500 theaters (all or mostly all in Germany), only 5 years before they had begun their research. Out of necessity the group set out to invent a complete sound-on-film system including: microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, an optical sound recorder, and the ability to eliminate intermittency before the film reached the sound reader. Vogt et al. invented the Kathodophone, or hot-cathode microphone, to take the place of the widely used poor quality telephone carbon microphone. Vogt wrapped a bar of ceramic material with platinum wire coated with barium oxide to create an electrically heated cathode that ionized the air between it and a funnel-shaped anode that served as a sound collector; current flowing through the ionized air is modulated by air pressure between the cathode and anode. The resultant changes are measured as voltage changes across a resistor, which are amplified to produce a low noise signal. The design was filed on April 4, 1921, USP 1,534,148, Sound Translating device. The group also filed USP 1,550,381, on November 28, 1921, for Electrostatic Telephone, a condenser microphone, which turned out to be better for field work. Tri-Ergon improved the low amplification of the triode tube by several methods they disclosed including a multigrid version as described in USP 1,630,753, Amplifier, filed April

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Fig. 30.1 Tri-Ergon inventors. Left to right: Massolle, Vogt, and Engl.

Fig. 30.2  The Tri-Ergon format added 7 mm to the 35 mm print for the optical track to preserve the size of the frame. (Cinémathèque Française)

4, 1921. They also created a light modulating glow-light for exposing sound tracks they called the ultra-frequency recording lamp: it used a small cathode wrapped in a magnesium cylinder as described in USP 1,634,201, Glow Discharge

Tube. The lamp was filled with high pressure argon gas and produced actinic light (the blue-­violet end of the spectrum), a good match for the sensitivity of color blind film. Theodor Case invented a similar glow-­light as described in the next chapter, which like Tri-Ergon, produced a variable density track. Tri-Ergon’s glow-lamp was filled with argon gas at a pressure of several millimeters of mercury to conduct charge at a potential difference of about 500 volts; it responded rapidly to changes in voltage unlike a light bulb filament. Engl (1927) wrote that the glow-light’s discharge was independent of its temperature, and he also reported that its frequency response was greater than 10,000 Hz. Playing back the track also had challenges: to overcome the deficiencies of the available selenium cells the group developed their own photocell vacuum tube that used a potassium layered light-sensitive surface. They also designed a new kind of electrostatic loudspeaker with a wide frequency range made up of three speakers each covering a third of the audio spectrum. They designed a basic and effective transport mechanism for moving film past the projector’s sound head to dampen its intermittent action, an invention that was to have a significant commercial impact on American efforts in the field. It was so uncomplicated, effective, and inexpensive to make, that its use by others, RCA engineer Edward Kellogg (1955) acknowledged, invited litigation, which is exactly what happened when William Fox, owner of the Tri-Ergon patents in the Americas, put the film industry on notice. This invention is described in USP 1,713,726, by Vogt et al., Device for Phonographs with Linear Phonogram Carriers, filed March 20, 1922. Another Tri-Ergon disclosure, USP 1,825,598, Process for Producing Combined Sound and Picture Films, was filed March 29, 1922. Although the specifications cite the aforementioned non-standard outboard track location the claims are sufficiently broad to cover the production method that was adopted by the Hollywood film industry. ‘598 teaches the method universally used for shooting theatrical feature

30 Tri-Ergon

Fig. 30.3  Tri-Ergon’s USP teaching the design of the projector’s optical sound reader, known as the “flywheel patent.”

films with a camera and a separate sound recorder, a method called double-system sound. It gives a better result if sound and image use film stocks designed specifically for their purpose, and double-system also facilitates editing and sound mixing. This patent turned out to be another cause for an infringement suit filed by the down on his luck William Fox. However, Henry C. Bullis, in USP 1,335,651, Talking Picture Apparatus, filed December 15, 1915, anticipates optical recording and playback using double-system sound, and while he does not describe marrying the track and the image on one print, it’s an obvious offshoot of his method. Marrying a double-system recording with its picture is either a fundamentally profound concept or unpatentable because it is obvious. All told, Tri-Ergon filed 18 patents (there was one re-issue) in the United States covering their art, but Tri-Ergon had problems with the issuance of some of its key patents in Europe, which were deemed to have been anticipated by

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prior art. All in all, theirs is a remarkable accomplishment, having created interesting and workable designs for microphones, speakers, recording playback transducers, and even amplifier tubes, all of which contributed to, at the very least, proving the viability of optical speakers sound-on-film. Another early sound-on-film technology included that of Tonfilm that used variable area recording, unlike Tri-­Ergon’s variable density system, which was recorded using a mirror galvanometer like RCA’s Photophone. Tonfilm was based on the work of Danish inventors Valdemar Poulson and Peder Pedersen, and it was commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany (Kellogg, 1955, June). Across the Atlantic, Case Laboratory in Upstate New  York concentrated on optical sound, as described in the following chapters. The Case Laboratory inventions became the basis for Fox’s Movietone, the first optical sound system widely used by Hollywood for feature films. Within a couple of years after Movietone’s introduction for newsreels, in the spring of 1927, most of the major American studios, including Fox, would sign licensing agreements with Western Electric or its agent ERPI, for its version of Movietone. In 1926 Fox’s representative John Joy (who had been Earl Sponable’s classmate at Cornell) went to Europe and met with Tri-Ergon and induced Engl to travel to New York to demonstrate sound-on-film movies to mogul William Fox. Sponable (1947), who might have been biased since he helped to develop the Case system (but in his writings he is even-­handed), reported that the results of Tri-Ergon’s efforts were “quite inferior to those obtained by the Fox-Case methods.” Nonetheless, as part of his goal to advance his dominance of the industry through technology, Fox on his own behalf rather than that of his studio, for $300,00 signed a 6-month option, to expire on June 30, 1927, for an exclusive license of the Tri-Ergon patents outside of Germany (Gomery, 76). Fox consulted with Western Electric’s marketing and sales subsidiary ERPI, as to the value of the TriErgon patents, and ERPI’s engineers and legal department concluded that they were of limited value but Whitford Drake, vice president of ERPI, thought that the American rights might have value in blocking claims that were or might be granted to the many patents filed by the litigious Lee de Forest. On July 5, 1927, Fox purchased a 90% interest in the rights to the patents of Tri-­Ergon Aktiengesellschaft, Zürich, Switzerland, limited to the Americas, for a price of $50,000. This acquisition became the basis for litigation that might well have altered the course of the development of motion picture sound technology in America had it not been for a procedurally unusual decision by the US Supreme Court, as we shall learn in chapter 37. Although the Tri-Ergon group offered a working optical sound and recording product in Germany, as noted, other similar technology existed in Europe, but it was scattered in too many hands to effectively compete with the perceived

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30 Tri-Ergon

looming American domination of the field. This is what the German Government feared because of ERPI’s growing number of installations in Europe. With investments from Germany, Switzerland, and Holland, major patent holders pooled their intellectual property in an organization called Tobis (Ton-­Bild-­Syndicate or Sound-Picture-Syndicate) on August 13, 1928, and acquired the remaining Tri-Ergon patent rights (Weis, 1985). Both Siemens & Halske and AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft or German Electricity Company), the major German electrical manufacturing companies, had relevant patent portfolios and founded a manufacturing venture in Berlin on October 29, 1928, called the Klangfilm Company (Soundfilm Company), which also formed a motion picture studio. The two groups, Tobis and Klangfilm, then joined forces to create the Tobis-Klangfilm group. A somewhat similar electronics patent alliance had been made in the United States amongst AT&T, Westinghouse, and GE. Klangfilm used an interesting light valve for optical sound recording based on an early electro-optical device, the Kerr Cell, which was developed for motion picture sound in the early 1920s by August Karolus (1893–1972) of the University of Leipzig. Hans Wohlrab (1976), who worked under Karolus to adapt the Kerr Cell, chronicled the European contribution to the art, and is one of the sources for this chapter. The Kerr Cell is based on Scottish physicist John Kerr’s 1875 discov-

ery that a strong electromagnetic field passing through glass will produce double refraction or birefringence, and the phase shifting of incoming polarized light. (Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the magic lantern, was the first physicist to explain birefringence based on his wave model of light.) The Kerr Cell light valve for recording optical sound uses a steady light source passing through a Nicol prism polarizer and then through a cell of nitrobenzene liquid that has parallel facing electrode plates whose planes are orthogonal to the incoming light rays. These plates are charged to produce an electric field through the nitrobenzen; the strength of the field is controlled by the sound picked up by a microphone whose electrical output is amplified to vary the voltage applied to the cell’s electrodes. The voltage changes vary the amount of the phase shifting and the characteristic of the polarized light passing through a second Nicol prism analyzer. The intensity of the light emerging from the second polarizer is an analog of sound’s waveform, which then passes through optics to expose moving film to produce an optical sound track. The device is an electro-optical variable shutter that is unlike other recording light valves because it has no moving parts, unless one considers the motion of the organic molecules of nitrobenzene producing the cell’s phase shifting. The Klangfilm Karolus cell was used for several films, ­notably for The Blue Angel, which was released in 1929, directed by Joseph von Sternberg and produced by

Fig. 30.4  A diagram of Zworykin’s Kerr Cell light valve from his USP.  Light source 11 is focused by lens 12 and passes through polarizing Nichol prism 13 to pass through Kerr Cell 2. Electrodes, the vertical rulings, are on either side of the glass cell that contains electro-optically active nitrobenzene. The linear polarized light produced by 13 is modulated by changes to nitrobenzene molecules as

a result of varying the electrodes’ charge in response to the output of the microphone 36, whose signal is amplified by the circuit to power the electrodes. The analyzing Nichol prism 15 outputs light whose intensity is an analog of the microphone’s input. The modulated light, focused by lens 16, passes through slit 18 to expose the moving film 20.

30 Tri-Ergon

U.F.A., Universum Film AG. Its use was discontinued because it had poor dynamic range, required 600 volts to operate, and was a hazard since nitrobenzene is explosive. A Kerr Cell light valve development program took place at Westinghouse Electric and Mfg. Co. of East Pittsburgh, as described by Zworykin (1928) et  al. Westinghouse recognized movie sound as an opportunity in 1926; Zworykin improved the transmission of the cell by reducing its yellow absorption by double distillation of the nitrobenzene. Yellow absorption was troublesome because it filters out the blue-violet light to which film is most sensitive. Measures were also taken to address the cell’s nonlinear transmission in response to voltage, but it was not used commercially for motion picture production. The limitations of the Kerr Cell may have spurred the development of the electrodynamically oscillating mirror light valve, a mirror-galvanometer design, sometimes called the Duddell oscillograph, which was developed by GE/RCA for variable area tracks. Wohlrab reports that this kind of light valve was used for stereophonic double track variable area recordings at the 1936 Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Another light valve, successful deployed by Western Electric, was invented by AT&T’s Wente who improved Rankine’s efforts by designing an electromagnetic light valve shutter. The Tri-Ergon patents, and other German controlled intellectual property, proved to be important for blocking American companies from distributing sound films in Europe. Warners attempted to distribute its The Singing Fool in Germany but on June 4, 1929, just 10 minutes before the curtain was to have risen at its premiere, an injunction was issued halting the screening based on a suit filed by Tobis-­Klangfilm (Gomery, 1976). The injunction was reversed on appeal because The Singing Fool had been recorded using the Vitaphone disk system, rather than optically, but this r­ uling was reversed on July 22, 1929, and no

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American sound films were allowed into Germany until the matter was ­ adjudicated by another German court. Alarmed by this state of affairs, John Otterson, the combative president of ERPI, Western Electric’s sales and service division, attempted to negotiate with Tobis-Klangfilm, but they demanded nearly 90% of the European royalties, terms that ended the discussion. Otterson engineered a boycott of the exportation of all American films that was enforced by the MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) with the hope that German exhibitors would feel the revenue pinch and appeal to TobisKlangfilm for relief, but his strategy didn’t work. The situation became increasingly dire for American interests as Tobis-Klangfilm won similar suits in five other European countries. Seeing an advantage in its competitor’s difficulties, GE/ RCA acquired an interest in AEG, and was thus able to distribute RKO films made with its Photophone system. (RKO was formed by RCA specifically to use its variable area recording system.) Warner Bros. used a similar strategy to purchase 20% of Tobis-Klangfilm to enable it to release its sound films in Germany. With Paramount left out in the cold, Adolph Zukor, the studio’s founder, finding the situation to be untenable, met with the head of AEG, Emil Mayer, and initiated negotiations. These, and a tangle of further negotiations, were concluded by German and American interests in Paris to allow American sound films to be distributed in Europe. The “Paris Peace Treaty,” covering patents and marketing territories, was signed on July 22, 1930, but soon afterward the German Government passed laws that nullified the effectiveness of the treaty. In February 1932 a second Paris conference achieved nothing, but another agreement was reached in Paris in March 1936. In 1939, with the outbreak of war in Europe, the American companies informed Tobis-Klangfilm that further negotiations were off the table.

31

de Forest and Case

Lee de Forest (1873–1961), born in Council Bluff, Iowa, plays an important role in this study of the evolution of cinema because of his great invention, the electronic amplifier tube, which made optical sound possible and because of his efforts to create and market Phonofilm, an early optical sound system. He was the son of a Congregational minister who, in 1879, assumed the role of president of the Talladega College for Negroes on behalf of the American Missionary Association. de Forest’s family was not accepted by the citizens of Talladega, Alabama, because they didn’t approve of the school’s efforts to educate Freedmen, former slaves. His father, Dr. Henry de Forest, was a strict disciplinarian who did not spare the rod, or in fact the whip. Young de Forest’s only companions were his siblings and African-American children. He demonstrated an early talent for building gadgets and began to travel down the path of a man who believed in science rather than religion, despite his father’s desire for him to follow in his footsteps by entering the Yale School of Divinity. de Forest was interested in the arts and wrote poetry for the rest of his life, and his love of opera led him to the idea of developing radio as a tool for the broadcasting of music. In 1891 he attended the Mount Hermon preparatory school in Massachusetts where he was at last able to escape his father and life in Talladega. He matriculated to Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1893 on a scholarship endowed specifically for de Forest family members, enrolling in a 3-year undergraduate program. It was in his freshman year that he was voted the homeliest member of his class, but judging from his yearbook photos, he wasn’t much uglier than the typical Ivy League male. de Forest was a loner who concentrated on his studies becoming passionately interested in electromagnetism. He came to hold the worldview that the means for improving the human condition could only be acheived through technological progress, a belief he felt was compatible with his goal to become one of the immortals, like Edison. His biographers, James A. Hijiya (1992) and Mike Adams (2012), write that he resented the rich Yale students from privileged families, like the man who would do so

much to help him with the Phonofilm optical sound system, a future Yale alumnus, Theodore Case. de Forest briefly served as a bugler in the Connecticut Militia just as the Spanish-American War came to an end; returning to Yale for another 3 years, he earned his Ph.D. in physics from the Sloan Physics Laboratory. Upon graduation he went to work for Western Electric in Chicago, where after a trial period he wound up in its research lab. On his own time, he experimented with Hertzian waves or what came to be known as radio, and with the help of his roommate, engineer Edwin H. Smythe, invented a method for detecting radio waves, an electrolytic detector they called a “responder,” as described in USP 716,000, Apparatus for Communicating Signals Through Space, filed July 6, 1901. This was the first of some 300 patents to be granted to de Forest, “who was doomed to spend most of his life in the twentieth century, when invention was becoming a collective enterprise, conducted by gigantic corporations like AT&T with its battalions of engineers” (Hijiya, 1992). In 1901, impatient with the progress he was making in Chicago, de Forest moved to New  York and attempted to compete with Marconi’s ship-to-shore wireless telegraphy efforts, specifically for transmitting the results of the International Yacht Races. During the trial, when a new kind of radio spark transmitter he was using malfunctioned, de Forest tossed it overboard in a fit of pique and resorted to a less advanced device. The way to transmit radio waves at that time was to use improved versions of Hertz’s lab apparatus that produced an electric spark across a gap. These early devices were used for spark-telegraphy for sending Morse code or by using a modulated oscillating circuit for spark-­ telephony for the transmission of voice (Rühmer, 1908). The yacht race attempt ended in the failure to transmit usable information for de Forest, Marconi, and another party, whose combined signals resulted in a cacophony of interference. In 1902 de Forest founded the American de Forest Wireless Telegraph Company with his fundraising business partner, Abraham (Honest Abe) White, who was convicted of stock and mail fraud by falsely alleging in a mailing that de Forest

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_31

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Fig. 31.1  Lee de Forest

Wireless had won a law suit against Marconi (War of Wireless…, p,12, 1906). White’s chicanery would entangle de Forest for years, which eventually followed him to California where he was arrested by US marshals who dragged him back to New  York to face federal mail fraud charges. At trial his friends and colleagues characterized him as an inventor in an ivory tower, a guileless victim who had no knowledge of the fraudulent practices of his partner. He was let off, yet the wily de Forest seems to have turned a blind eye to White’s dishonesty. Adding to the troubles incurred due to the shady practices of Honest Abe, de Forest was unable to achieve his goal, the creation of a viable wireless communications system. His responder (receiver) proved to be a part that defied manufacture, and so he looked elsewhere for a solution. While visiting the laboratory of Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden, he met a disgruntled employee claiming to be the true inventor of Fessenden’s electrolytic radio detector, who surreptitiously passed on the design to de Forest. de Forest used what he learned and went into production with the stolen design, the upshot of which was a patent infringement suit brought by Fessenden, one of many intellectual property disputes that would engage much of de Forest’s time and energy. This appropriation of another man’s work to further his interests, and aggrandize his ego, would also be evidenced in his dealings with Theodore Case, as we shall learn. de Forest and his company lost the lawsuit with Fessenden, and to compound this self-inflicted wound, he was unable to come up with a non-infringing radio receiver, a failure that led to his being bought out of the American de Forest Wireless Telegraph

31  de Forest and Case

Company for $500  in November, 1906; despite receiving only a pittance, the separation turned out to be greatly to his financial advantage (Hijiya, 1992, Adams, 2012). As part of his settlement, de Forest kept the rights to what he had been working on, the electronic amplifier tube. On October 25, 1906, he filed Device for Amplifying Feeble Electrical Currents, USP 841,387, in which he describes what he called the audion (audio ion), a name he gave to several devices related in intention if not in function. The device described in ‘387 was a glass tube and an arrangement of parts similar to the experimental device used by Edison and Dickson and recognized by Fleming as the rectifying diode (see chapter 27). The Device for Amplifying Feeble Electrical Currents used a gas filled tube that created an amplification effect, according to the inventor, by changing the distance between cathode and anode by using either electromagnetic or electrostatic forces. It’s reminiscent of how a cathode ray tube steers its electron beam, but it wasn’t a good recipe for electronic amplification. In 1906 de Forest engaged the services of New York City automobile lamp maker H. W. McCandless to build the first true electronic amplifier tube (Webb, 2005, p.  20), and on January 29, 1907 de Forest filed his signature invention, Space Telegraphy, USP 879,532, describing the triode, which became the keystone invention for the electronics industry, without which optical sound-on-film and a host of other communication systems would be impossible. From the specifications and claims, it is evident that de Forest was focused on a wireless telegraph receiver or oscillation detector and had no idea that he had invented a general purpose amplifier for greatly increasing a signal’s strength, nor did he understand the principal of the device. The triode is an evacuated glass tube with three electrodes: a heated electron emitting cathode, an electron receiving anode or plate, and between them a mesh grid that is positively charged. A potential difference or voltage exists between the cathode and plate; without any voltage applied to the grid, a steady current flows between the two. A low-­power signal applied to the grid controls the flow of electrons, or current, from cathode to anode and in this way, a higher power current can be modulated by a feeble signal on the grid. (For the patent drawings of ‘532, see chapter 27.) While this is the accepted explanation for how the triode works, de Forest writes “the explanation of this phenomenon is exceedingly complex and at best would be merely tentative.” J.  J. Thomson had identified the electron in 1897, 10 years prior to this filing, and Fleming had described the physics of the diode in terms of the flow of electrons in 1906. It’s curious that an expert in the field wouldn’t recognize the phenomenon or even use the word electron in his disclosure, but an inventor does not need to understand how his i­nvention works in order to be granted a US patent, and he can even offer an incorrect explanation for its theory of operation; he can

31  de Forest and Case

believe he has invented a device for one application that is, in fact, better suited to another. None of this prevented de Forest from being awarded one of the most valuable patents ever granted. Although de Forest is justifiably given credit as the inventor of the amplifier tube, the creation of a properly functioning triode took the combined efforts of many engineers and scientists. de Forest incorrectly believed that a small amount of gas was best left in the tube to enhance its amplification, which is consistent with his failure to understand the electron physics of the device. But Harold D.  Arnold of American Telephone and Telegraph and Irving Langmuir of General Electric demonstrated that a great improvement could be made to the triode’s performance by evacuating the tube to a hard (high) vacuum (Kellogg, 1955). While the scientists and engineers at AT&T/Bell Labs and GE/RCA greatly improved the audion’s amplification by removing the gas from the tube, the Supreme Court ruled that this improvement did not merit patent protection. de Forest also conceived of the design of the audio amplifier by realizing that the output of audions could be cascaded in a circuit to increase power output, which may not be that much of a leap since Fleming shows a similar arrangement for producing continuous DC current using diodes. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, owners of the rights to the Fleming valve or diode (as described in chapter 27), asserted that de Forest was infringing, but by the time the suit settled in their favor they realized that de Forest’s triode design was advantageous. Although de Forest was insistent that the invention of the audion had not been influenced by the Fleming diode, a point he felt he needed to make, possibly given his rank appropriation of Fessenden’s electrolytic detector, today historians believe that de Forest was dissembling (Hijiya, 1992). But in the end, from the point of view of intellectual property ownership, it did not matter (in the United States) since the Fleming valve patent was found to have been anticipated by prior art and invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1943. de Forest took credit for greatly increasing the amplification of the triode by a process called regeneration, the invention of Edwin Howard Armstrong, which involved feeding the tube’s outputted signal back to itself. In 1913, the year Armstrong graduated from Columbia University, with a degree in electrical engineering, he demonstrated and wrote papers about his feedback circuit that was capable of increasing amplification hundreds of times. He also learned that when the amplified signals increased past a certain level, the tube would transition to a state of oscillation and function as a radio transmitter. Armstrong received a patent for the circuit in October 1914, but three other inventors, including de Forest, claimed to have invented regenerative amplification and litigation ensued. The matter wound up twice in the Supreme Court, which in a second decision in 1934 reversed itself and found that de Forest was the inventor. The

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e­ ngineering community was up in arms; two professional societies recognized Armstrong as the inventor of the regenerative circuit: the Institute of Radio Engineers, the year of the court’s decision, and the Franklin Institute and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, in 1941 and 1942, respectively.1 For much of de Forest’s career he was involved in infringement suits he initiated; he also experienced business failures and personal hardship, but he never lost his love for working in the lab, which Hijiya (1992, p.  68) describes as a “religious quest,” spending long hours without regard to weekends and holidays. His conflicts and setbacks might have caused another man to reflect and change his ways, but not de Forest who compiled an enemies’ list blaming those he deemed to be responsible for his misfortunes. de Forest claimed to have made and lost several fortunes, but until impecuniousness caught up with him near the end of his life, he was chauffeur driven, stayed at the best hotels, and lived in upscale homes. He sold off various rights to the audion to AT&T, in successive tranches, and received payments over the years. He had a keen desire to apply himself to broadcasting, especially music, and his vision for commercial radio content had much in common with RCA’s chief, David Sarnoff, who shared a similar passion for broadcasting music. With players like RCA in the field, de Forest was unable to achieve the preeminence in broadcasting he desired but due to self-promotion, to a large extent the media and public accepted that he was “the king of radio.” He had a claim to the title based on the audion’s radio applications but so many inventors played a part no one person can be said to have invented radio. As a result of the AT&T licenses, de Forest was restricted to selling audions on the amateur market, but it seems that there were rights that AT&T had not foreseen, such as sound-on-film. In 1923, with regard to his motion picture optical sound work, de Forest (1923) wrote: “Perhaps the one consideration which, more than any other, prompted me to enter this field was my desire to personally develop a new and useful application of the audion amplifier.” de Forest turned his attention to cinema applications for the audion and on September 18, 1919, filed Means for Recording and Reproducing Sound, which was granted on February 20, 1923, as USP 1,446,246. It’s a description of a sound-on-film system applying audion amplification to optical sound recording and reproduction. Its claims were limited to the audion as part of the system but the audion patent would expire on January 14, 1924, which made the effort to file an

Armstrong is also the inventor of frequency modulated (FM) radio that quieted the background noise exhibited by AM (amplitude modulated) transmission. His attempt to commercialize it met with the resistance of David Sarnoff whose RCA had a great stake in AM with its NBC networks and hardware manufacturing businesses (Webb, 2005, p. 22).

1 

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31  de Forest and Case

Fig. 31.3  Theodore Willard Case at his summer home at Casowasco, near Moravia, N.Y. (Cayuga Museum of Art)

Fig. 31.2  The cover sheet of de Forest’s all-embracing but soon to expire patent teaching an optical sound system based on Audion amplification.

exercise in futility. de Forest filed the ‘246 patent, and 78 others, as an effort to enmesh optical sound-on-film in a web of protection. In 1920 de Forest purchased a Thalofide cell from Case Laboratory, to be used as an optical track reader. Although Case had purchased parts from de Forest 4 years earlier, this can be considered to be the start of a relationship that some writers describe as collaborative, which was true in the early phase of their association, but as their affiliation deteriorated due to de Forest’s lack of payment, poor contractual performance, and usurpation of inventive credit, they stopped sharing information, although what one was doing had to have been obvious to the other (Adams, 2012). Theodore Willard Case (1888–1944) was the son of Willard Erastus Case and Eva Caldwell, who married in 1878; Willard inherited the businesses created by Theodore’s great-grandfather Erastus Case, which were worth a fortune. Willard worked in the family business for a while but became a gentleman scientist specializing in electricity, presenting

papers on the subject before scientific bodies. The concept of a professional credentialed scientist is a relatively new idea, and Erastus followed in the footsteps of many self-taught scientists. Theodore also followed in his father’s footsteps and became fascinated with using light as a means for communication and recording sound. The timing is right for his having read Rühmer’s engaging Wireless Telephony, In Theory and Practice, published in 1908, which expertly covers the subject matter of Case’s greatest interest, optical telecommunications, and sound recording. His biographer, Stephanie Przybylek (1999), relates that Case attended East Coast private schools and then headed off to Yale in 1910, in the Renault convertible his father had given him, with the elder Case warning: “I don’t want that car in any races.” In 1911, while a student at Yale, Case began experimenting with the selenium cell describing his attempts to transmit sound by light and his idea for a phonograph called the “lightograph.” In February 1911, he wrote to his mother: “Yesterday I at last succeeded in transmitting sound by light I used the principal of the manometric flame… My reproduction of the voice was perfect.” After graduation ­ from Yale, and an obligatory year at Harvard Law, Case set up labs in the basements of his parents’ home in the town of

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Fig. 31.4  Earl Iru Sponable

Auburn and their sprawling summer estate in Casowasco, south of Auburn, in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. In 1916 he fortuitously hired as his lab assistant Earl Iru Sponable (1895–1977), who had just received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Cornell University, located only 30 miles from Auburn. Iru was his given middle name but he is invariably referred to and self-identified as Earl I. Sponable (The Cornell Alumni News, 1916). Sponable would become a sound recording expert and make significant contributions to motion picture technology both before and after he left Case Laboratory. He grew up on his family farm in Plainfield, New York, and worked his way through college waiting tables and playing the violin. He had been recommended for the job by the elder Case’s former assistant, Blin Sill Cushman, who worked in the Cornell Chemistry department; Cushman subsequently left Cornell to join Case Laboratory, which was founded immediately after Sponable joined Case. (Sponable was a classmate of Laurens Hammond, the inventor of the Teleview stereoscopic projection system, which is described in chapter 68.) The lab was located at 205 West Genesee Street in Auburn and when fully staffed, with about a dozen people including four principal researchers as well as assistants, it cost $100,000 a year to operate. Sponable’s (1947, April and May) invaluable account of the chronology of optical sound invention was a key source for this chapter. I believe that one of the motivations for Sponable’s essay was a desire to set

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the record straight by establishing a factual basis for understanding Case’s contribution to cinema optical sound technology. In 1916 Case Labs purchased a three-stage audion amplifier and receiving sets from de Forest Radio, Telephone & Telegraph Company, to help test minerals for their photoactivity. The minerals, some of which came from Case’s father’s collection, were illuminated while having a current passed through them to determine if they were photodetectors by measuring any change in their resistance. At that time electronic amplifiers were difficult to obtain because the rights to the audion tube had been exclusively licensed by AT&T and cross-licensed by GE. These companies controlled the supply of amplifiers while they engaged in efforts to advance electronics and apply it to radio, telegraphy, public address systems, the phonograph, and, last of all, to film sound. Case, Sponable, and Cushman worked with the Sperry Gyroscope Company to test an infrared communications system by transmitting signals between buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn using a powerful searchlight covered with a Kodak Wratten gelatin infrared filter (a filter that would pass infrared and hold back visible light). The Army Signal Corps was interested, and Case and the military transmitted infrared signals across an 18 mile stretch of the New  York Harbor. Case Laboratory also did line-of-sight optical communications research for the military during World War I, specifically for the Naval Experimental Station at New London, Connecticut. For this effort Case invented the infrared detecting Thalofide cell, which incorporated a photosensitive thallium oxysulfide electrode surface in a tube that had a high vacuum or was filled with helium or hydrogen. The light-sensitive materials used in the tube are described in in USPs 1,301,227 and 1,309,181, both filed October 9, 1917 and titled Variable Resistance. The Thalofide cell changed its resistance in response to the strength of the infrared radiation falling on it. Case would adapt this photocell for reading an optical sound track. In 1918 Case married a woman who had been working as a lab assistant and glass blower, Alice Gertrude Eldred. Also in 1918, Sponable married Marie Whalen, a woman he met at night school where he was taking a course in shorthand to help him take notes in the lab. A year after the end of the war, despite promising test results, Case’s work for the military diminished; he unsuccessfully attempted to interest them in infrared communications for another year or so. Case Laboratory was looking for a new mission and one amongst many ideas proposed was to set up apparatus in an attempt to listen to radio signals from Mars. While this sounds outlandish today it did not at the time. The belief that Mars was inhabited was promulgated by the respected astronomer and Director of the Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, Percival Lowell. Lowell’s (1908) account was reported by the press who ran his ­persuasively detailed

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maps of the Martian canals, which he perceived through his telescope and used to illustrate his book, Mars as the Abode of Life. Case would find his next major opportunity not on Mars but on earth, specifically the New York City lab of Lee de Forest. Lee de Forest’s many hours in the lab laboring on optical sound-on-film weren’t panning out because he was unable to develop good recording and playback transducers. As mentioned above, in 1920 he purchased his first part from Case, a Thalofide cell, hoping it might function as an optical track playback device. Over time de Forest became increasingly dependent upon Case for playback and then recording cells. He began to treat Case Laboratory not simply as a supplier but as part of his research organization. He requested changes to Case’s telecommunications transducers to enable them to function as parts for an optical sound-on-film system. As de Forest bought more parts, he requested more changes. There is nothing unusual about a customer approaching a vendor with a request for a change to a part, or even a new part made to specification. If an inventor like de Forest has a device he needs built to his specifications, a formal agreement is best memorialized to clarify ownership rights. As far as Case was concerned, he was inventing the parts using expertise that the customer lacked, but de Forest’s understanding was different, and he seems to have come to believe that he was the inventor giving instructions to Case. But Case’s obsession was optical communications, and he was the expert. de Forest was in a hurry for his new parts and may or may not have been contributing useful ideas, but both men let the intellectual property issue slide. Przybylek recounts that Case followed de Forest’s marketing and public relations efforts by clipping articles about them and pasting them in a scrapbook. Case Laboratory was counting on the famous and accomplished de Forest to create a market for its inventions. Case and Sponable were intrigued by de Forest’s desire to create an optical track motion picture system because it was a perfect fit for their expertise, and they became increasingly dedicated to the project. The de Forest relationship was given heightened attention after one of their projects, a cell to create a record of the intensity of sunlight over the course of a day, didn’t attract any buyers. Case made efforts to improve the characteristics of the Thalofide cell for sound-on-film playback as described in USP 1,342,842, Resistance Element, filed March 15, 1920. The patent covers light-sensitive materials for coating the cell’s cathode designed to make the tube photosensitive to the part of the spectrum produced by an incandescent exciter lamp, the most likely source of illumination to be used in a projector’s sound reader. In the disclosure Case sites Bell’s Photophone, an invention designed for light to carry an audio signal, as described in chapter 28. As their commitment to optical sound for film grew, like de Forest and the Tri-Ergon group, they found the need to invent key components to make optical sound work. In their case this meant developing a microphone and optical recording

31  de Forest and Case

and playback transducers, a single-system camera, an optical sound printer, and projector adaptations for playing back sound. They could buy amplifiers off-the-shelf from de Forest, at least in lab quantities, and soon they would seek to do so in production quantities from his licensees. Case Labs worked on all of the sound-on-film hardware except for the amplifiers and loudspeakers, which today are common items but, at the time, were just appearing on the market and difficult to obtain because the supply was tightly controlled. As Case and Sponable tried to develop a way to record optical sound Case filed patents for versions of the manometric flame, the Kerr Cell, and the mirror galvanometer, but he would succeed with the emissive glow-light tube, which he at first called the Helio light. In 1922 Case found that the infrared transmitter tube he had developed for the Navy (the Thalofide cell was the receiver), a tube that produced infrared by means of gas discharge, could be turned into an instrument for exposing sound tracks by shifting its emission to the violet-ultraviolet end of the spectrum to match the sensitivity of photographic emulsions. Case eventually called the new tube the Aeo light because it used an alkaline earth oxide-coated cathode. In its initial iteration, Case filled the tube with argon and next and, more successfully, with helium to produce actinic light. Tri-Ergon’s Engl designed a similar tube as described in the prior chapter. The commercial version of the Aeo light operated at 350 volts without requiring a heated cathode, which at first Case thought was necessary. When the signal from a microphone ran through the Aeo light’s coated cathode, it emitted light that mimicked the fluctuations of sound’s waveform to expose a variable density photographic track. This emissive device, for exposing sound-on-film, is unlike the subsequent light valve methods that worked by modulating a fixed light source; the use of the Aeo light, for both Phonofilm and Movietone, fell by the wayside. The same year, 1922, Case and Sponable demonstrated, in the lab, Aeo light recorded optical tracks of good quality using a modified Powers projector to run as a sound recorder and reproducer, with the Thalofide cell as the key component of the sound reader. What they heard in their lab was much better sound than anything demonstrated by de Forest in his lab using the same parts. This posed a problem for Case, not an existential one because of his family’s great wealth, but nonetheless his lab had to sustain itself because it was a commercial enterprise and he was a young man trying to prove himself. Case was coming to believe that his only customer for the parts, that he had put so much time and money into developing, was undependable. de Forest sailed to Germany with his family in early October 1921 where he worked with a manufacturer who had licensed his inventions; there he attempted to record sound by modulating a high-frequency gas discharge tube. At that time de Forest may have met with the Tri-Ergon group or saw demonstrations of their system. Adams (2012) tells us that in April 1922, de Forest claims to have created a new and advanced

31  de Forest and Case

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Fig. 31.5  Finding an electronic solution for a sound to light transducer must have seemed elusive to Case in 1922. The top half of the cover sheet of USP 1,718, 999, which teaches an improved manometric flame.

Fig. 31.6  A version of the Aeo light, from Case’s USP 1,975,768, filed November 19, 1927. Part 16 is the incandescent cathode that exposes the film.

device: “A new element, the ‘AEO-­Photion’ is introduced but not explained.” Adams believed that none of de Forest’s biographers can explain the nature of this part, but it is obvious that de Forest had been in communication with Case who told him about the Aeo light, for which he was taking credit, never having been in the same room with one. Late in the summer of 1922 de Forest demonstrated his Phonofilm system for the German press and articles about it appeared in American papers. In September 1922, de Forest returned from Germany and on October 2, he met with Case at the Ambassador Hotel in Manhattan where they discussed the new Aeo light. The next day Case sailed for London where he saw a demonstration of Rankine’s light valve, according to Przybylek (1999). Upon Case’s return from England, in November 1922, de Forest invited him and Sponable to his studio, a former brewery on Manhattan’s East 48th Street, where he projected sound films that Sponable recalled were of poor quality. de Forest was invited to see the new Aeo light demonstrated and met with Case and Sponable at Case Laboratory on December 15, 1922. Sponable (1947) recalls that de Forest was impressed with what he saw and requested and was given one of the new tubes to take back with him to New York City. At the time and years later, de Forest (1941) continued to take credit for the invention of the Aeo light; he recalled that he had been “summoned” to Case labs for what must have been the December 15 meeting. Writing in the Journal of the S.M.P.E, he tells his fellow motion picture engineers: “Forthwith I sketched out the first oxide-coated cathode glow-tube…” Obviously this does not square with the chronology of events since de Forest

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31  de Forest and Case

Fig. 31.7  A telegram from Case to de Forest, September 2, 1924. Taber is Case’s lawyer, as mentioned in the text. A year later Case and de Forest parted ways.

left Case’s lab with an AEO light. The day after meeting at Case Laboratory, December 16, 1922, Case contacted his attorney John Taber, and asked him to broach the subject of clarifying his business relationship with de Forest. Taber wrote such a letter to de Forest who answered that things were too up in the air to reach an agreement, a response that resulted in Case growing increasingly distrustful of de Forest, who had exacerbated concerns about his intentions by asserting the desire to avoid the use of lawyers. Sponable visited de Forest at his studio in New  York on January 9, 1923 to demonstrate progress Case Labs had made with a new version of the Aeo light. They tried out the new tube on the spot, and it was demonstrably fit for the purpose. Sponable would visit de Forest from time to time trying to help him improve the integration of the Case parts into the Phonofilm system, and de Forest wanted to employ Sponable for 3 days a week, but Case needed him at the lab. de Forest continued to receive samples of new versions of the AEO light and at the end of February, Case, Sponable, and lawyer Taber visited de Forest at his lab. They left the demonstration unimpressed with the sound quality they heard. de Forest did not seem to be able to get good components to work properly. This motivated Case and Sponable, who had growing insights into optical sound recording, to create a reference system using their components by designing and building a sound-­on-­film camera to demonstrate the quality they believed they had achieved. de Forest clearly knew less about the technology of the transducers than Case or Sponable, and he disappointingly brought less to the table than they had hoped in terms of his ability to integrate their parts into a working system. Case had made an error by developing parts for the use of a customer without a contractual relationship. On the other hand, de Forest was impatient with Case Lab’s progress, which was based on discipline rather than sloth, at a time

when he was shooting sound-on-film of indifferent quality that he hoped to exhibit as soon as possible in order to get his business going and create cash flow. While de Forest was making suggestions for part modifications that he expected to be executed in a hurry, he gave disingenuous excuses for not making timely payments for his purchases. To solve his cash problems, de Forest wanted to begin production and distribution, which would also require expertise in and an organization for outfitting theaters. On March 13, 1923, de Forest, with Case present, staged what was surely a premature demonstration of his Phonofilm system for the press. Of the short films screened, only one, of an Egyptian dance, was deemed to be “very good” by Case. One of the truisms of hardware demonstrations is that they are judged by their software, in this case filmed content. de Forest was offering a marginal system that needed all the help it could get from well-produced short films, but he did not accept suggestions gracefully. Case attempted to help him improve his technique, yet nothing could stop de Forest from venturing forth hastily with an unseasoned system, a lesson he ought to have learned during his trial at sea competition with Marconi two decades earlier when, in a fit of pique, he threw his failed transmitter overboard. One of de Forest’s biographers, the sympathetic Hijiya (1992, p.  111), summed up the working relationship between the two men this way: “Case…had made several inventions which de Forest used in Phonofilm, and had surpassed de Forest in research between 1923 and 1925.” In addition: “After the spring of 1923 he (de Forest) left most experimentation to his collaborators Case and Sponable, devoting his own time to learning to take picture and promoting Phonofilm sales…According to motion picture historian Kenneth Macgowan (1965)…‘Case and Sponable made the greatest technical advances’.”

32

Phonofilm

There are biographies, articles, and websites, which are all part of the self-reinforcing hagiographic myth that has grown up around Lee de Forest’s contribution to motion picture optical sound. On the other hand, Theodore Case, the inventor of the system that was the basis for worldwide cinema sound-on-film beginning in the jazz age and for the rest of the twentieth century, has but one slim biography, which was written by Stephanie Przybylek (1999), who in 1994 became the curator of the Cayuga Museum, on the site of the former Case Laboratory. It was there that she uncovered a trove of the lab’s documents that had been in storage and spent the next few years sifting through them from which she constructed an account of Case’s activities. Another useful source of information about Case Laboratory’s work is Sponable (1947, April and May) and his technology chronology. There is also the lengthy account of Phonofilm, by one of de Forest biographers, Adams (2012), and we have de Forest’s (1923a, b, 1924, 1926, 1941) accounts that are a barometer of his relationship with Case, in which he at first acknowledges Case’s contribution then, in later articles, softpedals his dependence on Case’s inventions by either taking credit for them or ignoring them. Przybylek sites a crucial turning point in the Case-de Forest relationship: “Case repeatedly admonished de Forest about product quality, but by early in 1924 it became obvious to Case that in de Forest’s mind quality ranked second to promotion.” It was then that Case, and his researchers Sponable and Cushman, met and decided to go forward with their own optical sound development program, and Sponable set about to complete a sound-on-film camera, a project that been lying fallow since 1922, when it proposed the primitive manometric flame as the basis for a sound to film transducer. Completed later in 1924 using an electronic transducer, the camera Sponable built was the forerunner of generations of sound-on-film newsreel cameras. The sound-on-film system Case and his associates in Auburn designed determined the specifications for the optical sound format used by Hollywood and the rest of the world. Although the literature often attributes the invention of the first commercially viable optical

sound system to Western Electric, it was indisputably a version of Case’s system. Western Electric swapped their admittedly superior transducers for Case’s, but identifying the system as Western Electric’s feels out of kilter. The situation is more like changing the engines on a jet airliner for ones that are more advanced – it’s still the same airplane. With an unreliable customer, de Forest, he had allowed himself to become dependent on, Case needed to come up with an alternative. He had made a major investment in research and development and his chances of success were sinking because of de Forest’s peccadillos and ineffectual efforts. Earlier in 1923 Case and Sponable performed a thorough literature search, which is summarized in the Sponable articles. After having conferred with their patent attorneys, they became convinced that they had developed a strong independent patent position allowing them to license optical sound technology giving them an alternative to any dependence on de Forest. In addition, they and their attorneys determined that neither the Ries nor Fritts patents were able to block them. Sponable relates that: “Ries came to Auburn to see Case in 1923 and offered to sell his patents for one thousand dollars. Also, the opinions by Thompson and Gifford (Mr. Case’s patent attorneys) in 1925 were to the effect that it was very doubtful that these patents would be upheld in Court. Ries later sold these patents and several other applications to the de Forest Company.” In 1926 the head of RCA’s patent department, identified by Sponable as Mr. Adams, offered an opinion to Case about de Forest’s attempt to dominate electronic amplification for optical sound by referring to de Forest’s patent Means for Recording and Reproducing Sound (granted on February 20, 1923, USP 1,446,246), as follows: “due to de Forest’s original (audion) patent having expired de Forest now had no more right to use amplifiers or to make vacuum tubes than anyone else.” (Parenthesis added.) An Aeo light recording transducer was successfully employed in the single-system sound-on-film camera built under Sponable’s direction by modifying a Bell & Howell 2709 35  mm studio camera. At first Sponable had Bell &

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_32

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Howell build the camera, but when it failed to meet his ­specifications, he turned to the Precision Machine Company of New York City, but the final version was made by the Wall Manufacturing Company of Syracuse, New  York. The recording head design used spring-loaded damping rollers or snubbers hugging film to wrap it around the drive sprocket to smooth out the motion of the intermittent. The recording head was located below the gate and the sound track exposure was made on the drive sprocket whose rotation was isolated from the shutter-intermittent mechanism. The location of the track, between a column of perforations and the edge of the frames, some 14½ inches or 20 frames ahead of the exposed frame, became the industry standard. Part of the 6 inch long Aeo light tube protruded through the rear of the camera; it exposed the track through a slit 0.001 inch wide whose length was perpendicular to the film’s direction of motion. The slit itself was a chemically deposited silver metal mask coated on a quartz plate ground and polished to a thickness of less than 0.001 inch that was mounted on a steel shoe. The quartz window was in physical contact with the film emulsion because Case felt an open slit would collect dust, as described in Slot Unit, USP 1,605,529, filed on June 1, 1925. This single-system camera was undoubtedly the proof of concept for the Fox Movietone single-system newsreel cameras. After leaving Case and working for FoxCase, Sponable filed on November 12, 1927, USP 1,777,682, Combined Motion Picture and Sound Camera, teaching a design that smooths the film’s motion past the Aeo light by

Fig. 32.1  Sponable’s Aeo light (27) sound-on-film camera, from a disclosure filed on November 12, 1927, after he was with the Fox-Case Corporation.

32 Phonofilm

isolating any irregularities in the rotation of the main drive or shutter-shaft from the driving sprocket. William E. Waddell, general manager of the Phonofilm Studio, who had once worked for Edison (possibly on the home Kinetoscope project), and also for Porter on the early anaglyph film Jim the Penman (Zone, 2012, p.  136), arranged to film President John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. and Wisconsin Senator Robert (Fighting Bob) Marion La Follette, Sr., in Washington; the two men, who could not have been more different, one a cranky conservative Republican and the other an ebullient member of the Progressive Party, which he founded. For what was likely the first sound-on-film newsreel de Forest asked Case to supervise the cinematography and sound recording with Sponable’s camera, and on the morning of August 11, 1924, Case, Sponable, de Forest, and his cameraman set up the equipment at the White House. Coolidge and his secret service men stepped out of the White House and onto the lawn at 1:30 PM, and the President addressed the crew abruptly with: “I don’t see why you people did not do as you agreed and set up on the porch.” Case meekly replied that he didn’t know they were supposed to be on the porch. A steadfast Republican, he was “dumbfounded” by Coolidge’s brusque demeanor. “He was shocked that a prosperous Republican like himself could be so rude,” Przybylek relates. The President looked through the Bell & Howell viewfinder, mumbled something unintelligible and walked back into the White House. Ten minutes passed and having changed suits, he reappeared. After some adjustments, with Case behind the camera, Coolidge gave what was supposed to be a 3-minute speech but one that lasted longer, requiring the film to be changed, a delay that visibly annoyed him. When the cinematography was completed, Coolidge, without a word, abruptly turned his back on the crew and strode back to the White House, presumably to brusquely deal with the affairs of state. The crew moved to a new location in D.C. and filmed La Follette who was a much better subject, if only because his voice was louder. In de Forest’s (1924) article, Phonofilm Progress, he implicitly takes credit for the camera’s technology: “Bell and Howell cameras are now employed. The arrangements for passing the film with mathematical smoothness and accuracy before a slit actually reduced in width, are decidedly superior…The camera has been made more silent and portable.” de Forest describes its use for the filming of Coolidge and La Follette, but the only place in the article where he mentions the word case is in the phrase “as the case may be.” The change in de Forest’s (1923a, b) attitude is evident comparing this 1924 article with his 1923 The Phonofilm, in which he credits Case and praises the Thalofide playback photocell. For his Phonofilm interviews, de Forest used a modified German camera to shoot sound-on-film. Phonofilm was shot at 21 fps, not the 24  fps that became standard for optical

32 Phonofilm

279

Fig. 32.2  On the grounds of the White House, the morning of August 11, 1924, preparing to interview President Coolidge with the Case camera. From left to right: Case, de Forest, and possibly William Waddell. Perhaps Sponable took the photo. (Library of Congress)

sound only a few years later. The track was between the picture edge and a column of perforations, which became the custom, but recording and playback heads were mounted on the upper loop, not on the lower loop, as would become the industry standard established by Sponable’s camera. Although single-system sound would become especially useful for newsreel cinematography, double-system sound, using a separate recorder, became the standard method for recording optical sound for features, as laid out in a Tri-­ Ergon USP 1,825,598, Process for Producing Combined Sound and Picture Film, filed on March 29, 1922, and cited in chapter 30. de Forest would file, on September 28, 1928, Talking Motion Picture Apparatus, USP 1,843,972, a description of double-system sound recording a few years after the Tri-Ergon disclosure. In February 1923, de Forest proposed the merger of Case Labs with his company, an offer that Case wisely declined because he preferred an arm’s length relationship in the form of a purchase or licensing agreement. In negotiations for a supply arrangement with Case, de Forest claimed to have a deal waiting to be consummated for 1000 theater installations, which never materialized. Later he reduced that number to 200 but succeeded in wiring only 34 theaters for Phonofilm in the United States, Europe, South Africa, and Japan, according to Gomery (Neale, 2012, p.  125.); only three Phonofilm theaters were in operation in the United States by the time de Forest sold the Phonofilm’s rights to a group in South Africa, in September, 1928. But the future

was an open book on April 30, 1923, when the contract negotiated at the Yale Club in Manhattan, by the inventors and their lawyers, was signed. It was an agreement giving de Forest the right to exclusively purchase both the Aeo light and Thalofide cells at specified prices, but the exclusivity hinged on performance; de Forest had to buy 200 cells, but he was unable to reach that number. At the time of the Washington D.C. interviews only a handful of Phonofilm systems had been installed. Based on the financial backing of American Hugo Riesenfeld, Austrian-born prolific composer, conductor, and music director of Manhattan’s Rivoli and Rialto Theaters, de Forest was able to market the Phonofilm system and produce short subjects. Riesenfeld helped de Forest put together professional production capability including a studio and the assistance of Freeman Harrison (Harry) Owens (1890–1979), born in Pine Bluff Arkansas, an experienced cameraman with a technological bent, who between 1921 and 1951 was granted 186 US Patents. From a random sample of two dozen I examined, it appears that the great majority were for moving image hardware, including film and television cameras, projector hardware, sound recording methods, and optics. On June 4, 1924, while under contract with de Forest, Owens independently filed what was granted as USP 1,723,436, Sound and Motion Picture Reproducing System, an optical sound camera-recorder that used multi-­stage amplification. In the ensuing legal battle between de Forest and Owens, de Forest prevailed in the New York Supreme Court. According

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to Hall (WS: Encyclopedia of Arkansas): “The ruling was a landmark decision that stated that the company owned all rights to the inventions that were made by the inventor.” When his contract with de Forest expired, Owens joined Fox-Case Movietone. (See chapter 33.)1 On April 15, 1923, de Forest publicly premiered 18 Phonofilm short films of popular performers at Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater. An internal Western Electric memo dated March 20, 1924, reported that the sound quality of Phonofilm was poor by their standards, and newspaper reviews were mixed. Riesenfeld failed to interest a major studio or producer in Phonofilm, despite his extensive network of industry contacts (Adams, 2012). Although Gomery gives a total of 34 theaters for worldwide installations, de Forest claimed more, but it was below the requirement for business success, and certainly less than the 200 needed to maintain exclusivity for Case’s parts. In some cases de Forest himself sold tickets at the box office, a possible sign of dedication, an understaffed organization, or a distrust of exhibitor accounting. Typical prices for a ticket ranged from $0.50 to a dollar in smaller towns, but they commanded higher prices in big cities. Phonofilm modification kits were available for Simplex, and possibly Powers and Motiograph projectors. de Forest (1924) went out of his way to emphasize that Phonofilm was not going to replace the silent drama when he wrote: “The Phonofilm will never attempt to tell the same form of story adapted for pantomime nor will it draw its talents from the regular motion picture field. When it is deemed advisable to produce Phonofilms of feature length the known success of musical comedy and dramatic stage will be reproduced.” Did he believe this or was it an attempt to avoid alarming the studios by predicting only niche applications for sound-on-film rather than total disruption? The bulk of the films produced using Phonofilm were one-reelers of variety acts but when given the opportunity, de Forest didn’t hesitate to cooperate with Paramount Pictures for their films Bella Donna and The Covered Wagon, which premiered on April 1, 1923, and March 16, 1923, respectively, with exhibition limited to first run houses. These Phonofilm feature releases, like early Vitaphone and Movietone releases of a few years later, did not attempt lip-synchronized dialog, but rather the process was used for musical accompaniment as a way to replace the live orchestra. Fritz Lang’s 1924 Die Nibelungen also used Phonofilm for its New York premiere on August 23, 1925, at the Century Theater. Beginning in 1924, the Fleischer animation studio employed the process in dozens of cartoons using the sing-along follow-the-­ bouncing-­ball technique. On October 13, 1936, Owens was granted USP 2,057,051, Method of Drawing and Photographing Pictures in Relief, the technique widely used to create anaglyph drawings for the 3-D comic books of the early 1950s. 1 

32 Phonofilm

de Forest’s promotion of Phonofilm gave the impression that it was entirely his invention, for which there may have been good marketing reasons since he was a famous inventor and Case was unknown to the public, as was pointed out by Hugo Riesenfeld who refused to give Case credit on the Rialto Theater’s marquee. It is true that de Forest had spent many hours in the lab experimenting to create a workable system, but he was also functioning as a systems integrator purchasing Case Laboratory’s parts. de Forest raised the capital, masterminded the enterprise, outfitted theaters, produced films, and single-mindedly promoted the product, so his feelings of proprietorship was intense, but he didn’t handle the matter of attribution with grace and relied on obfuscation rather dealing forthrightly with Case as inventorship became an increasingly divisive issue. de Forest did not have a system without Case’s parts, the Thalofide cell and the Aeo light tube, but during his presentation at the public introduction of Phonofilm at the Rialto, de Forest, with Case in attendance, he failed to mention Case’s contribution, although it was listed in the program. In particular, it must have rankled Case that de Forest renamed the Aeo light the Photion tube and by this misdirection took credit for the invention, a selfdelusion that began during de Forest’s stay in Germany. This sidelining of Case’s efforts and de Forest’s self-­ aggrandizement, at Case’s expense, persisted for a couple of years with Case growing increasingly frustrated. It didn’t help that de Forest could not meet his sales targets and Case was not receiving the agreed upon compensation. Case was forbearing when de Forest delayed paying bills, but despite this lent de Forest money to set up Phonofilm theaters in Upstate New York. He even tried to interest his Auburn contacts to invest in Phonofilm, but they didn’t like the terms of the deal they were offered by de Forest. Hijiya (1992) in his autobiography of de Forest quotes him, with regard to Case’s contribution, as follows: “(Case) came to see what I was doing, and became greatly interested. He learned quickly, and was soon a faithful imitator.” de Forest may have convinced himself that Case was merely a supplier of parts who had become interested in optical sound as a result of the master’s influence, but Case’s interest in optical sound began in his youth, years before de Forest ordered his first part. de Forest biographer Adams (2012) gives jealousy as another motivation for de Forest’s treatment of Case: they had both attended Yale and de Forest “loathed…a type, a young man from a wealthy family who did not have to work.” Wealth is an uncommon asset, and those who inherit it don’t always use it as creatively and productively as the young Theodore Case. Gomery (2005, p.  47) has a different opinion and writes that envy played a part, but that it was Case’s motive: “For personal reasons – for envy perhaps – Case turned all his laboratory’s efforts to besting de Forest.” In September 1925, Case was informed by his lawyer John Foster Dulles (a former Auburn resident now practic-

32 Phonofilm

ing in Manhattan, who would become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State) that de Forest had broken the supply contract and that it could be legally terminated. Case cut off relations with de Forest for reasons Sponable discreetly characterizes as “business complications.” In May 1926 Case created the Zoephone Company as the entity to “take over and handle the Case system of talking pictures.” To use as ammunition in litigation, which de Forest threatened should Case cut him off, he purchased the Ries patents on October 15, 1925, which he indeed used in lawsuits against both Case and his own former cameraman Harry Owens, who was also allegedly infringing. However, de Forest dropped the suit against Case and came up with a different recording tube and photocell for playback in 1925 (he prevailed against Owens). Continuing his campaign of litigious warfare de Forest sued Tri-Ergon, the Stanley Company of America, Western Electric, William Fox, and Fox-Case for patent infringement and related issues. Beginning in 1919, by his own reckoning de Forest, began filing what would become a total of 79 sound-on-film patent disclosures (Adams, 2012). Those that were granted may have offered narrow protection or probably were filed too late to protect Phonofilm in the few years it was in the marketplace. de Forest’s concern may have been that he be allowed to practice the art, or to use the filings as the basis for raising funds, or to enhance the valuation of his company in the event of a sale. The fog of litigation may have helped animated cartoon producer Pat Powers, who had been an investor with de Forest’s Phonofilm venture. After failing in an attempt to take over Phonofilm, he knocked it off, calling his process Cinephone, which Disney used for cartoons beginning with Steamboat Willie in 1928, and for Flowers and Trees and The Whoopee Party in 1932, after which Disney switched to RCA’s Photophone. de Forest, through General Talking Pictures Corporation (the successor of his Phonofilm Company) that was controlled by South African interests, remained active in the industry taking credit for pioneering sound-on-film while promoting Phonofilm for projector conversions capable of playing back any and all optical sound release prints. In 1929, in Exhibitors Herald-World, he compares his process with the successful Movietone, concluding: “…in fact, there is no great difference between the two systems,” which is certainly true since Case Laboratory made the most important contributions to both (de Forest, 1929, p.  44). General Talking Pictures continued to offer producer and theater products and services at what is described in the Phonofilm Wikipedia article as “selling cut-rate sound equipment to second-run movie theaters wanting to convert to sound on the cheap,” in an attempt to compete with products from the major suppliers, ERPI and RCA. Several reasons may be advanced for Phonofilm’s failure, but the major factor was probably that it had indifferent

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Fig. 32.3  Disney’s Steamboat Willie used the Cinephone sound-on-­ film system marketed by Pat Powers. It was Disney’s first synchronized animated sound cartoon.

sound quality. Phonofilm’s sound reproduction was limited by the existing microphones, amplifiers, and theater speakers, which steadily improved but only after the introduction of Movietone and Vitaphone, which had the unintended consequence of devaluing Phonofilm. Another difficulty not reported in the literature, but noted by de Forest (1924) himself as a positive attribute, is that the projectionist: “…soon masters the fine points of manipulation and adjusts the machine speed to give the proper pitch to a musical number….” In other words, the Phonofilm projector modification did not provide a method for running it at the same rate as the camera; therefore the motor’s rate, hence the pitch of played back sound, was left up to the projectionist. But what if he had a tin ear? In addition, Phonofilm-produced films had to compete in terms of production values with the films of the majors, and they may not have passed muster in that regard. However, they consisted of shorts of popular entertainers of the day like Eddie Cantor, Ben Bernie’s Orchestra, and Weber and Fields. Case and his team judged that de Forest’s company was badly run and disorganized, which also diminished Phonofilm’s possibility of success. Case sought to license his technology but de Forest tried to build a vertically integrated

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32 Phonofilm

Fig. 32.5  Case, it appears, invented blooping, the technique that would be used by sound editors and projectionists to prevent a popping sound at a splice, shown here in the top portion of the cover sheet teaching the invention. Blooping requires opaquing the print’s optical track at the splice to momentarily reduce the sound level. Fig. 32.4  A Phonofilm poster in which de Forest offers a reward for turning in infringers. The third line from the bottom reads: “De ForestCase Patents.” (Library of Congress)

service and manufacturing company, even going so far as to enter production. The paths the men took were both daunting but Case seems to have understood his strengths and weaknesses better than de Forest. Despite the dissolution of Phonofilm in America, it continued on for a few years in South Africa, Great Britain, Australia, Spain, Japan, and Latin America. All told more than 300 Phonofilm shorts were produced, about half of which have survived. The coup de grâce for Phonofilm productions in America may have been Vitaphone, introduced in 1926, which had superior sound and studio backing. After Case Labs broke off with de Forest in September 1925, Sponable designed an optical sound pickup attachment to be added to a Powers (no relation to the Cinephone Powers) 35 mm projector. The lower loop was chosen for the placement of the sound head because de Forest had used the upper loop, or what the industry would one day call the penthouse position; Case and Sponable did not want their system to be compatible with de Forest’s Phonofilm, which they believed was of inferior quality. Case Labs’ soundtrack preceded the image by 20 frames or 14.5 inches, and Case’s successor Fox-Case adopted the running rate of 90 feet per minute, or 24 fps, which had been chosen by Western Electric as the Vitaphone rate. Case worked to improve his system’s recording capability by making the Aeo light brighter to bet-

ter expose the track. For playback a tungsten lamp with a straight filament was initially used for the exciter lamp, but it was replaced with one using a brighter helical filament arranged in a straight line. An optical printer was also prepared for marrying double-system sound-on-­ film tracks. Case also invented the technique to suppress the popping sound made at an optical track splice, a simple opaque mark or bloop, covering the splice, as described in Sound Projector Apparatus, USP 1,896,682, filed on July 24, 1926. An improvement, Sound Record, USP 1,776,049, was filed on March 26, 1928, by Earl I. Sponable, which was assigned to the Fox-Case Corporation, in which a negative track’s bloop is made with a punch. Case recognized the need to find a licensee for his technology and a source of amplifiers even before he broke off with de Forest so he and Sponable called on the suppliers who might become licensees, General Electric and its RCA division and AT&T and its Western Electric division. Case Laboratory’s sound-on-film efforts were more advanced, according to Sponable, than those of either of these companies since they were focused on the phonograph, radio, telephony, and public address systems, for which they were developing amplifiers, microphones, and speakers; sound-­ on-­film was not a priority. Craft and two other people from Western Electric visited Case Laboratory to witness a demonstration of optical sound-on-film in December 1925 (Gomery, 2005, p.  48). Western Electric/Bell labs studied the Case system with the thought of a possible cooperative

32 Phonofilm

effort, and according to Sponable, after seeing Case’s system demonstration, Edward B.  Craft, the guiding light behind the Western Electric/Bell Labs’ efforts, may have become persuaded that sound-on-film was an opportunity whose ­potential surpassed that of the sound-on-disk system they were developing that became Vitaphone. Case Laboratory had created the capability to record and playback good optical tracks using the Aeo light and Thalofide cells, but other vital components were needed, such as the

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a­mplifiers and speakers whose supply was tightly controlled. Western Electric, at first positive about cooperating changed its mind and refused to sell amplifiers to Case. In addition, Western Electric was not interested in a patent license, but they eventually obtained a license to Case Laboratory inventions through Fox. At GE/RCA Case and Sponable got the runaround and were shuffled from division to division. In truth, these companies didn’t need Case’s inventions but William Fox did.

William Fox Hears the Future

William Fox (1879–1955) was born in the village of Tolcsva, in the Kingdom of Hungary, the first child of parents of German descent, Michael and Anna Fuchs. When he was 9 months old, William and his parents came to America where the Fuchs had 12 more children, 7 of whom would survive to be brought up on New York’s East Side in a sunless tenement slum. His father was an easy-going man who accepted the instability of frequently moving from job to job, but his son was an enterprising boy who became a candy peddler hiring other children to work for him in Central Park. The young Fuchs got in trouble when the candy wrappers of the “lozengers” his customers tossed aside in the park brought him to the attention of the police. Arrested, he spent the night in jail with his gang of peddlers; Michael and Anna, having no attorney, brought the family physician to court hoping he would be a sufficiently authoritative figure to advocate for their son. William got off without being charged or paying a fine and continued to peddle in the park; he began to work in the garment industry at the age of 13, tall enough to successfully pass for 16 (Sinclair, 1933). He became a foreman at D. Cohen and Sons where he had to cook up a subterfuge in order to attend his own bar mitzvah. He quit night school and with a friend put together a comedy act, but lost interest in a career on the stage when it turned out to pay poorly. The act, he recalled, was terrible. Returning to the clothing industry, he saved enough money to marry Eve Leo in 1899 and to start his own business, the Knickerbocker Cloth Examining and Shrinking Company, which he sold for a profit of nearly $50,000. Intrigued by the movies he bought a one third interest in a Brooklyn nickelodeon in 1904, and by 1910, when his company owned 15 motion picture venues, bought out his partners. The films he purchased for exhibition at his theaters from studios like Vitagraph, Biograph, Selig, Essanay, and Pathé, were accompanied by vaudeville acts. He bought a vacant 700-seat vaudeville house in Brooklyn that flourished under his management; his next move was to buy or lease additional theaters. He created an exchange for the prints he purchased so

33

he could rent them to other exhibitors, which became his entrée to the distribution business. Fox became embroiled in a struggle with the General Film Company, an arm of the Motion Picture Patents Company (the Trust), becoming the only holdout who refused to sell out. The Trust canceled his license ending his supply of films, but he fought back and sued them for $600,000; 2 years later the case was settled out of court in his favor for $350,000. The Trust was broken under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, in 1914, and Fox seized the opportunity to buy the failed Balboa Amusement Producing Company of Long Beach, California, to produce his own films and expand his distribution business. He raised capital and formed the Fox Film Corporation on February 1, 1915, with a 50% stake in its ownership. At first it operated a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and then opened one on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. An investment partner, seeking to cash out at a profit, sold Fox a 3% stake in the company giving him controlling interest (Solomon, 2014). William Fox, who remained based in New York City, was a workaholic who micromanaged his studio and theater businesses and was helped in his obsession by his wife Eve, who understood that the only way to spend time with her husband was by working by his side. Fox was liked by his creative employees because he did not spare his praise and he had good artistic and esthetic instincts as demonstrated by hiring the German director F. W. Murnau. Fox expanded his operation by buying theaters such as the lavish Roxy in Manhattan and other first run theaters in different parts of the country. He bought a one third interest in West Coast Theaters in 1926, acquiring the rest of the company the following year, according to Sinclair (1933) quoting Fox, but other sources give the year as 1925. (Fox’s memory for dates was unreliable.) His interest in theaters notwithstanding, Fox came to believe that future growth in the movie business was in production and accordingly created the West Los Angeles (or South Beverly Hills) Fox Hills Studio, which would be rebuilt for sound production in 1928 and renamed Movietone City.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_33

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Fig. 33.1  William Fox, pictured in a sketch (from a 1922 photograph) that appeared in the Exhibitors Herald World on October 19, 1929.

Fox is an absorbingly interesting early Hollywood studio boss and showman, in the avant-garde when it came to using new technologies, all of which he attempted to introduce in the late 1920s, just before he was ousted from the studio he founded. What makes him most interesting, in this history, is that he was a film mogul unlike his contemporaries, a visionary who viewed technology as a means to build an empire. These efforts included: licensing Kodak’s original bichromatic Kodachrome process, the basis for Fox Nature Color; the creation of a sound-on-film system, Movietone, which set the standard for optical sound for the rest of the century; and his backing the creation of the Fox Grandeur 70  mm wide screen system, which is discussed in detail in chapter 58. Fox licensed his color and sound technology, but Grandeur originated do to his sponsorship. Fox would be undone by his intractable urge to control the film industry, and a confluence of misfortunes that would strain his ability to meet the debt obligations he had taken on to expand his empire. As he told the tale to Upton Sinclair, he believed his ruin was masterminded by the banks, lenders, and industry rivals, a story told in chapter 37. In this and also chapter 35, we are concerned with Fox’s acquiring and controlling optical sound-on-film technology. The arrival of commercially viable cinema sound was preceded by radio’s burgeoning success; cinema sound was made possible by the technology developed for radio and

33  William Fox Hears the Future

sound recording, like improved designs for the phonograph, microphones, speakers, and amplifiers. William Fox thought that motion picture sound was an area for him to focus on after observing that the weather and radio broadcasting influenced attendance. He observed that before radio attendance in his theaters had been very good on rainy nights but after its advent attendance fell off on rainy nights. So it was that the new electronic mass medium was the motivation for Fox’s interest in offering sound to his audience, leading to his acquisition of proprietary sound-on-film technology, hoping to make it part of the film-going experience. The public was becoming acclimated to disembodied voices and music originating from a box and it seemed obvious to him that sound would be a fine addition to moving images. Fox also considered television, a broadcast medium that was yet to exist, as an impending existential threat to his theatrical cinema interests, but film with sound was achievable in a short time frame, whereas television broadcasting would prove to be two decades in the future. Television experiments were a matter of interest to the press, and Fox read those accounts and saw the advent of radio with a moving picture as a not too distant threat. Fox also correctly viewed soundon-disk, the Western Electric and Warner Bros. Vitaphone effort, as a long-term futile endeavor because of the “rough and tumble world of movie exhibition,” according to his biographer Vanda Krefft (2017). Fox believed that the technically feckless Vitaphone might poison the water for sound, and he was correct that sound-­on-­film was the better solution given the exigencies of the projection booth. However, the choice of sound-on-disk had some merit since it had better quality than optical sound at the time that Sam Warner became its champion. Moreover, the phonograph had been invented in 1877 and was a well-­understood technology, and AT&T/Bell Labs/Western Electric and GE/RCA were putting considerable effort into improving its quality, whereas sound-on-film was an unproved technology. Fox may have perceived that acquiring sound technology directly from its inventors would give him an independent proprietary position in a world (America actually) in which it was otherwise destined to be controlled by the titans GE and AT&T, but he would soon discover he could not escape them or even persuade them to allow him to make an arm’s length purchase agreement of electronics hardware. With a new technology and a potentially fraught patent situation, he was sailing into uncharted waters but willing to take the risk by hedging his bets and optioning or buying the rights to several optical sound systems. Having dismissed sound-ondisk, Fox moved to acquire optical sound-on film technology and most importantly, he acquired the rights to Case Laboratory’s optical sound system; it became Movietone, the first successful sound-on-film system for Hollywood’s theatrical cinema as well as the basis for subsequent optical sound systems, in particular the product made and marketed by

33  William Fox Hears the Future

Western Electric. On March 19, 1926, a Cornell classmate of Sponable, John Joy, who also played a similar role in bringing Tri-Ergon and William Fox together, visited Case Laboratory and reported the meeting to his boss, Courtland Smith, an executive at Fox. Smith asked Case to set up a demonstration for his colleagues at the Fox Nemo Theater’s Parlor B on 10th Avenue in Manhattan. The demonstration was well received, after which Smith set up a demonstration for the boss, Fox. Sponable reports that this took place at Fox’s home in Woodmere, Long Island, and that it pleased him. Fox tells the story differently in his recounting the tale to Upton Sinclair (1933), and although the date and place do not jibe with the reliable Sponable’s account, the result was the same. In Fox’s words: In the winter of 1925 I was in California, and in the spring I returned to New York. The first day I arrived at my office I was greeted by my brother-in-law, Jack Leo, who said he would like to show me something in the projection room. I went to the room, and to my amazement, in the projection room that I had visited for many years and had always been silent, the machine went into operation, and there was a little canary, bird in a cage and it was singing. It sang beautifully from the lowest to the highest note it was possible to sing. It sang for several minutes, and then following that came a Chinaman who had a ukulele and he sang an English song. He sang terribly and none too well, but to me it was a marvel.

Case and Sponable had successfully demonstrated a system using the Aeo light and Thalofide cell technologies for William Fox and had cleverly added the canary footage, having been tipped off that Fox and his wife Eve adored the singing birds they kept in their Long Island home. Unbeknownst to Fox, his brother-in-law Jack Leo had built a sound studio, at a cost of $12,000, in the Manhattan building that housed Fox’s offices; Fox gave the go ahead for his people to test Case’s system in the studio. Just a bit more than a year before, in April 1925, in a nearby Manhattan screening room, Sam Warner witnessed the Western Electric sound-ondisk system that would become Vitaphone. The first Vitaphone release, a silent film augmented with a music track, Don Juan, premiered on August 6, 1926, an event that Fox attended. Fox watched other Vitaphone films and was excited by the possibilities of sound, but not sound-on-disk, after he was present at a screening in which the disk and reel didn’t match, with comical results. In 1926 Tri-Ergon inventor Josef Engl traveled to the United States to demonstrate his group’s sound-on-film system for Fox, just at the time that Fox was working on his deal with Case to acquire his patents. Fox took a 6-month option on the TriErgon patent rights, excluding the German rights, for a purchase price of $300,000, with a deadline to exercise on June 30, 1927. On July 5, 1927, as noted in chapter 30, Fox, on his own behalf, purchased a 90% interest in the rights to the patents of Tri-Ergon Aktiengesellschaft, Zürich, Switzerland, limited to the Americas for $50,000, rather than licensing the rest of the

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world (minus the German rights). The purchase of rights, ­limited to North and South America, was a defensive move to protect his investment in the Case patents. However, as events would have it, in need of cash as a result of his great financial catastrophe, he attempted to use the Trio-Ergon assets in a nearly successful attempt to extract royalties from the film industry, as described in chapter 37 (Gomery, 1976). Fox acquired the rights to all of Case’s optical sound patents on July 23, 1926, for the moment setting aside the issue of the supply of amplifiers and speakers, an arrangement that he believed he could work out, but one that would prove to be an issue leading to major consequences for his business, and the deployment of optical sound for the entire industry. Fox was advised by Courtland Smith, head of Fox Newsreels, that synchronized sound could give his division an advantage in the highly competitive and lucrative newsreel market. Sound-on-disk was too unwieldly to be used for Newsreels, but Fox liked Case’s single system because the Sponable sound-on-film camera was portable and could be used in the field. Fox newsreels, shot with the single-system camera, would soon offer speeches of world leaders, interviews with luminaries, and sound recorded at sporting events. The quotable Fox told Sinclair (1933): I called for the inventor, Mr. Case, and said, “I am going to give you a million dollars, and you can spend this million dollars in the next four months, any way you like, in experimenting how to make this camera photograph on the outside without a soundproof room.” Shortly thereafter they brought the various things they had photographed outside. One was a rooster crowing and it sounded exactly like a pig squealing. Another was a dog barking and it sounded like a cow. They recognized they didn’t have it, because of the confusion of sound. About thirty or forty days later, they said, “Here, this time we have it.” On the screen there came the rushing before me a train photographed on the Jersey Central tracks, and I heard the whistle blowing and the wheels turning just as though the train were with me in that room. I said, “Now you have it.”

Case received a large block of stock in the newly formed Fox-Case Corporation, ideal for a wealthy man who did not need the cash and was willing to bet that the new organization would flourish, which paid off when he sold his stock back to Fox for $1.5 million. Fox went about constructing two sound stages in New York and gave Case $1 million (as noted) to improve the system and shoot outdoor sound-on-­ film experiments for a 4-month period. Case would continue to work on improving his system for Fox until 1930 (Krefft, 2017); Sponable was hired by Fox to help with the studio’s transition to the Fox-Case Movietone process. As described, Fox had personally purchased American rights to the TriErgon patents but although he owned these patents, the Movietone system was based entirely on the work of the Case Research Laboratory. As important as Case’s patent position, Case and Sponable’s system produced clear voice recordings, and their efforts allowed Fox to get a head start

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on the deployment of single-system newsreel cameras, thereby gaining experience with the process for the theatrical cinema. Fox had considered licensing or buying de Forest’s Phonofilm patents, possibly for their value, but more likely to protect his purchase of Case’s patents. de Forest (1941) ruefully reported that Fox, in an early encounter, had no interest in dealing with him: “When I found that William Fox was a fellow passenger on the Berengaria as I returned with my demonstration equipment from the Berlin Laboratory, he refused to meet me even to discuss the subject. When Fox returned to New  York in 1924 and learned that Phonofilm was installed in some Fox houses he peremptorily ordered them all taken out, without deigning to visit a theater demonstration.” However, Fox took up negotiations with de Forest 3 months after the Case agreement and optioned Phonofilm for $100,000, in October 1926 (Hijiya, 1992). But Fox did not exercise the option possibly because of what he learned about de Forest’s reputation for sharp practices and litigiousness, and he was also advised by Western Electric that de Forest’s proprietary position was weak. As one might have expected, based on his past behavior, de Forest was not going to exit quietly. According one of his biographers, Hijiya (1992. p.  111), de Forest said he was: “Infuriated by Fox’s kike-like…devilish machinations.” de Forest sued alleging that Fox was infringing, seeking injunctive relief. Of the many possible patents de Forest might have alleged were infringed perhaps most interesting are the ones he did not file, which involved the slit through which light passed to expose the sound track. de Forest based certain rights on his purchase of the patents of Fritts and Ries, as mentioned in chapter 28. It’s difficult to reconcile de Forest’s acquisition and use of these patents with Thomas Jefferson’s motivation for creating the American patent system, which was to encourage invention and industry. In particular, with regard to Fritts, in what way was Jefferson’s ideal fulfilled by de Forest’s purchase of the patent of a deceased inventor to be used as ammunition in litigation? Perversely, this patent somehow took 36  years to be granted, thereby giving it a valuable extension. Even so, the use of the slit in the optical path to enhance recording quality was previously disclosed on November 18, 1885, in USP 341,213, Transmitting and Recording Sounds by Radiant Energy, by Bell et  al. In his lawsuit de Forest claimed that Western Electric and ERPI had convinced Fox not to go forward with the option, thus keeping Fox from granting him $2,500,000 in stock and paying him $50,000 per annum for 5 years. de Forest was correct, Western Electric had dissuaded Fox from going forward with the deal, and it is true that their advice had been self-­ serving, but it was based on their expert assessment that de Forest’s patent portfolio was without value. Fox also purchased sound-on-film rights from former de Forest associate, prolific motion picture apparatus inventor

33  William Fox Hears the Future

Freeman Harrison Owens. As noted in chapter 32, while working with de Forest, on June 4, 1924, Owens filed on his own behalf, what was granted as USP 1,723,436, Sound and Motion Picture Reproducing System, the description of an optical sound camera-recorder. Owens was put under contract with Movietone on June 20, 1927. Fox built eight sound-on-film cameras and demonstrated them in Europe for British Movietone, where on May 6, 1927, Owens filmed the first talking pictures of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini attired in jodhpurs making a determined attempt at phonetically speaking in English. Also in 1927, Owens filmed a self-­ directed, self-deprecating, chipper, and charming George Bernard Shaw (Fielding, 1972; p. 164; WS: Encyclopedia of Arkansas). These films are examples of the fine quality of Case’s process and are of historical interest because of the personalities who were filmed. They can be seen on YouTube, and the quality of the GBS recording is particularly good. Krefft (2017) writes that seeds of doubt with regard to the Case proprietary positon began to plague Fox after Courtland Smith, now the Fox-Case general manager, advised him that AT&T and GE believed they owned key patents in the field. This is a doubtful proposition with regard to the validity of the optical sound recording and playback transducers Case Laboratory had invented, which the electronics giants could invent around, but what is indisputable is that these companies had a substantial head start in the art of electronic amplification that was required for both recording and playback. While the Case system did provide decent sound for voice, it dawned on Fox and his colleagues that phonograph sound was superior for music, but it ought not to have surprised them that further development of the new technology was required because it’s usual for a licensee to improve an acquired technology. However, good voice recording was sufficient for Movietone newsreels, which became the first and successful application of the Case-Sponable technology, as described in chapter 35.

Fig. 33.2  George Bernard Shaw holding forth in a self-directed 1927 British Movietone actuality. (Composited from several elements)

33  William Fox Hears the Future

Fox had a sound-on-film system that was incomplete; he needed amplifiers and speakers and other hardware, a supply problem that had to be addressed. Case’s system could record optical sound and play it back, but for successful exhibition, it had to do so loud enough to fill a movie palace with sound. AT&T/Western Electric had not been Fox’s first choice for amplifiers and other parts because of its relationship with Warner Bros. who had premiered their first Vitaphone sound-­ on-­disk film, Don Juan, on August, 6, 1926, the month following the formation of the Fox-Case Company. Another possible source of supply was Westinghouse; their interests in the field were handled by GE, now his only option. Fox moved swiftly and negotiated with RCA through GE’s chairman, Owen D. Young, who had founded GE’s RCA subsidiary. Fox and Young shook hands on creating a new venture their companies would jointly own and equally control to exploit Fox’s Movietone and any additional Fox patent positions. The day after their meeting of minds Young returned with a take it or leave it deal stipulating that RCA would own 75% of the company, including additional onerous terms for Fox placing him in a subordinated status. Fox did not know that behind the scenes David Sarnoff had scotched the deal because he was philosophically opposed to RCA not having control of a major electronics entertainment opportunity, as it had with radio with its creation of the NBC (National Broadcasting Company) Red and Blue Networks. Furthermore, he believed his organization could come up with better technology, a belief that turned out to be correct. According to his biographer Krefft, the immigrant Fox had a naive belief in the integrity of the established class of the Yankee businessmen with whom he was dealing; he was taken aback by Young’s breaking his word, although it was at the insistence of another immigrant, Sarnoff. Dismayed that he was now negotiating with a suddenly intractable opponent, to buy time, Fox extended the de Forest option for $100,000 for an additional month. When it was finally apparent that the handshake deal he’d made with Young was forever gone, Fox dropped the Phonofilm option causing de Forest to reinstitute litigation. Fox countersued pleading that de Forest did not honor the option and demanded the return of the option fee. After de Forest sold Phonofilm to General Talking Pictures of South Africa in October 1928, he did not pursue the lawsuit, and it was dismissed in June 1937 (Krefft, 2017; Solomon, 2014; Gomery, 2005). This left Fox with only one other place to go for electronics, Western Electric and John Otterson, its bull-headed boss who assumed control of the company at the beginning of 1925. The timing was right, and Otterson was unexpectedly waiting with open arms. He had been grousing about Warner Bros.’ performance, forgetting that it was only after appreciable effort that Western Electric was able to find any studio interested in their sound-on-disk system. He now expressed

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displeasure with the fact that his company had made a deal with Warners, rather than the more important studios Paramount or MGM. At that moment Otterson was demanding that the Warners allow him to set the prices Vitaphone charged theaters, but he was unable to have his way or to scotch the deal, which was consummated on April 20, 1926, probably due to the substantial backing Warners had from Goldman Sachs (Gomery, 2005, p. 36). The history of the motion picture industry and sound-on-­ film would have been different had Sarnoff not driven Fox into the arms of his competitor, AT&T/Western Electric. For one thing, RKO might not have come into existence as a vehicle for the commercialization of RCA’s variable area sound-on-film system, but the facts as we know them are more interesting than speculation. To understand why Western Electric and Otterson were so receptive to Fox, we need some background about the relationship between Western Electric and Warner Bros. and the formation of Vitaphone to exploit sound-on-disk, which is described in the next chapter, Vitaphone. Otterson, Western Electric’s General Manager, an Annapolis graduate with a master’s degree from MIT, and former president of the Winchester rifle company, who had only recently taken over Western Electric, despised the Warner Bros. who he seems to have confused with the Marx Bros. Otterson considered them to be a crude bunch of oafs whose disorganized efforts were destroying his organization’s opportunity for a thriving motion picture business. The straight-laced Otterson was unaccustomed to show business and mistook the Warner Bros.’s eccentric and flamboyant ways for incompetence, when in fact they were quite decent businessmen who ran a tight ship. The impatient Otterson had little notion of how difficult it was to induce the studios and exhibitors to embrace the new sound film medium and didn’t understand that the Warners had to be flexible in pricing and were in fact prepared to play a long game in order to create a market; they knew their customers and he didn’t. He bullied the Warners into relinquishing their exclusive lucrative representation of Western Electric motion picture sound products. As a result of his campaign to disenfranchise them, it helped him to have a new industry partner, William Fox (Geduld, 1975; Crafton, 1997; Gomery, 2005). Otterson believed he had a legal right to end the agreement with Warners’ because his lawyers informed him that the studio was in default of its agreement by not having lived up to their royalty obligations. In anticipation of the dissolution of the exclusive deal that had been made with Warner Bros., in December 1926 (some sources give January, 1927), Otterson formed a new entity, E.R.P.I. (Electrical Research Products, Inc.), usually written ERPI (rhymes with chirpy), to market, sell, and service Western Electric cinema sound hardware. Otterson asked Walter Rich, who had brokered the Warner Bros. and AT&T/Western Electric deal, and was a

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Vitaphone principal, to enter into a discussion with Fox. Otterson respected Fox’s studio since it was more successful than Warner Bros., and he believed it was better run. Otterson, through Rich, advised Fox that there was nothing to lose and everything to gain if he signed a licensing agreement through Vitaphone for sound hardware, which he knew would be short-lived since the Warners would, through Otterson’s efforts, soon be out of the way. As a result Fox didn’t have to wait for the Otterson-Warners licensing disagreement to be sorted out and was now able to order Western Electric hardware for his theaters through Vitaphone. Fox now had a supply of amplifiers and speakers and an installation and support service. The Vitaphone-Fox deal also provided for levels of cooperation including the use of studio and theater facilities as well the exchange of artists and technicians (Geduld, 1975). Although Otterson was not overly impressed with Movietone’s quality, Western Electric and Fox negotiated a cross-licensing agreement that was signed on the last days of 1926. Otterson agreed to modify his playback hardware to work with Movietone; after all, the same amplifiers and loudspeakers could be used for both, and he must have understood that sound-on-film was a viable alternative to sound-on-disk. It was announced that for an additional $1000 ERPI’s sound-on-disk conversion could be extended to the Fox-Case optical sound-on-film system, soon to be renamed Movietone. On May 10, 1928, a revised non-exclusive agreement was signed between ERPI and Fox-Case, to be effective beginning on April 2, 1927. This changed the previously agreed upon royalty of 8% of gross to $500 per negative reel for domestic released films, with a similar arrangement for foreign released films for the use of ERPI hardware (Sponable, 1947, November, pp.  23, 30, 31). AT&T/Bell Labs/Western Electric/ERPI had, by means of their agreements with Fox, licensed the Case Laboratory system as Case and Sponable once hoped they would, but under the name Movietone. The variable density Western Electric system is the direct offspring of Case’s system, substituting transducers created by Bell Labs for the Aeo light and the Thalofide cell. Its specifications for the picture-track offset and dimensions remained those established by Case and Sponable, which are in effect to this day. Western Electric retained the rate of 90 feet per minute they had established for Vitaphone installations, and in this way, curious as it may be, sound-on-disk established the rate for sound-on-film movies beginning in 1926 and enduring to the present day, in which digitally photographed and projected movies are also projected at 24 fps. The literature does not sufficiently emphasize that Western Electric’s contribution was a part-by-part replacement of the system invented by Case and Sponable, which brings to mind the paradox of Theseus’ ship. It was to the advantage of ERPI, and its corporate owners, to offer projector and theater

33  William Fox Hears the Future

conversions for both sound-on-disk and sound-on-film; ERPI installed thousands of these dual-purpose modifications. The Movietone relationship gave ERPI a crucial head start in sound-on-film. Soon most of the major studios would follow in the footsteps of Fox and license sound-on-film from ERPI. After Fox’s acquisition of Case’s technology, Sponable became the Technical Director of Research and Development of the Fox Film Corporation and its successor twentieth Century Fox, from 1926 to 1962. Courtland Smith became vice president of Fox-Case (which became Movietone), and Sponable credits him with guiding the success of the venture. Sponable, with the help of acoustic expert Paul Sabine, designed two sound studios for Fox-Case at 460 West 54th Street in Manhattan, two of the earliest motion picture sound recording studios dedicated to that purpose in the United States. In 1927 Sponable designed a screen that allowed sound to pass through it so speakers could be placed behind it. Sponable (1927) described it this way: “This screen is made of bleached cotton yarn woven in a novel manner to allow the passage of sound without muffling and yet reflect the maximum amount of light. With such a material the loud speakers can be placed directly behind the screen consequently producing the illusion that the sound is actually issuing from the point indicated by the action on the screen.” Today screens are often made of perforated vertical strips of vinyl sheets 54 inches wide, chemically bonded or welded (glued) together to obtain the proper width. When delivered to the theater, the screen is grommet mounted on a metal frame, a kind of sail for reflecting phonons. A small portion of the light, about 8%, is lost due to the perforations to allow the speakers’ sound to pass through the screen with little impediment. In Sponable’s (1927) article Some Technical Aspect of the Movietone, he relates that initially feature film Movietone dialog was shot single-system using a modified Bell & Howell 2709 camera, as he had done for Case Labs in Auburn, New York. It is evident from reading the Proceedings of the S.M.P.E. circa 1928 (reflecting on events of the past year) that the engineering community was undecided whether it was preferable to record single or double-system sound for studio work. Single-system turned out to be a transitional approach, and soon feature films were shot double-­ system, but single-system remained preferable for newsreels. For the Movietone newsreel system recording was done 7¾ inches after the camera gate aperture, between it and the take-up reel. For projection the displacement was changed from 7¾ inches to 14½ inches by making a print of the track and marrying it to the picture’s print; separating the image from the track was required for editing and post-production. Sponable’s single-­system camera, filed November 12, 1927, USP 1,777,682, Combined Motion Picture and Sound Camera, was the ­progenitor of single-system newsreel cameras, as noted in chapter 35.

33  William Fox Hears the Future

Fox-Case built sound stages in Hollywood, the largest of which were used for orchestral recording as the musicians watched projected images. Stage acoustics were adjusted by adding or subtracting drapes hung on the halls with more resonance required for music and little or no resonance required for dialog. Early optical sound track recorders were called sound cameras rather than recorders, and were available from Western Electric and RCA. They used continuous sprocket drive with synchronous AC motors, and AC motors were also used for the cameras to keep them synchronized with the recorders. It was also an advantage to use optical sound recorders to achieve the best quality sound since special film stocks were developed for that purpose. In addition, a dedicated recorder was preferable because it was unnecessary to smooth out the single-system camera intermittent action. Both Case and Sponable continued to work on improvements to the system, Case under contract and Sponable as Fox’s Director of Research. Sponable designed the Thermophone (air-thermo) microphone, a project he began to work on under Case, as described in USP 1,588,168, filed July 18, 1923, Microphone (Frayne, 1978). The Thermophone used a 0.00001 inch coil of heated platinum wire that changed its

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resistance in response to sound waves, with the changes measured and amplified for recording. de Forest used the Thermophone and praised it, but other even more advanced microphones would reach the market from ERPI and RCA. Case had been granted patents for recording slit and glow lamp designs, work that Sponable carried on when he was at Fox. He also designed a newsreel camera, as described in USP 1,736,139, Reproducing Apparatus, filed July 27, 1927, which is similar to Case’s USP 1,865,055, Photographic Apparatus, filed December 14, 1928. Sponable’s design allowed mounting the Aeo light in close proximity to the slit to improve exposure brightness, but the Aeo light passed into history; as Frayne (1978) explains, it was not bright enough to fully expose the positive film used for sound recording, Eastman EK-1301. Nothing Case or Sponable engineered or invented from this time forward was able to match the results of the teams of scientists and engineers at Bell Labs/Western Electric or GE/RCA, who greatly improved the optical sound transducers and created better amplifiers, microphones, and speakers. Kodak and other film manufacturers improved film stock for sound recording and engineers at the studios made contributions to the quality of optical sound, as will be described.

34

Vitaphone

The decline of the silent film, or more precisely one without an optical or disk synchronized sound track, was remarkably swift. In a private dining room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel attended by 270 people, on May 16, 1929, AMPAS president Douglas Fairbanks hosted the first Academy Awards ceremony to honor films released during the past two years. Of the awards he presented that evening, the two for Outstanding Picture went to Wings and Sunrise, intertitled films augmented with music tracks. In addition, an award of merit went to The Jazz Singer, which had a music track with talking and singing sequences (Schulman, 2017). The same year as the awards, 275 sound films were made, most sound-on-film, of which almost 175 were alltalking; the silent cinema was on its way out. Many actors played a part in this disruptive drama, but none more so than Harry (born Hirsz, 1881–1958), Albert (born Aaron, 1884–1967), and Samuel (born Szmul, 1887–1927) Warner (possibly originally Wanskolaser), who left Congress Poland with their parents to settle in London, Ontario, Canada. Jack Leonard (born Jacob, without a middle name, 1892–1978), their youngest brother, was born in London, Ontario (Thomson, 2017, p.  15). Jack was to become the wisecracking, driven, and feared boss of Warner Bros. during the golden age of Hollywood. In 1903 the brothers trekked from town to town in Ohio and Pennsylvania with their cranky Edison Model B Projecting Kinetoscope and their print of The Great Train Robbery, unknowingly following in the tradition of the itinerant magic lanternists (Thomson, 2017, p. 38). They opened their first storefront theater, the Cascade Movie Palace, in 1906 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and a year later they began a film distribution company. In 1918 they started up the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, which was incorporated 5 years later. Their biggest star before signing John Barrymore was a dog, the German Shepard Rin Tin Tin; Ernst Lubitsch was their most prominent director (Eyman, 1997). The studio prospered but remained a second-­tier operation compared with the more successful First National, Paramount, and MGM.

Harry Warner, the most financially astute of the brothers, and president of Warner Bros., was dissatisfied with the methods the studio used to finance its films, although it was profitable. They either raised money from rich individuals who had profit participation in a particular picture or presold the rights to groups of theaters (Gomery, 2005). Both methods meant that the studio scrambled to finance their productions and had to share a large part of their profits for each picture with investors. In December 1924, Harry Warner met Waddill Catchings, who ran the Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs. Harvard graduate Catchings had an academic bent and wrote two books on economic theory and organized a foundation to research the science of economics. He had helped with the financings that turned Woolworth’s and Sears, Roebuck into national retail organizations. Catchings had previously eschewed financial involvement with the studios, but was impressed by the Warners’ tight financial control of their operation (Nichols, 1985, p. 109). In 1925, in an offering engineered by Catchings, funds were raised by selling new shares in the studio to the public. As part of their deal with Goldman Sachs the brothers agreed that they would heed Catchings’ financial advice, and he was appointed to their board. One of Catchings’ first acts as a board member was to arrange a revolving line of credit for three million dollars, perfectly timed because the debt and bond market were flourishing and lenders were seeking borrowers (Crafton, 1997). As a result, Warners was able to buy a handful of cinema palaces to beef up their lean theater holdings to better compete with the other studios by securing high earning exhibition outlets for their films (Weis, 1985). Also in 1925, Harry Warner negotiated the purchase of a studio from its founders, the Vitagraph Company, giving Warner Bros. additional studio space in both the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and Hollywood, plus 26 film exchanges in the United States and 24 in Europe (Gomery, 2005, p. 36). Film exchanges facilitated the distribution of films by circulating those that had been exhibited and providing the exhibitors with prints of new releases. By the end of the year, with the

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was, despite the fact that the system had been invented by and was backed by AT&T, one of the two largest corporations in the world (the other was United States Steel) with $2.9 billion in revenue, at a time when the total revenue of the United States was $3.6 billion. Sam Warner was technology savvy and mechanically inclined, a man who could go up to the projection booth and get the show running if the projectionist was stumped. Sam traveled to New York for the demonstration, which took place at Bell Labs at 463 West Street, west of Greenwich Village, in April 1925. Unlike every one of the many studio executives who had experienced the Western Electric demonstration he grasped the importance of Bell Labs’ technology and became passionate about its possibilities. Sam Warner had a good business reason to be excited but it had nothing to do with lip sync dialog, and everything to do with music: Warner Bros., unlike their competition, did not have an extensive theater chain to guarantee the booking of their films. According to Crafton (1997), about 15% of the theaters in the country were controlled by the studios or their holding companies, a system that guaranteed them bookings. King (2002) points out that what ought to be considered is the quality of the theaters owned by the studios, because the 15% they owned produced 70% of the box office revenues. This process of dominating exhibition revenue began in the late 1910s, and by the 1930s the “Big Five” major studios, MGM (Loew’s, Inc.), Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Fig. 34.1  Two of the four Warner Brothers, Jack (top) and Sam Century Fox, and RKO, had vertically integrated operations (bottom). from production to exhibition, unlike the “Little Three” major studios, Universal, Columbia, and United Artists. addition of even more exchanges, Warner Bros. had a distri- According to Mae Huettig (Balio, 1976, p. 248), the Little bution system that rivaled that of MGM. The year before Three were classified as majors since they had access to Big RCA launched the NBC radio network, the Warners started a Five’s first run theaters. The Big Five’s oligopoly extended radio station in Los Angeles, KFWB in March 1925 internationally, giving Hollywood worldwide dominance. (Anderson, 1994). A few years earlier, only a handful of Exhibition was the most lucrative part of the studio’s assets radio stations had been operating in the United States, but by and accounted for a 94% share of their investment in the the time Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, which 1930s and 1940s; the bulk of the remaining 6%, for the most established the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) to oversee part, went into studio operations (King, 2002). the growing industry’s activities, tens of millions of people Warner Bros., before the sound era, had not reached the were listening to programs broadcast by radio stations, some ranks of the majors. For the studio to compete, it was necesof which were part of coast-to-coast networks (McChesney, sary to mount the large orchestras that accompanied features 1993). The acceptance of radio by the public contributed to in first run theaters, which was a costly effort. The business the acceptance of synchronized sound movies. case that appealed to Sam Warner, for sound-on-disk, was KFWB gave Warners experience with electronic sound that it might give the studio a chance to supply a facsimile of and led to Sam Warner and Colonel (or Major) Nathan the movie palace orchestral experience in neighborhood cinLevinson meeting and becoming friends in 1925. Levinson, emas at a fraction of the cost. Even the majors had reason to who was the West Coast sales representative for Western complain: William A. Johnston (1928), the editor of Motion Electric, helped to set up KFWB. Levinson (who became Picture News, industry observer and insider, wrote: “We head of Warners’ sound department) persuaded Sam Warner have added ten thousand dollar a week bands, jazz impresato attend a demonstration of Western Electric’s sound-on-­ rios, organs and name organists, vaudeville and vaudeville disk system (Gomery, 2005). Levinson had made the rounds headliners, a new and extravagant form of picture theater of the studios, MGM, Goldwyn, and others, to see if they vaudeville – till the presentation wagged the motion picture were interested in Western Electric’s disk system but no one dog. The public responded to the big shows but the expense

34 Vitaphone

was terrific and first run theaters began to show red.” The industry bosses, willfully disremembering their roots, also loathed dealing with unionized musicians. The new sound technology might be a way to eliminate the orchestra in the pit but retain the music, which could save the studio money but cost thousands of musicians their jobs. Sam’s brother, Harry had to be tricked into attending a demonstration of sound-on-disk but emerged from it enthusiastic, later stating that had he known the true subject of the demonstration he would not have attended. At the time the phonograph had better quality than optical sound, but the convenience of sound-on-film and its steady improvement, made sound-on-disk obsolete only 3 years after the introduction of Vitaphone. The superior quality of sound-on-disk compared with early sound-onfilm was demonstrated by Joshua Harris of the University of Illinois (part of a research project funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation) that took place on August 25, 2017, at the Reel Thing Conference on conservation and restoration of film, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Sound-on-disk had superior clarity and frequency range during the first few years of Vitaphone’s exhibition; accordingly, Sam Warner’s selection of the system was rational based on what he heard and his experience with the studio’s radio station KFWB. In addition, he had to have been familiar with de Forest’s Phonofilm whose reproduction of sound was a far cry from that of a theater orchestra; moreover he knew that phonograph sound had greatly improved because of Western Electric’s electronic recording and playback technology. Western Electric knew that it needed help in marketing their sound-on-disk system to the studios, having been repeatedly rebuffed, at first with the hiring of Charles S. Post as their agent, but he failed to make any progress. In May 1925 Western Electric next engaged entrepreneur Walter J.  Rich, who ran a small company that made automobile speedometers (Gomery, 2005, p. 34). It was with Rich that the Warners successfully negotiated the deal for what became Vitaphone, but before moving forward, the brothers had to try out the system (Krefft, 2017). Warners’ first attempts at using Western Electric’s sound-on-disk system, prior to any formal relationship with Western Electric, took place in June 1925 at their small Vitagraph studio in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. The studio had glass walls and needed to have drapes and rugs hung from the rafters, which failed to deaden the groans and screeches of the Coney Island Line of the BMT subway system that ran by the studio in a below-­ the-­surface open trench.1 By the spring of 1926, a number of

Two decades later, as a boy on my way to a day at the beach, I enjoyed looking out the window of the front car of the Coney Island BMT standing next to the motorman’s compartment.

1 

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short films were completed including one titled The Volga Boatman, possibly directed by Sam Warner himself (Geduld, 1975, pp.  111–115). The Warner Bros. studio resources in Hollywood were also deployed to test sound-on-disk. In April the Warners formed the Vitaphone Corporation to exploit the sound process using a name based on their newly acquired Vitagraph studio and AT&T (the phone company). The new entity’s mission was to market Western Electric hardware and services, with the ability to sublicense to the studios and theaters and to produce films; the venture was co-financed by the Warners and Rich, with Samuel Warner acting as its president. The deal was consummated on April 20, 1926, but few in the industry gave it the attention it deserved. Who needed sound? This was the most successful year in the industry’s history with 49 million people attending cinemas weekly for a total yearly box office of $750 million, $50 million more than the previous year (Krefft, 2017). There is an entrenched myth that Warner Bros. was a studio drowning in debt that grasped for the life preserver of sound but that was not the case, as demonstrated by their relationship with Catchings and Goldman Sachs. Further evidence to the contrary is that Western Electric audited Warners’ books in their due diligence to negotiate a licensing agreement with the studio and found it to be in excellent financial shape with a solid board of directors. Studio profits for 1925 were $1.1 million, or more than four times what they had been the previous year. The sound test was moved to the Manhattan Opera House on 35th Street where the Warners arranged for a short subject to be shot by director and producer Bryan Foy. But they had not escaped the New York City Subway system since a new section was being excavated by blasting Manhattan’s bedrock. Filming had to be halted frequently because of the subway work and due to other extraneous street sounds, which provided a motivation for building sound stages from the ground up (Hilliard, 1985). The interior of the opera house was converted by removing its seats and turning the theater boxes into repair shops and recording rooms. The sixth floor became a monitor room; cables were run to the stage through ventilating ducts, and a six-channel mixing console was installed mounted on a ventilating grill (Frayne, 1976). In July 1926, 80 musicians of the New York Philharmonic recorded the score of the first Vitaphone film, Don Juan, which was to open in just a few weeks. To maintain exclusivity with Western Electric, Warners’ revenue had to increase yearly; they also had to lease a minimum number of systems reaching at least 2400  in 4 years and pay a royalty of 8 percent of the gross of released sound productions to Western Electric. Vitaphone had the potentially extremely lucrative right to sublicense the system on a royalty sharing basis with Western Electric. However, as

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Warners seemed to be on the threshold of success, signing up Vitaphone theaters and gaining the traction that had eluded Western Electric, its manager, John Otterson (as described in chapter 33), became both hostile and covetous (Gomery, 2005; Pooling of Patents…, 1936, pp. 394–525). (Otterson also played a part in William Fox’s loss of the Fox Studio as described in chapter 37.) In September 1926, Waddill Catchings, who was now Warners’ Chief Financial Officer, explored the possibility of Paramount taking half ownership in Vitaphone in order to give credibility to the effort, but this required the approval of Western Electric. This resulted in Otterson offering Paramount’s boss, Adolph Zukor, a better deal than Warner Bros. even though he was contractual prevented from doing so. Zukor walked away from the problems that might arise between Western Electric and Warners, and approached Loews/MGM boss Nicholas Schenck, and together helped organize the Big Five Agreement, as described in chapter 36 (Gomery, 2005, p. 66). Warner Bros.’ efforts inflamed Otterson’s anger, who perceived them to be both disorganized and failing to meet their revenue targets, which his legal department advised gave him the right to claim the Warners were in default. At first Otterson unsuccessfully attempted to solve his problem by buying the studio outright for $4.5 million, an offer that was turned down, after which Otterson further resolved to pressure the Warners to change the deal’s terms. The brothers followed the advice of their major financial adviser, Catchings, who met with Otterson on March 14, 1927 and gauged the extent of his determination to publiFig. 34.2  Western Electric’s Edward B. Craft on a Vitaphone sound stage supervising a test. The camera behind Craft is in a sound deadening booth. (Cinémathèque Française)

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cally humiliate the Warners for being in default of their contract by publicizing an opinion letter written by Western Electric’s lawyers (Gomery, 2005). Warners accepted a onetime $1,322,306 payment on May 18, 1927 to relinquish their exclusive representation of Western Electric products, which included all 136 Vitaphone exhibitor contracts and its recent cross-license with Fox-Case. Warners signed a nonexclusive license for Western Electric recording technology with a “most favored nation” clause stipulating that their royalties would not exceed the lowest royalty payment to any other licensee. Warner Bros. picked up a lot of cash, but the studio forfeited what would amount to a fortune in future revenue. In chapter 33 we learned that in December 1926 Otterson formed the Western Electric Division ERPI to take over the marketing, sales, and servicing, business that had been Vitaphone’s; on December 31, 1926, he signed a cross-­ licensing agreement with Fox, who had made a deal for Case’s technology on July 23, 1926. Fox-Case was to be supplied with amplifiers and other hardware, which were badly needed by William Fox to achieve his sound-on-film initiative. Following Otterson’s advice, only a bit more than a week earlier on December 21, Fox-Case signed a similar agreement with Vitaphone while it still possessed the right to sublicense Western Electric technology, making them and Warners, for a brief moment, the only two studios to possess Western Electric cinema sound technology. Vitaphone partner Walter J.  Rich was bought out, and Harry Warner became the president of new stripped down Vitaphone. The sales and service portion of Vitaphone were

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taken over by ERPI, whose corporate office was at 250 West 57th Street in Manhattan. The 1000 ERPI employees were mandated with marketing, selling, installing, servicing, and licensing Bell System manufactured products that were not telephonic; its primary mission was to provide sound s­ ystems for the movie industry. While Warners’ Vitaphone had bargained with exhibitors on a theater by theater basis, ERPI’s approach was less flexible (Crafton, 1997). ERPI moved forward with theatrical installations of sound-on-disk hardware that usually included Movietone playback modifications to projectors (Solomon, 2014). The machinations of Western Electric that resulted in a repositioning of the control of sound technology did not go unnoticed by the five major studios, MGM (Loew’s), First National, Paramount Famous Lasky, Universal, and Producers Distributing Company (P.D.C.), and the powerful electronics organization RCA, as described in chapter 36. Although the major studios would sign deals with ERPI for significant royalty payments, their combined clout, given the competitive alternative of RCA Photophone, although a bit late to arrive, upended the technological stranglehold of AT&T/Bell Labs/Western Electric/ERPI. The first Vitaphone augmented sound feature production Don Juan, which had been produced without sound in mind, starred John Barrymore playing the title role. The music was recorded by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and had been composed by William Axt and David Mendoza, both of whom would work on many film scores. Newly designed loudspeakers by Western Electric, by Wente et  al., were completed only 2 weeks before the film’s premiere on Fig. 34.3  A Manhattan billboard proclaiming the first Vitaphone release, Don Juan. (Bell Telephone Magazine)

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August 6, 1926, at the Warner Theater in Manhattan. The most expensive seats for the premiere went for $10.00 (Weis, 1985). Don Juan had a mixed reception, only doing well in a handful of Warner-owned theaters. It was withdrawn and rereleased as a silent film leaving the fate of the Vitaphone enterprise up in the air (Gomery, 2005). A hurdle to exhibitor acceptance to be gotten over was that wiring a theater for Vitaphone was costly, estimated at $16,000 for a 900 seat theater. Vitaphone and Western Electric carried a loan for the equipment with the theaters putting down 25% of the cost to be repaid in a year, plus paying 10 cents per seat per week. By the end of 1927, 157 theaters had ERPI equipped Vitaphone sound-on-disk systems. By 1928 the number of sound theaters was 1046 and by the end of 1929, 5000 theaters were wired for sound-on-disk and sound-on-film. Earlier disk systems like Gaumont’s Chronophone and Edison’s Kinetophone were intended for lip synchronization, which they often failed to achieve. Oddly enough, while Vitaphone was capable of lip sync it was initially used to continue the exhibition practice of accompanying projection with music. Its primary use for feature films was to replace the live orchestra with a phonograph as affirmed by the fact that the speakers were at first placed in the orchestra pit and not behind the screen. A baby step was taken in the dueling scene in Don Juan taking advantage of synchronization by adding the sound of clashing swords but there was no spoken dialogue, only intertitles. At the New York premiere, the film was preceded with short subjects that, unlike the feature, depended on lip sync recordings for films featuring the tenor

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Giovanni Martinelli, violinists Mischa Elman and Efrem Zimbalist, singer Al Jolson, and others. The Don Juan program was introduced by a lip sync film of a lackluster Wil Hays, the censorship tsar or enforcer of “The Code.” He had been the former chairman of the Republican Party and Postmaster general and was now the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, an organization created to head off government censorship. Due to a dearth of Vitaphone installations Don Juan initially only ran with sound-on-disk at the Warner Theater where it played for 9 months. It was exhibited in a silent version at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, followed by the Vitaphone openings at the Egyptian, and then in Boston on November 1, 1926 (Crafton, 1997). It was well received in Hollywood by an enthusiastic audience of industry notables. On October 5, 1926, the second Vitaphone film, The Better ‘Ole, based on a comic strip set in the First World War in which grumbling protagonist seeks a better fox hole, opened at the Colony Theater in Manhattan (Geduld, 1975), in an effort that might be characterized as tentative sync sound, with images and sounds of an audience singing and a man playing the harmonica. In the spring of 1927, Warners began building four sound stages in Hollywood and one in Brooklyn on the site of the old Vitagraph studio. On May 24, 1927, the first of a series of Vitaphone shorts went into production, The Song of the Volga Boatman, presumably a remake of the test shot at the Vitagraph Brooklyn studio the prior year. On June 21, 1927, one of the first sound augmented feature films to be recorded in Hollywood, the Warners’ Old San Francisco, with intertitles and without lip sync, opened at the Warner Theater in Manhattan. Rerecording for the earthquake scene was done using multiple tracks on disks mixed together, a first for a Vitaphone film, combining sounds of people shouting and screaming and buildings collapsing. The sound track and image of the staged catastrophe was an effective evocation of a city being destroyed, possibly even more effective today than the day it was released because of the dated look of the footage and its practical rather than computer-generated effects. The lurid red tint (or was it toning?) supports the theme that this sinful Gomorrah deserved its hellish fate. Warner Bros. followed up the success of Don Juan in the 15 months following its release with about 40 essentially silent features with the same sound effects and musical score augmentation as had been used in Don Juan, until the arrival of The Jazz Singer in October 1927, by which time Warners’ had made at least 150 Vitaphone shorts; production had moved from Brooklyn to Hollywood after four new sound stages had been built (Gomery, 2005, p. 43). To a significant extent, The Jazz Singer owed its success to its star Al Jolson, who is now largely forgotten but was one of the most popular performers of his time. In the film Jolson spoke these now famous words: “Wait a minute, I tell ya! You ain’t seen

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nothin’ yet!” which was followed by his eye rolling, hip wiggling, manic performance of Toot Toot Tootsie, as he sang, clapped and whistled, but the scene with son (Jolson) and mother (Eugenie Besserer) may have most convincingly made the case for lip sync.2 Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, the film was released on October 6, 1927, the first partial talkie feature using just a few lip sync sequences in addition to the musical track and synchronized songs. The film is often credited with having been a significant moment in the history of cinema tipping the balance away from what had been, for three decades, a cinema of pantomime to all-talking photoplays. Sam Warner died on the day before the premier of The Jazz Singer. Brother Jack believed that the stress of getting the production on the screen was the direct cause. Sam had been tired and suffering from headaches and was hospitalized after a trip to the dentist’s office to remove infected teeth. It was thought that he had a mastoid infection; after a cerebral hemorrhage and several operations he died, his death attributed to pneumonia (Thomson, 2017, p.  63). Gabler (1989) writes that it was an abscess on the brain, but whatever the cause of death, his bereaved brothers did not attend the New York Premiere. Although The Jazz Singer is usually associated with the public and industry’s acceptance of the sound film, the film that did the trick in Gomery’s (2005) opinion, was The Jazz Singer’s reprise, The Singing Fool (1928), using the same augmented sound format with synchronized songs, given its far greater box office success. Warners’ first all dialogue sound-on-disk film, Lights of New  York, was released on July 8, 1928, with the studio claiming that the film was the first sound feature to do away with intertitle cards,3 but the studio continued to release many part-talkies for another year, after which their entire output consisted of all-talking films. Vitaphone varieties short subjects, filmed acts and some dramatic playlets, continued to be made in Hollywood and in Brooklyn. For a time Warner Bros. was the most successful studio in Hollywood because of its early commitment to sound. As a result of Vitaphone’s success in September 1928, the Warners were able to acquire the Stanley Theater chain and First National Pictures. In 1928 the net profit for Warner Bros. was about $2000,000, but in 1929 the figure was over $17,000,000, far more than Paramount, Fox, or MGM. The sound-on-disk Vitaphone process ruled at Warner Bros. until, in the spring of 1930, they began to offer release prints for both sound-on-­ disk and sound-on-film, although they used the Vitaphone brand for both. ERPI modifications to projectors, in these early years, often combined both sound-on-disk and sound-­on-­film playback hardware to give exhibitors the ability to show both kinds of films. To its 2  It hasn’t escaped notice that two pivotal American films, The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer, feature white actors in blackface. 3  Old Arizona followed on December 28, 1928, the first all-talking optical sound-on-film Movietone feature

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Fig. 34.4  A poster for The Jazz Singer, a film about the son of a cantor whose dream is to perform in blackface.

Fig. 34.5  An advertisement for Vitaphone, a gift to mankind from the gods as channeled by the Warner Bros.

advantage ERPI profited from installing both Vitaphone disk and Movietone ­ sound-­ on-­ film, which was rebranded as “Sound by Western Electric.”

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However, the convenience of sound-on-film technology, fostered by the determined engineering effort to improve the technology by AT&T/Bell Labs/Western Electric/ERPI (marketed and installed by ERPI), and by Westinghouse/GE/RCA (marketed and installed by RCA) prevailed, and Vitaphone sound-on-disk passed into history, which Theisen (1941) judges ended in 1930. Although it took up sound-on-film for release, for a while Warners continued to record, edit, and mix using phonograph technology, a medium far less suited to these tasks than optical track, undoubtedly because it had made a considerable investment in installing the technology. Unlike disks, optical tracks could be studied visually and synchronized with a simple mechanical device, a multi-gang synchronizer, which materially aided syncing up dallies, editing sound, and preparing mixes. Warners, and other studios, continued to use disk recordings for on-set playback machines for musical numbers and sound checks. For establishing sound-on-disk practices, Warner Bros. had access to the technology developed by Western Electric-Bell Labs, which helped them set up their studio. Lip sync recording was enabled by driving both the camera and disk recorder with selsyn motors powered by the same source of 60 Hz AC.4 In the projection booth playback was achieved by mechanically interlocking the turntable to the projector. A pickup was designed that used a steel stylus whose action, as it rode the disk’s lateral grooves, was oil-damped to control its inertial characteristics to control low-frequency sound distortion, which was also recorded at lower amplitude to prevent distortion. The disk played for the duration of a standard 1000 foot 35 mm print reel, about 11 minutes. It was 16 inches in diameter and ran at 33 1 3 RPM, and is the precursor of the 12 inch 33 1 3 long-playing or LP record introduced in the late 1940s. The Columbia LP had finer grooves, which combined with its low rotational rate permitted three times the running time. It was made of low noise vinyl, had better longevity, and far better sound fidelity that the Vitaphone disk (Morton, 2004). The cinematography and projection rate was fixed at 24 fps (90 feet per minute) – but why? For a sound-on-disk system, frequency response was not a function of the linear speed of the film past a sound head, but rather it was determined by the disk’s characteristics alone, so why chose a rate higher than the nominal silent cinema shooting speed of 16 fps (Kellogg, 1955)? Silent films were shot using cameras geared so that two cranks per second gave the standard 16 fps rate, but in practice the taking rate seems to have varied from 12 to 19 fps, at least based on Peter Jackson’s (2018) evaluation of footage of the First World War, at which time playback at 18 fps was a recommended practice but projectionists seem to have shown the film as they or the exhibitor pleased. In the Rather than cycles, cycles per second, or cps, this is usually written Hz, after physicist Heinrich Rudolph Hertz. 4 

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earliest days, this would have been with handcranked projectors but in the 1920s electric variable speed motor took hold. Changing the rate of projection was done to enhance the action of a sluggish drama or to follow management’s instructions to reduce the duration of the film for more audience turns, as was attested to by Sponable’s (1947) observation of (pre-sound) exhibition practice: “In connection with the Society’s (S.M.P.E.) standard, I have been unable to find any New York theater which is running film at 85 feet a minute; the present normal speed is 105 feet, and for Sundays often 120 feet per minute is used in order to get in an extra show.” (24 fps of 35 mm film is equivalent to 90 feet per minute.) We know that years before Vitaphone, the Gaumont, Messter, and Edison sound-on-disk systems depended on motor drive for pitch stability and that Kinemacolor and other frame-sequential additive color systems required motor drive because of their high frame rate. The trend away from handcranking was probably based on fact that electric motor drive was more dependable and freed projectionists to perform housekeeping tasks. As motor drive become commonplace in the decade before the introduction of sound, a projection speed in the neighborhood of 22 fps was common, but as observed by Sponable, projectors were often run faster on weekends to increase the number of screenings. By the time of Vitaphone, it wasn’t a question of whether theaters would have to buy new motor-driven projectors, but rather of retrofitting them with a way to stabilize speed in conjunction with the installation of Vitaphone’s mechanically synchronized phonograph turntables. H.  M. Stoller of Western Electric designed the constant speed bridge-balance for keeping the projector motor and the phonograph at a constant 90 feet per minute (Hilliard, 1985). One surmise is that the Western Electric/Bell Labs engineers selected 24 fps because it was such a nice number given the 60 Hz line frequency for alternating current in the United States. This may have made it simpler to think about and calibrate the cameras and recorders for production and projectors and phonographs for screenings since every 2.5 cycles of AC current represent one frame exposed or projected. But Western Electric engineer Stanley Watkins reported that the choice was made after consultation with projectionists to determine the typical rates in use, and based on what he learned Watkins settled on 24  fps (Kellogg, 1955; Lovette, 1946). Case Laboratory, inventor of Fox’s Movietone, experimented with frame rates before settling on 24  fps (coincidentally?) for acceptable optical sound-on-film fidelity, but de Forest’s Phonofilm, a similar system, was shot at 21 fps; lacking an electrical or electronic means to set the speed during projection, it relied on the protectionist’s ear to adjust the fps rate. It may be unfair to judge the choice of disk technology as a mistake influenced as we are by knowing the outcome. The phonograph was a known technology that had existed for decades and was far better understood than optical sound-­on-­

34 Vitaphone

film technology. Moreover, the disk system was being offered by Western Electric’s ERPI, part of AT&T, and that pedigree was persuasive. However, daily operation in the projection booth was difficult – the system simply had grievous flaws. The projectionist had too much to do to make sure the show ran smoothly, something that the engineers at Bell and Western must have known but failed to understand or acknowledge at a gut level. Hindsight informs us that, from a practical point of view, the challenge of disk sound for film was insurmountable due to the exigencies of daily exhibition. Kellogg (1955) quotes de Forest on the subject of phonographic sync sound technology, who it should be noted had an axe to grind as an advocate of sound-on-film; de Forest wrote: “The fundamental difficulties in this method were so basic that it should have been evident from inception, that commercial success could hardly be achieved in that direction.” Kellogg reminds us of the shortcomings of the deployment of such a product with the comment: “Consider the Warners’ Vitaphone.” Both experts felt that sound-on-disk should never have left the lab. However, from a studio point of view, it was workable for recording, and to support that activity, ERPI’s local office was located at 7020 Santa Monica Blvd., in West Hollywood. Silent prints had been sent to the exhibitors by exchanges or distributors on 1000 foot reels that were often spliced together onto 2000 foot reels for projection to halve the number of changeovers. Putting reels together this way did not work for Vitaphone since each 1000 foot reel had to be cued up with its own disk. Moreover, to run a smooth Vitaphone show properly required at least two projectionists because of the increased number of changeovers and the many new tasks that had to be performed. Lost frames due to damage that caused lost sync were a common occurrence; the projectionist needed to be diligent about substituting a slug of the exact length for the missing frame(s), a step that was unnecessary for silent or sound-on-film projection, which only required cutting out the damaged frames. For a sound-­on-­ disk film like Don Juan, with orchestral accompaniment, the loss of a frame or two here or there may have been acceptable, but even these films used sound effects that required precise sync. The ultimate Vitaphone embarrassment was playing the wrong combination of disk and reel. In the projection booth far more effort and diligence was required to project a Vitaphone film. A frame marked “START” was placed in the projector’s gate, and the disk was cued up using an arrow near its center. The steel stylus or needle of the Western Electric 4-A pickup was placed on the start arrow, and the tone arm followed its spiral grooves outward toward the circumference of the disk. The stylus’ weight on the disk was adjusted to between 3 and 6 ounces (85 to 170 grams), enormous by LP standards (1 to 3 grams), and the frequency response of the early Vitaphone disk was limited to 4300 Hz, a third of the response of an LP. The major limitation of the

34 Vitaphone

301

Fig. 34.6  A Vitaphone demonstration. In 1923 Western Electric engineer Edward B. Craft championed developing sound-on-disk. Here he is 3 years later in a projection booth wearing a tuxedo holding a Vitaphone disk.

system’s sound quality was the steel stylus, because the other ­components were of greater capability. (This finding was presented by Nicholas Bergh in a l­ecture-demonstration of early Western Electric systems on August 26, 2017, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood, as part of the Reel Thing Conservation and Restoration Seminar.) Western Electric amplifiers and loudspeakers were rated at only 2.5 and 10 Watts (peak power was greater) and were powered by direct current from batteries or motor generators. The speakers had a healthy 25% efficiency, enabling them to be driven by the low power amplifiers. The loudspeakers, which were called speaker horns, were large with an opening or mouth of 40 feet square. A 5000 seat theater could be filled with sound using multiple amplifiers and speakers (Hilliard, 1985). The degree of amplification from the microphone on the set to the loudspeakers in the theater was given by P. M. Rainey (1927) of ERPI: “The electrical energy developed by the microphone is of the order of 1  ×  10−8 watts, the output of the amplifiers which operate the loudspeakers may be as much as 40 watts. This means that the amplifiers are giving an energy amplification of four billion.” The steel needle and the weight of the heavy pickup arm caused considerable disk groove wear, and the early disks were meant to be retired after 20 plays but often were not, which resulted in noisy sound. The needle was supposed to be replaced every time a new disk was played, but that step was also sometimes omitted. The projectionist had to be attentive to needles skipping or jumping grooves in which case sync was lost, but how to recover from such an accident? An observer at the time, New York Times film critic Mordaunt Hall (1928), complained that synchronization was often “discon-

certingly poor.” Vitaphone disks were heavy, costly to ship, but not easily broken. Warner Bros. issued disks recorded on one side, but Paramount and others used both sides, which only added to the confusion of matching the disk and film reels. Although young and healthy people can hear a range of frequencies from about 20 to 20,000 Hz, the disks were capable of only from 60 Hz to a bit more than 4000 Hz, good enough for a man’s voice but not quite good enough for a woman’s, and far from ideal for orchestral sound that can range from 40 to more than 12,000 Hz. Another way to look at this is that the human ear can hear a range of 10 octaves and Vitaphone could deliver a bit more than 6 octaves. According to Hugh S. Knowles, in an article titled Disc and Film Recording in the Light of New Developments, in the October 26, 1929 Exhibitors Herald World: “The high frequency output of the record, which is important for good speech is not, as is sometimes supposed, limited by the groove velocity, since even at the present velocity it is possible to record, say 8000 cycles, very nicely. The thing that limits the output at these frequencies is that the principal component of the surface noise or scratch frequencies lies in this upper range ... (but) the tendency of the exhibitor seems to be to eliminate the scratch as much as possible, even at the cost of reproduction.” The microphone, speaker, and electronics technology created by Western Electric-Bell Labs served well when applied to optical sound-on-film, which prevailed for eight decades and over time enjoyed considerable improvement. Combining the track with the image avoided the pitfalls of Vitaphone, whose shortcomings can be summed up as follows: it defied the realities of exhibition. Writing in the August 1930 Journal of the S.M.P.E., Porter H.  Evans

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(1930) of the Brooklyn Vitaphone Studio, toes the Warners’ party line by acknowledging that sound-on-film, with which Warners was experimenting, was more convenient but he asserts that the salient issue is one of sound quality, and in that regard he insists that sound-on-disk is superior. Porter was holding the fort for sound-on-disk, but the studio was either about to or had actually made the decision to make the transition to sound-on-film. Resistance was futile and Warners had to submit, even if it was for their own good. The silent and the sound cinemas told the same kind of narratives, but the industry needed to experiment with ways to make synchronized sound work both aesthetically and technically. One opinion given in 1928 was expressed by Mordaunt Hall (1928): “So far the shadow with a voice is a novelty, just as the silent picture was a novelty in the old days. It remains for the producers to consider seriously the new device and bend their efforts to making productions

34 Vitaphone

that will cause the audiences, in the interest in the story, to forget that they are gazing upon talking shadows.” The industry changed rapidly, and by the autumn of 1930 silent films were gone and the talkies thrived thereafter using sound-on-film technology, according to Gomery (Weis, 1985). In terms of a narrative arc and the desire for a happy ending, it is fitting that Vitaphone, a bit more than three decades after Edison placed a cylinder phonograph in the battery compartment of the Kinetoscope, reached the level of technical proficiency to gain acceptance, however fleetingly. It would be churlish to snub the Vitaphone effort as one that was hapless and doomed from the get-go  – after all, as awkward an embodiment as it was, it was the fulfillment of decades of effort to apply phonographic sound to cinema, and it became a motivation for the industry’s transition to optical sound-on-film. The story of the development of sound-on-film technology is described in the following chapters.

35

Movietone

At the beginning of 1927 Fox installed Movietone in 25 of its own theaters, the same year that Fox made its first deal for Movietone exhibition with the Interstate Amusement Company, which operated theaters in Texas, Arkansas, and Alabama (Solomon, 2014). Movietone was premiered, to little public notice, on January 21, 1927, at the Sam Harris Theater in Manhattan with a program of sound-on-film vaudeville acts accompanying the silent feature What Price Glory. The first sound augmented Movietone feature was director Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven, released on September 10, 1927, which had previously been released as a silent film. F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, was the first Movietone film that was planned for a music track, which premiered on September 23, 1927. Like 7th Heaven it was a silent film with intertitles using an optical sound-onfilm score, the approach used for Don Juan, a Vitaphone sound-on-disk film released about a year earlier. After Sunrise, Fox Studios released all of its films with sound-onfilm. The Movietone ball really got rolling not as synchronized sound vaudeville acts or augmented sound garnish for silent films, but as the Movietone newsreel, which became an audience favorite. Courtland Smith, manager of the Fox newsreel unit, as Gomery (2005) put it, set about to: “differentiate its product from Vitaphone, and move into an unoccupied portion of the market for motion picture entertainment. Furthermore, sound newsreels would provide a logical method by which Fox-Case could gradually perfect new techniques of camera work and editing, and test the market a minimal cost.” Moreover, sound-on-disk newsreel field recoding was infeasible making this an ideal differentiator for Movietone. Although the Movietone format was compatible with the existing 35  mm infrastructure, the frame was reduced in width because of the addition of the sound track. This altered the aspect ratio of the frame to 1.19:1 from the Edison aspect ratio of 1.33:1, a change that would be remedied by cropping the top and the bottom of the frames to restore the screen aspect ratio to Edison’s, as described elsewhere.

Newsreels proper, as a species of theatrical cinema, were first offered in the United States by Pathé Frères in 1911, a weekly service as a variety show of current events and entertaining features distributed to exhibitors. From the first days of the celluloid cinema, there were the “actualities” or short scenes of everyday contemporary life, like the Lumières’ Lunch Hour at the Lumière Factory, or their Arrival of a Train at the Station, shot in 1895. Prize fight films were a major attraction, such as the Lambda Company’s production of the Griffo-Barnett fight filmed on the roof of their office located at 153 Broadway in Manhattan. Reenactments of newsworthy events were common, such as Edwin S. Porter’s staging of the execution of President William McKinley’s assassin, released by Edison in 1901 (see chapter 19). Model shots were used to recreate spectacular events, such as the sinking of Admiral Pascual Cervera’s fleet in Santiago Bay, Cuba in 1898, filmed by Edward H. Amet (Fielding, 1972). (See chapter 26.) The success of Pathé’s offering led others to make their own newsreels as the newsreel format itself became the attraction, rather than any specific newsworthy item, enhancing its value to the producer and the exhibitor as a dependable customer attraction. In 1919 Fox News was the last major newsreel service to be initiated billing itself as the “mightiest of all,” which it would become. Raymond Fielding (1972), author of a comprehensive account of the American newsreel, relates: “Fox News came on like thunder. It was the product of great energy, considerable imagination, and an initial investment of five million dollars. In time it became the largest of them all and survived until 1963.” Accordingly, it was in William Fox’s best interest, in a fiercely competitive market, to maintain leadership by one upping the other newsreel producers with the enlivening novelty of synchronized sound. The first major commercial acceptance of synchronized sound-on-film, paving the way for the medium’s acceptance for the narrative feature film, was the Movietone newsreel with its new releases every week, which immediately became popular after its ­ introduction on April 30, 1927, in

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_35

303

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Fig. 35.1  From Fox’s drafting department, approved by Sponable, the Movietone format.

Manhattan’s Roxy Theatre (Gomery, 2005, p. 51). The subject of the premiere was a 4-minute newsreel of marching cadets at West Point. The evening of Charles Lindbergh’s takeoff for Paris, May 20, 1927, a Movietone newsreel of the event was shown at the Roxy to an audience of 6,200 that cheered for almost 10 minutes. Lindbergh’s reception in the United States as a returning hero was similarly covered by Movietone, thus convincing both Smith and Fox that their strategy had succeeded, but even they had no idea how popular the Movietone newsreel was to become. Although the 10-minute newsreel became standard in all Fox cinemas, but this reached only 3 percent of the market, motivating Fox to enlarge his theater chain and to also add vaudeville short subjects. However, the shorts proved to be far less profitable than Movietone newsreels and were dropped in May 1929 (Gomery, p. 90). A wide variety of subjects were added beginning in January 1928, with synchronized sound snapshots of world figures such as George Bernard Shaw and Benito Mussolini (see chapter 33). Singers, comedy acts, and orchestras were added as sound newsreels became an attraction that a­ udiences

35 Movietone

looked forward to; in this way the public was informed of the news of the day and entertained with special features (Solomon, 2014). Decades later, newsreels were supplanted by TV news, but in their day audiences looked forward to them, as I can attest. In my youth, in the 1940s and 1950s, I greatly enjoyed the one reel hodge-podge of events and amusing trifles inserted between the features on a double bill (along with a cartoon, a serial, and a comedy short). The newsreel was pithily characterized by Oscar Levant as: “A series of catastrophes, ended by a fashion show” (Fielding, 1972, p.  53). The Embassy and Translux theaters on Manhattan’s 42nd Street played newsreels 24  hours a day, and other small theaters ran newsreels at railroad terminals for passengers waiting for trains. Initially 44 Movietone newsreel sound trucks were built, and crews were dispatched around the world. Fox News Movietone became the largest such organization and survived the onslaught of television for many years, ceasing production in 1963 (Fielding, 1972, p. 98). In December 1928 Movietone newsreels were refreshed three times a week; by 1929 Fox had 60 Movietone newsreel crews and would eventually have 100 crews (Sponable, 1947, May). The Hearst Corporation had been releasing silent newsreels through Universal and wanted its Hearst News to add sound, but that required a license to use FoxCase patents. It made arrangements to do so and released through MGM as Metrotone News and Fox as Movietone News. The Fox-Hearst Corporation was formed in 1929, which remained in operation through 1934 after Hearst purchased an interest in Fox Movietone News. After October 2, 1934, Hearst released its newsreels exclusively through MGM (Krefft, 2017). William Fox was taken aback when he learned that ERPI had licensed Movietone to the other studios for newsreels because he believed that AT&T had broken its verbal promise to give him a 5-year exclusive on their technology’s application for newsreels. AT&T may have felt a need to do so to compete with RCA’s Photophone that was being used by Pathé and then RKO-Pathé News. Exhibitors appreciated that audiences demanded the newsreels, which were produced by five companies (most of which survived through the 1950’s): Fox Movietone News, MGM/Hearst’s Metrotone News of the Day, RKO-Pathé News (which became Warner-Pathé News), Paramount’s Eyes and Ears of the World, and Universal News, which gave up the ghost December 1967. Newsreels were shot with single-­system cameras, at first dominated by lip-synchronized speeches and suchlike, but this became tiresome, and the style changed with more footage shot MOS (silent) and presented with voice-over narration like that provided by Movietone’s mellifluously intoning Lowell Thomas. (Thomas would use his association with the newsreel, encasing himself in a small black and white screen, for the introduction of This is Cinerama.) Newsreels were confined to

35 Movietone

305

Fig. 35.2  The newsreel cameraman’s calling was romanticized. (NEH)

Fig. 35.3  An Australian Fox Movietone crew and their newsreel truck. (NFSA)

the standard 35 mm reel’s length of 1000 feet, or about 10 minutes. Major scheduled events were often covered by a newsreel “roto-pool” in which the companies cooperated reducing crowding, confusion, and expense. The most famous event covered by a roto-pool was the May 6, 1937, Hindenburg airship disaster at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. Newsreel camera crews lugging 200 pounds of cameras, tripods, amplifiers, and batteries, covered the flights

of aviators Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, atomic bomb tests, the Byrd Polar Expedition, presidential speeches, sporting events, and fashion shows (Malkames, 2003, September). The average newsreel crew used 50,000 feet of 35 mm camera negative a year, with some using as much as 100,000 feet (Battle, 1935). Today it’s hard to imagine the glamour and dash of the newsreel cameraman in his heyday, which Hollywood

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c­ elebrated in Buster Keaton’s 1928 The Cameraman, and the Clark Gable 1938 vehicle, Too Hot to Handle, in which both actors play newsreel cameraman (Solomon, 2014). And yet, no perilous episode in a theatrical film topped the Keatonesque derring-do of cameraman Albert Mingalone who, in 1937 shooting for Paramount, attempted to get an aerial view of the opening of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut by suspending himself from weather balloons. As he filmed with his spring-wound Eyemo floating over the highway, a sudden loss of ballast and the prevailing wind caused him to drift toward the waters of the Atlantic. He was brought down to earth by a sharpshooter who shot out some of the balloons. Covering the opening of a new highway suspended from balloons may itself be newsworthy and entertaining, but there was a more serious side to the newsreel when it was used as propaganda. For the 1928 presidential campaign William Fox, who described himself as a Democrat when it came to New York issues and a Republican on national issues, offered presidential candidate Herbert Hoover his support through favorable Movietone newsreel coverage. After Fox’s business collapse, he wondered if Hoover might not have done more to help him in his time of need (Sinclair, 1933). The Wall Manufacturing Company of Syracuse New York, which had modified a Bell & Howell model 2709 camera for Case Labs following Sponable’s design, founded John M. Wall, Inc., to manufacture sound-on-film newsreel cameras for Pathé, Movietone News, and other customers all over the world. (Wall also built the Cinerama cameras.) The Wall camera was about the same weight as a Mitchell studio camera and ran on 12 volt power, had an industry accepted D-type Mitchell intermittent, provided a rackover for focusing, a direct optical side finder, and used either 400 foot or 1000 foot magazines (McInnis, 1946). The newsreel unit of Paramount used Bell & Howell 2709s, hard to mistake with their large external drive motor and a big exposed flywheel. The Bell & Howell Eyemo 100 foot load 35 mm camera with a 35 foot spring run, was widely used for handheld MOS (allegedly mit out sounds or perhaps motor only sync or shot) shooting, was deployed during the Second World War for combat cinematography; a 400 foot magazine version was also available. The single-system Audio Akeley’s optical sound capability was so highly regarded that it was also used as a double-system sound recorder, and the Akeley Gyro tripod was often used with other makes of cameras because of its smooth panning capability (Malkames, 2004). Attempts were made to reduce the noise and to improve the sound quality of single-system cameras using push-pull variable width recording coupled with an ultraviolet light source that was modulated by an RCA mirror galvanometer (Dimmick, 1938), technology which is described in chapter 38. Although Hollywood’s conversion to sound has been characterized as a period of chaos, this was not the case at the major studios for they were well prepared for the transition

35 Movietone

Fig. 35.4  A Poster for The Cameraman, 1928, a film in which a hapless but overachieving Buster Keaton becomes a newsreel cameraman.

(Gomery, 2005). At Fox, for example, William Fox and Winfield R. Sheehan had a plan and knew how to carry it out. On July 28, 1928, the Fox Hills Studio in South Beverly Hills was converted to sound recording stages and renamed Movietone City. The site of the corral that had been used by cowboy star Tom Mix’s horses became the prop room, sound effects department, carpentry shop, and storage area. Movietone City’s eight sound stages and other structures were built in 3 months by 2700 employees working three shifts 24 hours a day. The eight stages were vibration isolated using concrete shells within the outer building that were anchored on 200-foot-long piers that were sunk 18 feet below ground. The inner and outer structures were separated by insulating airspaces with the inner structure suspended by steel rods from the roof of the outer. A 14-foot-high wall surrounded the studio’s 40 acres that included its own fire and police departments, hospital, electric power plant, and sundry facilities such as cottages for movie stars. Estimates for the cost of the 30 new buildings range from $10,000,000 to

35 Movietone

$15,000,000; the new sound studio was dedicated on October 28, 1928. (Movietone City later became the 20th Century Fox Studio, which in 1958 engineered a lucrative real estate deal that turned its lovely backlot into the pedestrian hostile Brasilia-like Century City.) Fox’s head of production, Sheehan, once wary of sound, decided to increase sound film production and relocated many of Fox’s New York-based engineers to Hollywood to help equip sound stages and supervise recording and post-­ production. Sheehan wanted to make only all-talkies and predicted that Movietone would be installed in 30,000 cinemas worldwide (Solomon, 2014). Sponable’s USP 1,832,821, Method and Apparatus for producing Talking Moving Pictures, filed on November 1, 1928, describes a truck designed for sound recording that was undoubtedly the basis for those used for Fox newsreels, which were moved from soundstage to soundstage on the Fox lot as required. The Sponable truck, housing sound equipment and electric generators, was probably used for the on-location recorded theatrical feature, In Old Arizona; it was billed as “the first all-­talking feature filmed outdoors,” and was shot with its cameras wrapped in quilting to quiet them. The Movietone feature, based on a short story by O. Henry, was produced by Sheehan and codirected by Irving Cummings and Raoul Walsh. It premiered at the Criterion Theater in Los Angles on December 25, 1928. The film was praised for capturing the background sounds of nature. In Old Arizona benefited from Fox’s newsreel experience, and the sound I heard played back from a Blu-ray disk was good (Gitt, 2007). Only a few months earlier, September 1928, all Warner Bros. features began to be released with Vitaphone sound-on-disk. (Warner Bros. features remained branded Vitaphone, even when Fig. 35.5  Movietone City, opening day, October 28, 1928. (20th Century Fox)

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released as sound-on-film.) In Old Arizona helped to establish that optical sound was viable for feature production and far easier to distribute and project. The use of lip-synchronized sound for an entire feature flew in the face of existing prejudice. In Old Arizona’s lip sync aesthetic was at odds with the beliefs of technologists, film critics, and industry insiders, who were outspoken in their belief that the augmented sound music and effects technique, sans lip sync using intertitles, like the feature films Wings, Don Juan, and Sunrise, was the appropriate practice of film sound. This conviction persisted even though one and all had been exposed to sound newsreels and variety short subjects with decent quality lip sync sound, which indicates that the preference may have been based on an esthetic rather than a technical judgment. This can be substantiated by a review of relevant articles in the 1928 Transactions of the S.M.P.E. Conventional wisdom held that the silent film had reached a sacrosanct state of perfection and was an art form not to be tampered with by the inclusion of obtrusive synchronized sound dialog. However, like it or not, Movietone In Old Arizona was more than a whisper of things to come for as the passage of time would prove, this was how films would be made from then on. A bit less than a year after the release of In Old Arizona, the first Western Electric branded all-­talking film, substituting Wente’s light valve recording transducer for Case’s Aeo light, was released on November 5, 1928, Paramount’s Interference, directed by Roy Pomeroy. In 1928 a decision was made by the major studios to adopt what, for a year or so, remained known as Movietone. By 1929 it was the most used optical sound system for feature films followed by RCA’s Photophone, as reflected

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35 Movietone

Fig. 35.6  Sponable’s design for a field recording truck from his USP.

by the ­following list giving the number of Movietone features released by studio that year: Fox Film Corporation 46; Paramount Famous Players-Lasky 49; Universal 25; MGM 28 (one additional sound film was not Movietone); United Artists 14; and Columbia 13. RCA’s Photophone was used for these 1929 features: RKO Pathé Exchange 31; Film Booking Office 3; and Tiffany-Stahl Productions 7. Warner Bros. continued to use Vitaphone sound-on-disk for 37 features as did First National (which had been acquired by Warner Bros.) with 30. Another 20 sound features were made mostly using other systems by minor studios, 4 of which used Photophone and 1 Photofilm (de Forest). All but about 100 were all-talking (Geduld, 1975). Movietone was marketed, sold, installed, and serviced by ERPI; the Case transducers were replaced, according to Sponable (1947), beginning in 1930: “Sound-on-film by this time was well established as a commercial success and was displacing sound-on-disk as a release medium. The Western Electric light valve method of sound-on-film recording was commercially perfected. As Fox Film was a licensee of ERPI, and as such paid the regular royalty rates, it decided to give up its own method of Aeo light recording and use in entirety the Western Electric system.” (At about this time, the Fox studio, as a result of William Fox’s default on loans was taken over by a group headed by Harley Clarke who became the president of the studio, as described in chapter 37.) Efforts were made to combine color and sound-onfilm, and de Forest (1941) recalls shooting in Technicolor, with the camera silenced in a booth, in the spring of 1925. The subject was Chauve-Souris (The Bat), by Nikita Balieff’s touring vaudeville company, a show that had originated in Moscow. The performance was filmed in bichromatic Technicolor and de Forest reports that the Photofilm track was printed using the green record that,

while producing better sound than the red record, “was unsuitable.” This poor result was the fault of the spectral absorption characteristics of the dye tracks that were mismatched to the emission of the exciter lamps and the sensitivity of the projector soundhead cells. To solve the problem Sponable worked with Leonard Troland of Technicolor in 1928 to see if Fox could adapt its twocolor Fox Nature Color process for Movietone optical track prints. They succeeded after 5 months of effort by using a black and white print for the track that also served as the blank for receiving the imbibed color dyes (Layton, 2015). This method became standard for three-color Technicolor sound-on-film prints. Gomery (1976) ruefully comments: “…it is interesting to note the parallels of the invention, innovation, and diffusion of the Tri-Ergon experience to the American case. The independent inventors, Vogt, Engl, and Massolle, like Lee de Forest and Theodore Case, became lost in the corporate shuffle.” The outcomes of the independently invented sound-on-­film technologies in Germany by Tri-Ergon and in the United States by Case Laboratory, have similarities. The inventors were bought out, their technologies cross- or sublicensed or sold outright by the purchasers to electrical/electronic organizations with vast resources that further developed the technologies. The commercialization of sound-on-film products demanded the resources of a well-­organized well-funded company, like the electronics titans in Germany and America. The first two American studios adventurous enough to risk using sound went from positions of power and the ability to license (Fox) or sublicense (Warner Bros.) technology to royalty paying customers for AT&T/Western Electric/ERPI products. Warners’ Vitaphone was pressured into giving up its lucrative marketing, sales, and support agreement, and Fox Movietone optical sound-­on-­film, due to the restricted supply of amplifiers, metamorphosed into the Western Electric system.

35 Movietone

Fig. 35.7  A poster for In Old Arizona.

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How did the featured players in the American Sound-on-­ Film Saga fare? Earl Iru Sponable became one of the most highly regarded motion picture technologists. He served a term as the President of the SMPE (1949–1950) at the moment when it embraced television as the SMPTE. He led 20th Century Fox’s research and development efforts for 36 years, managing and directly contributing to the development of sound-on-film, newsreels, Fox Nature Color, Fox Grandeur, video projection, a lenticular color release print process, and CinemaScope. He died in 1977, at the age of 82 at his home in Lake Placid, New York. The man who hired Sponable as his assistant, Theodore Willard Case, one of the most significant inventors in cinema’s history, has been forgotten by the film industry and the world at large. He lost his way after his optical sound work was concluded and lived the life of a very rich man oblivious to the suffering brought on by the worldwide economic collapse. His inherited fortune was enhanced by his profitable sound-on-film venture and he built an enormous mansion for himself and his family in Auburn, New York, which became the scene of an ongoing party during the Great Depression. Divorced from his wife Gertrude in 1941, he sailed his yacht as his health deteriorated due to alcoholism, which “became increasingly serious in the late 1930s and early 1940s…” (Przybylek, 1999). Case was 56 years old when he died in 1944. Lee de Forest, on the other hand, was honored by the industry in 1960, the year before his death, with a special Academy Award given in recognition of “his pioneering inventions which brought sound to the motion picture.” Although he made a great contribution to electronics with his audion amplifier tube, the Academy did not distinguish itself by crediting de Forest with Case’s invention, but it was neither the first nor last time it would award an Oscar to a bad actor. The story of Sponable’s onetime boss William Fox may well satisfy the American version of the Aristotelian definition of a tragic hero, a man whose rose to a high place who falls to ruin or death because of a flaw, the vagaries of fate, or the will of the gods; in this case it’s the story of a boy who climbed up from the slums to become a movie mogul and is overthrown due to his overweening ambition, the vagaries of fate, and jealous rivals. Fox died in 1952, shunned by the industry he helped to create. The story of the business disaster that befell Fox and his failed attempt to assert ownership of his Tri-Ergon patent rights is told in the chapter 37.

36

RCA vs. ERPI

Bell Telephone was created in 1875 and in 1881 it acquired the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, which became its manufacturing arm. AT&T was incorporated in 1885, created from the Bell Telephone Company, as described in chapter 27. At the very end of 1926 or the beginning of 1927, Western Electric created Electrical Research Products Incorporated, or ERPI, primarily to market, sell, install, and service its audio products to both the studios and exhibitors, many of whom were theater chains owned by the studios or their holding companies. During the late 1920s and early 1930s ERPI had the lion’s share of the theatrical installation and studio hardware supply based on their control of both Vitaphone sound-on-disk and Movietone sound-on-film technology. Western Electric dominated the market due to its head start, but its late to market competitor was one of some substance, RCA, which battled to take market share from ERPI. While AT&T was based on the patents of Alexander Graham Bell, General Electric was formed and financed by Drexel Morgan & Company in 1889 from Edison General Electric, which had been created to consolidate Edison’s manufacturing companies and his electrical patents. GE’s RCA division, in turn, was formed in 1919 under the leadership of Owen D. Young, at the behest of the US Navy for the purpose of bundling together radio communications assets. The Navy’s intention was for RCA to become the controlling entity for telecommunications patents to benefit the United States’ defense efforts, an approach in part motivated by Guglielmo Marconi’s attempts to monopolize wireless telegraphy. This led to GE’s acquisition of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company and the Pan-American Telegraph Company. GE also gathered together the communications technology of AT&T, United Fruit, and the US Navy. RCA also served to market the electronics products manufactured by Westinghouse and General Electric; RCA’s first general manager was David Sarnoff, who at 15 had been a junior telegraph operator at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. Of greatest interest to us is that Sarnoff

would, within a decade, create the RKO movie studio for the expressed purpose of exploiting the GE/RCA Photophone optical sound system. In the days following the end of the First World War Charles A. Hoxie (1867–1941), a researcher at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New  York, invented a way to record transoceanic telegraphy, as described in his USP 1,456,595, Recording Apparatus, filed on April 13, 1918. His purpose was to permit the visual examination of the signal so that information could be easily separated from background noise or static. Hoxie recorded the signal as a visible pattern, very much like a variable area (also called variable width) sound track using a technique that resembles Blake’s method (see chapter 28), but rather than vibrating a mirror attached to a microphone’s diaphragm, Hoxie adapted the mirror galvanometer using a small mirror attached to a metal conductor held within an electromagnet’s field. The metal conductor changes its angle and that of the mirror as the field changes in response to a microphone’s amplified signal whose varying current is fed to the electromagnet. Light reflected from the vibrating mirror passes through a mask that looks like an arrowhead exposing moving film through a narrow slit to record a pattern that resembles a graph of sound’s waveform. The galvanometer technique to record sound was first demonstrated by Blondel in 1891 and improved 2 years later by Duddell and is sometimes referred to as the Duddell oscillograph. Hoxie’s method to record wireless telegraphy signals became the basis for an optical sound recorder called the Pallophotophone (shaking light sound), which would one day be shortened to Photophone for the marketing of the RCA optical sound system. In 1921, at the direction of the head of the GE research lab Willis R.  Whitney, Hoxie recorded President Calvin Coolidge and other notables; during the next years about a thousand such recordings, almost all of which have been lost, were broadcast over Schenectady radio station WGY, which was owned by General Electric (Theisen, 1941; Gomery, 2005). The recording medium was

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_36

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312

Fig. 36.1  From Hoxie’s 1918 USP teaching a variable area optical track recording method, the basis for RCA Photophone.

unperforated 35 mm film, but rather than the slender 2.54 mm (0.1 inch) width track later adopted by the film industry, Hoxie recorded a 1-inch-wide track, using a tape recorderlike drive, whose width he found could be greatly reduced to still produce good recordings. Later in 1922, Whitney, having gotten wind of de Forest’s efforts with Phonofilm, had Hoxie apply his system to motion picture sound. By the spring and winter of the next year, Hoxie was able to demonstrate what he had done for his colleagues and executives, but the failure of de Forest’s Phonofilm in the marketplace led to a decision to focus on consumer products and drop the motion picture research effort. Nonetheless, Hoxie’s work would give GE’s RCA the technology foundation for entering the motion picture optical sound field. The electronics program at GE paralleled that at Western Electric since both shared the rights to the audion and both had been improving

36  RCA vs. ERPI

the triode amplifier tube and sound amplifier designs. Both organizations had the knowhow to enter the motion picture field because of their work on the related applications of radio, telegraphy, the phonograph, and public address systems. GE, like Western Electric, worked on refining phonograph technology, but unlike Western Electric, it bypassed the sound-on-disk approach for motion pictures and concentrated on optical sound-on-film based on Hoxie’s work. Other sound recording work at GE was done by researchers Edward W.  Kellogg (1955) and C.  W. Rice, who greatly improved dynamic driver loudspeakers for radio receivers. A. C. Hardy and L. E. Clark helped GE and Westinghouse (who had an agreement to cooperate in the field) to improve Hoxie’s sound-on-film recorder design by adapting the production model of a GE oil-damped oscillograph to record a fairly flat response to 5000  Hz. The new sound-on-film recorder used a viscous coupling stabilizer flywheel rotating on a film of oil, an oil bearing, to smooth out the motion of film that was wrapped around a rotating drum. A different device was used for projector playback because the flywheel technique might infringe Tri-Ergon’s flywheel patent. Instead, the film was driven past the sound head using a different arrangement of sprocket wheels and snubbers. Although RCA had been created to hold telecommunications patents deemed to be vital to the defense interests of the US military, it also became the sales, service, support, and marketing division for GE’s radio business and it continued in that function for GE and Westinghouse for sound-on-film products. As a result of an agreement made at its formation, RCA was required to purchase a portion of the hardware it offered for sale from Westinghouse as well as its parent GE. RCA had some degree of independence and distributed such products with the proviso that it had the final word as to their specifications. When GE and Westinghouse combined their electronic sound marketing efforts through RCA, they specified which applications were reserved to each, but apparently motion picture sound had not been contemplated and was not addressed in the agreement. Sponable (1947, April) believed that this ambiguity may have been the reason that Case Laboratory had been unable to purchase amplifiers from these companies. Westinghouse and General Electric came to an understanding that both had the rights to market amplifiers through RCA for motion picture applications (Kellogg, 1955, June, July, August). The GE sound-on-film system was demonstrated for the industry during 1926 and 1927, but with barely any customer interest. Although it had invested substantially in sound-on-film technology, GE found that the motion picture industry was satisfied with silent filmmaking and had little appetite for disruption. The GE process was originally named Kinegraphone, which was dropped in favor of Photophone. (Bell and Tainter also named their light modu-

36  RCA vs. ERPI

Fig. 36.2  A poster for Paramount’s Wings, presented with augmented music and effects using RCA Kinegraphone optical sound during its 63 week run at the Criterion in New York beginning August, 1927.

lating system Photophone.) Paramount used the Kinegraphone system for the roadshow exhibition of William Wellman’s stirring production of the aerial combat film Wings, a silent film to which music and sound effects had been added, a technique called augmented sound, but it was only screened this way in a few venues. The premier took place in Manhattan at the Criterion Theater on August 12, 1927, where it played for 63 weeks. The film also used the Magnascope big screen process for aerial scenes that were spot colored using the Handschiegl process. (See chapter 40 for more about Handschiegl and chapter 58 for more about Magnascope.) GE became a major player in electric power and distribution, and through RCA it became the major player in the new field of broadcast radio. AT&T, on the other hand, controlled land lines and the telephone business with the companies competing in the market for electronic film sound. In 1914 Edward Christopher Wente joined the Western Electric Engineering Department of AT&T in New York, the predecessor of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Wente, who had a degree in electrical engineering from M.I.T., took leave from Western Electric after having been there for 2 years, to do graduate work at Yale; he returned in 1918 with a Ph.D. in physics. Wente’s 1916 invention of the widely used flat response low noise condenser microphone was the key development in the field in the opinion of Olson and Massa’s (1939) text on acoustics: “Modern acoustics may be said to have begun with the development of the condenser micro-

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phone by Wente.” In 1931 he invented the moving coil microphone using a fine coil of wire within a magnetic field, which was attached to the microphone’s diaphragm. Wente also invented a highly efficient loudspeaker that was available just in time for the introduction of Vitaphone. High efficiency of speakers was important because early amplifiers had very low power. He designed methods for objectively measuring the sound quality of optical sound tracks and its transducers and measuring techniques for studio recording. In 1933 his microphones and loudspeakers were used for Stokowski’s famous multichannel sound transmission of the Philadelphia Orchestra from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., which influenced Disney to adopt multichannel sound for Fantasia (Crabtree, 1935). (See chapter 39.) Wente’s light valve modulator for recording optical sound was inspired by Rankine’s (see chapter 28). In January 1923 Wente began work on the two-string light valve that became the heart of Bell Labs’ optical sound recorder, as described in USP 1,638,555, Translating Device, filed on May 1, 1923, which was the major alterative to Hoxie’s galvanometer. The underlying idea behind the electromagnetically activated valve is to control the width of a slit formed by two strips of conductive metal so that they move closer together or further apart in keeping with the amplitude (or loudness) of a microphone’s signal. The Wente valve is made up of two conductive ribbons that are driven by current of opposite polarity. The physics of the device is a direct application of the 1823 discovery of French physicist AndréMarie Ampère who found that two current carrying wires of opposite polarity attract each other but with the same polarity repel each other (Assis, 2015, p.64). The ribbons (strings) are enclosed within an electromagnet, and their natural mechanical frequency is adjusted to be higher than the frequency of the current passing through them by tensioning springs. The valve opening must change its size swiftly because the human ear can hear sound in excess of 15,000  Hz, but for voice recordings, a range of 100 to 5000 cycles Hz will usually do. The light valve’s opening is illuminated by a steady bright light, and the instantaneous gap width of the strips is optically imaged onto the moving film through a conically shaped aperture, diverging outwardly, to expose the track. The ribbons and their gap are parallel to the vertical edge of the film; the light passing through the moving slit at any instant is focused onto the film through lenses and a fixed slit at right angles to the valve’s slit. The fixed slit is used to limit the extent of the spreading of the modulated light in order to increase resolution, hence the high-frequency response, of the recording. A limiting factor is the diffraction of light passing through the slit, its spreading as it bends around the slit’s edges, which can reduce the sharpness of the image of the valve’s gap. Given that diffraction is a function of wavelength, light at the blueviolet end of the spectrum with shorter wavelengths produces the sharpest image, which is nice because photographic

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Fig. 36.3  The USP cover sheet for Wente’s two-string light valve. 10 is the light source, 20 is an electromagnet, 12 and 13 strings or ribbons of conductive metal, and 14 is the motion picture film being exposed. 15 is the fixed slit. This, the original embodiment, records variable density tracks.

e­ mulsions are most sensitive to the actinic rays. Wente’s device recorded a variable density track that appears to be a series of parallel lines at right angles to the direction of film travel. As the opening of the valve is projected on the steadily moving film, the width of the valve determines the density of the exposure of the lines, representing the amplitude of sound, and the number of lines represents the frequency of sound. As the current passing through the conducting ribbons varies, it causes them to vibrate by forcing them to repel each other within the field of the electromagnets. In practice the width of the gap, with no current passing through the ribbons, is 0.002 inch; the image of the gap is optically reduced and projected onto the film by a factor of two (Hilliard, 1985). The valve has a tendency to peak or exaggerate the amplitude of high fre-

36  RCA vs. ERPI

Fig. 36.4  The USP cover sheet for Wente’s light valve modified for variable area recording, an important capability as the industry moved away from variable density.

quencies but a low-pass electronic filter reduces the amplitude of the highest frequencies. However, some of the built-in highfrequency emphasis is desirable to compensate for the low frequencies that have most of the sound energy. Adjusting the emphasis of portions of the audio spectrum to improve sound quality, for voice or music, is called equalization. Most of the energy of speech is in the low frequencies, and without them the sound is tinny but without good high frequencies speech is unintelligible. Wente’s light valve produced a recorded signal that was fairly flat to 5000 cycles, about the same as that of an early Vitaphone disk. Wente’s valve was adapted for variable area recording as described in USP 2,077,193, filed on December 4, 1935, Recording System. Donald MacKenzie, who had also been assigned to the sound-on-film project by Edward B. Craft (see chapter 27),

36  RCA vs. ERPI

studied the characteristics of film emulsions and determined that the best material to use was positive print stock because it had the finest grain but it had low sensitivity to light; this required Wente’s valve to use a bright tungsten light bulb run at high voltage to achieve a good exposure. Western Electric also produced a recording machine that used sprocket drive mechanically filtered for smooth motion whose track was exposed while traveling over the sound sprocket, like Case and Sponable’s design. The recorder was driven by an AC selsyn motor so it could be kept in synchronization with a similarly equipped camera if both machines ran off the same AC power supply. For playback a sound head module was designed to be added below the gate for retrofitting existing 35 mm projectors. The module consisted of a sound reader using an exciter lamp and photosensitive cell plus an inertial damping system to smooth out the film’s intermittent motion.1 By the beginning of 1927 the movie industry had witnessed the premiers of the Warner Bros.’ sound-on-disk Vitaphone feature Don Juan and the Fox sound-on-film Movietone feature What Price Glory. In addition, Western Electric consolidated its control of cinema sound in America by buying back Vitaphone’s exclusive rights to sound-ondisk and taking over the rights to Movietone. On February 2, 1927, David Sarnoff, dauntless in the face of Western Electric’s early start, demonstrated the Photophone system in Schenectady, New York, at the State Theater to the press and other guests, and on the 11th to a similar group in Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater, where he screened a Photophone version of the first two reels of MGM’s Flesh and the Devil, with a score recorded by the Capital Theater Orchestra, followed by three sync sound musical short subjects. The New York Times reported that the sound was excellent (Gomery, 2005, p. 80). As a result of this activity, Schenck of Loew’s/MGM and Zukor of Paramount organized a committee to seek agreement on a single standard for a motion picture sound system. This effort to find a consensus was known as the Five Cornered or Big Five Agreement. It was formed on February 17, 1927, by MGM, First National, Paramount Famous Lasky, Universal, and Producers Distributing Company of America (P.D.C.); others were invited to join, but none did. The group called for the democratization of cinema technology, self-servingly decrying exclusive ownership of a technology that would stifle the industry. The group expressed the hope that future developments would provide a solution making it impossible for the films of any producer to be excluded from exhibition due to sound system incompatibility. Sound-on-disk was making headway as Warners’ The American WideScreen Museum, widescreenmuseum.com, has a wealth of material covering sound film technology including SMPE articles, Western Electric and Photophone projectionist manuals, and articles on multichannel sound.

1 

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Vitaphone installed disk systems in many theaters, but the executives and technical people at the major studios knew that sound-on-film was greatly preferable. Behind the scenes, maneuvering took place as they and RCA jockeyed for position fearing that it might have been shut out of the synchronized sound business by Warners, Fox, and AT&T/Western Electric. The five major studios considered the Photophone option as an alternative to both Movietone sound-on-film, sound-on-disk at that moment was represented by Warners’ Vitaphone. However, the rights to Warners’ sound-­on-­disk technology would soon be bought back by Western Electric to be licensed exclusively by its sales and service entity ERPI.  RCA needed time for GE engineers to complete development and get into production with the Photophone optical sound system (Gomery, 2012b); without RCA’s participation, the Big Five would be sole-­sourced. As they put it, the five studios were opposed to “having theaters tied up by the exclusive use of certain devices obtainable only in connection with certain companies’ products.” A 1-year moratorium was called while the issues were studied giving the committee time to employ “scientific experts and consult with governmental authorities…” (Five Companies…, 1927, pp.  1, 5). The job of delving into the technology was given to Roy J. Pomeroy of Paramount’s special effects department who wrote positive reports about Western Electric’s sound-on-disk and sound-on-film and RCA’s sound-on-film systems. It was important to the committee that both suppliers were financially secure and had cross-licensed their electronics patent portfolios. Another motivation of the major studios for exploring their options had been pride, the disinclination to accept technology controlled by their competitors Warners and Fox, but by the time the year devoted to studying the alternatives was up, the only source was ERPI (Geduld, 1975). Two of the Big Five studios, Loew’s/MGM and Paramount were the most successful of the majors sitting on piles of cash and could afford to wait and see how the introduction of the new technology would shake out. Sarnoff had attempted to come to terms with the studios but negotiations broke down; moreover, RCA would have had difficulty in delivering hardware when it was needed. The year’s delay turned out to be of material advantage to AT&T/Western Electric whose ERPI continued to install both the systems that had been Fox-Case Movietone and Warner Bros. Vitaphone. The committee disbanded and on May 11, 1928, with Paramount and Loew’s signing identical agreements for an optical sound-on-film license with AT&T at its New York office. (The day before Fox and ERPI signed a new agreement to bring the Fox royalties in line with what was to be offered to the Big Five.) A few months later, the three other member of the committee signed the same contract with ERPI, paying a royalty of 8% of box office gross (Gomery, 2005). Vitaphone technology was burdensome, but the studios would, for a time, continue to distribute films with both sound-on-film

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and sound-on-disk. Those who did not sign up with ERPI were RKO, a studio created by GE/RCA as described below, which used RCA’s Photophone, and Warners and Fox who already had made their deals. Warners kept the Vitaphone brand for their feature releases and Fox feature films segued from Movietone to the Western Electric brand, retaining the Movietone marque for newsreels. Although used for features relatively briefly, Movietone was the first major sound-on-film system in America, and it, like the derivative Western Electric/ERPI sound-on-film system, was based on the work of Case Laboratory. The alternative was the RCA variable area system based on the work of Hoxie, but with the exception of the way the track was modulated (variable area rather than variable density), it conformed to the specifications established by Case and Sponable. The combination of Vitaphone for sound-on-disk coupled with the penetration of sound-on-film through Movietone installations gave ERPI a substantial advantage over RCA, and it led the market for years. It’s true that GE/ RCA had a head start in the lab, with Hoxie’s sound-on-film technology, but that is not the same thing as being able to ship a product. Photophone would, in the long run, prevail because variable area had the advantage of a 6 decibel louder signal (twice as loud) and it was found to be advantageous for optimizing prints for both picture and sound quality. Fortunately for the industry, variable density and variable area were compatible since both could be read by the same projector sound head. By late 1928 motion pictures were a booming business for the exhibiters who could project sound films, but those who could not were suffering. By the early 1930s, nearly 5000 independent theaters went out of business, attributable to their inability to afford the conversion to sound (Gomery, 1991). ERPI agreed to equip the major studios’ theater chains first, and only after fulfilling that obligation did they turn their attention to the independents. The second-tier theater installations involved delays since hardware and technicians were in short supply, which became an opportunity for RCA’s Photophone (Crafton, 1997). Films that were silent and augmented with music tracks had become passé and were a box office disappointment because audiences wanted all-talking movies, there was no ­turning back. The days of the silent cinema were over as one theatrical art was replaced by a new one that fascinated audiences. The spark that lit the fire of the public’s acceptance of synchronized sound dialog, the talkies, in both America and Europe, is often attributed to the exhibition of The Jazz Singer (Gomery, 1976). However, a far more significant measure as to the impact of the new medium for the industry was the enormous box office success in 1928 of Jolson’s reprise, The Singing Fool. It premiered on September 30 at Manhattan’s Winter Garden Theater with tickets at $11

36  RCA vs. ERPI

or about $160 adjusted for inflation, and scalpers were getting twice that on the street (Gomery, 2005, p. 59). Business combinations in Germany, France, and Britain were formed to exploit the new trend in entertainment. In Germany the goal was an uninhibited private and government sector attempt to shut out American produced films and manufacturers of sound hardware, as described in chapter 30. In the countries where the manufacturers of sound-onfilm hardware did not control the technology, France and Britain, business was organized to reduce the influence of Germany and the United States. In America, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the conversion to sound by the entire film industry cost hundreds of millions dollars when taking into account building sound stages, equipping them with sound recording equipment, creating post-production facilities, and equipping the theaters. Theaters had to modify their projectors for sound, add amplifiers, speakers, and new screens; they also had to adapt their acoustics to meet the conflicting demands of music and speech. Due to the capital requirements for sound conversion, the Rockefeller and Morgan interests acquired major equity positions in the American motion picture industry through both the companies that manufactured the sound hardware and the studios, or their holding companies, and their theaters. According to the analysis of Klingender and Legg (1937), Wall Street bankers with existing seats on studio boards now occupied even more seats, which were held by the Morgan and the Rockefeller investment banks. Other major investors included Dillon, Read & Co., Lehman Bros., Standard Capital, Chase, and Radio City. General Electric, created out of Edison General Electric by Morgan, directly controlled RCA until it became independent under Sarnoff’s management in 1930.2 Drexel Morgan & Company had previously made major investments in the studios and the two electronics conglomerates, thus giving the banks indirect control of the entire American film industry. As described, Western Electric and their ERPI division scored two major coups leading to their prominence in the field of cinema sound. Their first inroad was Warner Bros.’ acceptance of the sound-on-disk technology that became marketed and licensed through Vitaphone, and the second was their arrangement with Fox that essentially handed over control of Movietone. In many instances, while installing Vitaphone sound-on-disk hardware, ERPI also adapted exhibitors’ projectors for playing back Movietone optical sound-on-film since the speakers and amplifiers that were useful for one were just as useful for the other. As a result, GE reacquired RCA on December 11, 1982, for $6.3 billion, which was allowed after the US Justice Department rescinded a 50-year-old consent decree that forbade GE ownership of RCA stock (Webb, 2005, p. 134). 2 

36  RCA vs. ERPI

317

Fig. 36.5  The conversion to sound created an opportunity for AT&T/ Western Electric/ERPI and GE/RCA, both of whom required financing for R&D and manufacturing. The studios, and their theaters, also required

money to purchase hardware. Financing was provided by the Morgan and Rockefeller interests, thus giving them a major investment in both the electronics suppliers and their end users, the studios. (Klingender, 1937)

Case and Sponable’s work became the basis for the worldwide standard for optical sound. The Case patents may have been of less value to Western Electric than the fact that a working system served as a proof of concept, and that Movietone had gotten the ball rolling as a production method and for exhibition. In addition to supplying their microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, ERPI replaced the Aeo light recording tube with the electromagnetic two-string light valve and the Thalofide playback cell with their own sound head for projectors; many of the new transducers were the creation of the gifted electronic-acoustical physicist E. C. Wente. Movietone was the basis for the sound-on-film system that would soon replace the provisional and infeasible Vitaphone sound-on-disk. As noted elsewhere in these pages, in terms of story arc, Vitaphone is a fitting last act to the saga of the adaptation of the phonograph to motion pictures that had occupied inventors since 1895. As described, in mid-February 1927, MGM, First National, Paramount Famous Lasky, Universal, and Producers Distributing Company came together under The Five Cornered Agreement to study available technology and products in order to set an optical sound-on-film standard for themselves. Although they had flirted with de Forest’s Phonofilm, they signed on the dotted line for Western Electric’s version of Movietone, as did Warner Bros.

(Solomon, 2014). Most of the studios began making sound pictures with sound-on-film Movietone and not with sound-­ on-­disk Vitaphone, but they also distributed sound-on-disk to serve exhibitors who preferred that option. Left out in the cold, David Sarnoff, the head of RCA was determined to supply GE’s variable area optical sound-on-film system, Photophone, to the film industry. As pointed out in chapter 33, had Sarnoff not interfered in the Otterson-Fox negotiations RCA might have been first to market with optical sound-onfilm in America. Sarnoff’s RCA had been the major player in creating commercial broadcast radio in the United States (which it would do again for television), and it was intolerable to him to play second fiddle in the field of movie sound, even if it meant creating a new Hollywood studio. Accordingly, Sarnoff engineered the combination of the studio operated by FBO (Film Booking Office of America) and the KeithAlbee-­Orpheum (K-A-O) vaudeville and movie theater circuit. In 1921 the Cole-Robertson studio was built on a 13.5 acre plot purchased from the Hollywood Cemetery Association, it was bounded by the Cemetery on the North, Gower on the West, Melrose on the South, and by what would become in 1926, Paramount on the east, from which it was separated by a wire fence. (The fence is gone and the two studio lots have been combined.) Cole-Robertson was

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renamed FBO in 1922, and its studio would become the home of Sarnoff’s RKO studio. In February 1926, Joseph P.  Kennedy, father of John Fitzgerald, bought FBO from its British owners, which continued to produce low budget westerns and family dramas. Discussions between Sarnoff and Kennedy resulted in RCA making a substantial investment in FBO with the intention of its using Photophone, but the studio still lacked the ability to guarantee the distribution of its films. Sarnoff and Kennedy approached K-A-O, which owned 700 theaters in the United States and Canada, of which 200 were movie theaters. In October 1928, K-A-O, FBO, and RCA, in a three-way stock swap negotiated in the cavernous Grand Central Oyster Bar, deep below the streets of Manhattan, created a new $300 million corporation with RCA as the controlling entity. This vertically integrated organization would manufacture, distributed, and retailed Photophone motion pictures (Jewell, 1982, 2012). Sarnoff arranged for Chase National Bank to provide a war chest of $80 million for operating expenses. RCA also owned the two major radio networks and a theatrical agency that exclusively booked its radio talent, creating opportunities for coordinating efforts between its radio and motion picture businesses. New recording machines, microphones, loudspeakers, and theater playback systems would be provided by RCA, which also outfitted field recording trucks for Pathé’s newsreel service. The new business combination was controlled by a new holding company, Radio Keith Orpheum Corp, which made movies under the banner of RKO Productions at the RKO studio, whose films were branded as Radio Pictures (Weis, 1985). It was the only American studio created, for all intents and purposes, to produce sound motion pictures. Sarnoff, who became RKO’s chairman of the board, succeeded in creating a studio that showed off the capabilities of the Photophone system, which at the very least served as a reference design for the entire industry. Other studios and producers began to use Photophone because of its quality and aggressive pricing, especially for exhibitors, making inroads into ERPI’s dominance. The Mack Sennett studio was an early adopter of Photophone, as was Republic. Pathé released a silent religious epic directed by Cecil B. DeMille, The King of Kings, on April 19, 1927, and then rereleased it as an augmented film with a Photophone track using a music score by Hugo Riesenfeld and two-color Technicolor sequences. Wings, another augmented film using an early version of Photophone, premiered on August 12, 1927. A year after its formation RKO purchased Pathé (United States), whose motion picture production business got folded into RKO within a year. In 1933 Disney dropped Powers’ Cinephone version of de Forest’s Phonofilm and switched to RCA Photophone. By the mid-1930s, Warner Bros. and Columbia also began to phase in Photophone (Geduld, 1975; Crafton, 1997; Gomery, 2005; Jewell, 2012).

36  RCA vs. ERPI

In 1929 there were 8741 theaters wired for sound, many for both sound-on-disk and sound-on-film, representing somewhat less than half of the theaters in the United States. ERPI, and their major competitor RCA, together installed a total of 4393 systems using their projector optical sound reader conversion kits (Sponable, 1947). There were many competing products offered, such as Phonofilm sound-on-­ film, and by December 1929, an incredible 234 different makes were marketed to theaters, most of which were sound-­ on-­disk systems put together by independents. A partial list includes: Mellotone, Dramaphone, Movie-Phone, Firnatone, Vocafilm, Cortellaphone, Bristolphone, Remaphone, Bel-OTone, Biophone, Cinephone, Sonograph, Filmtone, Han-APhone, Telefilm, and Kaleidophone (Gomery, 2005, p.  82). Vocafilm, founded December 1926, was an effort that Gomery characterizes as typical, but it may have been the strongest independent sound-on-disk system having raised $600,000. It used 78 rpm recordings synchronized to the projector using a mechanism like that of Edison’s 1913 theatrical Kinetophone. The basis for Vocafilm is described in USP 1,494,514, Art of Producing Motion Pictures and Sound Synchronization Therewith, filed on October 1, 1921, by Allen Stowers and Leo de Hymel, both of Texas. In the context of Vitaphone’s far more sophisticated electronic sound-on-disk system, Vocafilm was utterly obsolete while it was being demonstrated to the likes of Adolph Zukor when he toured its studio at 122 5th Avenue in Manhattan in 1927. ERPI’s head start made it the leading supplier to theaters as it aggressively installed both sound-on-disk and soundon-film systems, leaving slim pickings for Photophone, confining RCA to second tier or independents. RCA let exhibitors know that their modification could play ERPI’s variable density as well as their own variable area tracks and that theirs cost a lot less to install (Crafton, 1997). Depending on the size of the theater, a Photophone installation was priced between $6500 and $15,000, whereas the ERPI rates ran between $13,000 and $23,000 (Krefft, 2017). In response ERPI, in 1929 lowered its prices. That year, to accommodate exhibitors, Fox, Warners, and other studios, distributed their films in both sound-on-disk and sound-­on-­film versions, but by 1930 the industry abandoned clunky Vitaphone and switched to sound-on-film for release. ERPI’s variable density system began to lose its dominance as RCA’s Photophone variable area system became accepted, in part due to RCA’s aggressive price cutting, despite the fact that RCA was initially unable to deliver systems in a timely way until it reorganized its supply and manufacturing operation. To solve the problem, Sarnoff advanced RCA’s controller Charles Ross to head its Photophone sales and ­manufacturing effort. As a result of Ross’ reorganization, which included a liberal payment plan for exhibitors and an aggressive advertising campaign, Photophone recorded its first profitable month December 1929 (Gomery, 2005, p. 93).

36  RCA vs. ERPI

In the early 1930s, both systems had much in common with the same or similar flaws: both had a limited frequency range; both suffered from background noise; both (may have) played back on projectors that sometimes had wow and flutter; both used early vacuum tube amplifiers that had hiss, hum and distortion; extant loudspeakers had a limited frequency response and also distorted sound; optical sound had a restricted dynamic range, or the ability to record and reproduce quiet sound without noise and loud sound without distortion; there was no standard for sound equalization or the adjusting of the shape of the frequency response curves for recording and playback for the best quality sound; and acoustics were poor in many theaters. But Photophone’s advantages would prove to be significant, since it was twice as loud and unlike variable density tracks, its variable area prints could be made favoring image without compromising the quality of the sound track. Photophone made considerable inroads: ERPI’s streak of profitability ended in 1931 and RCA became its equal in the marketplace (Gomery, 2005, p.  94), but both companies were hit hard by the Great Depression. After considerable stalling on the part of Otterson (Gomery, 2005, p.  96), standards were set to insure that ERPI’s variable density and RCA’s variable area tracks were playback compatible. Western Electric had insisted on its licensees signing an agreement that contained an “interchangeability clause” to prohibit the playing back of Western Electric (at that time Movietone) tracks using other than their hardware. A step forward in the impasse between ERPI and RCA came when Sarnoff staged a demonstration in July 1928  in Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater successfully playing back a Photophone film score on Movietone equipment. In the long run, it was to the advantage of both firms to insure compatibility. In 1928 an agreement was reached by ERPI and RCA setting specifications for track width and center line (Kellogg, 1955, July). The physics of the systems was on the side of compatibility since the exciter lamp’s illumination, as it passed through either kind of moving track, could be read by the sound readers’ photocells. Variable density tracks were recorded at 0.100 inch (100 mils) wide, whereas variable width tracks were limited to 0.080 inch (80 mils) since the optical sound reader had to be more precisely aligned for it. Near the end of its development cycle the most advanced sound readers used S-1 or silicon photocells with peak sensitivity in the infrared, which was a good match for the spectral output of the exciter lamps. The last generation of sound reading heads was introduced in the 1960s by

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Kelmar Systems using the low noise so-called solar cell, generating an electric current rather than modulating it, unlike the photocells it replaced (Gitt, 2007). In 1937 ERPI was dealt a setback, so it may have seemed, by a Department of Justice decree that ended what the government deemed to be its monopoly on the sales and support of sound-on-film theater equipment. The decree forbade Western Electric/ERPI from selling to or serving exhibitors, but it could continue to do business directly with the studios for recording equipment and servicing it, with no restrictions on its activates outside of the United States. A new company was formed, Altec, which took over the assets and inventory of ERPI for the payment of one dollar, with ERPI’s former 295 employees continuing on with their jobs. Presumably Altec initially bought parts directly from Western Electric, although it was under no obligation to do so. The change of status was meant to allow RCA and independent organizations a better opportunity to service theaters and to give the exhibitors more choices with regard to their vendors. Altec was also free to service RCA Photophone installation if they chose to do so. There was a loophole: Western Electric components could be freely reimported into the United States and resold by parties other than Western Electric (Hilliard, 1985). Two technical attributes of the Western Electric variable density system led to its being eclipsed by RCA’s variable area system. The first was that variable area tracks were louder and loudness or volume was the audio specification that the studio executives understood best. They wanted their ERPI variable density shows to play back at the same projection booth fader setting (loudness control) as that used for RCA variable area tracks because, following the maxim that more is better, they thought their releases were losing a competitive advantage by having lower volume. Gitt (2007) gives the example of the mangled variable density track of Gregory La Cava’s 1936 Universal feature My Man Godfrey, which was over-modulated to make up for its lesser volume, to the point where it had disturbingly scratchy distortion. The other failing of variable density is related to the primacy of image: the print developing time that favored the best looking picture did not necessarily produce the best sounding variable density tracks. On the other hand, developing time didn’t matter, over a wide range, for the high-contrast variable area tracks, which meant that they remained optimal when developing time was adjusted for the best looking release print image. Western Electric adapted and modified its recording system light valve to produce variable area tracks. More information on the subject is given in chapter 38.

William Fox vs. the Industry

The mechanism that allowed celluloid motion picture ­projectors to be capable of displaying moving images, the intermittent that stopped and started each frame in the projector’s gate, required upper and lower loops of film before and after it. These became the subject of intellectual property conflicts on two occasions, especially with regard to the upper loop, the so-­called Latham loop, which was invented and patented independently at about the same time by Joly in France, and Lauste and Armat in America. The loop is required to help buffer or isolate the film’s stop-start action from the continuous motion provided by the upper drive sprocket (and the mass of the film on the feed reel) to prevent breakage. American patents covering the loop became intellectual property controlled by the aggressive Edison Trust, which for a time successfully used it as part of its armamentarium to dominate the early film industry. The lower loop, of immediate concern to us, became the location of the optical sound head where the intermittent action of the film was smoothed out to enable the track to be properly played back. The straightforward way for doing this is the motion damping flywheel, as described in USP 1,713,726, Device for phonographs with linear phonogram carriers, known as the flywheel patent, filed March 20, 1922, and granted to TriErgon inventors Hans Vogt et al. (see chapter 30). The patent also discloses a design for the layout of the exciter lamp and photosensitive pickup that are used for reading the optical sound track. The patent was a major hurdle to overcome for Western Electric and RCA, who were wary of designing a projector optical sound reader that might bring on an infringement suit. Tri-Ergon, in one relatively simple and inexpensive to manufacture design, coupled the mass of the film to the greater mass of a rotating flywheel “for absorbing irregularities of speed.” In what is probably the simplest design, as described in the Tri-­Ergon patent, the film is snugly run over a cylinder, the sound drum, which is connected to a flywheel; the film is pressed against the cylinder by spring-loaded snubbers to transfer the angular momentum of the flywheel to the film. The second part of the disclosure involves the same cyl-

37

inder where the sound track is read by using an exciter lamp’s light concentrated by a lens to pass through the optical track to modulate its intensity as it falls on a photosensitive device within the sound drum or cylinder (Tri-Ergon calls it a roller). In this way the constant illumination provided by the exciter lamp (a light bulb with a tungsten filament) is turned into electrical fluctuations analogous to sound’s waveform to be amplified and played back by loudspeakers (see chapter 30). This arrangement requires the film to overhang the cylinder so the exciter lamp’s light can pass through the track to be seen by the photocell. Both the mechanism for smoothing the intermittent motion and the sound reader became the basis for infringement litigation brought by William Fox in a last ditch attempt to remain relevant in the film industry and to extract revenue from those who had done him wrong. The second patent that posed difficulties for Fox’s rivals was USP 1,825,598, Process for Producing Combined Sound and Picture Films, filed March 29, 1922, by the Tri-Ergon inventors, also known as the double-printing patent. Claim 1 reads: “A process for producing a combined sound and picture positive film, for talking moving pictures, comprising, photographing sequence of pictures on one length of film, and simultaneously photographing on another length of film a corresponding sequence of sound accompanying the action, so as to expose the last mentioned length of film variously in correspondence with vocal or other sound having slight or otherwise varying differences of tone and intensity, developing and treating the two negatives separately, to give the picture and sound negatives the length and character of development and treatment appropriate for each, and printing from both negatives upon the same side of a single integral transparent sensitized film, the coating of which is all of the same character, to form the sound sequence at one side of, and parallel to, the picture sequence.” This claim’s typically tedious prose covers the concept of double-system sound, i.e., sound recorded by one machine and image photographed with another, to be married or printed together as a release print for exhibition. The language of any claim is an attempt to give the owner(s) of the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_37

321

322

Fig. 37.1  Cover sheet of the Tri-Ergon USP teaching marrying optical track and picture recorded and photographed separately. Although the Tri-Ergon outboard format is depicted, the patent covered Movietone and every optical sound-on-film system.

patent the right or standing to sue for infringement by anyone making, using, or selling a device incorporating the described art, if they have done so without permission. Claim 1 is so basic that it’s hard to get around – so basic that the studios seriously considered recording on disk hoping to avoid the claim. Tri-Ergon implemented the concept commercially with middling success in Germany by widening 35 mm film by 7 mm to place the track adjacent to but outboard one of the columns of perforations. This required more extensive projector modifications than for the Movietone and subsequent similar ERPI and RCA systems, which maintained the width of 35  mm film, but the claim is independent of the width of the film and track placement. The Tri-Ergon patents moved to center stage soon after William Fox lost control of his studio, which ultimately led to his attempt to extract tribute from and to punish his enemies.

37  William Fox vs. the Industry

The stage had been set for Fox’s fall from grace at the beginning of 1928 when the widow of Marcus Loew, the founder of Loew’s Theaters, who had purchased Metro Pictures and used it to the found MGM, let it be known that her shares in Loew’s/MGM were for sale. What followed was a bidding war between Waddill Catchings of Warner Bros. and William Fox. Nicholas Schenck, Loew’s, Inc. vice president, was secretly approached by Fox who offered him and Loew’s widow $125 per share, which exceeded Catchings’ $100 bid, which the widow accepted (Gomery 2005, p., 121, 122). Fox put in motion a plan to create the industry colossus by merging the Fox Film Corporation (which he founded in 1915) with Loew’s, the parent of the prestigious MGM studio and owner of a small but highly lucrative chain of first-class theaters. The deal to buy control of Loew’s/MGM was announced to a stunned Hollywood on March 3, 1929, an industry that was abruptly faced with a powerful force to be reckoned with, the soon to become new Titan of Movie Land, William Fox. Fox’s expanded empire would reduce his fellow moguls to second-­class status; they would no longer remain his peers – men who like him were but a generation removed from the shtetls of the Pale. Fox’s ability to buy the stock was made possible by $15 million he borrowed from Western Electric, which was to be paid to Loew’s widow and Schenck. But the consummation of the deal never came to pass due to the unfolding of events beginning with a calamity that befell Fox on July 17, 1929, at 10:50 AM, when he was seriously injured on the Old Westbury Road on Long Island. Fox and a friend left his home, Foxcroft, planning to play golf at the Lakeview Country Club, but on a clear day with little traffic, the driver who was substituting for his regular chauffer, swerved to avoid a small Chrysler sedan. It collided with one of the rear wheels of Fox’s Rolls-Royce, improbably sending it airborne flipping it on its side and into a ditch. Fox and his friend were thrown from the Rolls, but the chauffeur was killed instantly when it landed on him. Fox’s friend suffered only minor injuries, but the 51-year-old Fox nearly bled to death and was laid up for 3 months before he was able to return to his Manhattan office (Krefft 2017). (Dapper actor Adolphe Menjou boasted that he had given a pint of blood to save Fox’s life.) During the last days of Fox’s recovery, two pages of the October 19, 1929, Exhibitors Herald World were devoted to a hagiographic celebration of his career, with this headline on page 20: Imagination Spurs Fox to Greater Deeds, and the subhead: Dreams Come True, So Fox Still Dreams. The article on page 21 is datelined New  York, October 15, with a subhead: Movietone Is One of Great Feats of Fox. In the center of the spread is a sketch of a contemplative and soulful William Fox, wearing a tie and starched high collar, with the headline caption: Up to Now, which today reads like an uncanny warning. The article itself has the headline: Thousand Theaters, and Fox is Adding More, which for the most part recounts Fox’s accomplishments and also describes

37  William Fox vs. the Industry

a public offering of Fox stock that had been pitched in ­two-page ads in the New York press the first week of October in which it was stated that: “Fox…would disclose through the Movietone screen in each of his houses a plan to repay the people in material profit for 25 years of generous patronage.” Fox patrons were urged to go to their brokers and buy Fox stock to participate in this “monument of individual aggressiveness and enterprise,” but in the days to come, potential investors, “the people,” would be more intent on keeping the wolf away from the door than in adding Fox stock to their portfolios. Recovered from the accident, 5 days after he returned to his Manhattan office, misfortune continued to haunt Fox (and the rest of America) as his highly leveraged attempt to assume control of Loew’s/MGM began to unravel on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the day given as the start of the Wall Street Crash and the beginning of the decade-long Great Depression (Solomon 2014). The October 30 edition of Variety glibly summed up the financial undoing of an economy in five words: Wall Street Lays an Egg. MGM’s studio boss Louis B. Mayer, and head of production Irving Thalberg, Jr., both of whom had no equity stake in the MGM studio or Loew’s, nevertheless were taken aback by the impending ceding of operating control to Fox and sought to derail the deal through the influence of Mayer’s friends in high places. Mayer, who was a prominent figure in Republican circles, encouraged the Justice Department to bring an antitrust suit, adding to Fox’s woes (Grafton 1997). Others, who acted against Fox, were his right-hand man, manager of the Fox Los Angeles studio Winfield Sheehan, who conspired with Fox’s business partner Harley Clarke, who had a major stake in the International Projector Corporation, the manufacturer of Simplex projectors, to unseat Fox at the moment of his weakness. Clarke later boasted that it was he, not Mayer, who was responsible for influencing the government to thwart Fox’s ambitions. Even if Sheehan and Clarke had sided with him, Fox was engulfed in a farrago of vexing law suits and a need to pay off loans. To his dismay Fox was informed by ERPI’s head, John Otterson, that his $15 million loan had to be paid off immediately and that the additional $13 million loan he requested would not be approved by his boss, Walter S. Gifford, president of AT&T, despite the fact that Fox was willing to put up $50 million in properties as collateral (Krefft 2017). Fox’s unsettling injury and inability to deal with his debt obligations due to the mounting financial crisis forced him to sell a controlling interest in his holdings to pay off the loan to ERPI. Clarke, who proved to be not up to the task, became president of the Fox Film Corporation and Fox Theaters as William Fox was removed from the studio he had built. Fox’s detailed and anguished version of what he describes as the conspiracy to unseat him is told in considerable detail in Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox (Sinclair 1933). His biographer Krefft (2017) affirms that the facts support Fox’s

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contention – he was not paranoid – they were out to get him; his impassioned version of events had little impact on industry opinion. Having lost control of the Fox studio and theaters (which merged with Twentieth Century Pictures to become 20th Century Fox in 1935), Fox was left with what might be a major asset, personal ownership of the Tri-Ergon patent rights in the Americas (as described in chapter 30). Accordingly, he sought payment from perceived infringers, the sound hardware manufacturers, theater chains, and movie studios. In November 1931, William Fox’s entity, the American Tri-Ergon Corporation, initiated the first of two suits against Paramount for their use of the double-printing patent. Paramount had been indemnified against infringement by ERPI, therefore, ERPI was the defendant. In November and December, Fox put the industry on notice that this was a test case, urging the studios and producers to break ranks by taking a license with American Tri-Ergon, warning them that in the event of Paramount’s loss they too would be sued with the result that their negotiating position would be weakened, but no studio or producer signed up. A second action brought by American Tri-Ergon was filed against the Altoona Publix theater chain for infringement based on the fact that their projectors had been modified for sound-on-film using the flywheel patent, in effect once again suing ERPI since they had indemnified the theater chain. RCA was also at risk if these test cases went against ERPI, so RCA joined their defense (Gomery 1976).1 On August 14, 1933, the double-­ printing patent was ruled invalid, a decision which Fox appealed. On November 24, 1933, a Pennsylvania court found for him, a decision that, of course was appealed. Two additional decisions in appeals courts upheld both the double-­printing and the flywheel patents, and Fox was now in a strong position to receive royalties from ERPI, RCA, and the studios and exhibitors. The studios funded a $25,000 retainer for the former US attorney general William D. Mitchell to help them as a non-litigant who was allowed to advise the court (amicus curiae). The studios also began to plan ways to avoid the Tri-Ergon patents in the event that they lost the legal battle. The cases were appealed to the Supreme Court, which on October 8, 1934, refused to review either the double-printing or flywheel decisions. As it stood, William Fox had achieved total victory, and there would be a forthcoming royalty stream estimated to be worth $100 million as the result of the de facto ruling from the court whose decisions cannot be appealed. On November 2, 1934, Mitchell filed a brief requesting that the court reconsider, and unexpectedly and unusually, 3 days later, it agreed to hear the case. Mitchell had earned his retainer. After hearing arguments, on February The dates and order of events given here follow Gomery, which also jibe with the dates given in the Supreme Court decision. Other writers differ but Gomery’s account appears to be definitive.

1 

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5, 1935, the opinion of the Court on the matter of Altoona Publix Theaters v. American Tri-Ergon Corporation (case 294 U.S. 477) was decided extraordinarily rapidly on March 4, 1935. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decisions giving as its reason that both patents had been anticipated by prior art, which the court cited at length. The decision was unanimous on the part of the Justices who ruled; however, “Mr. Justice Brandeis took no part in the consideration or decision in the case.” This reconsideration of the ruling has been described as downright odd, and the suspicion is that pressure from people in high places influenced the justices’ decision to take up the case and to rule in favor of the industry. William Fox was defeated and was now faced with enormous legal fees. Fox, who had been worth $100,000,000 in 1930, was now worth $100 he alleged when he filed for bankruptcy in June 1936, facing a bill of $2,000,000 for back taxes. At the time of the bankruptcy hearing, he attempted to bribe the judge J. Warren Davis with a $27,500 so-called loan, and on October 21, 1941, he was found to have committed perjury. As a result he served 6 months of a year and a day’s sentence and was fined $3000. After his time in prison, Fox assumed active control of Mitchell Camera, which he had purchased in 1929  in connection with the Grandeur project, regularly going to work in its six-acre plant in Glendale, California. Mitchell was now a company with 600 employees making 85 percent of the world’s professional motion picture cameras. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Fox worked with the military to supply specialized motion picture cameras for aerial reconnaissance (Krefft 2017, pp. 744, 745). As was his wont, Fox would sit and watch George Mitchell at work, the man who had been the principal designer of the eponymous camera. Years before, Mitchell had continued the camera’s development after Leonard, the rackover inventor left the firm. It initially unnerved Mitchell to have Fox, ensconced in his office, gazing at his every move. According to Krefft (2017, p. 745), the two men became friends, and Mitchell said of Fox: “He was a funny man, but I liked him very much…He was always kidding me, saying: ‘Mitchell, you’re not a business man and you’ll never be a business man.’” To which Mitchell would reply: “As long as you’re around Mr. Fox, I’m all right.” Mitchell further observed: “They say he was a man mad for money, but that wasn’t really true.” William Fox had been cast out of the ranks of studio overlords, a pariah until the day he died on May 8, 1952, at 73 years of age. Forgotten by the industry he helped to create he was buried in the Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn. Of his former colleagues, according to Solomon, only one showed up at the funeral, producer Sol Wurtzel, who gave the eulogy to the handful of attendees, but then again the rest of the industry had not been invited (Krefft 2017; Solomon 2014).

37  William Fox vs. the Industry

In these pages we have seen how Fox championed the 70  mm format Grandeur process that was developed with the help of one of the great motion picture technologists, Earl Sponable, his head of research and development. Grandeur and similar big film wide screen processes of the late 1920s failed in the marketplace, but were successfully resurrected in the early 1950s as Todd-AO that created the 65/70  mm format. His short-lived bichromatic additive color attempt, Fox Nature Color licensed from Kodak, another late 1920s effort, despite considerable developmental effort and a major expenditure on a release print laboratory, remained unexploited. The third prong of this vision, Movietone sound, not only succeeded but was the parent of subsequent optical sound-on-film systems. A daring entrepreneur, he defied conventional wisdom; a man of many parts, he was also capable of sharp practices and outright criminal behavior. Nonetheless, this complicated and audacious man, with his attempts to enhance the exhibition experience and grow his business, was unlike his fellow studio bosses with his embrace of unproven technology. If only for Movietone he deserves to be enshrined in the pantheon of cinema technology pioneers. The only one of the bootstrapping studio heads or owners who cleaved to the notion that technology was an avenue for growth, and acted on this belief by attempting to add the modalities of the big wide screen, color, and synchronized sound, had passed away. While his name remained on the studio he founded his memory faded from view despite his indelible mark on the film industry, soon after his failed attempt to merge the Fox Studio and MGM. In the years prior to the litigation, there had been significant doubt with regard to the validity of the Tri-Ergon intellectual property position on the part of the patent department of RCA. However, with an abundance of caution, they advised the GE/RCA engineers to find ways to avoid the Tri-­Ergon claims. This led to designs having additional cost of goods and to years of delays before the production of less expensive mechanisms were built and sold to avoid the threat of infringement litigation. Kellogg (1955, June) relates that as a result of these concerns the engineers came up with interesting designs, but the lawyers were right to be cautious: when a third party is given the role of deciding one’s fate, there is no way to predict the outcome, as was made abundantly clear in the matter of Willian Fox vs. the Industry. The diligent patent department of RCA learned that Aloysius J. Cawley of Pittston, Pennsylvania, had filed a disclosure with the United States Patent Office on January 3, 1921, which could be read to cover the Tri-Ergon flywheel claims. RCA acquired the disclosure from Cawley and continued its prosecution resulting in a patent with newly crafted claims. It was granted on September 29, 1931, USP 1,825,441, Sound Recording Process and Apparatus, assigned to the Radio

37  William Fox vs. the Industry

Corporation of America, which allowed the company to date their ownership of the technology to Cawley’s original filing date, January 3, 1921. This predates the issuance of the TriErgon patents that were filed in the United States giving RCA statutory priority (Kellogg 1955, July). The situation is complicated and all of the ins and outs won’t profit us, but RCA’s assumption of the Cawley patent only partially resolved the problem since Tri-­Ergon received a reissue of their patent with new claims on January 11, 1938. Tri-Ergon and RCA signed a licensing agreement on October 25, 1946, 24 years after TriErgon’s original US application. The work of Arnold Poulsen Fig. 37.2  The cover sheet of Cawley’s USP that was used to advantage by RCA’s patent attorneys.

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and Axel Carl Georg Peterson as described in USP 1,597,819, Device for Feeding Acoustic Films at Constant Speed, filed July 9, 1924, also had to be dealt with by RCA, as well as other patents now owned by British Acoustic Films Ltd., which brought infringement suits against RCA and ERPI. Although British Acoustics lost both the original ruling and its appeal on June 27, 1940, to prevent the possibility of further litigation, RCA signed a licensing deal with them on December 21, 1941 (Kellogg 1955, July). In Germany, where the Tri-Ergon patents were valid, UFA and Klangfilm successfully licensed their optical sound-on-film technology, as described in chapter 30.

Optical Sound Evolution

Both variable density and variable area optical soundtracks were improved over time spurred by the competition between ERPI and RCA, both of whom strove to improve the components of their systems. By 1933 the 100–5000 Hz frequency response limitation had expanded by an octave and a half to 50–8000  Hz, and other attributes were similarly improved, with Western Electric calling its enhancements Wide Range and RCA calling theirs High Fidelity. Improvements were made to the entire chain of hardware beginning with the microphone. Western Electric’s changes included replacing their condenser mike in 1931, nicknamed the cannon, with the moving coil 618A mike. The new microphone used the electrodynamic microphone principle, which was apparently first described by Bell in 1877 who suggested a coil attached to a diaphragm made of a non-magnetic material arranged to vibrate within a magnetic field to generate a voltage proportional to the sound pressure on the diaphragm. The concept is also described in USP 242,816, Telephone, filed November 28, 1877 by Charles Cuttriss and Jerome Redding, but the design principle could not be realized without electronic amplification. RCA’s W. C. Jones (1931) and I. W. Giles figured out how to do just that by using a diaphragm made of duralumin with a dome-shaped center. A coil made of aluminum ribbon wound on an insulator was attached to the diaphragm to move within a magnetic field that was produced by a cobalt steel permanent magnet. Damping of the diaphragm’s movement to prevent distortion was achieved by restricting the flow of air of the cavities on either side of it. The new moving coil microphone achieved a response of about 40–10,000 cycles (Hz). RCA replaced its condenser mike, known as the tomato can, with something better, the bidirectional velocity ribbon mike the 44A, as described by Harry F. Olson (1931) who had about 70 patents granted in the field. It used a flat lightweight corrugated metallic ribbon of thin aluminum suspended in a magnetic field with unimpeded access to sound waves from both of its sides, which vibrated as sound hit its flat surface, thereby inducing a voltage. Olson points out that the use of such a corrugated ribbon was suggested by Erwin

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Gerlach in USP 1,557,356, Electrodynamic Loud-Speaking Apparatus, filed January 12, 1924. The terminology, velocity microphone, comes from the lightweight ribbon’s ability to respond to the vibrations of air at high frequencies. When the sound waves touch the flat side of the ribbon, it vibrates, but when the ribbon is oriented edge-on to the incoming waves it does not budge. By orienting the 44A properly, it could pick up dialog and reject camera noise. Many microphone design improvements took place over the years, including a capacitor-based design by Olson, USP 3,007,012, Directional Electrostatic Microphone, filed March 14, 1958. Other important microphones were designed for the movie industry such as Altec’s 21BV condenser microphone offered in 1949, and their M20 “lipstick” mike and the M30 cardioid mike. Introduced in the early 1960s, the Electro-Voice 642 Cardiline shotgun microphone permitted recording dialog from a greater distance than possible with conventional designs (Gitt 2007). Continuous contact printers, the standard for making high-speed release prints, were adapted for printing soundtracks. They initially exposed the track in a second pass but printers were designed to expose image and sound in one operation. In a 1950 paper, inventor John G. Frayne (1950) of Westrex, the rebranded Western Electric/ERPI, proposed a process called electro-printing, in which 16 mm or 35 mm release print tracks were improved by sidestepping photographic contact printing losses by recording the print’s optical track electrically, which eliminated generational loss. Another reason for electro-printing’s advantage was that it avoided contact printer sprocket wheel slippage. The technique was used for either variable area or density tracks and in the case of 16 mm, it was less costly for a limited number of prints by avoiding the need to make a master optical track for printing. The process, more costly than contact printing, was used for 35  mm release where the best quality was required, probably for so-called distributor prints to market the film to exhibitors. In the earliest days of synchronized sound, recording dialog had been a challenge because of the noise of the camera,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_38

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which mandated that cameras and operators were enclosed in soundproofed booths (DiGiulio 1976). The cameraman suffered from the heat within the enclosure, and it reduced the mobility of cameras resulting in fairly static shots, a loss when compared with the freedom of the later silent camera’s fluid motion. Several cameras were sometimes placed in the booth shooting the scene simultaneously using different focal lengths for wide, medium, or close shots, or for covering different parts of the scene; this multi-camera setup anticipated the technique used for shooting TV sitcoms, but this imposed restrictions on the ability to optimally light each camera’s point of view. Early Vitaphone and optical sound films were recorded planting hidden microphones on set, as many as half a dozen for a shot, whose outputs were mixed on set and, in the case of Vitaphone, sent to a diskcutting lathe to produce sound masters. Microphones were hidden in clothing and furniture or using camera mattes, flat masks held in front of the lens that blended into the background obscuring the microphone, but these were obviously stopgap solutions that created limitations in the blocking of actors and camera movement. The mike boom was devised by studio technicians for holding microphones over the heads of actors and out of the shot. Devices were added to allow steering the microphones, which was useful for the newly developed directional microphones, in this way picking up less camera noise and more intelligible sound because they could be aimed to hear less reverberation. In the earliest days, a sound technician or mixer, a newly created job category, sitting at a mixing console, became critically important on the set since he might be able to overrule the director or the cameraman. He originally sat away from the action in a confined space, but more portable equipment and headphones brought him closer to the set. Bulky sound-deadening camera devices, blimps, were devised, housings made to contain the cameras, taxing the ingenuity of their designers to allow the operators to have access to the camera’s controls so they could be adjusted during a shot. In 1932 Mitchell introduced what became the most widely used self-blimped BNC (blimped newsreel camera) studio camera, but sometimes it was necessary to wrap the camera in a soft sound-deadening housing called a barney. The studios improved or designed much of their own sound recording hardware, like a quick loading recorder-­ reproducer, improved recorders to reduce hum and flutter, and sound mixers (Thompson 1957). A surge in soundstage construction was initiated in April 1928, at Paramount, United Artists, MGM, and Universal, using the design consulting services of physicist and acoustic specialist Vern Knudsen, a faculty member of UCLA (Hilliard 1985). Newly built soundstages had double concrete walls and double floors with insulating material between them, with floors that were cushion mounted to

38  Optical Sound Evolution

s­uppress vibrations that might be transmitted from the ground. Eliminating the sound produced by ventilation systems was also a challenge. Similar considerations guided the conversion of theaters, as was reported by H.  B. Santee (1928), a theater systems engineer working for ERPI: “The hard or reverberant type of theater is especially annoying for speech selections since the duration of audibility is so great that a sound will remain to overlap the sound succeeding it. This gives an effect of poor articulation. For music however, a reasonable amount of reverberation is acceptable as it tends to give a fullness and roundness. Another variable factor which further complicates the situation is the changing amount of audience which in itself is an excellent absorbent.” Santee’s observations apply to soundstages since it was as important to control the reverberation characteristics of the stage as it was to keep out outside sound. Early soundstages followed a pattern with the control room looking down on it from on high. Microphones’ signals were piped to the control room and then to other parts of the recording building, usually added on to the soundstage, with rooms housing racks of electronics, principally amplifiers, and a lathe disk cutter room for sound-on-disk, which eventually housed optical sound recorders. The sound building also held a mixing facility, a motor generator room for producing AC to power the soundstage floor, designed to synchronize cameras and recorders or cameras and rear projectors for shooting actors against background plates. Even after sound-­ on-­ disk became obsolete, disk-cutting lathes remained in place for decades since disks were used to check recordings and for lip sync playback. The amplifiers once used for sound-on-disk were used for optical sound as sound-on-film recording machines were added (usually) to the lathe citing room. Batteries had their own dedicated room, which remained in active use for decades since the amplifiers required smooth direct current without any rectification ripple that produced hum. After variable density tracks fell out of use it was a simple matter to replace their recorders with variable area machines, just as these were replaced with magnetic recorders in the 1950s. The components of the sound facility were adapted over the years to the latest technology while preserving those that could be used as-is or with adaptation, as demonstrated by Nicholas Bergh, in a lecture-demonstration of early Western Electric systems, August 26, 2017, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood, as part of the Reel Thing Conservation and Restoration Seminar. John K.  Hilliard (1985), an electrical engineer who became prominent in the industry, was active in the studio’s conversion to sound and described the technology changes of the time in an article published in The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. Hilliard spent 14 years developing sound technology at MGM and then became a vice president

38  Optical Sound Evolution

at Altec Lansing, ERPI’s successor. In addition to the major soundstage construction projects, a massive effort was undertaken to draft engineers in any related field since nobody had experience with talking pictures. The eight major studios funded AMPAS to create a night school to train sound engineers with 900 students having taken its courses by 1931. A course cost participants $10 and was conducted at ERPI’s facilities and the University of California. MGM’s head of production, Irving Thalberg (1930) headed up the Producer’s Branch of the AMPAS Producers-­ Technician Committee to study the issues raised by sound; he noted that the situation facing the studios was so urgent that their desire to protect their own “technic” were, in this instance, necessarily superseded by their common needs. The subjects studied by Thalberg’s committee were silencing of arc hum produced by lights on soundstages; silencing cameras; acoustical properties of set materials; release print quality and standardization; and screen illumination. Hilliard also describes practices at the studios between 1927 and 1940 that resulted in sound tracks having distinctly different playback characteristics; one studio might require actors to project dialog as if on a theater stage and another might favor normal speaking voices. Also on-set recording results were markedly different from outdoor recordings because of the dissipation of low frequencies outdoors, whereas recording indoors caused reverberations heightening the low frequencies. These results led to efforts to advance the art of sound equalization for dialog by reducing or boosting portions of the audio spectrum to achieve better intelligibility under different recording and playback conditions, adjustments that had heretofore been made solely heuristically. It was also found that playback in theaters required greater volume than anticipated because of the psychological effects of having greatly magnified images of people on the screen and because of the distances audiences sat from the loudspeakers. Theater acoustics also changed with changes in attendance since people absorb sound. The Academy created a playback equalization standard (or curve) that was enforced for years but remained unchanged even as the technology greatly improved thereby needlessly limiting optical sound quality, as also noted by Gitt (2007). Hilliard ends his account with a plea for a change to this standard and expresses faith in the improvements that were possible to make to optical sound technology. In another article Hilliard (1983) provides additional detail: the Academy equalization curve gradually dropped high frequency response to 8000 Hz, where it was cut off. This was based on the need to reduce noise produced by film grain (ground noise). In addition, low frequencies were cut off below 55 Hz to prevent an artifact called shutter bump. Despite the fact that the technology improved, which included better speakers and electronics

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with theaters getting smaller so that their reverberation characteristics changed, all of which contributed to making expanded frequency response ­possible, the industry clung to the outmoded AMPAS equalization. A problem had to be addressed for studio cinematography: the light sources used for silent filmmaking, mercury-­ vapor lamps and arcs, made a lot of noise and could not be used when recording sound. These sources were well matched to the spectral response of the widely used orthochromatic film stocks. The newly available panchromatic emulsions had extended response to the yellow, orange, and red end of the visible spectrum, adding the ability to reproduce the full visible spectrum in terms of a gray scale, which was a better match to the spectral output of the silent running incandescent lamps. Panchromatic film had been supplied by Kodak beginning in 1922 but only on a special order basis. It was notably used by Robert J. Flaherty for his 1926 South Seas documentary Moana. Having shot the film on blue-­ green-­sensitive orthochromatic stock, Flaherty was disappointed with the results and reshot it with panchromatic film, giving him better tonality for skin and sky (McLane 2012). The Mazda Tests of 1928, which established the efficacy of panchromatic stock and tungsten light sources, were conducted by 40 American Society of Cinematographers cameramen at the Warner Bros. Studio with the cooperation of the SMPE and AMPAS, to determine whether or not tungsten lamps were suitable for feature film cinematography (Swartz 2005). (The tests were named after GE’s Mazda brand of tungsten lamps.) These tests used the newly improved Kodak panchromatic stocks, Types I and II, which were introduced in 1928 (WS: Chronology of Kodak…).1 At a time when a major transition was being made to sound recording, the industry was cautious about making other changes, especially to the new panchromatic stock. The studios and cameramen had gotten used to the look produced by orthochromatic camera negative, which was a good match for the red-deficient mercury-vapor lamps that were used for shooting silent films. During an 8-week period, 800 hours of negative film was shot and then evaluated. As a result, although there were reservations by a few cinematographers about its ability to reproduce detail in the shadows, the industry switched to tungsten illumination and panchromatic camera negative (Jones 1926). The quality of cinematography generally improved with a softer look replacing the harsher look produced with the mercury-vapor lamps. Noisy carbon Kodak also offered Eastman Panchromatic K that was sensitive to infrared radiation but insensitive to the green, yellow, and orange portion of the spectrum. It was useful for penetrating haze and day-fornight cinematography since it produced dark skies. Jones and Crabtree (1927) recommended its use with a filter that blocked short wavelengths (orange or red). 1 

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rower slit, and finer grain allowed for recordings that had less background noise. Reduction of the slit width narrower than its nominal 0.00025 inch increased the resolution of the recorded pattern allowing for a higher frequency response, but diffraction limitations had to be taken into account. Diffraction spreads light rays, thus reducing sharpness, as described in chapter 36. Using ultraviolet light for the valve’s source, with its short wavelength, allowed for a slit width reduction since diffraction is wavelength dependent. Fig. 38.1  The generic spectral response of orthochromatic and panUltraviolet light (UV) sources were used for both single-­ chromatic emulsions. Quiet running tungsten lamps matched the system newsreel cameras and feature film double-system response of the new panchromatic film. recorders. UV had the additional benefit of producing a finer grained track since its energetic rays favored exposure of the arcs were replaced by incandescent lamps, but they remained surface of the emulsion. Kellogg (1955) reports that newsuseful for illuminating large areas and for filming at night. reel camera sound-on-film sound quality improved after Sound-on-disk was a less flexible medium for post-­ ultraviolet light was used for exposing tracks. Newsreel production editing and mixing than sound-on-film because recording needed special attention because the camera negaoptical tracks, by their physical nature, could be more easily tive stocks that favored image quality were not a perfect accessed and manipulated during editing and mixing. match for optical sound recording. Feature films had the Moreover, sound editors had a visual reference when using advantage of using separate recorders, which used fine-grain an optical track to help identify where to make a cut. In addi- positive stock designed with sensitometric characteristics to tion, the sound quality of rerecording and mixing of sound-­ match that of the light valve. on-­disk didn’t hold up as well as that of optical sound track. Another important improvement to recording was the In the early days, good sound quality in post-production introduction of antireflection coated lenses that enhanced mixing for both sound-on-disk and sound-on-film was diffi- sharpness through flare reduction by increasing the amount cult to do and for this reason, for background music, an of image-forming light. Coated lenses have their air-­to-­ orchestra might be stationed near the set in order to have its glass surfaces vacuum deposited with a material like magsound mixed live with the dialog. Dubbing and mixing nesium fluoride with a thickness of a quarter the wavelength sound-on-disk in post reduced fidelity, providing an impetus of light and an index of refraction between that of glass and to drop it from production, but disk recordings continued to air. Destructive interference of light rays reflected within be used for review or for playback for lip syncing and dance the coating reduces boundary reflections due to the differnumbers. Early post-production mixing of optical tracks pro- ences of the adjacent indices of refraction. In this way the duced losses in quality, and one early approach was a precur- proportion of image-forming light, compared with scatsor of multiple channel sound: optical track features were tered light, is increased producing an image with greater sometimes released with multiple tracks taking up the width contrast. The technique also came into widespread use for of a single track, for example, by using three narrow tracks camera and projector lens optics in the late 1930s, as adjacent to each other, each with a third of the allowed width, described in chapter 23. one for dialog, one for music, and one for background Test were performed in the 1930s, using Eastman stock, sounds, relying on the projector’s sound head to mix the to compare the release print quality of RCA variable area and tracks. If the head was out of the alignment, the mix would Western Electric variable density tracks. Variable area tracks change its balance (Gitt 2007). Another technique used produce a high-contrast record with clear and black areas, before the ability to create reverberation electronically was whereas variable density tracks require the preservation of the echo chamber, a reverberant room built for rerecording subtle gradations of tonality (Frayne 1952). The result of the sound. tests was important for making release prints with the highThe combination of a linear speed of 90 feet per second est-quality sound since they were developed to favor the picand a narrow recording slit width resulted in exposures of a ture even if it meant the sacrifice of sound quality; variable few ten thousandths of a second so improvements were made area track was superior for release prints because they had to the brightness of light valve illumination sources. Over better sound while maximizing image quality. Ways were time Eastman and DuPont improved sound recording stock found to reduce background or ground noise for quiet pasmaking it more sensitive to light and finer grained with ver- sages, where it is most obtrusive, by decreasing the transmissions that were tailored for variable area or variable density, sion of the track one way or another. Electronic noise also allowing the film to be processed in standard developing reduction, an effort to increase the track’s dynamic range, solutions. Faster film permitted recording through a nar- was first applied to variable density recordings in the early

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1930s by Harold Silent and John G. Frayne (1932) by adding a bias current to the sound signal causing the light valve ribbons to narrow their 0.001 inch gap, thereby reducing the variable density tracks’ exposure in quiet or silent passages. This was the basis for the optimistically named Western Electric Noiseless Recording. A technique was also devised to do this automatically for variable area tracks by sensing quiet passages and using an electrically actuated shutter in the optical path of the GE light valve to reduce exposure. RCA made concerted efforts to improve the quality of its variable area process, which had innately lower noise than variable density tracks because at low volume, or for soundless passages, the track’s areas were clear. However, after a number of passes through the projector, the clear areas picked up scratches and dirt that played back as crackles and pops. The original version of the variable area track was the unilateral method, contiguous clear and black areas looking like a profile of sound’s waveform. In an effort to reduce the noise of its tracks and improve other attributes, RCA came up with the duplex variable area method that looks like two narrow side-by-side variable area tracks separated by a black area. Yet another approach for improving variable area track quality was the bilateral track, which was symmetrical about a line passed down its middle. In the mid-1930s, MGM began to use Western Electric’s squeeze track concept, introduced by G. R. Crane, for variable density recordings to expand the track’s dynamic range. Squeeze tracks used full modulation but reduced the width of the track by masking it so that it got wider for loud sounds and narrower for quiet passages. A motor-controlled matte system devised by Douglas Shearer Fig. 38.2  Some of the different kinds of optical tracks. The push-pull tracks were used for recording and mixing.

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of MGM, operated by a foot treadle during mixing, set the track width. RKO came up with a similar squeeze technique for its duplex variable area tracks (Batsel 1936). In 1932 a sophisticated approach for noise reduction, the push-pull technique, was introduced first for variable density and then for variable area tracks. It became widely used for recording and mixing, which was useful for the reduction of noise from film grain and pops and clicks caused by dirt and scratches, and it also reduced some kinds of distortion (Silent 1938). For push-pull two identical tracks are recorded out of phase in parallel within the available track width. In other words, one track was staggered a bit with respect to the other. Push-pull variable width tracks looked like duplex variable area tracks, but the out-of-phase tracks aren’t perfectly identical. The push-pull track when played back, each half by its own playback head, has noise subtracted electronically, such as that caused by scratches or dust, by comparing the two halves. Push-pull tracks also had low distortion because certain kinds of distortion appears only in one of the two and could be subtracted from the signal when compared with its out-of-phase mate. Tracks like these could only be played back in a handful of theaters that were equipped with sound heads using prism optics for splitting the image into two and reading each separately, which also required equipping the theater with additional electronics for processing the sound information. Played back with a normal sound reader, the outof-phase tracks canceled themselves out resulting in no signal. The most widespread use of push-pull was in post-­ production and sound mixing, with tracks sometimes 200

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mils wide to improve signal-to-noise, rather than the 100 mil width used for release prints (Frayne 1946). A great deal of rerecording and mixing is required in the post-production of a feature film so it’s best to begin with clean recordings that will stay that way through the pipeline. MGM may have been the studio to use the greatest number of channels in a mix because of their penchant for musicals, using a board that had up to 20 channels. The push-pull recording system was considered to be the ultimate analog photographic recording technique that for a time continued to be used for mixing, even after the introduction of magnetic sound for recording. ERPI’s variable density and RCA’s variable area systems coexisted in an unexpected way using an approach for increasing optical sound’s effective dynamic range as proposed by Nathan Levinson ( 1936a), head of Warners’ sound department, whose paper on the subject was titled A New Method of Increasing the Volume Range of Talking Motion Pictures. It is also described in his USP 2,039,173, Sound Record, filed June 24, 1935. The approach worked like this: films were released with some scenes using variable density and some using variable area tracks, based on which method was most advantageous. Variable density was used for ­dialog, because it had less noise from dust and scratches in Fig. 38.3  Levinson’s method for increasing dynamic range. Fig. 4. illustrates the concept of intercutting variable area and variable density tracks. This is the top portion of the USP cover sheet describing the technique.

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quiet passages than variable area. Variable area was used for titles and music passages because it was twice as loud and had more impact. Variable area had more clicks and pops from scratches and dust in its clear areas in quiet passages and was deemed to be less desirable for dialog scenes. But this kind of noise was inaudible in loud passages such as those with full orchestral sound (Gitt 2007). This switching between the two kinds of tracks served much the same function as that of a control cue for setting amplitude. Improvements were also made in loudspeaker design in 1936 when Douglas Shearer, head of MGM’s sound department, came up with a two-speaker loudspeaker system that reproduced sound from 50 to 8000  cycles, matching the capabilities of the optical tracks. The speaker incorporated a crossover circuit at 250 cycles, breaking up the audio spectrum into two portions, with one speaker playing back the lows and the other the mid-range and highs. Levinson’s two kinds of optical tracks for noise reduction and Shearer’s extended range loudspeaker are illustrative of the many improvements made by studio sound department engineers and technicians. In 1938 electronic compression using limiters was introduced to rein in the volume range during recording to reduce noise in quiet passages and distortion in the loud passages,

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thereby increasing the track’s dynamic range on playback (Kellogg 1955, August). Sprocket drive sound recorders and printers were improved by redesigning the sprockets so film slippage did not occur, which resulted in the smoother passage of the film past the optical recording head, thereby eliminating 96 Hz hum originating from sprocket chatter. At 24 fps with 4 perforations per frame, loose fitting sprocket teeth tapped perforations 96 times a second, producing hum (Frayne 1950). Very fine-grain Eastman 5375 sound recording film, introduced in 1958, further improved sound quality. According to Gitt (2007), by the 1970s RCA’s duplex variable area track, because of its higher output and lower noise, became the adopted method for releasing optical sound prints. Westrex offered a track that, to the eye,

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although ­produced by a string light valve rather than a mirror galvanometer, looked identical to RCA’s variable area; it was also widely used. Hilliard (1985) was correct that analog optical sound could have continued to be improved but other technology took its place. Motion picture sound developments followed a new path after the end of the Second World War with the introduction and adoption of magnetic sound for recording and mixing, while maintaining analog optical sound for release for decades. Cinerama introduced multichannel magnetic sound for exhibition that was also used for some CinemaScope and all 70  mm prints. For 35 mm release multichannel digitally encoded optical tracks made for major improvements in cinema sound, developments that are recounted in the next chapter.

Multichannel, Magnetic, and Digital Sound

Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra worked with Harvey Fletcher and Arthur Keller of Bell Labs to transmit a live performance, over AT&T lines, from Philadelphia’s Academy of Music to Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall on April 27, 1933, for an audience of 4500 people. For the event Bell Labs created a multiple channel sound system with a wide frequency response that used microphones and speakers designed by E. C. Wente. The goal of the event was to produce a transmission with sound that was as lifelike as possible. From a number of microphones, located at different parts of the orchestra, Stokowski mixed down to three channels to create what he considered to be the most pleasing sound, while his assistant conducted the orchestra (WS: http://www.stokowski.org/). On April 9 and 10, 1940, a three-­ channel optical sound track, with a response from 30  Hz to 15,000  Hz, recorded by Stokowski working with Fletcher, was played back at New York’s Carnegie Hall. (The transmission lines may not have been able to carry a signal beyond 10,000 Hz.) Walt Disney attended a performance that inspired him to make an animated film with Stokowski conducting classical music using the multichannel technique, an idea that became the basis for the feature Fantasia. It was roadshowed using the technique in only 13 theaters in the United States beginning on November 13, 1940, at The Broadway Theater in Manhattan. The three-channel optical sound was played back from a second projector that was driven in sync with the picture projector. RCA, not Bell Labs, engineered Fantasound for Disney, which was recorded as eight channel variable area push-pull sound and mixed down to three tracks for exhibition. A fourth track, a control track using 250, 630, and 1600  Hz tones, cued the volume level of the sound tracks, which were recorded at maximum volume to minimize noise. The control track was able to expand the 50 dB range of the optical tracks to the orchestral range of 80 dB. Fantasound, the combined effort of the Disney Studio and RCA, was the precursor of the multichannel directional sound that accompanied Cinerama, CinemaScope both Todd-AO and 70 mm release prints, widescreen 35  mm features, and the sound that

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accompanies today’s digital projection. Unlike CinemaScope’s original sound recording method, Fantasound cannot be considered to be stereophonic since no effort was made to maintain the phase information obtained in the recording sessions; rather, it was sound whose direction was determined during the mix. The intention was not to create true stereophonic sound but rather to provide a vibrant three-­ channel track rather than an acoustically accurate reproduction of an orchestra. With Stokowski at the master volume control the major effort was the production of spectacular sound that was directional and loud, so loud in fact that at some of the handful of venues where multichannel Fantasia was exhibited there were complaints that led Disney to reduce the fader settings. In 1940, at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, Western Electric demonstrated a compander, for compressing recording and expanding playback, using control tones to set playback gain for increasing dynamic range, but Frayne (1976, July/August) tells us that the process was put on hold during the war and shelved afterward because of the advent of magnetic sound. During the Second World War, Western Electric and RCA concentrated on the war effort and movie sound played second fiddle (Garity 1941). Other techniques were made in an attempt to reduce noise and distortion and to approximate the creation of multichannel sound from a single channel. Vitasound, a method to produce directional sound from a single channel, was championed by the head of Warners’ sound department, Nathan Levinson (1941); it was invented by Hillel I. Reiskind, an electronics engineer with RCA, as described in USP 2,363,361, Control Track Stabilizing Method and System, filed October 26, 1942. A version of the process is also described in USP 2,367,294, Control Track, filed April 12, 1944, by Levinson and assigned to RCA. Vitasound used a conventional optical track, plus a control track within one column of perforations to provide cues for sound levels and to activate different speakers. It accomplished this by changing the optical transmission between the perforations with dark areas of different widths. The

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_39

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Fig. 39.1  Fantasound used a separate print run in interlock with the picture with three duplex variable area tracks and a control track (left).

Fig. 39.2  The top portion of Levinson’s USP cover sheet teaching a control track running within the perforation area.

amplitude of the 96 Hz signal generated by the perforations was seen by a dedicated photocell, and changes in transmission were used to trigger the directional functions, with cues also providing an up to 10  dB increase in volume. Three behind the screen speakers were used, left, center, and right, with dialog always coming from the center speaker. For music all three speakers were activated, an approach that Kellogg (1955, August) refers to as a spread-sound system.

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This technique required the exhibitor to add a cue track optical reader to the projector and purchase a processor, plus left and right amplifiers and speakers. Only a few theaters opted for Vitasound, and the effort was terminated in 1942. With the arrival of the stereophonic magnetic tracks used by Cinerama, CinemaScope, and Todd-AO, a decade later, there was a revival of interest in multichannel sound. Paramount did not use magnetic sound-on-film for its VistaVision, but Fox, MGM, and Warner Bros. used optical and magnetic multichannel sound for ‘Scope prints. Magnetic sound-on-film for 35 mm release was not universally adopted due to release print costs and exhibitors’ disinclination to invest in new hardware. Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., and Universal used an optical track process called Perspecta, invented by Clarence Robert Fine of New York, as taught in USP 2,714,633, filed October 8, 1953, Perspective Sound Systems. Perspecta is similar to Warner Bros.’ Vitasound, but Perspecta used inaudible low-frequency cuing tones mixed into the variable area track, rather than a perforation located control track, thereby eliminating the need to install another sound reader. These control signals, 18 decibels below the audio signal, were filtered out and interpreted by a unit called an integrator made by Ampex and others, which responded to the tones and selectively steered the monaural track to any or all of three speakers located left (30 Hz), right (40 Hz), and screen center (35 Hz). Perspecta sound was capable of following speech as an actor moved across the screen. In addition to the directional cuing tones, others were used to adjust the amplifiers’ gain to increase dynamic range and direct multiple speakers to turn on simultaneously. This allowed the process to have more flexibility than simply switching speakers on and off for directionality (Kellogg 1955, August). Although the process was flexible, it could not simulate the stereophonic effect of a full orchestra, and while Paramount did not bill it as stereophonic sound, the studio’s tagline for VistaVision, “Motion Picture High Fidelity,” may have given that impression. (VistaVision releases used Perspecta.) Today a single channel directed by control tones may appear to be half-baked, but it provided directional sound that was convincing without costly magnetic striped prints. It could also be used for projection booths not equipped with the CinemaScope penthouse magnetic sound reader, one of Perspecta’s strong points, during its 1954 to 1957 lifespan in America; it wasn’t necessarily an inexpensive system to install since it required the same outlay for the array of amplifiers and speakers that were used for CinemaScope’s magnetic sound, and there was also the cost of the integrator. It remained popular in Europe, after its abandonment in America, and was used by Toho through the early 1960s. Perspecta was backwardly compatible and could be played back in any theater equipped for optical sound, which was any theater, but some installations not

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equipped for Perspecta, having good low-frequency capability, might inadvertently audibly reproduce the 40 Hz tone. Head of Paramount sound, Loren Ryder (1956), believed that audiences could not tell the difference between Perspecta and stereophonic sound, and he also believed that true stereophonic sound was intrusive because it placed limitations on editing. “In my opinion,” he stated, “the use of stereophonic sound as it has been handled largely tends to punctuate cuts  – it tends to emphasize the very thing that the experienced editor is trying to eliminate.” Was this bracing pragmatism or had Ryder become the anti-Sponable, pushing back on true multichannel sound? In 1954 70 films were released using Perspecta (Gitt 2007), with Warner Bros. and MGM using both mag tracks and Perspecta for ‘Scope. Warner Bros. films did not take full advantage of the process’s directionality since its tracks were mixed to always play back dialog through the center speaker. As far as I have been able to discover, it was Earl Sponable who conceived of the idea of switching a monophonic optical track to speakers at different screen locations for a directional effect. (The germ of the idea may have been Gaumont’s disk system that used a stagehand to move a speaker to follow the action.) Sponable describes this in Moving Talking Picture Apparatus, USP 1,851,117, filed January 17, 1929, in which the left and right edges of the print are notched to engage a feeler to trigger switching the sound to the desired loudspeaker. From the timing of the filing, it’s likely that the technique was meant to be used in conjunction with Fox Grandeur, but it appears that it was not deployed commercially. Although Perspecta was limited to a single optical track channel with directional cues, it was possible to create true stereophonic sound using an optical track. John G. Frayne (1955) of Westrex, in the early 1950s, suggested the use of dual variable area tracks, which looked like duplex variable area or push-pull tracks, for two-channel stereophonic sound, designed to be used with two speakers at the screen. The two variable area tracks were recorded using a fourribbon light valve. In addition to a two-microphone recording setup, Frayne suggests adding a bridged channel derived from a center microphone. The phantom center track would have been useful for big screens and was to be generated by means of an in-theater mix of the two channels to produce the middle channel. The same kind of sound reader for playing back push-pull tracks would have worked for exhibition and the installed base of sound readers would have played back the signal as a single mixed track. As far as I can determine, Frayne’s design was not taken up by the industry. In the years after the conclusion of the Second World War the most important advance in sound recording came not from Hollywood’s established American suppliers of optical sound hardware, the major electronic corporations, but rather from Germany. The forerunners of the German-developed

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magnetic tape recorders that were brought to the United States, and reverse engineered were described in chapter 28. They include the American Oberlin Smith, who in 1888 proposed using thread impregnated with iron filings as a magnetic recording medium; the Danish Valdemar Poulsen who in 1899 filed a US patent for his Telegraphone, the first magnetic recording machine; and the German Curt Stille, who in the mid-1920s used steel ribbon in place of Poulsen’s wire. German magnetic sound recording machines, tape recorders, were brought to the United States after the Allied invasion of the European Continent, and their introduction to the American film industry came about in several ways: In the Battle of the Bulge, a unit of General George S.  Patton’s Army captured two tape recorders that had been used by German Army Intelligence. One of these machines was sent to Colonel Richard Howland Ranger (1889–1962), inventor and electrical engineer, who was stationed with the Signal Corp Sound and Motion Picture Headquarters on Long Island (Ryder 1976). Ranger was an electronics engineer who had designed a system for intercontinental radio facsimile transmission for RCA. He would make contributions to magnetic tape recording and cinema sound with his Rangertone recorders and system for synchronizing camera and recorder (WS: Ranger: museum...). The other recorder was sent to the Naval Research and Sound Laboratory in Washington D.C.’s Anacostia district, where it was examined by Loren L.  Ryder (1900–1985). These recorders were made by Maihak of Hamburg in association with Telefunken, and Ryder visited Maihak, in part to study their patent positon. Ryder was a pillar of the motion picture technology community, who was head of sound at Paramount beginning in 1928 and for the following 26 years; he became president of the SMPTE in 1947. As a physics and math student at the University of California, Berkeley, he helped to install the first transcontinental radio telephone system. An observation he made while a student led to the discovery that electron emissions from an amplifier tube were maximized at low filament currents, a technique that could to extend the life of vacuum tubes. During the war he worked on an unusual project, to quote from his SMPTE Journal obituary of August 1985: “At the insistence of General Patton, he devised an ingenious method for ‘silencing’ tanks used during the Battle of the Bulge.” (No information is given as to how Ryder went about it.) His career at Paramount has parallels with that of his colleagues Earl Sponable at Fox and Douglas Shearer at MGM. American intelligence had been aware that the Germans had an advanced recording technology, having monitored radio broadcasts during the war, and now it was possible to examine the hardware. Ryder found that the German Magnetophon (usually Magnetophone in English) machines recorded sound that was greatly superior to any other method. The tape used a paper substrate coated with finely ground

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iron oxide on one side providing a uniformly smooth surface making good contact with the recording head, but tape with a plastic base was also available in Germany. After the war, the American manufacturers, who had made wire recorders, switched to machines using plastic tape. The captured machine had a high-quality spring drive and a vacuum tube amplifier that provided a frequency response from 100 to 10,000 Hz. In 1942 a major improvement was made to the Magnetophon that gave it even better sound, known as high-­ frequency bias, which mixes the audio signal with a high-­ frequency signal of tens of thousands of cycles, five to ten times the signal level of the audio. Only the audio signal is recorded because the bias has such a high frequency that it cannot be recorded since it is “beyond the capability of the system,” according to Marvin Camras (1988), one of the most important inventors in the field who was granted over 500 patents. No matter how promising magnetic recording may have seemed, the motion picture industry resisted it, according to Ryder (1950), who described his efforts to induce the industry to adopt the new technology for original sound recording and sound mixing. This took considerable persuasion and was achieved only after many intermediate stages of acceptance. The major inhibition to industry adoption was “the willingness to change technique and equipment.” One issue for the buy-in by studio sound editors was that they had become accustomed to and expert at looking at optical tracks for visual cues to aid cutting. Westrex, and then RCA, offered modifications to their optical sound recorders to enable recording on sprocketed acetate film coated with iron oxide. 3M made acetate base ¼ inch tape, and 35 mm magnetic film also became available. A magnetic sound recording system based on 17.5 mm stock was used at Paramount, as described by Ryder who remarks that sound quality went up and costs went down with the adoption of mag film for recording and mixing, but optical tracks for release continued. A parallel effort to introduce magnetic sound recording to America, also based on German machines, was made by Major John (Jack) T. Mullin (1913–1999) of the Army Signal Corps, who was to a large extent responsible for its introduction to the radio and recording industries. The Signal Corps assigned Mullin, who was stationed in Germany, to study German sound and electronics technology. He returned to the United Sates with two AEG Magnetophon tape recorders, the invention of Fritz Pfleumer, which he had appropriated from Radio Frankfurt. Mullin also took a large quantity of iron oxide-coated PVC (polyvinyl chloride) tape, made by the BASF division of I. G. Farben, material that became the basis for magnetic tape manufacturing in the United States. Tape was a medium that could be reused, played back immediately, or even listened to directly while recording, and it didn’t require chemical development like optical track. Mullin demonstrated machines he designed, based on the

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Fig. 39.3  A portable AEG Magnetophon K4 tape recorder manufactured in 1939. Anyone in the film, radio, or recording industries could have walked into a shop in Berlin and bought one prior to America’s entry in the war, but they overlooked magnetic recording.

Magnetophons, to the San Francisco chapter of the Institute of Radio Engineers in May 1946. Engineers from Ampex, located in the Bay Area, present at the meeting, became interested in the design. Mullin also demonstrated his machine to the Hollywood studios (Morton 2004). Singer and actor Bing Crosby (1903–1977) became intrigued by the possibilities of recording technology for the purpose of making high-quality “transcriptions” to time-­ delay his coast-to-coast broadcasts. His interest came about partly as a result of the NBC radio network refusing to pay for the cost of wax disk recordings to repeat his radio show for the West Coast 3 hours after performing it for the East Coast. Crosby switched networks, but after considering the matter, he didn’t want to rely on disk recordings. In 1946 he was introduced to Colonel Ranger and his German-made tape recorder, but Ranger could not manufacturer machines in quantity. Crosby met Mullin, who said that he would find a way to make them; he eventually went to work for Bing Crosby Enterprises as its chief engineer. Crosby financed the development of tape recorders by writing a check for $50,000 for a delivery of 50 machines by Ampex. He declined any ownership interest in the small Northern California company that supplied him with their first Model 200A machines in 1948, for which 3M provided quarter-inch-wide Scotch 111 iron oxide coated acetate tape (Grudens 2003). These machines contributed to a major change in the methodology of recording sound masters for both radio transcriptions and phonograph records. It may be a simplification to separate the introduction of tape recording into two compartments, one for the film industry and the other for the radio/recording industries, because the technology and products are so closely related, but it appears that while Ryder was instrumental in its adoption by the studios, Mullin was influential in its adoption by the radio and recording industries.

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Fig. 39.4  Kudelski’s first production Nagra II in 1953, with a clockwork motor and miniature vacuum tubes, with its optional sound level meter attached (left). (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 39.5  35  mm three-channel 5  mm wide mag striped film and 17.5 mm single-channel film with a 7 mm wide stripe, both used for recording.

In the film industry, in addition to the conversion of existing optical recorders to magnetic film, another option allowed the use of convenient quarter-inch tape. The battery powered Nagra series of recorders manufactured in Switzerland, introduced in 1951, were designed by Polish engineer Stefan Kudelski (1929–2013). These compact quarter-inch tape machines were capable of recording very good sound and offered synchronization capability with Pilotone tracks along both edges of its quarter inch tape. The location of the sync track was later moved to the center of the tape when two-channel models became available. The recorder laid down a 60 Hz signal derived from the AC line current that also drove the camera, or from a precision crystal oscillator (DiGiulio 1971). The Nagra series eventually offered built-in resolving capability that allowed the machine to transfer its recordings to 35  mm mag film so it could be played back and edited in synchronization with prints made from the camera film (Yewdall 2003; Kenny 2000). In the early 1950s the industry segued from push-pull optical sound to magnetic sound for both recording and post-production to the benefit of optical sound release prints. According to Frayne (1955, 1976a, b) the use of the magnetic sound medium for post-production and release prints had the poten-

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tial of producing optical sound with better f­requency response, greater dynamic range, less background noise, and more presence. Magnetic sound for release did not achieve ubiquity despite Sponable’s attempt with the magnetic striped CinemaScope format, but it did become the standard release format for 70 mm. The feature C-Man, directed by Joseph Lerner and released in 1949, was the first American feature film recorded and mixed using magnetic sound but released with an optical track. The recording was done by Reeves Sound Studio of New York City, in 1948. The studio’s namesake and proprietor, Hazard E. Reeves (1982a, b, Oct., Nov.), designed the 1952 Cinerama magnetic sound multichannel format that provided the stimulus for the 1953 CinemaScope magnetic stripe format and the similarly mag-striped 1955 70  mm Todd-AO (Quigley 1953). 70 mm release prints with magnetic tracks were an added expense that was justified because their exhibition was a special event with higher ticket prices, but many exhibitors balked at the additional cost for equipping theaters for 35  mm CinemaScope mag striped prints. This unenthusiastic reception, and the additional cost of making such prints, led Fox to retreat from a strict adherence to magnetic sound for release. Nonetheless, the industry and sound engineers were motivated to continue to seek alternatives to improve optical sound for 35  mm exhibition. However, the exhibitor pushback resulted in the continued use of optical tracks using the increasingly outdated AMPAS standard at a time when better recorded sound was heard at home with a good “hi-fi” playing 33 1 3 RPM LPs or FM radio (Gitt 2007). By the mid-1950s most of the studios were using 35  mm film that usually had three 5  mm magnetic stripes for three-channel recording and mixing. Another format used 17.5 mm film with a single 7 mm magnetic stripe. An oddity worth mentioning is the Sensurround process first used for the 1974 film Earthquake, which may be the only theatrical motion picture sound system that did not reproduce recorded sound but rather generated it on the spot, reminiscent of the silent cinema days that commonly used in-theater sound effects, or the use of live theaters’ thunder effects created by shaking sheet metal. Universal Studios and Cerwin-Vega created the event-show Sensurround gimmick that was used for a handful of films for a few years (Gitt 2007). The rumble track was produced by a noise generator triggered by 25 and 35 cycle control tones that were added to both optical and magnetic track release prints. The generated signals were fed to 1600 watt amplifiers to drive large low-­ frequency subwoofers arranged in stacked groups to produce noise at 110 decibels as low as 17 Hz, powerful enough to simulate an earthquake. American physicist Ray Milton Dolby (1933–2013), a former Ampex engineer and founder of Dolby Laboratories in London in 1965, was responsible for a major advance for magnetic recording in 1966 with the Model A301’s Type A

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noise reduction process. It compressed and then decompressed selected portions of the audio spectrum, ­ which for magnetic recording resulted in a noticeable reduction in tape hiss. For cinema Dolby sound was first applied to the magnetic recording and mixing of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, released with a standard optical track in 1971. Former record producer and artists’ manager Ioan Allen (1975) of Dolby Laboratories, working with Kodak, helped to create a two-channel version of the Dolby noisereduced analog optical track compatible with existing projector sound readers (Mead 2016). Achieving the best sound from the track required the installation of a new optical sound reader and processor, the Dolby CP 100, which decoded the two optical channels that had been mixed from a three-channel track, using a technique said to have been invented by Sansui of Japan, which Frayne and Uhlig (1974) had also described. Uhlig is particularly concerned with the accurate placement of dialog since it most frequently comes from the center of the screen, and he notes that suggestions for a derived center channel is well traveled art. Additional amplifiers and speakers were required for the process if the theater had not already converted to the CinemaScope or Perspecta sound. A breakthrough for the Dolby system came with the release of Star Wars in 1977, which was distributed in many first-run theaters as 70 mm blowups from its 35  mm negative, with mag tracks and Dolby optical multichannel sound for some of its 35  mm ‘Scope exhibition. The installation of the Dolby equipment rapidly paid for itself due to heavy attendance for a film that ran in some theaters for a year. By 1979 more than 900 theaters in the world were equipped to playback Dolby SVA (Stereo Variable Area) tracks. Dolby had competition from systems offered by Colortek, Todd-AO, Universal, Fox, and Pacific Theaters, who had taken over Cinerama. Through the 1980s three sound-on-film systems predominated: monaural sound using the Academy standard, derived three-channel Dolby SVA, and five-channel 70 mm magnetic sound striped prints (Kerins 2011). In 1983 George Lucas formed THX Ltd., motivated by his dissatisfaction with theater sound and the desire to improve the exhibition of his third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi. THX was a quality assurance service to help exhibitors optimize a theater’s sound (Weis 1985). In the 1990s efforts were made to move away from analog sound, the basis for both optical and magnetic sound-on-­film, with the adoption of digital sound systems. Optical Radiation Corporation and Kodak designed the Cinema Digital Sound System (CDS) that encoded six sound channels as optical information using the area that had been reserved for traditional analog tracks. CDS was used mostly for 35 mm release, but there was some 70 mm activity. By using the area that had previously been reserved for 35 mm optical track, the system was not backwardly compatible and could not be read by existing analog optical sound readers. This problem became

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Fig. 39.6  A release print with the compatible audio tracks. (A) SDDS; (B) SR-D; (C) mono- or stereo-dual variable area; and (D) a DTS sync track.

an opportunity for Dolby, ever alert to the possibilities of licensing revenue, which they realized with Dolby SR-D (probably Spectral Recording-Dolby), which encoded digital sound information optically in between the perforations and adjacent to the standard optical track. Unlike the CDS system, SR-D prints were released with both optical and digital tracks and were thus compatible with projectors not equipped for the Dolby process. A similar digitally encoded system was developed by Sony, SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound), which supported up to eight channels and was located on the two edges of the print. The Sony system had teething problems, from which it never recovered, and it achieved only middling marketplace acceptance. The return to sound-on-disk, albeit using a digitally encoded disk, DTS (Digital Theater System), was sponsored by Steven Spielberg who desired to have a sound track that was not limited by celluloid film technology for his 1993 film Jurassic Park. DTS uses a proprietary digital format for audio, encoding up to seven channel sound on a standard CD-ROM (Compact Disk Read-Only Memory) disk. The print has a timecode track to keep the similarly encoded disk in sync with it. In the latest version, the disk’s information is ingested onto the processor’s hard drive and used for playback during projection. Since the aforementioned systems were encoded on different areas of the print or on a separate playback device, the analog track and the tracks from Dolby, Sony, and DTS can coexist on one print. The Digital Era has taken a further step using a technique called object-based sound, as exemplified by Dolby Atmos. It attempts to go beyond multichannel sound by using a channel for every sound source, which can number in the hundreds, each as a separately recorded file. Object-based sound requires different approaches to the design of sound and post-production for feature films since the individual sound tracks get mixed and directed to the speakers in the theater by a processor, using a method called adaptive ­rendering, based on each auditorium’s acoustical properties

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(Pörs 2016). This technique, as advanced as it is, is different from the principle of stereophonic recording advocated by Sponable for the original CinemaScope releases, which preserved the phase information of real-world recorded sound. Instead, object-based sound relies on an approach more like the one used by the analog cinema sound system Perspecta,

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which was based on a preference for multichannel rather than true stereophonic sound using control cues to spatially locate the sound. Object-based sound is also reminiscent of an early version of Gaumont’s Chronophone, from the first years of the twentieth century, which engaged a stagehand to move the speaker to follow the onscreen action.

Part V THE CELLULOID CINEMA: Color

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Applied Color

From the earliest days of the Glass Cinema Era, magic l­ antern slides were vividly colored, usually using water colors, a practice that was continued after the introduction of photographic slides in the mid-nineteenth century. These were also hand colored, or colored by the use of filters, sometimes mounted in front of the projector lens on a rotating disk, so that the required color could be rapidly selected (Mannoni 2009; Rossell 2008). Painting on magic lantern slides, which usually measured a few inches across, was significantly easier than the subsequent challenge of coloring images on the small Edison frame measuring only an inch wide by three quarters of an inch high, but the demand for color was so great that hand painting and mechanically applied color were vigorously pursued, as well as the global techniques of toning and tinting. The desire to see projected images in color doesn’t require justification because that’s how we see the world. Moreover, there was a heightened awareness of color in the decades prior to the introduction of the celluloid cinema as daily life became more colorful with the manufacture of synthetic aniline dyes. The advent of aniline dyes occurred in 1856, the invention of Englishman William Henry Perkins, while he was a student at the Royal College of Chemistry (now Imperial College). On his Easter break, at the age of 18, in his home lab he synthesized the purple dye mauveine, the first of the ubiquitous aniline family. He filed a patent application for the discovery and founded a family business to manufacture the new group of synthetic dyes (Taylor 2002). These new dyes contributed to a more colorful world because they could produce a greater range of colors than transitional natural dyes, they were less expensive and less fugitive; they greatly contributed to more colorful textiles, magazine printing, and posters. For cinema aniline dyes became the major enabler for the pervasive tinting and toning of early motion picture prints (Yumibe 2012). The hand-painted magic lantern slide taught audiences to expect projected images to be colorful, but despite intensive efforts to improve the negative-positive system of photography during the nineteenth century, there remained no ­commercially viable method to achieve so-called natural or

three-color cinematography until the 1930s; natural color photography depends on black and white photography’s ability to capture all of the colors of the visible spectrum. However, the first light-sensitive photographic emulsions were color blind or sensitive only to the blue-violet end of the visible spectrum and would therefore capture yellowgreens, yellow, orange, and red as a dark gray tones or black. Next to be offered to photographers were orthochromatic film emulsions whose sensitivity was extended to the green or middle of the visible spectrum. However, the descriptive term ortho is an exaggeration since it is Greek for correct, and sensitization did not extend to the red end of the spectrum. Ortho emulsions were achieved by means of dye sensitizers added to them, and soon thereafter, at least in the lab, film had its sensitivity extended to the red. This kind of an emulsion is called panchromatic, denoting its sensitivity to all colors, but even when using panchromatic film, the best a photographic emulsion can do is to reproduce the visible spectrum monochromatically, with an image formed not by colored dyes but by grains of silver metal dispersed in gelatin (Collins 1990). Daguerreotypes were hand colored by brushing colored powered pigments on their surface, since using water colors obliterated detail (Newhall 2012, p.  269). Many surviving samples show evidence of attempts at applied color, possibly aided by the use of stencils for their application. Fox Talbot’s Calotype paper prints proved to be a better medium for hand coloring. Beginning in 1843 Fox Talbot established a hand color service located in Reading and sold prints that were watercolored or colored using transparent oil paints in his London Studio. Coloring was also applied to prints resembling Daguerreotypes made with Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion negative-positive process in the mid-1850s, and to Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrad’s egg-white or albumen print paper that began to be used in 1850. It was more difficult to do a decent job of coloring a small magic lantern slide because the image was only about 3 inches on a side, and there were complaints about the sloppiness of the technique and its esthetic value, which became evident when a

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_40

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slide was projected and thus magnified (Coe 1978). In the 1880s the arrival of the gelatin emulsion coated on paper for prints facilitated hand color because gelatin readily adsorbs dye. Hand coloring of paper prints continued to present days with photographers using a transparent medium like Marshall’s Photo Oil Colors. When the celluloid cinema arrived half a century after the practice of hand coloring had begun, it took even more skill to paint clothing one color, a face another, and the sky yet another, “staying within the lines” for the diminutive 3/4 square inch area of the 35 mm frame, and to do it 16 frames for each second of screen time. Methods for tinting and toning do not require the skillful and accurate application of color to bounded image areas, and these methods, which were widely used for slide preparation, may have been used for 80 percent of the motion picture release prints made between 1908 and 1925, a figure based on Kodak’s promotional literature of the time. So many prints have been lost that there is uncertainty with regard to this figure, moreover making an estimate may be hampered by the fugitive nature of dyes. Yumibe (2012) researched George Eastman House’s Davide Turcone Frame Collection of some 23,500 nitrate print samples. Examining these clips of two to three frames taken from each print, he came to the conclusion that 74 percent of the samples, based on titles made predominately between 1908 and 1912, had elements of color, and of those that had color 69 percent were tinted, 13 percent toned, 9 percent stenciled, and 3 percent hand colored. As to who it was who first made and projected locally applied color films, bear in mind that the level of effort and accomplishment differs for a one-off demonstration and the more taxing production of release prints. Edison, the Lumières, and Paul probably used the technique to enliven their earliest demonstrations, and we know that Edison showed two hand-colored prints for the first public screening of the Vitascope projector on April 23, 1896. Possibly, prior to September 25, 1895, some Kinetoscope prints were hand-colored, according to Ramsaye (1928), but these were not listed in catalogues until the spring of 1896. Jenkins and Armat, by Yumibe’s (2012) account, projected a hand-colored film of the popular vaudeville act, The Serpentine Dance of Annabelle Whitford, at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, beginning on September 25, 1895. Tinting, unlike the local application of color using a fine-­ tipped brush to the gelatin surface of the print, provides overall color by filling in the clear or transparent image areas by one of two methods: either the celluloid base is dyed or the gelatin image-bearing layer itself is dyed. Covering the projection lens with a color filter yields the same effect as tinting, a commonsense assumption verified by Jones and Gibbs (1921). Toning, on the other hand, leaves the clear portions of the print intact and substitutes color, with varying degrees of density, corresponding to the tonal gradations of the black and white image. Tinting a print’s gelatin emulsion can be done after the film is processed by soaking it in dyes,

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Fig. 40.1  A hand-colored frame from Méliès 1902 A Trip to the Moon compared with a hand-colored magic lantern slide. The film colorists had to paint 16 frames for each second of projection time on a frame an inch wide. The three-inch wide slide was painted on glass and remained on screen as long as the lanternist desired.

o­ riginally of German origin, but soon many of which were manufactured by the American National Aniline & Chemical Co., which became a major division of the Allied Chemical Corporation. Early tinting was performed by film labs by applying a colored varnish, and although little information exists about this process, surviving samples point to the practice that the varnish was painted or sprayed onto one side only (Read 2000). The more common laboratory practice became bathing the processed film in a tank of dye using one of the wide range of available colors, with trade names like ciné scarlet or ciné this or that, which were readily absorbed into the gelatin (Blair 1920). The longer the print remained in the

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bath the deeper the color as the tint was absorbed into the emulsion. By the late 1910s French, Belgium, and German film manufacturers were offering tinted celluloid nitrate base film stock, with Kodak responding with its own product line in the early 1920s. This simplified and standardized tinting relieved the laboratories of an extra process. Moreover, it was one that was undoubtedly less costly than the more complicated and less commonly used toning process (Jones (1921). Jones and Gibbs (1921) built a special instrument to measure the brightness of the projected image of tinted or toned release prints, taking into account that the granular silver image is produced through diffusion of light as it passes through the emulsion. Using a large number of samples, they found that dye tinting produced little change in the photographic quality of the projected image, and while the transmission varied over a wide range, it was fairly high. Dye and chemical toning, on the other hand, resulted in a slight increase in contrast and could result in a loss of brightness. Kodak’s Sonochrome tinted celluloid nitrate base positive print stocks were revised versions of early materials to make them compatible with the optical track’s spectral requirements since the tinted stocks of the silent era absorbed the wavelengths to which the projector’s optical sound reader’s photocell was most sensitive. This would have required more amplification that would have increased background noise, as described in an article by Jones (1929). These Sonochrome tinted stocks were offered in fancifully named colors, according to an advertisement in Variety, July 3, 1929: rose doree, peachblow, afterglow, firelight, candle flame, sunshine, verdant, aqua green, turquoise, azure, nocturne, purple haze, fleur de lis, amaranth, caprice, inferno, and argent. The prose describing these colors was decidedly purple, as, for example, for amaranth: “A less austere purple than Fleur de lis. Suggestive of gentility, aristocracy. Heightening the elegance and luxury of certain interiors. Balcony scenes at night illuminated from within.” Both tinting and toning became less popular by the mid-1920s, possibly because of advances in two-color cinematography (Slide 2013). The local application of color, or hand coloring, is frequently reported to have disappeared by this time, but interest in it still existed in the 1930s, as indicated in an article by one of its advocates, Gustav F. O. Brock (1931). As noted, toning, in which monochrome image density is replaced by color, requires a chemical treatment after the film has been processed to replace the silver metal grains. The major categories of toning, as classified by Famulener (1939), are metallic toning, dye toning, differential hardening, and color development. The first two of these procedures were usually chosen by the film industry. For metallic toning there are two alternatives: The metallic silver can be processed in a bath to turn it into a colored compound of silver, for example, the sulfide toning of silver to produce sepia. Alternatively, the print’s image can be entirely replaced by a new metal or

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Fig. 40.2  A Kodak ad for Sonochrome tinted base print stock.

metallic compound using a chemical bath to enable the substitution of the silver metal grains by compounds such as copper (red), iron (cyan-blue), or uranium (orange-red). At the beginning of the era of three-color Technicolor, all 500 prints of the 14 reels of MGM’s 1937 The Good Earth were toned sepia, requiring immersion of the processed black and white print in two successive baths, the first made up of a mixture of potassium ferricyanide and potassium bromide and the second a solution of sodium sulfide. Toning was widely used for MGM films at the time, and toning and tinting were combined to produce both scenic and psychological effects, as described by John M.  Nicklaus (1938, pp.  346–349), Superintendent of Photography of MGM, who cited one combination for the 1938 The Firefly: “Sepia (toning) and blue (tinting) were skillfully blended to create the mood of a romantic moonlight night.” (Parenthesis added) The combination of tinting and toning was not an uncommon practice in the silent era. Famulener (1939) gives other toning methods: A greater range of colors can be produced by dye toning rather than metallic toning using a bath to convert the silver image to a salt, often silver iodide or uranium ferrocyanide thus ­becoming dye mordants or substances that will readily accept

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Fig. 40.3  Comparing toning and tinting. Top: A sepia toned still. Bottom: A tinted still. (D. W. Griffiths’ 1930 Lincoln)

dyes. In one process the treated print is washed and dried and run through a silver ferrocyanide solution to make the metallic silver receptive to dye replacement, usually an aniline dye, using an aqueous mixture of the dye plus acetone, potassium ferricyanide, and acetic acid. The length of time in the mixture determines the amount of dye replacement of the silver and the intensity of the toning effect. The next procedure was not frequently used, namely, differential hardening requiring bathing the print in a bleach solution with the reaction of the bleach and the silver hardening the gelatin adjacent to the image allowing dyes to be differentially absorbed. Finally, color development uses chemical couplers in the emulsion, which form dyes at the oxidation sites associated with the developed silver. The silver is bleached away to leave an image composed only of dye. Such a method was used commercially for the duplitized TruColor release print process, as described in chapter 48. In some cases it can be difficult to tell (or r­ emember) the difference between tinting

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and toning especially for images with lots of ­mid-­range density. Toning was used for many of the attempts at two-color printmaking. Toning or tinting, if the process was not applied to the entire thousand-foot reel used for the distribution of features, involved splicing tinted or toned section into the release print. D. W. Griffith invented a way to create a toning effect during projection by shining a bank of colored lights, located above the screen, onto it, in which the colors were changed in coordination with the action. The process must have reduced the contrast by washing out the image to some extent. Because of its effect on the mid-range and dark tones, it’s akin to toning rather than tinting. Griffith’s invention was used for some screenings of Broken Blossoms in 1919 and was described in one review as “revolutionary,” but apparently it was not used thereafter (Nichols 1985, p. 121). It is described in USP 1,334,853, Method and Apparatus for Projecting Moving and Other Pictures with Color Effects, filed May 14, 1919. In addition to the novelty of the concept, it is the relatively unusual contribution to the technology by a filmmaker, since nearly every celluloid cinema invention was made by a scientist or engineer. Griffith also received patents for USP 1,476,885, describing a front-­screen background projection method, and USP 1,767,668, describing lighting effects using a gauze screen. In the early decades of the celluloid cinema, audiences understood that these applied color processes were not natural color images. They knew that this addition of color was not necessarily an attempt to accurately depict the visual world, but rather was an attempt to create a mood. People probably valued the images for what they were, an interpretation that heightened their enjoyment of the film, but they understood the limitations of applied color, which in fact were its strength and charm. Kodak’s researcher Loyd A.  Jones (1929), who made films that were pure color and shape, makes this point, in the context of tinting: “It must be admitted that the language of color – the more or less precise evaluation of the emotional value of the various hues, tints, and shades – is at present in a very rudimentary stage of evolution. Correlations are in many cases subconsciously felt without being consciously defined.” Jones used his invention, described in USP 1690, 584, Apparatus for Producing Kaleidoscope Designs, filed April 21, 1924, to make movies of nonrepresentational colored patterns in motion, which I surmise created images something like those of the Clavilux invented by his contemporary Thomas Wilfred, or Jones’ invention might be seen as a descendent of the Chromotrope (Betancourt 2006). As one might expect, the language of tinting and toning colors became conventionalized with specific colors representing a mood, location, or time of day, and so on. To some extent the choices seem to be inevitable or might be ­characterized as common sense red for fire; orange for a sunset; lavender for a romantic mood; yellow or amber for out-

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Fig. 40.4  Griffith’s USP cover sheet teaching a toning-like effect using colored lighting to illuminate the screen.

door scenes or to indicate a desert or hot environment; green for forest scenes or for an eerie or horrific effect, as was the case for the original release prints for Universal’s 1931 Frankenstein; and blue or indigo for nighttime or moonlight scenes. This last choice is interesting because in near darkness, less than a few foot Lamberts, we see scoptically and therefore monochromatically since only the retinal rods are used. To this day, when shooting day-for-night, especially to indicate moonlight, which is in fact reflected sunlight, the print often looks like it might have been toned or tinted blue (Yumibe 2012). In the silent era, when films were released by the studio, the exhibitor could select either a black and white or colored print, for which they would pay more. In general applied color was costly, between 30 and 100 percent more than a black and white print. Hand-colored, prints using whatever the method cost more; distributors offered the exhibitor prices on a sliding scale based on the amount of color, more

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for the backgrounds plus the actors and less for just the actors. Films were sold outright to the exhibitor by Maguire & Baucus, and by way of example, their catalogue of Edison subjects, in 1900, listed a 50-foot black and white print at $7.50 and the hand-colored version at $11.50 (Yumibe 2012).1 Thus, in some cases prints were not colored by the studio but rather by a distributor who would add value in doing so. Today it is difficult for us to appreciate the quality of the work that was done, not only because so many of the prints have been lost but because those that remain are often badly worn or damaged, and the fact is that aniline dyes, while fine for clothing, are fugitive (Musser 1990). There is speculation as to whether, prior to 1900, the local application of color was commonplace, but with the rise in its importance, special on-­set adjustments were employed by some filmmakers in order to take advantage of hand coloring (Gaudreault 2012). Méliès, who considered color to be in integral part of his work, took into account the limitations of the blue-violet sensitive camera film that would render greens and reds as dark tones or black, limiting the ability to apply color to his print. His sets were painted monochromatically so that a judgment could be made with regard to print coloring. Méliès’ view, based on the color blind emulsions available, was that: “…colored sets come out very badly. Blues become white, reds, greens, and yellows become black; a complete destruction of the effect ensues” (Yumibe 2012). Méliès coordinated his efforts with Elisabeth Thuillier who ran a workshop that was originally devoted to coloring lantern slides. Thuillier also colored films for Pathé and Raoul Grimoin-Sanson in her shop located in Vincennes, an eastern suburb of Paris. Between 1897 and 1912 she employed 220 women, at any given moment, to hand color films using up to five colors, each woman devoted to one color that she applied with a brush that might have only one bristle. Because of the time-consuming nature and innate inaccuracy of hand painting so many small frames, mechanical processes were devised for applying local color, notably by means of the Pathéchrome, Gaumont, and Handschiegl processes. On the other hand, as noted above, such inaccuracies may not have mattered as much as one might suspect, since audiences probably appreciated applied color for its irregular and wobbly nature because it was a handmade, random, charming, and living element augmenting the image. An appetite for the application of local color was created by the photochrom (a generic  – there were many vendors) printing process, which used for postcards and other printed matter that was popular between 1890 and 1914. Tens of thousands of subjects and millions of these lithographs were printed, with the colors chosen by artists. Lewinsky (2017) Yumibe’s, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, has many color plates illustrating applied color, and tinting and toning. 1 

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Fig. 40.5  A photochrom card from the 1890s of the Amalfi coast seen from the Capuchin convent.

writes that the ubiquitous photochrom card (the process was also used for the reproduction of paintings), stimulated the desire for color movies. One method for accomplishing this mechanically was Pathé’s procedure, introduced in 1905, called Pathécolor or later Pathéchrome, which is credited to Charles Pathé, and at its best resembled a photochrom post card. It was improved the following year by licensing technology from Joseph Florimond, and by December 28, 1906, 100 Florimond stencil cutting machines were in service. Pathéchrome was a dye tinting process wherein the dyes were applied to the prints’ emulsion surface using stencils to delimit the dyed areas, which greatly sped up the coloring process. The advantage of the system was that the heavy lifting was in the stencil preparation and a stencil could be used to make a great many prints. Reynaud, in August 1896, for his photographed Guillaume Tell, which was projected at the Théâtre Optique, his last-ditch attempt to compete with the Edison cinema, was the first filmmaker to adopt stencil coloring, a process that had previously been used for wallpaper and illustrations. Pathé-Frères, in Vincennes, expanded its local color application operation in 1909 employing 400 workers using Jean Méry’s process, an improvement to the Pathé system based on Méry’s pantograph for cutting stencils, one for each color. Pathé licensed Méry’s patent at the end of 1907 and then employed him in 1908 to further improve it, but he left the company in 1911 and moved to Éclair where he continued to develop stencil technology (Yumibe 2012). The improved accuracy and efficiency of Méry’s technique helped to further differentiate stencil printing from its hand-applied color competitor, and it also offered a challenge to Kinemacolor. The earliest stencil examples, according to Yumibe (2012), exhibit even more “within the line” inaccuracy than the best hand coloring. But it was the improvements in stencil coloring that led to Pathé’s achieving a dominant

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Fig. 40.6  The Pathé stencil machine. The frame of a print was projected onto a rear screen (bottom right) and the operator used a stylus, one end of a pantograph, to follow the outlines of areas on the enlarged frame. The other end of the pantograph had a cutting tool to produce the stencil on 35 mm leader. (Cinémathèque Française)

position in print production. A craftsperson would create a stencil, a frame at a time, by outlining areas to be colored by tracing them (this would later be called rotoscoping) on an enlarged projected frame using Méry’s pantograph. Previously a scalpel had been used to directly cut the stencils from a print by hand, an excruciatingly difficult process because of the size of the frame. For the Méry process the image of a 35 mm print was traced; a step-contact print was used to improve registration and enhance the accurate juxtaposition of the stencil with the release print. The stencil was cut by the craftsperson who used the pantograph to trace the rear project image causing a vibrating electromagnetically driven needle to cut into 35 mm leader. Several hundred women worked in the Pathé factory to cut the stencils, and others to hand color selected portions of the print. The release prints were also made using a step-contact printer, exposing one frame at a time, rather than the continuous motion contact method to avoid slippage between the negative and the print; this ensured accurate registration so that the stencil and print would line up to insure that the dyes would be precisely applied. The release print was sometimes also tinted or toned prior to the stencil printing, with sepia toning having been common, and also handapplied color might be touched up here and there. Gunning et al (2015) also credits Florimond with improvements to the printing machine devised by Méry in 1906 and 1908. It worked by holding the print and stencil in contact as they ran over a large diameter sprocket wheel where the dye was applied. The machine applied each color one pass at a time, with a loop of velvet that wiped the color onto selected areas of the print as it was blocked from other areas by the stencil. The saturation of the velvet loop and the amount of dye applied was carefully controlled. The dye was held in a reservoir that was gravity fed to, and absorbed by, a moving

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Fig. 40.7  A Pathécolor stencil. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 40.8 A Pathécolored print of La Passion De Maître, 1912. (Cinémathèque Française)

ribbon that was swept by a rotating cylindrical brush roller. A brush transferred dye to the moving velvet loop that then applied the dye to the print. The Pathé process was in demand, and some American studios considered shipping their prints to France for coloring. Customs’ duties and shipping may have ruled this out, but American films could have

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been colored for distribution in France and Europe. Examples of Pathéchrome frames I have seen in Yumibe’s book and elsewhere, are beautiful and superior to the hand application of color, and in fact Kinemacolor, although this comparison may be unfair since the processes are so different. However, in its early years it would seem that stencil color was not any better than hand-applied color. Pathé’s competitor, Gaumont, also employed a system of stencil coloring, noted for its use of subtle hues, which toward the end of the 1910s was predominately employed for historical dramas and travelogues. The Handschiegl-Wyckoff Process is a different approach to mechanically applied color and is described in USPs 1,303,836, The Art of Coloring Cinematographic Films, and 1,303,837 Machine for and Art of Coloring Cinematographic Films, both filed on November 20, 1916. Handschiegl-­ Wyckoff was developed for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1916 production of the life of Joan of Arc, Joan the Woman, and was used through 1926 for a number of features such as Universal’s 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, most often for titles and spot coloring of a single object in a shot. Given the description in the patent The Art of Coloring Cinematographic Films, the intention was to make three sets of opaqued coloring masters, also known as plates or matrices, one each for the red, yellow, and blue subtractive primaries for successive printing passes; subtractive color mixing of the dyed passes could permit a wide range of colors. Handschiegl and Pathéchrome gave similar results, according to the color motion picture process inventor, William Van Doren Kelley (1931). These were the major mechanical dye tinting technologies of the silent era. Unlike the three-strip Technicolor natural color process, two decades in the future, the Handschiegl and Pathéchrome techniques involved a post-­ production decision as to where and how color was to be applied. In the case of the former, print quality depended on Max Handschiegl’s (1880? – 1928) hands-on approach. The listed inventors of ‘836 and ‘837 are Alvin C. Wyckoff, Cecil B. DeMille’s cameraman, and Handschiegl, an engraver and lithographer trained in St. Louis, both employees of the laboratory of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation Studio (which became Paramount Pictures in 1927). By the time the patents were issued, Handschiegl had left Paramount, and the process was then sometimes known as the Wyckoff Process or the DeMille-Wyckoff Process, but afterward it was used for features by studios other than Paramount where it was called the Handschiegl Color Process. Handschiegl is credited with being first to color films using the imbibition process “on a commercial scale.” (Max…, 1928) Handschiegl won a significant patent interference action shortly before his death that affirmed the priority of his process. The first step of implementing the Handschiegl process was to paint a print of the film with an opaque material in the specific areas to which color would be applied. For example, in a scenic view, the sky would be opaqued so that

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Fig. 40.9  The Handschiegl-Wyckoff applied dye transfer color printing method as taught in the cover sheet of the USP. Successive passes of imbibed dyes are described, but in practice the process was often used for single dye spot coloring.

the release print would be dyed blue in that area. The “blocking out” or hand painting parts of the image was done directly onto a master print from which imbibition matrices were printed. (Imbibition is the transference of a dye from one surface to another.) According to Kelley, who observed the process, it took months for women to make the plates, but despite the difficulties of doing so for each frame, no enlarged image or pantograph was used as was the case for Pathéchrome. The print with its painted areas was then duplicated to produce a negative that became the printing master or matrix whose opaque areas were clear after processing. The exposed printing master was processed in a tanning developer to differentially harden the gelatin so that its softer areas were able to take up more of the dye than the hardened areas. The printing master was soaked in the dye, with the excess dye next squeegeed or blown off, and the master was dried. The monochrome release print was mordanted, or prepared to receive dye, by immersion in a solution of oxgall, a wetting agent, which softened its emulsion. The matrices were now used to imbibe the dye they held in the gelatin using a machine that had three drums for ­contacting the matrix and the monochrome print under pressure. The Handschiegl technique has similarities to the twoand three-color Technicolor imbibition printmaking

processes and has similarities to the work of Cros and Edwards, with their independently invented Hydrotypie (circa 1880) processes and Didier’s Pinatype (1905). Handschiegl was one of several applied color practitioners working for the film industry, a group that included Gustav Brock, Arnold Hansen, and G. R. Silvera. Famous PlayersLasky Corporation sued Handschiegl, and others associated with the process, for patent infringement in 1920. At Paramount, Loren Taylor, a former bandleader and newspaperman, took over management of the process generically called “spot color,” now branded as Quadri-color or Paramount Color, which was most often deployed for titles and for spot color (Layton 2015), unlike Pathécolor that was most often used to tint all of the significant elements of a shot. The Handschiegl process was used for Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1917), and Fairbanks’ The Three Musketeers (1921) (Basten 2005). The price for the Handschiegl treatment in 1926 varied from about $0.09 per foot for approximately 700 feet to $0.18 per foot for a 100 foot job. Black and white prints at the time cost the studios $0.026 per foot, prints made by the cemented duplitized Technicolor process were $0.16 per foot, and Kelley Color prints were $0.22 per foot. Kelley Color bought the Handschiegl process in 1927 and attempted

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to modify it for making two-color prints with the red record used as the key monochrome print or blank, onto which the blue-green and red-orange matrices were imbibed. However, Kelley (1931) reported that the spreading of the red dye beyond its boundaries could not be overcome at production speeds. After this failed effort to adapt the Handschiegl process applied color technology to “natural color” two-color prints, Kelley sold it to Technicolor in 1928, where it continued to be used until 1931 (Scott 2001). Prior to the arrival of photographic slides, magic lantern slides were painted to create the color image, but not as an addition to a monochrome image. As hand-painted slides gave way to photographic slides in the mid-nineteenth century, the expectation must have been that slides would continue to be in color. As far as the celluloid cinema is concerned, a question arises with regard to use of color as a post-production process: did it express the creative intentions of the filmmaker? Did the director, the cinematographer, the set and costume designers work to create the applied color look of the film? As long as color was an afterthought, however pleasing it may have been to audiences, it was a post-­production process, something superimposed onto the film as a means to enhance its marketability. The situation is analogous to the post-production process used today for converting planar cinematography into stereoscopic release prints. That is not to say that there were not some filmmakers who understood and took color into account or who might have controlled the post-production process. The example of Méliès has been cited, but other silent era filmmakers such as Griffith and DeMille had input in the choice of colors used in prints of their films. While the ersatz color effects may have been pleasing, filmmakers would have had difficulties learning how to use color if they could not see and control what they are doing at the time of cinematography. Applying color or painting on film continued to be practiced into the twentieth century by a handful of filmmakers, a group which included artists Len Lye (Leonard Charles Huia Lye, 1901– 1980), born in New Zealand, who is known for his “direct film” work, beginning with his 1935 A Color Box (WS: Len Lye), and American filmmakers Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) and Barry Spinello (born 1941). Attempts to color black and white films for commercial rather than artistic or aesthetic purposes in response to a demand created by color television. Yumibe (2012) credits the origin of the computerized application of color to a process created by Wilson Markle and Brian Hunt, as described in USP 4,710,805, Method of, and Apparatus for, Modifying Luminance Levels of a Black and White Video Signal, filed July 11, 1983, and assigned to Colorization, Inc., Toronto. Hal Roach studios bought an interest in Markle’s Colorization (the word has become a generic) Inc. and applied the process to two features it had produced in 1937, Topper and Way Out West, as well as to the 1946 production It’s a Wonderful Life

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(Newsline 1986, p.61). A number of filmmakers and critics objected to the process, which at the time was implemented crudely in production but, wonder of wonders, looked remarkably good for demonstrations. Objections were based on aesthetic concerns and a regard for the intentions of the director. Critic Roger Ebert (2010) was disgusted by colorization and complained that it was vandalism and akin to graffiti. In 1988 tycoon Ted Turner, who had acquired the rights to Citizen Kane, publicly announced that he had hired two companies to demonstrate their ability to colorize scenes from Kane. Turner was roundly criticized for this plan, which was likened to the desecration of a cultural monument. The following year Turner Entertainment backed off and issued a statement saying that their review of Welles’ contract with RKO indicated that their right to colorize the film may have been prohibited (Lebo 2016). In fact Welles loathed the idea and is reported to have said to his friend, fellow filmmaker Henry Jaglom: “Make me one promise. Keep Ted Turner and his goddamn Crayolas away from my movie” (McBride 2006). Coloring black and white films got a shot in the arm with DVD releases of television shows in the mid-2000s, and the practice of colorizing archival footage for use in features and documentaries has become an accepted practice. The early work of colorization resembled accurately applied local color overlaid on black and white images producing a milky pastel look. Later technology used hue to take the place of the monochromatic image, a process reminiscent of Kodak’s 1949 hand-coloring Flexichrome dye process, the revival of a 1940 process invented by Jack Crawford, in which dyes are added to a gelatin relief image and proportionately substituted for shades of gray. Depending on the skill of the artist, it was so good that the images could be easily mistaken for the three-color color photography of the day (Collins 1990; Coe 1978). Although colorization, despite computer assistance, remains labor intensive, improvement by algorithmic means is claimed by Barry Sandrew and others such as the Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Sandrew was originally with American Film Technologies, Inc., of Pennsylvania and then Legend Films, a California company. In a number of granted patents, he describes methods to automate the coloring of black and white images based on their monochromatic attributes.2 Visual effects shops are also called upon to supply colorized shots or scenes of films, and there appears to be, in principle, despite the many granted patents in the field, no proprietary barrier to doing so. The process itself has a number of similarities to the conversion of 2-D to 3-D movies; both require lots of rotoscoping.

USPs 4,984,072; 5,093,717; 55,344,915; 7,181,081; 7,333,670; and 7,577,312. 2 

41

Color Elucidated

Color is everywhere, on the earth and in the heavens, and there are different ways for producing what we perceive as color, some more common in our daily lives than others. When we look up at the midday sky, its blue color is produced by the scattering of the white light of the sun as it passes through the atmosphere, in which all but the wavelengths of light that are required for producing blue are scattered, but when the sun is at the horizon and there is even more scattering, because of the additional atmosphere through which light must pass, and so the sky looks orange or red. The sun emits white light and does so because of its relentless thermonuclear reaction, the conversion of hydrogen into helium and photons, but on earth there are less spectacular examples of the physics of emission, like fire and artificial illumination. In addition to scattering and emission, color can be created by refraction, which is the explanation for the rainbow’s spectral array. As rays of light pass through water droplets in the atmosphere, they are bent differently, depending on their wavelengths, producing the spectrum that Newton demonstrated with his prism. The sky at night also provides examples for how the sensation of color is created: when we look at the stars that are light years away, which are emissive sources like the sun, they have different colors depending on how hot they are (the hotter the whiter), but as for the planets and the moon, their colors result from the predominant method for producing color here on earth, the reflection of light by a solid body. An illuminated object both absorbs and reflects light at different wavelengths, and it’s the reflected light that is responsible for the sensation of color. Newton (1730, 1952) was the first person to note and experimentally verify this concept by projecting a pure color created by the prismatic refraction of white light onto paper of the same color. As he wrote in his Opticks, color exists only when it is perceived: “The rays, to speak properly, are not coloured. In them is nothing else than a certain power or disposition to stir up a sensation....” Newton performed and described many experiments using simple optical devices, slits, prisms, lenses, and surfaces both white and colored, on which to project light. He

famously demonstrated that white light from the sun is made up of the colors of the rainbow, with a simple experiment in a dark room by shining sunlight through a good-quality prism. When the prism’s refracted rays were projected onto a white card, Newton saw the spread of colors of the visible spectrum from red to violet. He learned that each color was, in a sense, fundamental because it remained unaltered when passed through another prism. One of the most wonderful things that he found was that when he mixed the rays of light of colors, projected on top of each other on a white surface, a new color was perceived. For example, when he projected blue and green on top of each other, he saw what we now call cyan. He demonstrated that by recombining all of the colors of the spectrum on a white surface, the result is perceived as white. This mixing of colored light is called additive color to distinguish it from subtractive color, and these are the two related methods for projecting color motion pictures. Using a moving comb-like shutter, Newton was also able to demonstrate that additive color could be produced by the sequential addition of its components: a rapid alteration of colors produces a new color, which for us is important because sequential additive color is the basis for the earliest celluloid cinema projection color systems. It may come as a surprise to the reader how many of the concepts of color vision and color photography originated in Opticks. Newton made use of the concept that light was a particle, which he called a corpuscle, in which the red corpuscles are larger than the violet corpuscles. In his Opticks he also observed that sheets of glass when touching can create rainbow-­like rings of color, which we now call Newton’s rings, and that soap bubbles’ colors are produced by the same phenomenon, which he explained by the interference of waves of light, despite his advocacy of the corpuscular construct. Newton did not understand the physical nature of a light wave, but he was familiar with water waves, and he also understood that sound was made up of waves in air. It was inconceivable to him that a light wave could travel through space unless, like sound through air, there was a

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medium to carry it, so he postulated the existence of what he thought might be the physical properties of a mysterious substance he called the ether, a medium that would permit the motion of small waves. One of his proposals was that the retina, which he sometimes called the “bottom of the eye,” contained a structure that allowed for the perception of color he called “the ends of the capillamenta of the optic nerve.” Newton’s contemporary Huygens (1690, 2007; WS: 2012), the inventor of the magic lantern, was an advocate of the wave or undulation theory of light that he propounded in his book Traité de la Lumière… (Treatise on Light: In which are explained the causes of that which occurs in reflexion & in refraction, and particularly in the strange refraction of Iceland crystal), which was largely ignored due to the acceptance of the corpuscular theory.1 About a century later, Thomas Young (1802), the physician and physicist who deciphered the Rosetta Stone, presented the Bakerian Lecture before the Royal Society on November 12, 1801, titled On the Theory of Light and Colors. By using apparatus similar to Newton’s, he performed and described experiments, one in which sunlight passes through two adjacent slits and casts a pattern of bright and dark bands on a screen. This pattern, he explained, had to be caused by the constructive and destructive interference of waves whose vibrations are perpendicular to their direction. Young based his ideas about color on Newton’s Optics and even used data that Newton had recorded about the spacings between the colored rings (Newton’s rings) formed by glass plates in intimate contact, to calculate the wavelengths of the various colors of light. He enunciated what became the basis for color photography, the additive primaries, which today are taken to be red, green, and blue, but there are many possible variations. Young also showed that when projected on top of each other they could produce a wide range of colors. He also proposed that it was unreasonable to expect that each and every one of the capillamenta at the bottom of the eye, which today we call retinal cones, functioned by sensing its own color, and he postulated that there must be three sets of distinct receptors for the long, medium, and short wavelengths of light that he identified as red, yellow, and blue. Half a century after Young, Hermann von Helmholtz (2005), physicist and physician, published work based on Young’s trichromatic stimulus hypothesis that can also be found in his 1867 Treatise on Physiological Optics, Volume 2, in which he advances Young’s hypothesis into a quantifiable scientific theory, based on color matching experiments, which thereafter became known as the Young-Helmholtz Huygens’ model is based on space being entirely filled with nondeformable balls, in intimate contact, as the medium that carried light waves. Thus, most curiously, his wave theory was based on corpuscles. This construct is similar to Newton’s theory of luminiferous ether.

41  Color Elucidated

Theory of Trichromatic Color Perception. Helmholtz (2005, p. 143) states: “The eye is provided with three distinct sets of nervous fibers. Stimulation of the first excites the sensation of red, stimulation of the second the sensation of green, and stimulation of the third the sensation of violet.” He further wrote: “but this does not mean that each color of the spectrum does not stimulate all three kinds of fibers, some feebly and others strongly.…” By which he means to say, for example, that a color that we perceive to be blue might also have wavelengths from the red portion of the spectrum. He also experimentally derived three overlapping curves that graph the sensitivity of the three types of cones, each mostly sensitive to the long, medium, and short wavelengths, a representation that has become commonplace. The visible spectrum is a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum with its wavelengths ranging from about 700 millimicrons for red (a millimicron is equal to a nanometer or one billionth of a meter) to 400 millimicrons for violet. Yellow-green is in the middle of the visible spectrum with a wavelength of about 550 millimicrons. Since color exists in the eye of the beholder, a few words will be devoted to how the eye functions. The eye, whose optics form an image of the visual world on the retina, is made up of the cornea, which light first enters, and then passes through the watery anterior chamber and next to the lens. These elements, like the lens of a camera, refract light to form a focused image on the surface of the retina, as light rays pass through a liquid region, the vitreous humor. The comparison of the eye and the camera is an apt one since both involve a lens projecting an image onto a light-sensitive surface in a dark chamber. The eye’s equivalent of a camera lens’s aperture or diaphragm is located in front of the lens, called the pupil or iris, which gives the eye its color. The iris closes down, a small circular opening in bright light, opening up in dim light, an adjustment similar to that of a camera’s diaphragm. A camera lens focuses by moving closer to or further away from the film, or sometimes just an element or section of a lens moves closer to or further away from the film. On the other hand the lens of the eye is focused by changing its shape, a process called accommodation, produced by muscles pulling on transparent fibers attached to the lens. For distant vision the shape of the lens is flattened and its focal length increased. The eye’s lens has a focal length of about 17  mm, which changes as it focuses, and given that the average maximum opening of the pupil is 8 mm, the eye has a top speed of about f/2.0 in the dark, with

1 

Fig. 41.1  The visible spectrum. Wavelengths are in millimicrons.

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Fig. 41.3  Helmholtz experimentally determined these curves for the long, medium, and short wavelength sensitive cones. Notice how the medium sensitivity significantly overlaps the long and short curves. The vertical axis is energy. (Helmholtz 2005, p. 143)

Fig. 41.2  The structure of the eye. (NEI)

the ability to stop down (close) to about f/8.0, with a pupil diameter of 2 mm in bright light. The retina’s macula or fovea, which has the greatest concentration of cones and provides the sharpest vision, is close by the optic nerve that transmits the eye’s processed signal to the brain, but this statement may be misleading since the eye is anatomically part of the brain, so partly processed is more like it. The cones are responsible for color vision, and as we have noted there are cones sensitive for the short, medium, and long wavelengths of light. Away from the fovea the density of the relatively insensitive cones falls off, and we have a greater density of sensitive rods, which are used for low light and produce monochromatic vision. Under good light we see color with the cones, photopically, and under dim light, we see with the rods monochromatically, scotopically. The rods’ sensitivity is based on a pigment, visual purple or rhodopsin, which is found in the eyes of many animal species, and the amount of rhodopsin in the human eye increases in dim light allowing the rods to become more sensitive  – they dark adapt. This adaptation allows the eye to have a sensitivity range on the order of a 1,000,000:1 and is analogous to changing a camera’s film to one with a faster emulsion or boosting the sensitivity of a digital camera’s sensor. The cones are sensitive to different portions of the spectrum based on the light absorbing pigments they contain, and the sensitivity of specific cones to long, medium, and short wavelengths of light provides the basis of the most straightforward explanation for how we perceive color. As put forward by Young and Helmholtz, there are three kinds of cones that absorb short, medium, and long wavelengths to transmit signals to the brain where it is processed, but this explanation must be incomplete since the eye has three additional layers of cells behind the cones and the rods that are linked together with horizontal connections. Therefore processing of the

s­ ignals of the cones and rods occurs within the eye before information is transmitted to the rest of the brain by the optic nerve. In 1855 Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposed that it was possible to photographically analyze the visible spectrum by applying the trichromatic stimulus theory and to reproduce a color image using additive color mixing. Leading up to this, Maxwell had experimented with temporal mixing of pigments using spinning tops and disks with colored segments, as Newton had done with his comb shutter. It was Maxwell who first applied the Young Hypothesis to photography and who produced the first triangular chromaticity diagram that, with further development, became an important tool in the development of color science and photography, but his experiment, while demonstrating his color photography scheme, was flawed as we shall learn. In 1861, professional photographer Thomas Sutton, working with Maxwell, photographed a tartan ribbon by placing filters made up of RGB colored liquids in rectangular glass flasks in front of a camera’s lens for three successive exposures. Three positive slides were printed from the negatives that were projected in superposition using three magic lanterns, each projecting through the same filters that had been used for photography. This resulted in an additive color image of the ribbon, the first example of natural color photography  – but it ought not to have worked because the photographic emulsions of the time were sensitive only to the blue-violet-ultraviolet portion of the spectrum (Longair, 2008). Ralph M.  Evans (1906?  – 1974), Kodak scientist, repeated Maxwell’s experiment and, following Maxwell’s notes, analyzed the spectral characteristics of the red liquid filter (Evans 1961). He found that it passed ultraviolet light, to which all silver halide emulsions are sensitive. Evans hypothesized that the red dye used in the ribbon’s material, like many red dyestuffs, must have reflected light at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. These two phenomena together allowed for Maxwell’s experiment to seemingly demonstrate trichromatic analysis and additive color projection.

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41  Color Elucidated

Fig. 41.4  Ive’s triunial magic lantern Photochromoscope for projecting color images based on Maxwell’s experiment. Three positive slides printed from negatives taken through RGB filters are projected in super-

imposition through RGB filters. The lantern depicted here was made by Newton and Co. in 1888. (Leisegang 1986, p.68)

Maxwell was remarkably lucky that the demonstration worked because the ribbon’s ultraviolet reflection substituted for the ribbon’s red reflected light, which the red filter ­transmitted. Wall (1925) reports that Sutton’s exposures of the ribbon were made outdoors in bright light, through colored fluids containers about three quarters of an inch thick, exposed from several seconds up to 12 minutes, depending upon the optical density of the fluids: “ammoniacal sulfate of copper” for blue (6 seconds), dilute “chloride of copper” for green (12 minutes), a sheet of “lemon-colored glass for yellow” (2 minutes), and a strong solution of “sulfocyanide” for red (8 minutes). Of interest is that Sutton also exposed the tartan ribbon through a yellow filter, about which Evans et al. (1953) comment: “The two versions of what took place cannot be reconciled, but it is certain that Maxwell clearly understood that analysis and synthesis by three, and only three, basic colors were required.” The words commonly used to denote colors, red, blue, and green, and so forth, are imprecise, and this lack of precision impedes understanding the differences between subtractive and additive color photography. Further, Newton’s selection of a handful of colors, the well-known ROYGBIV, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet hues, culled from the continuum of the spectrum was arbitrary and is not a selection of fundamental significance. Nonetheless, Newton devised what is probably the first color wheel by arranging the colors in

sequence around the circumference of a circle asserting that diametrically opposed colors had the greatest contrast. Scientists who came after Newton added more color designations to the spectrum and artists created their own color wheels with opposing or complimentary colors. Most of us have hands-on experience with color mixing when painting using the subtractive primaries, which we were taught are red, yellow, and blue, but more useful subtractive primaries are cyan, yellow, and magenta. Different color systems have been proposed during the last two centuries, which may work perfectly well for painters or philosophers like Goethe (1840) who described one in his book, Theory of Color, but such systems are not useful for creating trichromatic photographs. Attempting to achieve a full range of colors for photomechanical reproduction or ink jet printers requires the subtractive primaries cyan (a blue-green), yellow, and magenta (to some people a kind of pink). To make up for deficiencies in the absorption of the dyes or pigments, and to add contrast and sharpness to the image, a black key or K record is often added, as was the case for the first two decades of three-color Technicolor that used a subtractive release print process, which was a kind of photomechanical reproduction. Additive color, on the other hand, involves the mixing of colored light, not pigments or dyes, and is relatively unfamiliar to most people. A vast range of colors can be created by projecting combinations of RGB light onto a white screen,

41  Color Elucidated

and when slide projectors were common, the simplest way to demonstrate this was to use three of them aimed to coincide on a white screen, with each projector’s lens covered by a different filter, usually Wratten filters numbers 25 or 25A for red, 47B for blue, and 58 or 59 for green. The intensities of the projectors, if required, could be adjusted to produce the perception of white, and various combinations of intensities will produce the sensation of white. Many other primary triads are possible that can create a wide range of colors. There’s no fixed definition for white light because the eye adapts and will see the same piece of paper as white in sunlight, shade, or indoors under artificial illumination. If we project red and blue light onto the screen, we will see magenta; for blue and green light, cyan; and unintuitively, when mixing green and red light, we will see yellow – there’s no such thing as greenish-red or reddish-green. Changing the intensity of the light emerging from the projectors will change the perceived color, and there is more than one color mixture that will appear identical to the eye. Remarkably, two different additive mixtures created by different primaries, which appear identical to the eye, and are then filtered using the same filter, will produce a color sensation that is identical to the eye. The appearance of new colors made up of combinations of other colors can be predicted by adding the intensity contributions of the primaries using vector addition (Feynman 2011). If you cover the rays that emerge from Newton’s prism with a red filter, on their way to creating the rainbow spectrum on a white screen, you can observe the results of a filtration that absorbs two thirds of the spectrum and passes only the wavelengths from about 400 to 500 millimicrons. Do the same thing using the green filter and you’ll see the results of a filter that absorbs the spectrum except for the wavelengths from about 500 to 600 millimicrons, and for the blue filter, you’ll see the result of the absorption of the spectrum except for light from about 600 to 700 millimicrons. Maxwell’s primaries, red, green, and blue, are used for recording the three portions of the visible spectrum required for natural color cinematography whether the image is projected additively or subtractively, as will be explained. In this book the terms additive and subtractive color are used to designate the way the image is projected. Joseph S.  Friedman (1945), whose History of Color Photography, in effect continues the work of Edward John Walls’ The History of Three-Color Photography (published in 1925), commented: “the experimental procedure adopted by Maxwell was not a true application of the Young Hypothesis. He failed to recognize that the sensation curves he obtained in the course of his work on colorimetry were the basis for the theory of three-color reproduction. It was Frederic E. Ives who recognized this, and who incorporated it into his patent of 1890.” This patent, USP 432,530, Composite Heliography, filed on February 7, 1890, teaches how to determine the correct color filters to achieve accurate

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color analysis. Ives is considered to be one of the key inventors in the early days of color photography because of his correct understanding and explanation of the additive color primaries (Evans et al. 1953). While a good set of additive primaries are red, green, and blue, a good set of subtractive primaries are cyan (minus red), magenta (minus green), and yellow (minus blue) (CYM), so named because cyan is white light minus red light, magenta is white light minus green light, and yellow is white light minus blue light. Mixing dyes, pigments, or paints of any two of the subtractive primaries will produce one of the additive color primaries: cyan and magenta produce blue, cyan and yellow produce green, and magenta and yellow produce red. Mixing all three of them can produce black, with the possible requirement, as noted above, for a K record. The subtractive primaries are the basis for the projection of celluloid cinema color motion picture prints, computer hardcopy, as well as magazine photomechanical reproduction. For a celluloid motion picture print, light from the projector’s lamphouse must pass through three layers of superimposed color dyes; the layer closest to the celluloid base is cyan, the next is magenta, and the top-most dye layer is yellow. As white light passes through these layers, portions of the spectrum are subtracted by each layer, and the contributions of these three layers of dye can produce a vast array of colors, which can be plotted on the aforementioned chromaticity diagram. In this way it’s possible to compare the capabilities of one photographic or display system with another. Color reproduction technology may not be able to reproduce the full color gamut that the eye can perceive, but it can do a good job. To have a practical system of color reproduction for the celluloid cinema, it is necessary to be able to translate the photographed RGB analysis of the image into the subtractive CYM colors for release prints. A good illustration of how this works, on a practical level that some readers will have experienced, is the making of a color print of a photo from a computer file. Using a magnifying glass to look at the photo on the display screen, the reader will see a grid made up of adjacent rectangular RGB additive color primaries. The screen may be a backlit liquid crystal display with light passing through the red, green, and blue filters, covering each rectangular subpixel to make up a complete triad representing one color image element or pixel; the argument is similar for emissive light-emitting diode displays. The color produced by the LCD display (and a similarly filtered white light OLED [organic light emitting diode] display) is created by white light passing through each red, green, and blue filter. For the rendition of a particular color, each subpixel will have different intensities; if all are on at full intensity, the sensation is of white light. Each subpixel is an LC shutter whose ability to pass light is individually modulated or, for an OLED, a diode whose emission is similarly controlled. Even though the

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pixels do not lay on top of each other, additive color mixing is exactly the same as that for superimposed light because the subpixels are so close together, and the eye is sufficiently distant, that it cannot resolve them individually. When you make a print of a photo using your computer, the additive color image seen on the screen must be converted to subtractive color. This is accomplished by means of a lookup table that tells your printer what to do: the RGB pixels that make up the screen image are turned into CYMK information. At a minimum your color printer, assuming it’s the commonly used inkjet variety, uses cyan, yellow, and magenta, and black ink, the black K to make up for imperfections in the absorption characteristics of the other dyes or pigments. Early natural color celluloid cinema attempts were of the additive type that used the projection of images through col-

41  Color Elucidated

ored filters, but the CYM subtractive system prevailed. However, for the digital cinema, RGB additive color projection is commonplace. Trichromatic cinematography, photochemical or digital, involves analyzing the spectrum into three portions, red, green, and blue, but successful projection for the celluloid cinema requires color by subtraction and uses CYM primaries for prints, like those made using Eastman Color film. The subtractive printmaking method was enunciated by Louis-Arthur Ducos du Hauron on July 14, 1862, in a paper submitted to a member of the French Academy of Sciences that was suppressed because of doubts concerning its correctness, and so remained unpublished for 35 years, as we shall learn in the next chapter (Crosland 1992). Du Hauron first recognized that color prints viewed by reflected or transmitted light require a mixture of a set of minus primaries like cyan, yellow, and magenta.

Color Photography Before the Movies

It took almost a century of effort, after the invention of ­photography in 1839, before there were viable three-color processes for the celluloid cinema. The first such achievement for motion pictures came with three-color Technicolor Process Number Four that was introduced in 1932, to be followed by 16 mm Kodachrome in 1935. To give the reader some notion as to the magnitude of the effort to create color film, Wall (1925) lists about 2500 international entries in his patentography, spanning more than eight decades up to the 1925 publication of his comprehensive History of Three-­Color Photography. Only about a fifth of these were specifically designed to be applied to the celluloid cinema for natural color photography. Some cinema entrees may be duplicates, filed in more than one country, others may have been filed in countries he omits, and there had to have been work that was not patented. Some patents must have been much like others, some were impractical, and some moved the technology in fruitful directions. Motion picture technology chronicler James L. Limbacher writes that here were more than 100 attempts at celluloid cinema natural color processes (1968). The online database, Timeline of Historical Film Colors (WS), lists 230 early processes described or deployed worldwide, not all of them for natural color because some of the entries involve tinting and toning. Eastman Kodak engineering manager and cinema color technology historian Roderick Ryan (1977), in his A History of Motion Picture Color Technology, writes that in the United States alone there were 50 significant attempts to create motion picture color systems. Effort to create color photography began with still photography, since the celluloid cinema had yet to be invented. There are some dead ends that remain interesting because of their novelty, which I found to be irresistible to describe. Unlike Darwinian evolution the evolution of color photography is the product of the intelligence of a number of guiding hands, and we will briefly review how the science and technology advanced. With the exception of frame-sequential color, the concepts and products that were successfully applied to natural color cinematography were conceived for still photography prior to the invention of the celluloid cinema.

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One might suppose that methods for capturing and displaying full color employ Maxwellian analysis of the visible spectrum using color filters, as described in the last chapter, and this turned out to be the case, but there were flirtations with other approaches. A stab of hope was given to those who attempted to directly record color with a single unfiltered light-sensitive surface based on the experiments of Thomas Johann Seebeck of Jena, who in 1810 using a prism to cast the light of the visible spectrum onto a paper dampened with silver chloride, found that after 20  minutes of exposure colors were recorded, roughly corresponding to the original, with the blues and red reproduced best (Evans et al. 1953). In 1840 scientist Sir John Frederick William Herschel was also able to get a correspondence to the prismatic colors on paper soaked in a silver chloride solution, but he was unable to preserve the result, an irony of sorts because it was Herschel who proposed to Fox Talbot that sodium hyposulfite, or hypo, could be used to fix his Talbotypes. In 1848 French physicist Alexandre-Edmund Becquerel experimented with metal plates electrolytically coated with silver and treated with hydrochloric acid to produce a “thin … transparent and scarcely visible film” (Bolas 1897, p. 372). His heliochrome plates, it is said, reproduced the spectrum fairly well, but the greens were of reduced intensity. In 1851 a nephew of Nicéphore Niépce, Abel Niépce de-Sainte Victor, varied Becquerel’s heliochrome process by using silver chloride and varnishing the plate to improve the stability of the image. Hillotypes, first shown in 1850, based on the daguerreotype, were the creation of a Baptist Minister and professional daguerreotypist living in West Kill, New  York, Levi L.  Hill. They produced colors that were, according to Lavédrine and Gandolfo (2013), by means related to the heliochrome process. Newhall (2012, p. 269, 272) reports that contemporary experts were greatly impressed with the color rendition of Hill’s process and demanded that he reveal its details, but he refused to do so until 1856 and the publication of his Treatise on Heliochromy, which provided no useful information about an admittedly impossible to control process. Attempts to

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pursue the technique continued in Europe and the United States with no practical result. In 1868 Wilhelm Zenker proposed that Becquerel’s method, which used a metal reflecting surface, produced color by means of standing waves rather than chemical action (Evans et al. 1953). In 1890 Otto Weiner proposed that a silver chloride collodion emulsion was sufficiently fine grained to record standing waves as thin laminae of silver in the developed emulsion. The following year Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann (1845–1921) implemented the approach using an exceedingly fine-grain albumen emulsion, for which he received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics (WS: Nobel Prize. Org). Light entered the Lippmann process camera’s lens as usual, exposed the glass plate whose emulsion was facing rearward and in intimate contact with liquid mercury,

Fig. 42.1 Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 42.2  The Lippmann color process. A photographic plate’s very fine-grain emulsion is in contact with a liquid mercury mirror. When exposed, standing waves are created at the emulsion-mercury boundary and recorded in the developed film as laminae. (Not to scale)

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which reflected out-of-phase light waves back through it. The reflected light waves constructively and destructively interfered with the incoming light waves to produce standing waves that exposed laminae, or thin layers, to produce a kind of diffraction grating. A cross-section of the developed emulsion, viewed under magnification, shows the silver metal grains in proportion to the amplitude of the standing waves nodes, a confirmation that light can be explained in terms of the wave construct. After development the plate was viewed from the emulsion side under reflected diffused white light in order to observe a full-color image. Colors were produced using the same physical mechanism that produces colors from an oil slick. Since no filters, dyes, or pigments are used for analysis or reproduction, this is one of the few processes that can produce an unimpeachably accurate record of color based on recording wavelengths. Attempts failed to develop Lippmann’s invention into a practical photographic system. The Lumières, greatly improved the Lippmann emulsion, so much so that even Lippmann used their process (Bjelkhagen 2013). The Lumières made their first such color portrait in 1893 but after several years of effort dropped the method and switched to a trichromatically analyzed approach, as explained below. The Carl Zeiss organization of Jena, in 1910, also unsuccessfully attempted to market a Lippmannbased color system for portraits and landscapes. The product that reached the market is probably based on that of Zeiss researchers August Köhler and Johannes Lehmann, as described in USP 890,863, filed September 3, 1907, Utilizing Lippmann Photographs. Whatever its theoretical virtues, the Lippmann process had major difficulties with regard to convenience in taking pictures, viewing them, and making prints. Chapman Jones (1904) remarked, in a 1904 issue of Nature that the process was: “useful to the physicist rather than the photographer.” Moreover, it cannot be applied to cinematography. One useful approach to color printing came about due to the work of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative-positive system of photography, who spent decades seeking a process for making prints that did not fade. In 1852 he invented a photographic printmaking method adapted from one used for making printing plates, which he found to be attractive because printers’ ink does not readily fade. Fox Talbot discovered that the gelatin of a photographic emulsion that had been bathed in potassium bichromate became sensitive to light and harder and insoluble in proportion to exposure. After the bichromated plate was exposed and washed in warm water to remove the softer gelatin, a colorless relief image was produced that could be used as a printing plate when filled with ink and contacted with paper under pressure. This basic discovery, the tanning or ­hardening of gelatin to produce a matrix, although applied by Fox Talbot for what was monochrome printing, is the direct ­precursor of impor-

42  Color Photography Before the Movies

tant processes for still color photography and for cinema release printmaking methods using imbibed color dyes, most notably that of the Technicolor dye transfer process. In 1889 E.  Howard Farmer discovered that potassium bichromated (also called dichromated) gelatin could be hardened by being brought in contact with silver without exposure to light (Friedman 1945). This discovery, and the failure of the Lumières’ attempt to commercialize Lippmann’s invention, led to their adoption of a subtractive printmaking process in the mid-­1890s, which is described in French patent 245,948, of March 22, 1895. Following Farmer, the Lumières added a small amount of silver bromide to the bichromated emulsion of a positive printing transparency emulsion. Positive films made this way were exposed, each by an RGB analyzed negative, to make YCM subtractive transparencies. After exposure and processing (in which the soft gelatin was washed away), each positive transparency’s hardened gelatin relief image was dyed with the appropriate dye, and the resulting transparencies were juxtaposed and stacked on a glass plate support to be viewed by transmitted light. Eastman’s similar wash-off relief process was introduced in 1935, the antecedent of the better Eastman Dye Transfer process, developed by Louis Condax and Robert Speck, which was offered in 1946 (Collins). The Lumières’ subtractive hardened gelatin dye matrix process, like the later Eastman process, produced colors that were beautiful and deeply saturated. As Lavédrine and Gandolfo (2013) comment: “It would only be with the creation of chromogenic slide transparencies after 1935 (Kodachrome and Agfacolor) that such brilliant photographic colors would be seen again.” Unfortunately, the gelatin dye matrix process was a difficult one to use, and it was replaced by the Lumières’ less saturated but easier to use Autochrome. The ability of the gelatin emulsion to be chemically hardened in proportion to exposure creates two possibilities for color prints, both of which were exploited. After the softened gelatin is washed away, the gelatin remaining can be colored by taking up dye in proportion to its depth, with the result that the greater the amount of gelatin, the greater the color density. In this way it is possible to produce three appropriately dyed transparencies, made from negatives that had been exposed through RGB filters. We’ve seen, in chapter 40, how the Handschiegl process used such a dyed gelatin matrix as a kind of stamp to transfer color onto monochrome prints. As was the case for the Lumières’ process, these YCM transparencies of dyed gelatin can be laid on top of each other to be viewed using a light box or laid on top of paper to make a print. This was the basis for Technicolor Process 2, a subtractive duplitized printmaking method that cemented two prints base-to-base, one print with its gelatin dyed bluegreen and the other with gelatin dyed red-orange. Another related approach, which eventually became commercially valuable for cinema, was to use each gelatin relief

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matrix as a printing plate for dye transfer or imbibition, which did not depend on its gelatin taking up the dye. Each relief matrix is saturated with dye, and the excess is removed to leave an image made up of dye-filled declivities, with the printing density of the color proportional to the depth of the declivity. Each matrix is a vehicle for imbibing a dye onto the blank, or more properly into the blank’s gelatin that has been mordanted to receive it. The matrix is held under pressure with the blank for a period of time in order for the dye to be suitably transferred. In succession a dye image of each YCM primary is held in contact with and absorbed into the gelatin coating of the blank, hopefully in good registration and without the dyes spreading, to produce a printed subtractive three-color image. This imbibition or dye transfer process was used for Technicolor Process Number Three for two-color prints and in time for Technicolor Process Number Four for three-color prints. There were also efforts to perfect this technology for still photography including products with these brand names: Ozobrome, Trichrome Carbo, Duxochrome, Pinatype, Raydex, Jos-Pe, Vivex, Polychromide, and finally Kodak’s outstanding Dye Transfer product. For many years the Trichrome Carbo process was considered to be capable of producing the finest color prints (Evans et al. 1953). The first recognition that subtractive color images could be reproduced using three primaries was put into practice after 1710 by the Dutch printer Jacob Christopher Le Blon who used the mezzotint engraving process to produce remarkably lovely prints of anatomical subjects. Le Blon set the pattern for all later work in the field of color printing by heuristically selecting red, yellow, and blue primaries (later processes used cyan, yellow, and magenta, plus a black or K plate) in three passes to produce his color reproductions. By recognizing that three primaries could adequately do the job of reproducing the visible spectrum, Le Blon anticipated the work of Maxwell and Young, as recounted elsewhere in these pages (Lavédrine 2013, pp. 59–61). Indeed, in terms of the application of the concept to color printing, he anticipated du Hauron. In 1853 Hermann Günther Grassmann (1809–1877) developed the mathematics for understanding the additive color mixing of three-colored lights. Grassmann understood that an additive mixture of only three colors is required to define any color, and that adjusting the intensity of the components could continuously vary the colors perceived. Grassmann anticipated the classic 1861 demonstration of additive color photography by Maxwell. The credit for first articulating the conceptual basis for successful natural color photography is often given to ­Louis-­Arthur Ducos du Hauron (1837–1920), French physicist and inventor, whose experiments and writings spanned half a century. Cornwell-Clyne (1951) writes: “…Ducos Du Hauron in 1862 described…additive projection, the mosaic screen process, bipacks and even tripacks; thus he a­ nticipated

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nearly all subsequent practices.” At the age of 25, on July 14, 1862, while living in Algeria, he sent a family friend a paper titled Solution physique du problèm de la reproduction dews couleurs de photographie (Physical solution to the problem of photographic color reproduction), hoping that he would present it to the Académie des Sciences. The friend, L. (possibly Louis Francisque) Lélut, a member of the Académie, decided not to present the paper because a colleague to whom he showed it, who was not an expert in the field, felt there was no proof that the ideas were correct (Forch 1920, p. 281). The paper, in which du Hauron described analysis through three color filters and the method for making a subtractive print from the negatives using complimentary colors, was eventually published in 1897 (Crosland 1992). In a French patent granted on November 23, 1868, FP 83,061, Les Couleurs en Photographie, Solution du Problème, du Hauron describes his trichrome process, which calls for exposing negatives through green, orange, and violet filters. Prints are made from the three negatives on transparent sheets (so-called tissues) of bichromated gelatin that contained carbon pigments of red, blue, and yellow. When the three transparent pigmented sheets are overlaid on top of each other, a full-color photograph may be viewed either as a print or a transparency depending upon the substrate. This, and other similar printmaking process owe their existence to Fox Talbot’s discovery that gelatin can be treated so that photographic density can be represented as hardened gelatin. Du Hauron was reportedly unable to demonstrate the process for the Société Française de Photographie because of the lack of panchromatically sensitive plates. However, a lovely unsaturated three-color carbon print, which du Hauron made of a French village in 1877, is in the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester (Newhall 2012, p. 268). He also invented a means for single-user viewing of additive color transparencies with a peepshow-type device, a chromoscope, that became the basis for Frederic Ives’ Kromskop viewer, and he continued to publish articles that were the basis for a book published in 1869 of same title as the cited patent. Although du Hauron’s book, articles, and patents concern still photography, he anticipated the methods used for motion picture natural color processes. His concept for an additive color mosaic using a screen-plate or micromosaic filter was applied to still photography beginning in 1907 with the Lumière Autochrome, the first commercially successful color process for still photography, and later to the Dufaycolor motion picture process. The Autochrome plate was made by sifting potato starch to collect grains of about the same size separated into three parts, each stained one of the primary additive colors, red, green, and blue. The resulting powders were then mixed together and sifted over a tacky glass plate to adhere the grains. After the surface appeared gray, any minute i­ nterstices between them were filled in with a black powder. The micro-

42  Color Photography Before the Movies

mosaic of hopefully randomly distributed stained elements was then overcoated with a protective varnish, which when dry was coated with a panchromatic emulsion (Wall 1922; p. 137). The exposure was made through the glass plate and the stained potato starch micromosaic. The result was like other réseau processes in that it was processed to produce a reversal additive color transparency, similar to but different from other micromosaic processes, like Dufaycolor, which used ruled screens or réseaus with a fixed geometrical pattern of color elements. Such plates were reversal processed to produce positive images that were viewed rear illuminated or projected. Reversal processing takes advantage of the fact that the micromosaic screen, since it remains in place, is perfectly aligned with the filtered image elements. Each filter element is, hopefully, small enough so that the eye is unable to resolve the individual elements so that additive color perceptual synthesis occurred. Attempts were made to apply the technique using réseaus to cinema, and while it was not ideal for the celluloid cinema, the concept has been extensively applied to electronic cinematography for image capture and for displays using liquid crystal, light-emitting diode, and digital micromirror technology. Chapter 45 briefly discusses micromosaic color motion picture processes. French physician, poet, and inventor, Émile-Hortensius-­ Charles Cros’ (1842–1888) paper, Solution du Problème Photographie des Couleurs, was presented by Alphonse Davanne, the vice president of the Société Française de Photographie, to the society, on May 7, 1869, the same day that du Hauron’s paper on the same concept was presented

Fig. 42.3  The Autochrome micromosaic structure is visible in this magnified image as a random array of starch grains dyed blue, green, and red. (Cinémathèque Française)

42  Color Photography Before the Movies

(Hannavy 2007). Like du Hauron’s paper, Cros’ described the chronoscope for superimposing the images of trichromatically filtered transparencies to produce a color image by combining them through semi-silvered mirrors and color filters for additive synthesis. Cros called it a chromometer and gave more detailed information about its construction than had du Hauron with his similar viewer, which Wall (1925, p.  108, 109) shows included filters made of “grooves for troughs for colored liquids.” Two inventors, exposed to the same events and information, having hit upon the same idea more or less simultaneously, is far from unknown in the history of science and invention. Du Hauron and Cros, in later years, were amused by the incident, and Cros graciously accepted du Hauron’s priority. Between them they conceived of the fundamental practical approaches to color photography, most of which they could not put into practice since an enabling technology, the panchromatizing of an emulsion, was yet to be invented. Cros’ Hydrotype (or Hydrotypie) color printmaking process of 1881 was a predecessor of dyed matrix or imbibition processes, variations of which were used by Handschiegl for mechanically applied color and by Technicolor for release printing. Cros first proposed color synthesis by means of the frame-sequential method, like that used by Kinemacolor, which he verified using a phenakistoscope (Browne 1983). As noted previously, the phenomenon of temporal synthesis of additive color was first described by Newton (1730) in his Optics in an experiment using a comb-like shutter and later by Maxwell who performed additive color experiments using spinning tops. The ability to photographically capture natural color depends on the emulsion’s being sensitized to all the colors of the visible spectrum, but the first silver halide emulsions were only sensitive to the ultraviolet and blue-violet. In 1873 German photochemist and prolific author, Hermann Wilhelm Vogel (1834–1898), a professor at Berlin’s Technische Hochschule, announced his discovery of optical sensitization in the journal he had founded, Photographische Mittheilungen (Photographic Reports). By adding small amounts of aniline dye to the emulsion, Vogel extended its sensitization to the longer green wavelengths that were absorbed by the dye; this constituted the invention of orthochromatic film. A dye’s absorption of a portion of the spectrum, to extend emulsion sensitivity, brings to mind the mechanism explaining the sensitivity of the cones (Lambrecht 2011). In the next few years, Vogel learned how to extend the sensitivity of film to yellow, orange, and red to create the panchromatic emulsions (Hannavy 2007). Sensitization depends on photons impinging the dye molecules, which are surrounded by silver halide within the gelatin emulsion. The dye releases electrons that are injected into the silver halide, in effect exposing the halides using electrons rather than light. This improvement not only extended the range of film to the visible spectrum

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but also produced more sensitive film allowing for the use of faster shutter speeds to arrest motion, smaller lens aperture openings to increase depth of field, and exposures under dimmer illumination. Orthochromatic glass plates came on the market in 1882, but panchromatic plates were not available until 1906 when they were made and sold by the English firm Wratten & Wainwright, which had been founded in 1877 by Frederick Charles Luther Wratten and Henry Wainwright. Wratten made a significant advance in manufacturing film, specifically the noodling of the emulsion prior to coating, and in 1906 hired a scientist who became a legendary figure in the field, Charles Edward Kenneth Mees (1882–1960). Soon after joining the firm, Mees productized the technology of panchromatic emulsions, and the company offered panchromatic glass plates. Mees also worked on a line of gelatin filters that came to be known as Wratten filters, which became a mainstay of photographers and scientists through the twentieth century and to this day. Mees’ efforts to accurately specify and consistently manufacture filters are significant because prior to his work, these filters (called screens at the time), made of dyed collodion, gave undependable results. The ability to make such filters out of gelatin, often laminated between sheets of flat glass, to a published specification of their spectral absorption, was a great advance and one required for successful color photography. In 1912 Eastman purchased the Wratten & Wainwright firm, and Mees moved to Rochester assuming the role of director of Kodak’s research laboratory. However, it wasn’t until 1926 that off-the-shelf panchromatically sensitized 35  mm film became available from Kodak (Jones 1926). Before this Kodak panchromatized negative was special ordered or cinematographers themselves panchromatized film prior to use by bathing it in sensitizing solutions of dyes such as dicyanin or pinacyanol. Ammonia and alcohol, in an aqueous solution, were also used to hypersensitize film rather than to broaden its spectral range. Filmmakers originally had been using colorblind stock, but orthochromatic camera film, which became available

Fig. 42.4  Blue, orthochromatic, and panchromatic emulsion sensitivities. All photographic emulsions are sensitive to ultraviolet and blue. Their ability to see the entire visible spectrum requires the addition of dyes.

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in 1906, was far preferable. Ortho stock became so identified with the films of Biograph Studios’ cameraman Billy Bitzer and director D. W. Griffith, they were said to have the “Biograph look.” With the new ortho camera negative, it became easier to predict how makeup would look on screen and how film would render hues in shades of gray, which it could accomplish with more subtlety and better gradation producing a softer, less harsh look (Mayer 2009). In addition, the ortho stock, since it was more sensitive to light, allowed for stopping down the lens aperture to increase depth of field. All told, ortho was a great improvement, but panchromatic stock proved to be even better. Despite this, there was the predictable resistance to change, and when Kodak introduced panchromatic 35 mm camera negative film there were those who felt it looked harsh or grainy, as is evident from the transcript of the discussion following Crabtree’s (1927) paper on the subject. There may have been some initial problems with the film but people can become so acclimated to the familiar that even genuine improvements can be challenged. With panchromatic sensitization the entire visible spectrum was rendered in appropriate shades of gray; for color photography it’s indispensable. Prolific American inventor Frederic Eugene Ives (1856– 1937) worked on natural color photographic technology for both still and motion pictures, and he also developed improvements to photomechanical reproduction, advancing the art of color printing. Ives made his contributions to color photography in the early 1900s at a time when the specifications for the spectral characteristics of the filters used for additive color photography and display were a subject of heated controversy; what were they and should they be the same or different for photography and display? Ives felt they ought to differ and that the projection filters ought to have narrow bandwidths. Although at the time the primary concern was additive projection, the related subject of subtractive printing was also a matter of concern (Evans, 1953). It had been beyond the purview of Maxwell, Young, or Helmholtz to provide practical recommendations for photography, and the subject was open for discussion. There were alternate ideas concerning filter choices put forth by Von Hübl, H.  Howard Farmer, and Alexander A.  K. Tallent (amongst others). In 1904 A. J. Newton and A. J. Bull performed the first comprehensive testing of filtration for subtractive displays, and their recommendations were influential (The Proceedings of the Optical Convention, 1905). In 1910 Mees and Pledge of Kodak articulated that a proper filtration combination was able to reproduce a good gray scale. The subject turns out to be complicated, in particular because the spectral sensitivities of the cones of the eye overlap significantly, and it is all but impossible to create color dyes or pigments that do not have overly broad spectra. The science of color photography has greatly advanced over the years,

42  Color Photography Before the Movies

but given that the human eye-brain is the final arbiter of image quality, the subject retains its subjective component. Ives also worked on stereoscopic imaging and invented the parallax stereogram, founding an approach for viewing stereoscopic images without eyewear, which may well bear fruit for cinema in this era of displays in which pixels are individually addressed. His interest in stereoscopy led to a special use for color motion picture printing technology when he and Jacob F.  Leventhal, beginning in 1922, produced the successful Plastigrams anaglyphic series of theatrical one-reelers, using duplitized prints, a process involving toned emulsions on both sides of the print. In 1888, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Ives demonstrated what is considered to be one of the first workable methods for making three-color prints on paper or glass he called heliochromy, a mélange of several techniques. Circa 1898 all three components of his Kromskop three-color system, which he developed in England under the aegis of the Photochromoscope Syndicate, reached the market: the Kromskop camera, the Kromskop slide viewer, and the ­triunial Kromskop projector, which together comprised an end-­to-­end system (McKernan 2013; Coe 1978). (They were also known as the Chromoscope or Photochromoscope.) The Kromskop camera passed light through the lens and then through a system of prisms and reflecting surfaces to split the image-forming rays into three parallel paths to

Fig. 42.5  Frederick Eugene Ives inserting slides into his Kromskop viewer.

42  Color Photography Before the Movies

expose plates through analyzing primary filters; such a camera is called a one-shot camera. The Kromskop additive color slide viewer positioned within it a Kromogram, a color photo made up of three positive transparency prints, like the chromoscope described by du Hauron and Cros. In 1895 Ives improved the system by imaging all three exposures adjacent to each other on a single 7 in × 5½ in plate. He also offered a spring-driven repeating back for view cameras to expose the RGB-filtered negatives in sequence. The system reportedly produced excellent colors, but it was cumbersome and went out of production after the introduction of the more convenient but less vivid and grainy Lumière Autochrome process that was introduced in 1907. Ives’ Kromskop Lantern turned

Fig. 42.6  Ives’ Kromskop camera as described in USP 475,084, Camera, filed February 12, 1892.Three related optical arrangements are given teaching how to split light into three parts, of equal path length, to photograph negatives through RGB filters.

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Maxwell’s three projector experiment into a product by housing three magic lantern projectors into a combined unit, a triunial projector, with a horizontal layout (Mees 1922). Other projectors for the same purpose, such as Hughes’ Docwra or Lancaster’s Triple, appeared at the same time but were of the more traditional vertically stacked triunial design. All achieved the same end: the projection of RGB-filtered positive slides to produce additive full-color images. Such additive color efforts may have served as proofs-of-concept for cinema inventors, but in the long run additive color projection was not well suited for the celluloid cinema, in part because projection was too complicated and tended to be insufficiently bright.

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42  Color Photography Before the Movies

Fig. 42.7  Ive’s stereoscopic three-color viewer as described in his USP 531,040, Photochromoscope and Photochromoscope-Camera, filed July 3, 1894. Top: the additive color viewer. Bottom: the RGB filtered stereopairs.

Wall (1925) describes an interesting example of a one-­ shot camera by photographer John Wallace Bennetto in 1897, as described in British Patent 28,920, Improvements in the Production of Coloured Photographs and Apparatus for that Purpose. Coe (1978) reports that by keeping its details under wraps Bennetto successfully created a whirl of anticipation, as reported in the British photographic press of the time. It was optically simpler than the Kromskop, splitting the incoming light into two, rather than three paths, by means of a beam splitter at 45° to the lens axis, a semi-silvered mirror coated on a red glass filter. Part of the image-forming light from the camera’s lens passed straight through and exposed the red sensitive plate. The light rays that were reflected upward, at right angles to the lens axis exposed a bipack, in this case two glass plates whose emulsions, the

upper sensitive to green and the lower to blue, were separated by a greenish-yellow filter to absorb blue light. This design is of interest because Wall believes it is probably the first such disclosure of the bipack and its layout is conceptually identical to that of the three-strip Technicolor camera. The bipack configuration by itself is also important because it was a widely accepted method for two-color cinematography under the Cinecolor and TruColor brands, offering the great advantage that the process used minimally modified 35  mm movie cameras. The Devin Tricolor and National Photocolor one-shot cameras were used into the 1950s for photos in Sunday newspaper rotogravure magazines (Kingslake 1992, pp. 54, 55), of which Fred Astaire sings: “And you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure,” in MGM’s 1948 Easter Parade, as he and Judy Garland stroll down the

42  Color Photography Before the Movies

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Fig. 42.8  A stereopair produced from additive color transparencies meant to be viewed with Ive’s stereoscopic Photochromoscope. It took six slides to accomplish this: two sets of RGB positives. (See Fig. 42.7.)

Fig. 42.9  Bennetto’s one-shot camera. The beam splitter B is combined with a red filter. Light passing through B exposes the red-­ sensitive (pan) plate at E.  Light reflected upward from B exposes emulsion to emulsion bipacked plates located at F, consisting off a blue-sensitive plate, exposed first, and behind it a green (ortho)-sensitive plate.

Fig. 42.10  A drop-back attached to a view camera. Long, medium, and short wavelength exposures are photographed on three glass plates in succession. While satisfactory for portraiture and landscapes most of the time, it was not suited for action photography.

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Fifth Avenue set, in a film released in Technicolor using a printing process resembling rotogravure. The drop-back camera, that used gravity or a spring motor to advance a plate for RGB sequential photos, persisted into the twentieth century, and one made by Butler for three-color separation negatives for view cameras was in use circa 1920 (Sipley 1951). This was a workable approach for motionless subjects and even for portraiture, but only the simultaneous exposure of all three negatives permitted three-color photography of moving subjects. In a French patent granted in 1895, du Hauron proposed what he called the polyfolium chromodialytique, a booklike assemblage of two emulsion-coated glass plates between which was sandwiched a sheet of film, an assemblage of color-analyzing layers that anticipated the transcendent method for modern color photography, known either as the integral tripack or the monopack. The topmost glass plate of the polyfolium chromodialytique was coated with a blue-­sensitive emulsion and exposed through the glass side of the plate so its emulsion was closer to the others. The light then passed through a yellow filter to absorb blue light to next expose a green-sensitized emulsion coated on the sheet film. The light then passed through the sheet film and a red filter on its way to exposing the red sensitive emulsion coated on a glass plate. The processed negatives were designed to produce an RGB record that could be used to make YCM prints. This is the basic design concept of films like Kodachrome, Eastman Color, Ektachrome, Agfacolor, and Ansco Color, which enjoyed the more sophisticated and practical method of coating all three emulsions on a single substrate. Many took up the multipack concept, like Ives in 1916, through the Hess-Ives Corporation, which put on the market the Hiblock tripack. It was made up of two glass plates and a sheet of film sandwiched between them, which was contained in a plate holder and exposed in a view camera. The plate closest to the camera had its front surface coated with a yellow dye.

42  Color Photography Before the Movies

Its rear facing emulsion was blue sensitive, the sheet film was green sensitive, and the front surface of the rear plate had a red sensitive emulsion, all of which was bound together at the edges (With the Trade… 1916). Coe (1978) reports a curious incident in the history of color photography involving deception. In 1928 English Color Snapshots Limited offered a product similar in concept to the Hiblock system, but aimed at the consumer market, using a sandwich of three acetate films and paper backing in the popular 120 roll film format. William Tarbin, its inventor, claimed to have improved the sharpness of his Trifolium film by moving the red-sensitive layer to the top of the tripack reasoning that it becomes the cyan image, which is most critical for the perception of sharpness, but both the red and the green layers are also sensitive to blue light, which must have contaminated their analysis. Tarbin proposed a yellow camera filter to overcome the problem, which Coe points out is a dubious solution to the problem posed by the peculiar order of the emulsion stacks. Customers returned their exposed snapshots to the Color Snapshots’ lab in the London suburb of Hendon, said to have the capacity to produce 6000 Colorsnap prints a day, which were printed using the dye transfer technique. In short order it was discovered, when the colors of common objects were misrepresented, that the company had girls hand coloring prints to make up for the process’s inadequacies. When the subterfuge was reported the year after it was launched, the resulting scandal forced Color Snapshots into involuntary receivership, despite the venture having raised over a million pounds, which may be on the order of half a billion dollars today. Nonetheless, the process was taken up under license by Agfa Ansco in the United States and Agfa in Germany with some success. Three sensitized surfaces, held apart by some distance because of the thickness of the substrate materials, must have compromised sharpness, but it seems to have given an acceptable result for small ­snapshot prints.

Urban and the Origins of Kinemacolor

The earliest celluloid cinema color systems were based on the principle of additive color projection. There are three methods for producing motion picture additive color: the frame-sequential technique involving nonsimultaneous analysis and color synthesis; analysis and synthesis of simultaneously captured and presented frames projected in registration; and analysis and synthesis using the micromosaic technique in which color information is incorporated within a single frame. The first additive color system that was patented, based on frame-sequential analysis and synthesis, was granted to Hermann Isensee of Berlin, DRP 98,799, on December 17, 1897, according to Cornwell-Clyne (1951). The patent describes a disk made up of three 120° primary color filter sectors rotating in front of both the camera and projector lenses for both exposure and projection. Many similar systems, suggested or actually built, would follow. The limitations of these techniques were well understood by the mid-1920s, and Wall (1925), who also credits Isensee, wrote: “…. any process, such as simultaneous projection which required a special machine, is severely handicapped commercially, and the alternate or persistence of vision methods (frame-sequential) had already become discarded. Therefore, the film of the future will be one which carries each picture as a finished colored result (subtractive prints). Many have been and are still striving towards this end, chiefly by the two color methods, which obviously reduces the essential operations, and the results are in some cases fairly satisfactory.” (Parentheses added.) Without a doubt, this learned opinion is based on the histories of and issues raised by Kinemacolor and the various additive iterations of Kelley Color. Wall lists over 500 patents issued in the United States and abroad covering color motion picture systems that were granted by 1925. Wall, a scholar of color photographic technology, became a Technicolor researcher in his last years, but did not live to see the company’s triumph, Technicolor Process Number 4. In 1932, Walt Disney released the animated cartoon short, Flowers and Trees, using the Technicolor Process Number 4, which employed the first commercially viable three-color

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camera and subtractive printmaking system. In the long run, such three-color systems were successful, like Technicolor Process Number 4, Kodachrome, Agfacolor, and Eastman Color, based on increasingly sophisticated and practical subtractive technology. However, the first commercially successful milestone in color cinematography was the additive two-color frame-sequential Kinemacolor, which was most popular in Great Britain. It was based on a pragmatic compromise, the reduction of trichromatic to bichromatic analysis. Another departure from Maxwell’s magic lantern experiment, in which the filtered images were projected in superimposition simultaneously, was based on Émile-­ Hortensius-­Charles Cros’ (1869) insight that additive color photos can be perceived when the component images are presented sequentially (rapidly enough), which he undoubtedly meant to apply to still photography since his work predated the celluloid cinema; observations of temporal color synthesis had previously been made by Newton and Maxwell. Cros’ concept was based on experiments he performed using a phenakistoscope that he described in 1869: “The elementary images are rapidly substituted the one for the other in the eyes and the impressions produced on the retina recombine. This method is available for projection on a screen from transparent positive or from positives viewed direct.” Both bichromatic and trichromatic systems were known as natural color systems to distinguish them from applied color, but the designation natural color was also used to differentiate trichromatic from bichromatic systems. Kinemacolor was promoted as a natural color system to make it clear that it was truly photographic reproduction and not applied color like that of its competitor Pathécolor. Kinemacolor’s creation was influenced by experimenters working in or near Brighton, some 50 miles due south of London, a group that has been inevitably dubbed the Brighton School (McKernan 2004). This movement, having begun with the goal of trichromatic color, abandoned such efforts because of its complexity settling on two-color processes, as was the case for George Albert Smith’s Kinemacolor, as we shall learn. Later ­inventors, like the Technicolor and Kelley

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_43

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groups, tried and abandon additive color projection turning to bichromatic subtractive technology, but the technology seemingly held potential at the time Kinemacolor was introduced. The Kinemacolor organization was a vertically integrated business based on frame-sequential two-color additive cinematography, content creation, distribution, and exhibition, involving a proprietary projection process, all of which were made viable by the force of personality, taste, and showmanship of one man, Charles Urban. Charles Urban (1867–1942) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and achieved renown in Britain as a result of his stewardship of the Kinemacolor process, eventually losing his own and his second wife’s fortune, dying all but forgotten in a nursing home in Brighton, fittingly the spawning ground of Kinemacolor. He backed the development of and marketed cutting edge motion picture technology, like the Spirograph, whose commercial failure contributed to his undoing. He produced scientific and educational films, topical films that today we call documentaries. A dapper cigar smoking risk-­ taking visionary and charismatic promoter but poor public speaker, Urban’s great venture was Kinemacolor, which Luke McKernan called “the marvel of its age” (Lewinsky 2017), reaching a peak with his production of the December 1911 coronation of King George V as ruler of India, titled The Durbar at Delhi (The Court of Delhi), often simplified as Delhi Durbar, and also known as With Our King and Queen Through India. The film was lavishly exhibited to acclaim beginning on February 2, 1912, at Urban’s Scala Theatre in London. Delhi Durbar, a lengthy film, now only exists in fragments. Terry Ramsaye, in December 23, 1922, The New York Times, in an article titled Screen: The Greatest, lists Urban amongst the “greatest people of the motion picture industry,” although today he is unknown to those who are not specialists in the field (McKernan 2013). Urban was a first-generation American whose parents came from Austro-Hungary and Prussia. His early life was far from smooth sailing as a result of his father’s business failures and the loss of an eye in an accident while playing baseball. Born Carl, he adopted the name Charles in 1882 after leaving school. He did well as a salesman, moving to Michigan in 1889, where he was attracted to the Edison inventions, the mimeograph machine and the phonograph, the latter being promoted as a business machine Kinetoscope came to Detroit on November 19, 1894, which Urban seized as an opportunity merging his phonograph business with that of the local Kinetoscope operator. After seeing the Vitascope projector in New York in 1896, he became excited by its possibilities and decided to sell it through his Michigan Electric Company. However, he became dissatisfied with its need to be motor powered, which curtailed sales in rural areas that were not electrified. Urban turned over his specifications for an improved projector to New York engineer Walter Isaacs, who

43  Urban and the Origins of Kinemacolor

Fig. 43.1  Charles Urban

designed and built the Bioscope (a frequently used brand name or perhaps it is more properly characterized as having become a generic) projector, which in its first incarnation, although using an intermittent, did away with a shutter in an attempt to eliminate flicker (like Jenkins’ early Phantoscope). The Bioscope used a Demenÿ beater-cam intermittent movement that was reportedly steady, undoubtedly used a chemical combustion lamphouse, and was handcranked to attract sales in unelectrified rural Michigan. Urban’s successful sales efforts came to the attention of Edison’s New York-based distributor, Maguire & Baucus, who offered him the job of managing their British operation, which he began 6 months after a stint in their New  York office, traveling to London in August 1897. Although it remained the world’s industrial leader, England was now competing with both Germany and the United States, and Urban’s appearance in London, selling Edison products, was viewed with unease; the local motion picture business community perceived Urban to be part of the “American Invasion,” but he became Anglicized. The London operation, which had been dependent on the waning Kinetoscope business, diversified by distributing Urban’s Bioscope projector and Lumière’s products. Maguire & Baucus had only a p­assing interest in the

43  Urban and the Origins of Kinemacolor

motion picture business, but Urban was e­ nthusiastic about its possibilities and beefed up the operation, moving it to Warwick Court and changing the company’s name to something he thought sounded British, the Warwick Trading Company, which was founded in May 1898. Maguire & Baucus offered to sell the company to Urban, but when he declined, they found a British investor who partnered with him. Due to Urban’s managerial skills, the company’s sales increased from £10,500  in 1897 to £45,000 in 1901 (Thomas 1969, p. 9). With the Bioscope, Urban had a projector capability independent of Edison, and Urban also added a product development effort to enhance his product line. He engaged British engineer Alfred Darling, who in addition to designing a 35 mm camera also designed film perforators, printers, and other cinema hardware, plus a compact 17.5 mm camera aimed at the home market, the Biokam. Warwick added the Lumières’ Kinora flip card viewer, and Urban hired a Warwick customer, Cecil Craddock Hepworth, filmmaker, producer, and author, to work on documentary and educational films he produced and were distributed by Warwick. Urban believed wholeheartedly in documentary and educational films and had little interest or faith in the narrative cinema the operation thrived as he added crews shooting 35 mm films in different parts of the world. In his role as a producer he met filmmaker, chemist, spiritualist, magic lantern lecturer, and hypnotist, George Albert Smith (1864–1959), who would, with Urban’s backing, design the Kinemacolor system, based on the Lee-Turner additive color system, which was based on the work of Jumeaux and Davidson, all of whom lived in the environs of Brighton. Dr. Benjamin Jumeaux of Southwick and Captain William Norman Lascelles Davidson of Brighton, living in nearby south coast towns, worked together using various approaches to create additive color motion pictures. Davidson spent £3000 from 1898 to 1906 on the quest for a natural color cinema system. One of their approaches involved projecting film 82 mm wide that traveled horizontally made up of two rows of frames that were about 40  mm  ×  28  mm with round perforations at the edges and down the middle of the film. A duplicate set of the three trichromatically analyzed frames was printed above and below each other, a complete set occupying seven perforations. The use of two rows of duplicated frames was probably a way to increase the effective frame rate at a lower projection speed. Each pair of top and bottom frames was probably projected simultaneously through a set of filters arranged on a rotating wheel. Jumeaux and Davidson filed patents in 1901 and 1903 covering this technique, according to Mannoni (2016, p.  72), but they abandoned the system because of difficulties in obtaining good image registration. There are explanations for how this invention worked in the books by Cornwell-Kline, Wall, and Hopwood or in the online Timeline of Historical Film Colors,

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but the literature may be conflating features of several of their inventions.1 In BP 3729, filed November 17, 1903, Improvements in and connected with Trichromatic Photography and Optical Projection, the inventors state that they use three lenses and analyzing filters, and Davidson has this to say, when discussing improvements to the original invention in BP 453, filed August 10, 1908, Improvements in and relating to Kinetography in Natural Colors: “The essential feature of my present invention for producing and exhibiting animated or moving pictures consists in the use of properly adjusted color screens (filters) which travel with or at the same speed as the film of a bioscope or such like kinematograph camera or projecting machine….” This approach influenced the work of Edward Raymond Turner, as described below. Jumeaux and Davidson were determined men who patented, described, or tried different approaches to two- and three-­ color cinematography, in some cases projected through prism arrangements, as well subtractive projection using dyed bichromated gelatin prints, as taught in USP 814,215, Trichromatic Photography, filed February 15, 1904, which lacks the specificity required to obtain a result. In 1900, using the Kammatograph rotating disk viewing device (described in chapter 53), Davidson and Jumeaux determined that they could achieve a satisfactory color effect by using bichromatically analyzed and synthesized images displayed in sequence. They presented what may have been the first public projection of two-color additive color motion pictures in Paris and Brighton in 1904, and again in 1906 at the Royal Institution and the Photographic Convention at Southampton, with the assistance of William Friese-Greene (McKernan 2013). For the demonstrations in Paris and Southampton, Jumeaux and Davidson used wedge prism optics located in front of the taking and projection lenses to film and project two filtered subframes, probably the technology described in Davidson’s EP 7179, of 1904. Wall (1925) reports that the subject needed to be placed in front of a black background at a set distance to avoid color fringing produced by spatial parallax. Of interest is that Jumeaux and Davidson’s film was processed by G. A. Smith who, with the backing of Charles Urban, created the bichromatic Kinemacolor system. Also of note is that Davidson’s assistant, for a brief period of time, was the perplexing William Friese-Greene. While Smith’s efforts would lead to the creation of Kinemacolor, Friese-­Greene’s efforts would play a role in the loss of Urban’s patent rights. In 2012, the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England, uncovered a reel of film shot in 1902 by London photographer and inventor Edward Raymond Turner There is an opportunity for a scholar to dig into what these two inventors actually proposed and achieved, a worthwhile endeavor since they directly influenced their fellow inventors in the environs of Brighton.

1 

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Fig. 43.2  The Jumeaux and Davidson three-color 82 mm format. The perforations on both edges were reconstructed in Photoshop to help determine the frames’ size (40 mm x 28 mm), given that the film’s width is known. (Cinémathèque Française)

(1873–1903), whose work had been funded by financier Frederick Marshall Lee. Turner had been an assistant to prolific inventor E. Sanger-Shepard, who worked to define the RGB subtractive printing primaries; he also worked for Frederic Ives, while he was designing his Kromskop peepshow-­style viewer, which is described in chapter 42. When the small can of film, which had been in the museum’s possession for 75 years, was opened by curator Michael Harvey, he suspected that the film was a black and white frame-sequential color record. The reel of 38 mm film, with two horizontally displaced circular perforations bisecting each frameline, was in good condition and was copied a frame at a time to 35 mm film using the specially designed gate of an optical printer. The results of the effort were sent to the visual effects house Prime Focus in London to be turned into a color video file. Turner had marked several of the fame’s edges with color indicators, but it would not have been difficult to identify the proper color encoding of the frames. The film had shots of a scarlet macaw on a perch, a girl on a swing, Turner’s son and daughter in their garden, a parade, a goldfish in a bowl, a beach shot panning to a pier, and a street scene of Knightsbridge in London. The images show color fringing resulting from the motion parallax

i­nherent in frame-sequential trichromatic analysis (WS: The first Color Moving… 2012). The restoration, if it may be so described, may not be entirely representative of what the projected image looked like using Turner’s complicated projection scheme because of the differences in the characteristics of the filters used for cinematography, the unknown sensitometry of the emulsion, the peculiar temporal sequencing used for projection, the differences between photochemical and electro-digital display technologies, and because a film meant to be viewed additively is being viewed subtractively. Nevertheless, these derived files are a representation of the first color movies, and they are charming. Turner’s tests were made in bright sunlight, necessary because of the low sensitivity of the film and the absorption of the color filters. Because the film of the time was color blind, Turner must have sensitized it for a broader spectral response, a process requiring soaking the film in a chemical bath prior to exposure, a technique he presumably learned while working with Ives as part of the Photochromoscope Syndicate in 1898. Cornwell-Clyne (1951) writes that Turner’s photography was frame-sequentially shot through three filters using a single-lens camera and rotating filter, a process taught in USP 645,477, Kinetographic Camera, filed

43  Urban and the Origins of Kinemacolor

Fig. 43.3 The three-color camera taught in Lee and Turner’s USP. Figure 2 is the filter shutter with its red, green, blue-violet, and occluding (C) segments. Figure 1 is a schematic in profile of the camera with the filter shutter (highlighted) shown placed within it or in front of the lens (dotted lines).

Fig. 43.4  The segmented filter shutter used by Turner’s projector.

October 14, 1899, and granted March 13, 1900, to F. M. Lee and E. R. Turner. The Lee and Turner camera used a disk of red, green, and blue-violet filter sectors that were separated by opaque sectors, rotating in synchronization with the action of the intermittent. The disk shutter was located within the camera body and between the lens and the film gate, and

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its opaque segments also served as the shutter to occlude the film as it advanced. Provision was made for increasing the exposure through the red filter because of the relative insensitivity of the film to that part of the visible spectrum. While the frame-sequential method used by the 38 mm camera is simple to understand, the projection approach is more complicated and was designed to reduce the machine’s running rate while maintaining the ability to project the succession of filtered frames required for additive color synthesis (The British Journal… 1907, p.48). The Lee and Turner approach to the projector, which they completed in April 1902, was based on an untried suggestion by Jumeaux and Davidson for a projector with a vertical stack of three lenses, with sectors cut off to bring their optical centers closer together as described in B.P. 23,863, filed in 1898. Wall (1925) explains the approach as follows: “Three projecting objectives were used vertically superimposed and three pictures simultaneously shown, each component being shown first through the top lens, then by the middle and lastly by the bottom lens. The shutter had colored concentric sectors, with narrow, opaque, radial sectors between each triad of filters. In the first triad the order of the colors from the periphery to the center was red, blue-violet, green; in the second red, green, and blue-violet and in the third blue-violet, green and red, therefore, it is clear that each constituent record passed behind each lens accompanied by its own filter.” Although the frames were taken sequentially through a single lens, they were projected by three vertically stacked lenses. The spinning shutter sectors covering each lens were sequenced to follow the changing triad of frames as they advanced three frames at a time. Gaumont proposed a similar method in his BP 3220, but as related in chapter 45, he offered an additive color product based on the simultaneous photography and projection of all three images, the 1912 Chronochrome, using a vertical stack of three lenses. As a film producer, Urban was at heart a documentarian interested in educational and scientific subjects, and the idea of natural color was appealing to him. Warwick, like other distributors of the time, sold applied colored prints at a premium price. When Lee and Turner approached Urban, in the spring of 1901, he was intrigued by their concept, but his fellow Warwick directors took some convincing. Urban persuaded his board to accept a 6-month option allowing Warwick to explore the system’s possibilities. If the option was exercised, the patent rights would remain with Lee and Turner, but Warwick would be given a 14-year exclusivity, paying Lee and Turner a tenth of the selling price of the manufactured machines and a third of any licensing revue. After the 6 months had passed, having spent £500 to build a camera and perform tests, Warwick dropped the option. The camera was built by Urban’s collaborator for such things, engineer Darling, and used film 38 mm wide with two round perforations straddling the frame lines, as previously

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Fig. 43.5 Smith’s Kinemacolor USP cover sheet. Figures 1, 2, and 3, depict the filter shutter. Two-color filters were used for both cinematography and projection, red and green, unlike Turner’s process that used red, green, and blue filters.

described in connection the Turner footage restored by the National Science and Media Museum. Although Darling’s camera was ready by October 1901, due to the complexity of its design, the projector was not delivered until February 1902, and the lens array a few months later. Urban thought the outcome of the tests offered promise, but Warwick had no further interest in the project so he personally bought out Lee and partnered with Turner in September 1902, with the intent to continue developing the technology (McKernan 2013). Turner was working on the invention at the moment he died of heart failure on March 9, 1903; it was Urban who found his body on the floor of his lab. According to McKernan, in March 1904, G. A. Smith, who had been processing film for Warwick, wrote to Urban telling him that the

Lee and Turner hardware was obsolete, by way of seeking support for his own natural color system development efforts. Urban engaged Smith to complete what Turner had begun, subsequently spending several frustrating years shuttling back and forth between London and Brighton to review Smith’s labors. In November 1902, the standard 35 mm format was adopted, and an attempt was made to eliminate the projector filters by tinting the frames, for which a three-color tinting machine was made for Urban by Braun & Co. of King’s Cross, but it did not produce acceptable results and was abandoned (Thomas 1969, pp.  10, 11). Smith (1908) was unable to achieve good results, as he recounted in 1908 to the Royal Society of Arts, recalling that the process, as given to him “was unworkable.” He further reflected: “As

43  Urban and the Origins of Kinemacolor

soon as the handle of the projecting machine was worked the three pictures refused to remain in register, and no knowledge that any of us could bring to bear upon the matter could even begin to cure the trouble…The slightest defect in registration it pitilessly magnified, and…the effect on the observer is almost unbearable.” It was at this meeting that Smith projected a two-color alternative, what would soon be known as Kinemacolor, to many rounds of applause, for which he would subsequently be awarded the society’s silver medal. Kinemacolor came about by making a compromise based on Smith’s abandoning trichromatic capability and adopting bichromaticity. Defeated in his attempts to make three-color frame-sequential analysis and synthesis work, he turned his attention to a two-color system using red-orange and blue-­ green filtration. He must have been aware of this approach since his neighbors, Jumeaux and Davidson, whose film he developed, had demonstrated it with the help of the Kammatograph and their own film projections a few years earlier. Smith used a color filter wheel arrangement similar to that of Lee and Turner’s for cinematography, but with a rotating disk shutter made up of only two sectors of green and red (or orange) filters that were interrupted by opaque sectors to occlude during pulldown, as described in USP 941,960, Kinematograph Apparatus for the Production of Colored Pictures, filed June 11, 1907, and granted November 30, 1909, which had been previously filed in Britain on November 24, 1906, and granted as BP 26,671 on July 25, 1907. Smith experimented with variations in his filters’ dyes to improve color reproduction, but he did not disclose what he had learned in his patent specifications, an omission that would have serious consequences for the Kinemacolor enterprise. Two-color analysis divides the visible spectrum into two overlapping portions: the short (violet) to the middle (green) wavelengths and the middle to long (red) wavelengths. Like three-color analysis, it requires film with panchromatic sensitization, which Smith achieved prior to cinematography by immersing the camera negative in a dye solution. Photography was best accomplished in bright sunlight as a result of the light losses due to the filters, and to the required higher than usual frame rate and its consequential reduction in shutter time. The pragmatic bichromatic simplification, after two additional years of effort, gave Smith and Urban a camera and projector that, although the patent mentions 30 fps, according to Hulfish (1913, p.  263) ran at 32 fps or 120  feet per minute for 35 mm. (It’s of interest that Hulfish (p.267) gives the nominal projection rate as 14 fps and not 16 fps as usually stated). By that time, the preferred intermittent used sprocket drive, but the Kinemacolor projector used a beater cam. The filter arrangement for projection was a modification from that used for cinematography. The steel filter holder was designed for simple replacement of the green and red gelatin filters that occupied two main sectors of about

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160° each but with a second smaller “adjusting” green filter juxtaposed with the main green filter. The projectionist calibrated the color balance by operating the projector without film and changing the angular extent of the adjusting green filter to arrive at what he judged to be a white screen. The sectors separating the green and red filters were not opaque but rather “a dark blue… thus supplying to the picture screen a third tint through the open slots of the color shutter to correct some of the tints of the Kinemacolor picture when projected,” according to Hulfish (1913, p.270). It was a fanciful notion to suppose that this dark blue shutter, projecting a bit of light onto the screen during pulldown, could have made a helpful contribution to lost blue information, but the recipe must have been arrived at empirically by the inventor. The carbon arc’s amperage had to be turned up to maximum to get enough light on the screen because of the filter losses. The most satisfying color photography requires trichromatic analysis and synthesis because human beings have three sets of retinal cones, each with a peak sensitivity to the short, middle, and long wavelengths of the visible spectrum. However, the eye is a flexible instrument and color reproduc-

Fig. 43.6  The Kinemacolor projector. The hinged paddle, located in front of the filter wheel, was used to occlude the image when leader ran through the gate.

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tion by Smith’s method, although dependent on a truncated spectral analysis, can give fair results with the careful choice of filters and the selection of the colors of the objects photographed, and most important, it can produce skin tones that are pleasing. By the late 1930s, the bichromatic commercial processes offered by Hollywood laboratories were far better than earlier efforts like Smith’s (described in chapter 48). A properly designed color system also has the ability to photograph and project good white and black and a neutral gray scale, but this can only be approximated bichromatically. The eye can be forgiving with respect to accepting what appears as white, as evidenced by the fact that we perceive a sheet of paper as

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being white under indoor illumination, outdoors under direct sun, or in the shade. Typical bichromatic analysis and synthesis, independent of whether the images are presented additively or subtractively, produce colors that may translate roughly as follows by Cornwell-Clyne’s (1951) account: red becomes red-orange, yellow becomes pale orange or pinkish, green is reproduced as green-blue, blue as deep green-blue, sky blue as pale blue-green, and purple as reddish gray, and hopefully black and white are more or less reproduced as their names denote. This assessment is based on observations of what a mature bipack system was capable of achieving in the 1940s and 1950s, but Kinemacolor didn’t nearly do as well.

Fig. 43.7  Combined frames from the 1912 Kinemacolor film Delhi Dubar. Color fringing produced by temporal parallax is clearly visible. (Luke McKernan)

The Rise and Fall of Kinemacolor

The first commercially viable system of its kind, Kinemacolor, was shown to the press on May 1, 1908, the same month that Urbanora House on Wardour Street, in Soho was opened. A second demonstration took place on July 23, at Urbanora House for the Lord Mayor of London and other notables. The theatrical rollout of Kinemacolor began in the second half of 1908, but there was no premiere in the conventional sense, and the introduction of the product took place over months at different London venues. A Kinemacolor film titled A Visit to the Seaside, which was filmed in Brighton, continued to play at Urbanora House. Kinemacolor moved to the Alhambra and then to the Palace Theatre, where the program consisted of a score of short subjects, presented as narrated lecture screenings. Beginning in March, and for the next year and a half, Kinemacolor programs were screened daily at the Palace. It was at the high-tone Palace on Friday, February 26, 1909, at 3:00 PM, that the process was publically announced as Kinemacolor, a name that had been suggested by Urban’s friend, journalist Arthur Binstead. Soon after, Smith was bought out for £5000, which he later came to regret (McKernan 2013). The Kinemacolor projector that went into service was an unusually heavy machine designed to reduce vibration that might have been a source of color fringing, but in 1909, an off-the-shelf Urban Bioscope machine was used that needed a modification to prevent excessive film wear. A design change was introduced March 1910, replacing the beater cam pulldown by engineer Henry W. Joy, who devised a dual cam intermittent to reduce wear and tear of the film. The Kinemacolor projectors used in Britain had motor drive, required because of the high frame rate.1 Kinemacolor cameras were off-the-shelf Urban Bioscope cameras fitted with a rotating filter shutter as modified by Moy and Bastie. In March 1909, Urban formed a new company to exploit Kinemacolor, The Natural Color Kinematograph Company Curiously, according to Thomas (1969, p. 20) electric motor drive may have been forbidden by regulation in New York at the time, requiring a design change to permit the projectionist to handcrank more easily at the high frame rate. 1 

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Ltd., (Color and not Colour because Urban was an American). Commercial efforts in the United Kingdom were based on licensing to exhibitors and also four-walling or roadshowing. Urban’s efforts outside of Britain were focused on selling patent rights and licensing, but in his adopted nation, he controlled the entire Kinemacolor experience, from production to exhibition. Urban and his first wife divorced the month Kinemacolor was initially demonstrated, and on February 22, 1910, he married the wealthy Ada Jones, who became his business partner and a director of The Natural Color Kinematograph Company Ltd. (It was Jones who bought out Smith.) Despite the fact that Smith was retained on staff at £500 per annum, and an R&D effort took place in America, after years of activity, Kinemacolor’s technology apparently did not materially advance. Urban’s most successful theatrical titles were based on films of the Royal Family as they participated in various public events and ceremonies, such as the Coronation procession of King George V, shown first on June 28, 1911. The most successful of the tributes to the Crown was Delhi Durbar that premiered on February 2, 1912. Other Kinemacolor films of note were From Bud to Blossom (1910), The Unveiling of Queen Victoria Memorial (1911), Investiture of the Prince of Wales (1911), Making of the Panama Canal (1911), films of the Balkan War of 1912, and the fiction films Order of Napoleon (1910), The Vandal Outlaws (1911), and the Scarlet Letter (1913), produced in America. More than 1000 Kinemacolor films were made of which only 50 are known to exist, 23 of which are in the collection of the Cineteca di Bologna (Lewinsky 2017). Kinemacolor’s major competitor was the applied color stencil process of the steadily improving Pathécolor, and to a lesser extent one offered by Gaumont, which were pleasing and more accurate than hand applied color, but unlike Kinemacolor, they did not require a new special projector. To Urban’s advantage, the public knew these were applied and not natural color processes, and so bichromatic field-­ sequential Kinemacolor, however imperfect, became an ongoing attraction. But the technology had built-in flaws due

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_44

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Cineteca archive at the aforementioned conference. These digital reconstructions were displayed using a DPL projector under viewing conditions entirely different from any experienced by a spectator sitting in a theater in London in 1910; I believe a modern audience would have found that inexpedience to have been unbearable. Pozzi combined the images so that the colors were displayed simultaneously rather than sequentially. The digitally managed bichromatic filtration was based on recommendations by Kinemacolor authority Luke McKernan. No effort was made to remove blemishes with the result that a bit of the footage was beautiful by happenstance, as if it had been hand painted by Stan Brakhage. Many shots were pleasing, such as those of horses, which were acceptable shades of brown. Also satisfactory were the washed out reddish bricks of the buildings, and the waters of the canals of Venice were an oddly pleasing inky deep blue, but it seemed to me that much of the time a sepia print would have served better and wouldn’t have had color fringing. The red and green color fringing of wagging dogs’ tails evoked the kind of visual effect that is used to communicate a drug overdose, which contrasted with the rest of the muted colors. A two DVD set showing off this Kinemacolor restoration work, plus examples of Gaumont Chronochrome and Fig. 44.1  The Kinemacolor projector was a heavy machine, built that Pathécolor is available, in English titled Kinemacolor and way to reduce image vibration that might add to color fringing. other Magic (Lewinsky 2017). (Cinémathèque Française) Since Kinemacolor’s flicker is attributable to its low frame rate, some authors have explained additive color to its failure to provide the eye with the information required frame-sequential systems by invoking the persistence of for full color perception, and yet the limited palette could be vision, but this imprecise term does not further the explanapleasing. A more pressing issue was the low sample rate tion. As was discussed in chapter 5, the perception of appar(32 fps) that caused color fringing for objects in rapid motion ent motion is based on the proper presentation of a sequence or fast camera moves. Yet, even this was not the decisive of incrementally different frames, based on the eye-brain’s defect, which was flicker, or more accurately color flicker; detection of luminance. However, the mechanism at work for the colors were unstable and hard to look at for many people. Kinemacolor is based on temporal additive color mixing, There were numerous complaints of headaches, eyestrain, which is mediated by a different part of the brain. For the and flickering. Although we can try to put ourselves in the temporal variations in color (more properly hue), the visual place of moviegoers of the time it’s hard to understand their system’s ability to see flicker is limited because of the brain’s expectations when we are living at a time when excellent inability to detect rapid hue variations in the time domain, as color cinematography is commonplace. I have never seen a determined by Johnson et al. (2014). There is no additional Kinemacolor print projected with a Kinemacolor projector, retention capability requirement. Kinemacolor’s projection but David Pierce, the Assistant Chief of the National Audio-­ of alternately colored frames is below that required for flickVisual Conservation Center, of the Library of Congress, at erless additive color mixing; however at a high enough frame the Reel Thing Conference on August 25, 2018, in rate, sequentially presented additive color can be excellent. Hollywood, described such a screening, which he saw at The Urban recognized that the United States market presented National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England, a major opportunity and staged a performance of Kinemacolor as “color bombardment,” with so much flickering that the at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, on December 11, image was difficult to look at. 1909, which was attended by 1200 industry and press repreThe largest collection of Kinemacolor footage, films shot sentatives. Twenty short subjects were projected capped by for the most part in Italy, resides at the Cineteca di Bologna; John Mackenzie’s Old Glory, a film of an American flag that the second largest is held at the British Film Institute. A res- had been created by a formation of 2000 children on the toration designed to produce a result suitable for modern steps of the Albany, New  York, State Capital Building audiences was managed by David Pozzi of Immagine (McKernan 2013; Ryan 1977). Present were 10 members of Ritrovata, who showed a number of clips of films from the the Motion Picture Patents Company (the Trust) that had, on

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December 18, 1908, initiated the second and most repressive stage of its attempted monopolization of the film industry, as described in chapter 18. The Kinemacolor demonstration was greeted with great enthusiasm, and as Ramsaye (1926) reports, Urban and Trust members shook hands on a deal at the Garden that was to have been formally consummated the next day. Although the Trust agreed to purchase the American Kinemacolor rights for $250,00, Ramsaye recounts that William T. (Pop) Rock of Vitagraph, a member of the Trust, repaying an earlier kindness, told Urban: “Charlie – let me slip you something straight. These fellows are just kidding you. I sat there along with the rest of them and promised to put up my twenty-five thousand, but they’ll never ask me for it. They don’t want Kinemacolor here and they don’t want to go through with it. It scared them. You’ll never get away with it – you watch.” At the end of 2 days, after being given the brushoff by the Trust, Urban sailed to Europe on December 14. The Trust had recently reorganized, a change the group was digesting, and it was disinclined to add new membership, so it had put off Urban. Unable to absorb anything radically new, it wanted to maintain the current projection standard; Kinemacolor projectors, although they were capable of projecting black and white 35  mm films, were too, different, and costly. Upon his return to Britain, Urban was met by Gilbert Henry Aymar and James Kline Bowen, of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Aymar had attended the Madison Square Garden presentation, and excited by what he had seen sought to represent Kinemacolor in the United States; he presented Urban with a plan to use a licensing approach for exhibition. Securing the American patent rights by paying Urban $200,000, they founded the Kinemacolor Company of Allentown on April of 1910. In addition to the one-time payment, Urban took a token number of shares and also insisted on recourse in the event that Aymar and Bowen failed to meet their financial projections. The company foundered because of business and technical issues, and Urban, in January 1911, asserted control and succeeded in selling the United States patent rights again for another $200,000 to speculator George H. Burr, who issued stock for a new company, Kinemacolor Company of America (KCA). Burr then succeeded in selling shares in the new company to the public totaling $6,000,000. The massive amount of money raised by Burr by selling stock, and the company’s subsequent brief tenure, was par for the course in an era of rampant unregulated speculation. KCA was next sold to vaudeville mogul John J. Murdock, with the new company run by William H.  Hickey who enjoyed some success by exhibiting Delhi Durbar. In 1912, a week after offering its product to exhibitors, Kinemacolor Company of America received 416 applications for its projectors. It also began a major advertising campaign and was prepared to distribute 300 presumably short films that were to be made by East and West Coast production companies

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(Kindem 1981). To launch Kinemacolor in America, feature films were also planned, amongst them a version of Tosca (1912) starring stage actress Lillian Russell, but there were problems: after attempting to market the system based on the hoped-for lucrative projector lease model, KCA changed tactics and sold them outright for between $200 and $300. Hulfish (1913) points out that they had to be electric motor driven because it would have been a burden for a projectionist to handcrank at 32 fps, and as noted previously, the British machines were motor driven. Ramsaye’s (1926) account is that the Motion Picture Patents Company sought to crush Kinemacolor by sabotaging the Kinemacolor exhibition efforts, but the Trust and KCA made a deal, with KCA being the last entity allowed into the organization, on August 4, 1913, but by October 1913, KCA was all but out of business. The company’s failure is due to several factors, including overexpansion by investing in their new Hollywood studio, which was acquired from it by D. W. Griffith. KCA’s planned production of The Clansman got made at the studio but by Griffith who retitled it The Birth of a Nation. Urban’s efforts to license Kinemacolor on a worldwide basis didn’t pan out as hoped, although it’s true that he received upfront payments from his American licenses and in a number of other countries. Another country in which Kinemacolor riveted the public’s attention was Japan, and there was also considerable interest in Italy. In England, Urban’s policy of making documentary and educational films worked, especially for films having to do with the royal family, but his efforts at dramatic films, mostly one-reelers, flopped. With regard to the quality of Urban’s narrative films McKernan (2013) writes: “They were uniformly terrible. Even by the low standards of British film production of the period, Kinemacolor fiction films were notably poorly acted and terribly directed. Needing to be filmed in sunlight because Kinemacolor absorbed so much available light, they looked like naïve pre-studio productions of earlier years. The choice of subjects was equally mistaken….” The film of a royal pageant proved to be a crowning success, the epic film The Durbar at Delhi, which like 70% of Kinemacolor’s films was a documentary, in this case a spectacle covering the royal celebratory tour of India in December 1911 and January 1912. The motivation for the event was the determination of King George VII to uphold the legitimacy of British rule by being ceremonially proclaimed the Emperor of India. According to McKernan (WS: thebioscope.net), for the cinematography of Durbar, Kinemacolor cameramen tweaked the colors of the green-blue and red-orange filters based on subject matter, but we have no specifics as to what such adjustments entailed. Major film production companies like Gaumont and Pathé also covered the occasion. Kinemacolor photography was challenging since it needed liquid bath panchromatization that required cool storage of the film prior to cinematography, with the negative processed

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on site. Urban kept a gun under his pillow guarding the negative to protect it from his competitors who he believed might attempt sabotage. The Durbar at Delhi premiered on February 2, 1912, a month or more after the competition’s films were released, allowing Urban to mount a grand production on the stage of London’s 920-seat Scala Theatre, north of the theater district. Urban’s theatrical effort became a must-see event, in part due to the addition of a stage show. He built a set of the Taj Mahal and presented the film as two 3-hour episodes,2 one in the afternoon and the other in the evening. The projection was accompanied by a 48-piece orchestra playing music that had been used at the events in India. A large chorus plus a 20-piece fife and drum corps that included bagpipe players also performed. The enraptured review that appeared in the Bioscope proclaimed that: “Man has conquered most things; now he has vanquished time…The cinematograph, in short, is the modern Elixir of Life…” McKernan (WS: thebioscope. net) Within the first month many of the Royals saw the performance, giving Urban’s efforts the imprimatur he had sought, but he was unable to make the May 11, 1912, performance attended by King George V and Queen Mary since he was recovering from an operation to repair a perforated stomach ulcer. Durbar was financially successful, especially so in Britain, and did well in the United States. Despite the success of Durbar, Urban immediately faced a challenge to the legitimacy of his intellectual property based on the alleged priority of William Friese-Greene, who is discussed in chapter 9, and elsewhere. The conflict between Urban and Friese-Greene had been brewing for years, as recounted by Urban’s even-handed biographer McKernan (2013) who writes that Urban had been hounded by Friese-­ Greene, the self-deluded “inventor of kinematography” who claimed to have created the basic technology behind Kinemacolor. Experts in the field of early color cinematography are uneasy about the dubious contributions of Friese-­ Greene, who in 1898 filed BP 21,649, for a frame-sequential additive color method, which Cornwell-Clyne (1951), in his standard reference, Colour Cinematography, characterizes as being vague, impractical, and unoriginal. Wall (1925), commenting on the same disclosure, tells us that “W.  Friese-­ Greene appears to have had some confused notion…The supposed results were, of course, an optical impossibility....” Friese-Greene, while working for Davidson, had become interested in natural color cinema and continued to work on it in Brighton and elsewhere in England. He formed Friese-­Greene Ltd., which initially provided a color system along the lines of that invented by Jumeaux and Davidson but, of greater significance, another process similar to Kinemacolor, which was taken Thomas (1969, p. 28) gives the running time as two and a half hours. The times given, two and a half or three hours, may refer to the total time of the projection and the stage show.

2 

44  The Rise and Fall of Kinemacolor

Fig. 44.2  A poster for the performance of the Kinemacolor theatrical spectacle, Delhi Dubar, at Urban’s La Scala Theatre. The reproduction I found was not in color, but the poster probably was.

up by Brighton theater owner Walter Harold Speer, who formed the entity Biocolour Ltd., in 1911, based on exploiting FrieseGreene’s British Patent 9465, Improvements in and relating to the Production of Negatives and Positives for Multi-colour Projection and Improved Means for Projection on to a Screen, filed May 5, 1905, and granted on February 15, 1906. Speer was persuaded to believe this was the master patent in the field of color cinematography, one whose claims were supremely blocking. Prior to his adoption of a frame-sequential approach, Friese-­Greene demonstrated something different, as described in Hulfish (1913, pp. 273–277). We know from Hulfish that the Kimatograph Weekly, of November 24, 1910, describes a demonstration of projected images taken 6 years before of “Mr. Friese-Greene’s son signaling with colored flags,” which may have been taken with a dual camera with side-by-­side filtered lenses and projected using two machines combining superimposed and alternating filtered frames, an approach that was apparently never commercialized prior to Friese-Greene’s work on Kinemacolor-like process. Far from British Patent 9465 being “the master patent,” it was characterized by Cornwell-Clyne (1951), as being “hopeless,” who dismisses the approach without giving reasons. The two claims covering the side-by-side bichromati-

44  The Rise and Fall of Kinemacolor

cally filtered subframes have nothing to do with G.  A. Smith’s Kinemacolor patent, which is of significance since it was the basis for the interference action that will be described below. Speer began to project bichromatic films in his Montpelier Electric Theater in Brighton, but it could not have been the one described in BP 9465, since it cannot have functioned and probably was similar to Kinemacolor. Speer proceeded to place taunting advertisements in the trade press claiming that Biocolour was the only legitimate color process. Urban sued Biocolour and went to court on August 22, 1912, awarded a judgment of injunctive relief, and the Brighton screenings ceased, but this was merely the commencement of the legal battle in the offing. According to Coe (1981), Biocolour Ltd. was at first headed by Colin Bennett who had been a Kinemacolor cameraman. Biocolour replaced Kinemacolor’s spinning color filters by tinting alternate frames, using a machine designed by Friese-Greene, which in principle would have allowed a projector to run its additive color images by eliminating the rotating filters; moreover the possibility of the frames and filters getting out of sync due to misthreading the film would have been eliminated. To address this problem, Kinemacolor prints used “guide spots” printed between the perforations to signify alignment with the green filter segment (Hulfish). Whatever the merits of Friese-­Greene’s improvement, which had been anticipated, the projector would still have to run at twice the silent speed using twice the amount of film; additionally, it would have been burdened with all of the aforementioned defects of Kinemacolor. Friese-Greene enlisted the aid of the wealthy Selwyn Francis Edge, a well-known car and motorboat racer, automobile manufacturer, and cyclist, who in 1911 formed Bioschemes to take over Biocolour. Friese-Greene appears to me to have had the personality of a cult leader, one whose spell has survived his death. At the very least, he must have had a silver tongue to persuade Speer and Edge that he was the inventor of important and original technology. Assuming control of the enterprise, Edge threw down the gauntlet challenging Urban, when he boldly advertised: “I do not hesitate to say that the (Kinemacolor) patent as it is published is worthless.” (Zone 2007) Urban had succeeded with Kinemacolor for years, and it was inevitable that he face competition, and it is not a given that the first to enter a market with a new technology will become the industry leader. In a sense, Urban had brought on the confrontation with his business model based on proprietary hardware and the control of production, distribution, and exhibition, designed to freeze out competition. As the technology’s manufacturer and exclusive user in Great Britain, he placed Kinemacolor at odds with industry business practices shutting out other producers, distributors, and even exhibitors. The alternative to this closed vertically integrated system would have been to license the technology and thus spread its benefits, which might have led to even greater

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adoption of Kinemacolor. It may be futile to speculate, but had Urban chosen such a path an industry-wide effort to improve the technology might have ensued benefitting all. Urban was not content to beat Biocolour in the marketplace, the best place to win an intellectual property fight; rather he imprudently opted for validation in the courts. He saw this as the place to make his case to the public, placing his fate in the hands of a third party. Urban was in love with the Kinemacolor enterprise he had masterminded and was unable to make a dispassionate business decision with regard to the Biocolour-Bioschemes threat. It must have seemed unquestionable to him that truth was on his side and that justice would prevail. Another issue that vexed Urban was his belief that G.  A. Smith was in cahoots with Friese-Greene passing on Kinemacolor secrets to him, but Smith’s demeanor and testimony at the ensuing hearings, and his loathing for Friese-Greene, make this unlikely. Bioschemes petitioned for a re-examination, to potentially disqualify Smith’s patents, a usual tactic in patent litigation. By this time, Friese-Greene was no longer involved on a day-to-day basis with Biocolour or Bioschemes. Over a period of 4 days, the 8th through the 12th of December 1913, Mr. Justice Warrington listened to the arguments of Kinemacolor and Bioschemes. McKernan (2013) relates that Urban did not testify but that Friese-Greene “(gave) contradictory and sometimes confusing testimony.” Experts were called to give critiques of Kinemacolor’s color fidelity, and much of the testimony concentrated on the activities and influence of the Brighton School (However, Turner, a major contributor, lived and worked in London). Smith’s testimony was characterized as removed and superior but was sufficiently impressive so that Warrington found that he was the true inventor of the process. This was a resounding victory for Kinemacolor and Bioschemes appealed the ruling, with the case going to Lord Justice Buckley who heard arguments over the course of another 4 days. Lord Buckley concluded that Smith’s patent did not accurately specify the characteristics of the color filters and asserted that because there were other red and green filters that would not work in this application Smith’s patent was insufficiently disclosed. Buckley stated that these filters were frequently used as part of the set required for trichromatic analysis, and in addition, because the blue filter was not included, all colors could not be reproduced. He reversed Warrington’s decision, and the patent was ruled to be invalid on April 1, 1914, but he stayed the order for a month allowing for an appeal to the House of Lords, where his decision was upheld. Judge Buckley looked at the intellectual property issues broadly rather than relying on procedural technicalities it would seem, but Judge Warrington using similar criteria came to the opposite conclusion. The patent system has played a major role in shaping the motion picture industry and the evolution of motion picture technology would,

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without a doubt, have followed a different course without it, but whether this would have been for good or ill cannot be known. Smith’s patent is similar to that granted to Lee and Turner (USP 645,477, Kinetographic Camera, filed October 14, 1899), but it reduces the number of filters from three to two, possibly a patentable simplification. But at the time, additive color bichromatic analysis and synthesis were understood, making it impossible to claim as part of the invention. As Judge Buckley points out, there is a lack of specificity with regard to Smith’s choice of filters, which would have required providing the filters’ spectral distributions or exact dye formulas or combinations of dyes. This costly litigation undoubtedly contributed to the diminution of both companies, but Urban’s voluntary liquidation of his company to pay off its creditors may have been based on his assessment that Kinemacolor had peaked in popularity and a financial projection that the company was running out of cash, as analyzed by Gorham Kindem (1981) in his comprehensive essay, The Demise of Kinemacolor. Urban’s company was failing, despite the fact that it had a major success with Delhi Durbar, which grossed £150,000  in England alone during 1912 and 1913. The effort to dissolve the company was stayed because the liquidator felt that it had value despite the fact that its balance sheet had suffered a blow due to its recent legal expenses. Urban had optimistically inflated the value of the company’s assets, which included its foreign patents, trademarks, and an exaggerated valuation of goodwill. Undoubtedly the loss of its proprietary position in Britain was a setback even for the valuation of the foreign patents. The Natural Color Kinematograph Company Ltd. was voluntarily liquidated in April 1914, and Colorfilm was created to acquire its assets and continued to operate into the First World War. It produced a well-received film about the armed forces, Britain Prepared, released in January 1916. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Urban went to the United States to promote the British effort and was thus unable to give his attention to the Colorfilm business in Britain. In America, he attempted to improve the Kinemacolor process with the help of Henry Joy, who designed a faster pulldown to mitigate its temporal parallax color fringing. The new Urban-Joy process was called Kinekrom, but the effort did not move beyond the demonstration stage (Only a higher fps rate for cinematography would have mitigated fringing.) There might be a tendency have it that the reign of Kinemacolor was a disappointingly short one, but compared with the limited longevity of today’s high-tech devices, Kinemacolor’s duration is impressive. There are several reasons for Kinemacolor’s theatrical success, not the least of which is the innate human desire to see natural color moving

44  The Rise and Fall of Kinemacolor

images. As the first of its kind, it had novelty value, and Urban knew his audience, appealing as he did to English patriotism, the exhilaration of being part of a ruling empire, and the promotion of the royal family. Moreover, Urban was a good showman who exhibited Kinemacolor as an augmented theatrical event, enhanced by choruses, orchestras, lavish scenery, and costumes. His marketing campaign forsook immediate returns for a slow build, turning Kinemacolor into one of London’s major happenings. Kinemacolor must be ranked as one of the great celluloid cinema technology milestones, similar in certain respects to two other early-to-­ market systems that also taught valuable lessons, Vitaphone and Cinerama, which were, like Kinemacolor, clearly technically flawed. Nonetheless, each product, Kinemacolor, Vitaphone, and Cinerama, was the first successful commercial introduction of a modality that would become an ongoing part of motion pictures. Kinemacolor was of considerable influence, not only for what it achieved but for the attention it called to the problems it was unable to overcome. For example, a Kinemacolor screening in New  York City was the direct inspiration for Mannes and Godowsky’s work in color photography and their invention of Kodachrome. In America, a handful of workers associated with the Kinemacolor Company of America, William Francis Fox, William Crespinel, and William Van Doren Kelley, continued to work on color processes, in particular Crespinel and Kelley would make significant contributions (McKernan 2004). In Boston, Technicolor’s inventors analyzed Kinemacolor technology to learn from its failings. Kinemacolor’s descendants are described in the following chapters, and in the last section of this book, we will encounter applications of additive color for television and electronic displays. Although subtractive color projection ruled for the celluloid cinema, it was to be otherwise for television and the electro-digital cinema that use additive color display technology. Additive color television images were first demonstrated by Baird using mechanical scanning then in an electronic-mechanical system by Goldmark of CBS (Columbia Broadcast System). But in the long run, RCA’s additive color dot-sequential NTSC television, conceptually similar to the Dufaycolor réseau, prevailed for the home CRT TV set and then for its successor, the flat panel display. Today the dominant motion picture projection system is based on Hornbeck’s DMD (digital micromirror device), whose color synthesis is an application of Maxwell’s demonstration of additive color projection. (See chapter 82.) Kinemacolor, notwithstanding its defects, was the first step along the path of commercializing subsequent moving image color technology.

Additive Color After Kinemacolor

All natural color cinematography involves analysis by color filtration that can be projected additively or subtractively. The systems described here were designed with additive projection in mind. A completely successful celluloid cinema color system ought to be compatible with the 35 mm infrastructure of existing cameras, post-production procedures, laboratory work, and the installed base of projectors. Moreover, the analyzed frames had to be photographed and protected simultaneously. As Kinemacolor taught, to do otherwise is to create temporal parallax color fringing; and as important, the color records must be photographed through a single lens. To do otherwise is to invite spatial parallax color fringing. The multilens Gaumont Color and Fox Color processes taught that lesson, and trichromatic analysis is necessary in order to reproduce the full visible spectrum. The overarching lesson learned from numerous and determined attempts was that the subject of this chapter, additive color, in the form of frame-sequential, subframe formats, or micromosaic réseaus, were awkward embodiments and unacceptable, due to light loss and other issues. Although the screen plate or micromosaic additive color approach can be used in unmodified cameras and projectors, and to a large extent is compatible with the black and white infrastructure, it hungers for light and has other problems as described below. But today, in the Digital Era, additive color projection is the rule. Early inventors’ color cinema efforts concentrated on additive projection taking their direction from Maxwell’s demonstration. Only some of the systems described below had even limited commercial viability (Kinemacolor, described previously, is the expectation), and the additive color projection systems of the first decades were obsolete by the later part of the 1920s, except for the micromosaic réseau Dufaycolor that had some commercial use. The early days of color motion picture technology’s marketplace of ideas, at least to the historian, is as important as the marketplace of commerce. While the former serves to both illuminate and exhaust possibilities, success in the latter serves as the best inspiration for continued innovation.

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Chronochrome, 1912, was a multiframe or subframe system that used more than one lens for bichromatic or trichromatic analysis by imaging each color record on 35  mm stock. Chronochrome (also known as Gaumont Color) was the most successful system of its kind, using a vertical stack of trichromatically analyzed subframes. It was the invention of engineer-entrepreneur Léon-Ernest Gaumont, whose efforts included phonograph sync sound, which he combined with his color efforts, are described in chapter 26. On November 15, 1912, he presented the two-­color additive Biochrome process before the Societé Française de Photographie. Heartened by this reception, and other favorably received screenings, Gaumont developed a trichromatic version by 1913, which is partly described in BP 3220, An Improved Kinematograph for Projections in Natural Colours by the Three-Colour Process, applied for on February 8, 1912 (a year earlier in France), teaching a vertical stack of objectives. This disclosure was not the final version of the product and is similar to the invention of Turner, which used three color sectors rotating in front of the projection lenses as illustrated in Fig. 43.4 in the chapter Urban and the Origins of Kinemacolor. In an article based on “a paper found among the effects of Léon Gaumont (1959) after his death in 1946,” Gaumont wrote: “We preferred the well-known three-color additive method used through all our experiments by Cros and Ducos du Hauron. Each image on the screen appearing in natural colors was formed by superimposition of the three images, violet, green and orange. The combined radiation of these three colors results in the reproduction of natural colors. The image was photographed on the film by three objectives placed one above the other, each provided with a glass color filter…an intermittent movement capable of long pulldown had to be made which was capable of transporting the film without undue strain, while guaranteeing absolutely prefect registration.”

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_45

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eight controls for adjusting the image with individual controls for moving the top and bottom green and blue lenses horizontally and vertically (the red lens remained fixed). It must have been a challenge to keep fringing to a minimum. This on-the-fly correction during projection reminds me of what was required for the original additive two-color Technicolor and years later for the tryptic Cinerama. Wall (1925) believes that a punched tape record might have been made after a run-through to record the adjustments to be used for subsequent screenings, a speculation made creditable by USP 1,454,850, Method of and Apparatus for Distant Regulation of Cinematographic Objections, filed March 29, 1920, by Léon Gaumont and Leopold René Decaux, which describes how to eliminate fringing by adjusting the distance between the axes of the projection lens ensemble electrically. However, for cinematography geometry tells us that correcting for one distance can cause fringes for objects at other distances. Good projector and lamphouse design may have allowed Chronochrome’s projection of the filtered frames to be adequately bright. Restorations done by Cineteca di Bologna prove that Chronochrome was capable of producing beautiful color, at least in its restored version. At Gaumont’s request Kodak produced a panchromatic camera stock for the process, which was offered only on a Fig. 45.1  Gaumont’s Chronochrome projector. In this version the out- special order basis to the industry until it became an off-the-­ board shutter was of conventional design and did not incorporate the shelf product in 1926. In the interests of helping develop the filters used for the frame-sequential process. Chronochrome’s filters stock to his specifications, Gaumont gave Kodak a triple-lens were part of a triple-­lens ensemble (lower center); they are shown in camera for experimentation that became the testbed used to detail in the following illustration. (Cinémathèque Française) turn Capstaff’s Kodachrome bichromatic subtractive still portrait system into a cinematographic system, which This three-lens vertical optical ensemble used RGB filters became the basis for Fox Nature Color. The Exhibitor Times to photograph a stack of three 1.7:1 aspect ratio three-­ (Chronochrome… 1913, p. 1) of June 14, 1913, describes a perforation high negative frames. In order to get the centers New  York City demonstration that occurred the previous of the lenses close enough, they had sawn-off sectors. The week at the 39th Street Theatre: “These Chronochrome-­ format used a nine perforation pulldown for the three ana- Chronophone results are singularly fine offerings. The collyzed subframes that because of their reduced height saved ored films are beautiful….” Earlier in the article the on the consumption of film and hopefully projector and film Chronophone “talkies” are praised as “realistic to the point wear and tear. The frames were 14 mm rather than the usual of perfect illusion.” Although Chronochrome “remained in 18 mm high, and the prints ran at 16 fps, which were screened limited use from some years,” according to Coe (1981), using a special projector (Abel 2005). The trichromatic pho- when it was combined with Chronophone phonographic syntography and projection arrangement eliminated some of chronized sound, it was the most accomplished effort of its Kinemacolor’s problems: limited gamut bichromatic color kind until Technicolor introduced its three-color process and field-sequential cinematography and projection that pro- using optical sound in 1932. duced temporal color fringing and flicker. Gaumont’s process had excellent colors, far superior to the bichromatic Gilmore Color, 1914, has no record of having been used competition, but the process suffered from some color fring- commercially deployed, Ryan (1977) reports, but it’s an ing produced by spatial parallax because the lens axes were interesting example of a subframe system, in this case a two-­ offset vertically. Color fringing based on this lens arrange- color additive process based on Frederic Eugene Ives’ USP ment can never be mitigated for objects beyond a fixed range 1,262,954, Motion Picture Apparatus, filed on February 18, of distances from the lenses. An assistant close by the screen 1914 and granted on April 16, 1918. Gilmore Color placed communicated changes in alignment to the projection booth two analyzed subframes within a standard 35  mm frame, by telephone in an attempt to achieve convergence of the which were arranged using either of two 90° rotational three images. One model of the lens-filter assembly had schemes: the images were rotated in the same or the opposite

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Fig. 45.2  The Chronochrome projection lens. The filter stack is shown at the right. The red filtered lens (rouge) remained fixed. The two other lenses could be shifted vertically and horizontally to superimpose the three filtered images on the screen.

Fig. 45.3  The clip at the left (supplied by the Cinémathèque Française) is a Chronochrome print, a repeating triad of GRB analyzed frames, which were projected using the lens and filter stack shown above Fig. 45.2. To make the print for reproduction, at the right, it was necessary to find a sequence of three frames that were exposed simultane-

ously, so I examined them stereoscopically to find a triad that had no motion parallax. Chronochrome was projected additively, which is infeasible for reproduction in these pages, so a subtractive print was made. Since the frames were exposed through the GRB filter stack their subtractive colors (MCY) were used to make the print.

direction. Either is an efficient use of frame area, and the 90° rotation produces the pleasing aspect ratio of about 1.8:1. Ives describes several different optical approaches for achieving the format using mirrors or prisms either before or after the two taking lenses. Unfortunately two lenses producing two perspective views were required for cinematography, one for the green and one for the red record, making spatial parallax a certainty. Similar subframe schemes have been used for stereoscopic formats, and there is a lot in common between the efforts to produce bichromatic additive color and stereoscopic systems because both use two channels, and both have used “complimentary” colors for image encoding. If both subframes are rotated in the same direction, they will experience no relative unsteadiness during projection but may suffer asymmetrical vignetting.

dard studio camera modified to pull down two perforations to produce two half height subframes photographed through a rotating filter wheel with the camera running at 48  fps, which would have maintained the 90 feet per minute linear film rate and produced a wide aspect ratio image. For release prints, it was intended for the subframes to be dyed alternately red and blue-green. The projector was to be modified to run frame sequentially at 48 fps. No commercial activity can be found (Committee Reports… 1931).

Magnachrome, circa 1930, was a bichromatic process devised by C. Roy Hunter of Universal, which used a stan-

Morgana, 1932, was a 16  mm bichromatic process promoted by Bell & Howell. Both cinematography and projection used rotating bichromatic filters, but unlike the other frame-sequential additive color processes described here, it used the unique frame shuttling movement of two frames forward and one frame backward (Ryan 1977). The process, the invention of Sydney George Short and Juliet Evangeline Williams of the UK, is described in USP 1,931,512,

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Fig. 45.4  The Gilmore Color format, from Ive’s USP, which uses head to tail or similar sense rotation of the subframes. Figure 12 is the mirror box for creating the required image rotation and subframe placement.

Apparatus for use in Color Cinematography, filed August 8, 1931 (a year earlier in Britain), and announced in 1932 (Kattelle 2000). The purpose of the design was to increase the effective frame rate from 24 to 72 frames per second to suppress flicker and color flashing (Cornwell-Clyne 1951, P. 270). A film of the 1933 Pasadena Pageant of Roses, shot using the process, was projected on a 6-foot screen and well received by an audience of 300 (Chambers 1933, p. 64). The Morgana movement was adapted by Bernier for stereoscopic projection using frame-sequential polarized light image selection, as described in chapter 69. Thomascolor, 1934, remained in development until 1941. It was a trichromatic additive system using 65  mm film. Its optical system produced a checkerboard array of four subframes following an RGBB format created by splitting a photographic objective into quarters, with the rays from each segregated and imaged into the quad format by means of reflecting surfaces. Maxwellian analysis was accomplished using a red Wratten 25, a green Wratten 58, and two blue Wratten 47s. The process is described in USP 2,152,224, granted on March 28, 1930, to Richard Thomas of Los Angeles, and a number of additional patents were issued covering the technology. The camera negative, which was panchromatic black and white stock, was processed normally. The 65 mm images were optically reduced to 35 mm black and white prints for additive color projection through filters using an intricate optical system to superimpose all four subframe images on the screen. The process is of interest because of the novelty of using four subframes, and Ryan (1977) reports that it was not taken up for theatrical filmmaking.

Raycol, 1929, was based on the work of Austrian chemist Anton Bernardi, who moved to Great Britain in 1926 to found Raycol to exploit his invention. The process is of psychophysical significance, because it is a two-color additive system reproducing an unexpectedly broad color palette even though the usual red and green filters were used for cinematography (Street 2019). The projection system used two subframes positioned above and below each other. The analyzed subframes were recombined on the screen using prism optics, and one might expect that like other bichromatic additive color systems, the same filters were used for cinematography and projection, but Bernardi discovered that if he omitted the green filter he got quite a startling result: a range of colors beyond expectation or reason, albeit of subdued saturation, is perceived. Can a properly additively analyzed set of frames projected through a red filtered and white light mix on the screen to be seen by the eye-brain as a wide range of color? The question was examined scrupulous by Edwin Land (1959, pp. 84–94), beginning in the late 1950s, and is now called the Land effect, although Bernardi made the discovery. In 1930, Raycol was used for the short film The School for Scandal, which was the first British color production with sound. In 1933, the Raycol feature, The Skipper of the Osprey, was put down by critics who found the image to be of poor quality. The process was not used thereafter (Coe 1981, pp. 120–121). Micromosaic Processes, Background. The micromosaic or screen plate technique fulfills the requirements that exposures are made by one lens on a single frame (at the same instant), yet it is a shared area rather than a subframe or subtractive technique. It uses a multiplicity of minute juxtaposed

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Fig. 45.5  The Thomascolor projection lens, from the USP. A similar optic was used for cinematography. The diagram shows the light analyzed into long, short, and medium parts: red, green, and two violet frames.

primary color elements for color analysis and synthesis, photography’s version of color pixels, a technique suggestive of that used by painter Georges Seurat. The principle is also used by halftone printing and by digital cameras with their Bayer pattern filter or similar mosaic patterns. This fixed microfilter array is known as a réseau; it foreshadowed the shadow mask tube originally used for television and that of today’s flat panel displays. The film was usually exposed through the film’s base on a panchromatic emulsion, with the emulsion-based interface having been treated with a mechanically produced pattern of miniscule color filters that remain in place after development. An important variation used a random distribution of dyed elements deposited on the base rather than a fixed pattern réseau. The concept was first proposed in the late 1860s by du Hauron, and according to Newhall (2012, p.  272) the first screen plate or line screen was made by Irish physicist and geologist John Joly (1857–1933), who is best known for developing radiation therapy for treating cancer. In 1893, he invented a process that exposed a negative plate in contact with a ruled micromosaic checkered screen made up of red, green, and blue areas. After development, a positive transparency was made from the camera negative and bound to the screen, which from normal viewing distances was perceived as a natural color photograph. The first commercially successful color film for still photography was the micromosaic Lumière Autochrome, which was manufactured by randomly distributing dyed potato starch grains that were adhered to the glass plate and then overcoated with emulsion. Micromosaic camera film was invariably processed as reversal since the filter elements’ locations remain intact after development. A great deal of effort went into inventing printing methods for these processes, according to Cornwell-­

Clyne (1951), with considerable work having been done by Ilford, Agfa, and others. The process depends on the eyes’ inability to resolve the small analyzed and filtered picture elements. On the plus side, there are no temporal or spatial parallax artifacts, and an ordinary camera may be used for photography, but as is typically the case for additive color projection, it will be dim. Autochrome, 1907. Although it was not well suited to being a motion picture process, the Lumière Autochrome must be mentioned because of its historical significance. In the mid-1930s an effort was made to apply it to cinematography, but 35  mm release prints, according to Lavédrine and Gandolfo (2013, p. 253) had “a substantial loss of color saturation.” From 1907, when it was introduced to the mid1930s, when it was discontinued, it was the preferred color film; at first, it was available only as glass plates but later as celluloid film. The filter array was made with a random distribution of red-orange, green, and blue-violet, dyed starch grains deposited on the plate. The array of starch filters was overcoated with panchromatic emulsion, but first lampblack powder was used to fill in the interstices between the starch grains. The dyed grains and lampblack absorbed a great deal of light, requiring extended exposures that were made through the uncoated side of the plate. The reversal processed transparencies might be projected or more likely viewed by means of transmitted light. The quality of the images varied due to a number of factors, not the least of which was the skill of the photographer, some of whom produced beautiful results, although such a judgment is suspect because modern viewing conditions are so different from the special viewing devices designed for viewing Autochromes. There are difficulties making prints onto

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Fig. 45.6  An Autochrome (restored) of Charlie Chaplain photographed between 1917 and 1918 by Charles C. Zoller. (George Eastman House Publishing Trust)

another Autochrome because of the resultant moiré-like artifacts due to the impossibility of aligning the original and print micromosaic patterns, but separation negatives could be prepared for subtractive printing. Efforts have been made to restore Autochrome images to make them suitable for viewing and for photomechanical reproduction. The National Geographic, which relied on the process prior to the introduction of Kodachrome, has maintained a large collection. Warner-Powrie, 1920, was invented as a screen plate method for still photography, with subsequent efforts made to adapt it to motion pictures, but in the opinion of Ryan (1977): “the inventor found considerable difficulty translating his process, which was quite acceptable for still photography, to use in motion picture production. Producing one picture on a glass plate does not present the same problems as producing several thousand on a long roll of film.” The still photography version of the process is described in USP 802,471, Heliochrome Plate and the Process of Making the Same, filed October 25, 1901, and granted fOctober 24, 1905, to John H.  Powrie of Chicago. Powrie’s partner in developing the process was Florence Warner, who had been supplying a product called the Florence Plate; she joined forces with Powrie to supply Warner-Powrie plates, as reported in The Amateur Photographer of October 15, 1907 (Gamble 1907). In a coincidence of names Powrie worked with Warner Bros. for years

to unsuccessfully apply the Warner-­Powrie process to the celluloid cinema in a pilot operation at the Warner Research Laboratory in New York City. Film was shot on horizontal-travelling 47 mm wide panchromatic film to expose a negative with four times the area of a standard 35 mm frame. The film was exposed through the base with RGB rulings having a pitch of 900 lines to the inch. The large negative was necessary to achieve a sufficiently fine structure, after optical reduction, to a standard vertical-traveling 35 mm film with its own set of colored rulings. The rulings ran parallel to the length of the 47 mm camera and 35  mm print films resulting in prints with their mproducing a plaid-like réseau. This kind of additive color projection depends on the eye’s inability to resolve the minute color elements. The colored line screens were made by a photographic process, rather than a printing process as was the case for Dufaycolor, described next. The process involved dichromated gelatin mordanted and dyed using a series of iterations involving the washing away of the dyed gelatin and the recoating of gelatin to be dyed. In the extensive discussion after presenting his paper, as transcribed in the Transactions of the SMPE in 1935, Powrie (1928) said that 7 or 8 years had gone into the attempt to make the process work for cinema. As far as I know, the process was not used commercially.

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Fig. 45.7  Illustrating a manufacturing technique for creating a réseau, from a Dufay USP. Successive steps lay down fine color rulings on the film’s base, through which the exposure will be made.

Dufaycolor, 1932, was an attempt to apply one of the many still photographic réseau processes to theatrical motion pictures. Dufaycolor was originally a product of Société Anonyme des Plaques et Produits Dufay; it was invented by Louis Dufay, Thomas Thorne Baker, and Charles Bonamico. The process was created for still photography in 1908 and sold as a photographic plate from 1910 to 1917 under the name Dioptichrome (Friedman 1945). From inception it was under development, first as a product for glass plates and then as one coated on acetate base. Manufacturing the still photographic product placed the réseau on the base with repeated printing and bleaching steps followed by the application of a protective layer of varnish, which was followed by a layer of panchromatic emulsion. Under magnification, the réseau looks like a plaid textile pattern. An early version of the process is given in USP 1,003,720, Manufacture of Screens or Colored Surfaces for Color Photography, filed May 23, 1908, by Louis Dufay. In 1925, the British firm Spicers Ltd., a manufacturer of paper products, invested in the process, and in 1932 formed a venture with Dufay called Spicer-Dufay Ltd., with the mission of producing a color motion picture system. The name of the venture was changed to Dufaycolor Ltd. in

1933. The next year, it was manufacturing 90,000  feet of 35 mm Dufaycolor on acetate base per week, as reported by W. H. Carson (1934), who describes the process at length. The manufacturing process was designed by French engineer Charles Bonamico; it used a milled steel roller to apply grooves to the acetate to receive applications of ink. After the colored ink is applied, it is followed by bleaching producing clear lines to be filled in by similar successive steps resulting in a plaid-like trichromatic réseau. In 1934, Ilford Ltd. purchased limited rights and manufactured the film in several formats including 16 mm. Improvements to the process continued to be made until 1938 by a new entity formed in 1937, Dufay-­Chromex Ltd. which combined the interests of Spicers, Ilford and a British company, Cinecolor Process (probably unrelated to the American Cinecolor Corporation). The movie product used a panchromatic emulsion exposed through the base having réseau lines on the order of 20 per millimeter. Cornwell-Clyne (1951) writes that réseau was not visible during projection: “because of the additive effects due to movements of the position of screen elements during the projection at 24 successive pictures per second.” In other words, unsteadiness in projection blurred or blended together the réseau’s individual color elements.

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spectra on a photographic plate. Lenticular sheets, whose surface is made up of sections of minute spheres, were used by Gabriel Lippmann in 1908 for his “fly’s-eye” autostereoscopic method. Lippmann’s brilliant idea is the precursor of holography; it’s also the basis for wavefront reconstruction technology and computational photography, and it may well have inspired French astronomer and engineer Rodolphe Berthon.

Fig. 45.8  Lenticular color uses the triad filter (left), which produces subtractive color analyzed image stripes (right).

The film was processed as a negative or reversed as a positive, but it was a challenge to find a way to make good prints on réseau stock until it was discovered that it could be done by using diffused printer light. This release printing capability, Cornwell-Clyne recounts, was perfected by Dr. D. A. Spencer and Dr. G. B. Harrison of Ilford Ltd. using a special illumination system for contact printing machines. The process was used for sequences in Radio Parade of 1935, released in 1934, and short subjects as well as for the entire feature Sons of the Sea, released in 1939. The Kinematograph Weekly reported that the Dufaycolor sequences use in Radio Parade of 1935 were “not up to the highest standards.”(Coe 1981) T.  T. Baker (1938) of Dufaycolor, Inc., New  York in 1938, described the ­negative-positive version of the process and improvements made to it, that included improved projection by using a new light source, a high- pressure vapor lamp that emitted three wavelengths of light matching the réseau’s spectral characteristics. The only other process like it to have been commercialized, albeit unsuccessfully for home movies, is Polavision introduced in 1977, described below. Lenticular Processes, Background. These processes use a columnar réseau but do not use colored rulings; rather they produce a similar result by means of embossed lenticules and a triad of color filters placed over the taking and projection lenses. Intimations of a color process based on the concept were first made in 1895 by F. W. Lanchester, an English engineer, in BPs 16,548 and 16,595, which Evans (1953) classifies as the microdispersion method, and Wall (1925, p.659) as a prism dispersion process. Lanchester used a pinhole screen located immediately adjacent to the emulsion, and photographic researcher and author, R. E. Liesegang, proposed the use of a striped camera filter in place of a pinhole screen in the British Journal of Photography in 1896. Liesegang’s microspectral system used a lens to focus light onto a finely ruled screen or grating that then passed through a prism to record the analyzed

Berthon/Keller-Dorian Lenticular Process, 1909. A year after Lippmann’s announcement, Berthon described a lenticular color process in EP 10,611, filed May 41,909 and granted on May 4, 1910, which is also described in USP 992,151, Apparatus for Color Photography, filed February 4, 1909. The lenticular additive color approach can be considered to be a variation of the réseau process, but it is different in that it uses a triad (RGB) color filter over the lens and lenticules at the film in place of a three-color screen plate to create a fine pattern of interdigitated columns of RGB analyzed stripes. The film’s black and white panchromatic emulsion is exposed through its base, which is made up of corduroy-like vertical columns of minute semicylindrical lenticules embossed with goffered lenticules on the surface of the celluloid base by means of a rotating ribbed drum, using a process called calendaring. The direction of the triad filter’s stripes matches the orientation of the lenticular elements, i.e., they are both (usually) vertical going. Image light passing through the triad filter passes through the lenticular base and is refracted into RGB analyzed stripes and recorded by the panchromatic emulsion as monochromatic density. The reversal processed film creates its own screen plate, but a colorless one encoded in image density whose colors are restored in projection using the same kind of triad filter that was used for photography. The trichromatic interdigitated pattern on the screen, as is the case for any screen plate system, must be sufficiently fine for additive color synthesis to take place. There are no temporal or spatial parallax artifacts associated with the process, and a standard camera may be loaded with the embossed film, base facing the lens. Photography must be done with the widest lens aperture because stopping down results in the occlusion of rays p­ assing through the edge sections of the triad filter, changing the color balance of the image. The usual screen plate problems apply to the lenticular color process, namely, filter absorption of taking and projecting light and difficulties making prints. Rodolphe Berthon’s invention was improved with the help of engraver Anthon (some sources give Albert) Keller-­ Dorian. The technology was offered for license by Société du Film en Couleurs Keller-Dorian of Paris, also known as Société Française Cinéchromatique. More than a score of

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Fig. 45.9  A triad filter made for the lenticular Kodacolor process. (Cinémathèque Française)

patents were assigned to the company beginning in 1921 until the end of its operations in 1930. The process was licensed by Eastman Kodak, which in 1928 applied it to 16  mm home moviemaking under the name Kodacolor, a name that would reemerge in 1942 as a negative-positive integral tripack system for snapshots. Kodacolor lenticular film was exposed through a cellulose base having 22 vertically embossed lenticular elements per millimeter. It was the first home movie color system, and it was processed as reversal like other Kodak home movie films. Users were required to mount a special 25 mm f/1.9 CineKodak lens to which the striped filter was added, and a conversion kit was made available for existing 16 mm Kodascope projectors (Capstaff 1928, pp.  940–947). The process was attractive from Kodak’s point of view since it was far easier to calendar the surface of the celluloid base to make lenticules than accurately manufacture minute RGB colored columns, but one drawback was that only black and white prints could be made. The Keller-Dorian process was also licensed to Agfa who pursued color printmaking. In 1930, the Kislyn Corporation of Englewood, New Jersey, was organized to turn Berthon’s concept into a product based on the research and development program carried out by C.  L. Gregory, whose work concentrated on the ability to make color contact prints from the positive lenticular camera film. Gregory’s lab was closed down within a year because the Societé du Film en Couleurs, proprietors of Keller-Dorian, for whom Gregory had previously worked, brought legal action.

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In 1936, Kodak applied the lenticular color process to 35 mm for what was called “a preliminary investigation of the problem,” which was demonstrated April of that year at the Loew’s Rochester Theater using a modified Simplex projector with a faster pulldown and wide shutter angle, plus a modified Peerless Magnarc lamphouse, all of which contributed to increasing image brightness to overcome the light losses inherent in additive color projection. The lenticules ran horizontally and used a filter placed over the lens with blue, green, and red bands, running from top to bottom. The report describing the project, written by Capstaff et al. (1937), notes that part of the goal was to overcome the industry’s belief “that it was impossible to show these pictures properly even in the average theater, not to mention the de luxe houses having screens from 25 to 35 feet in width.” A second demonstration was given for 200 guests on July 9, 1936, at the Center Theater in Radio City in Manhattan using a screen that was 22 feet wide; according to Capstaff et al., adequate screen brightness of 33 foot candles at the center of the screen was achieved. The effort, evidently, did not progress beyond the demonstration stage. Siemens & Halske’s Opticolor was based on Berthon’s lenticular process, according to Hull (1969). It was used in Germany for the short feature film Das Schönheistsfleckchen (The Beauty Mark), which premiered in Berlin in August 1936. It was followed by a documentary about Germany that was screened at the Paris Exhibition the following year. The process was abandoned in 1941 (Cornwell-Clyne 1951; Ryan 1977). (See chapter 51.) In November 1951, Kodak introduced Eastman embossed print safety film, type 5306, a lenticular process developed with twentieth Century Fox. Despite the efforts of motion picture technology pioneer Earl Sponable, who headed up the twentieth Century Fox research lab, and despite an announcement in January 1953 that the process would be used by Fox for their release prints, the system was shelved probably because of the advantages of the newly introduced Eastman Color system. Ryan (1977) writes that Kodak also strove to develop the lenticular system into a method for color television recordings and in 1956 offered 35  mm Eastman Embossed Kinescope Recording Film, Type 5209. The system was used for a year by NBC at its Burbank facility and discontinued after the advent of color video tape recording. As ingenious and attractive as the lenticular color system might have been, by avoiding the complex manufacturing process and chemistry needed for the integral tripack, or the daunting alternative of Technicolor’s imbibition printing process, the approach had too many limitations. Polavision, 1977. I attended the press introduction of this screen plate process in a warehouse in Needham,

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Massachusetts, a circus-like event with Edwin Land playing the part of a professorial ringmaster. The Super 8 format film remained in a special self-developing cartridge for exposure and projection. The Polavision camera exposed the emulsion through the RGB rulings of its polyester base that remained in place for additive color projection. Point and shoot cameras were made by Eumig of Austria, a respected manufacturer of amateur cinema gear. After exposure the film was processed in a projector the size of desktop computer CRT monitor that also served as a rear projection viewer, also made by Eumig. The cartridge contained pods of viscous chemicals that processed the black and white emulsion to a

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reversal image the first time the cartridge was inserted into the player-projector. The image, confined to a small screen, was far less pleasing than the Super 8 Kodachrome used by most home moviemakers. The image was less saturated than chromogenic Super 8 materials, and the vertical rulings, while somewhat visible, were not entirely objectionable. Polavision was instantly obsolete, with the technology finding a diminished afterlife as a high-speed motion picture analytical tool and as a rapidly processed 35 mm slide film, Polachrome. Eumig’s financial exposure was sufficiently great that the failure of Polavision bankrupted the company in 1979 (Kattelle 2000; Lipton 1975).

Subtractive Technologies

This chapter encapsulates the history of early color cinematography services based on subtractive release printing processes, many of which were bichromatic, since it was more easily achieved for both photography and printing. The interest in bichromatic processes in America continued even after the introduction of three-color Technicolor in the early 1930s, because the Technicolor service was costly and had limited capacity; in addition, two-color cinematography proved to be acceptable for some genres, such as animated cartoons and Westerns. The processes used different techniques for cinematography, sometimes based on special cameras and optics and their own methods for making color prints. For subtractive bichromatic release prints, the following techniques were tried: chromatized black and white single-sided print stocks using rehalogenation or re-emulsification; duplitized dye transfer prints using base-to-base cementing; duplitized print stock, coated on both sides with black and white emulsions that were toned; duplitized print stock with emulsion incorporating color couplers; and two-pass dye transfer printing onto a single side of blank stock. Technicolor’s color subtractive service, based on imbibition printing, used in conjunction with its three-strip camera, was the dominant subtractive three-color process, from the early 1930s to the early 1950s, and will be covered in two subsequent chapters. Cinecolorgraph (Colorgraph), 1912  Colorgraph was designed as an end-to-end color service by chemist Arturo Hernandez-Mejia (1870?–1920). Educated in the United States he was originally from Caracas, Venezuela; he made films in South America and owned a large film laboratory in Cuba (Arturo Hernandez… 1920, p. 831). Hernandez-Mejia (1912, pp. 10–15) wrote that he spent many years working on his color process while in Cuba, taking advantage of the island’s “favorable conditions of lighting.” He moved to the United States, first to Midtown Manhattan and then to New Rochelle, New York, to organize the Colorgraph Company of America with C. A. (Doc) Willat, who ran the Cuban laboratory. (Willat was the production manager of Technicolor’s 1917 feature, The Gulf Between.) Hernandez-Mejia’s camera

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eliminated the sources of both temporal and spatial parallax color fringing using a single lens for bichromatic analysis. Two rolls of film were used, each recording its half of the visible spectrum, with frames exposed at right angles to each other in two gates, with image-forming light passing through a beamsplitter directly to one frame through a red filter; the light was next reflected by the beamsplitter at 45° and through a green filter to expose the other frame, as described by Hernandez-Mejia (1916, pp. vol. no. 22, 3524, 3529, 3530). This kind of an optical layout, for still photography, was well-known by that time, for example, Wall (1925, p. 118, 119) cites B.  J. Edwards’ three-plate one-shot camera of 1899. While it’s clear that the beamsplitter technique was well-known for still photography, and its application to cinema is obvious, considerable skill is required designing both a practical motion picture camera and a method for release printmaking; there are similarities between Hernandez-­ Mejia’s camera and the three-strip Technicolor camera. Hernandez-Mejia’s release print concept is described in a patent filed on June 21, 1912, USP 1,174,144, Process of Making Color Photographic Transparencies, which is an early suggestion for duplitized printing for motion pictures. Duplitized print stock has both of its sides coated with emulsion. E. Lewy is apparently the first to have used duplitized film for color photography, as taught in his 1910 D.R.P. 238,514, according to Wall (1925, pp. 639–651). Obviously, the assertion that an invention is the first of its kind requires complete knowledge of everything in the field that came before it, but it’s safe to state that Hernandez-Mejia made an influential contribution to the art. Duplitized printing for cinema is an obvious approach since a different color can be assigned to each side of the print. The goal is to be able to design a practical printmaking process, which Arturo Hernandez-Mejia may have achieved, in his case by dye toning each emulsion. The blue-green ­filtered negative was printed on one side of the stock and dye-­ toned red-orange, and the red-orange filtered negative was printed on the other side of the stock and toned blue-green.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_46

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since a yellow filter prevents exposure of the blue-violet sensitive emulsion. The yellow dye is washed out in processing, but based on remarks made in Hernandez-Mejia’s disclosure, he may have intended it to remain in an attempt to produce superior blacks by means of yellow’s subtractive combination with the green-blue images. Wall points out that Gaumont and others also had the idea of using the “yellow dye to restrain” the exposure on the other side of the base. After exposure the print film is developed and bleached in an iodide mordant making the silver receptive to dyeing. Then each side of the stock is dye-toned with its appropriate color using a machine designed for that purpose. In a second approach, the emulsions have metallic salts added to them, and after development the print is immersed in a potassium ferricyanide solution resulting in toned images with silver Fig. 46.1  The Colorgraph camera film paths; the R and G frames were ferrocyanide as a by-product, which is removed by sodium exposed in gates at right angles to each other. (The lens and image thiosulfate (fixer). Hernandez-Mejia’s USP 1,525,423, forming area is highlighted yellow.) Process and Apparatus for Coloring Motion Picture Films, which was filed on December 18, 1922, teaches his method Many methods have been proposed and used for toning or to tone duplitized print stock, using a machine that continudyeing the black and white emulsion, as described earlier in ously moves the film through a series of tanks in which it is these pages, in which dye is substituted for the silver in the bathed in a series of chemicals. By the time the patent was emulsion. Hernandez-Mejia (1912, pp.  10–15) first pur- granted on February 3, 1925, Hernandez-Mejia was deceased. chased his duplitized stock from English and German manuCoe (1978) states that while having an influence on color facturers but thereafter from Eastman Kodak. After supplying processes for decades to come, Colorgraph did not progress it to Hernandez-Mejia, under license from him, they offered beyond demonstration films, probably because there were it as a special order product, which implies that Eastman had many unsolved technical issues and due to the death of determined that it was proprietary. By offering the duplitized Hernandez-Mejia. Ryan (1977) writes that there seems to be stock, Eastman furthered color technology for motion pic- no record of the system having been commercially used. tures, not only for Colorgraph but later for Brewster Color, However, Colorgraph was used for the 1913 four-reel reliPrizma, Technicolor, and their own efforts to turn the original gious film Conscience? produced by the Conscience Film Kodachrome into what became Fox Nature Color. In this way Company of New  York (Layton, 2015). A 1919 advertiseHernandez-Mejia made a sizeable contribution even if his ment for the service shows a photo of an impressive three-­ process never achieved commercial success. By the early story building and is headlined “Colorgraph Laboratory 1930s, duplitized print film was offered by Kodak, Agfa, and Incorporated of New Roselle, New York.” On the bottom of DuPont, in conjunction with bipack camera negative to pro- the layout, in bold type, this appears: “Double-Coated vide the basis for other companies to use these materials for Colorgraph Films.” The ad boasts that prints can be run on their own proprietary color services. Subtractive duplitized any projector and warns possible infringers of the consebichromatic release printing was used for important main- quences that await them (Colorgraph Laboratory 1919, stream products, which will be described in chapter 48. These p. 139). commercial color services designed their own camera modiDuplitized prints were reportedly difficult to project in fications and release printing techniques including toning sharp focus because the image resides on two surfaces sepaformulations and processing machines. rated by the thickness of the cellulose base. On this subject Hernandez-Mejia suggests methods for coloring prints Cornwell-Clyne (1951) refers us to R. H. Cricks who wrote that involve the contact printing of both sides of the duplitized that given the depth of focus of the projection lenses used print stock by creating a sandwich of the camera negatives for typical throws (distance to the screen), and rake angle with the duplitized stock in the middle having its emulsions (usually projectors are higher than the screen, and rake is the in contact with the emulsions of the camera negatives (or downward slant), the duplitized image ought to be reasonduplicates made from them). This printing technique was ably sharp. However, the reports of soft focus for duplitized later used by others in the field, in particular by Capstaff for stock projection are consistent, and Cornwell-Clyne offers Fox Nature Color. One of the print stock’s emulsions was the theory that since duplitized prints were usually made dyed “lemon yellow” to prevent or “slow down” print-­ from bipack photography, the cause of the soft focus is the through to the opposite side of the print stock’s emulsion, scattering of light passing through the first emulsion before

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Fig. 46.2  The top portion of an ad that Colorgraph ran in the trade press in January 1919.

it exposes the rear emulsion. Perhaps, but it is also the case that the best focus required that the projectionist split the difference between the images on both surfaces, which even if well done might result in a loss of focus with the slightest focus drift due to the heating of gate and expansion of metal parts. Cornwell-Clyne (p. 575) points out that according to Bell & Howell’s instructions for the adaptation of their standard camera to backpack use, it was best to swap out the entire intermittent mechanism with one designed especially for bipack registration to insure sharp focus. Brewster Color, 1915  Percy Douglas Brewster (1885?– 1952) graduated from Cornell in 1905 with a degree in mechanical engineering (New Color Photography… 1916). He later studied under photographic technology expert UK-born Edward John Wall, often quoted in these pages. According to Brewster’s obituary in the New York Times of October 30, 1952, he had been granted 360 photography patents. In USP 1,191,941, filed February 11, 1913, Color Photography, Brewster describes duplitized camera negative for photographing a bichromatic record, but this seemingly promising approach was not taken up, possibly because sharp focus on both emulsions could not be satisfactorily achieved. In 1913 Brewster contacted John G. Capstaff of The Kodak Research Laboratories to request 35  mm stock coated to his specifications. After having considered Brewster’s ideas, as recounted below, Capstaff came up with bichromatic Kodachrome, the basis for Fox Nature Color.

Brewster eventually offered a complete color service using duplitized print stock. For his bichromatic cinematography method, he describes a beamsplitter in USP 1,222,925, Film for Color Cinematography, filed June 24, 1914. This is a camera with one intermittent for exposing two frames simultaneously using the lens’s light split into two optical paths for exposing the fames though the appropriate red and green filters. This is a relatively early application of beamsplitter technology to motion picture cinematography, and like the inventors at Technicolor, he used one with a patterned reflecting surface. In Brewster’s case the beamsplitter uses stripes of mirror-surfaced columns alternating with clear spaces to pass half the imageforming light and reflect the other half, in his case, to a bipack with film held apart by a spacer. The modern approach for making such a beamsplitter is to sputter a metallic coating onto the reflecting surface, usually of aluminum, but silver and gold have been used. In the cited patent, Brewster uses an arrangement of prisms, but in an application filed on March 14, 1921, USP 1,752,477 Camera for Color Cinematography, he describes a different method for separating the optical paths into two parts using a spinning mirror-shutter at 45° to the lens axis. In either case the unfiltered orthochromatic emulsion captures the required blue-green record, and the panchromatic emulsion is exposed through a red filter to block the blue and green light. After 1930 Brewster extensively modified the process for trichromatic cinematography in an attempt to compete with

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Fig. 46.3 Brewster’s beamsplitter bipack camera from USP 1,222,925. The two frames are exposed at the highlighted area. Fig. 9 depicts the beamsplitter’s structure of alternating clear and mirror columns.

Technicolor.1,2 Ryan (1977) reports that the three-color version was demonstrated on April 12, 1935, to the Royal Photographic Society, at which time it was noted that the image lacked sharpness but had praiseworthy color. In 1941 Brewster sought damages and injunctive relief from Technicolor claiming infringement, but the outcome of the suit seems to have been unrecorded indicating that it was dropped or settled out of court. There was a great deal of litigation in this particular field, such as the suit filed by Hernandez Mejia against William Van Doren Kelley (Decisions of the Commissioner of Patents … 1923, p. 87). Brewster Color was used for two films by D. W. Griffith, first for 1920 Way Down East and the following year for Dream Street. In 1920 Brewster Color was used for Bray Productions’ animated cartoon The Debut of Thomas Cat, which is thought to be the first American color cartoon (Pallant 2011). Perhaps the film was photographed frame sequentially through analyzing filters. Bray used the process only once, possibly because of the cost of the prints or perhaps they may have been prone to scratching. Kinemacolor America, 1915  Attempts to use off-the-shelf black and white release print film for conversion to color, a process called chromatizing in this book, predate cinema for still photography. Wall (1925) describes this approach, as “emulsions superimposed on the same side of the base.” The process is distinguished from color printing using duplitized stock since chromatizing involves treating a black and white print stock’s single-sided emulsion. Early inventors, seeking to make subtractive prints, had little choice but to devise methods involving off-the-shelf black and white stock. Coloring an emulsion was achieved by chemical treatments using metallic or dye toning, mordant dye coloring, or the

Bichromatic Brewster: USPs 1,308,538; 1,563,959; 1,580,114; and 1,580,115 2  Trichromatic Brewster: USPs 1,992,169; 2,070,222; BPs 449,678; 449,749; and 449,750 1 

tanning and dyeing of gelatin. In general, the first analyzed color negative is exposed on the black and white print stock and developed to a positive and then toned and prepared for the second exposure of the other color record’s negative to be overlaid on it. It may have been possible to use the remaining unexposed halide for this purpose; otherwise it was necessary to rehalogenate or add another emulsion on top of the original one. The technique of re-emulsioning may have originated with the German Gustav Selle’s USP 654,766, filed December 7, 1898, Production of Colored Photographs. Selle’s patent describes a three-color process for still photography for making paper prints using rehalogenation and gelatin dye mordanting with waterproofing the colored layers in succession to prevent unwanted chemical reactions within them (Wall 1925). Over time, many chromatizing variations were conceived, attempted, and patented. One early suggestion for chromatizing off-the-shelf black and white release print stock was made by Kinemacolor Company of America’s head of research and development, William Francis Fox, an Englishman living in New  York City’s Borough of Queens. Fox describes ways to improve the exhibition of Kinemacolor by retaining frame-sequential cinematography but abandoning it for projection and making subtractive prints from its negatives. Fox described one version of a chromatizing print process in USP 1,166,123, filed February 3, 1915, Photographic Process, and another filed on January 13, 1917, which he called “in some respects an improvement,” USP 1,256,675, Production of Colored Pictures. A brief summary of the disclosure technique is given, even though chromatizing was not taken up by Kinemacolor. Positives are made from the alternate frame Kinemacolor camera negative by skip-frame printing (every other frame) onto black and white stock to place each analyzed record on its own reel. The red-orange filtered reel becomes the blue-green printer and the blue-green filtered reel the red-orange printer. The release print is exposed using the blue-green printer and toned blue-green (red-orange’s

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subtractive primary) developed and toned. The process now calls for exposing the silver bromide remaining in the emulsion with the red-orange printer (blue-green’s subtractive primary), or if there is not enough silver bromide remaining, the toned emulsion is protected by a celluloid solution, and then the print film is re-emulsioned in preparation. The red-­ orange record is exposed on top of the blue-green toned image, developed and toned red-orange. There are 14 steps to the process involving optical printing and chemical baths, detailed descriptions of which we can forgo, but in sum Fox describes a method, using successive exposures and chemical treatments, to produce a subtractive print with two layers on one side of the print stock. Fox’s subtractive process, compared with the original frame-­ sequential Kinemacolor additive process, had the potential to greatly increase projection brightness, eliminate projector-­ induced color flicker, and allow the print to be shown on any 35 mm projector running at the standard 16 fps, but it could not have eliminated color fringing produced by temporal parallax in photography, which was at times was quite severe. Whatever its merits (assuming it worked), Fox’s chromatizing process came too later to save Kinemacolor, but the chromatizing process Kelley created for Prizma may have been inspired by it. Polychromide, 1918  Subtractive Polychromide was developed by Aaron Hamburger, an American photographer who established a portrait studio in London before the First World War, who had been granted several patents for still color photography and toning processes. In 1918 Hamburger and W.  E. L.  Day were granted EP 136,595, describing a motion picture beamsplitter camera. The 1922 EP 203,358 teaches a dye-toning method for making duplitized prints that allegedly was able to produce a broader range of colors than expected from the usual bichromatic analysis and printing. Wall (1925) comments that the basis for Hamburger’s assertion, that he was able to reproduce yellow from a bichromatic process was based on “an esoteric power” possessed by silver, and therefore “obviously farcical.” (Wall had a latent sense of humor that occasionally develops in his book, The History of Three-Color Photography.) Bichromatic cinematography cannot achieve a full range of colors. The Polychromide duplitized prints were made using a Debrie printer and technique along the lines of the one Capstaff designed for Fox Nature Color. Ryan (1977) notes that with the availability of bipack negative materials, Hamburger abandoned the beamsplitter method, and Polychrome film was shot using a Debrie bipack camera circa 1930. Cornwell-Clyne (1951) writes that Polychromide continued to be used in London as late as 1933 with only minor modifications.

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Fox Nature Color, 1929  Fox’s Nature Color process was licensed from Eastman; it was an extension of two-color Kodachrome, invented by John George Capstaff of The Kodak Research Laboratories, which used an entirely different technology from the monopack (integral tripack) Kodachrome introduced in 1935. Capstaff’s creation was earmarked for still portraiture because it produced good skin tones. It used bichromatically analyzed negatives and a dye absorption printmaking process. Kodachrome was based on a discovery Capstaff made in 1913 that an exposed negative processed in a tanning bleach removed the emulsion’s silver replacing it with hardened gelatin (Wall 1925). The gelatin remaining untanned became a soft matrix that when soaked in a dye took it up producing a positive color image. Capstaff made positive transparencies from prints made from analyzed negatives by tanning them and dying one red-orange and the other green and then superimposing them in register on a paper backing to create two-color prints. Exposures during a portrait sitting could be taken sequentially using a repeating (drop) back, or the negatives could be exposed simultaneously using a one-shot camera. The inspiration to turn the process into a movie system came when Capstaff received an inquiry for a custom motion picture product from Brewster, as noted above. In 1915 Capstaff set out to do experiments to adapt the Kodachrome process to cinematography by using two vertically stacked lenses to simultaneously expose above and below analyzed 35 mm frames. Capstaff had the good fortune of having a three-lens Chronochrome camera that Gaumont had given the lab for testing the suitability of the panchromatic stock Kodak agreed to make for him. Capstaff turned the camera into a two-lens two-frame pulldown machine to expose negative through bichromatic filters. Test footage was shot in George Eastman’s garden and on the roof of The Kodak Research Laboratories. The camera pulled down eight perforations and exposed above and below filtered frames using twice as much film as usual. The analyzed negatives were the basis for making subtractive prints that ran at the normal rate by combining the negatives’ color information onto one frame. Prints were made with a special optical printer that simultaneously exposed both sides of duplitized stock, which was sandwiched between the green and red-orange printers. The duplitized print film was developed and tanned producing dye-absorbing gelatin, after which each side of the base was dyed taking up its color, in a machine designed for making release prints (Matthews 1930). A considerable amount of research and development was done with the result that Capstaff was granted many patents for the process.

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Fig. 46.4  Frames from one of Capstaff’s tests that led to Kodak’s license to William Fox for his stillborn Nature Color. (Kodak)

The desire for applied or natural color was furthered by the properties of gelatin, in the simplest case the emulsion’s ability to be colored because of gelatin’s ability to absorb dye, and with regard to Capstaff’s work, this property was exploited to produce a bichromatic version of natural color. Its first intimation was Fox Talbot’s 1852 discovery that a gelatin-coated glass plate bathed in potassium bichromate becomes sensitive to light; afterward its softer gelatin areas can be washed away in warm water to produce a colorless relief image. The remaining hardened gelatin serves as a printing plate that can be inked to make an impression on paper. The discovery of the tanning or hardening of gelatin became the basis for many still and motion picture color printing processes, including Capstaff’s Kodachrome. There were other ways to exploit the tanning of gelatin, such as the Handschiegl applied color process in which a gelatin matrix was made in a tanning developer to produce a relief image in soft gelatin that absorbed dye when bathed in it. The absorbed dye was then transferred or imbibed under pressure onto the print to be colored. The Technicolor dye transfer processes created yet another kind of matrix made up of a hardened colorless relief image, a matrix whose declivities represented photographic density, which were filled in by dye that was imbibed onto a gelatin-coated receiving blank. Kodak licensed Capstaff’s technology to William Fox, who was motivated to take it up to compete with Warner Bros. (Ryan 1977). In the late 1920s, Warner Bros. ­committed

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to a series of bichromatic Technicolor feature films, which by contract tied up Technicolor cameras and the company’s printmaking output. The competitive Fox, who was convinced that technology was a key to growing his business, was motivated to shoot his productions in color and get around the bottleneck. He directed Fox’s Vice President Jack Leo to come up with a color system, and Leo in turn gave the task to John F. Coneybear, head of the Fox laboratory (Color to Play Important Part in Future Fox Productions, 1930). Coneybear selected Capstaff’s Kodachrome process for evaluation and in 1925 Capstaff came to Hollywood to supervise tests. Fox liked what he saw, and the process was licensed on a non-exclusive basis and branded Fox Nature Color. One account has it that 1 million dollars was spent on a lab for making prints, but Layton (2105) and Pierce report that the lab was more modest with only part of Fox’s New York lab set up to make Fox Nature Color prints, but a second lab was planned for Hollywood. Kodak arranged for Fox to pay a royalty directly to Brewster, whose process had been Capstaff’s starting point. Coneybear commissioned both 35  mm and 70  mm Fox Nature Color cameras; accordingly twenty- 35 mm and ten 70 mm Grandeur cameras were ordered at a total of $310,000. The 35 mm Fox Nature Color camera of 1926 was made by the William P. Stein Company, founded in Upstate New York in 1903 and known for developing a process for GE’s electric motors (Boone 1954; William P. Stein 1953). I examined one of the 35  mm Fox Nature Color machines, complete with three lenses mounted on its turret and its pop-on close-up prism, at Richard Edlund’s Santa Monica studio. (The Fox Nature Color camera was used by Paramount for their development of VistaVision, as recounted in chapter 64.) The 70  mm version is in the ASC’s collection in Hollywood, using lenses with sawn-off sectors, unlike the 35 mm version that did not require the operation to bring the optical centers of the lenses closer together. The 70 mm camera’s dual lenses were a pair of 50 mm f/2.3 Bausch & Lomb Raytar, and the one I examined was serial number 8. Although the camera exposed the color records simultaneously, eliminating temporal parallax color fringing, the vertical lens offset produced spatial parallax and color fringing especially if no adjustment was made for subject distance. A prism attachment was made for the near range, but it may have introduced its own fringing artifact due to magnification differences arising from unequal optical path lengths. Because the lens’s filters absorbed so much light, cameramen were advised to bathe the film stock in a solution to hypersensitize it prior to exposure (ammonia solution might have been used). The negative was kept on ice, to maintain hypersensitization, until a few hours before photography to give it time to reach ambient temperature to avoid condensation spots. William Fox hired Ziegfeld Follies set designer Joseph Urban to help create the look for four extravagant

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productions, but none of them wound up being photographed in color (Solomon 2014). However, the 1930 London Review used the process after which Fox Nature Color was discontinued, possibly for budgetary reasons, or the fact that William Fox, who had commissioned the effort, had been shut out of his company, as described in chapter 37. One bit of advice from the Fox Nature Color handbook for cameramen is interesting: “Back lighting should be used very carefully since very bright highlights, such as catch lights in the hair, will have a tendency to come out distinctly green and so may destroy the effect intended” (Ryan 1977). Harriscolor, 1929  Harriscolor was devised by Joseph B.  Harris, Jr., whose company purchased the assets of the Kelley Color Company in 1928 (Walker’s Directory… 1931; Cornwell-­Clyne 1951). In one embodiment Harris used two 35  mm Bell & Howell cameras set at right angles to each other, with one camera exposing straight through a beamsplitter and an analyzing filter and the other camera exposing the reflected image through its analyzing filter. This ensemble was designed to produce bichromatically analyzed frames from the same point of view using cameras with synchronized intermittents. A report in the SMPE Journal describes a bichromatic process in some detail (Report, 1930), but a trichromatic Harriscolor is described in the Film Daily of July 7, 1929 (Harriscolor 1929), as an end-to-end three-­color service using “…a standard single-coated, three color process.” (What might that be?) On the other hand, the SMPE report describes a rehalogenation process using a light yellow tinted stock to give “an illusion of three-color photography,” to which the Film Daily article may be inexpertly referring. Such an approach would result in moving the white point to the yellow without extending the color gamut. Release prints were to have been manufactured at a plant being built at 1040 (North) McCadden Place in Hollywood, capable of turning out 33,000 feet of color prints with optical track per day. The Film Daily article states that five quiet running cameras had been completed and that 26 more would be ready in 90 days. I have no information with regard to Harris’ plans having reached fruition or the process having been used commercially. Sennett-Color, 1930  Mack Sennett Studios, in Studio City, California, initially used bichromatic Technicolor to shoot two short comedies in 1927, Bathing Girl and The Girl from Everywhere, both photographed by cinematographer Ray Rennahan (Brown 2013). In 1930 Sennett turned to William T.  Crespinel of Multicolor, one of the process’s inventors, who provided on-set training after which the studio devised its own briefly used solution for bichromatic cinematography, Sennett-Color, which, like Multicolor, used bipack camera negative and duplitized stock for release printing. Most of the Sennett technicians’ efforts probably went into design-

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ing the camera modifications required for bipack cinematography. Sennett used a British bipack material ­ which consisted of a panchromatic negative and a stock called Red Ortho Front Negative having a blue-green sensitive emulsion coated with a red layer (Ryan 1977). My guess is that Multicolor made the release prints and that SennettColor was essentially Multicolor by another name. Sennett-Color demonstrates that it was possible for a small studio to function like a systems integrator to shoot and release bichromatic subtractive prints. Studio cameras could be converted to bipack function when they were fitted with a new film magazine having two feed and two take-up mechanisms. Cameras required relatively minor modifications to the gate area to accommodate the additional bipack thickness. For good sharpness the 0.005 inch thickness of the front film base had to be taken into account by resetting either the lens mount’s back focus or recalibrating the ground glass of the focusing screen. Because the front and back emulsions are exposed simultaneously (e.g., unlike Kinemacolor) using one lens (e.g., unlike Gaumont Color), there was neither temporal nor spatial parallax color fringing. Both negative films were engaged by the same pulldown and registration pins producing the steady images required to prevent release prints from showing color fringing. Bipack film consisted of two differently sensitized camera negatives, with their emulsions facing, separated only by a filter layer. They were exposed simultaneously, with light from the lens traversing the base of the orthochromatic film closest to and facing the lens, to expose the blue record on its rearward facing emulsion surface. Either negative had a yellow or red filter coated on top of its emulsion to prevent exposing the blue-violet portion of the rearward panchromatic stock that photographed the orangered record. The filter was bleached and washed away in processing. Prints were invariably made on duplitized stock. This bichromatic bipack-duplitized combination, after years of improvement, produced a limited but acceptable color gamut with good saturation, allowing color service companies to compete with three-strip Technicolor in terms of print price, and the fact that bipack could be photographed with existing production cameras. TruColor and Cinecolor provided these services (described in chapter 48) for the Hollywood film industry, which were most often used by second-tier studios for low-budget productions and by animators like Ub Iwerks and the Max Fleischer Studio, who were competing with Disney. Surprisingly good results were achieved for cartoon shorts with the print’s dyes possibly tweaked to suit the needs of the particular production. According to Limbacher (1968), the bipack process was pressed into service due to the scarcity of the Technicolor three-strip camera for the 1948 London Summer Olympics. To deal with the shortage of its cameras, Technicolor offered bipack cameras and a service called Technichrome, in which

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release prints were made using its three-color imbibition process. An early suggestion for bipack cinematography was made by Frederic Ives, in USP 1,320,760, Motion Picture in Colors, filed May 27, 1918, which describes two differently sensitized rolls of film exposed in the camera gate with facing emulsions. The heart of Ives’ disclosure is the design of the bipack gate in which the films are exposed through an optical flat with a pressure plate having flexible tensioning to take into account the double thickness of the touching emulsions. (Brewster had a similar notion, as described above.) However, bipacking did not require exposure through an optical flat to keep the emulsion surfaces in contact. Ives contemplated that the bipacked rolls of film would be wound together on a single core and taken up the same way, but in practice bipack was packaged as two rolls of film, and magazines were designed to handle such an arrangement with the camera stock following the familiar film path and the negatives juxtaposed at the gate, afterwards following separate paths to be taken up on two cores. Gaspar Color, 1930  Gaspar Color was a subtractive process invented by Hungarian chemist Béla Gaspar (1898–1973) whose work was based on that of the Austrian Karl Schinzel, who in 1905 proposed a color print process using a glass plate coated with three silver halide emulsions, separated by plain gelatin layers, with each layer containing dye that is complimentary to the layer’s sensitization. The print stock was to be exposed, probably in three passes, each color record through its appropriate filter, and after development the result would be three stacked silver halide images. Schinzel proposed the resulting stack to be treated with hydrogen peroxide to bleach the dyes that had been closest to the silver grains. Because of silver’s oxidation products released during development, these areas would be ready to react with the hydrogen peroxide; thus the dyes would be bleached becoming colorless. After chemically removing the silver in the emulsion by fixation, a complementary dye image of the negative would remain as a positive image of the required subtractive primaries. According to Wall (1925), R. Neuhauss called attention to the fact that all of the dyes would be bleached or destroyed by this chemical reaction, not just those in close proximity to the silver. Schinzel agreed that this was a flaw but he had set the stage for what would one day become a practical process based on dye destruction. In 1921 prolific photographic scientist John I.  Crabtree at Kodak Labs described a better chemistry for dye destruction imaging, and Friedman (1945) recounts that the idea lay dormant after Crabtree’s work until it was taken up by Gaspar. Gaspar Color Ltd. was incorporated in 1934 in England to commercialize the dye destruction release print stock that Gaspar invented in 1930. The material was manufactured by

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Gevaert of Belgium, but with the outbreak of the Second World War, manufacturing was taken over in the United States, by Ansco, a division of General Aniline and Film Corporation. Gaspar Color was a bichromatic or trichromatic multilayer process in which fully formed dyes were built into the emulsion layers. As Schinzel had suggested, during processing the dyes were bleached at the developed silver sites in proportion to exposure. The dyes left behind formed an image having both intense and stable colors. The print film had three emulsions, two on one side and one on the other, so it can be considered to be a kind of duplitized material. Gaspar Color was offered only as a print stock, and its introduction predated the first integral tripack camera film, Kodachrome, by a year. Gaspar Color is distinguished from Kodachrome and Agfacolor because Kodachrome was dyeadditive and Agfacolor dye-forming, while Gaspar Color was a dye destruction process. The process was used in North America beginning in 1941 for 16 mm and 35 mm release prints, the best known of which were the puppet animation films, Puppetoons, by George Pal, who like Gaspar was born in Hungary. Film artists Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger also used it, but Gaspar Color was not used for feature films (Ryan 1977). Ilfochrome, once known as Cibachrome, is the only remaining dye destruction process, used for still photographic prints; it is known for its brilliant color and long-­ lasting dyes. Cosmocolor, 1934  Originally conceived as a bichromatic additive color subframe process, Cosmocolor was converted to a subtractive process and used by RKO for a feature film, Isle of Destiny, in 1940, for which two-color release prints were made on duplitized stock (Ryan 1977). Dunning Color, 1935  Photography for Dunning Color used an integral 35  mm camera with side-by-side intermittent mechanisms, based on “silenced Bell & Howell movements,” that simultaneously exposed panchromatic film through blue-green and red-orange filters on two rolls exposing two standard 35 mm frames (Fernstrom, 1936). The process was the work of the father and son team of visual effects experts Carroll H. and C.  Dodge Dunning. Similar cameras were built by Fairall and Norling for stereoscopic cinematography and by Kelley for color cinematography. The Dunning Color camera was later used for stereoscopic photography by Chris Condon of StereoVision International of Burbank, which I examined in the early 1980s. Side-by-side Raytar lenses were available in 35 mm, 50 mm, and 70 mm focal lengths, abutted by means of cut-off sectors to reduce the interaxial distance of the lenses to a fixed 11 3 inch spacing (Zone 2012). Such an arrangement must result in horizontal parallax, but within a certain range of distances, color fringing can be mitigated.

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At the Reel Thing Conference in Hollywood at the Linwood Dunn Theater on August 24, 2018, Jaime Busby and Alan Boyd, of Gotham Photochemical, projected a ­work-­in-­progress restoration of a one reel film from a set of recently discovered Dunning Color prints. The short subject Snickerty Nick and Buzzy the Pirate Bee, made in 1935, was one of the three such films produced by American children’s book author Julia Ellsworth Ford. Busby and Boyd observed the print under a microscope and saw that it had stacked color emulsions. According to Ryan (1977), there was a three-color version that used duplitized stock with rehalogenated cyan- and red-toned images on one side and with a dye transfer yellow image on the other, which is not what Busby and Boyd described. The Dunning camera was used for Doom Town, a documentary about a March 17, 1953, atom bomb test in Nevada.

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shorts, it was abandoned, p­ ossibly because Polaroid’s printmaking facility was inconveniently located in Cambridge, Massachusetts; moreover, establishing a fully outfitted production facility in Hollywood would have been costly. In addition, Ansco had released its monopack films, and Polaroid, with a close relationship as an Eastman Kodak customer, may have suspected that their own efforts would be eclipsed by what would one day be known as Eastmancolor. Moreover, the company chose to focus on amateur still photography (Ryan 1977).

Dufaychrome, 1948  A process called Tricolour was acquired by Dufay-Chromex Ltd. in 1948 and renamed Dufaychrome. It was the work of British inventor Jack H. Coote and the Wray Optical Works, who had designed a camera that was similar to the three-strip Technicolor camera, using the same kind of beamsplitter configuration. The Telco Color, 1936  Telco was originally a bichromatic addi- cameras look alike except that Coote’s machine used two tive process probably using subframe optics for camera and magazine housings, a dual-width magazine for the bipack projector, as devised by Leon Unger and K. R. Hoyt. Telco and a single-width magazine for the green record. The release evolved into a totally different subtractive process using print process used a series of re-emulsifications incorporatbipack photography and duplitized printing. It was used by ing Agfa color coupler chemistry. Dufaychrome was used for Universal Pictures Corp. for short subjects and low-budget advertising shorts but not for feature films. Cornwell-Clyne (1951, pp.  509–580) describes a number of other 35  mm films (Ryan). design efforts using beamsplitter and multi-lens optics for Polacolor, 1947  Attempts at chromatizing by re-­color analysis in both Western Europe and the Soviet Union, emulsification or rehalogenation continued through the none of which had the kind of commercial success achieved 1960s with three relatively late-in-the-game processes, by Technicolor. Polacolor from the Polaroid Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dufaychrome from Dufay-Chromex Ltd. of One of these is the clever design by Byron Conrad England, and Panacolor from Panacolor, Inc. of Hollywood, Haskin, head of special effects at Warner Bros., which is California, with the latter two described below. The Polacolor described in USP 2,374,014, Color Photography, filed April chromatizing process is described in USP 2,471,547, 28, 1942. The camera aims to achieve the same kind of Photographic Process for Producing Multicolor Images, trichromatically analyzed three-strip results as the filed February 24, 1947, which was the work of W. H. Ryan Technicolor camera, but using only two rolls of film rather and Vivian K.  Walworth. Polacolor was a three-color sub- than three. Light passing through a beam-splitter prism tractive release print process that required RGB analyzed exposes a single film in a vertically oriented gate, and light separation negatives and used Eastman Fine Grain Release reflected downward at right angles exposes a bipack in a Positive 5302 or similar stock as its starting point. After horizontally oriented upward facing gate. One of the exposure by the red negative, the release print stock was bipacked films passes on to the vertical gate to be exposed, developed in a cyan dye-forming developer to create a silver and the other directly to a takeup reel. The camera film must and cyan dye image. Development was stopped, and the film be advanced the height of two frames to produce the negawas washed and then re-exposed by a low-wattage lamp. The tives meant for producing matrices for imbibition printing. first rehalogenation step required a bath to reform the silver Although plans for building a first unit were underway, that halide in the exposed portions of the film. After this step the did not proceed and the camera did not go into production. emulsion was made up of the cyan dye image and silver Two reasons come to mind: the cost of development to build halide. Now the film was washed and dried and exposed by relatively few cameras required for feature production and the green separation negative and developed in a magenta the fact that in 1942, when the effort was underway, Warners dye-forming developer. The process proceeded along the would still have been sole-­sourced for imbibition release lines described to add the yellow image from the blue separa- prints; they would have been freed from waiting in the tion negative. The result was a print made up of the YCM queue for cameras but they would still have faced release color components forming a subtractive color image. In print production limitations due to Technicolor’s strained 1949, after Paramount used the process for several cartoon manufacturing capacity.

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404 Fig. 46.5  From his USP, Haskin’s design for a three-color beamsplitter camera using only two rolls of film, rather than the Technicolor camera’s three. Films 17 and 15 are bipacked and exposed at gate 52 by light reflected by beamsplitter 4. A different frame of film 15 is exposed at gate 53 by light passing directly through the beamsplitter. Film 17, exposed only once, is taken up on reel 55. Film 15 is taken up on reel 56.

Panacolor, 1953  The trichromatic Panacolor (also a trade name also used for a German projector aimed at educational ­applications) from Panacolor, Inc., of Hollywood, was a chromatizing rehalogenation printmaking process as described in part in USP 2,886,435, Photographic IronSilver Color Process, filed on August 21, 1953, granted to Michele P. L. Martinez. A detailed description of a refined version of the process is given in USP 3,372,028, Color Process Using a Single Layer Silver Halide Emulsion, granted to L. J. Nicastro, a continuation based on the original filing of January 10, 1963. Panacolor required the use of RGB separation negatives. Nicastro’s disclosure shows flowcharts with more than 40 steps of exposure, developing, washing, bleaching, washing, and drying in succession. Panacolor was used to make release prints for a handful of features, beginning in 1962, with the Horizontal Lieutenant for MGM, and was last used for a feature in 1966 (Ryan 1977). Panacolor could not compete with Eastman Color. Eastman Stripping Film, 1953  Eastman Multilayer Stripping Film, the invention of John G.  Capstaff (1950), was an intriguing technology designed as a camera negative process with imbibition printing as an objective given that the processed film intrinsically produced color separation negatives. The film’s structure bears a resemblance to Kodachrome since neither used built-in dye couplers. Eastman Multilayer Stripping Film consisted of three emulsions coated on an acetate base, each analyzing a third of the visible spectrum. The top layer was sensitive to blue, followed by a yellow filter layer and then a stripping layer. The next layer recorded the green information, followed by another stripping layer, and the bottommost emulsion layer recorded the red portion of the visible spectrum. The top two exposed emulsions were removed in a stripping machine and transferred onto an acetate substrate for processing.

Mechanical stretching was required to ensure maintaining the dimensions of the emulsions and to align each of them with the substrates’ perforations, steps carried out in a water bath. While the top two emulsions were coated onto new acetate bases and then developed, the bottom emulsion was developed while remaining on its original base. Each required its own processing time to optimize its gamma. The RGB analyzed processed negatives could then be used as if they had been shot with a three-strip Technicolor camera, from which dye transfer prints could then be made. Eastman also designed a printer, called the Capstaff triple-head Rotary Registry Printer, for making release prints onto Eastman Color release print stock. Three patents were issued to Capstaff covering the art.3 The DuPont variant, S.T. Tripack, was introduced in 1949 as a bipack; due to its two-part construction, only one emulsion needed to be stripped and adhered to a new base (Ryan 1977). As far as I know, it was not used for a feature. Eastman Multilayer Stripping Film was given a trial run for Columbia’s 1953 stereoscopic production The Stranger Wore a Gun, with the posters crediting Technicolor, who made the imbibition prints. This was the only time Eastman Multilayer Stripping Film was used for a feature film. I viewed a digital planar print of the film, and it looks like Kodachrome from the 1950s, with high contrast, saturated colors, and good apparent sharpness. The look was pleasing enough that other factors must have been responsible for the abandonment of the process. Having watched bichromatic Randolph Scott Westerns in my youth, it was fun to see him inhabit a world in full color. The ancestor of the technology was George Eastman’s original snapshot system of 1888 that used paper substrate stripping film. Capstaff, John G., Stripping film patent: USPs 2,367,665; 2,533,424; and 2,611,686 3 

Kelley’s Color Microcosm

William Van Doren Kelley (1876–1934) indefatigably made contributions to color cinema technology leading to the development of important services that remained in use through the mid-1950s. He, more inventor than entrepreneur, and Herbert Kalmus, more entrepreneur than inventor, were two pioneers who developed and commercially exploited many different color motion picture technologies. Kelley, who was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in his youth, exhibited a flair for invention, theater, stage illusions, and magic, inclinations that would motivate him as long as he lived. Kelley (1919) wrote that he was in London in 1900 where he was exposed to the color photography processes of these inventors: Chicago inventor James W. McDonough, who worked on additive color screen plates; American inventor Frederick Ives and his Kromskop; English inventor E. Sanger-Shepherd who defined the subtractive printing primaries; and Parisian inventor and entrepreneur Léon Gaumont and his three-color stills that were viewed with a Mutoscope  – like a viewer (Wall 1925). Kelley partnered with his brother in a signage business in Brooklyn where they introduce a successful flashing light design circa 1910, probably based on his USP 876,907, Exhibiting Device, which he filed on April 30, 1906. The success of the invention undoubtedly lifted his level of confidence and may have given him some independence to pursue the development of color cinema technology, which he entered with great zeal after another trip to England in 1910, with cameraman Joseph Mason, to create promotional displays for theaters exhibiting Biograph films. Working with Mason and the Biograph camera inspired his future work (Layton 2015), and during his stay in London, he undoubtedly went to Kinemacolor screenings. Back in the United States, beginning in 1913, Kelley’s early color experiments were undertaken in the basement of 1586 E. 17th Street in Brooklyn, New York (Theisen 1935), now a tree-lined street of single-family dwellings and small apartment houses. In November 1914, with investment capital of $100,000, Kelley founded Panchromotion and worked with the English inventor Charles Raleigh to refine his four-­ color Panchromotion, an experimental additive process that

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was cut from the same cloth as the Kinemacolor two-color frame-sequential technique based on a rotating color filter shutter. Raleigh, who had been a gold miner in South Africa, moved to Paris where he acquired the French rights to Kinemacolor, but after having had a falling out with Charles Urban sold his interest back and went to work for the Kinemacolor operation in the United States. After he left Kinemacolor America, Raleigh and Kelley founded Panchromotion, which had a short life and produced no products, but it was the basis for Prizma, which for a time was Technicolor’s major competitor. Raleigh (1922) recalled that in a 10-year period, he saw “over a million dollars in hard cash melt away in the attempt to capture this elusive illusion” (about $15 M today). The Panchromotion process used four-color analysis with a rotating four sector disk having red-orange, blue-green, blue-violet, and yellow filters exposing frame sequentially on 35 mm panchromatic negative. The filters were chosen to have overlapping transmissions, the rational for which was the belief that this would reduce color flicker. The filter sectors used an assortment of subsectors and unfiltered sections. For projection an arrangement of six filter sectors was used, four of which had red-orange, magenta, greenish-blue, and blue filters, with two having three subsectors without color filters. Aspects of the system are disclosed in three similar patents filed between 1914 and 1916, including USP 1,216,493, Film or the Like for Color Photography, filed April 13, 1916, by C.  Raleigh and W.  V. D.  Kelley. Their approach was not without precedent since similar schemes were suggested in the prior art, as Wall (1925) writes: “F. Leiber patented a system which was designed to obviate the defect of Kinemacolor in giving yellowish whites…four filters were used in pairs (DRP 263,038; 1911)…R. Bjerregard used a sector shutter with inserted white sector (DRP 242,101; 1911)…C.  Raleigh used a rotating shutter with overlapping sectors (FP 443,315; 1912)….” About half a year after the filing of Raleigh and Kelley’s ‘493, a similar disclosure was filed by J. A. Wohl and M. Mayer, on October 15, 1913, Color Photography, which was granted as USP

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405

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Fig. 47.2 A figure from Kelley and Raleigh’s USP 1,278,211, Photographic Color Screen, filed November 6, 1915, teaching frame-­ sequential color cinematography. RGB and Y are self-explanatory. K is the frame for holding the filter, and S represents the unfiltered sectors. Light passing through a filtered and a clear sector are mixed for each frame’s exposure. Thus each frame is analyzed by means of color filtration and some unfiltered light.

Fig. 47.1  William Van Doren Kelley

1,122,455. It was the basis for a division filed on December 29, 1914, Color Photography, granted as USP 1,211,904, which was assigned to Kelley’s next company, founded in 1915, Prizma Inc. (The Prizma Process of Color Photography 1917). Kelley, Wohl, and Mayer would join forces. The selection of Panchromotion’s filters was the result of years of experiments by Raleigh, who was not trained as a scientist and therefore unrestrained by theory. Rather he used a heuristic approach to create thousands of new filter combinations to determine which gave the most pleasing result (Layton 2015). While Panchromotion was not used theatrically, it was the basis for the first of version of Kelley’s Prizma Color, which was by the early 1920s, in a business sense and in terms of technology, ahead of Technicolor and its first process. Prizma was also, in one way or another, the forerunner of the important color services, TruColor and Cinecolor. For Kelley Panchromotion was just a stop along the way, to be followed by Prizma and its series of processes, which in turn was followed by other companies in Kelley’s quest for the color process. In 1915 Kelley attracted an investment from J. A. Wohl and Max Meyer, of the arc lamp manufacturer M. J. Wohl &

Company, who had been experimenting in the field of color cinematography as demonstrated by their ‘455 patent cited above. Prizma Inc. was headquartered in a former garage in Jersey City circa 1915, with the company’s business offices later moving to 40 Wall Street in Manhattan. In the ensuing 6 years, and after nearly three-quarters of a million dollar were spent on development, several processes were produced under the rubric Prizma, before the company had a commercially viable system (Ramsaye 1926). The first public screening of Prizma, a rebranded Panchromotion, occurred on the evening of February 8, 1917, at New  York’s American Museum of Natural History. As reported in the American Museum Journal, more than 3000 people attended (Dickerson 1917). The event was covered by The Moving Picture World, reporting that “throngs” were in attendance requiring a second screening later that evening, and its reviewer found that Prizma had none of the red and green color flashing that accompanied rapid movement of prior color movie projection, which is undoubtedly a reference to Kinemacolor. A slight flicker was observed, and the green of the foliage was subdued. The rainbow of Niagara Falls was praised, and generally the reviewer thought the process to be good but found that: “… a softening of the general color scheme is noticeable” (MacDonald 1917). The first theatrical film released under the Prizma brand also used the four-color rotating filter system for projection, either identical to or based on Panchromotion. The film was

47  Kelley’s Color Microcosm

Our Navy, a news film or documentary, of interest because of World War I, shot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which was shown Christmas week 1917 at the 44th Street Theater in Manhattan. According to some accounts, the print, although photographed using four-color analysis, was projected using Kinemacolor-style projection with rotating red-orange and blue-green filters. An article published in a 1917 edition of the house organ of the ASC, Motion Picture News, commented that the colors were “subdued (but)…admirably rendered.” Although skies and water were “well reproduced,” the article goes on to state that that greens weren’t true and yellows were “absent.” The detailed technical summary concludes with: “Colors in full saturation are hardly within the scope of this process” (The Prizma Process… 1917). Contemporary accounts are important, but we can only surmise how the images were perceived through the eyes of those who lived a century ago. Ryan (1977) comments that Panchromotion “…had all of the deficiencies of Kinemacolor and no advantages to offset them….” Ryan is supported by accounts of color fringing in subtractive prints made from Prizma frame-sequential cinematography. As reported by Simon Brown et  al. (2013), James Stuart Blackton, when directing the Prizma film The Glorious Adventure, released in 1922, asked leading lady Diana Manners to move her arms slowly to avoid color fringing. It is difficult to untangle which version of Prizma was used at any given time because it was in an ongoing state of change, motivated in part by an effort to make it compatible with existing projectors. The literature is sometimes contradictory, and Kelley, who wrote many articles and filed many patents, is not always adequately forthcoming. On February 25, 1917, Prizma was used for screenings of nature and animal films at the Strand in Manhattan, using the rotating filter wheel, but at the same time in private screenings aimed at fundraising, Kelley was showing an improvement that would have expanded the reach of additive color Prizma (Layton 2015). Kelley took a step in the direction of making the process compatible with standard 35  mm projectors by dyeing alternate frames red-orange and blue-green, to eliminate the rotating filter requirement. The projectors still had to be run at twice the usual 16 fps rate; the processes resembles Friese-Greene’s Biocolour, which is described in chapter 44. The reader is reminded that the terms additive and subtractive refer to the methods of projection, additive usually referring to the frame-sequential method and subtractive referring to light passing through the color layers of one frame for synthesis. Because alternate frames were tinted doesn’t signify that the new version of Prizma was subtractive, as some writers have supposed, since Kelley simply substituted dyed frames (tinted filtration) for a spinning color filter wheel. It cannot be considered to be a step in the direction of subtractive projection, but it was a step toward projection compatibility. If the method was truly subtractive, toning

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rather than tinting would have been required. The ultimate goal of a color process is to have the color information contained in one frame and projected with an unmodified projector running at the normal speed, but at the time Kelley didn’t see how to achieve this subtractively, even for the less challenging bichromatic approach. Kelley wasn’t prepared to give up on additive color; he and Prizma Vice President Carroll H. Dunning set up a laboratory at 205  W. 40th Street in Manhattan, where they designed Kesdacolor, an additive color micromosaic technique, an intriguing amalgam of line-screen and duplitized print technology. Kesdacolor was based on a réseau with alternating blue-green and red-orange fine-­pitched vertical stripes of filters. The goal of this effort was to incorporate all of the color information on a single frame to insure compatibility with existing black and white film and processing and with the projection infrastructure. Kesdacolor was a true outlier: an additive color system that used duplitized stock meant for making subtractive prints, which is probably why CornwellClyne’s (1951) Colour Cinematography and The Focal Encyclopedia of Film and Television Techniques (Spottiswoode 1982) misclassify the process as subtractive. The Kesdacolor camera had two lenses located above and below each other, designed to expose two frames of 35 mm film simultaneously as described in USP 1,431,309, Motion Picture Film, filed February 10, 1919. A line screen, an interdigitated raster of alternating colored columns, was located within the camera covering both frames in close juxtaposition to and in front of the negative. The top lens took its exposure light from an upward-­ facing diffusing surface whose illumination was reflected at right angles and exposed through a lens and a filter the same color as one of the stripes. The filtered exposure light could not pass through one set of the filter stripes of the vertical rulings because it was its compliment, thereby producing opaque lines to form a raster or grating of alternating black and white stripes on the processed negative. The bottom lens formed an image that was photographed through the color analyzing line screen. The print was made on duplitized stock with the monochromatic image on one side and the line screen on the other. Skip-frame optical printing was required to segregate the line-screen master from the analyzed image. The colored line screen was produced by printing the raster master onto one side of the duplitized stock and then toning the silver image of the rulings red and tinting the clear areas green-blue. The system, like other screen-plate or micromosaic systems, depended on the eye’s inability to resolve the finely spaced elements to permit additive color synthesis. A test screening took place at the Rialto Theater in Manhattan on September 12, 1918. Ryan (1977) reports that the title of the demonstration was The American Flag, suggesting that the line screen used blue and red rulings selected to match the flag’s colors. The process did not go beyond the demonstration stage.

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47  Kelley’s Color Microcosm

Fig. 47.3  The Kesdacolor USP cover sheet.

Carroll H.  Dunning (1881–1975) would go on to found the well-regarded Dunning Process Company in Hollywood, offering a proprietary traveling matte and process plate services for the studios. Beginning in 1935 he introduced Dunning Color, two-color and then three-color subtractive release print services, as described in chapter 46. Dunning designed a 35  mm camera with horizontally offset filtered dual lenses for bicolor analysis. Kelley used the Dunning camera for shooting anaglyphic short subjects by adding prism extensions to the lenses to increase their interaxial separation. Novelty short subjects began to be released by Kelley under the Plasticon brand at the end of 1922, possibly with single-sided chromatized prints but more likely

duplitized release prints, using one color for one perspective view and the complimentary color for the other view. At the end of 1918, Kelley’s Prizma Company was reorganized as a production company focused on subtractive exhibition beginning a series of weekly short subject travelogues released through Louis J.  Selznick’s World Film Corporation. Distribution began on the week of December 29, 1918, with a film about the Hawaiian volcano, Kilauea (Slide 2013). Initially Kelley used the alternate tinted frame method for additive color projection but, I believe, switched to a subtractive chromatized print process. In either case the films could be shown on an unmodified projector, with the alternate frame prints at double the frame rate, and the sub-

47  Kelley’s Color Microcosm

tractive prints at the normal frame rate; Kelley may have finally become convinced that additive projection could not be perfected. Everywhere with Prizma, released using chromatized subtractive prints, was shown at the Rivoli Theater in Manhattan in January 1919. The process itself was the star attraction, a marketing approach that would be repeated decades later for This Is Cinerama. On January 20, 1919, The New  York Times reviewer wrote that Everywhere with Prizma’s color ranged from good to poor and that the process demonstrated that color movie photography was not perfected, but Prizma was successful for a time (Ryan 1977). (It seems likely that Kelley was still using field-sequential photography.) It’s possible that Kelley’s subtractive chromatized process was inspired by the work of Kinemacolor America’s William Francis Fox, previously cited, USP 1,166,123, granted December 28, 1915. Kelley’s USP 1,278,161, Color Photography, filed February 7, 1916, is cut from the same cloth. Kelley didn’t limit himself to two-color prints in the ‘761 patent and mentions the possibility of three color prints using imbibition for the third color, presumably yellow. While Kelley did not extend the process to trichromatic capability, Dunning did in 1937 (as noted in the prior chapter). Kelley used two different techniques for dyeing the duplitized prints: in one case each side was dyed in succession, and in the other approach one side of the print in progress was coated with a removable layer, or resist, protecting it from the chemical baths required to tone or dye the second color image. Prizma’s subtractive release may have been the earliest in the United States, with the chromatized 1919 Everywhere with Prizma, thereby anticipating Technicolor’s duplitized 1922 The Toll of the Sea. Kelley abandoned the single-sided chromatized process with the availability of off-the-shelf duplitized positive print stock. Based on this work, Prizma became the progenitor of both TruColor and Cinecolor, which are described in the next chapter. In December 1919 it was announced that, with Selznick’s involvement, the Republic Distribution Corporation would produce new feature films shot in Prizma, and that it held exclusive distribution rights to the process (Republic’s December… 1919). Earlier that year Kelley (1919) presented examples of both additive and subtractive prints to the SMPE, with the additive prints using the alternating tinted frames method and subtractive prints using an unspecified process. On February 27, 1922, at the New England Section of the Illuminating Engineers Society, both chromatized and duplitized prints were shown. Kelley and his associates lectured and screened two films, With Prizma in Africa, by William Crespinel, and The Psychology of Color as Applied to Motion Pictures, by Carroll Dunning (Section Activities… 1922). There were 65 attendees, amongst them were a group of Technicolor researchers who must have been riveted by the samples of color cinematography and printing they beheld. One of them, Eastman Atkins Weaver, who had a doctorate

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degree in electrochemical engineering and was an expert in lens aberration and colorimetry, took “analytical notes” (Layton 2015). He observed that the chromatized single-sided process had poor colors with white flesh tones and unsaturated greens that looked pale blue, that the reds were unsaturated, and that the projected images had poor overall detail. He also reported that while the duplitized print was better, it was not sharp, had poor color saturation, and lacked yellows and blues and that the foliage was gray rather than green. But these defects didn’t seem to matter to the public since Prizma was succeeding in the marketplace (possibly improvement was made after Layton’s report). Exhibitors were happy with subtractive projection since they didn’t have to change a thing, given that the color information was on one frame allowing for projection using a standard machine running at the standard rate. Subtractive printing could not cure temporal color fringing caused by frame-­sequential cinematography, but a Prizma camera capable of simultaneously exposed frames was said to be under development. As a result of having seen subtractive Prizma Color, animation pioneer James Stuart Blackton, one of Vitagraph’s founders, decided to use it for a film and directed the first color feature to be so released, The Glorious Adventure, produced in England at Stoll Studio in Cricklewood, at a cost of $150,000. The exposed camera negative was sent to America for processing (Cornwell-Clyne 1951). The cinematographer was Crespinel, who would play a part in the development of Cinecolor to be described in chapter 48. The film was premiered in London in January 1922, and a technical review in the Kinematograph Weekly reported “color shifts, dull highlights, and black shadows showed evidence of a lack of sufficient light for proper exposure,” and color fringing was also cited (Bennett 1922). The film opened in New York in April with The New  York Times complaining that the images “seemed crude” with “the chromatic intensity of a cheap postcard and the indistinctness of a poorly lighted photograph” (The Screen: The Glorious… 1922). As noted above, Blackton instructed actress Lady Diana Manners “to move her arms slowly to avoid color fringing,” although the camera was purported to eliminate that defect (Brown 2013). Kelley laid the blame for the photographic defects and harsh reviews on Blackton, charging that the filmmaker didn’t understand the potential of color cinematography and that the scenario failed to take color into account, but it was Crespinel, an expert, who was the cinematographer. Other Prizma films made the following year were Vanity Fair and The Virgin Queen. Prizma had a decent run, and in addition to these features, 26 “actuality” shorts, dance subjects, and feature film inserts were produced between 1918 and 1922. Kelley left Prizma in 1923, which did not further its cause; another reason for the company’s decline was that its laboratory was inconveniently located in New Jersey, but most important was that it simply could not compete with the grow-

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ing success of Technicolor (which was inconveniently located in Boston). Kelley was an entrepreneur-inventor, self-taught, highly motivated, and determined, and as far as I am able to gather, the companies he formed were centered on his inventive contributions with the notable exception of Dunning’s contribution. Therefore, when he left Prizma, it ended any chance that the company may have had to make improvements to the process. It was different at Technicolor where its leader, Herbert Kalmus, had been educated at universities in America and Europe. Technicolor employed many researchers with backgrounds similar to that of Kalmus, and the company nurtured a stable research and development organization spanning decades. This stability of organization was absent given Kelley’s peregrinations, for surely his efforts were disturbed by his business reshufflings. In addition, Kelley (1925) demonstrated a certain impropriety, when in the first of a two-part article published in 1925  in the Transactions of the SMPE, Color Photography Patents, he does something I have not otherwise seen in a journal article: he dissects the claims of patents competing with his efforts and critiques their merit. Since these claims were or might have become of substance in litigation, it’s not a surprise that C. E. Kenneth Mees, the director of Kodak’s Research Laboratory, made the following comment during the discussion period following the reading of the paper: “I suggest that Mr. Kelley does not give opinions on the validity of patents. That is a matter for the Supreme Court.” After Kelley left Prizma, he founded Kelley Color Films, Inc., which offered a bichromatic camera and print process as part of a color service package. Three years later Kelley, together with Crespinel, partnered with Max Handschiegl, whose dye transfer applied color process was described in chapter 40. Feature films in this era sometimes used bichromatic color along with tinted or toned segments to maximize dramatic effects; this reduced print costs that would have been incurred if the entire film had been produced and released in bichromatic color. Kelley unsuccessfully anticipated the Technicolor dye transfer process by attempting to transform Handschiegl’s imbibition process for tinting monochrome prints into a natural color process. Kelley’s first attempts were at bichromatic prints using optical printing to separate the two color records into two imbibition printing matrices. The prints were made from the matrices that had absorbed dyes transferred to mordanted clear gelatin-coated receiving print film blanks. However, the process could not be scaled up for production. Attempts were made to extend the process to three-color printing by imbibing dyes onto a receiving film that had a key black and white image, a technique that was later used for the early threecolor Technicolor process. Such an approach, using YCMK plates for photomechanical reproduction, remains a mainstay of color printing for magazines, books, and newspapers. Although the process ­produced praiseworthy colors, based on contemporary accounts, the prints exhibited color

47  Kelley’s Color Microcosm

fringing and a loss of sharpness, probably due to the spreading of the imbibed dyes. It’s my impression from reading Kelley’s (1919, 1925, 1926) accounts that he was using a black and white image that had far more density than the conventional low-contrast K (key black) image, a result that would have produced a look similar to that of a stencil applied color print. Dye spreading and other technical problems were never solved, and the quest for a solution was terminated with the death of Max Handschiegl on May 1, 1928. The Handschiegl process was originally designed to be a mechanically applied color process giving a result similar to that of its contemporary Pathécolor stencil process, but it was not designed for or precise enough for manufacturing natural color prints. The machine for applying the dyes could never match the precision of the 100-foot-long stainless steel pin registration ribbon designed for successive imbibing passes used by the Technicolor printing process. After Handschiegl’s death Kelley returned to duplitized prints (Max… 1928, p.  574), but the process met with scant success, and the assets of Kelley Color Films were sold to Harriscolor in 1928. One of Kelley’s last attempts at making bichromatic release prints occurred in 1929 when he tried to create a bichromatic duplitized print by cementing two toned prints emulsion to emulsion. This approach, had it succeeded, might have produced prints with better sharpness than Technicolor’s cemented base-to-base process. In 1919 Kelley was presented with the first medal awarded by the SMPTE for his color motion pictures accomplishments (Theisen 1935). His career encapsulates the evolutionary progress made by his generation of color cinema inventors as he tried and discarded one process after another. His first approach was frame-sequential photography and projection using a complicated filter array, but he realized its shortcoming and switched to a two-color system similar to that of Kinemacolor. Next he eliminated the projection filter wheel and substituted tinted frames having alternating colors. Kelley tried his utmost to continue on with additive technology and with Dunning created the hybrid Kesdacolor that used a combination of line-screen and duplitized print technology, but it was not deployed commercially. He designed a process to chromatize off-the-shelf black and white print stock to make two-color release prints, which was little used, and he worked on duplitized technology that led directly to TrueColor and indirectly to the creation of Cinecolor. He attempted to adapt the Handschiegl imbibition process to three-color release prints and worked on a method to manufacture two-color release prints by cementing the component prints emulsion to emulsion. His work progressed from frame-sequential additive color to more sophisticated subtractive projection technology, but he never achieved a commercially viable three-color process. Kelley continued to work on motion picture technology until his death in 1934.

TruColor and Cinecolor

Introduction  Two-color TruColor and Cinecolor couldn’t match the image quality of three-color cinematography, but they were successful for several reasons. Over time they were improved compared to the earlier bichromatic subtractive processes described in the prior chapter. Importantly, they reproduced pleasing skin tones, and the eye can be a forgiving instrument; despite their limited color palettes, they succeeded in competing with Technicolor in its heyday, in part because the human eye is adaptable. For example, these processes seemingly reproduced blue skies even if they could not objectively reproduce its color. The second-tier studios needed TruColor and Cinecolor during Technicolor’s heyday, from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, because there was a shortage of both three-strip cameras and imbibition printmaking capacity, and Technicolor favored the major studios leaving the second-tier outfits out in the cold. None of this would have mattered if these services were not compatible with conventional motion picture cameras and projectors. Cinematography for the bichromatic processes depended on bipack camera film and the making of release prints on duplitized print stock, both of which were offered to the producers and labs by the film manufacturers. TruColor and Cinecolor took these off-the-shelf materials and used them in their laboratories where they applied their proprietary knowhow. The Motion Picture Laboratory  The term laboratory has been used by the film industry from its earliest days; lab functions more nearly resemble those of service bureaus and factories, processing film and manufacturing release prints, rather than a place where research takes place. To help the reader better appreciate the duplitization processes used by the two organizations described in this chapter, a brief history of lab practices is given. Much of the summary of lab technology provided here is based on a comprehensive 22-page article with 293 references, published in 1955 by Kodak Research Laboratory’s Assistant Head of Applied Photography, the renowned British-born John Ickeringill Crabtree (1891–1979) (1955), who joined the company in 1913 and retired in 1957.

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Crabtree gives the “birthday of the motion-picture laboratory” as August 1889, when George Eastman first filled an order for celluloid film for W. K. L. Dickson, who worked in a 18 ft × 20 ft lab that had two adjacent darkrooms, which Dickson wrote included “one for punching, trimming, joining the films, and printing the positives; the other for developing, fixing, washing, and ‘glycerining’ the film,” the last step for making the film more flexible. For processing, a term that includes the chemical steps required to turn exposed film into a negative or a positive, the film was wrapped in a spiral around “large, black, enameled drums” suspended above shallow chemical-filled troughs into which it was lowered. After the development step, the drum was carried to another trough where it and the film wound on it were revolved in a spray of water, after which the other required steps were carried out: fixing, washing, a dip in the glycerin trough, and finally fan drying “while revolving the motor-driven drum.” Printing positives from negatives was done on an 8- or 10-inch-diameter sprocketed drum “geared to turn slowly, over which the films came in contact, the exposed film being under the negative and the pins registering both films.” A small electric lamp, which had its intensity controlled by a variable resistor, was used to expose the print film. Dickson’s was the first celluloid cinema laboratory, establishing the procedures performed by future film laboratories. In about 1900 the laboratory emerged as a separate unit, whereas previously its functions had been the province of the cameraman and his assistant. The lab took over what they had done, namely custom development by inspection. That’s the way that still photographers using glass plates or sheet film, approached their art, by removing the color-blind or orthochromatic negative from the developer when they deemed it to be satisfactory, which could be done without danger of fogging the film when it was illuminated by a red safelight. Such a practice might be inefficient for a movie studio’s lab that had a high volume of work. A better approach, as we shall see, which was put into practice, but

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_48

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only after decades was film developed to a fixed time and temperature. A decisive step toward the adoption of time and temperature processing occurred with the need to develop optical sound tracks to a target gamma, circa 1928, as refinements in sensitometric measurement and mechanical and chemical control systems had become a necessity to achieve consistency. In the early days, motion picture producers perforated raw stock themselves, often using precision equipment made by the British firm Wrench & Prestwich. This ceased to be a required function after Kodak and Pathé began to supply perforated 35 mm film, but other tasks were added to the lab’s list beyond the processing and printing of dailies and release

Fig. 48.1  John Ickeringill Crabtree (Emilio Segrè Visual Archive) Fig. 48.2  A developing rack, circa 1911.

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

prints, such as optical printing for making fades and dissolves, the filming of titles, and tinting and toning. Manufacturing laboratories were established to make significant quantities of release prints, separate from the studio lab that processed film and made dailies. Specialist labs were also established, like the ones described in this chapter, for the processing of bipack film and the manufacture of duplitized color release prints. Crabtree tells us that the first processing machine to be used was designed by Englishman Cecil Craddock Hepworth, as described in the 1898 BP 13,315. Hepworth’s processor was comprised of a series of shallow side by side troughs with the film fed through them by sprocket drive. Léon Gaumont was active in this field, and in 1907 he installed tube processing machines at his facility in Paris, and in 1913 sold one to Kodak in Rochester. In 1916 USP 1,177,697 was issued to Gaumont for a machine based on a sequence of tanks in which the film followed a helical path on racks over a series of rotating crowned rollers. This design was taken up by others in Europe and America and improved, although other methods for driving film through tanks were devised. The principle of most modern processing machines, according to Crabtree, was demonstrated in 1920 by the Spoor-Thompson machine, which ran film through a series of tanks, and dispensed with sprocket drive, thereby eliminating the possibility of sprocket-hole tear. Machines of this type ran film through them faster than 200 feet per minute. A major change in release printing occurred circa 1927; prior to this prints were made directly from the camera negative, but to conserve it and in order to be able to manufacture high-quality release prints for foreign markets, Kodak introduced Eastman Duplicating Stock, which contained a yellow dye enabling contrast control by exposing it through either yellow or violet filters. This stock was used for making both master positives and duplicate negatives. 1927 was also the

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

Fig. 48.3  A film-drying drum.

year for the introduction of what became a widely used developer formula, Kodak D-76, which produced finer grain, gave better gradation, and allowed for more convenient longer development times than prior developers. 1928 marked an important change in how the studios went about processing camera negative film. Prior to this, laboratories would not machine process camera negative for fear of damaging it, but in that year C. R. Hunter of Universal demonstrated its efficacy. By 1932 the three largest studios in Hollywood were machine processing camera negatives to a fixed gamma. Gamma is the slope of the straight-line portion of the Hurter-­ Driffield curve, which is a plot of the negative’s density versus the logarithm of its exposure. Developing a film stock to a specific time and temperate in the same (fresh) developer will produce the same H&D curve, with the same gamma, hence the same photographic results. The lab, using a sensitometer, can make the required density measurements of processed film and derive the gamma, thereby insuring that all the film run through a processing machine will have the same imaging characteristics. Prior to this cameramen counted on the lab to control the density of their negatives by changing the time it remained in the developer, but with the machine processing of camera film to a specific gamma, cameramen had to make their exposures with greater precision. Orthochromatic film had been developed to the negative’s desired density using the inspection method that involved viewing it under the illumination of a Wratten Series No. 2 red safelight, which could be done without fear of fogging the film. The replacement of

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ortho emulsions by panchromatic film occurred when sound was introduced in the late 1920s; although the time and temperature method was favored, it was possible to develop panchromatic film by inspection, using the right technique according to Jones and Crabtree (1926). 1931 saw the introduction of the electrolytic recovery of silver from exhausted fixing bath in which silver metal would migrate from the fixing solution to be deposited on stainless steel electrodes (WS: The Alchemist… 1940). The Bell & Howell Model E printer was introduced in which the picture and sound “were printed in one operation.” The Model E was followed by similar printer models of increasing sophistication from different manufacturers. In much the same way that Dickson adjusted the timing of prints by changing his printer’s lamp intensity, printing machines sensed notches made to the edge of the negative to key the printer light based on the judgment of specialists called timers. Kodak offered two new specialized stocks in 1937 to allow for greater intermediate material control: one for printing master positives and the other for printing duplicate negatives. Integral printing was introduced in 1940  in which positive raw stock flowed through the printer, the processor, and speed-­adjusting elevators (loops of film) with the release print passing through a projector for inspection. TruColor  Consolidated Film Industries, the proprietor of TruColor, was founded by Herbert John Yates (1880–1966), who was born in Brooklyn, New  York, and became a successful executive at the American Tobacco Company and Liggett & Myers, during a period of consolidation in the tobacco industry when the big companies gobbled up the small ones. It was this experience that informed Yates’ approach to the motion picture business. Yates joined Hedwig Film Laboratories in 1916 and by 1918 decided that he had found a way to increase his wealth (with the help of his brother George) by purchasing Hedwig and Republic Laboratories, which became part of the entity he incorporated in 1924, Consolidated Film Industries (CFI). After a series of mergers and acquisitions, which included the absorption of the New  York laboratories Erbograph and Craftsman, and re-incorporation in 1927, it became the largest motion picture laboratory, processing camera negative, making dailies and release prints from locations on the East and West Coasts (Tuska 1999; Slide 2013). In 1928 Yates became the major shareholder of the Biograph Company, and a year after that CFI began to buy up failing phonograph record labels that it sold a decade later to the Columbia Broadcast System. By 1935 Yates formed and controlled Republic Pictures, made up of Poverty Row studios, a group of shoestring organizations that had heavy debt burdens including bills they owed Yates’ CFI for lab services. The Poverty Row designa-

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Fig. 48.4  Herbert J.  Yates. The inscription reads: “To Don Barry, a tough guy with a heart of gold. Herbert J. Yates, October 2, 1945.” Don “Red” Barry acted in low-budget Westerns.

tion did not necessarily refer to a specific location in Hollywood, although many of these studios were in the neighborhood that was just a few blocks north of the corners of Sunset and Gower, near the adjoining Paramount and RKO lots. These marginal companies made low-budget Westerns, detective stories, serials, and comedies, mediocre films that were populated by dependable actors. Yates persuaded owners of two of the Poverty Row studios, Monogram and Mascot Pictures, to merge with CFI, and with the new combination in place, Yates added Liberty, Majestic, and Chesterfield Pictures. In effect, Yates had been financing these studios by carrying the debt they owed his laboratory, and so these studio’s bosses were amenable to a deal that would extinguish their debts, assured by the tobacco-chewing Yates that they would maintain a degree of autonomy. Yates told them he knew nothing about running a studio, which was true, and that he planned to remain in New York to act as the chairman of the board, which was not, and within 2 years he bought them out and took control (Roberts 1955). In 1935, to house Republic Pictures, Yates first leased and afterward bought the Mack Sennett Studios in Studio City, in what was then the agricultural and rural San Fernando Valley; it was located across the Santa Monica Mountains from Hollywood, 5 miles north of what had been Poverty

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

Row, to what today is known as the Radford or CBS lot. Herbert J. Yates arrived in Hollywood, the boss of a studio of respectable size, who controlled a major film laboratory that processed and printed black and white film, bichromatic color film using its Magnacolor process, in part based on patents sublicensed from Vitacolor. In 1930 the Vitacolor Company purchased more than 30 of Kelley’s Prizma Color patents and worked out a process to chromatize a conventional single-sided release print emulsion based on Kelley’s earlier work. Vitacolor lay dormant until 1947 when a bichromatic process under its name was used for two feature films, Last of the Redmen and The Return of Rin Tin Tin; circa 1930 Vitacolor sublicensed some of the Prizma patents to CFI, which used them and other technology it acquired, to create Magnacolor, the precursor of the TruColor color service. Magnacolor was based on bipack cinematography and subtractive release prints made on duplitized stock, toning the emulsion on one side of the stock red-orange and the emulsion on the other side blue-­ green (Ryan 1977). Magnacolor was first used by Paramount Pictures for short subjects after which it met its feature film fate as the color system for low-budget Westerns produced, for the most part, by Republic Pictures in the 1940s, with these representative titles: Last Frontier Uprising, The Man from Rainbow Valley, and Rough Riders of Cheyenne. As has been noted, bipacks could be used in a standard studio camera with a gate change to accommodate the double thickness stock and a special magazine for two feed and take-up cores. Bipack consists of a front film with orthochromatic sensitivity to record blue-green, with its emulsion coated with a red filter so that the rear panchromatic film is exposed by just the red end of the spectrum. The ortho film closest to the lens is photographed through its base, with its emulsion in contact with that of the rear panchromatic negative film. The bipack camera films most likely to be used were either Eastman Bi-Pack Negative or DuPont DuPac Negative. Eastman bipack negative stock was available as follows: Type 5235 Pan to be used in conjunction with Type 5236 Ortho for tungsten illumination, and Type 5234 Ortho for daylight; 5235 and 5236, when used together for daylight cinematography required a salmon color conversion filter, usually a Wratten 80A or 80B. After the bipack black and white negatives were exposed and developed (the red filter coating was removed during processing), they were printed on opposite sides of duplitized color-blind stock such as DuPont Duplicoat or Eastman Duplitized Positive. Duplex contact step printers were used to simultaneously expose both emulsions in a sandwiched configuration with the print film between the two camera negatives. Since the emulsions of both camera negatives were in contact with the emulsions of the duplitized stock, there was no image reversal for the orthochromatic record even though it was shot through its base. Toning was accom-

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

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Fig. 48.5  The Republic Pictures logo. Left is the three-color version. Right is as it might have appeared in two-color TruColor.

Fig. 48.6  The structure of a bipack from a patent teaching improvements to the art, assigned to DuPont, USP 1,900,459. Light exposes and passes through the ortho film and then through a dyed colloid filter layer

to expose the pan film. The two films’ emulsion sides are in contact at the gate area to promote sharp focus.

plished by floatation of the exposed and developed print stock: first one side was floated emulsion down on a bath and then fixed and washed. The blue-green side, from the red record, was chemically toned in a bath of potassium ferricyanide and a ferric salt. The other side was then dye-toned red from the blue-green record, by floating the emulsion down in an iodide mordanting solution to convert the silver metal positive image into a silver iodide image capable of absorbing the dye. After washing the print, it was floated on the surface of a red dye solution and then washed and dried. The optical track was toned blue-green to better match the spectral distribution of the projector’s exciter lamp and sensitivity of its optical track reader. The choice of a chemical or metal

replacement toning for the blue-green side and the dye used for toning of the red side of the print was made based on crafting the best colors and gray scale for the production. CFI replaced the Magnacolor process with TruColor, which was first used in 1946 for Republic’s Out California Way, starring singing cowboy Roy Rogers (Martin 1998). Bipack cinematography continued with TruColor, but the prints used a radically different technology, duplitized release print film Eastman Two-Color Print Safety Film, Type 5380, which had color-forming couplers in its two emulsions. Famulener (1939) of Agfa Ansco, notes the possibility of dye coupling for toning, although he doesn’t mention its use for duplitized printing, the to this application is

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48  TruColor and Cinecolor

Fig. 48.7  The cover sheet of Kelley’s USP 1,998,584, illustrating the nature of the bipack ensemble. In this disclosure Kelley advocates a method for tacking the emulsions together to prevent “creep” to improve handling and increase sharpness. Bipack services avoided such a scheme by using a properly designed gate.

obvious. Famulener describes two related methods for color development: in the first, the oxidation product of the developer, resulting from the reduction of silver halide to silver metal, forms a dye. In the second, the oxidation products of the developer couple with a compound, either in the developer or the emulsion, to produce a dye. For the duplitized version, there is no issue with regard to dyes wandering to adjacent emulsion layers as is the case for color coupling’s most important application, the integral tripack. Sidney Solow (1976), the head of the CFI lab, relates that it was A. J. Miller of CFI’s Fort Lee, New Jersey operation, who suggested to Kodak that a duplitized color coupler print stock

could be used to upgrade the Magnacolor process. This was a fortuitous transition for CFI since it was the first lab to process an Eastman color coupler product; very soon duplitized printing would become obsolete, and the Eastman color system, based on dye coupling, would become nearly universal. (See chapters 51 and 52 for more about color coupling.) The Kodak duplitized stock had one emulsion incorporating magenta and yellow couplers; which when developed produced a silver and red-orange dye image, and the emulsion on the other side of the print stock incorporated a cyan coupler producing a silver and a blue-green dye image. Just

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

one development step was needed to create both color images, after which the film was run through a normal fixing bath to remove unexposed and undeveloped silver; developed silver remained that had to be removed, which was accomplished by a bath of ferricyanide bleach to convert the silver metal to silver halide so that it could then be removed with a second fixing bath. Prior to the final fixing bath, a sulfide treatment was applied to the track area turning it into silver sulfide so it would not be affected by the fixer. The step was required because the dye track could not be properly read by projectors’ optical sound readers; the sulfide treatment preserved the silver metal in the track giving it suitable density. It was far simpler to make prints using color coupler duplitized stock in machines that were the same as those used for black and white print processing, rather than the prior floatation toning process. On the downside, the step contact sandwiched printing of the two bipack negatives on either side of the print stock continued, and color couplers used fugitive dyes, unlike the prints made with the prior toning process. However, insofar as posterity is concerned, as long as the black and white negatives were well stored, the films were conserved. The bichromatic duplitized coupler process was in use for 3 or 4 years, after which CFI switched to three-­color monopack (integral tripack) print film that was coated on only one side with multiple emulsion layers containing dye couplers. The first such stock came from DuPont, Color Film Positive type 275, which was available in 1948, and may have been adopted by CFI at that time (Coote 1993). CFI dropped the DuPont material when Eastman Color Print Film, Type 5382, became available in 1954. Thus, in a span of about 8 years, CFI’s process transformed itself several times, first from one making toned duplitized prints, to one making color coupler duplitized prints on Eastman print film; CFI then abandoned the duplitizing process and transitioned to DuPont and then Eastman integral tripack release print film. TruColor ceased using bipack, probably by 1954, when trichromatic Eastman Color was well on its way to dominance. Exposing print stock from a tripack color camera negative, like Eastman Color, used the same kind of fast continuous contact printers as those for black and white printing, not the slower step contact printer with its sandwich of bipack negatives and duplitized stock. CFI, having had a head start with color processing, became a successful Eastman Color lab profiting from Eastman’s product development of camera negative, print film, and the intermediate materials used for effects, large print orders, and the production of masters for release prints made in foreign markets. During his reign Yates ruled with an iron fist, and Republic made B features with good production values, good music scoring, high-quality sound using RCA Photophone, and

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good prints made by CFI. However, after several shareholder law suits, the board removed Yates in 1959. At the time of Yates’ dismissal, he was in failing health, with the enterprise having passed its zenith; the studio had lost money for the last 2 years. Yates had failed to latch on to the growing opportunity created by television episodic series production. Additionally, the majors outdid CFI at its own game by producing more of their own B pictures for the bottom of the double bill. Another cause for Yates’ removal was his vain attempt to make a star of his wife, Czechoslovakian-born figure skater Věra Hrubá Ralston, who appeared in 26 features, most which did not fare well at the box office. CFI was sold to Technicolor in 1970, 4 years after Yates’ death. During his reign at the studio he created, Yates produced many successful pictures with singing cowboy stars, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and John Wayne, who became a Hollywood icon (Hurst 1979). Wayne was relegated to bottom-of-the-bill Westerns at Republic for more than a decade, from which he was rescued by his friend, Director John Ford. When Wayne returned to Republic in 1952, it was as a movie star in the film The Quiet Man, which John Ford refused to shoot in TruColor, preferring Technicolor (Eyman 2014). In agreement with Ford, Cornwell-Clyne (1951) comments: “A two-colour process can in the nature of things only provide a minute proportion of the total range of color sensations, and the undoubted satisfaction which has apparently been registered by uncritical audiences confirms the belief held by many color film experts that the average film-goer is far less sensitive to the subtleties of colour than had been generally supposed.” An alternative point of view is that the perception of color is a remarkably flexible attribute of the eye-brain and that people adapt to a limited color gamut, seeing colors even if they are objectively missing. Moreover, lacking a vocabulary with which to do so, an untrained person may be unable to articulate or conceivably perceive the shortcomings of bichromatic cinematography, which once accepted for what it is has a beauty unto itself. Cinecolor  Cinecolor, the predecessor of Multicolor, began operations in 1932–1933, as an offshoot of the quest for making release prints for the stereoscopic process designed by Harry K. Fairall, who was the director, cinematographer, and producer of the 3-D feature film The Power of Love, which premiered at the Ambassador Theater in Los Angeles in September 1922. The film was shot with Fairall’s dual 35 mm integral stereoscopic camera and projected anaglyphically using interlocked 35 mm projectors whose lenses were covered with red and green filters; the same filters were used for the lenses of the eyewear worn by audience members. When The Power of Love was shown, it required two interlocked projectors, an unwieldy exhibition process best suited to well-­staffed first-run houses, world’s fairs, or theme parks.

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Actor and director William Worthington, the president and treasurer of the Stereoscopic Binocular Film Company, the proprietor of the Fairall process, and his son-in-law, producer and director Rowland V. Lee, sought to free the anaglyph process from the constraints of dual projection with a release print process that permitted the exhibition of anaglyph prints using a single projector. One day in 1926, at a restaurant in Hollywood, Fairall spied Englishman William T.  Crespinel (1890–1987), who was to play a major role in the technical development of Multicolor and Cinecolor. Fairall knew of Crespinel’s work as the cinematographer of the Prizma feature film The Glorious Adventure, released in 1922, and in the ensuing conversation, he learned that Crespinel had also been the cinematographer for the widely distributed Ives-Leventhal Plastigrams and Stereoscopiks series of anaglyphic short subjects. After his meeting with Fairall, Crespinel met with Worthington, who was about to shoot a stereoscopic feature using the Fairall camera. Crespinel told Worthington he had his fill of anaglyphic 3-D after his experience shooting six novelty shorts using the Ives-Leventhal process, which was similar to the Fairall process. He told Worthington that “many in the audience became affected with eyestrain, dizziness, headache and nausea….” Crespinel acknowledged that duplitization was the obvious solution for anaglyph distribution, with prints having one perspective toned blue-green on one side of the film and the other perspective toned red-­orange on the other side; but “why do it?” he asked, when the result was discomfort and eyestrain. Crespinel offered Worthington an alternative: use the duplitizing process to a better end and create a good color process. Fairall, Worthington, and Lee agreed with Crespinel and formed the Multicolor Film Corporation (Zone 2007). Crespinel understood that the duplitized release print processes by Kelley Color and Technicolor needed considerable improvement. His opinion was that of an expert in the state of the art, having worked for Kinemacolor and as a Prizma cinematographer. Multicolor was designed as a bipack subtractive process, and its duplitized release prints were toned using a flotation technique that was similar to that of its competitor Magnacolor. Fairall and Crespinel conceived of a continuous print manufacturing process from the exposure of the duplitized stock to the finished print, as given in USP 1,897,369, Method of Producing a Color Positive for Use in a Colored Motion Picture, filed August 17, 1927. The process went into production, but unfortunately for its principals, Multicolor’s reputation was damaged by the industry’s negative assessment of the inserts it made for the feature The Great Gabbo, released September 1929. The Multicolor scenes were criticized for being blurry and having a “rainy” appearance. The sequences have been lost, but even if we had them, the passage of time, given the fugitive nature of

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

dyes, would make it impossible to assess how they looked in 1929 (Ward 2016, p. 213). It must be noted that the quality of release prints that Technicolor was making at that time was also put down. It seems that during 1929 until the early 1930s, color processes were incapable of producing consistently good prints, a situation that was brought to the fore by the rising demand for color as a compliment to the recently introduced sound processes making color desirable for musicals. Worthington and Lee bought a controlling interest in Multicolor from Fairall and took over operations, funding Crespinel to forge ahead with experiments at Paramount’s Real-Art film lab on Occidental Boulevard, in Los Angeles (Film History, vol. 12, 2000). In 1932 Howard Hughes invested about $1.5 million in Multicolor so it could build a laboratory that had a capacity of 3 million feet of color release print a week (Coe 1981). Hughes’ investment was secured by the plant itself, located at 7000 Romaine Street in Los Angeles. To help with Crespinel’s product development efforts, chemist Alan M.  Gundelfinger was hired. The company offered a new bipack camera negative, optimistically named Rainbow Negative, in fact a DuPont product, DuPac, developed based on Crespinel’s specifications. Crespinel managed the organization of a color service that was based on off-the-shelf products, modified Mitchell cameras, DuPac print stock, and Multicolor’s proprietary duplitized release printing process. Crespinel also designed the bipack camera gate as described in USP 1,927,887, Gate for Multiple Films, filed on February 24, 1930. The Multicolor (and subsequent Cinecolor) cameras were Mitchells with new gates, bipack magazines, and an optically flat shim inserted in front of the ground glass of the finder to adjust its focus to account for the bipack emulsions’ new position, having been increased by the thickness of the base of the forward negative. Bell & Howell studio cameras could also be used (Cornwell-Clyne 1951). In 1929 Fox used Multicolor for Fox Movietone Follies of 1929, the musical Sunny Side Up, and an operetta, Married in Hollywood, and Pathé used it for segments in three of its films. William Fox visited the Multicolor plant and expressed interest in the possibility of buying the process when he met with Rowland Lee. They signed a contract for Fox to acquire the process for a million dollars plus royalties subject to the approval of Fox’s board in New York. However, the board ousted Fox from the company he had founded, and the purchase was never consummated (Layton 2015). Fox’s fall is described in chapter 37. While Consolidated Film Industries licensed patent rights for TruColor from Vitacolor, based on Kelley’s Prizma, Multicolor did not do so, although some sources state that Multicolor was a direct offshoot of Prizma. It’s true that one of its principals, Crespinel, had shot a Prizma film, but as we have seen, the origins of the process began with its founders seeking a way to distribute films shot with the Fairall camera.

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

Fig. 48.8  Crespinel’s design for a bipack gate describes how to promote intimate contact between the front and rear emulsions to maintain sharpness and registration.

However, it is true that Multicolor bought the equipment of Kelley’s Prizma Color Company, which was dissolved in 1932, the year that Multicolor was reorganized as Cinecolor; therefore, Cinecolor did have a connection with Prizma, although through an asset purchase rather than a technology license. MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox included Multicolor sequences in their productions, but it was not usually used for an entire feature film. The last Multicolorbranded feature was released in 1932, Tex Takes a Holiday, which in England was titled Dolores the Beautiful. According to Coe (1981), it was reviewed in the British Kinematic Weekly with this comment: “The colour was good, though rather of the picture postcard variety.” (The reference is probably to photochrom postcards.) In April 1932 Multicolor was taken over by A.  L. McCormick, a Detroit automobile distributor, whose interest in the field had begun when his father-in-law lost a few hundred thousand dollars in Colorfilm, a New York color service company that had gone bankrupt. After meeting with Crespinel, McCormick decided that Multicolor was a company that could be rescued if changes were made. Multicolor was reorganized, refinanced, and renamed Cinecolor, as the

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West Coast affiliate of Colorfilm, which McCormick had purchased. The newly christened Cinecolor took up where Multicolor left off, remaining in its building, retaining Crespinel and Gundelfinger, Multicolor’s contracts, and client list. McCormick realized the futility of direct competition with Technicolor and beginning in September 1933 positioned Cinecolor as the dependable lower-cost service whose two-color system looked almost as good as the three-­ color process. Ryan (1977) reports that Cinecolor became the most successful bichromatic process, and by the end of 1933 the company reported it had orders for the coming year for 9 million feet of release printing. This included Paramount Pictorials, the studio’s magazine short subject series; amongst its customers were the color cartoon studios of Ub Iwerks, Pat Powers, Max Fleischer, and the animation division of Warner Bros. Cinecolor was promoted as an improvement due to the work of Gundelfinger (1950) and J. W. Stafford, in part based on a relatively simple procedure to achieve accurate exposures and better color: a gray card, of known reflectivity, was held in the scene pointing at the camera with a photometer aimed at it to measure its reflected brightness. There was nothing new about an exposure meter, like the Watkins Bee, which had been used in the industry since the early 1920s. Nonetheless, the method promoted by Cinecolor helped to achieve good exposures, and if the card was photographed at the head or tail of the shot, it provided a reference so the lab could optimize print color. To increase throughput Cinecolor built an improved processing machine that combined both developing and toning into one operation promoting color consistency. This machine was made up of three lengthy troughs containing chemicals, the troughs being vertically stacked with a drying chamber located above them running their length. The emulsions of the print films were floated on the surface of solutions for toning in the shallow troughs, with an arrangement allowing for the processing of ten prints side by side for an effective throughput of 120 feet per minute each print. The machine was designed to accommodate 35 mm, 16 mm, and 8 mm. The company asserted that it had created new dyes and printing techniques to extend the range of colors beyond what had been heretofore achievable with a two-color process, which was a possibility based on the new dye-toning process, possibly contributing to a wider color gamut than offered by metal toning. Cinecolor gave filmmakers a 24-hour turnaround for dailies in color, which Technicolor provided only in black and white, except for short lengths of film. Moreover, unlike its Technicolor competition, Cinecolor dispensed with the color consultant and concomitant aesthetic and technical restrictions. Bipack could use any easily modified studio camera, rather than the Technicolor threestrip camera that became a behemoth in its blimp; moreover the camera was in short supply. In 1933 Cinecolor prints in

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Fig. 48.9  Cinecolor was used for the Fleischer Studio’s production of the 1934 Betty Boop animated cartoon, Poor Cinderella.

quantities were only marginally more expensive than black and white prints at $0.03 per foot, while Technicolor prints were $0.05 per foot. As noted, Paramount Pictures used Cinecolor for short subjects, as did Poverty Row studios such as Monogram and Eagle Lion, who made some of their feature films in Cinecolor. In the mid-1930s much of the lab’s output was for animated cartoons by studios (Iwerks, Powers, and Fleischer) shut out of three-color prints because of Disney’s contract with Technicolor. In September 1942 Cinecolor declared bankruptcy, and its plan to reorganize was approved by the US District Court at Los Angeles in May 1944 (Walkers… 1928, p. 419). In 1945 the Cinecolor The Enchanted Forest, a Producers Releasing Corporation film, became a box office success that influenced other studios to use the process.1 In 1946 MGM used Cinecolor for its feature Gallant Bess, shot by John W.  Boyle, a prolific cinematographer who had begun his career in 1915 (WS: John W…). In 1948 Cinecolor introduced faster bipack stock that permitted a reduction in set lighting and also kept the cost for shooting Cinecolor to only 10 percent more than black and white cinematography. The This is a source of confusion since a 1930 film of the same title was produced by Colorart Pictures and released in bichromatic Technicolor.

1 

introduction of monopacks by Ansco and Eastman increased the demand for a three-color service, and in response the Cinecolor print process was modified. For a brief time, the company offered a product it called Natural Color, which was replaced by Supercinecolor, in 1951, that could be used to make prints from Ansco Color and Eastman Color camera films. Cinecolor offered dailies made on Eastman Color Print Film, Type 5381, which was introduced with its 5247 camera negative, the first generation of its transformational color system, as described by Hanson (1952). The first film printed in Supercinecolor was 20th Century Fox’s The Sword of Monte Cristo, released in 1951. Supercinecolor was not based on Eastman Color release print film but rather used Gundelfinger’s modification of bichromatic duplitized process that turned Cinecolor into a three-color partly chromatized process. Printing required making separation negatives from 5247 camera negative, with duplitized prints dyed magenta and cyan on opposite sides of black and white Eastman Duplitized Positive Safety Film Type 5509, in one pass using a special step contact printer, just as had been done for two-color Cinecolor. The yellow image was not applied using imbibition, as some sources have stated, but rather the cyan side of the print was rehalogenated and then exposed to the blue separation negative in a step contact

48  TruColor and Cinecolor

printer. The exposed silver of the newly applied emulsion was mordanted and dye-toned yellow. Cinecolor made a fateful decision when it decided to turn its duplitized print service into the three-color Supercinecolor, which was based on the need to offer a service for the new monopack camera films from Ansco and Kodak. The decision to eschew Eastman Color print stock, despite the fact that Kodak was a force to be reckoned with, may seem imprudent, but it should be remembered that there had been so many color process false starts that Crespinel and Gundelfinger can hardly be faulted for upgrading their own printmaking process. Their major competitor in the color service business, CFI, had a head start with the new materials due to its familiarity with color coupler duplitized print stock; it rapidly made the transition to a full-service Eastman Color lab, remaining a viable independent entity until it was folded into Technicolor in 1970. Crespinel became president of Cinecolor Corporation in 1946 and resigned from that position in 1948 retaining a

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board seat (Bernhard… 1948, p. 8.). The new president was Joseph Bernhard who was also the president of Film Classics, which merged with Cinecolor in a stock swap. Prior to Crespinel’s presidency, the company was operating at a loss but was profitable during his tenure. Cinecolor was not profitable from 1950 to 1954 because of domestic operating losses, and the necessity to bail out its faltering British division. In June 1952, the Donner Corporation, against the wishes of Crespinel, took over Cinecolor and changed its name to the Color Corporation of America in May 1953. Donner, in 1954, sold a controlling interest in the company to Benjamin Smith and Associates, the parent of the Houston Fearless Corp., which ran a lab in Burbank that processed Ansco Color. Haines (2003) reports that Herbert Kalmus bought the Cinecolor building for the expansion of Technicolor’s research department. In 1958 Crespinel sued Color Corporation for failing to honor his severance agreement (Crespinel 1958). He died three decades later in Laguna Beach, California.

Two-Color Technicolor

The consulting firm Comstock & Wescott, located at 9 Hardcourt Street in Boston, was incorporated on February 10, 1912, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained physicist Daniel Frost Comstock (1883–1970) and self-­ taught mechanical engineer William Burton Wescott (1883– 1952). The firm was renamed Kalmus, Comstock, and Wescott when it was joined by MIT trained chemist Herbert Thomas Kalmus (1881–1963) on November 28, 1913. At a time when there was added prestige associated with obtaining an advanced degree from a European University, both Kalmus and Comstock obtained their doctorates abroad, Kalmus from the University of Zurich, and Comstock from the University of Basel. Comstock also spent a year working in England at the Cavendish laboratory with the discoverer of the electron, J. J. Thomson, and returned to MIT to teach theoretical physics in 1908, but left the position of associate professor in 1917 to concentrate on the quest for a color motion picture process. Comstock wrote several books, amongst them works on electrodynamics and special relativity. Wescott came from a well-off family, and by the time of the founding of Comstock & Wescott, he was a practicing engineer; in 1916 he became one of the ten founders of the SMPE. Kalmus is the best known member of the firm that spun-off Technicolor, for he was its public face, business manager, and fund raiser, but Comstock was the technology leader and deserves the lion’s share of the credit for managing the early efforts that led to the creation of Technicolor (Layton 2015). The consulting firm KC&W gained a reputation for its analytical, creative, and problem-solving abilities as their client list grew. The company addressed problems in a wide range of engineering fields, with one of the most lucrative brought to its attention by Kalmus, from a grinding wheel company that sought a superior abrasive with which to compete with the proprietary formulation of the Carborundum Company. Carborundum is based on silicon carbide, but the new abrasive created by KC&W was a special formulation of aluminum oxide (Haines 2003). KC&W’s interest in motion pictures and color cinematography began with the assign-

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ment it was given to assess the viability of a projection system that used image stabilization rather than intermittent motion, a concept demonstrated by Reynaud in France, and later applied to 35 mm projectors by Mechau in Germany, as described in these pages. The job was handed to them by one of the investors in the project, William C.  Coolidge. The device was the invention of a specialist in making improvements to the internal combustion engine, Lewis C.  Van Ripper; it was assigned to the Vanoscope Company, as described in USP 1,085,392, Motion Picture Machine, filed July 19, 1911. To quote Van Ripper’s disclosure: “My invention relates to a projecting machine for motion pictures of the type in which the film is given continuous travel, instead of the usual intermittent travel, and a plurality of mirrors are provided which reflect the images from successive pictures….” After analyzing the invention, Comstock deemed it to be unworkable but suggested to Coolidge that KC&W be given a chance to come up with an improved design, a proposal that was accepted, but they could not figure out how to make it work and Kalmus enterprisingly offered Coolidge an alternative: invest in KC&W to study how to create a color motion picture system. Wescott had his appetite whetted for the color motion pictures after seeing Kinemacolor in London, after which he returned home with a length of film to study. KC&W’s color photography researches began in 1912 resulting in filed patent disclosures, and in 1914 Coolidge created the Scientific Development Company to hold the granted patents. These efforts were, to a large extent, a reaction to Kinemacolor’s imaging artifacts, which have been articulated at length in these pages. It was at this time that E. J. Wall (1925), Chairman of the Department of Photography of Syracuse University, was hired to consult with KC&W. The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was incorporated in the state of Maine by KC&W on November 19, 1915, as an entity whose mission was to develop a natural color motion picture system. In September 1922, it was absorbed into a Delaware holding company, Technicolor, Inc., a change initiated by one of Technicolor’s major investors, Judge

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_49

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William Travers Jerome; the new ­corporation was to serve as a vehicle to hold the company’s patents. Kalmus claimed to have come up with the name Technicolor from the MIT graduating class yearbook, Technique. (It’s also reasonable to assume the name was derived from the word technology due to the inventors’ association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) As a result of analyzing the Kinemacolor process Technicolor realized that a properly designed twocolor system had to simultaneously expose both frames. In order to demonstrate to its satisfaction that additive color could produce a good result, the Technicolor group culled Kinemacolor footage to find slow camera moves and no fast action, thereby mitigating temporal parallax color fringing arising from frame-sequential image capture (Layton 2015). To advance the Technicolor enterprise, the extroverted Kalmus resolutely developed his natural aptitude for business and fundraising skills. He set about to learn how to comport with persons of wealth by attending a crash course on etiquette to hone his social skills. Kalmus was frequently cited as being the father of Technicolor, to the growing consternation of Comstock, an attribution that contributed to their split in 1925. Kalmus had been well schooled in industrial research by his MIT advisor Willis R. Whitney, who in 1900 founded of the General Electric Research Laboratory. Kalmus took a management position in Technicolor as well as some of the companies that were founded as a result of KC&W’s research. It was Kalmus’(1993) tenacious ability to raise capital, rather than any inventive skill, for which he received the nickname Mr. Technicolor, an epithet he used without a trace of selfmockery for the title of his autobiography. (In Hollywood they called him by the honorific “the Doctor.”) He deserved the title because of his steadfast vision to create the first threecolor motion picture process in the face of daunting adversities, withstanding trials that would have dissuaded an ordinary mortal, thereby allowing the company to stay-the-course. The three-color Technicolor camera would rule for two decades, and its release printmaking process would remain in production for another two decades. Technicolor’s investors, scientists, and engineers repeated the mantra that they were setting out to solve problems in an orderly fashion, because they knew that achieving a working three-color motion picture system was an absorbingly complex task, one that could only be solved by taking measured steps, one leading to the next. This methodical strategy is different from the more ad hoc approach taken by their major competitor in the 1920s, Prizma and its founder William Van Doren Kelley. To an outsider looking in it may well have seemed that the efforts of both Technicolor and Prizma were on a par, zigzagging between triumph and failure, despite their different approaches to solving the problem. Over the years Technicolor’s fortunes waxed and waned as different processes under its brand were offered to the industry, garnering both acceptance and rejection. In 1917 Technicolor

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introduced a single lens camera using a single roll of film with a prism system behind the lens to photograph simultaneously exposed bichromatically analyzed frames that were projected additively and simultaneously through two lenses, a process the company abandoned soon after its introduction. In 1922 Technicolor designed a new bichromatic camera and designed a subtractive duplitized print process based on the cementing together of the substrates of two dyed prints. By 1928 Technicolor designed a new camera and made single surface prints based on imbibition printing, the transferring of dyes from gelatin matrices to a gelatin coated blank. By 1932 the company built on its two-color technique to create a three-color dye transfer process from which it made prints photographed with a unique three-strip camera. In 1954, after the introduction of integral tripack materials from GAF and Eastman, it dispensed with its three-strip camera and turned to these chromogenic camera negatives as the source of the printing matrices; it also improved its imbibition release print process to better match the increased demands of the new big wide screen processes. Technicolor Process Number One, 1917  The Technicolor researchers understood that cinematography using a single lens was necessary to prevent spatial parallax-induced color fringing; in addition the images had to be photographed simultaneously to prevent temporal parallax-induced color fringing, both lessons having been taught by Kinemacolor – but the first Technicolor process continued to use additive projection. The camera for Process Number One was adapted from the 35  mm Bell & Howell 2709, with its extremely steady intermittent, which Technicolor reverse-engineered. The camera used black and white negative that was panchromatically sensitized by Technicolor, using its own process to entrap the sensitizing dyes to extend their active lifetime by means of a colloidal barrier. Wescott designed the camera so that the red-orange and blue-green frames were exposed simultaneously in the following manner: image-forming rays passing through-the-lens were diverted by an ensemble of three prisms that split the incoming lens light into two optical paths of equal length to expose two frames that were separated by two frames. The top frame, frame 1, was exposed through a red-orange filter and the bottom frame, frame 4, through a blue-green filter. The in-between two frames, 2 and 3, were left unexposed until the film was advanced (Haines 2003). A dual lens projector was built with a two-frame intermittent pulldown in order to superimpose and additively combine the bichromatically analyzed frames through the same filters that had been used for exposure. The two-frame separation between the analyzed frames was required to allow space for the two vertically offset projection lenses. Behind each lens, and in front of each gate, were glass plates that could be tilted to refract the top and bottom projected images into superimposition on the screen. The

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upper glass was pivoted to rotate about the horizontal axis and the lower about a vertical axis to achieve the required convergence (Ryan 1977). By the account of Layton et  al. (2015), Comstock applied electromagnetic field theory to boost the light output of the lamphouse’s carbon arc light a third, by elongating the arc’s shape to better cover the top and bottom frames, which helped to add illumination for this inherently dim additive color projection method. To work out the bugs and prove the concept, a feature film, The Gulf Between, was produced under the supervision of Doc Willat, who was mentioned earlier in connection with Hernandez-Mejia’s Cinecolorgraph process. The film was shot in Jacksonville, Florida, chosen for its bright sun and Fig. 49.1  The principal behind Technicolor Process Number One optics, as described in Westcott’s USP 1,454,418, Transparency and Method of Making the Same, filed October 22, 1915. The camera optics, shown in Fig. 1, consist of lens L, beamsplitter mirror g and other mirrors, to form the analyzed frames, G’ and R’, photographed through filters S and S’. In production the camera substituted prisms for mirrors. Fig. 2 shows the simpler optics required for additive color projection. Additional optics (not shown) were used to align the green and red filtered image on the screen.

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good weather. An extensively modified railway car was parked in Jacksonville, on a siding for the duration of the production; it had been set up as a lab for sensitizing and developing film. The film feature was previewed on September 13, 1917, at the Tremont Temple, a Baptist church in Boston. The Gulf Between was shown to exhibitors and the press on September 21, 1917, at the Aeolian Hall in New York City, but the results were terribly disappointing. The image suffered from severe color fringing because the projectionist could not get the two images to properly converge. It must be admitted that it is not possible to test a system like this fully unless it is used in a real-world application to stress its capabilities, but the company should have better prepared. Like Urban’s approach for exhibiting Kinemacolor, the film was

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a back seat to the First World War, since many Technicolor researchers assisted the war effort. Comstock was teaching at MIT and hired some of his best students to help with product development, three of whom were Leonard Thompson Troland, Joseph Arthur Ball, and Eastman Weaver (Haines 2003).

Fig. 49.2  From Wescott’s USP 1,502,077, Cinematographic Machine, filed September 11, 1916. The reflection path of the camera optics is the same as that of the previous figure illustrating the use of mirrors. This disclosure uses prisms. The lens, which is not shown, is to the right of prism ensemble. G is the beamsplitter’s mirror surface. This drawing describes how the Process Number One camera achieved bichromatic analysis.

road-showed because of the special projection requirements, but the alignment problems persisted, which led to Kalmus’ unequivocal disavowal of additive projection. Technicolor Process Number Two, 1922  Technicolor spent the years immediately after its failed Process Number One after having abandoned attempts at additive color projection. The company set its sights on a subtractive bichromatic projection method, another step in its incremental approach, knowing that a three-color process remained out of reach for the moment. The researchers decided to take advantage of the fact that the cellulose nitrate substrate could be duplitized and colored appropriately (two sides, two colors), as taught by Arturo Hernandez-Mejia and Brewster. However, designing a new camera and printing process took

Leonard Thompson Troland (1889–1932) was an MIT graduate with a degree in biology who received his PhD in chemistry from Harvard in 1915. After joining the staff of KC&W in 1918, he became its Chief Engineer working on perfecting the process; in the evenings he lectured on perceptual psychology at Harvard. After KC&W separated from Technicolor and Kalmus in 1925, becoming Comstock & Wescott once more, he became Technicolor’s Director of Research and Process Control. Troland wrote many books and articles and devised the Troland Td, a unit of measure of retinal illuminance equal to the product of the intensity of the light it receives and the area of the pupil. As a chemist for Technicolor, he worked on monopack technology. Joseph Arthur Ball (1894–1951) graduated from MIT with an undergraduate degree in physics in 1915, and joined KC&W in 1916 to work on the additive color system. He had expertise in optics, cinematography, and mechanical engineering, and he also functioned as the company’s business manager. He is best known as the co-designer of the three-strip Technicolor camera. Eastman Weaver (1894– 1971) became an expert in color science after serving as Comstock’s assistant, helping him with the many aspects of the Technicolor process including optics, duplitized stock, and applying color dyes. He was one of the longest-serving employees at Technicolor, having been hired in 1915 and retiring in the 1960s (Layton 2015). The original camera design, which had additive color projection in mind, was no longer useful, and a new camera was needed, with the two-frame separation no longer required. Ball was given the job of designing the new camera to produce negatives for subtractive release prints and projection, a camera to expose two frames at once. Comstock designed a new prism beamsplitter that Ball later helped to improved. The beamsplitter used an ingenious isosceles triangle configuration to create two optical paths of equal length that resulted in blue-green and red-orange analyzed adjacent frames when exposed through the usual filters, each passing their portion of the visible spectrum. The bluegreen record was the bottom frame and the red-orange record the top frame, arranged as a pair of reversed images. The prism block filter assembly was removable from the camera with two versions, one with filters balanced for daylight or carbon arc photography (6000°–5500° Kelvin) and the other for tungsten illumination (3200°–2800° Kelvin). The color records of these two frames were separated using a skip-frame optical printer to produce two printing masters. The adjacent frames (one of which had to be inverted) were

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located with reference to their perforations, and their registration was symmetrical around their center line (Ryan 1977). The precision registration demanded by the new process could not be achieved using off-the-shelf Eastman camera negative, so Technicolor built its own perforation machine using unperforated stock. Ball’s design was now based on the reliable Bell & Howell studio camera reputed to have the most precise registration. He estimated that prism beamsplitter and filtration optics required an exposure increase of 30 times that of conventional black and white cinematography, or to put it another way, an additional five stops of exposure. Technicolor’s adviser, Edward John Wall (1860–1928) (WS: E.  J. Wall Collection), recommended a single-sided print that had its emulsion toned on top of which a second colored image was dye transferred, but Technicolor chose duplitization using a new approach. Wall, an expert in the field of color photography, did not live to see the Technicolor three-color system. He was born in Gravesend, England, to a family of farmers, became a chemist and an expert in photographic emulsions after joining the company that introduced glass plate photography to Britain. He also worked for the European Blair Company and then moved to Rochester, New  York, in 1910, to join the Fireproof Film Company to work on developing a formula for nonflammable cellulose acetate base. He became head of the department of photography at Syracuse University, and after consulting with KC&W moved to Boston in 1916 to help Technicolor. A prolific author and editor, after retiring in 1922, he wrote Practical Color Photography and The History of Three-Color Photography. The Technicolor engineers began their program to make duplitized prints by dyeing gelatin matrices printed from the camera negative. The basis for this decision may have been that dying the matrix itself, and using it for the print, was better understood and therefore seem to represent less development risk than imbibition using a matrix.

Fig. 49.3  Process Number Two optics. The top portion of Comstock’s USP 1457, 500, Cinematographic Film, filed February 9, 1916. Fig. 1 shows the approach that was implemented with the lens in front of the prism assembly. Figure 3 illustrates the bottom-to-bottom arrangement of the analyzed frames.

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Experiments took place in KC&W’s basement where a film lab was set up, but the effort failed to produce consistent color because of variations due to inconsistencies in the emulsion thickness of the print stock, which changed the optical density of the dyes that colored the gelatin. Comstock suggested a way to bypass the problem by exposing the release print stock through its base to expose the silver halide in close proximity to it, thereby allowing the production of a hardened gelatin relief matrix independent of the emulsion’s thickness. To form the matrix, after exposure through the base of the film and its development and hardening, the top portion of the emulsion was washed away. The resulting clear gelatin matrix’s height was now an analog of the optical density of the image to be dyed. The problem of density variation was solved, but there remained a quandary because the usual duplitized stock could not be exposed through the base. Technicolor decided to make the matrices and then to cement them base to base. This led to the undyed matrices being printed on half-thick three mil acetate, to be cemented together base to base, after which each side would be colored its appropriate bichromatic primary by flotation in dye baths, first on one side then on the other. It would have been preferable to cement the dyed gelatin surfaces together since the images would then be in the same plane to assure sharp focus, but nobody knew how to do that. Wall advised against cementing, and he knew whereof he spoke, because of his experience as a chemist working for companies that manufactured celluloid acetate base. Wall was ignored to the eventual displeasure of projectionists, exhibitors, distributors, the studios, the public, and to the grief of Technicolor. After a great deal of trial and error, the Technicolor engineers worked out a process for cementing the component prints together base to base. In 1922, believing they had a production technique, the company began to make release prints. The exposed half-thickness prints were cemented base to base before processing, so that any dimensional changes due to the forthcoming chemical baths would be

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identical. The cemented duplitized exposed print(s), after developing and fixing, had the silver images bleached away in a bath of vanadium oxide and potassium ferricyanide that also hardened the gelatin in proportion to exposure. Excess gelatin was hot water etch-washed away leaving the desired matrices; each side of the dried duplitized print was then flotation dyed. It took a bit of time for the matrix to fully absorb the dye as it moved through the 20 feet long and 18 inches wide trough. Technicolor could lower the contrast of a shot by pre- or post-flashing of the exposed print, but it’s not clear to me if this method was introduced with Process Number Two or Three (Haines 2003). Technicolor also hit upon the idea of adding black dye to the red-orange and blue-green dyes to improve apparent sharpness and to produce superior blacks and contrast, but the black dye (like the K in CYMK printing) greatly desaturated colors, from what can be seen from digital restorations, producing a look suggestive of hand-applied color to a sepia print. However, this was an era in which color printing for books and magazines sometimes had a similar look and people were familiar with hand-applied color to a sepia print. Only two feature films had been released using the additive Process Number One, the entirety of the 1917 The Gulf Between and inserts for the 1920 United Artists feature Way Down East. Subtractive Process Number Two, on the other hand, was far more successful and used for about a score of features released between 1922 and 1927. The first film made in Process Number Two was funded by Kalmus and Technicolor shareholders and distributed through Joseph Schenck’s Metro Film Company. It was The Toll of the Sea, starring Anna May Wong, which has been described as Madam Butterfly transplanted to China (Layton 2015; Haines 2003). The prints, made in the Technicolor Lab in Boston, cost 27 cents a foot (Ryan 1977). On November 26, 1922, the film premiered in New York City at the Rialto Theater, and the following year it went into general release grossing more than $250,000 of which $160,000 was earned by Technicolor. A film print manufacturing plant was built adjacent to KC&W’s lab, and a Hollywood beachhead was also established. C.  B. DeMille made features with Technicolor inserts, one of which was The Ten Commandments, released by Paramount in 1923, as did Samuel Goldwyn for Cytharea, released by First National in 1924. Technicolor offered Goldwyn the process on approval, an arrangement in which he could reject the inserts or buy as many copies as he wanted. He liked the results and First National ordered 195, duplitized prints, 230 feet in length, at a cost of $41.65 each. The best known use of a Process Number Two sequence is the masked ball scene in Universal’s 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, but MGM was the leading user of inserts. Ryan (1977) reports that Limbacher, in a mimeographed document, states that 12 two-reel short subjects were released in Process Number Two. Three features that used the process

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for an entire film were Paramount’s 1924 Wanderer of the Wasteland, United Artists’ 1926 The Black Pirate, and Fox’s 1927 The Joy Girl. The best known production was Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate; Fairbanks vetted the process by having eye doctors test 150 Los Angeles residents to determine if there were deleterious effects after watching Technicolor movies. The color fringing and color flickering of additive systems and reports of headaches and eyestrain associated with prior processes had made Fairbanks wary. On August 25, 2017, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood, as part of the Reel Thing conference on film conservation and restoration, Richard Dayton and Eric Aijala, both with YCM Lab of Burbank, a specialist in photochemical restoration, screened a clip from director Monta Bell’s 1925 The Lights of Old Broadway, which had a color sequence restored from a badly cupped Technicolor Process Number Two print that was intercut with toned shots. The Technicolor shots include the sudden appearance of a giant American flag at a rally. The shot was on screen only momentarily, but was perceived by this observer as being a good representation of the flag’s color. Close-ups of faces had good skin tone, but they were washed out in long shots however, there is no way of knowing how closely this restoration represents what was seen by audiences when the film was released. Amongst the factors to take into account are that DMD projection usually uses a xenon rather than a carbon arc lamphouse, and the screen at the Dunn is at least twice as wide as that used in the 1920s. Clips from Process Number Two inserts used in C.  B. DeMille’s 1927 The King of Kings were screened at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, during a program given by Serge Bromberg on February 15, 2020. These gave a different impression of Process Number Two; unlike the Black Pirate prints I’ve seen, Bromberg’s examples exhibited vibrant colors. A digital transfer made from a print showed significant wear and tear, but was reasonably colorful, while a restoration made from the camera negative was gorgeous. Because of the broad capabilities of digital image manipulation, the intention of whoever is in charge of the restoration can determine its look. Two divergent viewpoints, both legitimate, are that the “restored” print’s appearance should be an attempt to recreate what the original audience experienced. The other point of view has it that restoration should be an attempt to create the most pleasing experience for a modern audience. The need to make large quantities of release prints exercised Process Number Two to the breaking point. One problem was inconsistency in color from print to print and from shot to shot, but more troubling was that prints were prone to separation of their duplitized components. There was also print cupping or curving, causing a loss of sharp focus across the image in the horizontal, which became an insidious and pressing problem. This was caused by the differential heat-

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Fig. 49.4  A frame from The Black Pirate, United Artists, 1926, filmed using Technicolor Process Number Two. We can only speculate how this reproduction compares with the colors the audiences saw when the film was released. The ability to make prints in the process is long gone. Restorations are usually screened with a DMD projector using a xenon arc rather than a film projector with a carbon arc on a screen twice as wide as was used in the 1920s.

ing of the two sides of cemented print in the hot projector gate resulting in dimensional changes to one side more than the other. These cupped frames did not maintain flatness, hence sharpness across the frame, and had to be returned to Technicolor to be subjected to a decupping process (not sure how they did that). Other problems with the cemented prints were that they were scratching too easily producing disturbing color tramlines. In addition, prints were often hard to keep in focus when color segments were inserted into black and white prints because their imaging surfaces were not at the same plane. Nonetheless, the public and the industry liked what they saw, that is, when the prints were good. On November 10, 1925, Comstock and Wescott split from Kalmus and Technicolor, becoming once more Comstock & Wescott, remaining a successful consulting organization. The end of the relationship between Kalmus and his former colleagues was fraught and final and had been brewing for years as Kalmus enraged both Comstock and Wescott with his growing imperiousness and harsh demands, as he lost touch with Technicolor’s day-to-day operations, preferring as he did, to hobnob with Hollywood elites. On the West Coast he fostered the belief that he was the technical and creative brains of Technicolor, when in fact that was Comstock’s role. In addition Kalmus was viewed with hostility by his colleagues as he engaged in ethically dubious manipulations of the Technicolor share price to enrich himself at the expense of clueless investors, which today might have landed him in jail and with a stiff fine for insider trading.

After the schism, with Comstock no longer available, development of a three-color imbibition process, which the company had decided was the natural color printmaking process with the best chance of success, was given to Troland. It had taken the company 8 years to achieve a troubled and limited palette two-color process that had begun to fall out of favor. For example, despite Douglas Fairbanks’ success with The Black Pirate, he did not choose Technicolor for his next feature, as he had once announced. Ball also remained with Technicolor, leaving Boston to run the Technicolor Hollywood laboratory and camera facility, Plant No. 3, as it was known, at 1006 North Cole Avenue. It was at about this time that Ray Rennahan (1896–1980) was hired as part of Ball’s team; he became a renowned Technicolor cinematographer receiving two Academy Awards for color cinematography. In 1928 Natalie Kalmus (1882–1965), the former wife of Herbert Kalmus, embraced Ball’s suggestion that color cinematography should be planned and controlled throughout the entire production. During her controversial career as head of the Technicolor Color Control Department she designed a color score for each feature and strictly enforced its execution. Technicolor Process Number Three, 1928  This twocolor subtractive process used the same camera that had been designed for Process Number Two, but its prints were made with dyes imbibed onto a single-sided blank of mordanted gelatin-coated 35 mm acetate. Bichromatic Process Number Three was another step in the direction of the

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trichromatic solution that was fully embodied with Process Number Four. The approach Technicolor took with Process Number Three somewhat resembled the Handschliegl applied color process that, for each color pass, imbibed dye that had soaked into each matrix’s gelatin. Both of Process Number Three’s dyes were imbibed onto the gelatin receiving surface of an acetate blank, but each dye was transferred from the declivities within its hardened gelatin matrix. Imbibition printing was first used for photography by Cros in the 1880s with his Hydrotypie process using gelatin matrices to transfer magenta, cyan, and yellow dyes to a receiving sheet of paper. Attempts at commercializing the process were attempted in 1905 by Léon Didier with his Pinatype process and in 1913 by Frederic Ives, who created a mordanting process to treat the receiving surface to better accept dyes to increase sharpness (Wall 1925). Such efforts, to apply imbibition printing to still photography, probably influenced its application for motion pictures by Handschiegl, as described in chapter 40. Technicolor believed that once the two-color imbibition printing process was exercised it would pave the way for the next step, three-color imbibition printing, but could a consistent manufacturing process be engineered for large quantities of release prints consisting of many thousands of frames? In projection these frames would be magnified hundreds of times linearly, in effect making theatrical projection a microscope for revealing registration flaws that would be seen as color fringing and a loss of sharpness. Problems in printing might arise, such as the stretching of acetate substrates during handling and processing, registration during the making of matrices by optical printing, the spreading of the imbibed dyes, and possibly the consistent saturation of the dyes imbibed onto the blank. Process Two had used matrices whose dyed gelatin became part of the print with the depth of the gelatin determining color density. Green-blue and redorange gelatin dyed prints were cemented base to base to create a subtractive duplitized print, but Process Three was different because the gelatin matrices were now used not as part of the print but as printing plates. The printing matrices were manufactured on seven mil substrate that was thicker than the normal release print base for dimensional stability and durability. Each matrix was prepared more or less as it had been for the previous process: after development and drying the black and white silver image emulsion was chemically etched to form a hardened gelatin relief replica of the image with the remaining emulsion removed by warm water washing. For Process Number Three the matrices were used to transfer their dyes onto a chemically prepared mordanted clear gelatin-coated 35 mm blank. The valleys in the hardened gelatin matrix held the dye to be imbibed onto the receiving blank. It was necessary to hold the dyed matrix in contact with the blank for several

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minutes for it to be fully imbibed from the matrix to the blank. The first pass imbibed the green-blue (cyan) image; after drying the second pass imbibed the red-orange image. The two printing passes hoped to achieve good registration due to Comstock’s invention of a long steel belt with two columns of registration pins to engage the perforations of the wet mordanted blank and the dyed matrix film. After a matrix’s dyes were imbibed, it was washed, dried, and used again permitting something like 40 prints to be made from it. In its first iteration two-color Process Number Three did not provide consistently good color, and there were other problems, so it was not entirely well received by the industry. Some customers viewed the process to be so unsatisfactory that orders continued for cemented duplitized Process Number Two prints. For a time, both cemented and imbibed prints coexisted, because whatever the problems, the cemented prints often had lower grain and more consistent color. Technicolor had been unable to interest a studio in using Process Number Three for an entire feature since its early quality had soured the market and tarnished the company’s reputation. Improvements in the process were necessary and to a large extent based on the work of Bertha Sugden Tuttle (1897–1984), who had a PhC degree in pharmaceutical chemistry from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. After a few years at KC&W, she moved to Technicolor in 1925, reporting to Troland until she left the company in 1933. Tuttle worked on the dye formulations to improve color and image sharpness. Improvements to the process were also based on better blank material that made the process more reliable. Technicolor believed that the color had improved, but the issue of quality control and consistency remained. To prime the pump, since others were disinclined to shoot a feature, The Viking, photographed entirely in color at a negative cost of $325,000, was produced by Colorcraft, a company formed by Technicolor investors. The film was sufficiently lavish to impress Irving Thalberg who bought it for MGM, which released it as a silent film on November 28, 1928. A year later it was rereleased augmented with a musical score and sound effects, but without the synchronized sound dialog that audiences now preferred. The film’s color was good enough to be deemed to be “agreeable” by Mordaunt Hall (1935), New York Times reviewer, but the print Hall had seen was almost certainly cherry picked and possibly not representative of the process’s quality in production quantities. Although MGM was disappointed with the film’s performance at the box office, it made money for Technicolor who manufactured 298 feature length prints. Technicolor also got a large print order for Paramount’s Redskin, which premiered at the Criterion in Manhattan on January 26, 1929. The dye transfer prints were catching on for sequences inserted into feature film release prints, and more Technicolor features were on the way. But print quality

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was compromised as demand increased, although these prints had no cupping or (probably) the loss of focus of segments inserted into black and white prints. A perusal of The Film Daily for 1929 discloses that it was a banner year for Technicolor with many films (usually inserts) released in the process or about to go into production, and in a survey of newspaper reviews The Film Daily of July 16 quotes The New  York World Telegram and Sun: “(Technicolor) is sensationally different. The fuzziness…has completely vanished…and the colors are no more artificial than those that beguile and beckon behind Broadway footlights.” Other favorable reviews are summarized, but it is unknown whether the films discussed were printed with duplitized Process Number Two or imbibition Process Number Three. Unfortunately, Process Number Three

Fig. 49.5  A poster for the first feature produced using Technicolor Process Number Three, The Viking, released by MGM as a silent film in 1928 and a year later with an augmented sound track. The lurid poster unintentionally taunts the process because it could not reproduce yellow.

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proved to be unstable when it was used for Warners’ major production of The Show of Shows, almost entirely in color and costing $850,000, which was released November 28, 1929. The press reported that the prints changed color from scene to scene, that some images were out of focus and grainy, and that the color was inferior to that of those made with the duplitized process (Layton 2015). The SMPE Color Committee in May, 1930, looking back at the past year, wrote about Technicolor’s woes as follows: “The excessive request for prints have caused the release of prints not up to the possible standard of the company. It is understood that the Hollywood plant is now making prints by the imbibition method, and of good quality” (Report 1930). The committee members, four of the field’s most highly respected technologists, were given as John

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G.  Capstaff, Wm. T.  Crespinel, F.  E. Ives, and Wm. V.  D. Kelley (Chairman). When reports of poor quality prints reached Boston, technicians on the dye transfer production line were initially at a loss to find the cause of the problem. A beleaguered Troland agreed with the critics and struggled to fix the manufacturing process. He found that the problems were related to materials that did not meet specification, thus impairing the sensitive 14-step process under the added pressure of making a great number of prints. After the premiere of The Show of Shows, Troland commented that some of the difficulties came from one of the cameras used on film that “was badly out of register” (Layton 2015). The process continued to be used especially for sequences in musical comedies, like the 1929 films Broadway Melody from MGM and The Desert Song from Warner Bros. Hanssen (2006) suggests that cinema technology had been static in the period prior to the arrival of sound and that the arrival of sound, in the late 1920s, paved the way for the acceptance of color, with the abundance of musicals increasing the desire for color. The studios believed that musicals were a good vehicle for color, and the first “all-talking all-­ color” feature to use the Technicolor process was Warner’s 1929 On with the Show! The film grossed more than $3,500,000 and generating the kind of interest that motivated Technicolor to double the capacity of the Boston plant,

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which in 1930 manufactured 60,000,000 feet of release print (Ryan 1977). Between 1928 and 1933 more than 80 features, from most of the major studios, were released using Process Number Three. The first half dozen released in 1928 were silent, with half shot entirely in the process and half with inserts, and in 1928 and 1929 about two dozen features were released with synchronized sound optical tracks, or they were part talkies using the process. A third of these used color for the entire film, the rest for sequences. A pattern of usage was established often limiting color to sequences inserted into monochrome films, which continued through the early 1930s. Between 1930 and 1933 about fifty all-talking features were released using Process Number Three, with a score of these films entirely in color (Haines 2003). By then augmented sound and part-talking films were outdated. Technicolor was well suited for optical sound since the track was printed on black and white stock that also served as the imbibition blank, avoiding the problems caused by dye transmission that did not match the spectral sensitivity requirements of the projector’s sound reader. Moreover, the track had the best possible quality because was it was processed separately and its development time was optimized without regard to the requirements for the image, as was the case for black and white variable density prints. In

Fig. 49.6  The Romaine Street Technicolor plant in Hollywood, as it was in 1948.

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addition to the track, a black surround was printed on the blank to neatly contain the image and to provide a crisp frame line to help the projectionist threading and projecting the print. Technicolor had previously added black dye to the blue-­green and red-orange dyes to the duplitized cemented prints of Process Number Two, and for Process Number Three a black and white low contrast image, derived from the green record was printed on the blank to provide better blacks, contrast, and sharpness; in addition, as noted, the blank carried the silver metal image of the optical track. In 1930 the expanded Technicolor Plant No. 4, located on Romaine Street and the corner of N.  Cole Avenue in Hollywood, was completed with a greatly increased release print capacity, but Plant No. 3 ran at a fraction of its capacity until the mid-1930s and the advent of the three-color sub-

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tractive process, Technicolor Process Number Four. Quality control problems surfaced as the plant ramped up production, with the result that in the early 1930s Technicolor’s reputation suffered once again. Today we are familiar with the phrase “glorious Technicolor,” but there was a time when the word Technicolor was a pejorative. The public had a spell of color fatigue, and the use of Process Number Three declined for a time. The studios also cooled to the process for several reasons: color was more expensive for both production and release prints, and so it seemed to be only suited to big budget shows. Technicolor took longer for shooting and post-production and some studios preferred having an inhouse process, as was the case for black and white that was handled in their own labs. Nevertheless, in 1931 Technicolor closed its Boston plant and moved all of its production to Hollywood.

Three-Color Technicolor

Technicolor’s introduction of three-color Process Number Four came during a slump in film-going, toward the end of the Great Depression. Attendance in 1930 peaked at 90 million per week and fell to 60 million in 1932–1933 (Haines 2003). The industry was hurting and had lost interest in color at a time when staying profitable or perhaps even surviving was at stake; theater chains were going belly up. Kalmus had his hands full trying to get orders despite the fact that he tirelessly attempted to insinuate himself into the Hollywood decision-making social set. He continued to cavort with Hollywood elites to little benefit during the early 1930s’ decline in color production, but he kept the Technicolor enterprise together through thick and thin with his cohort of investors, like the super wealthy Jock Whitney who became involved with the company in 1932. Technicolor Process Number Four, 1932  At a high level the key aspects of the three-color system Process Number Four, from photography to printmaking, are described in Ball’s USP 1,926,255, Subtractive Color Photography, which was filed on March 3, 1931. In it he describes the blue, green, and red filtration required to produce the camera negatives, the K low density black and white image derived from the green record to be printed with the optical track on the mordanted receiving blank, and imbibing the yellow, magenta, and cyan matrices on the blank to create a three-­color subtractive print. In USP 2,072,091, Cinematographic Camera, filed August 20, 1931, Ball and co-inventor Gerald F.  Rackett describe the mechanical and optical design of the camera that enabled the first successful three-color cinematography. After two decades of effort, Technicolor had designed a viable three-color motion picture service, and in the next few years, it established itself as a respected brand as the word Technicolor became used as an adjective to describe vibrant color, and the phrase “glorious Technicolor,” became commonplace. Kalmus consolidated three-color research and development in Hollywood placing Ball in charge, which up until that time had been Troland’s responsibility in Boston. In

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the ensuing years, Ball became the go-to man in the Hollywood engineering and management communities. The three-strip Technicolor camera, introduced in 1932, consisted of two intermittents in one body that simultaneously exposed the frames of three rolls of 35  mm film arranged in two optical paths – a single film path and a bipack path. Light rays from the lens passed through a beamsplitter made up of an ensemble of two right angle isosceles prisms, joined together to form a cube. At the common surface of the prisms, in its first iteration, a semi-transmissive gold flecked front surface mirror was used, and in a later version a semi-­ silvered mirror took its place. So important did the company consider the prism technology that the device was safely secured after the day’s shooting while the camera remained on set. The light rays along the lens’s axis passed directly through the beamsplitter to expose the green portion of the spectrum through a green filter on orthochromatic negative. The rays that were reflected by the beamsplitter, at a right angle to the lens axis, exposed the bipacked emulsion-to-­ emulsion negatives that recorded, respectively, the blue and red portions of the spectrum. The light that exposed the bipack passed through a magenta filter that blocked green light and transmitted red and blue light. The front bipack film was sensitive to blue light only, and the rear panchromatic emulsion was sensitive to the full visible spectrum, but its exposure was restricted to its red end since the blue-sensitive film’s base was coated with a red filter layer to prevent all but the red light to expose the panchromatic emulsion. This dye filter layer, washed away in processing, also served as an antihalation layer (Ryan 1977). Lenses were designed with a short back focus to take into account the prism’s thickness and were also corrected to take into account the prism’s refractive properties. Perhaps the best known Technicolor camera lens was Lee’s wide angle 35  mm f/2.0 retrofocus design, as noted in chapter 24. George Mitchell, of the eponymous camera company and the manufacturer of Technicolor’s two-color subtractive

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_50

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Fig. 50.1  The three-strip Technicolor camera, certainly the most complicated studio camera every built. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 50.2  A frequently reproduced diagram of the Technicolor beamsplitter system, based on one of Ball’s patent drawings.

cameras, reviewed the design for manufacturability and built a handful of the pre-production units. It would have been a simpler design to have built the two camera components at

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right angles to each other to accommodate the image rays’ divided optical paths, but a decision was made to have the mechanisms parallel, probably because the result looked more like the usual studio camera (but in its blimp it more nearly resembled a big refrigerator). As a result, the film path for the bipack half of the machine was convoluted and the film advanced in the direction opposite from that of the usual studio camera. Only a trained and fastidious expert could operate the machine: the manual specifies 69 mandatory procedures to be performed prior to cinematography (Ryan 1977). The camera, a tour de force of mechanical and optical engineering, cost $10,000 to build; it weighed more than 200 pounds and more than 900 pounds when blimped for sound and loaded with film. The most profitable part of the Technicolor color service was manufacturing release prints. The two-color imbibition process, Process Number Three, initially produced prints of uneven quality, but with time and research greater consistency was achieved, especially when release print production wasn’t strained by the pressures of demand. The Process Number Four release printing technique added a third dye matrix printer and benefitted from what had been learned from Process Number Three. Although a fair number of patents were issued to Technicolor, much of the inner workings of the imbibition print manufacturing process were kept under wraps and held as trade secrets, which is a strategy that makes perfect sense since so much of the process was concealed in manufacture and could not be reverse engineered by examining a print. Cinematographer Ray Rennahan, during initial testing of the new camera and printmaking process, found that the three-color printing process could not match the quality of the two-color imbibition process, but this is what one would expect during a shakedown (Layton 2015). Many dyes from different manufacturers and dye combinations and variations were tested beginning in November 1931 to find the best combination for the imbibition line, but the image quality of the three-strip camera’s negatives far surpassed the ability of the imbibition printmaking process, as digital restorations made from the negatives clearly reveal. In 1965 I visited the Hollywood Technicolor plant at 1016 North Cole Street in Hollywood and observed imbibition prints being made on the plant floor. After the through-the-­ base exposure of the matrix from the camera’s separation negatives, as was done in the two prior processes, it was developed in a variation of Kodak’s D-76 and then processed in a solution containing citric acid, potassium bromide, sodium hydroxide, ammonium chloride, and pyrogallol (pyro); the last chemical added to harden the gelatin in proportion to where it had the most exposure. Jets of warm water washed away the exposed and unhardened gelatin to produce the relief image of the matrix. I witnessed none of this, but I was shown the release print manufacturing area of

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Fig. 50.3  The cover sheet of one of Ball’s USPs describing the three-strip camera’s technique for color analysis.

Fig. 50.4  Lee’s 35 mm focal length retrofocus lens design for the Technicolor camera. Light enters from the left.

the plant, with its gleaming pipes and stainless steel tanks that resembled the creamery I had once visited. The 35 mm blanks emerged into the dye transfer room, through a rectangular opening in a wall, from the area where they had been printed, as a blank that was clear except for the optical track, ready for imbibition printing. The blank was held in contact with the dye-filled gelatin matrix, and run through a 240-foot-­ long glass-walled trough giving them the time needed to be in contact for the dye transfer to take place. The first printing step imbibed the yellow dye, which appeared to be a luminescent orange when seen through the glass window at the point where pressure was first applied to the mordanted blank by the matrix. The cyan and red dyes were printed in turn, repeating the process used for the ­yellow

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Fig. 50.5  Technicolor’s dye transfer process up close. The matrix M is laid on top of the blank B, which is riding on a belt of stainless steel pins P.

imbibition pass with the blanks held in contact with the dyed matrix on a long stainless steel conveyor belts laced, with two columns of registration pins to keep the bottom blank and top matrix in precise juxtaposition. The matrix and blank came in contact under pressure for 45 seconds at 110 °F as the dye was transferred; the print was dried between printing passes. A matrix could be used about 40 times before it was worn out. Several printing machines were in operation to meet the plant’s required throughput. Although the matrix has been compared to a rubber-stamp, a rubber-stamp holds its ink on its surface to make an impression and the un-inked portions make no impression, but the Technicolor matrix held dye in proportion to image density in the valleys between the hills of hardened gelatin, dye that was transferred to the blank’s gelatin coating (Haines 2003). Print quality control at the Technicolor Hollywood plant took place in a large room above the factory floor, with the prints leaving the imbibition machines buffered in loops, which hung from the ceiling on their way to being reviewed, an arrangement resembling the spoolbank of Edison’s Kinetoscope (The Technicolor staff called their spoolbanks elevators.). The prints were screened at the rate of 128 frames a second as they entered the quality control room and its projectors, where a row of seated technicians observed the images. The technicians determined what changes, if any, needed to be made to the print’s color balance, and conveyed their instructions by speaking to workers on the factory floor by telephone, giving instructions like: add so much magenta or subtract so much cyan; the worker below would make an adjustment, if I recall correctly, by turning a valve, which changed the amount of dye available to be imbibed. This kind of an instant correction could not take place when making Eastman color prints since quality control required the examination of an entire reel of film, but in this case changes could be made on-the-fly in the midst of printing a reel. In earlier days Technicolor’s control of the process was determined on a subjective basis, but that did not persist as the company developed a photometric methodology for measuring the characteristics of prints. The control of density, contrast, and color were necessary for shots within a scene in

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order for them to have the same look, even if they were shot at different times under different conditions. It was also important to be able to create effects, such as the customary blue filtration for day for night. Image correction was rudimentary compared with the capabilities of today’s post-­ production digital coloring suites, but nonetheless effective. Steps were taken to control the color balance with filtration, the most sophisticated systems using printing machines with additive color heads that mixed RGB sources. Contrast could be controlled by flashing the matrix stock, giving it a post- or pre-exposure of a controlled intensity. Density control, the most basic aspect of matrix mastering, was adjusted by exposure changes, and color balance could also be similarly controlled. Technicolor used A and B roll printing (sometimes called checkerboard printing), a technique that became commonplace for 16  mm and was used for some Eastman Color 35 mm printmaking. With this technique matrices were prepared from two rolls of camera negative with overlapping lengths of film to create dissolves by combining a fade-in from one roll with a fade-out from the other. Dissolves or fades were thus the same generation as the rest of the matrix without visible changes to contrast, additional graininess, or color shifts, which were more visible for Eastman Color prints until intermediate materials improved. As noted the blank’s K image was derived from the green record, an approach that is similar to that used for photomechanical reproduction where the inks are identified as CYMK, where K is the black ink (or key) image helping to add apparent sharpness and richer blacks. With the arrival of Process Number Five, based on Eastman Color negatives as a source for the matrices, the blanks’ silver image was eliminated except for special productions such as John Huston’s 1956 Moby Dick, to create a desaturated and stark image. Technicolor prints seemed to have deep blacks, which is important to give the projected image a good dynamic range. Every new advance in motion picture technology is described as another step in the medium’s ability to capture the world of our senses, but each new cinema technology heightens the ability to create fantasy. Both sound and color were exploited for making musical comedies, which are as fantastic in their way as any science fiction film. We can say for certain that three-color cinematography added an important element of the visual world missing from black and white movies, and it’s undoubtedly true that the acceptance of three-color cinema was a given even after the missteps of Technicolor and its competitors. Believing there was the threat of misuse of the new process that might imperil its acceptance, Technicolor set out to influence or in fact control filmmakers’ color choices. As noted above, the company established a color quality control process, headed by Kalmus (1882–1965), the former Natalie Dunphy, model and student artist, who at the age of 20 eloped with Herbert

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Fig. 50.6  A schematic of the Technicolor dye transfer printing process as it was practiced in Technicolor’s British plant.

Kalmus in 1902. In 1923 the couple was divorced but continued to live together until 1944, as far as the world and press was concerned as husband and wife, in the house they bought together in Bel Air. Natalie Kalmus became head of Technicolor’s Color Control Department in 1934, and for two decades influenced color choices for sets and costumes. The three-­color process depended on its impeccable execution beginning with preproduction, and so she created a color score for each film as part of the effort to give it a picture-perfect look. She and her staff, by contract with the studios, had authority over the use of color as part of the Technicolor soup-to-nuts color service. Ms. Kalmus (1935) describes using color to help further a film’s narrative in an erudite article, Color Consciousness, which ran in a 1935 issue of The Journal of The Society of Motion Picture Engineers; she is unjustly identified with the garish palette for which she can hardly be blamed when the shows were musicals. Conventional wisdom puts her down for meddling in the creative process, and her input was sometimes not well received by filmmakers who had their own ideas about color, but the enmity she may have engendered wasn’t entirely her fault. She was given a job to do, whose results were, to a large extent, subjectively determined by her

and similarly judged by others. Greater experimentation with color had to await the arrival of Eastman Color and Kodak’s laissez-faire attitude toward its photography. It’s also probable that directors and cinematographers, in the male chauvinist world of Hollywood, found it difficult to tolerate taking advice from any woman. A memo by David Selznick, written during the shooting of Gone with the Wind, doesn’t support the assertion that she favored gaudy colors, since he complained that her recommendations were for a restrictive monochromatic palette. The film’s production designer, William Cameron Menzies, prevailed and received a special Academy Honorary Award for his “use of color for the enhancement of a dramatic mood.” In 1948 Ms. Kalmus left Technicolor and sued Herbert for alimony, based on a 1922 agreement, after learning that he was going to remarry (Layton 2015). Ray Rennahan, who began his association with Technicolor, shooting two-color tests, is the cinematographer most closely associated with the early days of Process Number Four. He was recognized by the Academy with awards for his work on Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blood and Sand (1941); he was the first cinematographer to have the opportunity to apply professional lighting techniques to

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the new Technicolor. The three-strip Technicolor camera demanded bright and hot carbon arc lighting on set due to the significant light losses of the camera’s beamsplitter and filtration system, to the point where actors suffered from the heat and their sweating required frequent makeup touchups. For black and white photography cinematographers were enjoying the cooler tungsten illumination that was a good fit with the Kodak panchromatic negative introduced in 1926. Lighting for Technicolor was demanding and a step backward compared with shooting in black and white, but the problem was somewhat ameliorated as a faster set of negative films with finer grain became available, which were first used for Gone with the Wind in 1939 (Bordwell 2003). British cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who also began working in the silent era, and whose work was admittedly influenced by the old masters, is closely associated with the Technicolor look as practiced in England. He shot the Powell and Pressburger produced and directed Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), which are considered to be examples of color cinematography excellence. The first film to use the new camera was Walt Disney’s Flowers and Trees, which was released in 1932 by United Artists. The supposition that Disney’s initial cell animated color productions were photographed using a conventional camera and the frame-sequential approach is untrue. The technique requires photography of the RGB-filtered sequence of single frames, on the same roll of film, with the developed negatives’ frames segregated with optical printing. This procedure was Disney’s original concept, but he was dissuaded from using it by Herbert Kalmus who insisted, incorrectly, that registration would be compromised, despite the fact that Kalmus had, only 6 months earlier, advised his two-color cartoon customer Fleischer Studios that the frame-sequential approach for cell animation was ideal. Kalmus persuaded Disney to use the new Technicolor camera, and photography was done by Ray Rennahan at the Technicolor Seward Street facility, and then at an extension to the animation department on Disney’s lot (Layton 2015). Weekly rental of the camera was $170, and Disney was charged from 5 to 6 cents a foot for prints. Technicolor was fortunate to have Disney for the first customer of the three-color system since exhaustive tests were conducted in an attempt to match the reproduction of the colors with those of the painted cells and backgrounds, which contributed to the refinement of the process. As fate would have it, Kalmus found himself in need of additional cameras for the cinematography of Gone with the Wind’s burning of Atlanta sequence. According to Theo Gluck, Disney historian, Kalmus implored Disney to give up the use of the camera. Disney complied and thereafter his cartoons were shot using the RGB frame-sequential technique (communicated in conversation, 2015). The success of Flowers and Trees, which received an Academy Award, stimulated Hollywood’s interest in the

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p­ rocess; the short film had an impressive 8321 theatrical bookings. But doubting Thomases believed that cartoons were an easy subject for color, and not a fair representation of how the process might perform for live action. To dispel this belief, Technicolor investor Jock Whitney’s Pioneer Pictures produced the gaudy 1934 short La Cucaracha. The film was made in response to poorly shot three-color short subjects, a number of which were produced by MGM, efforts that might have set back Technicolor’s cause. Pioneer also produced the first full-length Technicolor feature in 1935, Becky Sharpe, directed by Ruben Mamoulian, which did not do well at the box office. It is reported to have had a subtle color scheme demonstrating that the process could be used to good dramatic effect. (Its negatives were mutilated after its initial release, and the restored version, although a valiant effort, only suggests what might have been the look of the original.) 1935 was a landmark year for Technicolor because it was the first year it was profitable. Beginning in 1941, the brand Monopack, a Kodachrome film, was used to designate a 35  mm camera stock sold exclusively to Technicolor; it could be used in any production camera, giving it the ability to shoot in circumstances too challenging for the three-strip camera. Technicolor attributed Monopack technology to Leonard T.  Troland, whose USP 1,808,584, Color Photography, was filed September 9, 1921. (USPs 1,928,709 and 1,993,576 are also of interest.) Troland, as noted above, took over from Comstock and worked on Technicolor’s prism systems, also making contributions to imbibition printing. He remained in Boston for a time, but his position as head of R&D was given to Ball in Hollywood, which had become Technicolor’s principal location (Layton 2015). Monopack (with a lower case “m,” also known as integral tripack) has antecedents dating back to du Hauron and a succession of proposals for implementation spanning many decades by many inventors. The ‘584 Troland patent primarily teaches a bichromatic process, making broad assertions to allow its claims to be extended in scope to a three-color process. ‘584 offers a blizzard of suggestions for the design of the emulsion structure and means to segregate and analyze color information in an integral film. It is unknowable, to this writer, how many of its many prescriptions or combinations of techniques might have resulted in a practical monopack, but its 259 claims would have been a nuisance in any interference contest. Troland’s ‘584, and its reissue 18,680, allowed Technicolor to promote the notion that this is one of the key patents in the field preceding the development of Kodachrome, and therefore the basis for Monopack. Monopack was a version of Commercial Kodachrome, with low contrast from which prints of projection contrast could be made (see chapter 55). Despite the tenuous nature of Troland’s patent, Kodak took a license. Friedman (1945, p.  119), in his impressive History of Color Photography, writes: “It is certainly not an

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Fig. 50.7 Disney’s Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first film to be shot with the three-strip Technicolor camera, and the first to be released printed using three-color imbibition. Disney’s tests for the film helped Technicolor tweak its process.

easy matter to trace any connection between the structure of Kodachrome film and a Troland monopack. It is only in a reading of a few of the claims, worded in a very general manner, that any connection exists.” However, the reissue of Troland’s patent was amongst the three cited on packages of early Kodachrome. To further make the case against Troland’s priority, Friedman points out that he is clearly anticipated by the work of Schinzel as well as that of Fischer, in both cases by decades. Friedman, writing in the 1950’s, notes: “The Troland patent was issued in 1931, but it was applied for in 1921. For this reason Dr. Troland was given priority to Mannes and Godowsky. Since the Eastman Kodak Company controls both these disclosures, the question of priority is merely academic and economic.” However, there was nothing “merely academic” about the motivation for withholding Monopack, né Kodachrome, from the rest of the industry. Kodak paid royalties to Technicolor totaling $2,526,557, between 1935 and 1948 (Annual and Cumulative… 1951). If bona fide, the Troland claims would have covered the Agfa (and Ansco) monopack films introduced the year after Kodachrome, but I can find no mention of an interference action or of Agfa having paid tribute to Technicolor. As far as the royalties paid are concerned, it’s possible that the licensing fees paid to Technicolor, or the public acknowledgment of inventorship, which served to enhance its reputation for innovation, may have in effect been a rebate to offset payments for purchasing camera and print stock, a kind of quid pro quo. The agreement also resulted in Kodak agreeing to restrict the sale of Monopack to Technicolor, as

revealed by a Justice Department legal action brought against the two companies. Monopack was used to supplement three-strip camera cinematography especially when portability on location was an asset. For example, it was used for the exteriors of MGM’s, Lassie Come Home (1943), and for the African location cinematography of MGM’s King Solomon’s Mines (Clarke 1945). Monopack had a number of advantages, most decisively its ability to be used in any motion picture camera, but its image quality (graininess is cited) did not match the quality produced by the three-strip camera. The Monopack process involved optical printing each camera frame through successive RGB filters to derive the imbibition matrices, a technique that would be used in a decade for the new camera films from Ansco and Eastman. Technicolor so monopolized the market for three-color features, one could argue especially to the detriment of second tier studios, that in 1947 the United States Department of Justice filed a restraint of trade antitrust suit against both Technicolor and Kodak. An important charge made by the Justice Department was that Technicolor’s Troland’s patent had been used to preclude Kodak from selling Monopack directly to the studios, which might have been able to create their own color services based on it. The suit alleged that Eastman Kodak cooperated with Technicolor because it had agreed to purchase all of its film stock from Kodak. It’s probable that this agreement was tied in with the Troland license. Technicolor pointed out that there were other color processes, namely, the two-color Cinecolor and TruColor, available for use by the independents, but that was a disingenuous

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argument because trichromatic color was superior. The suit was settled without going to trial, in the case of Kodak almost immediately in 1948, and in the case of Technicolor in 1950, when a consent decree was issued by the Justice Department allowing producers to cancel exclusive contracts. The decree also mandated that Technicolor license its patents on a reasonable royalty basis. In an acknowledgment that much of the process was sub rosa, Technicolor was obliged to share its trade secrets with its licensees. In addition, Technicolor had to provide plans for building three-strip cameras to licensees (Haines 2003, p. 52). A major laboratory, Deluxe, once the Fox lab, signed up for the imbibition printmaking license, but only a handful of prints were made by them as integral tripack printing alternatives came on the market. All in all, the practical effects of the decree were minimal because it came into effect just as creditable monopack products from Ansco and Eastman became available. Monopack’s exclusivity kept it out of the hands of possible competitors, but at a time when only Technicolor could make three-color prints. A bichromatic Kodachrome camera film, as Mannes and Godowsky had originally conceived, would have provided a simplified alternative to bipack cinematography for the Cinecolor and TruColor color services. Between 1932 and 1954 hundreds of Technicolor motion pictures continued to be produced using its three-strip camera, with Monopack used for the noted special applications. Technicolor’s was the premium color service pretty much available only for “A” pictures produced by the major studios, which was to the company’s advantage since its profits, to a large extent, came from large print orders. Moreover, the three-strip cameras were in limited supply; as reported in The Film Daily of December 1, 1929, (p.  2), only 38 had been completed by that time, with more being built at “the rate of one a week.” Elsewhere in the literature the figure is given as three dozen in total as having been built. A gating factor for production was the company’s release print capacity, so the number of cameras built took that into account, but demand for the printing service was so great that contracts were being written 2 or 3 years in advance of a production’s projected release date. Technicolor Process Number Five, circa 1950  Loaded with the new integral tripack camera films from General Aniline and Film and Eastman Kodak, any 35  mm movie camera became a color camera, freeing the industry from the limitations of the three-strip camera and the creative strictures of Technicolor consultants. This change permitted the same freedom of camera placement and movement as that of black and white filmmaking; within a few years it enabled cinematography under far less demanding lighting conditions, reduced the cost of color cinematography, allowed for studio processing and 1-day dailes, and encouraged creative

50  Three-Color Technicolor

expression and experimentation. Although these new films became part of systems with film stock for intermediate, effects, and release prints, Technicolor was able to make prints with their process using the same kind of optical extraction that had been used for making matrices from Monopack. So swift and pervasive was the industry’s acceptance of Eastman products that 1954 was the last year the three-strip camera was used, specifically for Universal’s Foxfire. Technicolor continued to develop new technology and worked with Paramount to create the horizontal-traveling eight-­ perforation 35  mm VistaVision, which was designed for big screen high-­quality 35 mm release, a format made possible by Eastman Color and the wet-gate optical printing technique. Technicolor also created a viable alternative to 65 mm cinematography, Super Technirama, based on VistaVision that was similarly dependent on wet-get printing for optimum results, as described in chapter 66. Both of these processes initially used modified three-strip cameras. The shift in exhibition to wider aspect ratios and bigger screens, in the early 1950s, strained the imbibition process whose prints lacked the sharpness they once seemed to possess. Technicolor improved its process to keep up with the demands off ‘Scope and widescreen; what had been acceptable on a 20 foot screen was unacceptable on a 40 foot screen, because the imprecise registration caused by the spreading of imbibed dyes was far more magnified, producing a soft image. Technicolor was able to fix the wandering dye problem and take steps to improve image quality by offering the studios the ability to shoot full frame for cropped widescreen, by using the silent aperture to increase the available negative area otherwise reserved to make room for the optical track. The final composition was optically extracted from the negative for making the matrices, a technique that was especially beneficial for cinematography using the double frame 35 mm VistaVision process. In March 1952, an article by Hanson (1952) described the new integral tripack Eastman Color camera negative 5247 and positive print 5381 films, the first group of products for a new system that became widely accepted offering significant advantages. Although Eastman had been anticipated by GAF with their Ansco Color reversal-reversal and negative-­positive products, Eastman’s colored dye coupler masking technology proved to be decisive by making possible prints with better color and good contrast images. The Technicolor’s print service was now optional, with the improvements noted permitting it to remain viable. Films shot with Eastman Color film printed on Eastman stock were branded by the studios with credits like Warnercolor or Metrocolor, and in many cases Technicolor continued to make imbibition release prints from Eastman Color negative that were branded Color by Technicolor. By 1954 the three-strip camera had become obsolete, but it took two more decades for imbibition printing to give up the ghost

50  Three-Color Technicolor

in the United States. The last feature film using the Technicolor dye transfer process in America was in 1974, The Godfather Part II. The British Technicolor dye transfer line was closed in 1978, and sold to the Beijing Film and Video lab; it stopped making dye transfer prints in 1993. The Rome Technicolor dye transfer facility was closed down in 1980. Technicolor revived the process, with improvements, in 1997, and it was used for the release printing of reissued features such as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Vertigo. The process was used for some new features such as Bulworth (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999), but it was discontinued by Thomson after it took over Technicolor in 2001 (WS: Timeline of … 2012). The French firm changed its name to Technicolor SA in 2010 and today, what had been the film-based Technicolor, is a digital postproduction service company. Technicolor provided the celluloid cinema with a beautiful color motion picture process that became a legend; it’s one of a handful of motion picture technologies that has attracted fans and achieved a cult status, like Cinerama and VistaVision. Technicolor was a combination of technologies consisting of a daringly complicated camera that simultaneously exposed and trichromatically analyzed three rolls of 35 mm negative, and a heroically intricate release print process that resembled photomechanical reproduction. The company’s bichromatic processes were problem prone but valuable testbeds for the three-color version it introduced in 1932, which had far better color and a more dependable printmaking process. But it was Eastman Kodak that finally succeeded in creating a successful end-to-end color system that unleashed color for theatrical filmmaking. It was based on a more convenient and high-quality system of cinematography, post-production, and printmaking. Eastman Color ended Technicolor’s hegemony and broadened filmmakers’ access to color, but the Eastman camera film also gave Technicolor a new source for its imbibition release print business. There are those, like Haines (2003), who decry the transition from Technicolor to Eastman Color. His position, held both by Technicolor aficionados and some other observers, is that in its first few years Eastman Color wasn’t capable of the same vivid colors; in effect, it substituted convenience for image quality. In addition Eastman Color camera negatives and prints faded rapidly unlike the Technicolor black and

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white camera negatives and imbibition prints, whose dyes, it has been said, do not readily fade. Until improvements were made to the stability of its dyes in the 1980s, Eastman Color camera negative and print materials faded rapidly. Technicolor dyes must fade, like all dyes, but they do so slowly. Over a period of 15 years, living in the Hollywood area, I have attended screenings of original Technicolor prints and of photochemical and digital restorations, at two AMPAS theaters and those put on by The American Cinematheque and The Reel Thing film conservation and restoration conference. AMPAS has a collection of Technicolor imbibition prints, some of which were made by Technicolor for reference and quality control purposes. Under modern conditions using 35  mm projectors with xenon arc lamps, rather than the carbon arcs for which the prints were originally timed, on screens twice as wide as originally intended, most of the prints made in the 1940s and 1950s simply don’t look good, at least by contemporary standards. But looking at old Technicolor prints projected as described says little about how Technicolor prints were perceived when originally exhibited. A 35 mm print of an original nitrate base print of Black Narcissus (1947) at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood in 2017 looked unsharp and dull, but the next day I screened a Criterion Collection digitally restored version of the film on a 64-inch OLED TV. The image was crisp and saturated, truly beautiful, an entirely different experience, demonstrating that the three-color camera produced marvelous negatives, whose quality had been hidden from view in a print made in 1947 screened 70 years later. Herbert Kalmus had tendered his resignation in 1946 when he reached the age of 65, which was rejected by the Board, and so he stayed on. Accounts of his final exit from the company differ, with one reporting that after the successful release of Super Technirama Spartacus in 1960 Kalmus went to Europe on vacation and upon his return learned that he had been pushed out of the company he built by an investor, disposable razor, and pen tycoon Patrick Frawley, a champion of right-wing causes, who was himself ousted 10 years later due to financial improprieties. Another version of Kalmus’ departure is less dramatic, having it that his departure was mutually agreed upon (Basten 2005).

Agfa and Ansco Color

Had a snapshot of the history of color cinematography been taken in the early days of the 1950s it would have shown that Ansco Color, a negative-positive color system brought to market by General Aniline and Film, was one of the two product lines on track to end the supremacy of Technicolor. The company that became Ansco Photo Products, Inc., was founded in 1842 as E. Anthony & Company. After a merger with the camera maker Scovill Manufacturing, it became the Anthony & Scovill Company (hence Ansco) on December 23, 1901. Ansco was located in Binghamton, New  York, where Anthony had been manufacturing photographic printmaking paper (Hannavy 2008). After Hannibal Goodwin’s death in a traffic accident in 1900, Ansco acquired his USP 610,861, Photographic Pellicle and Process of Producing Same, granted September 13, 1898, describing the manufacture of cellulose nitrate base. In 1905 Ansco prevailed against Eastman Kodak in an infringement suit based on its ownership of Goodwin’s patent, as described in chapter 8 (Brayer 2011). Events in Germany were to have a major impact on Ansco’s corporate fate after it was absorbed into Agfa, or Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation (Aniline Manufacturing Corporation), founded in Berlin in 1867 as a dye manufacturer. Agfa began making photographic products in 1898 and in 1925 became part of the conglomerate IG Farben, or Interessens-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (Amalgamated Color Company Corp.), in a consolidation that involved several other German chemical companies. In 1936 Agfa introduced its own subtractive color process, Agfacolor Neu, an integral tripack (monopack) chromogenic (using color dyes) transparency (diapositive) process, whose development was furthered by the company’s expertise in inventing and manufacturing dyes. Agfacolor was the second such integral tripack material to be offered on the market, appearing the year after the introduction of Kodachrome. Both were reversal transparency materials following the same arrangement of stacked emulsion layers, each devoted to analyzing a third of the visible spectrum, processed to have dyes take the place of each emulsion layer’s silver image. Agfacolor used dye couplers incorporated

51

in the emulsion layers, all of which were developed by a single color developer to form three different color dyes. On the other hand, Kodachrome had no dye couplers in its emulsions, and in its first iteration it required the addition of dyes that reached each emulsion based on their controlled diffusion, as described in chapter 55. For both of these reversal films, as one of the final processing steps, silver metal was removed from the emulsion by means of bleach or solvents leaving only the three dye layers in place, with cyan in closest proximity to the base, magenta the mid-layer, and yellow at the top of the stack; these formed a subtractive positive image that could be viewed by transmitted or projected light (Forrest 1937). Agfacolor Neu was far simpler to process than Kodachrome, but at the time of its introduction, it was slightly less sensitive to light and had less saturated color. Both Kodak and Agfa had, in 1928 and 1932, respectively, under license, offered an early color product for amateur motion pictures, one that avoided the complexities of multilayer emulsions and dye chemistry, since it used reversal processed black and white film; both were based on, the additive color Keller-Dorian-Berthon lenticular process for 16  mm cinematography, which is described in chapter 45 (Matthews 1955). Such efforts notwithstanding, it came to be understood that the preferred process for color photography was the integral tripack , a technology whose product development and manufacture was far beyond the means of independent inventors, or even a company like Technicolor. Kodachrome, the invention of independent inventors Mannes and Godowsky, could not have been turned into a product without the help of Kodak. Kodachrome remained an iconic product for more than half a century, using emulsions without color couplers, unlike the great majority of other color films; but Eastman’s great success with theatrical motion picture products was based on films with dye coupler emulsions like Agfa. Arriving at a workable integral tripack was a long and difficult journey following the path, as was so often the case in this field, suggested by Ducos du Hauron who conceived of the multilayered approach to trichromatic analysis and sub-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_51

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sequent coloring or dyeing of stacked layers of film ­combined into a subtractive image, which he describes in his French patent granted on November 23, 1868, FP 83,061, Les Couleurs en Photographie, Solution du Problème, as noted in chapter 42. Du Hauron’s suggestion was only a starting point. For a practical motion picture film, the light-­sensitive emulsion layers are coated on top of each other on transparent flexible celluloid base to create an integral tripack. At the outset there was no guarantee that it was possible to devise a way to coat and stack multiple emulsion and other necessary layers to produce such a product. Methods were required to replace the exposed and developed silver of each emulsion layer with dyes, which Agfa succeeded in doing based on its growing ability to manufacture different kinds of synthetic organic dyes, and in particular the work it had done on the dye precursors or couplers that needed to be incorporated within each emulsion layer. In addition, these dye couplers had to be kept from diffusing to adjacent emulsion layers. The goal was to create a process using a single chemical bath to create chromogenic reactions in each emulsion layer to simultaneously produce cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes. It took nearly a century after the invention of photography to be able to produce such a product, and after their introduction another half-century of effort went into improving their colors, increasing their sensitivity to light, making prints, and reducing fading. After du Hauron’s work, some of the figures involved with the advancement of the integral tripack were G. Selle, who in 1899 suggested controlled penetration of color sensitizers to create layers reserved for different parts of the visible spectrum within a single emulsion; J. H. Smith, who in 1903 created the first integral tripack; and K.  Schinzel, who in 1905 produced the multilayer Katachromie, a tricolor stack of emulsions that contained dyes that were eliminated in regions where metallic silver was formed, which is the basis for Gaspar’s dye destruction color process. B.  Homolka, in 1907, invented the first true color developer, a technique that was advanced by R. Fischer in 1909, who then worked on the problem with H. Siegrist for several years. According to Friedman (1944), this technology is “based on the fact that the oxidation products of certain phenylenediamine and amino phenol developers react with aromatic amino and hydroxyl bodies, or with compounds which contain an active methane group, to form highly colored bodies. In general, cyan colors are obtained by the use of hydroxyl bodies, yellows by the use of the aceto-acetic ester derivatives, and magentas by the use of the heterocyclic rings such as pyrazolone or substituted aceto-nitriles.” After the photographic emulsion is exposed to light, it can be developed into an image because the developer turns exposed silver halide to silver metal, which crucially also produces oxidation products at the silver metal sites, as referred to by Friedman,

51  Agfa and Ansco Color

which are required for the reaction to turn couplers into colored dyes exactly where they are needed. Rogers (2007) defines the term color coupler this way: “A coupler is a chemical which when reacted with oxidized colour developer, produces a dye.” He also comments: “Hundreds of thousands of chemicals have been screened as potential couplers but few have been or are used in commercially available colour films or papers.” Wolf-Heide in 1920 followed up on the work of Selle with a two-layer emulsion version using the controlled penetration principle. W.  Schneider in 1932 worked on sensitizing layers and other emulsion technology. Rudolf Fischer is cited as a key contributor to integral tripack technology because of his creations of indoaniline and azomethine prior to the First World War, which led to a large range of useful synthetic dyes and the creation of the color couplers that can be developed by phenylenediamine. Fischer’s discoveries became the basis for Agfacolor, which appeared in the early days of the Second World War. The subject of color or dye couplers is described at greater length in the next chapter. Agfa had many problems to solve, not the least of which required the working out of manufacturing techniques for coating multiple layers onto a cellulose substrate (Forrest 1937, Wall 1925). Agfacolor reversal film was composed of a top emulsion layer with blue sensitivity that incorporated a yellow dye coupler; below that was a yellow dye filter layer (eliminated in development) to prevent blue light from reaching the bottom two emulsions; below that was a middle orthochromatic emulsion sensitive to the green portion of the visible spectrum that incorporated a magenta dye coupler; and finally the bottom that was panchromatic emulsion for analyzing the red that incorporated a cyan dye coupler. After reversal development a color developer acts with the oxidation products produced when the exposed silver halide is reduced to silver metal so that the couplers, in proximity with the oxidation products, combine with the color developer to become dyes. The amount of dye created is in proportion to the reversed silver metal’s image density. Since the silver metal negative remains along with the unexposed silver metal after color development, all of it must be removed by chemical bleaching to produce a transparency image. The final subtractive image is composed of the blue analyzed layer’s image made up of yellow dye, the green analyzed layer’s image made up of magenta dye, and the red analyzed layer’s image made up of cyan dye. In addition integral tripack is overcoated with a protective layer to prevent abrasion, and the cellulose substrate may be dyed gray or have an antihalation layer coated, often on its back surface, to prevent backscattering of light that would reduce contrast and create haloes around bright objects, like street lamps. According to Hull’s (1969) study of Nazi cinema, Agfacolor was not the film used for the first color German

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dramatic film; rather it was the additive process Opticolor for Das Schönheitsfleckchen (The Beauty Mark), a 29  minute film that premiered in Berlin on August 4, 1936, about the life of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. Opticolor was the name given to Berthon’s lenticular additive process that was licensed by Siemens & Halske. It used similar filters for the camera and projection lenses consisting of red, green, and blue bands (see chapter 45). A second film in the process, a documentary about Germany, was shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1937, but Siemens & Halske abandoned Opticolor in 1941. The first coupler monopack, Agfacolor reversal, was used for the 1939 German feature film Frauen Sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women are Better Diplomats), which was released in 1941. It was produced by the Universum Film AG (UFA) studio at the insistence of Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, cinéaste Joseph Goebbels, who believed that motion pictures were the key component in the Nazis’ propaganda efforts. Goebbels, who was a devotee of Hollywood films, wanted the German cinema to have Technicolor’s capability. With Fig. 51.1  A generic reversal film before exposure. A is the blue-violet-­ America entering the war, the supply of Technicolor films sensitive emulsion layer containing yellow couplers. It is followed by a was cut off for the German public, but Goebbels had his yellow filter layer that is removed in processing. The B ortho green-­ sensitive layer contains magenta couplers, and the C pan red-sensitive agents buy prints, wherever they could find them, for his prilayer contains cyan couplers. D is the celluloid base and E is the antiha- vate screenings. The production of Frauen Sind doch bessere lation layer that is removed in processing. B and C are separated by a Diplomaten became a test of the new Agfacolor reversal systhin gelatin layer and C and D are separated by a binder layer. The tem under studio conditions, and problems cropped up. Color thicknesses are not to scale. varied from take to take without rhyme or reason, and it became apparent that the Agfacolor dyes faded quickly. When he screened Frauen…, Goebbels “banned the showing of the first film in Agfacolor, Women are Better Diplomats, on the grounds that the color was depressing and of wretched quality...The German process struck Goebbels as nothing short of shameful,” according to (Armitage 2012). Hull (1969) reports that his actual reaction was more colorful, as witnessed by actor and director Viet Harlan, who quotes Goebbels as having exclaimed: “Take this shitty mess out of my screening room and burn it.” Subsequent productions during the Second World War used an Agfacolor negative material, with reportedly improved quality, but any evaluation is hampered because most prints exist only in bits and pieces and the film stock has probably faded. A sample of clips of Agfacolor films can be found in the 2017 documentary Hitler’s Hollywood, a compilation of Nazi propaganda films produced mostly by UFA, which the Nazis had taken over under the direct control of Goebbels. The narration analyzes the clips from the point of view of the influential German sociologist and film critic Siegfried Kracauer. A handful of the clips are beautiful, but making a judgment about the state of the art based on such a Fig. 51.2  A generic reversal film after exposure and processing. The sample is suspect because we don’t know the nature of the A, B, and C layers correspond to those in the previous illustration. Dyes are added to the layers in a single color development step and any source materials or the intentions of the colorist; moreover digital restoration can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. remaining silver is chemically bleached.

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51  Agfa and Ansco Color

Fig. 51.3  Hitler and Goebbels on set. Goebbels took over the German film industry and mandated a number of Agfacolor films to challenge Technicolor’s supremacy.

The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen is available in what may be a complete version, a big budget special effects show released in Agfacolor in 1943 “to celebrate the ten years of Nazi cinema and the twenty-fifth anniversary of UFA…” (Armitage 2012). But Goebbels still didn’t get his way: compared with Technicolor the colors remain a proxy by Münchhausen. Cornwell-Clyne (1951, pp. 356–359) reports that the reel-to-reel color consistency of Münchhausen was acceptable because of the forgiving nature of the subject matter, a fantasy with color difficult to fault because of imaginative art direction and costume design, with drastic changes of setting. Cornwell-Clyne reports poorly saturated reds, a misty overall look, and poor blacks that are the cause of brownish fades. Agfa and probably UFA, producer of most of the films, felt the process was not ready for feature use but had to obey the command of Goebbels so that 13 features were completed in Agfacolor between 1940 and 1945. In 1923 Agfa incorporated Agfa Products, Inc., in the United States, but it achieved less than a 1 percent share of the market for black and white materials because of Kodak’s domination. Agfa, to gain traction in the American market and increase manufacturing capacity, acquired Ansco in 1928, renaming it Agfa Ansco. The company built a new plant in Binghamton in 1930 at a cost of $4 million outfitting it with production equipment built by Agfa in Wolfen (Lesch 2000). With the outbreak of the Second World War, the company was taken over by the US Treasury Department, in the largest seizure of its kind during the hostilities. Its headquarters were relocated to Manhattan, and it was renamed General Aniline and Film, which was mandated, on a crash basis, to manufacture materials that previously had been imported from Germany (Eisenstadt 2005). Ansco Color, based on

Agfacolor, was created in a 6-month period in 1941 to supply the American Armed Forces with color film products. Technologists in Binghamton, who had been trained by Agfa in Germany, felt they lacked the knowledge to be able to replicate the manufacturing process, but other American scientists and production people, motivated by the war effort, took on the project under the leadership of chemist and industrialist Albert E.  Marshall, who had been appointed to the administrative board that ran the company after its takeover (Sipley 1951). In addition to manufacturing the film stock, the company set up a processing lab in Binghamton. In the decade and a half after the end of the war, the US government sold off parts of GAF. Agfa and Ansco went their separate ways with different product development paths but sharing an underlying technology. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union seized the Agfa plant in Wolfen, in what became East Germany, and began to manufacture Sovcolor for the Communist Bloc, which after 1964 was renamed ORWOcolor (ORWO is an acronym for Original Wolfen). In this way there came to be three different product lines based on the original Agfa technology: ORWOcolor made in the Eastern Bloc; Agfacolor and Agfachome in West Germany by the originator Agfa (which became Agfa-Gevaert); and Anscocolor and Anscochrome in the United States by GAF. In 1945 Ansco announced three Ansco Color reversal films, available on either nitrate or acetate stock, designed as a complete system for motion picture production (Duerr 1946). The use of color reversal for a camera film for theatrical features is unusual, given that the negative-positive system was pervasive throughout the industry, but it was not entirely without precedent since Technicolor used the reversal Monopack. The new films were as follows: for the ­camera

51  Agfa and Ansco Color

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Fig. 51.4  An Agfacolor frame from The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, released in 1943.

Ansco Color Type 735; for duplicating and optical effects Ansco Color Type 132; and for release printing Ansco Color Type 732. Camera stock Type 735 had a film speed that was roughly comparable to that of Technicolor and Kodachrome at Weston 8, corresponding to an exposure index (E. I.) of 10 on the more widely used ASA scale, which is quite slow by today’s standards. A digital cinema camera may have a basic rating of 800 ISO, or something like 80 times (or about 6 f stops) faster than the aforementioned materials.1 Ansco Color was made up of three emulsion layers, following the configuration previously described. The exposed film was developed in a metol-hydroquinone black and white developer to produce a negative silver metal image in each of the three layers, each a record of one third of the spectrum. After the first black and white development, the film was rinsed and immersed in stop bath to halt the developer’s action. The film was next bathed in a chrome alum hardener and washed. Reversing the image required fogging the film, using a tungsten lamp, to expose the silver halide that had not been exposed in the camera or affected by the metol-­ hydroquinone developer. The multilayer latent image was then developed in a color developer to form the dye images by the particular color coupler embedded in each emulsion layer. In this way the dye couplers juxtaposed with silver halide’s oxidation products were transformed by the color developer into dyes (Schmidt 1953, pp.  1726–1729). The film was then rinsed and run through another stop bath that The ASA or American Standards Association film speed or sensitivity ratings were replaced by the ISO or International Organization for Standardization ratings; they were numerically about the same.

1 

was followed by a second hardening treatment in chrome alum and another wash. All of the silver that would have interfered with the transmission of the dyes, to produce a subtractive transparency, were removed from the emulsion layers by immersion in a ferricyanide bleach bath and converted back into silver halide. After a wash the silver halide was removed from all three emulsion layers by a bath in conventional hypo or fixer, after which the film was washed and dried (Ryan 1977). In order to produce accurate color prints, to control contrast or because of imperfections in the image-forming dyes, a technique called masking for the integral tripacks is employed. One kind of mask involves using black and white prints of the original to reduce contrast or control color. The mask, typically a low-density negative image, is held in contact with the original for printing. Masking was first suggested by the German E. Albert in the 1890s in GPs 101,379 and 116,538, designed to improve photomechanical color reproduction by addressing a problem caused by the K or key plate, a black plate used in addition to the RGB printing plates. This black printer plate, which began to be used circa 1875, improved image contrast and the depth of the blacks but degraded bright colors. Albert solved the problem by contact printing a low-contrast low-density transparency print from the black printer. This negative was sandwiched in registration with the separation negatives making the printing plates (Friedman 1945). Kodak’s remarkable masking solution for the negative-positive integral tripack process is described in the next chapter. To control contrast Ansco offered a low-shrink black and white panchromatic stock for creating the mask required for

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its reversal camera original, recommending that the mask be made from the camera original by contact printing. The negative mask was then held in contact with the original and optically printed onto reversal duplicating stock Type 132, to produce the master for continuous contact printing onto reversal print stock Type 732. While a single monochromatic mask can control excessive contrast and increase shadow and highlight detail, a mask for each color layer is required for the correction of dye imperfections. The dyes used in chromogenic films absorb light beyond their targeted portions of the spectrum: the red dye absorbs green and blue to a significant extent; the green dye absorbs some blue; and the blue dye absorbs some green. Director of Color Technology at Kodak, Ralph M. Evans (1959), explained: “The effect (dye absorption imperfections) cannot be tolerated twice (making a print) of the same subject. This darkening of the blues and greens can be offset by the use of a low contrast mask (about 30% of full photographic contrast)….” Masking will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, but the lack of a more convenient masking system, moreover one that addressed dye imperfections in addition to contrast, undoubtedly contributed to the eventual withdrawal of Ansco Color motion picture products from the Hollywood feature film market. Cinematographer John Arnold, MGM’s executive director of photography, saw one of the first features photographed using Ansco Color reversal, Sixteen Fathoms Deep, a 1948 adventure film distributed by Monogram Pictures, which was released on Ansco Color print stock. Only a handful of other features were filmed using the Ansco Color reversal system (Ryan 1977). Although Arnold was not impressed by the production, he thought that Ansco Color was worth investigating as a candidate for an in-house MGM studio process (Rowan 1955). MGM, like Fox and Warner Bros., wanted to have its own color system, which meant processing the camera film in its laboratory and making dailies, but outsourcing the release prints. With the cooperation of Ansco, MGM began a test program lasting many months in which the process was exercised under a wide variety of conditions. The technicians were particularly attracted to the fact that the film could be used in any studio camera rather than the three-strip Technicolor machine. The studio adapted some of its black-and-white processing equipment to handle Ansco reversal films, all of which were processed in the same chemicals requiring only different times in the baths. The test program changed gears as soon as the Ansco Color negative system was made available to the studio in 1951, at which time the 35 mm motion picture reversal material was withdrawn. However, Ansco continued to offer and improve Anscochrome films for 16  mm production, where shooting reversal was the custom (Forrest 1957, 1958). The

51  Agfa and Ansco Color

negative-positive system is advantageous because it is able to capture more detail in the shadow and highlight areas due to the fact that reversal is usually designed to have higher contrast since it is meant for direct viewing. Testing was carried out by shooting Ansco Color negative on set, at the same time as MGM features were shot in Technicolor, in order to compare the results. Technicolor cameraman Ray Rennahan shot Hawaiian exteriors on Ansco negative piggybacking on MGM’s 1950 production of Pagan Love Song. The studio liked the tests and adopted the process calling it Metrocolor. Four new Ansco film stocks were introduced as part of its negative-positive system: Type 843 Ansco Color daylight-­balanced negative camera film, Type 846 Ansco Color negative duplicating film, Type 848 Ansco Color positive printing film, and Ansco Color Compensating traveling matte film (Duerr 1952). Ansco improved its negative-positive system adding tungsten-balanced camera stock Type 844, with a 16 ASA exposure index, followed by Type 845, also tungsten balanced, but with a 50 percent increase in film speed. This film used an orange tinted acetate substrate, so that it resembled processed Eastman negative, although it had no masking properties it could be intercut with Eastman negative with its built-in masking. Ansco color duplicating negative film Type 846 and Ansco color positive release printing film Type 848 were added, and Ansco introduced black and white panchromatic intermediate stock for making separation negatives. Between 1952 and 1954, MGM produced ten films in the process, in some cases using the entire system of camera negative, intermediate material, and release printing. The first film shot on Ansco negative camera film was The Wild North, released in 1952, followed by three features in 1953, Ride, Vaquero!, Take the High Ground!, and Escape from Fort Bravo. In 1954 the following films were released: Brigadoon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and The Student Prince. Three 1953 films, although shot on Ansco Color, were released using Technicolor imbibition prints: Kiss Me Kate and Arena, both shot in 3-D, and The Long, Long Trailer. The last studio film shot on Ansco negative stock was MGM’s Lust for Life in 1956. The restored versions of these films do not necessarily reflect how they looked when released, but they have lovely colors that tend to be earthy and soft with open green foliage. Ansco withdrew from the theatrical motion picture market to concentrate on supplying its major customer, the US government, a retreat that was undoubtedly the result of the Ansco Color process having been eclipsed by Eastman Color negative’s colored coupler masking technology, an advance that helped Eastman Kodak achieve virtual dominance of theatrical film color cinematography for more than half a century.

52

Eastman Color

Kodak Park in Rochester, near the banks of the Genesee River and in close proximity to Lake Ontario, was established in 1890. It became an immense manufacturing and research center, which at its peak was the major such facility in New York State with 30,000 employees, with its own electrical and steam generation plants, water supply, railroad, fire department, 30 miles of roads, 2000-seat theater, gymnasiums, restaurants, bowling alleys, a rifle range, a pool hall, and the camera club with the most members in the world. In 2001 when production of film peaked, Kodak’s revenue was $19 billion, the year it was the world’s major consumer of silver. The following year revenue dropped to a nearly profitless $13 billion, and market analysts were making pessimistic speculations about the company’s ability to meet the challenges of digital photography (Hill 2008). Today, Eastman Kodak, the company that once was the world’s photochemical imaging leader, is greatly reduced in size and revenue. It is no longer one of the world’s most important corporations, having been eclipsed by Pacific Rim companies that see themselves as being in the business of electronic and digital imaging. By 2007 all film production, which it had been manufacturing in factories in different parts of the world, had been confined to two adjacent buildings located within the sprawling 1200 acres of Eastman Business Park, Building 38 and the curiously named 14-Room (Shanebrook 2010). Kodak Park was renamed Eastman Business Park in 2009, probably to deemphasize its role as a manufacturer. In its decline, to reduce its City of Rochester property tax base, the company blew up unused buildings. Decades of effort were spent on the development of new film products whose manufacturing details became closely guarded secrets. The company put in place a system of knowledge fragmentation using code names for chemical components that changed from building to building, and also differed for the amounts of each component, making it impossible to poach the formulas and even their quantities. Even if knowledge of the formulas could be acquired, manufacturing knowhow presented a formidable barrier. Kodak’s counter-industrial espionage program began after such a

treacherous attempt had been made by George Eastman’s heir apparent, Henry M. Reichenbach, who Eastman believed was conspiring to steal trade secrets and start a competing company. George Eastman, on New Year’s Day of 1892, the day that the Eastman Co.’s name was officially changed to The Eastman Kodak Co., fired chemist Reichenbach and three other employees, and on the following day, Eastman wrote to his New York City-based attorney: “I recently discovered what might be called a conspiracy…” on the part of these men, who were backed by an unstated party, to use what they had learned at the Eastman Dry Plate Company, to found a competitor (Brayer 2011). From the outset Eastman Kodak had an intimate relationship with the American motion picture industry as the principal supplier of 35  mm black and white stock. It was Technicolor’s major supplier for camera negative, matrix, and blank release print stock. For decades, for the bichromatic color services, it supplied bipack camera film and duplitizing print stock used by TruColor and Cinecolor. It created the first integral tripack product, Kodachrome, initially earmarked for 16 mm amateur filmmaking (see chapter 55), which was adapted for Technicolor’s use as Monopack camera film. To create color film products, Kodak researchers investigated the perception of and reproduction of color. They researched sensitometry, dye, and emulsion chemistry and the psychophysics of color reproduction as applied to practical film products. In 1938 Kodak researcher David Lewis MacAdam (1938b, JOSA; 1938a, JSMPE) showed that it was possible to closely approximate “exact” color reproduction for the subtractive display of color photography using a specific set of dyes based on Maxwellian trichromatic analyses, when a proper set of masks was employed. In addition to MacAdam, two other Kodak scientists (amongst many) who contributed to the creation of color photographic systems were Ralph M.  Evans (1953) and Wesley T. Hanson, Jr. But no matter how smart, how learned, how insightful Kodak scientists were in understanding and quantifying the perceptual process of color and attempting to apply their insights to silver halide products, progress in

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_52

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Fig. 52.1  A photochrom-style picture postcard of Kodak Park in its heyday.

making a color film system only advanced by experimentation that required showing samples of color photographs to test subjects. The final arbiter of a natural color system is the human eye, and although the researchers made strides, knowledge of the perceptual mechanism of color was incomplete, but in fact unnecessary to achieve a good result (Hanson 1949). The first motion picture negative movie film to profit from Kodak’s color expertise was announced in 1950, Eastman Color camera film, Type 5247, daylight balanced with an exposure index of 16, on a par with Technicolor’s camera film speed. Type 5247 was followed by fairly frequent revisions including new Eastman Color camera negative that was tungsten balanced, more sensitive to light, and in 1959 with Type 5250 having colored couplers in all three layers, whereas Type 5247 had colored color couplers in only two layers. Release print stock and intermediate materials were also successively improved. Integral tripack films for theatrical motion pictures require the technology of color coupling, of which there are two kinds: first, couplers that create a dye image like the Agfa and Ansco negative and reversal camera and print films described in the last chapter, and also colored couplers that create a dye image and correction masks within the emulsion layers, for both camera negative and intermediate or effects stocks. To make high-quality prints it is neces-

sary to control contrast and reproduce accurate and pleasing colors; it was the technology of the colored dye coupler that formed corrective masks within the negative, and intermediate film emulsions, that made monopack color cinematography practical. T.  H. Miller (1949), of Kodak, succinctly gives the reason for masking: “Differences between the original and the reproduction are primarily due to the high photographic contrast in the optical characteristics of the dyes of the original.” A perfect color dye for subtractive color synthesis ideally absorbs its complimentary color: cyan would absorb red, magenta would absorb green, and yellow would absorb blue. An ideal spectral plot of each of these dyes, wavelength versus intensity, would have sharp transitions. The absorption of each perfect dye would occupy one third of the visible spectrum, with no incursions into other portions of the spectrum. For cyan that ideal encompasses wavelengths between 600 and 700  nm (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter), for magenta the wavelengths span 600 and 500  nm, and for yellow the wavelengths lie between 500 and 400 nm. But perfect dyes don’t exist: in practice, cyan dyes absorb not only the desired red but also unwanted blue and green; magenta dyes absorb not only the desired green but also unwanted blue; yellow dyes absorb not only the desired blue but also unwanted green (Miller 1949).

52  Eastman Color

Although coupler-formed dyes will absorb beyond their mandate into other portions of the visible spectrum, this doesn’t preclude them from producing subjectively pleasing color. In the visual world colored objects may appear to be identical to the eye while having different spectral characteristics, but problems arise when making photographic prints. This is especially the case for theatrical release because of the intermediate copies that are required to make the release prints for a feature film. Without masking, due to the successive additive errors in the duplication steps, color shifts and contrast will become increasingly pronounced. Masking for printmaking, to reduce contrast and subtract unwanted portion of the spectrum, is required to compensate for dye imperfections. Masking for printing still photographs, in which the original and mask are held together emulsion to emulsion is practical, but it is impractical to use such a technique for the preparation of motion picture printing masters; this is especially true since complete color correction requires a mask for each dye layer of an integral tripack (Hanson 1952). Kodak’s first commercial use of masking was for Kotavachrome Professional Prints, made from Kodachrome Professional sheet film, a service introduced in 1938. A mask was made of the original sheet film transparency using contact printing. An unexposed black and white negative film was adhered to the emulsion of the reversal sheet film and exposed through it and developed in situ (Coe 1978). The resulting mask, a low-density negative, remained juxtaposed to the transparency in perfect registration after development for contact printing or enlarging onto a Kodachrome-type reversal material for prints up to 30 in x 40  in. The mask could be peeled off restoring the transparency to its original condition. For filmmaking a masking system along these lines would have been out of the question. Therefore, Kodak worked to create a negative-positive system that was similar to Agfacolor’s negative camera stock, whose color coupler processing involved a relatively small departure from conventional black and white processing. Further, it was necessary to be able to correct for the spectral imperfections of the coupler-formed dye in each layer in order to manufacture high-quality release prints. Kodacolor Aero Reversal Film was the first Kodak tripack product to use couplers incorporated into the emulsion layers, using the protected coupler chemistry invented by Edwin E.  Vittum and Paul W.  Jelly, Kodak research scientists, as described in USP 2,322,027, Color Photography, filed December 26, 1940. These colored couplers were encased in a resinous binder of organic material for protection from the chemical reaction that would have occurred due to the coupler’s contact with the emulsion’s silver halide. Kodacolor Aero Reversal Film was offered to the US Air Force for aerial reconnaissance in 1940, with a major benefit that it could be field processed. In 1942 the company introduced the Kodacolor roll-film negative-­positive system for snapshots,

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its first integral tripack consumer product to incorporate dye couplers. In 1944 Kodak added a silver masking layer to Kodacolor negative, a slow color-blind black and white emulsion layer located below the yellow filter layer. In development it became a low-density black and white positive mask, acting to tamp down excessively bright colors and retain detail in highlights. In an article published in 1980, Kodak scientist Wesley T. Hanson, Jr. (1913–1987), who began working on integral tripack technology soon after the introduction of Kodachrome in 1935, recounted what transpired at Kodak Park in the pursuit of a color motion picture system. It was Hanson who, in 1943, devised the concept of using colored couplers as masks to correct color dye imperfections, the key to the success of the Eastman Color negative-positive system, and to the near ubiquity of color cinematography. Hanson recalled how the concept for one of the most important inventions in the history of photography came to him: “Lying in bed one night in February of 1943, I thought that if you had the coupler itself colored and you destroyed that color when you made the dye, then you had an automatic mask right there.” Hanson’s inspiration led to the creation of a complete system that required, in addition to camera film, intermediate materials, as well as print stock. In 1949 a new Kodacolor film was introduced incorporating Hanson’s colored color coupler masking layers that Kodak called “integral colored masking.” Ektacolor sheet film, also using colored coupler masking, was introduced for portraiture. (Kodak established the suffixes “color” to denote a negative film and “chrome” to denote a reversal film.) Soon colored color coupling became the backbone not only of negative films for still photography but for theatrical cinematography. Researchers at Kodak like Hanson considered which of the still photographic materials they had created might be the basis for a motion picture system. The Kodacolor system offered researchers at Kodak Park a potential basis for a negative-­positive color system for professional motion pictures, but experiments using these materials demonstrated that they were not sharp enough and too grainy. According to Hanson (1980), Kodak researchers also looked at the possibility of creating a print stock by mixing together three differently sensitized emulsions and coating them as a single layer, a design they called monolayer. This monolayer print film would have used the Kodachrome development process as part of a system beginning with an Ektachrome film for cinematography. Although Ektachrome reversal film had the necessary image quality, it was rejected because it was difficult to make good prints from it; moreover, the movie industry was accustomed to the negative-positive system. By the late 1940s, Kodacolor film and its companion paper print material had been sufficiently improved to be considered as the basis for a motion picture system. The team set about to coat both Kodacolor and its print film emulsions on acetate to enable shooting a demonstration film. The test was pro-

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52  Eastman Color

Fig. 52.2  A portion of a WWII ad extolling the virtues of the new Kodacolor Aero Reversal Film.

jected for the company’s management and marketing teams and was received enthusiastically. The test images were judged to be was far superior to any of those of the other processes under consideration. The decision was made to create a color motion picture system along the lines of Kodacolor’s integral tripack negative-positive technology. Hanson recounts that one critical issue was resolved when Kodak researchers invented a way to coat several emulsion layers on a substrate in a single coating run, a process that reduced the cost of manufacture. Kodak announced its color negative-positive cinema system in April 1950, beginning with Eastman Color Negative Safety Film, Type 5247, which was first used to shoot Columbia Pictures’ When the Redskins Rode, released in 1951 as a Supercinecolor print, based on a process that used rehalogenated duplitized print stock,

described in chapter 48 (Ryan 1977). It was the first of half a dozen features made by Columbia photographed on the new Eastman Color and released as Supercinecolor prints. Other early efforts include those of Warner Bros., using Eastman Color under the brand name Warner Color. 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and United Artists were also early adopters releasing films shot on 5247 printed in Technicolor and Supercinecolor, and Republic Pictures produced a few films shot on Eastman Color with prints made using their bichromatic TruColor process. From its introduction, Eastman Color negative used colored couplers, with spectral characteristics chosen to correct, by filtering out or subtracting, the imperfections of the image-forming dyes. Initially masking couplers were used only in Eastman Color’s two b­ ottom layers,

52  Eastman Color

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Fig. 52.3  The USP cover sheet for Hanson’s monolayer film using the Kodachrome development process for making release prints.

which formed the green and red records. Type 5247’s emulsion structure was as follows: the top layer was protective gelatin coated on a blue-sensitive emulsion that incorporated a yellow colorless dye coupler. A yellow dye image was formed to take the place of that layer’s silver image. This emulsion layer was coated on top of a yellow filter layer whose purpose was to keep yellow light from exposing the bottom two emulsion layers. The next layer was the green record, an emulsion sensitive to blue and green incorporating the yellow colored coupler that formed the magenta dye image. In addition to the formation of the magenta dye image, the yellow correction mask was created during color development as colored coupler

was destroyed in proportion to the formation of the magenta image-forming dye. A gelatin interlayer separated the green record from the red record, the bottom emulsion, which incorporated a red-­orange-­colored coupler that formed the cyan dye image and correction mask, along the lines described for the blue-green-sensitive layer. This red-sensitive bottom layer was coated on a substratum to bind it to the cellulose acetate safety film support, whose rear surface was coated with an antihalation backing that was removed prior to development (Hanson 1952). After processing the remaining yellow and red-orange colored coupler masking layers gave the camera negative its characteristic orange color.

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To help understand the colored coupler concept, here’s a more detailed look at how the colored coupler masking is formed during processing of the red sensitive emulsion layer with its red-orange-colored color coupler: first the film is developed in a black and white developer to produce the silver image. Color development then occurs in which the colored color coupler within that emulsion layer is chemically developed into both the cyan image-forming dye (the compliment to the red layer’s color sensitivity) and the mask. The cyan dye image is formed in proportion to the oxidation by-­ products associated with the black and white developer’s reduction of the silver halide to silver metal. The colored coupler that has not been developed remains, but is diminished in proportion to the formation of the image-forming cyan dye. The colored coupler’s spectral characteristics have been chosen to correct for the cyan dye’s imperfections. In other words, the remaining colored color coupler becomes a color correction mask. The unexposed areas in the emulsion layer retain the colored color coupler’s full density. For the

green-sensitive layer of Type 5247, dye image formation and masking works in a similar fashion (Ryan 1977). The processed camera film is a negative in terms of image density, and the colors are the subtractive compliments of the analyzed short, medium, and long portions of the visible spectrum. The print stock uses colorless couplers rather than colored color couplers, and its sensitivity is adjusted to see the color of the background mask layers as if they were clear acetate. The creation of the colored color couplers, in which positive image masks are produced, resembles Gaspar Color’s dye destruction process, as described in chapter 46. Perhaps Hanson’s colored color coupler approach was so inspired. This description of the masking technology used for Eastman Color Negative Safety Film, Type 5247, is similar to that which was used for successive generations of Eastman Color film, which used colored color couplers not only in the red and green layers but also in blue layer. Eastman Color departs from the early Agfa and Ansco negative-positive processes in

Fig. 52.4  Eastman Color camera negative exposed with a calibration image for lab use. The salmon-colored color couplers are one notable feature; another is that the negative’s colors are the compliments of

those in the positive, which can be affirmed by observing the vertical color bars in the upper left corner of the frames. (Test film by Technicolor)

52  Eastman Color

other important way: its dye couplers are physically restricted to specific emulsion layers by being embedded in fatty or oily insoluble molecules rather than being anchored in place by long molecular chains. The color development chemistry is also different but based on the same basic concept in which the oxidation products of silver halide development, rather than the silver metal grains themselves, participate with the color developer to form dyes in the emulsion layers of both the images and their masks. All the silver in the emulsion layers must be removed in the final processing steps so that light may pass through the subtractive image-forming dyes. The silver removed in processing is recovered from the solutions. In 1950, at the time of Eastman Color’s introduction, there was no integral tripack color duplicate negative material for making internegatives. Instead a black and white panchromatic film, Type 5216, was used for making three separation positives through red, green, and blue filters, a technique that is still used today for archival protection copies printed on polyester base. To make an internegative, these three records were exposed, in superimposition in succession, through the appropriate filters onto Type 5243. In order to insure exact registration for a sharp image and to avoid color fringing, step registration printers were required to combine the three color records onto Type 5243 internegative, which was used for making release prints. Hanson and Kisner (1953) described improvements to the Eastman Color system that included Color Negative, 5248, 3200° Kelvin balanced for tungsten lamps, with an exposure index of 25, a 50 percent improvement in speed compared to 5247. Also the improved positive print stock 5382, internegative 5245, and panchromatic separation film 5216 were introduced. In 1956 a new color negative intermediate film was announced Type 5253, which could be used as both interpositive and internegative (Bello 1957). When Hanson (1980) presented a historical review, Eastman Color was a family of camera films, the fastest of which had an exposure index of 100. In successive iterations Kodak improved the attributes of the Eastman Color stock including camera, intermediate, and release print. Many of these films were also available for 16 mm production. The final generation of Eastman’s fastest 35  mm color camera film, Vision3 500T Color Negative, 5219, is five times more sensitive than the 1980 film. Currently Kodak makes three additional Vision3 Negative Films, 250D, 200T, and 50D, with T used to designate tungsten balance and D for daylight balance. An unusual book, a memorial to an industrial achievement of the highest rank, Making Kodak Film, The Illustrated Story of State-of-the Art Photographic Film Manufacturing, by Robert L. Shanebrook (2010), a retired Kodak executive, describes with unprecedented completeness, with color photographs of production equipment and diagrams, how Kodak color film was and still is manufactured. Such a book would

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not have been published during Kodak’s heyday, but there is no point to restricting such information since Shanebrook describes the goings-on in the last manufacturing plant for motion picture film. His book describes an intrepidly complicated process whose origins go back more than a century. He describes how both cellulose acetate and polyethylene terephthalate, PET or ESTAR (similar to DuPont Mylar) base materials, are manufactured, the coating process creating multilayer emulsion materials, methods for testing the product, how various formats are packaged, and hitherto unavailable information. The newer cellulose acetate is more heat, grease, and solvent resistant than previous versions and has good optical quality; however it degrades with time, and camera negatives must be kept in cold storage in sealed cans at a controlled humidity. A trip through a film archive requires a sweater and is accompanied by the pervasive smell of vinegar, a phenomenon called the “vinegar syndrome,” a sign that the base is chemically deteriorating. In 1949 Kodak announced that it would discontinue the manufacture of nitrate base film and switch all of its film products to cellulose acetate safety film, and other film manufacturers followed its example. Chemist Charles R. Fordyce (1902–1994) was in charge of the development of acetate base in the Manufacturing Experiments Division at Kodak Park beginning in the mid-1940s, after having been the supervisor of its laboratory development beginning in 1931. On several occasions the industry cited him as having made a major contribution to the development of safety film (Cianci 2016, p.  60). Cellulose triacetate became standard for all Eastman film products in a rapid transition that took place by 1951 (Fordyce 1976). The new base had a fluorescent dye added to it so it could be identified with ultraviolet light (Crabtree 1955). Eastman movie film is made on rolls that are 54 inches wide and more than a mile long. The acetate base for motion picture film has remained at 0.005 in thick for more than a century, and the total thickness of the emulsions and its many coatings is less than 0.0015 in. Kodak Vision3 500T film consists of many coatings, including protective layers, filters, and multiple emulsion layers for the analysis of the same spectral band: the topmost is a protective matte finish overcoat, made up of plastic beads, a lubricant, antistatic material, and polymer in gelatin, below which is coated ultraviolet filter. This is followed by fast blue- and slow blue-sensitive emulsions stacked to combine their best characteristics to produce fine grain and sharpness with good sensitivity to light. As described above, colored color couplers are mixed into the various emulsions. Next is a yellow dye layer, after which is a protective interlayer made of gelatin followed by three separate green-sensitive emulsions, a fast, an intermediate speed, and a slow one. Another gelatin interlayer, which forms a chemical barrier, is followed by three separate red analyzing emulsions, of fast, intermediate, and low sensitivity.

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Fig. 52.5  The structure of Kodak Vision3 500T negative camera film after processing. A indicates yellow dye occupying the two blue-­ sensitive emulsion layers. B indicates magenta dye occupying the three green-sensitive emulsion layers. C indicates cyan dye occupying the three red emulsion sensitive layers. D is the celluloid base. 1 is a UV-absorbing layer overcoated with a protection layer. 2 and 3 are gelatin interlayers. 4 indicates two layers: gray represents the antihalation layer followed by the subbing layer to bind the top layers to the celluloid base. 5 is an antistatic and lubricant backing.

Following the red layers is an antihalation layer made up of dye particles of cyan, magenta, yellow, and ultraviolet dye. This is followed by a subbing polymer layer to improve adhesion to the cellulose triacetate base that has a backing made up of plastic beads of lubricant polymer and an ­antistatic material. The layers coated on the substrate are held to a thickness tolerance of 1%, and the average thickness of each layer is approximately 0.0003 inch. The base is three times thicker than the combined coatings. Kodak Vision color print film has a simpler structure than that of Vision camera negative since there is only one emulsion layer per color, with colorless rather than colored dye couplers. The top layer is a gelatin overcoat followed by the green-sensitive layer that forms the magenta dye image. Next is a gelatin interlayer followed by the red-sensitive layer that forms the cyan dye image. Another gelatin interlayer is followed by the blue-sensitive layer that becomes the yellow dye image, which is followed by an antihalation layer and then the subbing layer to help the layers adhere to the base. The base, which is ESTAR, is about the same thickness as that of camera film at 0.0047 inch and is coated with a conductive antistatic layer and then a scratch-resistant lubricated coating. Polyester ESTAR has three times the dimensional stability of acetate and is extremely durable. Camera

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Fig. 52.6  The structure of Kodak release print film.

negative is designed to have a wide dynamic range and low contrast because it has to reproduce detail in the shadows and the highlights, but print film is a high-contrast material designed to match the characteristics of the camera film and its colored couplers. The print film does not need colored couplers and is designed to take into account the negative’s masking dyes to produce clear transmission rather than the overall orange of the camera film. The availability of Eastman Color dramatically changed the number of feature films released in color. Prior to its introduction, Technicolor was able to supply cameras for only 15 productions at a time, but Eastman Color turned any 35 mm camera into a color camera. With the arrival of Eastman Color 5250 in 1959, a higher-speed less grainy negative became part of a well-designed system (Salt 1992). Fuji, Agfa-Gevaert, and Ferrania also offered integral tripack materials for the negative-positive system. Fujicolor system, introduced in 1955 by Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., of Tokyo, Japan, after several cycles of improvement during its domestic use, was introduced to the American market in 1967. It became widely used for both cinematography and release printing (Ryan 1977). Agfacolor, although not widely accepted in America, was used for Seinfeld, an American television comedy series that was in production from 1989 to 1998. For this product Agfa abandoned the chemistry it introduced in the 1930s to make its films compatible with Eastman Color processing, as Fuji Photo Film had done for its products. Both Agfa and Fuji left the motion picture film business, with the result that Eastman Kodak is its last manufacturer.

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Despite the fact that the industry has substantially transitioned to digital cinematography, post-production, ­distribution, and projection, some feature films are still shot on film, but cinematography of either origin is digitally post-­produced and distributed. Film remains a viable choice for filmmakers because the image quality of camera negative is so good. At a meeting at the Cinémathèque Française in December 2016, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel expressed the belief that film has a different quality from digital cinematography because of the random nature of its granular structure. The Bayer pattern, the analytical filtration pattern of the digital sensor, is a fixed but usually unobtrusive pattern, but color film “grain” is made up of color dye clouds that randomly change size and shape from frame to frame. Deschanel believes this dynamic structure gives the projected image vitality. However, filmmakers who share his opinion and love the look, such as director Christopher Nolan, may be out of luck if demand diminishes. As of this writing (December, 2020), Kodak maintains processing labs in New  York City, Atlanta, and London, but FotoKem in Burbank, serving the Hollywood film industry, is the

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only full-service lab I know of that is capable of meeting the demands of feature film production for both 35  mm and 70 mm. Kodak film stocks were successively updated to make them ever more suitable for big screen projection with reduction in gain, improvements in color, and good sharpness. In 1968 Kodak introduced Color Reversible ­ Intermediate Type 5249, which incorporated colored couplers and was reversal processed allowing for the printing of an internegative in one step. In the opinion of Sidney Solow (1976), head of the Consolidated Film Industries laboratory color reversal intermediate stock, CRI Type 5249 was a great step forward: “The image that is created on the intermediate negative is so close to the original...that prints made from both the original and the intermediate are virtually indistinguishable.” However, many of Solow’s industry colleagues did not share his enthusiasm for CRI. In 2014 AMPAS awarded an Oscar to the Laboratory Industry, received on its behalf by filmmaker Christopher Nolan, a staunch advocate of film. Today the major Hollywood laboratories, Technicolor and Deluxe, once film laboratories, now specialize almost entirely in digital services.

Part VI THE CELLULOID CINEMA: Small Formats

Early Small Formats

By the first decade of the twentieth century, the 35 mm format had been become ubiquitous, and while it was accepted as a standard by the theatrical film industry it did not address every motion picture need. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, new smaller gauge formats were offered for non-professional cinematography as well as for content distribution for the home and small venues. Matthews (1955) and Tarkington, of the Kodak Research Laboratories, list over 20 sub-35 mm formats that appeared between 1898 and the introduction of Kodak’s 16  mm system in 1923. Kattelle (2000) lists 59 formats that were introduced in the years up to 1968, gauges between 3 mm and 32 mm, many of which made it to the marketplace. Some of these were probably little used and Kattelle does not claim his list is definitive. A list of 34 substandard formats in the same time frame, prepared by Tümmel (1973), has items not found on Kattelle’s list. In addition to the sub-35 mm formats, there were about 20 failed attempts to introduce the 35 mm format for amateur cinematography, the first of which is attributable to German manufacturer Oskar Messter who introduced his Amateur-Kinetograph, a combination camera-­projector in 1897 (Coe 1981). The use of combustible nitrate base was unacceptable for the home, as was the negative-positive system, which almost all of these early formats, used, because it added to the cost of making prints. In addition, the growth of amateur cinematography wasn’t furthered by the fact that early cameras were handcranked and required tripod mounting for cinematography. In addition, the lack of format standardization raised the issue of projecting footage using a projector of another make or even of the same gauge (width) because the frame size and perforations might differ, a problem that was mitigated to some extent since the early machines were frequently combination camera-projectors. Small gauge format expert Kattelle writes that: “The first U.S.-made home movie machine of record was hardly more than a toy,” the $6 Parlor Kinetoscope, designed as part of a content distribution system, which was a handcranked peepshow moving image viewer, as described in USP 588,916, Kinetoscope, filed on June 1, 1896, invented by Willard

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G. Steward and Ellis F. Frost, of the District of Columbia; it’s described and illustrated in the chapter The Lumières and the Europeans. The specifications describe two columns of frames either on transparent film or paper, but only paper rolls were sold. A stereoscopic version seems plausible based on the patent figures that illustrate side-by-­side frames and a set of dual eyepieces. The device was manufactured by the American Parlor Kinetoscope Company of Washington D.C.; it used a mechanism housed in a wooden box that was 11 inches wide, 12 inches high, and 3 inches deep. Image frames were 1 3 4 in ×  1 3 8 in, on a vertical-­traveling closed loop of paper that was wrapped over a drum. The image was viewed through awkwardly placed apertures at the bottom of the cabinet. The mechanism has a resemblance to that used by Reynaud for his Projecting Praxinoscope: each frame’s reflected image was optically stabilized by means of a rocking mirror as it passed over the surface of the drum. Picture belts were offered for sale in lengths up to 60 feet, three of which had these titles: Dance of the Rustic, The Elephants, and General View of the Beach at Atlantic City. It is not known how these movies were photographed (Kattelle 2000). This peepshow viewer is of interest because its USP 588,916 was part of the Edison Trust portfolio. After the introduction of the Edison-Dickson Kinetoscope and the demonstrations of projection that followed, it took no time at all for entrepreneurs, particularly in England, to realize that motion pictures could be extended to the home or as a medium for non-theatrical content distribution, and that an exiting magic lantern lamphouse could be used as part of the projection apparatus. The first four machines to reach the amateur market appeared in 1897 and each year thereafter. All were British beginning with the 35  mm Motorgraph, which was followed by 17.5 mm camera-projector systems, the Birtac, the Biokam, and the La Petite. The combination camera-­ projector 35  mm Motorgraph was made by W. Watson & Sons; combination camera-projectors like this were designed to be used in conjunction with a magic lantern lamphouse because it was reasonable to assume that many of the people interested in making movies already owned a

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_53

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Fig. 53.1 The Birtac 17.5  mm camera-projector. (Cinémathèque Française)

Fig. 53.2  The Birtac 17.5 mm format.

magic lantern. Although other 35 mm machines followed in the footsteps of the Motograph in the coming years, most of the efforts aimed at the amateur market involved sub-35 mm gauges with offerings from England, France, Germany, and the United States, but most manufacturers realized that the 35  mm format was too costly for the home moviemaker. According to Cushman (1944, p. 407) and Randall: “There was, in all these attempts, one mistaken viewpoint: each manufacture believing that he could monopolize the film

53  Early Small Formats

supply. The films were, therefore, deliberately made noninterchangeable with those of competing manufacturers.” A number of 17.5 mm camera-projector machines based on 35  mm stock, slit in half and perforated, were offered beginning with the Birtac by Birt Acres (1854–1918), who was born in Virginia but spent most of his life in England where he was an associate of motion picture hardware designer and film producer Robert W.  Paul. In 1898 Acres introduced the first substandard gauge machine offered to the public, the daylight loading compact handcranked Birtac camera-projector that accepted 50-foot rolls of 17.5 mm film designed with two perforations per frame along one edge of the film (Coe 1981). In 1899 a second 17.5 mm format camera using one square perforation located in the middle of each frameline, the Biokam, was designed by Thomas Hepworth and marketed by Charles Urban’s Warwick Trading Co. Ltd. The Biokam was meant to serve as a motion picture and snapshot camera, a printer, projector, a reverser (?), and an enlarger for still photos. A complete outfit sold for 11 guineas, a great deal of money, telling us that customers for the product were well-off. Another 17.5 mm camera-projector, the La Petite, was introduced in 1900 and was manufactured in London by Hughes, using film that had one square perforation at the frameline. A 17.5 mm camera made in Dresden was introduced in 1903 by the respected manufacturing firm of H. Ernemann AG, the Kino Einlock, another design that used film with one perforation in the middle of the frameline. The systems given here are only a sampling, with Kattelle listing 16 manufacturers offering products based on the gauge between 1898 and 1930. One 17.5  mm machine and format had a noticeable difference; the Duoscope introduced in 1912 used two perforations at the framelines. In the early days, it may have seemed that the 17.5 mm gauge, cut down from 35 mm stock, had the best chance of achieving ubiquity, but acceptance of a sub-35 mm gauge had to await the offerings of the substantial firms Pathé and Kodak, whose competing formats using safety base, arrived at about the same time in the early 1920s. The art of creating a format was in its youth when the early substandard gauges were offered; there are several design considerations that require attention: decisions have to be made about width, the location and dimensions of perforations, framelines, and guiding edges. The dimensions of the frames determine the image’s aspect ratio. Edwards (1964) and Chandler describe the design methodology they used for the creation of the Super 8 format, which also included attention to the sound track, that was absent from the early efforts; their article serves as a tutorial on the subject of movie film format design. The function of the perforations is indexing, for locating each frame in the same relative position and for transporting film through the camera and projector mechanisms. Attention needs to be given to the

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53  Early Small Formats

Fig. 53.3  The Biokam 17.5 mm format.

Fig. 53.4  Part of an ad for the Biokam combination machine, 1899.

perforations’ strength and durability, given the physical characteristics of the celluloid base and their size, shape, and location. Perforations shouldn’t be any larger than they need to be to do their job since frame area must be optimized to provide the best image. The guiding edges of the film have an important purpose that may escape attention; they are required to function in conjunction with the camera and projector gates to keep the film flat for a sharp image. Did the many designers who created the many early formats consider these factors? It’s remarkable that Edison and Dickson cre-

Fig. 53.5  The Duoscope 17.5 mm format.

ated such a good design, the 35 mm format, since they were the first engineers to do so. There were many other small gauges and format designs, only a few of which are described here. The Lumière Kinora system, based on flipbook viewing rather than projection, was offered between 1896 and 1914. The rights to the system had been purchased in 1893 by the British Mutoscope and Biograph Co., which marketed the product in 1902. The Kinora system was also sold by Urban’s Warwick Trading Company (Anthony 1996). Flipbooks were published for the system, and a camera was available using 1-inch-wide film that was processed and printed on paper and returned to the user for viewing using a handcranked pedestal mounted peepshow device. In 1899 Prestwich offered the Junior, a combination machine that used a 12.7 mm gauge (Tümmel 1973). In 1900  in France, the Mirographe (or Mirograph) system, made by Reulos & Goudeau of Paris, was introduced using 21 mm film, a unique format that did not use perforations but rather the indexing and film advancing functions were accomplished by means of edge notches that were engaged and driven by a spiral gear.1 The Mirographe cost about $50, with the lamphouse $16 (Cushman 1944, p. 407). In 1900 L. Gaumont & Cie., also of Paris, offered a camera-­ projector, the Chrono-de-Poche (Pocket-Chrono), which used 15 mm center perforated film that was advanced intermittently using a beater movement (Kattelle 2000), a choice probably based on Gaumont’s association with Demenÿ. Although the camera was handcranked, it could also be run with an accessory spring motor, possibly the original application of the kind of clockwork mechanism that would one As noted in chapter 12, Dickson asserted that prior to Edson’s trip to Paris in 1889, he (Dickson) had film made from celluloid supplied by Corbett edge notched to be engaged by a gear for intermittent drive. 1 

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nation, a questionable choice for the home, based on safety considerations, given that home movie systems of the time used flammable nitrate stock. Sears offered a catalog of films of popular topics in lengths of from 20 to 30 feet. One of the founders of Sears, Roebuck & Company, Alvah Curtis Roebuck, filed a number of patents for motion picture projectors. Circa 1915 two American combination machines appeared using the 17.5 mm format, the Sinemat and the Autograph. Another American 17.5  mm home movie system, the Movette, was introduced in 1917 by Movette Inc. of Rochester, according to Kattelle, or according to Cushman in 1912, by the Movee Co. of Cleveland, Ohio. Its Eastman nitrate negative camera film had two circular perforations along the side of each frame and was loaded in a metal canFig. 53.6  The Mirograph 21.5 mm format. ister holding 200 feet of film from which a loop extended for threading; this is an early example of a magazine system for day be widely used for amateur motion picture cameras. amateur use. For projection the camera negative was printed None of these machines were imported to the United States, on positive acetate safety stock. Coe writes that this was the to any significant extent, and the American amateur market first home movie system to make an attempt at “simplifying developed independently from that of Europe’s. film-making for the non-expert.” The Movette outfit, consistWhat may be the first American-made small format pro- ing of camera, projector, and tripod, cost $150 and 50-foot jector used 17.5  mm film, the Vitak of 1902, which was loads of film were $5.25; the expensive Movette did not sucbrought to the market by William Wardell as a mail order ceed in the marketplace. In 1918 the Wilart Instrument premium, a give-away when purchased with other products. Company introduced a 17.5  mm system using safety film The merchant offering the premium paid $2 for the Vitak, with a single perforation on one edge of the film, the comwhich was of cheap construction using flammable compo- pact Actograph (Lescarboura 1921). Wilart was the respected nents, a bad combination with nitrate film stock (Cushman maker of the 35 mm Wilart News Camera, nicknamed “the 1944, p.408). Like other projectors of its time, the machine American Pathé.” Efforts to use the 35 mm format for home was handcranked. Between 1904 and 1906, inventor Enoch use continued in 1915 with a camera and projector that used J. Rector offered the 17.5 mm Ikonograph projector, which paper film that never made it to market, made by the Kinak was available in three models at $10, $15, and $25. A camera Motion Picture Company of New York. The Alamo appeared was promised, but it never reached the market. Rector was a at about the same time, which was manufactured by the claimant to the inventorship of the Latham Loop, and as Simplex Photo Products Company of Morris Park, New described elsewhere used his 63  mm Veriscope format to Jersey. It could be purchased with a Zeiss Tessar f/3.5 lens produce a film of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight of 1897 for $58. Other similar cameras and projectors might be men(Ramsaye 1926, 1964). The Ikonograph did not succeed in tioned but 35 mm machines had minor acceptance. the market and its manufacturer went bankrupt. In 1910 Whether for home movies or canned content for distribuCharles E.  Dressler of New  York, introduced the 35  mm tion, for settings like church and school, cellulose nitrate Picturescope projector using a format with two columns of (nitrocellulose) film was ill-suited for the purpose; while it is images with frames running in the opposite direction; the not usually explosive it is inflammable, and once combustion projected film reversed at the end of the reel effectively is started, the material contains enough oxygen that even rewinding itself. with a limited air supply it will continue to burn. To quote Other early American machines include the Project-A-­ Kodak researcher Albert F. Sulzer (1940): “Decomposition Graph’s Duplex, using 11 mm film, which was introduced in liberates comparatively large quantities of carbon dioxide, 1910, using a single center line perforation. Another 11 mm carbon monoxide, and oxides of nitrogen, which under cersystem named Duplex was marketed by Gerald J. Badgley tain conditions are dangerous to life. Some of these liberated and introduced in 1915, which used two round perforations gasses are also inflammable, and under some conditions are at the film’s edges. (It’s possible that these systems have explosive.” Eastman Kodak began work on nonflammable been confused in the literature.) The 1905 Sears, Roebuck celluloid base, cellulose acetate, in 1906 and announced its Catalog has a full-page entry under the heading, Home availability in 1909. Eastman’s corporate aspiration was to Entertainment, for the 17.5  mm Premier Projector, whose halt production of 35 mm nitrate base film, but in 1911 theprice was about $9.00. It used an acetylene lamp for illumi- atrical distributors and exhibitors complained that acetate

53  Early Small Formats

base had less strength, poorer dimensional stability, and scratched more easily than nitrate base. Part of the problem with the material may have been the rough handling of projectors of the era, but acetateac base had to be improved. Thus the use of safety base was curtailed, but George Eastman vowed not to release motion picture products for the home unless they used safety film because cellulose acetate burns slowly, and its combustion can be extinguished using conventional means, unlike cellulose nitrate whose fires are difficult to extinguish. Early safety base film was useable for small formats, possibly because the wear and tear issues were mitigated since the film had less mass and moved more slowly. George Eastman approved the 1923 release of the 16 mm format that used cellulose acetate safely film, a format and system whose creation was overseen by John G. Capstaff of the Kodak Lab, as we shall learn in the next chapter. Edison’s team designed a content distribution system, the Home Projecting Kinetoscope, also known as the Home P. K., which went on sale in 1912. Its format packed a great deal of screen time onto film 22 mm wide with the frames arranged in three columns of 5.7 mm width, with two rows of perforations, one row between columns 1 and 2, and another row between columns 2 and 3. Each foot of film contained 210 frames and 75 feet of film ran for 15 minutes. The size of each frame was 5.08 mm × 3.76 mm, a trifle smaller than the Super 8 frame, but the perforation pitch was the same. The Home P.K. was designed by Adolph F.  Gall, one of Edison’s engineers; it is described in USP 1,204,424, Kinetoscope, granted November 14, 1916. When the handcranked film reached the end of a column, the projector’s intermittent was designed to reverse direction to allow the print to run without interruption, thereby avoiding rewinding. The changeover from column to column was automatic, with the lens, according to the issued patent, designed to jog over to the next column as required. However, the $100 machine, costly for a time when a salary might be $2 per day, did not perform well. There were snags such as misalignment of the lens at column transitions, the lack of a frameline control, a lack of take-up reel that resulted in tangled film, and a fire shutter that failed to move entirely out of the way inadvertently occluding part of the image. According to Cushman (1944, p.  408), Home P.K. prints were made on cellulose nitrate that was treated to reduce the fire hazard. The projector was meant to be used in noncommercial venues such as homes, schools, and churches. Prints were created by optical reduction from 35  mm; they were purchased from a catalog and exchanged at low cost. The Home P.K. did not catch on with the public, leading to an effort reminiscent of Edison’s attempt to extend the life of the Kinetoscope by turning into the Kinetophone. In 1913 the Home P. K. projector was mechanically coupled to a photograph to add sound, but it was not capable of lip synchroniza-

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Fig. 53.7  The Home P.K. format.

tion. The films ran 6 minutes, typically vaudeville acts and scenes from plays, its content described as being of mediocre quality. Some machines were also sold abroad, but by 1914 the market for the Kinetophone P. K. had collapsed. Of the 2476 machines that were built only 500 had been sold by early 1915, and almost all of the 1185 machines shipped to Europe were returned. Edison may have had plans to improve the glitches but gave that up after the major fire of December 9, 1914, in his West Orange campus that destroyed ten buildings, or three-quarters of his physical plant (Kattelle 2000). Musser (1991) reasons that the engineering effort Edison and his staff put into the P. K. diminished their professional product developments and cost them the growing theatrical

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35 mm projector market. Edison’s efforts were eclipsed by other manufacturers who responded to the highly competitive and steadily growing market that required active product development to keep up with changing exhibition practices. In 1912 Pathé Frères announced a new system meant primarily for content distribution, based on a format that used 28 mm wide safety film, the Pathé Kok, a reference to Pathé’s cock-a-doodle-­doo rooster logo, with prints optically reduced from 35 mm. Cushman (1944, p. 407) credits Pathé as the first manufacturer to offer cellulose acetate safety film for small gauges. The company redesigned a 35  mm handcranked Pathéscope projector to work with the 28 mm gauge. Compared with other substandard formats, it has a relatively large 19 mm × 14 mm frame. (The Edison-Dickson 35 mm frame is 24.89 mm × 18.67 mm.) The new format used three perforations per frame on one side of the film and one perforation on the other located at the frameline, an arrangement designed to prevent mirror image projection. The Pathéscope projector kit included a screen and cost $75. Cushman gives a higher price, $150 for the projector and $200 for the camera, but these may have been different models. Since electrification was incomplete in its intended market, France, its electric lamp needed a power source, which could be provided by a battery or a generator that was turned by the same handcrank that advanced the film. The projector was capable of filling a 3-foot-wide screen with a decently bright image using its incandescent lamp, and its relatively large frame provided a good quality image. Ten thousand Pathéscope projectors were sold by 1918, with an estimated 25,000,000 feet of prints having been manufactured by that time. A handcranked camera for the format was also offered constructed of leather covered wood, which had an f/4.5 45 mm lens and used coaxial 400 foot capacity metal magazines. While the camera seems to not to have reached American shores in significant numbers, a projector was offered by distributor Willard B.  Cook, in 1913 (Kattelle, 2000). When the 28 mm gauge was adopted by Victor in the United States for its Animatograph projector, it used a format variation with three round perforations on both sides of the

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frame.2 The First World War brought a halt to the 28  mm format, first in Europe and then in the United State. Nevertheless a standard for the format proposed by Victor (1918) was adopted in 1918 by the SMPE. On November 24, 1922, having profited from the lessons learned from their 28 mm effort, Pathé launched its Pathé-­ Baby handcranked home projector in Europe based on a new 9.5 mm safety film format. The projector used a small cylindrical magazine loaded with prints up to 28 feet in length that were reduction printed from 35  mm, and a catalog listed many titles for rental or sale. The projector was 275 francs and prints were 5 or 6 francs.3 Film was automatically threaded from the magazine, and at the completion of a showing it was automatically rewound back into it. The 9.5  mm format had a single center of the frameline slotshaped rectangular perforation, like that of some 17.5  mm formats, to maximize frame area. 9.5 mm prints were edgenotched to key the projector to freeze-frame intertitles for a few seconds, thereby conserving film and extending the running time of the print. The popularity of the projector led to Pathé’s introduction of the Baby-Pathé spring-wound camera with a wireframe sports finder on April 1, 1923. Pathé also offered a processing service for the film, which before the Second World War was only available as orthochromatic reversal stock but after the war panchromatic reversal became standard. Crisp (1997) writes that the system became “enormously popular” in Europe and was sold in the United States under the Pathex brand. Despite the fact that the format design was efficient, with a frame size only a bit smaller than that of the 16 mm frame and film about half the cost, it failed to gain a foothold in America undoubtedly due to Kodak’s major effort to establish its new 16 mm system in 1923. The 9.5 mm format became a vehicle for the introduction of interesting technology such as the 1932 PaillardBolex Talkie convertible 9.5  mm/16  mm projector, which was demonstrated to the Royal Photographic Society; it used a synchronized turntable arrangement, but by then the concept of sound-on-disk was obsolete, at least for the theatrical cinema. In 1934 a British manufacturer offered 9.5 mm hardware in the form of combination camera-projectors, the Midas that used a novel concept: electric motor drive powered by dry cells housed in a removable container. In 1935 Eumig of Austria sold a 9.5  mm format camera with a built in photocell as part of a matched-needle exposure control system, a first of its kind in which, while film-

Robert W. Paul used Animatograph for his 35 mm “living photos” of 1896; Animato-Graph was used by Victor for his still-born spiral disc format of 1910. 3  It’s difficult to provide a dollar equivalent since “by the mid-1920s the franc had slipped from its prewar value of twenty cents against the dollar to a dangerous low of about two cents.”(WS: Anderson, 2008) 2 

Fig. 53.8  The Pathé 28 mm format.

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Fig. 53.9  The 9.5 format was efficient, with a frame about only 1 mm less than both of 16 mm’s height and width dimensions. (Dimensions in mm)

ing, the user was guided to the proper aperture adjustment. At the close of 1937, Pathé introduced its Pathéscope Vox optical sound-on-film projector using a variation of the 9.5  mm format with a track along one edge of the print, which necessitated a reduction in frame size. Also in 1937, Dufaycolor (see the chapter Additive Color after Kinemacolor) was offered for the 9.5 mm format, but it was inferior to 16  mm Kodachrome that preceded it by two years. By the end of the Second World War, the 9.5  mm format was in decline, with customers dependent on used equipment, but in the early 1950s, Kodachrome as well as reversal color film made by the Italian company Ferrania were packaged for it. In 1955 Pathé gamely offered its Duplex format, a 9.5 mm variant with two adjacent frameline perforations, which like double 8 mm was run through the camera twice to be slit in two after processing and returned to the user as 4.75-mm-wide film (Coe, 1981). A French filmmaking handbook for the amateur, published in 1960, Le Cinéma D’Amateur Pas a Pas, has scarcely a reference to or any advertisement for the format, which serves to confirm that it had lost its popularity by that time (Boyer 1960). The introduction of Eastman Kodak’s Super 8 in 1965 ought to have been its coup de grâce, but 9.5 mm had achieved a cult status and lingered on. Another almost forgotten, but noteworthy group of products for home or small venue viewing, based on the distribution of prints, did not use a conventional ribbon of perforated film. Rather these formats were designed with small frames adjacent to each other printed on a rectangular

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or circular substrate, similar in concept to Edison and Dickson’s initial experiments using a cylinder with a spiral array of frames. It’s interesting to speculate how the motion picture medium might have developed had they begun their experiments using the more suitable disk rather than the cylindrical phonograph record as a model for their experiments. Hopwood (1899, p.  152) gives only a few details concerning Anthony’s Spiral Lantern that used an 8-inch diameter plate holding 200 frames in a spiral format. More is known about Kinetographic camera-apparatus for Taking, Enlarging, and Projecting Successive Pictures of Moving Objects, USP 594,094, which was granted on November 23, 1897, to Nikolay Nelson of Waukegan, Illinois, describing a design for a glass plate formatted with tiny frames that advanced intermittently in front of a fixed lens for viewing. In England the Kammatograph of 1900, patented in 1898 and invented by German-born Leo U. Kamm, was a similar concept that used a 1-foot-diameter glass disk, resembling a gramophone record, which held 600 images arrayed in a spiral. The disk was handcranked, moved intermittently and was projected using a magic lantern lamphouse, and a mechanism with a two-bladed interrupting shutter. One of the first Kammatographs sold was to color cinematography experimenter William Norman Lascelles Davidson who, with his neighbor Benjamin Jumeaux, used the Kammatograph to establish that they could obtain a satisfactory two-color moving image. Their experiments may have influenced the development of Kinemacolor. Joe Kember of the University of Exeter makes the observation that the glass plate format avoided the fire hazard of nitrate film stock (WS: University of Exeter News). Another glass disk system was sold in Vienna from1902 to 1903, the Vita Home Cinématographe, but it made little impact (Coe 1981). In American in 1910, Alexander Ferdinand Victor’s company announced the Animato-Graph system for content distribution using a metal disk in which 35  mm frames were mounted in a spiral. The projector offered intermittent drive and shutter occlusion both during advancement and projection to mitigate flicker; it ran at less than the nominal 16  fps rate of the day. Kattelle (2000) reports that the image was rather dim and that the frames buckled in projection, producing an out of focus image. The system was never offered in the marketplace, but it was the basis for the later Stereotrope projector designed for specially formatted 30-frame cartoons that were sold in December 1910. The May 25 1912 issue of Scientific American describes another plate format, giving the name of the inventor as M. Georges Bittini and his nationality as French, but Kattelle gives his nationality as Italian and his name as Sig. Gianni Bettini. His cinema a plaque (literally, plate cinema) used a rectangular glass plate measuring 13 in x 21 in, containing 576 tiny pic-

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tures which, as reported in Scientific American, provided 1 minute of projection, which works out to almost 10 fps. The plate remained fixed but used a scanning optical system that presumably halted for each exposure; the system’s camera also served as a projector. In 1912 the Société des Cinéma-Plaques offered a glass plate movie camera based on a rectangle that was formatted with 12 rows of seven frames 7 mm × 8 mm. The camera, which was also a projector, had an internal supply of 18 such plates for exposures in sequence. Another format of this kind was demonstrated to the Royal Photographic Society on January 20, 1914, the Oko (Polish for eye), which used rectangular celluloid film 12 cm wide, perforated on both edges with rows of 15 frames 7  mm  ×  5  mm. The Oko had a playing time of twenty minutes for a length of 3 feet of film. It went into limited production in Poland in 1923 and only 100  units were built. The system was designed by Kasimir Proszynski, the inventor of the 35  mm Aeroscope newsreel camera, possibly the only camera that ran on compressed air (Herbert 1996). It’s possible that Urban’s Warwick Trading Company had some interest in the Oko having worked with Proszynski on a synchronized sound system. The major, but unsuccessful, attempt to establish a disk content distribution system was the Spirograph, based on the concept of British journalist and inventor Theodore Brown (1870–1938), who must have been aware of the Kammatograph, introduced in 1900. Brown’s Magic Bioscope, which he developed between 1904 and 1905, proposed the use of a peepshow-style viewer as a display, which was never manufactured or offered for sale. The image storage medium was a glass disk with 140 small frames arrayed in a ring. Brown photographed what he called Magic Bioscope moving images of himself working in his lab on December 4, 1905. Improvements in Kinematograph Pictures, BP 14,493, which was granted to Theodore Brown and Bessie Kate Brown on April 23, 1908, describes “a process for obtaining photographic images of a reduced magnitude from ordinary kinetograph film pictures.” Charles Urban acquired the Browns’ patent in 1908, trademarking its Spirograph brand the following year. Urban’s chief engineer, Henry William Joy, probably distracted by Urban’s Kinemacolor efforts (see the chapter The Rise and Fall of Kinemacolor), attempted to turn the Spirograph into a manufacturable product, but the development process was described as a “nightmare” that occupied Joy for a decade, as recounted in Huhtamo’s (2013b) definitive study of the Spirograph’s history. Seeking a larger market Urban moved his operation from Britain to the United States where the Spirograph was announced in 1923. Manufacturing was begun by Urban Motion Picture Industries, Inc., of Irvington-on-Hudson, about 50 miles north of New York City, in a building that

53  Early Small Formats

Fig. 53.10  The Spirograph peepshow viewer in use (1923).

Urban purchased and refurbished at a cost in excess of $1.5 million. Each celluloid disk held a spiral array of frames, shot on 35 mm camera negatives, optically reduction printed to produce masters for contact printing. The disks, which resembled gramophone records, were printed on Eastman safety film, some of which were 8 inches and others 10½ inches in diameter, the latter with 1200 7/32  in  ×  5/32  in frames. Perforations were located for each column of images adjacent to the disk’s circumference; the wedge-shaped framelines were widest at the circumference narrowing toward the center of the disk. Urban called these disks records, claiming that they were the equivalent of 75 feet of 35 mm film with a running time of between a minute and minute and a half. Following Urban’s inclination the titles were of an educational nature, to be sold as part of the Living Book of Knowledge series. These were announced and produced, at least in preproduction quantities, with the disks meant to have a list price of a dollar each. The Spirograph used a peepshow-style optical system, and there was a projection option; illumination was supplied by a low voltage lamp. Production problems were not solved, and the viewing device did not work dependably, with the result that the company went out of business in 1924. Only a limited number of the handcranked Spirograph viewers were made. Huhtamo’s (2013b) article is illustrated with a photo of a motor driven unit.

53  Early Small Formats

Running against the 16 mm tide (16 mm was introduced in 1923, as described in the next chapter) the 1920s saw the introduction of several amateur 35 mm cameras and projectors that made little headway in the marketplace, like the Debrie Sept, the Ica Kinamo, the Campro, and the Bol Cinegraph, named after one of its designers, Jacques Bogopolsky, who was responsible for the versatile 16  mm Bolex. On February 10, 1926, Pathé demonstrated a version of the 17.5  mm gauge for the Societé Française de Photographie, called the Pathé Rural, which was earmarked for small cinemas. For the most part, it was adopted only in Europe where it “briefly became France’s ‘standard for pedagogical screenings’ and nontheatrical presentations in remote

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areas” (Orgeron 2012). The ­system was officially launched almost 2 years later on November 15, 1927. The projectors were portable and of robust construction. Prints were optically reduced from 35  mm and printed in two columns on 35 mm safety film that was slit in half after processing. Two square perforations straddled each frameline; the format’s 13.5 mm × 9.5 mm frame was about 60% greater than that of the 16  mm frame, permitting projection in small auditoria. Despite founder Charles Pathé’s vigorous evangelizing on behalf of the format, and the addition of sound in 1933, whatever advantages it may have had were swept away by Kodak’s formidable 16  mm development effort and infrastructure (WS: pathefilm.uk), as described in the next chapter.

54

16 mm

In 1914 Frederick W. Barnes, manager of Kodak’s Hawkeye works where Brownie and other snapshot cameras were manufactured, caught the attention of C. E. Kenneth Mees, head of the Kodak Research and Development Laboratory, when he showed him the camera he had designed that used 35 mm film to produce a double 17.5 mm format. The film was run through the camera to expose one column of frames a quarter of the size of a 35 mm frame in a first pass; it was then reloaded and a second column of quarter-­size frames was exposed (Matthews 1955). After processing the film was slit down the middle to produce two lengths of 17.5 mm film, making this approach, as Barnes saw it, a candidate for home movie making, not unlike the other 17.5 mm formats noted in the last chapter. In 1912 Mees had hired his former colleague John George Capstaff (1879–1960), as the head of the Photographic Division of the Kodak Research Laboratories. Capstaff had been in charge of manufacturing filters at the British firm Wratten & Wainwright, which Eastman had acquired. Mees told Capstaff about what Barnes had done and Capstaff began experimenting with Barnes’ camera to work on what became the 16 mm system. Capstaff recognized that the results gotten with the substandard 17.5 mm format frame was an important clue to the direction that might be taken for the creation of a home movie system. He also realized that a system that would be attractive to amateurs, and therefore commercially viable, would require reversal processing, returning a positive camera original to the user, rather than having to go through the bother and expense of making a print from the camera negative. In 1914 the meticulous Capstaff began work on improving the reversal process, as part of a home movie system, based on the method that had been described in 1900 by the Italian photographic chemist Rudolfo Namias (Wall 1925). Reversal processing reduced costs and would be a boon for amateur filmmakers, but problems had to be addressed. After exposure the emulsion’s silver halide becomes disposed to reduction to silver metal by chemical development using organic compounds called developers. During reversal processing, the negative silver metal image must be bleached

out of the emulsion with the remaining unexposed silver halide treated to become the positive or reversed image. The unexposed silver halide is re-exposed and then developed turning it into a positive image of silver metal, after which the film is fixed and washed as usual. Capstaff and his colleagues noted that, as a beneficial attribute, the reversal image had finer grain than that of a negative-positive print, but, on the downside, there was no opportunity to make corrections using printing to a shot that had been incorrectly exposed. Capstaff figured out how to make the reversal process produce consistently good results over a wide range of exposures by adjusting the re-exposure step to take into account the user’s exposures. He also designed an emulsion that was optimized for reversal, but his work was interrupted by the First World War. Controlling the reversal exposure “was the development that determined the success of the 16 mm program of amateur motion pictures,” according to Kodak researchers Glenn E.  Matthews (1955) and Raife G. Tarkington. Harris Benjamin Tuttle, Sr. (1902–1988) (1966), Capstaff’s assistant, recounted his experiences working with “Cappy” on the 16 mm program, which took place between 1919 and 1925, in an article that was published in 1966. Capstaff and Tuttle were aware of the potential applications of the new format, home movies, education, medicine, and industrial films. One of Tuttle’s first jobs was to plot sensitometric curves of reversal film to better understand its characteristics, in order to learn how to produce good images from less than perfectly exposed shots. Capstaff and Tuttle designed processing machines using 17.5 mm film to stand in for the new format as it was being designed. The work was challenging for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the processing machine materials had to withstand the acid bleach required for reversal processing. Tuttle and Cappy worked with the Barnes camera until they received a working model of what would become the 16  mm CinéKodak from the Hawkeye Plant on May 20, 1920. Capstaff intended the 16 mm format to use slow-burning safety base acetate film in accordance with the mandate from

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_54

473

474

Fig. 54.1  John George (Cappy) Capstaff

Fig. 54.2  The 16  mm camera aperture. The aspect ratio is 1.37:1 matching that of the Academy frame established for optical sound. The projection aperture is cropped for an aspect ratio of 1.34:1.

George Eastman. A consideration in choosing the 16  mm width was that it could not be economically cut from flammable 35 mm nitrate stock. Capstaff designed a format with a frame size (camera aperture) that is 10.26 mm × 7.49 mm, with about 3 mm allocated for locating the perforations on either side of the frame. The new format had two perforations per frame, one located at each of the edges of the film bisected by the framelines. The frame conformed to the 35  mm aspect ratio to allow for reduction printing. Tests demonstrated that the image had good quality when pro-

54 16 mm

jected on a 9-foot wide screen, large enough for amateur and even audio-visual requirements. Kodak’s resources were used to design a complete system infrastructure to include cameras, projectors, lenses, accessories, film stock, means for making prints from reversal film, and establishing processing stations at different locations. The Ciné-Kodak’s appearance was the work of the French designer Julian Tessier and is substantially the same as that described in his USP 1,572,252, Motion Picture Apparatus, granted on February 9, 1926, for a tripod mounted handcranked camera. Like other silent era cameras, the Ciné-Kodak was designed to run at the 16 fps rate when hand cranked two turns per second. The original Ciné-Kodak Model A camera weighed 8 pounds loaded with film and accepted hundred foot spools. The die-­cast aluminum camera had rear controls for focusing and aperture setting for the built-in Kodak Anistigmat 25 mm f/3.5 lens. The film was fed by a single sprocket employing what Kodak described as a Lumière cam operating a claw to intermittently advance the film. The camera had a parallax compensating optical viewfinder whose vertical viewing angle was linked to the focus setting. Kodak sales and department heads took turns borrowing the prototype camera on Saturday mornings for weekend testing. One sales executive had undercranked his four rolls producing both fast motion and overexposures, a mistake that set in motion a design effort to create a battery powered motor drive accessary for the camera to insure proper running speed, and work was already underway for the spring powered Ciné-Kodak Model B. Real-world use of the camera and its reversal film uncovered problems such as lab processing errors due to too much chlorine in the Rochester summer water supply that ruined the bleach process, or reticulation of the reversal emulsion due to high environmental humidity; this was discovered after Mees returned with the film he shot on a trip to Jamaica. In the spring of 1921, at the urging of George Eastman, Tuttle and Capstaff shot a number of films, one of them of a child’s birthday party. They projected their movies for Eastman and Mees; Eastman was especially delighted by the party footage and approved the creation of the 16  mm product line on the spot with the exclamation: “Full steam ahead!” (Kattelle 2000). On January 8, 1923, Mees introduced the 16 mm system at East High School in Rochester New York, a practice run for the more formal introduction. Tuttle filmed the guests as they arrived, and the film was processed during Mees’ lecture, which was projected at its conclusion. This routine was repeated on January 23, 1923, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Film was developed in a continuous processing machine that used a long glass tube in which the negative could be observed so that the reversal exposure could be adjusted (Matthews 1955). By observing the density of the orthochromatic negative using a red safe-light, on its journey though the processing machine, Tuttle and an assistant were

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475

Fig. 54.3  Tessier’s design for the 16 mm Ciné-Kodak camera from his USP.

Fig. 54.4  The Ciné-Kodak Model A, the first Kodak 16 mm camera. Compare it with Tessier’s design in the above drawing. (Cinémathèque Française)

able to adjust the brightness of the reversal exposure to optimize the appearance of the positive image. This procedure was based only on the appearance of the negative of the first shot on the reel but it would be improved with the ability to

make automatic s­hot-by-­shot. Tuttle (1966) photographed 16  mm test sequences of Gloria Swanson, in a studio on Long Island, during the filming of The Hummingbird, released in 1924. Tuttle’s 16  mm camera original reversal footage was projected side by side with a 35 mm film print with which it compared favorably. Mees designed a continuous tank processing machine that used a photocell to measure a beam of red light passing through the developed orthochromatic negative to measure its image density. This measurement was used to adjust a diaphragm in front of the reversal re-exposure lamp to control its intensity to optimize the density of the positive image. Tuttle worked on a method to make reduction prints from 35 mm in anticipation of what would become the extensive Kodascope Library; he built an optical printer using a Williamson 35  mm contact printer and an experimental 16  mm projector. Kodak helped local football coaches to record the plays of their games to analyze team and player performance, an application of 16 mm that one day would became part of the coaching programs of teams in the National Football League. The robust die cast handcranked 100-foot spool loaded Ciné-Kodak 16  mm camera and the electric motor driven rheostat controlled Kodascope projector were introduced as a kit in 1923 for $335, including splicer, tripod, and roll-up screen of relatively high gain, altogether costing $66 more than that year’s Model T Roadster, Ford’s basic car (WS: auto.howstuffworks). The Kodascope Model A 16  mm

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Fig. 54.5  A Kodascope Model A 16 mm projector.

Fig. 54.6  A Bell & Howell 70DR, with a three-lens turret and small finder lens turret.

p­ rojector was fitted with a 2-inch focal length lens and used a three-bladed shutter to produce a flicker reducing 48 interruptions per second when operating at the standard 16 fps. The light source was a 14 volt 56 watt lamp that, together with the lamphouse optics and projector lens, filled the 4.5-foot-wide screen with an adequately bright image. A special lamphouse was also available for larger screens. The

54 16 mm

first 16 mm reversal film, available in 50 and 100 foot loads, was orthochromatic stock with black paper head and tail leaders to prevent film fogging. An accessary camera motor could be purchased, made by the Mastercraft Corporation, but the batteries for driving it, made by Willard, were trouble prone, and the product was discontinued in only months; the following year a new electric motor was introduced. After the first run of 200 Ciné-Kodak cameras, it was modified with a swing away behind the lens mirror for reflex viewing prior to exposure, as an addition to the optical finder. In 1923 Bell & Howell introduced the Filmo 70 camera that had been prototyped for 17.5  mm and redesigned for 16 mm. It accepted 100 foot loads and was the first spring driven 16 mm camera, which ran 37 seconds at 24 fps on a wind. The Filmo was soon upgraded with a three-lens turret; a smaller turret geared to the lens turret held the viewfinder lenses. The Filmo, which combined precision and robustness, was built in relatively low numbers; a total of 12,000 were made during its production lifetime (Kattelle 2000).1 Kodak eventually sold camera models ranging from the inexpensive to a feature loaded professional instrument. These offerings were a necessity since 16 mm film couldn’t be sold unless there were cameras for it, and they can be viewed as providing other manufacturers with reference models to demonstrate the format’s possibilities. The custom ordered Kodak Ciné-Special was introduced in 1933 with a two-lens turret, a line of respected Ektar lenses, a spring drive that ran 40 feet of film, and 100 and 200 foot magazines with built-in movements and gates to allow rapid loading. The upgraded Ciné-Special II, introduced in 1948, had a two-lens diverging turret permitting wide angle and long lenses; with an f/1.9 25 mm Ektar, it was priced at $893 (Kattelle 2000). Its best-­ known use may have been the nature or wildlife films produced by Disney for television broadcast and for 35 mm for theatrical release, in the early 1950s. 16  mm film libraries expanded and the rental of reduction printed Hollywood films became commonplace. Eastman Kodak aggressively marketed 16 mm with the result that 5 years after its introduction millions of feet of film were shot weekly by more than 125,000 amateur cameras. By that time, in addition to Kodak and Bell & Howell, DeVry and Victor were manufacturing 16 mm equipment in America. In 1928 Kodak introduced its first attempt at a color reversal film for 16 mm, the additive color Kodacolor, which used lenticular micromosaic technology it licensed from ­Keller-­Dorian, as described in chapter 45. The product had limited success and its release, whatever the technology’s drawbacks, was evidence of Kodak’s belief in the necessity The scaled-up Filmo, the 35  mm Eyemo, became a mainstay of the Hollywood film industry when a compact camera was required, especially if it was going to be in harm’s way. It was widely used for shooting newsreels and by combat photographers during the Second World War.

1 

54 16 mm

of color for the amateur moviemaking market. In 1929 five new 16 mm Kodak processing plants were added for a total of 52 worldwide. 16  mm dominated amateur filmmaking eclipsing 9.5 mm, 17.5 mm, and 28 mm usage and began to make inroads into areas in which 35 mm had prevailed such as audiovisual and military applications. Seven years later Kodak would cement its relationship with home movie makers with the introduction of Kodachrome, the world’s first integral tripack (monopack) subtractive color film, as described in the next chapter. What may have been the first 16  mm optical-sound-on-­ film projector was introduced by British Thompson-Houston, a subsidiary of General Electric, in 1931. This 16 mm optical sound format was similar to that used for 35  mm optical sound placing the track between the edge of the reduced in

Fig. 54.7  The Kodak Ciné Special II, introduced in 1948, is pictured with its diverging two-lens turret and 200-foot magazine. Fig. 54.8  A screen shot of lenticular Kodacolor from a film made at George Eastman’s garden party introducing the process. Pictured are Eastman, left, and Edison, right, one sunny afternoon in Rochester, New York, long ago on July 30, 1928.

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width frames and the perforations, an approach that did not become a standard. A better idea emerged at the beginning of 1932 when the RCA Victor Company, which marketed Westinghouse Electric and Mfg. Company and General Electric sound products. RCA, introduced a projector that used the format that became the standard for 16 mm optical sound-on-film; it eliminated one of the columns of perforations and used that area for the track. Westinghouse and GE engineers took a deep dive into optics, electronics, and sensitometry, basing their effort to create decent 16 mm sound on their variable width recording method, as described in an article by their highly regarded inventor, Edward W. Kellogg (1883–1960) (1935). The team decided that a single row of perforations would suffice since 16 mm cameras and projectors used intermittent shuttle advance that engaged only one row of perforations. At the 24 fps sound speed 16 mm film runs slower (36 ft per minute) than 35 mm film (90 ft per minute), theoretically limiting its high-frequency response. The 35  mm optical track is .07in wide, while the 16 mm is .06 in wide, so the loss of illumination and sound level is not as much of a concern as the reduction in running rate. Optical sound-on-film projectors by other manufacturers followed from Agfa, Bell & Howell, British Gaumont, Siemens, and Westinghouse (Coe 1981). The RCA Autophone, a 16 mm optical sound-­ on-­film camera, with an attractive appearance design, was available in 1935. It had a built-in microphone at the rear of its body enabling the cameraperson to record commentary on a variable area track. Beginning in 1951 magnetic sound striping was added to the area that had been devoted to optical track so projectors could now record as well as reproduce sound that was better than that of optical track. Of even greater concern than adding sound to home moviemaker was the ability to properly expose Kodachrome, a film that had very little exposure latitude. In the winter of 1957, Bell &

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Howell introduced what was billed as an “electric-eye” 16 mm camera, the 240EE that accepted 100 foot loads, and had a built in 20  mm f/1.9 lens that accepted focal length convertors; but most importantly, it featured a photoelectric cell, apparently a large selenium cell behind a lenticular array, which was part of a circuit that controlled the lens aperture to automatically set exposures. The camera used a clockwork motor that could run 32 feet of film on a wind. According to the November 1957 International Projectionist, the previous year B&H had introduced a magazine loading 16 mm camera with the same automatic exposure feature. During the Second World War 16  mm manufacture was redirected to provide training and entertainment hardware and film for the troops, and as a means to record combat. 16 mm sound-on-film became accepted for the distribution of prints for training and entertainment for the armed services. Projectors were made for the armed forces but were in such short supply that civilians were encouraged to turn in their machines to help the war effort. In 1942 the newly created Army Pictorial Service, a branch of the Army’s Signal Corps, took over the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, and produced 35 mm and 16 mm films. This provided the foundation for a flourishing professional 16  mm industry that continued for decades, motivating product developments for cameras and projectors as well as advancements in film stock, printmaking, and post-production. 16  mm labs, in addition to processing film, offered post-­production services like negative conforming and sound mixing in many big cities in the United States and other countries. 16 mm projectors for the classrooms and the office proliferated as part of the thriving audio-visual industry, with machines from RCA, Kodak, Bell & Howell, and others,

54 16 mm

often based on wartime designs; projectors with arc lamphouses were made for auditoria and their large screens.2 In America, by the 1960s, a full range of post-production hardware, including flatbed editing machines and editing rooms, for rental became available. Professional versions of Kodachrome designed for making prints were supplanted by Ektachrome Commercial. In 1972 the new tungsten balanced 100 E.I. (exposure index) Eastman Color, with greatly improved sharpness, reduced graininess, and shorter processing time, proved to be well suited to 16 mm (Ryan 1977). The advent of television syndication, and the need to rebroadcast in another time zone, led to a substantial extension of 16 mm, first for black and white and then for color film, as described in chapter 78. News film could be shot on negative film and turned into a positive image with the flip of a switch for broadcast. The requirements of color TV led to new materials such as the widely used 160 ISO Ektachrome that was better suited for TV newsgathering than negative film since its positive image facilitated editing. Ektachrome could be readily processed by local TV stations, an activity that disappeared with the coming of portable video camcorders. In the United States, the sound-on-film camera market was dominated by Auricon, which was founded by John Mauer, with its CineVoice camera that was designed by Eric Berndt. The CineVoice was followed by other Auricon single-­system models, the Pro-600, the Super 1200, and then the Special versions of the latter two. These cameras were offered during a span of four decades beginning in the early 1940s. They were capable of recording either optical or magnetic sound-on-film, the latter preferable for TV news coverage. The absence of reflex viewing for these quiet running cameras was felt due to the acceptance of the zoom lens, thus creating an opportunity for modifications by organizations run by Gordon Yoder, Jim Frezzolini, Dick DiBona, and Ed DiGiulio (1927–2004), a former Mitchell engineer and Vice President, who founded Cinema Products. Auricon produced the much lighter and improved Pro-600 Special with a 400-foot 15-minute magazine load and the Super-1200 that accepted a 33-minute load. DiGiulio’s (1976) crystal controlled motor Cinema Products CP-16 was introduced in 1974, initially using Auricon movements. Designed by John Jurgens and Bob Auguste, this lighter reflex camera displaced the Auricon as the industry standard by the mid1970s. TV stations in American, numbering over a thousand, were a healthy market for sound-on-­film cameras for local, national, and international newsgathering. 16 mm newsgathering became an important instrument in the functioning of the American democracy by depicting the Vietnam War, with

My enduring memory of 16 mm projection comes from sitting only a few feet from a clattering machine in a summer camp recreation hall on a rainy day in the Catskill Mountains. Perhaps it was a war-surplus machine that had once intrepidly projected Betty Grable movies to marines on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific. 2 

Fig. 54.9  The area used for one of the columns of 16 mm’s perforations was repurposed for an optical sound track by RCA. Pictured here is a dual-bilateral variable width track.

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Fig. 54.10  An Auricon 16 mm Pro-600 single-system camera ready to shoot the news for Channel 22, shown equipped with a zoom lens with a built-in through-the lens-finder.

Fig. 54.11  The Bolex H16 Rex, a reflex camera using a prism beamsplitter.

daily broadcasts contributing to the public’s growing disappointment and eventual rejection of the war effort. 16 mm fostered independent filmmaking, a term that has come to designate relatively low-budget feature films produced by filmmakers with theatrical distribution aspirations, but the term was once applied to (usually) 16 mm film artists who did not have Hollywood ambitions and were part of an underground or avant-garde film movement that had been influenced by Maya Deren, who began making her dreamlike films in the mid-1940s, and Stan Brakhage who began making his hand painted films in the late 1950s. Brakhage was a major exception to the bicoastal geographic distribution of the American underground by living with his family in the Colorado Rockies. The eclectic movement encompassed stylistically diverse filmmakers like Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, James Whitney, George and Mike Kuchar, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Larry Jordan, Bob Nelson, James Broughton, and Andy Warhol. One of the first, if not the first, 16 mm avant-garde filmmakers, almost entirely unsung, was Kodak researcher Loyd A. Jones, who made nonrepresentational abstract films with 16 mm, soon after its introduction. The work of these filmmakers was self-­funded or financed with grants and could not have been made without affordable 16  mm, in accordance with the maxim of Jean Cocteau who wrote: “Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive as pen and paper” (WS: nytimes.com/2008/08/24/ magazine). 16 mm cameras designed for the serious user fell into two categories: those for advanced amateurs and those for independent, documentary, or industrial filmmakers. The most afford-

able advanced hardware was manufactured by companies like Bell & Howell, Bolex, and Beaulieu. Another category of cameras that was more expensive was aimed at corporate users or well-heeled independents by companies like Arnold & Richter, Éclair, and Cinema Products. Both Beaulieu and Bolex offered high-end cameras, which were withdrawn soon after their introductions, and 16 mm versions of 35 mm studio cameras were made by Panavision and Mitchell. High-quality optics were available such as Kodak Ektars made in the United States, Angénieux lenses (especially zoom lenses) made in France, Paillard lenses made in Switzerland, and Zeiss lenses made in Germany. 16 mm also allowed for the creation of a new cinema style that was more commercially acceptable than that of the underground, the cinema vérité documentary as practiced by the filmmaking collaborators Albert and David Maysles and Richard Leacock and D.  A. (Donn Alan) Pennebaker. These documentarians designed and cobbled together their own double-system synchronized sound hardware. Two approaches were used: one employed a cable for transmitting a synchronization signal from the camera to the sound recorder and the other dispensed with the cable and used crystal oscillators in both camera and recorder, the camera oscillator controlling its speed and the recorder’s laying down a reference signal to enable resolving magnetic tape to perforated 16 mm magnetic film for editing. The compact high-quality Swiss Nagra quarter-inch reel-to-reel recorders became a widely used instrument for both vérité and feature films replacing bulky sound-on-film magnetic recorders. Beginning with its introduction in 1952 the German-made Arri 16ST, designed by Erich Kästner of Arnold & Richter, was a key enabler of professional 16 mm filmmaking. Its outstand-

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ing feature is its rotating mirror reflex through-­the-­lens viewfinder. The lightweight pin registered 16ST accepted a 100-foot internal load and external magazines (Raimondo-Souto 2007); DiGiulio (1976) estimates that by the mid-1970s, 20,000 16S’s had been sold. This is probably the first professional motion picture camera that allowed the cinematographer to view directly through the taking lens while it was running (aside from early cameras that permitted direct viewing of the emulsion) to compose and to focus. Because the mirror was part of the shutter assembly, rotating in front of and out of the way of every exposed frame, the image through the finder flickered. 1963 saw the introduction of the Éclair reflex NPR quiet running camera,

Fig. 54.12  The Arri 16ST used a rotating mirror reflex finder. (Arri AG)

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the first serious competitor of the Arri 16S. The French-made NPR, designed under the direction of chief engineer André Coutant, was the camera that the vérité documentarians had been dreaming about, elevating the 16 mm medium to a new level of capability. Like the new 35 mm studio cameras, it used a crystal controlled motor that was accurate to ±15 parts per million over a wide temperature range. This technology permitted the elimination of a physical connection between camera and a properly equipped recorder for the synchronization of image and sound. The twin-lens turret light-weight NPR used a reflex optical system designed by Angénieux. It could be rapidly daylight loaded using 400 foot cassettes. Arriflex, in 1965, introduced a blimped version of their 16 M, the Arri 16BL, which could be user modified to operate as single-system sound machine. In 1970 Éclair ­introduced the ACL quiet running camera, designed by JeanPierre Beauviala, which was frequently used together with the Swiss-made Nagra SN recorder. The light weight (11 pounds less lens) ACL accepted a 400-foot coaxial cassette. Two years later, Arriflex responded by showing the quiet running Arri 16SR with a number of advanced features such as a bright fiber optics viewing screen for the reflex finder that, when equipped with the Zeiss 10-100 mm Vario Sonnar, offered automatic e­ xposure control. The 12.5 pound camera (less lens and film) began to ship in 1974 (Raimondo-Souto 2007). 16 mm was used for episodic TV, at one time by the BBC especially for exteriors, and it has been and is used for

Fig. 54.13  The optical system of the Arri 16ST’s reflex finder. The rotating mirror-shutter is highlighted. (Arri AG)

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Fig. 54.14  The Super 16 frame.

s­ hooting feature films that are optically blown up to 35 mm, perhaps most famously by director John Cassevetes for his

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film Faces (1968). Today such productions are scanned and turned into digital files to be post-produced using the DI (digital intermediate) process and then turned into DCP (digital cinema package) files for theatrical distribution, as was the case for Beasts of the Southern Wild, released in 2012, which was shot in Super 16. The image quality of 35 mm or DCP prints is enhanced by directly scanning 16 mm camera film because it avoids the losses that occur in an optical blowup. The Super 16 format variation, designed by Rune Ericson of Sweden, provides an increase frame area with a 1.7:1 aspect ratio requiring only minor cropping to achieve the 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio for theatrical distribution. Super 16 requires camera film perforated on one edge only and extends the frame into the image area usually reserved for the row of perforation or the sound track.

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Kodachrome

In 1935 Kodak announced they would begin offering sharp fine-grain 16  mm, Kodachrome subtractive reversal color film, which was not any more difficult to use than ordinary black and white. This was the fulfillment of a nearly centurylong quest, or as its inventors Mannes and Godowsky (1935) put it: “The Kodachrome reversal process recently introduced is the result of an attempt to produce a color process that would involve no problems not incidental to black-andwhite photography.” Kodachrome was the product that stimulated the growth of home movies, where color cinematography became the rule rather than the exception. Color photography historian Joseph S.  Friedman (1945) wrote that its introduction put substantial pressure on the rest of the photographic industry to supply color film products. Prior to this attempt at a 16  mm color system, Kodak had introduced, in July 1928, the short-lived 16  mm lenticular additive color film process Kodacolor, licensed from Keller-­ Dorian, which required a three-color striped filter for photography and projection, as described in chapter 45. The Kodacolor name would later be used for a successful negative-­positive snapshot process introduced in the 1940s, and the brand Kodachrome had been previously used for a bichromatic color portrait process invented by Capstaff in the 1910s, which became the basis for the little used Fox Nature Color of 1929, as described in chapter 46. Kodachrome became available for 16 mm in April 1935, and in May 1936 for the double 8 mm format (Coe 1981). Kodachrome was the first successful three-color subtractive monopack color film, and it was soon available in formats other than 16 mm, notably for 35 mm Leica format color slides. It remained a celebrated brand even after it was discontinued in 2009 after a remarkable run of nearly three quarters of a century. Its popularity probably reinforced the public’s desire for three-­ color feature films. The story of Kodachrome’s creation melds two of the cherished myths of American enterprise, that of the grit of the unwavering independent inventor and that of the monolithic resources of the corporate research and development laboratory. The background of integral tripack (synonymous with

monopack) photography has been described elsewhere in these pages, principally in chapter 42, and it need not be repeated here, except to remind the reader that the concept was first enunciated in 1864, in an initially unpublished document, by the ingenious and dedicated French inventor Louis Ducos du Hauron. Kodachrome was the creation of Leopold Damrosch Mannes (1899–1964) and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (1900–1983), who attended the same private high school, the Riverdale School, in New York City. Both came from musical backgrounds and both attended a 1917 screening of Our Navy in Kelley’s Prizma additive color process at the 44th Street Theater in Manhattan. This turned out to be an experience of great significance for the young men since their disappointment with its quality became the inspiration for their interest in color photography, which led to their performing color photography experiments in the Riverdale School’s physics lab. At Harvard, pianist Mannes majored in music and minored in physics, and at the University of California, Berkeley, Godowsky majored in physics and chemistry while playing violin with the San Francisco Symphony, after which he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, and played with the Los Angeles Symphony. After graduation Mannes and Godowsky teamed up again in New York City to continue their color photography experiments while pursuing careers in music. Abandoning their first attempts at additive color, they began working on a two-color bipack, and in 1921 succeeded in producing demonstrable results. The young men were well-connected socially, and as a result a meeting was arranged with George Eastman who was supportive, but there was no follow-up. The next Kodak meeting was arranged by a family friend who was head of the Experimental Physics Department at Johns Hopkins, and in 1922 Mannes and Godowsky met with Kenneth Mees, head of Kodak’s R&D lab, at the Chemist’s Club in New  York City at which Mees agreed to help them (Day 1996). The two musician-inventors proceeded to experiment using made-to-­ order photographic emulsions, supplied to them by Mees, working in the bathrooms and kitchens of their parents’ Manhattan apartments.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_55

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In one of the apartments, they demonstrated their experimental work for Lewis Strauss of the international investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company; as a result, they were offered a $20,000 loan enabling them to continue their work (Collins 1990), resulting in the filing of a series of patent applications between 1921 and 1930,1 prior to any formal relationship with Kodak. The disclosures cover both the integral bipack and tripack concepts using a structure that had multiple emulsion layers, each responsive to a portion of the visible spectrum. They describe methods for processing the film by adding appropriate color dyes to each layer, a stepwise process different from the single development process that was devised in Germany by Agfa, which used color couplers in each emulsion layer to form dyes. The key to making Mannes and Godowsky’s concept work was finding dyes that could be added to each developed and reversed emulsion layer, and only to that layer by what they termed controlled diffusion (Friedman 1945). Mannes and Godowsky met Mees again at the Chemist’s Club in 1929, at a propitious moment since one of his researchers, Leslie Brooker, was working on dyes that might be suitable. Mees made the two inventors an offer of 3 years of employment at Kodak Park plus a royalty based on licenses of the patents they filed prior to Kodak employment. An incentive to their moving to Rochester was that it was the home of the Eastman School of Music (Kattelle 2000). Although Mannes and Godowsky were pursuing the beginnings of successful careers in music, with Mannes having been awarded a Pulitzer music scholarship and a Guggenheim fellowship while Godowsky was touring and giving concert performances, they accepted Mees’ offer on October 31, 1930, and arrived in Rochester to begin work. Their goal was to produce a reversal transparency two-color subtractive process using two emulsion layers. As they went about their experiments in their lab at Kodak Park, they needed to carefully control dye diffusion to add color to each layer, a process that was exquisitely time sensitive, but working in the dark made it impossible for them to see the face of a clock, so they timed the process by whistling the final movement of Brahms’ C Minor Symphony. Alas, the 3-year term of the contract came and went without their having achieved their goal, but Mees extended the contract for another year, and amazingly enough they moved beyond the bichromatic concept and came up with the trichromatic film that would become known as Kodachrome (Collins 1990). They left Kodak’s employ in 1939 but continued on as consultants after which Mannes returned to music and Godowsky set up a lab in Connecticut where he continued to research color photography. Mannes died in 1964 and Godowsky in 1983, both having lived to see Kodachrome become a celeUSPs filed by Mannes and Godowsky: 1,516,824; 1,538,996; 1,659,148; 1,980,941; 1,996,928; and 1,997,493 1 

55 Kodachrome

brated color film and a cultural icon, with both of them attaining the status of legendary inventors. The first generation of Kodachrome directly bore their stamp and originally required 28 steps that took 3½ hours to produce the complete subtractive reversal image, but by 1938 the dye diffusion and bleaching process described below had been reduced to 18 steps and the processing time to a little more than half an hour (Ryan 1977; Mannes 1935). All of the future generations of Kodachrome would have the same basic structure with a stack of emulsions coated on acetate base. The first to be coated on the base was the red-­sensitive emulsion, followed by the green-sensitive emulsion coated on top of it, and then came a coating of a yellow filter made of finely divided silver particles, named after its inventor, the Carey Lea layer. Like every silver halide emulsion, all Kodachrome layers were sensitive to blue-violet so the yellow filter was needed to keep blue light from exposing the two bottom emulsions, sensitive to green and red. The topmost blue-sensitive emulsion was coated on top of the yellow filter layer. Each Kodachrome emulsion layer analyzed one third of the visible spectrum by using filtration and emulsion sensitization. All together the layers were no thicker than an emulsion for black and white film, which insured that the camera lens lens would form a sharply focused image. After Kodachrome was exposed in the camera, it was processed beginning with standard black and white developer to develop the emulsion’s latent images. The resultant negative silver images were then chemically bleached to remove them from the emulsions, and the silver halide remaining in each emulsion layer was developed in a coupling developer, the first of which was designed to create a cyan dye and silver image in the bottom red-sensitive emulsion, but in doing so cyan dye and silver reversal images were unnecessarily formed in the other layers. The film was then dried and afterward immersed in a solution that penetrated the top two emulsions to bleach away the cyan dye and turn the silver images back into silver halide. The process continued with the magenta coupling developer required to form magenta dye and silver images in the top two layers after which the film was dried again. The film was immersed in a second solution that bleached away the dye from the top layer and turned its silver metal back into silver halide in preparation for immersion in a yellow coupling developer, after which the remaining silver was bleached away leaving three layers of color dye images, the subtractive complements of the colors that each emulsion had analyzed, resulting in a three-­color transparency. A simpler method for processing Kodachrome replaced this method, by eliminating the recursive bleaching process and targeting color coupling developers directly to the intended emulsions (Evans et al. 1953). Kodachrome was an integral tripack color film without built-in color couplers in which color dyes, which were part of three color developing solutions, were substituted for each

55 Kodachrome

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Fig. 55.1  Mannes (left) and Godowsky, the inventors of Kodachrome. (George Eastman House Museum)

emulsion layer’s silver reversal image to form a subtractive transparency. Kodachrome appeared on the market before the Agfa films that were manufactured with dye couplers within each emulsion, an ingenious chemistry that required only one color development step and therefore greatly simplified processing as described in chapters 51 and 52. The proprietary and complex nature of Kodachrome processing was a two-decade revenue opportunity for Kodak since it was initially sold with the processing charge included, which was done in a Kodak lab. This was the case until the end of 1954 when the Justice Department prevailed, in a federal antitrust suit, and Eastman’s Chairman of the Board Thomas Hargrave announced that the company agreed to sell the film without the processing fee, and further that Eastman would enable Kodachrome processing by other organization. One result was that the cost of processing fell by more than 40% (Business: New Kodak… 1955).2 As a young photographer, at the time, I recall my compatriots were more concerned with the quality of independent labs processing than costs, but were paradoxically comparing notes about how to load their cameras in order to squeeze an extra exposure on a roll of 35 mm slide film.

2 

There were at least five major changes to Kodachrome processing and about a dozen different but structurally similar films offered under the same brand. Later generations of Kodachrome bore scant resemblance to the process devised by Mannes and Godowsky, except for the basic disposition of the layers and their lack of color couplers (Ryan 1977). Due to the complexity of the development process, Kodak put a significant amount of work into insuring the consistency of colors (Koerner 1954). The first Kodachrome had an E.I. (exposure index) of 10 and was daylight balanced; in 1936 Type A tungsten (3200 Kelvin) photoflood balanced film was offered with an exposure index of 16. In 1941 Technicolor Monopack, a 35 mm Kodachrome camera film designed for making imbibition masters for release printing, was introduced. In 1944 Kodak supplied Kodachrome Duplicating Safety Color Film Type 5265 for the 16 mm professional market, a low-contrast reversal material designed for making prints from Kodachrome camera film capable of reproducing optical sound tracks. Type 5265 film was widely used for industrial and education films, and it was also used for printing feature films for distribution to the armed forces overseas. In 1946 a low-contrast camera film meant to serve as a printing master and not for projection

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55 Kodachrome

Fig. 55.2  The Kodachrome processing method used beginning in 1938. (Kodak)

was released, Kodachrome Commercial Safety Color Film, Type 5268, with a tungsten E.I. of 10 and a daylight E.I. of 8 when used with an amber Wratten 83 filter. It was used extensively for 16 mm commercial filmmaking as well as for the production of episodic television series. It was replaced by low-contrast reversal Ektachrome Commercial film Type 7255 in 1958 (Ryan 1977). After the first two Kodachrome processes introduced in 1935 and 1938, process K-11 was introduced in 1955, K-12 in 1961, and K-14  in 1974. A notable change to Kodachrome occurred in 1961; the prior film and process were replaced by Kodachrome II, offered as daylight balanced film with an E.I. of 25 and a Type A (tungsten balanced) material with an E.I. of 40. Compared to its predecessor, the film had finer grain, better shadow and highlight detail, and apparently more accurate and saturated colors. Whatever its merits it was different enough so that some photographers bought large quantities of the prior issue to store in freezers and decried the discontinuance of

good old Kodachrome. Kodachrome 25 replaced Kodachrome II in 1974, the year that also saw the introduction of Kodachrome 64, and in 1986 Kodachrome 200 was introduced as a 35 mm slide film with 20 times the sensitivity of the original 1935 film. Kodachrome, like other Eastman amateur movie films, was coated on safety base film as had been mandated by George Eastman. Research on these safety substrates began at Kodak Park in 1906, and its first cellulose triacetate safety film was produced in 1908. Improvements in its chemistry took place between 1909 and 1911, but the result of these efforts was not accepted by the film industry, and despite the fact that improvement was required only minimal research activity took place until the First World War when the American government needed dope (a film base precursor) to coat the cloth wings of biplanes. Experiments to improve acetate base continued between 1918 and 1924, probably to address the p­ ossibility of a home movie market, and process improvements were accompanied by a

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Fig. 55.3  A Kodak guide to photography using Kodachrome and Kodacolor. (Kodak)

reduction in cost due to the introduction of synthetic acetone. The development effort was invigorated when the activity was moved from laboratories in the manufacturing plant to the Kodak Research Laboratory, which resulted in marked progress by 1948. Although initially aimed at the replacement of the nitrocellulose base used by motion picture film, all Kodak film products switched to cellulose

acetate and its derivatives by the end of 1950 (Haynes 1953). As far as motion picture film was concerned, work continued especially with regard to reducing shrinkage, and different formulations of acetate were used for various types of Kodachrome, including cellulose acetate propionate and, prior to 1953, acetate butyrate and triacetate (Fordyce 1976).

Double 8 mm and Super 8

At the time of its introduction in 1923, a basic Kodak 16 mm outfit consisting of a camera, projector, and a screen cost about as much as a Model T Ford, and was too expensive for most Americans. To grow the market and address the needs of additional potential customers, in July 1932, Eastman Kodak introduced a new motion picture system, the double 8 mm format, which was based on the 16 mm system. The new product was more economical because it used less film with a much smaller frame, but despite this limitation, it had to have an image good enough to provide a satisfying experience for home movie users. It made business sense for Kodak to take advantage of the extensive 16 mm infrastructure to lower the cost of system development and the product itself, which seems to have been major considerations guiding their efforts. While pricing for a product is usually based on its cost of goods and marketplace factors rather than research and development expenditures, Kodak wanted a better return on investment with lower risk than if it had created the new format and its infrastructure from scratch. Thus the format would use much of that which had been established for 16  mm, and in particular it would take advantage of the Kodak processing laboratories that had been deployed throughout the world in the decade after 16 mm’s introduction (Kattelle 2000). The new product used loads with a 25 foot length (plus leader) of 16 mm-wide film designed to be run through the camera twice, first exposing one half or column and in a second pass the other, in this way producing two columns of opposite-going frames, which after processing were spliced together to provide a 50 foot reel of 8 mm film. The concept is the same as that used by the 17.5 mm format that Barnes had shown to Capstaff that had been the direct inspiration for the 16 mm development program. The double 8 mm camera film departed from standard 16  mm by having twice the number of perforations, one per each 8 mm frame, or about half the height of a 16 mm frame and its width. The 16 mm frame occupied 21% of the 35  mm frame and the 8  mm frame 5% of the 35 mm frame, with its frame maintaining the 1.33:1 aspect ratio; it measured 4.37  mm  ×  3.28  mm,

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with the perforation size remaining that of 16  mm, 1.27 mm × 1.83 mm (Lipton 1975). 8 mm with its reduced pitch and mass didn’t require the large 16 mm perforation that reduced squandered frame size; even so the new format had acceptable images quality when projected on a screen a few feet wide, just fine for the living room. Another drawback of the design was the need to reload the film in order to run it through the camera for a second pass, an approach that invited an additional opportunity to fog the film, which was often loaded in bright daylight. It was also possible to only expose half the film or, worse yet, to double expose the film by running it through the camera thrice. The first Kodak 8 mm camera and projector models were the clockwork-driven Ciné-Kodak 8 Model 20, priced at $29.50, and the Kodascope 8 priced at $22.50. A roll of 25  feet of double 8  mm black and white reversal film was priced at $2.25. At first neither customers nor other manufacturers jumped on board with any vigor, and for a couple of years, the adoption of double 8 mm was up in the air, but the ability to make home movies with good color film beginning in 1936, with a product that wasn’t more difficult to use than black and white, accelerated the acceptance of double 8 mm. Kodachrome gave families a chance to film vacations, birthdays, and the like, thereby revisiting those occasions. Nevertheless, only a relatively small number of American families had movie equipment before the advent of the Second World War. The first manufacturer other than Kodak to offer an 8 mm product was Bell & Howell that, in 1935, introduced their own version with a camera, the Filmo 127-A using film only 8 mm wide; Kodak sold double 8 mm film to Bell & Howell who slit and repackaged it as an 8 mm-wide format. A few years later, both Keystone and Revere emulated Bell & Howell but afterward dropped 8 mm-wide film and switched to the Kodak double 8  mm format. Thereafter many other companies offered double 8  mm cameras and projectors. According to Kattelle (2000), the 1940 directory issue of Popular Photography listed 2 domestic manufacturers of 8 mm cameras with a total of 11 models and only 2 f­ oreign

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Fig. 56.1  The double 8 mm format. It remained 16 mm-wide as it was run through the camera and processing machines. The dotted line indicates where it was slit after processing and returned to the user on a reel of 8 mm-wide film.

Fig. 56.3  A Revere Model 85 8  mm projector, manufactured by the Revere Camera Company in the early to mid-1940s. The company began as a maker of automobile radiators but came to specialize in unassuming 8  mm hardware. Revere was purchased by 3M in the mid-1960s.

Fig. 56.2  The original 8 mm camera, the Ciné-Kodak 8 Model 20. The viewfinder was built into the carrying strap.

companies offering 2 cameras. During the Second World War, the manufacture of consumer motion picture cameras

came to a halt. In 1948 the domestic 8 mm cameras on the market were now at an average list price of $119 compared to $52 before the war. These cameras were, for the most part, spring driven, but battery-powered electric drive was becoming popular especially as Japanese brands, like Yashika, Minolta, Fujica, and Canon, entered the field in the early 1950s and began to take over the market (Kingslake 1989). Products from European manufacturers like Nizo, Paillard, and Beaulieu also became available. The number of 8 mm camera models rose steadily through the 1950s and plateaued in the low hundreds through the mid-1960s up until the introduction of Super 8, after which they were discontinued. 8  mm magnetic sound projectors, designed for release prints, were first developed by the Calvin Company working with 3M to produce a technique for adding a magnetic stripe

56  Double 8 mm and Super 8

to the format. Calvin hoped that 8 mm magnetic sound prints, from films produced on 16 mm, would serve as an economical audiovisual medium. To prove the concept, Calvin modified 16 mm projectors for 8 mm sound for a trial use by the Caterpillar Company. Calvin also worked out techniques for making good-quality prints and in 1953 offered their MovieSound-8 projector, the first magnetic stripe 8  mm machine (Hedden and Curtis 1961). Kodak followed with their robustly engineered Kodak Sound 8 introduced in 1960 (Coe 1981). Sound projectors were also made by Eumig, Elmo, and others, allowing the home moviemaker to add narration, sound

Fig. 56.4  The Swiss-made Paillard Bolex B8L twin-turret 8 mm camera, from 1953. It is shown here with 13 mm f/1.9 Yvar and 38 mm f/1.9 Kinotel lenses. Its clockwork motor offered speeds between 8 and 64 fps. Fig. 56.5  The Camex Reflex spring-wound 8 mm camera, circa 1953. Made by Erscam in France, probably the first of its kind to offer a through-the-­ lens reflex viewfinder, in this case using a reciprocating mirror. It accepted interchangeable lenses and is shown here with an Angénieux zoom lens.

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effects, and music using the iron oxide stripe located in the area on the side of the film without the perforations. Hans Napfel, a camera designer formerly with Zeiss, working for Fairchild Camera, created the Fairchild 8 magnetic sound-onfilm camera, the Cinephonic, in the 1960s, which used 100 foot loads of double 8 mm film; Napfel’s cameras were used for single-system TV newsgathering (Rawls 1962). Kodak also contemplated the creation of an audiovisual system based on an improved 8 mm format as a release print medium for professionally generated content, and they also considered development efforts to grow their home movie market. The first public intimations that at least the former was the case occurred in the summer of 1961, in the first of three articles that appeared in the Journal of the SMPTE. This article was written by John Flory, chairman of the Association of National Advertisers, Films Steering Committee, who was consulting for Kodak by doing a study of the audiovisual (AV) marketplace. Flory (1954, 1961) reported that there were almost three quarters of a million 16 mm sound projectors in the United States and predicated that it was possible, with a less costly system, that there could be 15 million 8  mm sound projectors in service by 1976 for professionally produced content, as well as a market for production runs of tens of thousands of release prints. At the time of Flory’s report, there were at least four million 8 mm silent projectors in use in the United States. Flory also favored magnetic rather than optical sound noting that present manufacturers of 8 mm sound projectors had all chosen that option. While Kodak was taking the content distribution opportunity seriously, they were similarly concerned about the decline in 8 mm sales. American sales of 8 mm cameras peaked at a little more than 1,100,000  units in 1959 and dropped to somewhat less than 800,000 units a year by 1961. Kodak gave these reasons for the decline: customers believed that shooting home movies was harder than taking snapshots

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and that they were expensive. Moreover, dealers were misguidedly selling customers complicated featured loaded cameras beyond their needs that proved to be challenging to operate (Kattelle 2000). Other obstacles were organizing and editing the footage and the bother of setting up projection, making home moves more of a hobby than the casual commitment required for taking snapshots. With regard to the claim that upselling took place, it was to be expected that salesmen on commission would make such attempts, given that 8 mm cameras ran the gamut from extremely simple machines to those with sophisticated technology including reflex viewing, automatic exposure control, and zoom lenses. The amateur filmmaker could choose from the simplest Kodak Brownie to the hefty Bolex three lens turret models that accepted 100 foot double 8 mm loads and had many creative controls. But no matter how advanced the cameras, the challenge of loading without fogging in daylight remained. Moreover, since the format design was based on the needs of 16 mm, the perforations were too wide for the physical requirements of transporting 8 mm film resulting in a reduction in frame size and corresponding image quality (Lipton 1975). A year later C. J. Staud and W. T. Hanson, Jr. (1962) put forth a new design for 8 mm that could make good-quality low-cost release prints, in their article, Some Aspects of 8 mm Sound Color Print Quality. A paper of this nature coming from Staud, the director of the Kodak Research Laboratory, and Hanson, its assistant director and one of the principal inventors of Eastman Color, had a significant impact on the industry and its observers. Staud and Hanson had chosen their words carefully and gave no mention of a forthcoming cartridge system for home movie making; their focus was clearly on industrial applications. However, they spelled out problems with the 8  mm format and noted a possible step that might be taken to mitigate fogging that occurred in loading double 8 mm by adding a dye to the film base. In July 1964 Kodak researchers Evan A.  Edwards and Jasper S. Chandler (1964) authored a new paper on the subject of an improved 8  mm format similarly titled Format Factors Affecting 8  mm Sound-Print Quality. In this article the authors describe experiments they undertook to help them design what would become known as 8 mm Type S, or Super 8. The focus of the article remained on the new format’s use as an audiovisual medium, which was not meant to supplant 16  mm but rather to make better 8  mm prints. These two Kodak papers produced a considerable amount of comment, much of it unfavorable since it took no stretch of the imagination to suspect that Kodak was also quite interested in creating a new amateur format that would undoubtedly threaten existing 8 mm products. In fact, some people thought the AV angle was a cover story to deflect attention away from Kodak’s true motives. People in the industry were telling themselves that Kodak was acting with guile to protect the

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sales of existing hardware while they laid the groundwork for its obsolescence, which is exactly what Kodak’s critics would have done had they been in its shoes. In June 1965 Kodak, as they promised, introduced the new film format, Super 8, to address audiovisual and industrial communications markets and the declining sales in double 8 mm hardware and film. The key to the redesign of the format was the reduction of the width of the Super 8 perforations to 0.91  mm from 8  mm’s 1.83  mm, which was determined after thorough testing to measure the wear and tear on film with the narrower perforations. The camera aperture for the standard 8  mm frame was 4.37  mm  ×  3.28  mm, and the dimensions for the Super 8 frame were 5.46 mm × 4.01 mm, for about a 50% increase in area. The pitch or the distance between the centerlines of the frames was 3.8 mm for standard 8  mm and 4.23  mm for Super 8, but some projectors were offered that could handle both formats. The perforations were moved to the middle of the frame rather than at the frameline to enable stronger splices. Careful consideration was given to the film’s guiding edges by providing enough material to produce good sharpness to insure flat film when a frame was at rest in the gate area. The main sound stripe was located on the side of the film away from the perforations, and a narrow balance stripe was located between the perforations and the film’s edge to allow the film to spool evenly. Kodak provided the specifications for the new format to other hardware manufacturers, including their principal American hardware competitor Bell & Howell, who began a design program for camera and projector models. Bell & Howell had agreed to make the announcement of their Super 8 product line in coordination with Kodak in June 1965, but a story giving the impression that Super 8 was the creation of Bell & Howell broke prematurely in Popular Photography magazine in the middle of May in many areas of the country because of a slipup in newsstand distribution. Popular Photography’s editor, John Durniak, had been frustrated by Kodak’s strictures with regard to divulging background information and the date the magazine could run the story, but Bell

Fig. 56.6  The Super 8 format (right) compared with the 8 mm format.

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Fig. 56.7  Super film showing the location of the magnetic sound stripes, the full width track for recording, and the narrow balance stripe (which could also be used for recording).

Fig. 56.9  The June 1965 issue of Popular Photography. The photo shows Bell & Howell Super 8 concept models giving the impression that the format was their creation. The magazines were prematurely distributed to newsstands at the end of May, which resulted in a brouhaha, no laughing matter in Rochester, since B&H’s announcement anticipated Kodak’s. (Bonnier Corp.)

Fig. 56.8  Comparing the areas of formats’ frame.

& Howell was willing to cooperate, and he assigned your author to write what became the cover story about the new Bell & Howell Super 8 product line. I spend several days at the company in Chicago where I talked to their hardware engineers (Lipton 1965) and also met British lens designer Arthur Cox who had designed new zoom lenses for the Bell & Howell Super 8 cameras. Cox took advantage of the relatively recent ability to use a computer program to help reduce the size of a zoom lens. His mandate included being able to build the lenses in the United States at a low cost of goods. If he was unable to succeed in this goal, the lenses would be outsourced, probably from Japan, and that’s what happened after a few years of domestic production. After the publication of my article, to placate a furious Kodak, I was given a new assignment and headed to Rochester to cover Kodak’s

Super 8 work where I met Super 8’s design team including Evan A. Edwards, an expert in the injection molding of plastic parts, who designed the cartridge. Kodachrome II had been introduced in 1961, two and a half times faster than the prior version of the film but less grainy and with better contrast and exposure latitude, which was an important contribution to the quality of Super 8’s image. The black plastic injection molded cartridge was loaded with fifty feet of Super 8 Kodachrome II film; it was a great improvement over Kodak’s earlier factory reloadable metal double 8 mm cartridge. Kodak ruled out a design with top and bottom feed and take-up reels because a 50 foot load of acetate base film would result in an undesirably large cartridge. Kodak, desiring to maintain their acetate base manufacturing infrastructure, chose a coaxial design in which the film feed and take-up cores were on the same axes but in side-by-side chambers, with the cartridge’s take-up core engaged by the camera’s motor-driven dog. The stubby and study daylight loading 2.75 × 3 × about 1 inch Super 8 cartridge was made of six injection-molded parts, each a different plastic chosen for its properties and one metal part, a phosphor-bronze spring to apply pressure to the plastic pressure pad. Film within the cartridge took a twisty path from

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Fig. 56.10  The interior of the coaxial Super 8 cartridge. The notches on the left edge keyed the camera for film type and speed, and the middle notch positioned the cartridge with respect to the camera’s gate. (Drawing by Christopher Swan)

Fig. 56.11  The Kodak M2 Super 8 camera, whose appearance harkens back to Julian Tessier’s design for the first 16  mm camera, the Ciné-Kodak.

56  Double 8 mm and Super 8

feed to take-up core as it passed through an open slot 6 frames in length, where each frame was intermittently advanced for exposure by means of the camera’s pushdown shuttle. The cartridge’s spring-loaded pressure pad was accurately positioned by means of three facing prongs that were part of the camera’s aperture plate. These three prongs, which enraged the area surrounding the camera aperture, were sufficient for precision location since three points determine a plane, but Euclid’s Elements were viewed as a matter of opinion by amateur experts who favored a pressure plate (or pad) built into the camera. The user loaded the camera by opening the camera door and inserting the cartridge, a simple process. A set of notches along an edge seated the cartridge within the camera and keyed it for film type and speed. The notches also provided information for cartridge sorting by film type at the processing station. Super 8 adopted 18 fps as a running speed, and with a three-bladed projector shutter, each frame was repeated three times, when at rest in the gate, for an effective 54 images per second. Kodak researchers had found that the small increase from 16 to 18 fps produced less flicker, a good change because Super 8 projection was brighter than standard 8 mm projection. Even the M2, the introductory Kodak Super 8 camera, a simple point and shoot machine, was capable of taking higher-quality images than the most expensive 8 mm camera. Fuji adopted a top and bottom design for their Single 8 variant that was loaded with film of the same dimensions as Super 8 but using stronger polyester base, about two thirds the thickness of acetate. The Fuji cartridge used a pressure pad that was built into the camera, and it was purported that other manufacturers were poised to introduce cameras for the Fuji device, but that never occurred. Enhancements to the Super 8 system followed, one of which was worked out by Kodak engineers Don Gorman and Pete Chiesa (Kattelle 2000). Their XL (existing light) system, introduced in 1971, was based on cameras with a wide shutter angle, a more efficient automatic diaphragm mechanism, fast lenses, and the high-speed reversal films Ektachrome 160, Ektachrome G, and Tri-X Reversal. The usual Super 8 camera had a shutter angle of 160° that produced exposures of about 1/40 second at 18 fps. The Kodak XL cameras had a 230° shutter, which required a faster pushdown shuttle, resulting in about 1/30 second exposure; this increase in exposure time and a fast f/1.2 lens permitted photography indoors under dim lighting. Ektachrome G film had a 160 E.I. emulsion that produced okay skin color when used with sources with a wide range of color temperatures without changes in lens filtration. In 1973 Kodak released the Ektasound system consisting of Super 8 sound cartridges loaded with magnetic striped film, cameras that recorded sound on the stripe, and projectors that played and recorded sound. Cartridges were avail-

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Fig. 56.12  The low-light-capable Kodak Supermatic XL33 Super 8 camera. The zoom version was the XL55.

able in 50 and 200 foot loads, and sound cameras were marketed by a number of companies, including low-end machines that did an adequate job. Super 8 sound cameras, especially if used indoors or with the built-in microphone, needed to be housed in a sound-­reducing enclosure to reduce camera chatter. Beaulieu and Leica (the Leicina) offered Super 8 cartridge accepting cameras with interchangeable lenses, and Pathé, Canon, and Bolex modified their 16 mm or double 8 mm cameras to run 100 foot loads of double Super 8 mm. The typical high-end camera that accepted the standard 50 foot cartridge had a built-in zoom with through-thelens viewing and automatic exposure metering. Many different models of Super 8 silent and sound projectors became available, some with images claimed to be twice as bright as the usual 8 mm machines, due in part to the increased Super 8 frame area but also due to the cooperation Kodak had gotten from manufacturers to produce brighter tungsten halogen lamps. Some Super 8 projectors offered what is possibly the most significant technology shift in film transport in seven decades, sprocketless or capstan drive. The invention may have been first described in USP 3,244,469, Sound-and-­Picture-on-Film Reproducing Apparatus, filed January 2, 1963, by Raymond G. Hennessey, Hans F. Napfel, and Lee H. Schank, engineers working for the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation on Long Island. Sound reproduction requires the film to move past the playback head continuously and this design eliminates the need to smooth out the intermittent motion required for projection. Frames are advanced intermittently using a shuttle, as is customary for small gauge projectors, but in place of sprockets the film is transported by a constant speed motor driving a capstan and pinch roller located after the gate, the method used for a reel-to-­reel magnetic tape recorder drive. The loop between the gate and the sound playback head is maintained by adjusting the speed of the motor driving the shuttle. The size of the loop is sensed by a simple feeler

Fig. 56.13  Three kinds of Super 8 cartridges: the 200 foot magnetic sound striped cartridge (left), the 50 foot sound cartridge (lower right), and the 50 foot standard cartridge (top right).

device to control the rate of the “claw motor,” thus creating a self-correcting closed-loop servo system. In this way sound is reproduced without changes in pitch, but there are changes to the projected frame rate to maintain the loop, which are not be discernable. The system made it easier to design projectors that could show both standard 8 mm and Super 8 mm, since the only changes necessary were at the gate. It also simplified manual loading or automatic threading, including designs using cartridges, and possibly the elimination of sprocket drive might reduce film wear. Kodak’s variation used a single motor and a conical pulley system to mechanically change the rate of the claw’s pulldown, a variation of the Fairchild concept. Kodak also produced the continuous drive Supermatic VP-1 telecine that used a cathode ray tube flying-spot scanner (described in chapter 72) to turn Super 8 into NTSC video, although its $1350 list price ruled it out for home movie makers. Kodak made a major effort to round out the Super 8 system so it would appeal to users with different applications, such as broadcast television. Toward that end, in the mid-1970s, Kodak offered the 1000 pound $12,500 Supermatic (SM) processor, designed to process high-speed Ektachrome SM. The machine used only four chemicals for processing film and required a plumbing hookup; it was

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Fig. 56.14  The Kodak Ektasound 130, a basic sound-on-film camera. Other manufacturers offered models with greater sophistication and many features, some accepting the 200  foot cartridge allowing for 10 minutes of shooting at 24 fps, but none ran quietly.

Fig. 56.15  The Kodak Instamatic M80 self-threading Super 8 silent projector, which resembled an attaché briefcase when closed for carrying and storing.

designed to be used by non-specialists. A 50 foot cartridge of SM film could be ­processed in 13½  minutes at a cost of

56  Double 8 mm and Super 8

$0.45 (Lipton 1983). Kodak offered a number of different kinds of black and white and color Super 8 films in the silent and sound cartridges and in 100 foot double Super 8 reels. Super 8 was rapidly accepted by the buying public, and as sales of its hardware and film rapidly grew, standard 8 mm sales rapidly declined. As it became obsolete, inventories were sold off at bargain prices. Super 8 was taken up for audiovisual and industrial uses such as in-flight projection of feature films. Technicolor packaged Super 8 dye transfer prints in its own cartridge for education and training and point-of-sale advertising. Projectors designed to look like TV sets were offered, such as the rear screen Chinon DS-300 or Kodak’s front screen Moviedeck projector, introduced in 1974, but unlike TV sets, their mechanisms were noisy. Super 8 spawned an eclectic worldwide burst of independent filmmaking: international film festivals sprung up in places like Caracas, Venezuela; São Paulo, Brazil; Thonon-LesBains, France; and Tehran, Iran. These festivals showed off the work of local filmmakers, some of which were ethnographic studies, attempts to document and preserve local ways of life. Narrative films and lavishly produced historical dramas were also made by local filmmakers. The nontheatrical film and audiovisual field in the United States is defined to include 16 mm and 8 mm production and distribution by schools, businesses, government, community agencies, religious, and medical and health organizations. Super 8 was the basis for a billion dollar industry in 1966, as reported by Thomas W. Hope (1968), an authority in the field and the publisher of The Hope Report. Hope wrote: “…the breakdown of films available in the cine-8 format (standard 8  mm) and in super-8 format has really become academic. More than 97% of the 8 mm films are now available in super 8. By 1969, a majority of distributors will no longer normally sell cine-8.…” However, the ascendancy of Super 8 would be threatened by video technology; by the late 1970s and early 1980s manufacturers like Sony and Kodak had begun to offer camcorders. Although they were considerably more expensive than low- to moderate-priced Super 8 cameras, and their image quality was not as good, they permitted long takes, were quiet running with good-quality synchronized sound, and could be viewed on a TV set without setting up a noisy projector and screen, and dimming the room lights. They were able to meet the basic needs of home moviemakers, like capturing weddings, toddlers’ first steps, and family trips, but editing was nigh on impossible, but did that matter? The great majority of Super 8 users did not edit their films. On the other hand, the Super 8 infrastructure had become increasingly technologically sophisticated with low-­light-­level-capable cameras and film, cartridge-loaded single-­system magnetic sound cameras, and good-quality projectors, some of which were also cartridge loaded, a processing machine that could be run in the corner of an office, a telecine the size of the usual projector, and many cameras with reflex viewing and zoom lenses of

56  Double 8 mm and Super 8

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Fig. 56.16 Fairchild’s sprocketless film drive, as illustrated in the top half of the cover sheet of USP 3,244,469. Part 37 is the loop sensor. The design was part of an audiovisual cartridge loading system.

increasing greater range. Super 8 was even being used in airliners for in-flight motion pictures. But its popularity with the public had peaked by the late 1970s. The Polavision system devised by Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, was an attempt to extend Polaroid’s “instant” photography concept to home movies. In 1977, the year that Super 8 hardware reached its marketplace peak, Polaroid introduced its cartridge loading rapid processing Polavision system, whose additive color technology is described in chapter 45 (Lipton 1975). In assessing the challenge, Land must have believed that the increased size of the Super 8 frame gave him the opportunity to use the réseau additive color technique. Land, who was fundamentally a chemist, was a master of the technique of processing film in the camera, which he perfected for his still photography business; he understood that an integral tripack reversal film could not serve as the basis for his Polavision concept. The means to achieve what he was seeking depended on exposing film with a black and white emulsion through its base, whose rear surface had minute columnar RGB rulings for additive color analysis and synthesis, thereby p­ ermitting his organization to apply the rapid processing chemistries they understood. Using a photographic technique, 4500 dyed RGB

columns per inch (1500 triplets) were formed on the rear of the polyester film’s base. The réseau concept was many decades old, and Polavision, like many inventions, was an improvement of a technology conceived at an earlier time. Land knew that additive color was extremely inefficient in terms of projection brightness, but he hoped to solve that and the visibility of the RGB columnar structure, using a rear screen viewer whose small screen would promote both brightness and hide the appearance of the rulings. Such a rear screen projector would also serve as the processing machine; during its first pass through the projector, the additive color film’s emulsion would be processed using the chemical pod contained within its cartridge. The appeal of such a product seemed like a reasonable proposition in the days when TV screens were only a couple of feet wide, a viewing modality to which the public had become accustomed. A rear screen viewer placed on a living room credenza would be more convenient than having to set up a projector and screen, and dimming the lights. The camera and projector/processor worked as advertised, but the quality was a far cry from what users had come to expect: Kodachrome II made beautiful pictures, but Polavision images just weren’t as sharp

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56  Double 8 mm and Super 8

with the same saturated bright colors; moreover, the system was unable to take advantage of the panoply of Super 8’s advanced hardware and features, setting Polavision apart as an odd duck offshoot with limited appeal. Land did not understand his customer, who had access to cameras loaded with technology, like sound-on-­film, low light capability, slow motion, time lapse, and zoom lenses with a tremendous range, all of which made his product a weak offering. More to the point, its second-rate image disqualified it for the user for whom the Polavision was primarily intended, who just wanted to capture baby’s first steps. On the one hand, Land’s timing was good because Polavision was introduced at the peak of Super 8’s sales, but on the other hand it was bad because Super 8 sales declined thereafter, in part due to the threat of the camcorder. The sales of Super 8 cameras peaked at about 1.2 million units circa 1977 and fell to under 200,000 units circa 1983. Super

Fig. 56.17  A Nizo S8T Super 8 camera made by Braun. Like other brands Nizo offered several models based on the same basic body whose principal differentiator was their lens’s zoom range. The S8T was a machine of decent capability in a field of competitors offering many features and high quality. Comparable products also had beamsplitter reflex viewing, built-in zoom lenses, and automatic exposure control. These cameras made the turret obsolete, for most users, by reducing the need for interchangeable lenses. All used battery-powered electric motors and some had power zooming.

Fig. 56.18  The Polavision projector-processing machine. The first time the Polavision cartridge was run through the machine, the film was processed, which involved breaking open chemical-containing pods built into the cartridge. Thereafter the film was projected on the machine’s rear screen. Film cartridges are shown adjacent to the projector. Fig. 56.19  A Polavision camera, the model with a zoom lens.

56  Double 8 mm and Super 8

8 gear, including Polavision, had begun to look like contraptions, noisy mechanical contrivances in light of the quiet sleekness of the video camera-recorder, notwithstanding video’s image quality. The concept of video technology, and the public’s belief in the idea of the i­ndubitable progress of electronics, may have been responsible for dooming the amateur celluloid cinema, a foreshadowing of the fate of the theatrical celluloid cinema. By the mid-1980s, there were probably more than one million home movie camcorders in use. In 1984 even Kodak demonstrated the Kodavision format and camcorder that used 8  mm-wide magnetic tape loaded in a cassette. Like other cameras of its class, it was much bigger and heavier than a Super 8 camera because it was designed around a cathode ray tube pickup.

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Super 8 has been projected at the Cannes Film Festival and has been used for shooting parts of theatrical features such as Super 8 (2011) and Argo (2012). Super 8’s reign was a brief one, only a bit more than a decade, but as of this writing, it continues to have applications like student projects and music videos, despite a dearth of processing laboratories. In 2016– 2017 Kodak showed a Super 8 concept camera with digital features, an effort to proselytize film to the future generation of filmmakers living in an electronic/digital world. Kodak offers Super 8 perforated Vision3 negative and similarly formatted Ektachrome stock, which is sold to a handful of specialist organizations, which they load into cartridges supplied by Kodak. Post-­production services such as transfers to digital files and refurbished cameras are also available.

Part VII THE CELLULOID CINEMA: The Big Wide Screen

The Shape of Screens to Come

In August 1889, the Eastman Dry Plate Company made its first thin and flexible cellulose nitrate base on which to coat a light-sensitive emulsion for photographic film for its consumer snapshot cameras. Nitrate dope was poured onto glass plates that when dry was peeled off as thin sheets of celluloid nitrate, which afterwards were coated with photographic gelatin emulsion. Eastman intended that this flexible transparent film would replace the paper substrate stripping film used in his Kodak No. 1 camera of 1888. Stripping film, after removal from the customer’s camera at Rochester, was developed, and its image-bearing gelatin emulsion was stripped from the paper backing and laid onto a glass sheet for making contact prints. Modern photography was inaugurated with the new Eastman Transparent Film that made it far easier to make prints (Belton 1992). This product was exactly what Thomas Edison’s hands-on lab assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, needed for their Kineto Project experiments. As recounted earlier in these pages, in a letter dated March 18, 1925, George Eastman wrote: “I received a call from a representative of Mr. Edison’s (probably Dickson) who told me of Mr. Edison’s experiments in motion pictures and how necessary it was for him to have some of this film.” (Richardson 1925) Dickson sent a $2.50 purchase order for a 1 in. wide strip of 50 feet of film, which Eastman received on September 2, 1899 (Bowen 1955). The film would be driven through the experimental Kinetograph and Kinetoscope machines after perforations were added in Dickson’s darkroom, using a perforation punching machine of his devising. Dickson had to make a decision about the direction of the film’s travel, horizontal or vertical; at first the film was horizontal-traveling, but Edison and Dickson settled on verticaltraveling 35 mm film cutdown from 70 mm stock. Photography has, from inception, been a high-definition medium; fine detail was a daguerreotype selling point, and with the advent of glass plates, the Fox Talbot negative-­ positive system was capable of prints that to this day remain beautiful to behold, with extreme sharpness and impressive tonality. Dickson, an experienced photographer, must have been concerned about the small size of the frame he was spec-

57

ifying, because the plates he used for still photography were comparatively enormous and capable of exquisite image quality. But Kineto images would be experienced using a peepshow viewer, peered at through a small opening, of content that went by in mere seconds having an emphasis on motion rather than definition. In the context of the early Kineto experiments with minute frames laid out on the surface of a cylinder, the 35 mm format may have seemed to be of a respectable size. The first motion picture format was designed with a frame placed between two columns of perforations, four on either side, which after Dickson’s last minute fiddling was fixed at 24.89 mm × 18.67 mm, with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The imaging capability of 35 mm motion picture film, given the relatively small size of the frame, plus the decision to use a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, had an enormous impact on the aesthetics and technology of the celluloid cinema. Schubin (1996) points out that although reasons have been advanced for Dickson’s choice, we don’t know with certitude why this aspect ratio was chosen. Although first chosen for one specialized exhibition purpose, the Kinetoscope peepshow viewer was successfully adapted to the needs of theatrical projection. The 35 mm format was adapted and improved by advances that took place on several fronts, involving the technology of photographic sensitometry, cameras, projectors, lenses, research into color, sound, widescreen, and by improvements to the design of perforations and their pitch, to take into account factors such as shrinkage and printer slip. All things considered, was remarkably adaptable and permitted technological innovation. It remains an open question as to why Dickson selected the 1:33:1 aspect ratio, but it’s interesting to speculate about his choice. Perhaps this shape was chosen because it was a small departure from a square, the rectangle that would nicely fit within the circular coverage of a lens, known as the circle of good definition. A lens can produce an image of even larger diameter than this, out to its circle of illumination, but few lenses have a circle of good definition that extends to the limits of the circle of illumination (Kingslake 1992). Edison and Dickson may have decided that 1.33:1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_57

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was a decent compromise, a little bit wider and more interesting than a 1:1 square, and a better choice for composing shots of two or more people interacting, or for landscapes. The matter wasn’t entirely settled with the Edison-Dickson format, and filmmakers and inventors continued to experiment with alternatives for gauge and aspect ratio including cropping the 35 mm frame, using larger formats with other aspect ratios, the projection of contiguous frames, and the use of anamorphic optics. The 35 mm frame was magnified when viewed through Kinetoscope optics, as was the case when projected, but the perception of the image is different when looking through peepshow optics compared to looking at a cinema screen. The structure of the image, when looking at a motion picture, with its rapid succession of similar frames, is a different experience from looking at a still print. Grain can be thought of as the basic unit of the image, dancing monads at the root of the celluloid cinema experience, a product of silver particles’ frame-by-frame changing patterns, always present but usually below the surface of perception. This random dancing distribution of silver particles suspended in gelatin, or of color dyes, has been a part of the cinema experience for more than a century. Many of the efforts described in this section have been aimed at reducing its visibility and to improve overall image quality by using a larger frame, especially when the goal was to project on a big screen. The quality of the 35  mm negative-positive system was steadily improved by Kodak and other film manufacturers. These efforts, over the span of a century, enhanced the capability of the small frame, but it is important to understand that the prints seen in theaters were not made directly from the camera negative, and print quality was accordingly reduced. Because a limited number of copies can be made before the camera negative deteriorates through wear and tear, in order to protect it, and to make masters for foreign markets, the studios adopted a duplication methodology to protect it. The term generation is used to describe the ­successive duplications made from the camera original negaFig. 57.1  Four generations, from left to right: original Eastmancolor negative, master positive (interpositive), duplicate negative (internegative), and release print. The first three generations use colored coupler masking.

57  The Shape of Screens to Come

tive, which is the first generation. Each copy produces a deterioration in image quality called generation loss, and each copy can involve a reduction in sharpness, an increase in granularity, and an increase in contrast. To preserve the camera negative and to be able to manufacturer many release prints, the original was used to print an interpositive that was used to print an internegative, which in turn was used to print (sometimes the term strike is used) the release prints: in other words, what was seen in theaters were fourth-generation prints. What the audience saw was never quite as good as what the filmmakers and executives at the studios saw, a second generation-copy made directly from the camera negative. High quality prints also struck directly from the camera negative, called distributors’ prints were used to market the film. Over time the technology and techniques improved, and it became possible to make very good fourth-generation release prints. Kodak scientist Wesley T. Hanson (1980) points out that generational loss of image quality was not solely attributable to film characteristics and can be caused by high-speed printers and sloppy processing. Optical effects, like fades and dissolves, which were (usually) cut into the camera original master, required other duplication steps that added additional generational losses. The Kinetoscope sold the concept of celluloid motion pictures, and while it had only a short life in the marketplace it served its purpose, for it was the inspiration for Edison’s competitors who saw theatrical projection as an opportunity. Edison’s 35 mm format, devised for manufacturing prints for a peepshow device, after having been repurposed for projection, became an international standard in 1909. There were only relatively minor changes to the format until optical sound-on-film called for a major modification. Fox, the first American studio to produce films with sound-on-film using their their Movietone optical sound system in 1927, released prints with a gate aperture that was 0.826 in × 0.708 in, for a frame aspect ratio of 1.167:1. The 35 mm format, with added optical track, was standardized in a process begun in 1929 by the SMPE and concluded by AMPAS in 1932, at which time

57  The Shape of Screens to Come

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Fig. 57.3  The 35 mm Academy format. The projector aperture (dotted lines) is 0.825 × 0.60 in. and the camera aperture is 0.87 × 0.64 in. The frame’s aspect ratio is 1.37:1.

Fig. 57.2  The Movietone format. The addition of the 2.5 mm column reserved for track (gray) reduced the width of the Edison frame. The projector aperture of the Movietone frame was about 22 mm wide by 18 mm high.

the frame’s design took into account the 2.5-mm-wide column reserved for optical soundtrack information that was located between the frame and one column of perforations. The Movietone reduction in frame width resulted in a squarish image, which might have been displeasing since audiences had become accustomed to the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. In order to maintain the original silent screen aspect ratio, a new standard was created; the Academy optical sound projector aperture was set at 0.825 in × 0.600 in. Since the frame width was reduced by the sound track, the height of the frame was reduced to achieve a wider aspect ratio, by adding a wider frame line to yield a 1.375:1 projection aspect ratio (Crafton 1997). The reason for this aspect ratio is often overlooked: by that time of its selection, with three decades of exhibition experience, projection was a well-established practice, and engineers knew that projection booths were usually located above screen height with projectors aimed downward at an angle hopefully not to exceed 18° (Report of the Projection…,1938, Nov.) Such a downward angle led to trapezoidal distortion of the projected image, which was not usually noticeable, but it had to be taken into account. The top horizontal edge of the image was projected to fill the screen slightly beyond the top vertical edge of the surround (a mullion often made of black velvet-­like duvetyne fabric) to give crisp edges, but an even greater spill over onto the bottom of the surround’s vertical edges occurred since it is

further from the projection lens. The 1.375:1 aspect ratio was selected so that the masked screen aspect ratio could remain 1.33:1 given these circumstances. This remained the 35 mm theatrical screen aspect ratio until the early 1950s with the introductions of CinemaScope and wide screen formats like VistaVision. To understand the 35 mm frame’s limitations, it’s instructive to know the size of the screens on which it was projected. An SMPE survey of 600 theaters, published in 1938, found that the average screen width was 18½ feet, within a range 10 to 34 feet wide, with 50% of screen width’s falling between 16 and 21 feet (Report of the Projection…, 1938, June). A Polaroid circular slide calculator meant for stereoscopic cinematography, published in the early 1950s, was limited to screens up to 30  feet (Lipton 1982). A median screen, prior to CinemaScope in 1953, was half the width of today’s screen, which I estimate is just under 40 feet. This is corroborated by conversations with sources at projector manufacturers and the data from 300 RealD installations I analyzed in 2006. For a 20 foot wide screen, the Edison frame’s linear magnification is about 250 times, which is a considerable enlargement for a frame that’s a bit less than an inch wide. Increasing the magnification of the frame by projection on bigger screens will reduce image quality for a viewer at a fixed distance, but what may be most meaningful is the retinal area of the projected image, which is determined by screen size and the observer’s distance from it. Understanding this, in the early days before the introduction of synchronized sound, motion picture engineers made recommendations advising exhibitors to avoid projecting on very large screens, which would be of greatest concern for

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those who chose to sit close to the screen. In addition to the size of the screen, its shape is a major consideration. The Golden Rectangle (also called the Golden Section or Ratio), with its 1.618:1 ratio, has been claimed to be the aesthetic ideal for containing an image, based on geometric arguments such as measurements of natural phenomenon and averages of the aspect ratios of canvases hung in museums (Dunlap 1997). In the 1950s, when wide formats were being discussed, the Golden Rectangle aspect ratio had its advocates, but there is no a priori best aspect ratio for composition and display, which one would think might be best determined on a shot-by-shot basis. Eisenstein (1970), in his essay The Dynamic Square (sometimes called the Dynamic Frame), made an interesting suggestion based on a square screen: vary the screen shape for each shot or scene based on its compositional requirements. Changing the aspect ratio during projection is a method that has been applied on a number of occasions, as was the case for the 1955 short produced by the British Film Institute, The Door in the Wall, directed by American Glenn H. Alvery, Jr. The film was shot in large negative VistaVision and is credited as the first film to apply the concept, which according to Coe (1981) used continuously variable masking. Changing aspect ratios for dramatic effect was used by Douglas Trumbull (email to the author, Aug., 2017) in his 1983 feature Brainstorm. Trumbull shot the virtual reality sequences on 65 mm using the same kind of wide angle lens Kubrick used for 2001: A Space Odyssey. These 65 mm 2.2:1 aspect ratio images of the virtual world are interspersed with 35  mm scenes shot in the 1.66:1 aspect ratio used to designate the mundane world. Christopher Nolan shot scenes of his Batman films, released in 2005, 2008, and 2012, using the 15 perforation horizontal-traveling 65  mm IMAX. When projected on IMAX screens, sections of the film alternated between its 1.4:1 aspect ratio to fill the screen and the ‘Scope 2.4:1 aspect ratio to fill only part of the IMAX screen. NIKFI, the Cine and Photo Research Institute of the Soviet Union, took Eisenstein’s Dynamic Square seriously and in the 1960s applied it to related Varioscope formats that were used by the Gorky Cine-Studio in Moscow that made a 20-minute film using its 70 mm variant Vario-70, a ten perforation pulldown vertical-going format with a square aspect ratio from which other screen shapes could be derived. Vario-35 was based on the standard 35 mm format, and Vario-35A was based on the full-frame format (the Edison frame minus the side area reserved for track) using a variable anamorphosing projection lens, the Varioanamorphot, whose rotatable cylindrical components stretched the image in the vertical or horizontal, to create the desired screen aspect ratio. The Vario formats included frames that were square, widescreen, or vertically oriented. Komar and White (1969) reported that several images could be presented on the screen and that movement

57  The Shape of Screens to Come

of an image to different parts of the screen was possible. The concept of the Dynamic Square is readily adaptable to digital projection because it requires no moving mullion to produce crisp edges. What follows are descriptions of some important early large formats: Demenÿ designed a perforationless camera-­ projector he called the Chronophotographe that used 60 mm film with a frame 45 mm × 36 mm having a 1.25:1 aspect ratio, as described in chapter 11. Gaumont & Cie. manufactured and marketed the camera-projector as the Biographe at the end of 1895, hoping that it would be used by amateurs for home movies, and it was also used for the distribution of content. Demenÿ invented an intermittent pulldown mechanism for the Biographe that was emulated by many early projector designers, the beater-cam movement, which was a necessity since his original projector was unable to use sprocket drive or intermittent shuttle frame advance since his film format had no perforations. Dickson and Lauste’s Eidoloscope projector of 1895, designed for Latham’s Lambda Company, used 51  mm (50.8  mm) film with a 38  mm  ×  19  mm frame having a 2:1 aspect ratio (Belton 1992, p. 105; Tümmel 1973). Sources sometimes give different widths for these formats and for the frames themselves, possibly because of rounding in conversion from millimeters to inches or vice versa, or confusion with regard to whether the reference is to the camera or projector aperture, and in some cases measurements may have been made from film stock that had shrunken after many decades. Gregory (1930) points out that the design of early formats may have been an effort to avoid Edison’s patent position. Their bigger frame might also be explained by the fact that these formats were meant for theatrical projection rather than the Kinetoscope peepshow viewer. Yet another reason for their design may not have been that they were bigger than the Edison format but rather that they were hard to pirate because equipment for projecting or copying prints did not exist. A design by Max Skladanowsky, the Bioskope I, used 44.5 mm film having 40 mm × 30 mm frames (the Edison aspect ratio), its width derived from slit Kodak 89 mm still camera stock. Film shot using the format was first publically exhibited on November 1895, at the Berlin Wintergarten. A second version in 1896, the Bioskope II, used 62.5  mm film with a 50 mm × 40 mm frame having a 1.25:1 aspect ratio. For more information about Skladanowsky’s work see chapter 17. In the aftermath of the Lathams’ Lambda Company collapse, some of its principals went on to found Biograph, which in 1897 created the 68  mm Mutograph system. The format retained the Edison aspect ratio but used a much larger 66.0 mm × 49.2 mm frame. The camera had the distinction of punching its own perforations at the time of exposure; it was used by cinematographer Billy Bitzer, as described in chapter 15. Enoch J. Rector, who had been an

57  The Shape of Screens to Come

Fig. 57.4  The Vario-70 format developed by the Gorky Cine-Studio in Moscow was based on a 70 mm frame with a ten perf pulldown within which was placed compositions with different aspect ratios. The

Fig. 57.5  A clip of Rector’s Veriscope 63 mm format. (Cinémathèque Française)

associate of the Lathams, developed the 63  mm Veriscope format with its 49  mm  ×  30  mm frame and 1.66:1 aspect

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images, as shown, were projected as wide, square, or tall. Moveable screen masking provided a crisp surround. (Wysotsky 1971, pp. 253–262)

ratio. Bitzer shot the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight of March 17, 1897 for Rector, which due to its running time of 100 minutes is listed by the IMDb as “the first known feature film!” Fitzsimmons knocked out Corbett with a punch to the stomach in the fourteenth round, in what has been described as a “bloody fight.” Three cameras were used to expose what was, for that time, the enormous amount of 11,000 feet film. The film reportedly made three quarters of a million dollars for Rector’s company (Fielding 1972 p. 11). The American Sportagraph company attempted to emulate the Veriscope business model of road show exhibition. Edwin S.  Porter, while working at the Eden Musée, built large format hardware for Sportagraph, but the endeavor fizzled when its first attempt to film a high-profile sporting event, the Palmer-­ McGovern fight on September 11, 1899, was canceled due to an overcast sky making good exposures impossible. Sportagraph’s luck didn’t improve when the following day, before a crowd of 8000, McGovern, the pride of Brooklyn, was KOed in the first round by Englishman Palmer (Musser 1991, pp. 139, 140). (I was unable to find Sportagraph’s format specifications.) Other big film formats include Blair’s 1896 Viventoscope 48 mm format, having a 38 mm × 25 mm frame. Cameron (1953) writes that in 1899 there were more than a dozen cameras and projectors that used wide film, including the English Prestwich with a format that was 23/8 in (60.3 mm) wide with a 1.31:1 aspect ratio frame. In an article published in 1936, Louis Lumière (1936) describes a public projection on a screen 21  m  ×  16  m or 69 feet × 53 feet, in 1900, at the Paris Exposition Universelle in the Galerie des Machines. He used his 35  mm Cinématographe and an illumination system with a 100 ampere carbon arc lamp and a water-filled spherical condenser. The screen was immersed in water prior to the projection to enhance its translucency so it could be viewed from both sides, which Lumière relates “was sufficient because of the optical instrument used.” Lumière had hoped “to obtain better definition in the images” and commissioned a large format camera by Carpentier. Sherlock informed me

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that the film measures about 72-73  mm wide, possibly because it was originally 75 mm wide but has shrunken. The camera aperture is stated to be 58 × 48 mm and the projector aperture is given as 56 × 46 mm, but the images on the film now measures about 57 × 47 mm, possibly due to the aforementioned shrinkage. The Lumière large format projector was not functional in time for the Paris Exposition Universelle, which is why 35 mm served in its place. According to Serge Bromberg, in a presentation given at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, on February 15, 2020, the projector damaged film and could not be used. The Cinémathèque Française has a fragment of a print of film by Lumière showing a street with the Eiffel Tower in the background. The 1.2:1 aspect ratio frame has eight circular perforations on each edge of the 75 mm wide film. Lumière does not tell us if the large format was publically projected at a later date, but he does state that the project was abandoned in 1905. At the aforementioned presentation, Bromberg screened restorations made from 8K scans, made directly from the negatives, of four of the Lumières’ 75  mm films. The images, which were superb, were played back from a DCP file using a DMD projector. Also at the Paris Exposition Universelle, Cinéorama used (or planned to use) ten 70  mm projectors to cover a large cylindrical surface, in effect the motion picture equivalent of Robert Baker’s panorama, which stationed its observers on a central platform to view a sprawling cylindrical mural. For Cinéorama the mockup of a hot air balloon gondola served as the platform, and the ten tiled 70 mm projections served as a mural in motion. Filmmaker and inventor Raoul Grimoin-­Sanson was probably the first to attempt a motion picture flight simulator, whose subject was the balloon’s ascent from the Tuileries Gardens. Unfortunately its exhibition seems to have been canceled for safety reasons, as described in chapter 60. In 1914 the finale of the Italian film Il Sacco di Roma (The Sacking of Rome) was exhibited in a 70  mm Panoramica (or Panoramico). The frame’s dimensions were 58 mm × 23 mm, having a 2.52:1 aspect ratio; the Panoramico camera was designed by Filoteo Alberini, co-founder of one of Italy’s early film production companies, Alberini e Santoni (Tümmel 1973). According to Katz (2013), the process was stereoscopic, but this characterization is probably mistaken and may be based on the fact that Panoramica was also called Auto-stereoscopio. Film format specialist Sherlock (1997) tells us that another 70 mm format developed by Alberini circa 1922 used a camera with a horizontally swiveling lens, to cover a 60° field of view, a concept borrowed from still camera technology.1 At the time

Sherlock points out that the technology of the Panoramico, and the later Widescope camera, used these USPs: 1,318,348; 1,371,218; 1,392,475; 1,447,173; 1,462,784; 1,555,824; 1,556,903; 1,693,722; and 1,837,467. 1 

57  The Shape of Screens to Come

Fig. 57.6  The Lumière 75 mm format.

designing a wide angle lens fast enough for cinematography may have been difficult, which led the inventor to consider a swiveling lens solution. Panoramic scanning-type slit cameras have been offered for still photography such as the Cirkut of 1902, which rotates in the horizontal while the film is continuously advanced past a vertical slit. The Panon and Widelux use another approach with a lens that rotates through its nodal point about a vertical axis making an exposure that sweeps film wrapped around the section of a cylinder, through a kind of funnel ending in a slit (Kingslake 1992). It’s hard to see how either type could be made to work for cinematography, but Elms, as noted in chapter 58, attempted the same approach, and Cinerama inventor Waller patented such a design (as has Douglas Trumbull.) As noted above, there are several ways to improve image quality for theatrical big screen projection: through improvements in film stock; improvements in optics; improvements in lamphouse design; the use of a larger format; photography with a larger format reduction printed to 35 mm; or the projection of adjoining 35 mm frames, such as the Polyvision triptych, designed by Debrie and used by

57  The Shape of Screens to Come

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Fig. 57.7  A poster for Raoul Grimoin-Sanson’s Cinéorama balloon ride simulator, 1900. (Cinémathèque Française)

Abel Gance for the 1927 Napoléon, which filled a wide screen for panoramic or “split” screen and collage effects. With the exception of Polyvision, until the end of the 1920s, such efforts seem to have lain fallow. 35 mm was projected using a wide angle lens to fill a bigger screen when spectacle was the abiding concern with image degradation of

secondary importance. In the ­mid-­1920s this approach was the basis for Magnascope and Fantom Screen, as we shall learn in the next chapter. But the most effective way to achieve big wide screen projection is to use a bigger frame, and Hollywood’s tentative experiment with formats bigger than 35 mm is discussed next.

58

Grandeur et al.

In the late 1920s independent inventors and the studios explored the possibility of big screen exhibition while retaining the 35 mm infrastructure. In the foothills of the sound era between 1926 and 1928, both Paramount and MGM found ways to increase the size of the screen to enhance the spectacle of selected scenes. Paramount’s Magnascope, intended for adding impact to a film’s action sequences, was publically unveiled for Old Ironsides on December 6, 1926, in New York City, at the Rivoli Theater. On cue the screen dramatically increased from 18 ft × 12 ft to 40 ft × 30 ft, aided by the technique of inventor Lorenzo del Riccio as described in USP 1,646,855, Motion Picture Exhibiting, filed January 24, 1927. The patent describes a system of pulleys for changing the size of screen masking to accompany the switch to a second projector with a short focal length lens to enlarge the 35  mm print. An account of two-projector Magnascope is given by the Supervisor of Projection of Publix Theaters, a Paramount subsidiary, H. Rubin, who verifies the use of the approach “for the showing of certain scenes in Old Ironsides…” (Rubin 1928). The Magnascope process, in a later version, used a single projector, as described in USP 1,879,737, Projection Apparatus, filed Dec 22, 1928, also by del Riccio. This patent discloses an appliance bolted to the front of the projector to hold a pivoting afocal auxiliary lens attachment that, when moved into place in the projection lens’s optical path, increased screen magnification. This simplification would have been more attractive for neighborhood theaters than the two projector systems. While it would have been off-putting for smaller theaters, the two-projector version would not have been a stretch for a movie palace since they had the resources to have the projectors required for both Magnascope and to maintain changeover capability. Once a theater had the single-projector Magnascope attachment installed, there may have been little to inhibit its manager from projecting the entire feature on an oversized screen, resulting in less sharp and grainier images, as reported by Carr and Hayes (1988), who had personal knowledge of the practice. Circa 1930 it was so widespread that the studios implored the

exhibitors to desist, and cinematographer Gilbert Warrington suggested composing features for the 2:1 aspect ratio. Magnascope was also used for the exhibition of Chang, a 1927 Paramount film featuring wild animals, produced by the team of Merian C.  Cooper and Ernest B.  Schoedsack, who would go on to produce King Kong. In the same year the process was used for key areal sequences in William Wellman’s compelling Wings. Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, released in 1930, also used Magnascope for sequences of aerial combat. These efforts by the studios demonstrated their interest in big screen projection while conservatively continuing on with 35 mm. Hell’s Angels had begun production as a silent film in 1927, but dialogue scenes were added for its release. Under Hughes’ supervision, impresario Sidney Patrick Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, on Hollywood Boulevard, had a dozen new Western Electric speakers installed, and its Powers projectors replaced by six Super Simplex machines. All told six Simplex machines were required for changeovers: two for picture, two for the dialog and music track, and two for an effects track that used theater rattling amplification for the sounds of aircraft and explosions (Crafton 1997). For certain key scenes of Hell’s Angels, the screen was expanded from 24  ft  ×  18  ft to 37 ft × 24 ft and the 35 mm 1.33:1 screen aspect ratio was widened to 1.54:1 through cropping. Magnascope inventor del Riccio also devised the 56 mm Magnafilm with a camera aperture aspect ratio of 2.18:1 and a screen aspect ratio of 2.0:1, for Paramount, which used a camera built by French manufacturer André Debrie. The process, designed to be projected with a modified 35  mm projector, was previewed for the industry on July 25, 1929, at the Rialto Theater in Manhattan, where it was projected on a 40 ft × 20 ft screen (Coe 1981). Magnafilm was abandoned after this single demonstration probably because the image suffered from darkened edges. Since the vignetting occurred in the photography, the demonstration did not necessarily demonstrate the infeasibility of converting existing 35 mm projectors to accept the format, which had been its major selling point, according to Sherlock (1997). After the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_58

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58  Grandeur et al.

Fig. 58.1  From the USP, Paramount’s Magnascope, by inventor Lorenzo del Riccio, used two 35 mm projectors, one with a standard lens (7) and one with a wide angle lens (12), the latter for throwing a magnified image onto a bigger screen as the surround’s masking was adjusted.

Fig. 58.2  André Debrie’s 56 mm Magafilm camera built for Paramount, and a clip of the film it shot. (Not to scale) (Cinémathèque Française)

u­nsuccessful demonstration of Magnafilm Paramount announced it would use Universal’s Magnachrome 65 mm process, but Magnachrome was also abandoned. (Paramount made a short film in both 65 mm and 35 mm titled Fair and Square Ways.) Both Universal and Paramount played minor roles during the big screen wide aspect ratio boomlet of 1929–1930. The concept of preserving much of the 35 mm infrastructure, while adding to frame size did not die, for in 1931 it was suggested, by a working group of the SMPE, that one approach to provide an increase in image quality was to convert existing projectors to handle 50  mm film (Hardy 1931).

A somewhat similar approach, but designed to maintain the size of the 35 mm frame while adding room for an optical track, had been put forth by Tri-Ergon as described in USP 1,825,598, Process for Producing Combined Sound and Picture Films, filed March 29, 1922, by Hans Vogt, Joseph Massolle, and Josef Engl. They proposed modifying existing projectors so that the original Edison 35  mm silent frame was preserved by adding 7-mm-to the width of the film, for optical track, thereby widening the film to 42  mm, which required some projector modifications but not to the sprockets. This modification was made to some projectors in Germany (see chapter 30), while the approach taken by the American film industry was to retain the 35  mm width by placing the optical track between a row of perforations and the frame, thereby reducing the frame’s width. The size of the frame was further reduced to preserve the screen aspect ratio, not the best approach if the goal was to maintain image quality. It’s possible that this reduction in image area contributed to the interest in large formats that immediately followed the introduction of optical sound. To compete with Magnascope, MGM engineers Joseph Vogel and J. J. McCarthy designed a variable magnification lens (or attachment) to increase the size of the image that avoided the need for a second projector, or the momentary interruption caused by swinging an attachment into place in front of a lens. The process was called Fantom Screen and was used for Trail of ’98, one of the last silent blockbusters. MGM had invested heavily in this saga of the Klondike Gold Rush and hoped that Fantom Screen would allow it to compete with all-talking films released with lip sync sound. Trail

58  Grandeur et al.

of ’98 premiered at the Astor Theater in New York on March 20, 1928. When Grauman exhibited the film at his Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, in May of that year, he mounted a “Yukon Nights” saloon themed stage show with vaudeville acts as a prologue. Grauman must have relished producing this stage spectacle because as a boy, in 1898, he had gone gold prospecting in the Yukon with his father (Pawlak 2012). The segue between the stage show and the film was enhanced with a northern lights effect using Brenkert theatrical projectors, as the saloon divided in half to reveal the image projected on a screen that grew in size as it moved toward the audience and changed masking, a transition requiring many of the theater’s 30 stagehands. Fantom Screen was deployed for the Chilkoot Pass avalanche and for a scene involving the protagonists crossing rapids. The original 24 ft × 18 ft screen became enlarged during its forward journey to 37 ft × 28 ft (WS: Grauman’s Chinese). This is a latter day version of a technique that was used in the late 1700s by Robertson for his Fantascope magic lantern shows. Almost two decades later, a process like Magnascope or Fantom Screen was used for a green-tinted storm scene, projected in some first-run houses, for the exhibition of William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jenny, when producer David O. Selznick felt the need to add spectacle to the 1948 film. The quality of the projected motion picture image is, for one thing, a result of the mechanical design of the camera and the projector, and in particular the precision of their intermittent movements, or the accuracy with which they are able to index or register each frame. Without the ability to register each frame in the same relative position in the gate of the projector, the image will be unsteady, one that can be seen to jump up and down or weave side-to-side, and such motion, even if not noticeable in and of itself, will cause a reduction in sharpness by blurring image points. For the same size screen, a larger format provides the ability to produce a steadier and sharper image because frame unsteadiness is less magnified. Motion picture engineers implicitly subscribe to the maxim that a quality motion picture image is one that conceals its structure, and for that reason, in the 1920s, they advised theater owners to restrict screen widths to less than 20 ft, as has been noted earlier in these pages. Magnascope and Fantom Screen may have been effective gimmicks for brief passages, but by exceeding a screensize limit, the 35 mm frame could not produce optimum results for the duration of an entire feature length film. The way to achieve a good looking image on a big screen is with a bigger frame, and that meant a new format with a new infrastructure including new cameras and projectors. In addition to registration, more image area provides greater pictorial quality because the frame can store more information, which allows for better gradation or a smoother gray scale and possibly higher contrast with detail in ­shadows

513

and highlights, finer grain, brighter projection, and the overall appearance of greater sharpness. Projector designers and projectionists flirted with burning the film in the gate in the quest for a brighter image, a problem that could be mitigated using a larger frame. As noted in the last chapter, the image seen on a theater screen was projected by a fourth-­generation copy, the release print, but by beginning with a larger negative, the diminution in screen quality caused by successive duplications could be mitigated. These technical factors, coupled with the drive of showmen to express spectacle on a bigger canvas, account for the interest in larger formats, especially for exhibition in the money making theater palaces with their thousands of seats. In the late 1920s, in addition to the use of a larger format, attempts were made to achieve spectacle by using more than one 35 mm projector to project contiguous images to fill wider screens. Widescope and Polyscope (both described below) increased screen area by abutting two or three 35 mm frames; in the early 1950s, the tryptic Cinerama became a commercial success. As the 1920s drew to a close William Fox, whose adventures are recounted in chapter 37, became the major proponent of the big format with his Fox Grandeur process. Fox was different from his fellow self-made moguls by actively pursuing technological advances as a way to build his empire. Although his was the third entry into the big format field in 1929, preceded by RCA’s Spoor-Berggren process, and Paramount’s Magnafilm, his Grandeur process led the pack (News of the Industry 1929). Fox, like his colleagues, had bootstrapped his way from nickelodeon operator to running an exchange and becoming a studio boss. Fox saw technology as a way to surpass the rest of the industry, a way to become cinema’s king. Fox also envisioned the creation of a giant studio and exhibition empire by combining the MGM and Fox studio assets. In Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, having felt the impact of radio on theatrical cinema attendance, looked beyond that to the threat of television, a view he held two decades before the other studio bosses. Fox told Sinclair (1933): “I reached a conclusion that the one thing that would make it possible to compete with television was to use a screen that was ten times larger than the present screen….” His fellow studio heads generally lacked enthusiasm for new technology and were more likely to avoid the risk that comes with innovation, which might be viewed as a paradoxical attitude in a business in which each new product, a movie, involves the substantial risk inherent in a product whose fate is sealed by the whim of the public on one weekend, after what may have been years of development and major investment. But was this a propitious moment in which to create a new large format infrastructure? The industry was in the process of converting its studios and theaters to sound as the Great Depression struck, and it was in hock to the hilt. But like it or not, the other studio bosses

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found themselves competing with an aggressive William Fox who was goading them to follow him in another costly ­direction. It was Fox striking again for he had been, to a major extent, responsible for the introduction of optical sound. Fox’s technology initiatives took place on three fronts: Fox Movietone sound, Fox Nature Color,1 and Fox Grandeur. The Grandeur initiative was linked to his theater strategy: in order to compete with the major studios, he needed his own grand movie palaces, the first-run theaters that had the greatest seating capacity and produced the most revenue. It wasn’t the number of theaters that mattered, a relatively small number would do, but they had to be the right kind of prestigious revenue producing theaters. Some were picture palaces built for the purpose and others were converted vaudeville houses; Fox sought to acquire the best performing houses, the biggest theaters that needed the biggest screens. The 35 mm format restricted screen size and limited the possibility of event pricing in these theaters, which had provided the motivation for Paramount’s Magnascope and MGM’s Fantom Screen, but Fox sought to address the issue with something grander, Grandeur. Fox’s dream was to combine three modalities, color, sound, and the big wide screen, to create the most spectacular exhibition in high revenue-generating picture palaces, and he nearly succeeded. In addition to his lust for business acquisitions, his technology thrust would undoubtedly establish his dominance, and he would surely become the number one Hollywood mogul by dint of innovation and spectacle. He longed for the day that audiences would sit spellbound in a Fox movie palace looking at a gigantic wide screen image in color with the best synchronized optical sound the industry had to offer, all of which involved technology he owned or licensed, to be developed into products by his unusually able technology leader, Earl I. Sponable. In the early 1920s, an interesting approach for big screen projection was invented by John D. Elms who sought to preserve the 35 mm format, but unlike Magnascope and Fantom Screen, Elms’ invention had the possibility of good image quality on a wide screen. The camera lens of Elms’ Widescope system is described in USP 1,447,173, Lens-Focusing Device, filed July 23, 1921. Elms used a double camera consisting of two side-by-side mechanisms. Both frames were exposed simultaneously, on two reels of 35  mm negative using two close together but, oddly enough, vertically stacked cameras and lenses that were angled to create a wide field of view diptych. The process attempted to create a wide aspect ratio big screen process that stayed within the 35 mm infrastructure for both cinematography and projection. For Fox Nature Color is sometimes incorrectly called Natural color, and Sherlock reminds me that the carrying case for the Stein-built Grandeur Nature Color camera, at the ASC clubhouse in Hollywood, is marked Nature Color. 1 

58  Grandeur et al.

exhibition two 35 mm projectors were used to project adjacent images on a screen with a 2.66:1 aspect ratio. Widescope had similarities to the yet-to-be-invented Cinerama, since both preserved the 35  mm format and both required the seamlessly blending of adjacent images. In this case, unlike Cinerama, the join was smack dab in the middle of the screen and the visual field, as is evident from the illustration in the Transactions of the SMPE article written by Elms (1922). At the time of the demonstration that Elms put on for the SMPE, he had not come up with a method for properly blending the vertical join where the two images met. Additionally, he offered no way to overcome the impossibility of close-up in part due to the vertically offset lenses. In 1927 Elms described a swiveling dual single-lens system he called also Widescope, designed to capture a wide field of view using a single film, rather than the two he previously demonstrated, but in his disclosure he only described the lens mechanism and failed to explain the overall process and what he hoped to achieve with it, stating vaguely that it is one “having valuable attributes in the taking of motion pictures.” The invention is described in USP 1,783,463, Motion Picture Camera, filed April 10, 1928. According to Sherlock a public showing of Widescope using 57 mm film shot with the swiveling lens took place November 7, 1926, at the Cameo Theater in New York. (In a comment to me Sherlock notes that there is an unconfirmed contemporary report that Elms acquired technology from the previously mentioned Alberini.) Fox, after being favorably impressed by a Widescope demonstration projection of Niagara Falls, purchased Elms’ patents and assigned Sponable to investigate his inventions. Sponable studied Elms’ methods and deemed them to be unwieldy, and so he developed his own ideas about how to achieve big screen projection. This led to the creation of Fox Grandeur, a 70  mm process that improved both image and sound quality and enabled big screen projection, a step in the direction of Fox’s domination of the theatrical motion picture industry by means of the most advanced technology. Fox formed the Fox Grandeur Corporation with Harley L. Clarke, to thereby control it and isolate it from his studio holdings. Sponable designed the format including specifications for the film, track, perforators, printers, splicers, camera, and projector (Richardson 1929, p. 34). In 1929 he asked the Mitchell Camera Corporation to build a 70 mm camera, a scaled-up version of the Mitchell standard. Fox paid $13,000 for the first Grandeur camera and $8500 for each of two that were subsequently ordered, after which Sponable reportedly gave Mitchell a verbal order for another 50. Fox recounted a meeting he had with Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount, and David Sarnoff, head of RCA (to whom the studio head of RKO reported), in which they told him that: “I was about to make a great mistake: the industry had just changed from silent to sound; a great inventory had to be

58  Grandeur et al.

Fig. 58.3  A Mitchell FC 70 mm Grandeur camera. (Richard Bennett, CineGear.com)

wiped down (silent films in the can written off) and we were just about catching our breath, and here I was trying to upset it again. I was calling it progress and they were calling it destruction.” The term often used to describe what Fox is talking about is “creative destruction,” which was coined by the Austrian economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1943). Harley L.  Clarke, Fox’s business partner in Grandeur, owned a controlling interest in the International Projector Company, manufacturer of the Simplex brand and 75 percent of all the 35 mm projectors in the world. International was going to make the Grandeur 70 mm projector and obviously, as noted, the system needed a 70 mm camera. Clarke went behind Fox’s back and bought the Mitchell Camera Company. Fox was furious when he found out; in a settlement with Clarke he wound up with an interest in the Grandeur organization and Mitchell ownership, with Clarke retaining his interest in International. Fox joined George Alfred Mitchell and Henry Boeger on the Mitchell board to help manage the company. The first 70  mm camera production units, per Sponable’s specifications, were delivered to the Fox-Case Corporation in May 1929. In 1930 four more went to MGM for their Realife branded process, and one to a company called Feature Productions. These 70  mm cameras were called the Mitchell FC, possibly to designate Fox-Case or Fox Camera. Mitchell FC production was halted because Grandeur and other large format films failed at the box office. The canceled order for 50 FC’s resulted in Mitchell suing the Fox Film Corp. for non-payment of the cameras (WS: Mitchell Camera; Mitchell Camera Corp v. Fox Film Corp…,

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1937). In fact, it was William Fox, the owner of Mitchell, who was suing the studio he had once controlled (Krefft 2017, p. 474). The Grandeur format had about 2.5 times the area of the silent 35  mm frame and about 3.4 times the area of the Academy frame. Sherlock (in private communication) notes that there are several contradictory published specifications for the format.2 The camera aperture was 1.920  ×  0.926 in, which is about 23.52 × 48.77 mm, giving a 2.07:1 aspect ratio. The projector aperture was 1.811  ×  0.906 in, or 46.00  ×  23.01  mm, giving a 2.00:1 aspect ratio. Sponable increased the width of the 35 mm Movietone variable density track from its 2 mm to 6.1 mm, according to Sherlock, while other sources give the width as 7 mm (probably a 6.1 mm track width within a 7  mm container). Grandeur maintained 35 mm’s four perforations to a frame, even though the frame was taller, but the perforations were bigger and their pitch was greater. Initially, presumably to preserve the standard set by 35  mm’s 90  ft per minute running rate, Grandeur ran at 19.3 fps, a poor choice in terms of image sampling and sound quality, for a format designed to provide a superlative experience on a wide screen. However, there may have been another motivation for initially favoring a lower speed, namely, the 70 mm Grandeur Fox Nature Color cameras, built to use the color system that Fox was licensing from Kodak. These cameras, built by Stein, ran film at twice the usual linear rate to create their above and below bichromatically analyzed pairs of images frames. Although release was planned to use duplitized subtractive prints running at half the rate of cinematography, photography would have involved using twice as much film at twice the linear rate. The 19.3 fps rate may have been chosen to keep the camera film’s running rate within bounds for either economical or mechanical reasons, but Grandeur and Fox Color were never used together for a feature. The speed was increased to 24 fps with a running rate that was 20% faster than 35 mm (Gitt 2007). The additional track width may have been capable of producing an optical sound track with lower noise and a greater dynamic range, and the higher rate past the sound head may have been able to improve the high frequency response. It seems obvious today that the additional width could have been used for multi-­track sound, which became a vital component of big screen projection in the early 1950s, but Sponable was thinking of using a directional sound system based on a single channel with cues notched into the prints’ edges, engaged by spring loaded feelers. The single track was to be directed to different speakers located behind the screen, as described in his USP 1,851,117, Moving Talking Picture Apparatus, filed January 17, 1929, which is quite possibly the first invention to embody this concept. This is similar to the widely used Perspecta system of a quarter century later, which is described in chapter 39. Published dimensions for film formats all too often differ.

2 

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58  Grandeur et al.

Fig. 58.4  The Grandeur 70 mm format (right) compared with the Movietone 35 mm format (left). Grandeur kept the four perfs per frame used by 35 mm but they were bigger with a longer pitch. These frames were reconstructed from a Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 print and other sources.

The 70  mm projector was designed and hand-built by Simplex, a 1600 pound machine that used a 150 amp arc (Cameron 1953). According to Carey Williams (WS: in70mm.com), only seven of them were made; three went to New York’s Roxy Theatre and three to Los Angeles’ Carthay Circle Theatre, and presumably the studio needed one. The projector lenses were designed and built by Bausch & Lomb who also designed a special condenser system to create an elliptical rather than circular area of illumination to better cover and optimize the brightness of the wide frame. The projector had a disk shutter located between the light source and the gate, rather than in front of the lens as had been common in the silent era, which allowed for better frame and gate cooling since they received less heat permitting a higher amperage arc for a brighter image. The 70 mm Simplex also had a rotating turret to facilitate changing projection lenses. The Grandeur process was premiered at the Gaiety Theatre on Broadway September 17, 1929. The screening included travelogue footage of Niagara Falls, a Fox newsreel and Fox Movietone Follies of 1929. The screen size of the Gaiety was limited by its proscenium to 35 ft × 17 ft, which I estimate had 60% more area than the original screen. On February 13, 1930, Fox released the first Grandeur narrative feature, Happy Days, a musical, which was reasonably profitable (Limbacher 1968). Mistakenly, Fox told Sinclair that the first Grandeur feature was Sunny Side Up, released in 1930, which he said: “…was hailed as a great success.” The next Grandeur film was The Big Trail, released in October 1930, directed by Raoul Walsh, starring John Wayne. Only two theaters in the country were equipped with Simplex Grandeur projectors, the Roxy in New York and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson found it a challenge to source lenses good enough to capture the detail of the great

vistas he was photographing on 70 mm Eastman Type Two Panchromatic film. Bausch & Lomb created at least one new Baltar lens design for the camera, with a 75 mm focal length. (For decades Baltar was a highly respected line of lenses for 35  mm cameras.) Edeson’s camera crew of 38 was only a part of the massive production. The opening shot of The Big Trail depicted 40 cowboys trekking to the distant hills, 200 wagons, and 1700 cattle. The film’s box office failure derailed Wayne’s career for a decade (Eyman 2014). Grandeur films were simultaneously shot in 35 mm to enable wider release, but the next film shot in Grandeur, Song o’ My Heart, was released in March 1930, only in 35 mm; it did not do well at the box office. At the time Fox was borrowing money to allow him to buy a controlling interest in MGM, but because of the Crash of 1929 and the hostility, scheming, and intransigence of business associates and lenders, as he told the tale to Upton Sinclair (1933), he lost control of his studio, which contributed to Grandeur’s demise. Production of the most expensive Fox film to that time costing $1.76 million, The Big Trail, began shooting only 11 days after Fox lost his ownership of the studio that had been taken over by the duplicitous Harley Clarke. Rather than expand the Grandeur footprint by turning 20 Fox theaters into Grandeur theaters, Clarke made the bewildering decision to turn them into indoor miniature golf courses. Fox was furious at Clarke’s participation in his fall from power, and still owning a 50% ownership in Grandeur, Inc., as its co-owner tormented Clarke with a series of legitimate business maneuvers, causing Clarke to sour on Grandeur and close down the project. The Fox Studio never made another Grandeur film. Although The Big Trail lost more than a million dollars, it was a critical success, and it is part of the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry of

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Fig. 58.5  Sponable’s USP cover sheet for what may be the first suggestion for a single channel optical track with directional cues, in this case using indentations on the print’s edges sensed by spring loaded feelers during projection.

“cultural, historical or aesthetically significant” American films that are recommended for preservation (Krefft 2017). Not to be left behind, when large format still held out the hope of becoming an accepted, Jack Warner announced the “wideangle 65  mm” Vitascope process (Quigley 1953). His studio remained enamored with Vitaphone, so the sound-on-­disk system was planned to be used for Vitascope at the moment it was being phased out and sound-on-film was replacing it.3 Vitascope was initially used as part of the live show, Larry Ceballos Review, and then for three 1930 films, Kismet, A Soldier’s Plaything, and Vitascope is the name used by Edison for marketing the Jenkins-Armat 35 mm projector of 1895.

3 

The Lash. The same year, United Artists released The Bat Whispers, reduction printed for release in 35 mm using a 2.0:1 aspect ratio, having been shot using their five perforations per frame 65 mm Magnifilm. That’s a name easily confused with Paramount’s still-born Magnafilm, and according to Sherlock, the ads for the New York City screenings called it Magnafilm, while later screenings in other cities called it Magnifilm, as did the credit on the prints. Sherlock believes that The Bat Whispers was shot with a Mitchell FC camera converted to the 65 mm format. 65 mm format Fearless Silent Super-Film (also known as Fearless Super-Film) cameras were built for some of the studios, which were used for only a few films in their heyday,

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58  Grandeur et al.

Fig. 58.6  Promotion for Fox’s 1930 Happy Days, with the headline: “Grandeur Film Makes Debut at Fox Carthay Circle Theatre.” The article states: “Grandeur is said to further lessen the gap between illusion and real life. It’s sponsors claim for it that it gives stereoscopic or third-­ dimensional effects, together with the magnification of distance…The film…permits of a wider and more deeply etched sound track which is said to give a more perfect reproduction of the human voice. The new invention is shown on a triple vision screen of unprecedented proportions which fills the entire proscenium arch….” (Hollywood Filmograph, March 1, 1930)

but were resurrected for the Thomas Color process in the 1940s, and for the Todd-AO production of Oklahoma! in the mid-1950s, at which time half a dozen were taken out of storage and refurbished. MGM used (or planned to use) Mitchell FC Grandeur cameras rebranded as Realife and Simplex projectors for their 1930 Billy the Kid, directed by King Vidor. However, the film was not released in 70 mm. Belton asserts that MGM made 35 mm reduction prints from 70 mm, but according to Sherlock, there is no evidence that this is the case, and it is likely that the 35 mm release prints were shot on 35 mm. MGM’s 1931 The Great Meadow may have been the last film photographed in Realife, but it was exhibited only in 35 mm. In 1929 George K. Spoor and P. John Berggren’s Natural Vision 63.5 mm system was used in cooperation with RKO for filming a snippet of a Broadway show, Lady Fingers, which was demonstrated at New  York’s Gramercy Studio and attended by RKO executives and the press; the image was projected on a screen 52 ft × 30 ft. The New York Times critic wrote: “Gargantuan in size, with life-like figures of a dozen chorus girls singing their songs…There was a spontaneous outburst of applause from the audience” (Koszarski 2008). In 1930 RKO released the feature Danger Lights, along with the short Niagara Falls, in Natural Vision, which

had limited engagements in a few theaters in New York and Chicago (Dewey 2016). In 1936, several years after Grandeur et al. had come and gone, Spoor soldiered on with Natural Vision, but failed to attract interest with his big format demonstration footage of Niagara Falls (Motion Picture Herald 1936, vol. 123, p. 27). Some sources state the process was stereoscopic, but it may have been confused with its early 1950s namesake, the process that sparked an important stereoscopic cycle. Limbacher’s curious account has it that Spoor’s process attempted to produce a volumetric stereoscopic effect by using “two screens  – one transparent and one opaque  – which made the image free from distortion no matter where it was viewed in the theater” (Limbacher 1968). Sherlock comments that Spoor also showed the Niagara Falls short at the Spoor Spectaculum Theater at the Chicago Fair in 1933. The showing at the Mosque Theater in New Jersey, in 1936, was supposed to last 8 days, but closed after the first day because Spoor failed to pay the theater’s crew. USP 1,980,600, Motion Picture Projecting Machine, filed December 14, 1932, by G.  K. Spoor of Chicago, teaches shooting a stream of gas under pressure at the center of the projected frame, as it comes to rest in the gate to prevent movement and vibration (and maybe for cooling).

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Fig. 58.7  A poster for The Big Trail, 1930.

In March 1930, an English engineer came up with a precocious alternative, Fulvue, which preserved the 35 mm format; it used anamorphic lenses for cinematography and projection. Fulvue was designed by George Ford and offered by the firm Watson & Sons, and like CinemaScope of a bit more than two decades in the future, it doubled the width of the screen. The Fulvue process was demonstrated and well received by the technical press in England. Similar 35 mm systems were demonstrated in the United States by the Victor Talking Machine Company and also by the C.  P. Goerz American Optical Company, the latter’s anamorphics were designed by H.  Sidney Newcomer and offered under the Ciné-Panor brand. None of these efforts made any impact on the theatrical film industry at the time (Coe 1981). In May 1930, following the example of the 1927 Five Cornered Agreement, an attempt to address the untidy introduction of competing sound systems (see chapter 35), the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) sought to tamp down the turmoil caused by what it viewed to be the precipitous introduction of large format

cinema; a cynical view would have it that they were simply throwing a monkey wrench into the works. The situation was in flux even within some studios whose technicians were experimenting with different formats. Representatives of the studios met at the Hays Motion Picture Production Code office and agreed that no wide film standard would be agreed upon until there was a recommendation from an independent expert. In fact, no recommendation was required, because in December 1930, in response to the disappointing box office results of so many large format features, the MPPDA and the Hays Office declared a 2 year moratorium on all new releases, which turned into a two decade long hiatus (Belton 1992). It’s possible that a plateau of new technology fatigue had set in, due to the conversion to sound, which caused filmmakers and studios to reevaluate ways of looking at the esthetics of narrative cinema, and required a substantial financial investment that resulted in a shift in studio ownership and control. The studios had also recently experienced the difficulties of dealing with an inventory of unreleased silent films, and if they went ahead with adding a new format they would

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be confronted with a similar vexing challenge. A silent film awaiting release could be augmented with an effects and music track and added dialog sequences, but audiences rapidly got tired of that approach and demanded all-talkies. Which suggested another vexing problem: What to do with a film shot in 35  mm in an exhibition environment in which audiences clamored for 70mm? The exhibitors, in many cases independently owned, were emerging from being saddled with “wiring for sound,” which cost about $20,000 for a big theater. Few of them were enthusiastic about additional spending, which would have been $3000 to $4000 for a new projector (two required for changeover), plus the new screen and possible costs to address upgrading the sound system, and other issues arising from a big wide screen’s compatibility with a theater’s architecture. Moreover, the transition to the big wide screen would have occurred during the deepening Great Depression, which by the early 1930s was financially impacting theatrical filmmaking. It may be that at that moment the industry, along with the rest of society, began to fully grasp the seriousness of situation with the prospects of a lengthy recovery. Another deterrent to big format films was that they cost more to produce, which was not simply attributable to film stock costs. The big screen, it was assumed, had to be filled with expensive to produce spectacle. Belton (1992) gives one explanation for the failure of the big formats: “…it was not so much the collapse on Wall Street as the poor showing of wide films at the box office that accounts for the demise of widescreen exhibition.” That the perceived quality of the films is the cul-

58  Grandeur et al.

prit is supported by the fact that they also did poorly in their 35 mm versions, but additional factors like the lack of format standardization cannot be discounted. An interregnum of more than two decades followed with screen size and aspect ratio remaining as they had been, during which time there was no challenge to the 35 mm standard. In the early to mid-1950s the initial films released in the new big screen processes were all, quite improbably, box office successes: Cinerama’s travelogue, This is Cinerama, twentieth Century Fox’s CinemaScope biblical epic The Robe, and ToddAO’s musical theater classic Oklahoma! (Even a terrible film like the 3-D Bwana Devil was a box office smash.) These money makers gave the studios and producers confidence to go forward with the new processes. After initial acceptance, each followed its own trajectory: Cinerama, the 35  mm triptych, although it endured for years, was complicated and unwieldy and was used for a handful of travelogues but only for two narrative features; CinemaScope forever changed motion picture exhibition in terms of screen size and aspect ratio, while preserving the 35 mm infrastructure; and Todd-AO revived large format technology to established 70 mm projection as a viable exhibition format that endured for many decades. In addition, the worthy alternative to Fox’s CinemaScope, Paramount’s VistaVision, used large negative cinematography reduction printed to a heavily cropped 35 mm frame to enable big screenwide aspect ratio projection; for the exhibitor, it involved only the relatively simple substitutions of a short focal length lens and a big screen. All of these processes had been foreshadowed by efforts initiated in 1929–1930.

Expanded Screen: The Interregnum Ends

In 1953 the expression expanded screen was used by author and publisher James R. Cameron for the big screen technologies that were making an enormous impact on the motion picture industry (Cameron 1953). At the same time, the stereoscopic cinema began a surge of popularity that some aficionados have called its Golden Age, as described in chapter 70. These technological disruptions had this in common: they sought to expand the cinema’s proficiencies beyond apparent motion, sound, and color, to create an experience with greater presence and spectacle. The early 1950s’ motivation for new cinema modalities was provoked by the growing popularity of small screen black and white television sets and televsion’s low production value programming. History was, in a way, repeating itself because attempts at big wide screen, at the end of 1929 into 1930, were partly motivated by radio’s increasing popularity, according to William Fox, explaining his motivation for Grandeur: “Prior to this (before radio’s popularity), on a rainy night our business would be larger than it would be on a clear night. When the radio came in, I made a careful observation and found that on rainy nights we were doing little or no business” (Solomon 2014, p. 95). Conditions were different in the early 1950s because the introduction of the big wide screen in 1929–1930 had followed hard on the heels of the industry’s deployment and the public’s acceptance of synchronized sound. The industry response to Fox’s push for a new big format for the production and exhibition of big wide screen cinema was cautious because the industry had just made the transition to sound and was wary of additional disruption, a concern that was exacerbated by the stress of the Great Depression. The big wide screen had received an unenthusiastic reception at the box office and remained on hold during the 1930s and 1940s, decades that otherwise saw steady technology advances that improved the cinema experience, but as far as the public was concerned, the technological advance that was most evident was the introduction of three-color Technicolor in the early 1930s. Disney’s multichannel Fantasound for the 1940 Fantasia undoubtedly had little impact on the public because its exhibition of multiple channel sound was confined to a

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few theaters. Other improvements such as better black and white film stock and sound recording moved forward but were less apparent than color or films projected on big screens or stereoscopically.1 Only in the early 1950s would the promise the Grandeur Era be fulfilled, to a large extent as a response to the motion picture industry’s significant slump in box office revenue in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. The literature attributes this to various economic and societal factors, but the cause given the most weight is the rise of television, which encouraged audiences to stay home to watch “free” entertainment (Edgerton 1981). In addition to the diversion of television, the ability to afford other leisure activities is also cited for the drop in attendance. On the other hand, during the Great Depression, at the time of the introduction of big format exhibition, attendance actually rose, which has been attributed to the idea that: “A major function of the cinema was a source of entertainment and a way for people to forget their troubles with stories that almost always had ‘happy endings’” (Pautz, 2002). Going to the movies was enormously popular during the Second World War, and between 1946 and 1948 weekly attendance peaked at between 80 and 90 million moviegoers, but thereafter began to drop at a time when there were only 3.9 million TV households. Five years later, there were almost eight times as many TV households, and cinema attendance had fallen to 40 million per week. This downward trend did not bottomed out until 1967–1968, with weekly attendance at 20 million. Edgerton’s (1981) compilation of yearly box office receipts shows a peak in 1946 at $1692 million bottoming out in 1963 at $942 million, and thereafter trending upward. With the introductions of the new processes described in this and the following chapters, each studio head was faced with questions: Were the new ways to make and project films a clue to the new direction? Was cinema now going to be based solely on novelty and spectacle? Should my studio proA bibliography of the motion picture technology of the period covered in this section was compiled by Krainock (1958).

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_59

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duce films using one of the new techniques, and if so which process? The issue of reviving attendance, by whatever means, with bigger screens or 3-D, was just one of the vexing issues facing the men who ran Hollywood. Another source of uncertainty and anxiety was the result of the Motion Picture Production code, an outdated 1930s self-­censorship initiative that originated as an industry effort to stave off government intervention to satisfy lay Catholic morality. Once religious strictures were a force to be reckoned with, but the public’s taste and values changed during the war. How to explain that the America motion picture industry, which to a large extent was founded by Jews, was making movies to conform to Catholic morality when they were, for the most part, attended by Protestants? The Code was out of touch with a population that had one way or another experienced the existential issues created by the Second World War. Movies, their content and treatment of the lives of Americans after the war, to remain relevant, had to keep up with the experiences of the audience and the changes in societal attitudes. Was the drop in attendance the result of a change in worldview that was not being reflected on the screen? Times were changing in yet other ways for the major studios, ways that might put a crimp in their revenue; they were now legally bound to end egregious business practices and thereby lose a safety net. The system of block booking, created in the earliest silent days by the European studios, had been introduced to Hollywood by Adolph Zukor (Dick 2001). This practice forced exhibitors to book movies that were obviously going to flop in order to have the right to book the best titles on a studio’s slate, thereby extending the risk of the producer to the exhibitor. This enforced booking encompassed newsreels, cartoons, and studio promotion, but the large theater chains, which were owned by the studios, were exempt from the practice. Despite the fact that the courts had found against the studios’ block booking practices beginning in the 1920s, the Roosevelt administration, as a result of a secret deal with MGM’s Washington lawyer, ignored the courts and failed to enforce the decisions. However, in the well-known judgment, U.S. vs. Paramount Pictures, of May 3, 1948, written by Justice William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court once and for all put an end to block booking and compelled the studios to divest their interest in the theater ownership (Schatz, 1999). Removing this sharp practice, which was very profitable, given that 85% of the major studio’s (or their holding company’s) revenue came from their theaters (Krefft, 2017), was another cause of uncertainty in a time of change. Difficult times were a magnet for innovation, and the early 1950s became a period in which technology, rather than content or movie stars, moved into the spotlight. It was a moment in which exhibitors and studio bosses became more open to innovation, a moment of heightened susceptibility to processes that intensified spectacle and could moti-

59  Expanded Screen: The Interregnum Ends

vate people to turn off the “boob tube” and go to the picture show. So it was that the early 1950s saw new cinematography, projection, and sound technology move from the lab to the theater; these technologies introduced in the early to mid1950s decisively changed the course of the celluloid cinema. But these transformations would not have been feasible without recent advances in color film technology that had been more than half a century in the making. A profound change in filmmaking began to take place with the introduction of the integral tripack negative-positive systems from General Aniline and Film with Ansco Color and Eastman Kodak with Eastman Color. When loaded with these new color films any movie camera became a color camera, and the industry was freed from the bottleneck and limitations of the Technicolor three-­strip camera. Cinerama, CinemaScope, 3-D, and Todd-AO would have been even more challenging to implement with the bulky Technicolor cameras. Technicolor had been the only high quality three-color motion picture system during the 1930s and 1940s, but the three-strip 35 mm Technicolor camera, which was in short supply, weighed 120 pounds loaded with film or about 900 pounds when blimped. For Cinerama, given its three-camera configuration, Technicolor would have been an absurdly awkward proposition, since a blimped Technicolor Cinerama camera might have weighed two tons. Moreover, the Cinerama camera design required its lenses to be close together, which could not be realized with Technicolor cameras. Similarly, Todd-AO’s 65/70 mm format would not have been viable without the new color camera films and print stocks. Even single camera 35 mm CinemaScope, in its original version with narrower perforations to allow for multiple magnetic sound tracks, would have been impossible to print using the Technicolor camera or its imbibition printing service. The spectacle that came with a bigger wider screen was the impetus for change leading to Cinerama, CinemaScope, and Todd-AO. No time in the history of the celluloid cinema was more stimulating, or of greater significance in terms of technology change. A dam had burst releasing a flood of innovation that transformed the nature of the motion picture medium. In chronological order, the key changes were color systems from Ansco and Kodak that enabled the innovations; Cinerama and its big deeply curved screen exhibited with multichannel magnetic sound; the Natural Vision stereoscopic system; Fox’s 35 mm anamorphic wide aspect ratio CinemaScope with magnetic stereophonic sound; Paramount’s VistaVision photographed with a double-frame 35  mm negative that was (usually) released in widescreen 1.85:1 35 mm; 65/70 mm Todd-AO and MGM’s Camera 65 and the identical Panavision 70 mm; and wide aspect ratio Technirama, based on VistaVision. What endured from these efforts was the establishment of two new aspect ratios, ‘Scope 2.40:1 and widescreen 1.85:1 (in the USA), and the

59  Expanded Screen: The Interregnum Ends

concomitant abandonment of the Edison 1.33:1 aspect ratio except for television. The 65/70  mm format became an accepted alternative for big screen projection with its 2.21:1 aspect ratio and six channel magnetic sound, and 35 mm cinematography became accepted as a source for 70 mm release. Stereophonic magnetic and directional optical sound were widely deployed for 35 mm exhibition. With the acceptance of the Eastman Color system, the three-strip Technicolor camera was retired, used for the last time in 1954 for Universal’s Foxfire. Although Technicolor’s hegemony as an end-to-end natural color service ended, its imbibition printmaking service flourished making prints from Eastman Color negatives. The introduction of Cinerama was one of the most impactful events in the history of the celluloid cinema; it can be

Fig. 59.1  A poster for This Is Cinerama, 1952.

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considered to be a descendent of Robert Barker’s panoramas and the various scrolling or moving panoramas that originated in Europe (Huhtamo 2013). It’s of interest to observe that the discursive scrolling panoramas of the eighteenth century were a storytelling medium, but the panoramic Cinerama established itself as a non-narrative medium, a cinema of travelogues, and in the process of doing so Cinerama became an instant commercial success. This Is Cinerama starred itself, the Cinerama process. It premiered on September 30, 1952, at the Broadway Theater in Manhattan and moved to the Warner Cinerama Theater in June 1953 for the rest of its almost 2.5-year New York run. I was 13 years old when I went to the Warner Cinerama Theater, sitting far from the screen in the cheap seats. Despite the lack of the wide screen’s peripheral vision effect from that distance, it

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59  Expanded Screen: The Interregnum Ends

Fig. 59.2  A poster for The Robe, 1953.

was still a thrill, maybe a contact high in response to the patrons down front, screaming during the roller coaster ride, or was I influenced by the screaming coming out of the speakers to my right, left, and behind me? The next event to shake up the film industry, another impressive box office success, Bwana Devil, followed hard on the heels of Cinerama. It opened on November 27  in two California Paramount theaters, one in Hollywood and the other in

downtown Los Angeles (Zone 2012). Bwana Devil was shot in the stereoscopic Natural Vision process that cobbled together two standard cameras for cinematography and two standard projectors for exhibition. A few months after my exposure to Cinerama I sat watching Bwana Devil at the Loew’s State Theater in Manhattan, wearing cardboard Polaroid eyewear that had an odd chemical smell, while shouting gleefully with the rest of the audience as spears

59  Expanded Screen: The Interregnum Ends

were hurled at us. So it would seem that screaming during a roller coaster ride or ducking spears had become a vital part of the expanded screen experience. The third new process to appear after the introductions of Cinerama and Natural Vision, directly challenged both but was, by contrast, easy to project. The wide aspect ratio CinemaScope that premiered a year after the introduction of Cinerama, on September 16, 1953, with 20th Century Fox’s The Robe at the Roxy Theatre in New York City. It was projected on a big mildly curved screen, unlike Cinerama’s that was deeply curved, and like Cinerama, it had multiple channel magnetic sound. It was a technological marvel, extending the 35  mm format’s capability with a big wide screen image and good quality four channel sound. Most importantly for the studio, The Robe was a box office hit and Fox strengthened its resolve to make the process ubiquitous, which it succeeded in doing within a decade. CinemaScope, like the two processes that preceded it, worked within the existing 35  mm infrastructure, and like them it required changes to projection methodology, but unlike its two competitors of the moment, CinemaScope required only one camera and ­projector. CinemaScope positioned itself as the best alternative to both Cinerama and 3-D, and the press went along by calling the process three-dimensional, when in fact movies have been three-dimensional beginning with Dickson’s first test footage, because projected images contain monocular depth cues, including motion parallax. The depth cue that was missing was the two-eye stereoscopic cue, so it could be truthfully said that both Cinerama and CinemaScope were three-dimensional, but not stereoscopic. A substantial effort was mounted by Fox to develop CinemaScope into a product, with its optics acquired by the studio from the independent French inventor, astronomer Henri Chrétien. Which process was most promising? Even had the studio bosses been analytical geniuses, there were many uncontrollable and unforeseeable variables to consider, the most

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important of which was public acceptance; only prescience could guarantee certainty. The theater owners, big chains and mom and pop operations, were also rightfully apprehensive about which of the processes would succeed, because backing one might mean a considerable investment down the drain if it was the wrong choice. A case in point was 3-D that rapidly lost steam and failed primarily because of complications in the projection booth; it was passé in only a year and a half. Had Cinerama endured as a tryptic, it would have stressed the studios and exhibitors because of its cumbersome implementation, but the studio heads had to take Cinerama seriously because it received good press and was making a lot of money in only a handful of specially equipped theaters. Cinerama had obvious technical flaws that one-time Cinerama investor and producer, Mike Todd, set out to cure by spearheading the development of Todd-AO, which took up where Grandeur et  al. left off. Showman Todd was responsible for the acceptance of the first viable alternative to the 35  mm format in the celluloid cinema’s history, as a result of which 70 mm exhibition thrived internationally for decades. Cinerama, Natural Vision 3-D, and Todd-AO were all independently developed, but Todd-AO, although developed ­ outside of the studio system, was derived from the studio-backed big format processes of 1929–1930. Cinerama is important to cinema history because its success influenced changes to the screen’s size and shape, and also sound. Its profitability and complexity provided the motivation for developing alternatives. The rise of Cinerama is an example of how the individual inventor, working without studio sponsorship, in an age with welldeveloped means for raising capital, found the wherewithal and had the ability to create a technology that disrupted an industry. The story of Cinerama, of how a new exhibition modality, created beyond the studio orbit, had a wide-ranging influence on cinema technology’s evolution, taken up in the next two chapters.

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This Is Cinerama

This book is a history of a technology that is evolving to meet a deep-rooted desire to create illusions whose goal is, one might suppose, to create a simulacrum indistinguishable from, or isomorphic, with the world. The two divergent and extreme methodologies deployed toward that end represent a paradox of size, employing tiny display screens in virtual reality headsets, reminiscent of a peepshow, or projecting images on enormous screens as an audience experience, reminiscent of the panorama. Here we consider the latter based on the desire to simulate the visual field on a giant surface. In 1894, few people peering into a Kinetoscope imagined that the 35  mm film within it would one day be used to project motion pictures in natural color, with synchronized sound, on a big screen. Early steps toward that end have been noted in these pages; the panorama, the moving panorama, and the diorama come to mind. The advent of projection combined with photography created the opportunity for inventors and showmen to move beyond painting for these kinds of representations of the visual world. Between 1859 and 1909, a number of ride or tour simulation concepts were described or even built, to project still or moving images, sometimes as panoramas on large curved screens (Liesegang 1986, pp.  72, 73). One can view such efforts as photographic versions of Robert Barker’s painted panoramas. In 1859 Thomas Sutton in England devised a limelight illuminated magic lantern to project concave slides, bowed toward the lens, to maintain focus over the curved field of a cylindrical screen; according to Liesegang: “Nothing is known of the outcome.” In 1892 Moëssard in Paris came up with the Cylindrographe-camera that used four slides and limelight magic lantern projectors to cover a 170° curved screen 8.5 by 2.1 m. Edge blending to hide the joins between the adjacent slides was attempted, using “shutter-screens” located between the limelight and the condenser. A patent filed September 24, 1894, USP 545,423, Stereopticon Panorama Machine, by Charles A.  Chase of Chicago, assigned to the Chase Electrical Cyclorama Company of Illinois, describes the use of 11 magic lanterns projecting on the inside of a 360° cylindrical screen. An

exhibition of the process took place on August 24 and 27 of 1894. The Chase panorama had a circumference of about 30 meters and was 10 m high. The 11 slides were photographed to overlap slightly for blending of the image’s edges by using vertical strips in the projector’s gate, spaced in front of the slides, to fade the illumination at the images’ edges. To adjust the blend, the strips were moved horizontally until it was observed that the combined adjacent images were melded unobtrusively a similar solution was devised for Cinerama to solve the same problem. D.  W. Noakes’ Noakescope magic lantern show of the late nineteenth century, was one of several such pre-celluloid cinema attempts at a ride or tour simulation. It used a quadurnial magic lantern to present a boat ride made up of a series of 220 hand-colored photographic slides. One slide dissolved or metamorphosed into the next to produce a flow of images to reproduce the experience of traveling through the canals of England, a presentation that was titled England Bisected by Steam Launch (Cook 1963). In 1898 in London, T.  W. Barber and C.  W. Locke created a still image panorama using a ten-lens system with 7¼ by 6½ inch glass slides, and suitable projectors to fill a screen with a circumference of 400 ft that was 40 ft high. Spectators viewed the screen on a platform midway between its top and bottom. A motion picture approach, the Cinéorama (Cinépanorama or Cinécosmorama), was patented in November 25, 1897, as FR 272,517, Nouvel appariel permettant de photographier et de projecter sur un écran circulaire des vues animées panoramiques en couleur par le Cinécosmorama Sanson (New device for photographing and projecting panoramic color animated views on a circular screen by the Cinécosmorama Sanson), by Frenchman Raoul GrimoinSanson (1860–1941). This simulator was designed to use ten 30 by 30 foot screens arranged to form the inside wall of a projection screen for a 360° panorama, using a setup much like Baker’s painted panorama. The building was decagonal, so the projection surface may have had the flat sections of painted walls. Cinéorama was meant to be viewed by a group of 150 people standing on a 10-m-diameter platform,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_60

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Fig. 60.1  The cover sheet of Chase’s USP for his Stereopticon Panorama Machine.

a mock balloon gondola replete with authentic rigging, with an actor playing the airship captain who narrated the flight. An ensemble of ten 70  mm cameras were arranged to shoot a 360° panoramic view from a balloon flight that rose to 1300  ft above the Tuileries Garden. The films were designed to be projected with ten synchronized projectors that for the descent may have been run in reverse, or optically printed backward, or the descent may have been photographed (Schneider 2006). Cinécosmorama was scheduled to be demonstrated at the 1900 Paris Universelle Exposition (Mannoni et al. 2000), but during a run-through one of the projectionists collapsed from exposure to the 115° heat and lost two fingers in the projection machinery, leading to the intervention of the authorities, who became concerned about the fire hazard presented by the collective heat of the projec-

tors’ arcs, reasonably so since the projection booth was located immediately beneath the audience’s ersatz gondola. Mannoni (communicated in conversation) believes that the show was canceled before it had a chance to open and was not presented publically, but Coe (1981) states four performances were given possibly over 4 days before having been shut down. Cinéorama may have been the first flight simulator, an attempt to create a style of entertainment that was later dubbed a phantom ride, as described below with regard to Hale’s Tours. Also at the 1900 Universelle Exposition in Paris, the Lumières projected still images on a screen in a circular building with their Photorama that used a film strip 90  cm by 11  cm wrapped around a cylinder with a 29  cm diameter. Twelve rotating lenses projected into mirrors sweeping the image onto the cylindrical screen. The lens-

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mirror ensemble spun at 3 rotations per second; thus 36 images per second were wiped onto the cylindrical screen’s surface, a rate high enough to mitigate flicker and produce the appearance of a continuous image. The illumination source was a 90 amp carbon arc. With the advent of a practical moving image technology, a new kind of simulator called the phantom ride made its appearance, in the spirit of Cinéorama’s evocation of a moving conveyance. The best known phantom ride was billed as Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World, promoted by the former fire chief of Kansas City, Missouri, George C. Hale (1849–1923). It used 35 mm cinematography and projection and became popular just before and after the turn of the century. Hale’s first concept was to run train cars through a tunnel on whose walls images were projected, like a theme or amusement park dark ride. But when the Pleasure Railway premiered at the 1904 St. Louis Exhibition it used a faux railway car, essentially a movie theater outfitted as a railroad ride simulator (Brown 1916). A conductor provided commentary, and sound effects like train bells clanging were added as enhancements (Everson 1998). The projection screen was at the front of the car showing a film shot from

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the cowcatcher of a locomotive. The sensation of a moving train was simulated by mechanically rocking the car, with wind effects added. Billy Bitzer (1973), who became D. W. Griffith’s cameraman, shot one of these phantom ride films, The Haverstraw Tunnel, using the 35  mm version of the Biograph camera modified to run an extended load. The Pleasure Railway toured the world, and in Britain it was licensed by Charles Urban. One of Hale’s operators, Adolph Zukor, produced The Great Train Robbery (1903); he founded the studio that became Paramount Pictures (Sherlock 1997). The triptych Polyvision was used for the 1927 film Napoléon, by French filmmaker Abel Gance (1889–1981), who only occasionally engaged the process’s panoramic potential (Cossar 2011). The hardware was built by André Debrie, consisting of three 35  mm projectors to produce a triptych image with an aspect ratio of 3.99:1. It has been asserted in the literature that MGM distributed Napoléon in February 1929, in an abridged version placing the “screens” adjacent to each within the 35 mm frame for single projector distribution, but Sherlock cannot find corroborating contemporary accounts. Napoléon has become an occasional event

Fig. 60.2  The Cinéorama balloon flight simulator was a motion picture panorama. The audience stood in a gondola to experience a huge cylindrical motion picture made up of ten adjoining 70 mm images projected from the booth beneath them.

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Fig. 60.3  From the cover sheet of the USP for Hale’s Pleasure Railway.

accompanied by a symphonic orchestra, as it was during the performance I saw conducted by Carmine Coppola at the San Francisco Opera House in the early 1980s. Polyvision, to some extent, anticipated the process that in the early 1950s became an inflection point in cinema technology history, Cinerama, a word that is just an acute accent and a vowel away from Grimoin-Sanson’s Cinéorama, although it was probably coined independently. Sherlock (1997) credits Polyvision as having given Henri Chrétien the idea of applying his anamorphic optics to wide screen. Attempts to create a panoramic motion picture simulacrum were continued using a single camera/projector optic, the Hypergonar anamorphic lens, the invention of French astronomer Henri Chrétien. The anamorphic lens, designed to increase the horizontal angle of view of camera and throw projection optics, is described in chapter 24. A film, Pour Construire un feu (To Build a Fire), by Claude Autant-Lara, which began shooting in 1927 but was not released until 1930, used the Hypergonar for several sequences. Chrétien’s anamorphic lens is of great importance since it became the basis for 20th Century Fox’s CinemaScope. At the International Exposition in Paris in 1937, Chrétien used two projectors equipped with anamorphic lenses purported to cover a 30 ft × 297 ft screen, an effort that will be further discussed in chapter 62 (Belton 1992). Cinerama grew out of the experience, creativity, and vision of an expert in motion picture technology, Frederic Waller, Jr. (1886–1954), a visionary inventor and dedicated sailor who, when feeling the need to get away from it all would take to the sea on his yawl. His interest in sailing led to his invention of the waterski (Aquaplane, USP 1,559,390, filed on Oct. 27, 1925), but his passion was cinematography. In the 1930s he “took over Paramount trick film department” where he became interested in wide-angle photography and what he perceived to be its heightened three-dimensional

effect (Belton 1992). Despite Waller’s attentiveness to wide-­ angle photography, and his growing awareness of “what ­dramatic improvement could be made with the use of peripheral vision,” he was unable to pursue this interest at Paramount. He expressed his dream quest in this quotation from his USP 2,280,206, filed September 14, 1937, Motion Picture Theater: “In its broadest aspect, it is an object of the invention to produce (the text reads product) the effect or illusion that the spectator is actually in and surrounded by the environment depicted. For example, if the scene is laid in a forest, the spectator, within his normal field of vision, will see forest on all sides and overhead, so as to produce the illusion that the spectator is in the forest, rather than merely looking at a picture of a forest covering only a small portion of the normal field of vision.” Waller wanted to give the audience something beyond the commonplace experience  – he wanted the audience to be in the movie. Although Motion Picture Theater describes a four-projector system, it is the precursor of what became three-projector Cinerama. The Cinerama process has been kept alive with screenings in a handful of theaters and private installations by enthusiasts, some of whom have curated much of its history in the Internet magazine In70mm.com, which preserved a letter from Waller to a potential investor, W. L. Laurence, who lived at 541 E. 72nd St., Manhattan. The letter, dated March 31, 1950, written two and a half years before the debut of Cinerama, is a well-crafted pitch to Bill, as Waller refers to Mr. Laurence. The lengthy, detailed, and illustrated letter is an appeal for financing to help Waller continue the development of the giant curved screen exhibition process that had become his life’s work after being engaged by architect Ralph Walker to help with a project for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In 1937 the petroleum industry asked the firm of Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker to come up with a design for an exhibit that would be “unlike any other,” which they planned

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Fig. 60.4 Gance’s Napoléon triptych. Top, an image repeated thrice; middle, a panoramic vista; and bottom, a collage using an image and its mirror image to embrace the center image. (Cinémathèque Française)

to call A World Without Friction (Quigley 1953). Walker had been involved in designing theaters, but this job was out of the ordinary, and he engaged Waller to help with the proposal. After considering the challenge, Waller and Walker recommended a motion picture theater with a screen that was the inside section of a sphere that they called Vitarama. It was designed to use 11 interlocked 16 mm Kodak Cine Special cameras with exhibition using 11 interlocked projectors. According to Sherlock, Vitarama was projected on a screen that was a quarter section of a sphere with five images along the bottom, four above those, and two in the top row. Walker’s firm put up the money to form the Vitarama Corporation, which wound up with the assignment of some of the patents underlying Cinerama; while the Vitarama process was not commercialized, Waller used it for fundraising demonstrations. Waller was able to enlist the cooperation of John G.  Capstaff of Eastman Kodak’s research lab, inventor of

the original two-color Kodachrome process and the primary inventor of the 16 mm format. Capstaff helped Waller with the gift of 16 mm Kodachrome and lenses. Martin Quigley (1953) reports that Walker commented: “The good people in Rochester actually tested 931 lenses to produce the eleven that matched.” In the latter part of 1938 Waller demonstrated Vitarama to raise funds for further development, an effort that led to an investment by Laurence Rockefeller, who provided lab and demonstration space in his carriage house on West 55th Street in Manhattan. After the war Waller moved his setup to a converted tennis court in Oyster Bay, Long Island, to host demonstrations of what became Cinerama. For Vitarama Waller, as noted, used a screen that was a section of a sphere, but unlike other screens it was made up of multiple vertical Venetian blind-like louvers designed to the prevent cross reflections that would have reduced image contrast. In December 1950, one of the people attending an Oyster Bay demonstration was Mike Todd, who became one

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Fig. 60.5  Fred Waller

of the producers of the first Cinerama feature film and the founder of the competing Todd-AO process (Belton 1992). Although Vitarama did not make it to the fair, in late 1938 Eastman Kodak asked Waller to help them with their presentation for the New York World’s Fair. Waller wrote to potential investor Laurence about the Kodak exhibit: “we devised a panoramic arrangement of eleven screen projections of Kodachrome slides.”1 It’s possible to trace Waller’s thinking by surveying the patents he wrote in the 1940s covering various projection methods on concave screens. He even considered the swiveling lens approach for panoramic cinematography and projection, as described in USP 2,413,269, Method of Projecting Motion Pictures, filed February 1, 1941. The reader may recall that John Elms, as described in the chapter Grandeur et al., considered the same concept, and a similar 70  mm system designed by Filoteo Alberini is described in the chapter The Shape of Screens to Come. In 1955 16  mm was used to create a 360° panorama exhibited at Disneyland, in Anaheim, California. Screens were positioned above the heads of a standing audience with no attempt at edge blending. Six inch mullions separated the 11 adjacent screens with movies front-projected onto the inside of a cylindrical surface 40 feet in diameter. The first film made in the process was America the Beautiful, shot from the roof of a moving vehicle. 1 

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Waller designed two other exhibits for the fair, and he was experimenting not only with projection but with three-­ channel sound using parallel grooves on a phonograph disk. The outbreak of the Second World War created a new opportunity for Waller when, after seeing Vitarama, a friend and retired naval officer suggested that it might be the basis for a gunnery trainer. The result of a major engineering effort, involving the physics of artillery ballistics, was the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer that was used extensively by the US military. This new kind of combat simulator employed five interlocked 35  mm projectors to fill its dome screen. Trainees practiced with replicas of 50 caliber machine guns, and an electronic scorekeeping system was used to provide instant feedback through headphones when an aircraft was hit, which was impossible to achieve in real-world training. Waller made the claim that “the Air Force officially estimated that more than 250,000 casualties were averted by the training made possible on our machine….” After the war, in November 1946, Waller formed the Cinerama Corporation with the help of investors Laurance Rockefeller, Time Inc., sound recording engineer Hazard (Buzz) Earle Reeves (1906–1986), and others. Waller gave up on using a screen that was the concave inner section of a sphere and switched to a more practical cylindrical design; he continued to use the louvers to reduce cross reflections. Both Vitarama and the gunnery trainer influenced his new experiments; in particular, the trainer had used five 35 mm projectors, but Waller knew he had to reduce the number to something more manageable for theatrical exhibition. He settled on three machines to create a panoramic triptych projected on a cylindrically curved screen. Beginning in the spring of 1949, demonstrations projecting triptych test footage, to motion picture industry leaders, were held in the Oyster Bay tennis court, which Reeves characterized as “heart-­breaking” (Quigley 1953). His lament will strike a chord with any inventor who has sought funding from ambivalent potential investors: “Everyone was impressed. But there was a terrifying inertia about their enthusiasm, too many ‘buts.’ It was fine, but it was too expensive. It was marvelous, but what would become of all the fine films in vaults in Hollywood if this thing should ever take over?” In July 1950 a discouraged Time Inc. dropped out to be followed by Laurence Rockefeller, but Reeves, a believer, bought their shares. Journalist and showman Lowell Jackson Thomas (1892– 1981) had achieved fame covering the desert guerrilla war adventures of the brilliant and obsessed Arabophile T.  E. Lawrence. Thomas (2017) produced and narrated a theatrical extravaganza dramatizing Lawrence’s exploits that played on the stages of New  York and London using projected slides, motion pictures, and dancers. He also wrote the 1924 bestselling book With Lawrence in Arabia, which contrib-

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Fig. 60.6  The top portion of the cover sheet of Waller’s 1925 USP Aquaplane. Waterskiing was featured about three decades later in the first Cinerama film.

Fig. 60.7  From Waller’s USP cover sheet for a swiveling lens panoramic system. Cinematography might have produced temporal anomalies since the frame was captured in a horizontal sweep, and projection might have been compromised by reduced brightness.

uted to Lawrence’s celebrity. Thomas, who had recently returned from an expedition to Tibet, visited his friend Reeves in his New York City recording studio.2 It was there that he was told about Cinerama; after seeing the Oyster Bay demonstration, Thomas became an investor and took an active part in running the company and promoting the process. Thomas and Broadway producer Mike Todd founded Thomas-Todd Productions, to produce the first Cinerama As a boy I listened to Thomas’ radio broadcasts from the Himalayan foothills.

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film, This Is Cinerama. Thomas engaged renowned documentarian Robert Flaherty to direct the film, but he died before production began. Todd and his son began shooting sequences at Niagara Falls, on a roller coaster, and various European tourist locations before Thomas engaged Merian C.  Cooper, who produced the waterskiing sequence and a section known as America the Beautiful, which was to have been shot by Todd. Relations between Todd, and Thomas and the board became strained, possibly because of cost overruns in the sequences Todd shot, or because of differences in style and his opinions about the future improvements and uses of

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Fig. 60.8  Hazard Earle Reeves

Fig. 60.9  Lowell Jackson Thomas

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the process. Todd left the company in August 1952 to become a Cinerama competitor by emulating and improving the big wide screen technology efforts of 1929–1930, which included resurrecting and modifying its cameras. The Cinerama process, while maintaining the 35 mm format and much of its infrastructure, used a challenging approach for exhibition based on a frame that was six rather than four perforations high. The camera apertures were 0.996 in. × 1.116 in (25.29 mm × 28.35 mm), without provision for sound track, and Waller calculated that by using three of these vertically elongated 35  mm frames, abutted horizontally, he would “have 4½ times the film area available; consequently, 4½ times the definition.” His calculation was undoubtedly based on the original Edison silent frame, in which case Cinerama’s picture area is 4.9 times greater, but given the need to overlap the projected images for smooth edge blending, the 4½ times figure is probably more accurate. Waller realized he was going to have a problem with the two vertical regions where the three images came together, and he devised a gizmo to blend the overlapped edges that he called a “jigalo,” which is often spelled gigolo (in French it’s les gigolos or les cils vibrant). The jigalo was a notched metal comb-like part located at the vertical edges of the gates’ apertures that bounced up and down as the film advanced through the gate, in effect a moving segmented shutter to create vignetting for edge blending. Waller described it as “a light chopper made with sawtooth edges which moved faster than the eye can perceive.” It’s a concept similar to that described by Chase for his Stereopticon Panorama Machine, noted above, and the serrated edges of the dissolving shutters used by magic lanterns beginning in the 1830s. Waller postulated that the three-dimensional effect of his system was based on both “movement perspective” and “movement parallax.” He defined two related monocular depth perception cues at work that applied to an observer who was optimally positioned to view the big curved screen in one of the best seats where the image encompasses most of the visual field. As the camera moves forward, when the observer looks straight ahead, perspective changes occur due to the change in size of close objects compared to the more slowly changing background, a depth effect that depends on the monocular cue of relative size. For the left- and right-side screens responsible for the peripheral effect, the perception of depth depends on the monocular cue motion parallax, in which there is a horizontal rejuxtaposition of near and far objects since objects close to the camera move more rapidly than those in the distance. Motion parallax is similar to binocular stereopsis, but unlike stereopsis it works with one eye shut and it’s a temporal phenomenon. Thomas guided the production of This Is Cinerama, which wound up being a mélange of American and international

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Fig. 60.10  Cinerama. A widely reproduced graphic depicting the Cinerama process, from cinematography to projection.

tourist attractions – which was not unexpected given his history of global peregrinations. Cinerama’s Eastman Color cinematography included a rollercoaster ride, a scene from the opera Aida, a flight over and through the Grand Canyon, a sequence in Florida using Waller’s waterskis, a gondola ride through the canals of Venice, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir shot in black and white and printed in sepia. Thomas was the face of Cinerama, the on-screen host who introduced This Is Cinerama from a small screen in black and white in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Thomas had taught oratory in his younger days and had developed a melodious baritone, perfect for radio and narrating Movietone News. After Thomas’ enticing buildup, the curtain opened and opened and opened, seemingly revealing a screen big enough to be a portal to the infinite. Cinerama was perceived to be a bona fide spectacle by both the public and the press who had been primed for the experience by the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, whose campaign deflected any discussion of how the process worked. The campaign stressed the experience – the effect of Cinerama on the spectator (Quigley 1953). And happily the promotion noted, Cinerama was not 3-D and did not require glasses. It’s no exaggeration to say that Cinerama became a sensation, with the process and movie of the same name becoming a popular culture phenomenon.

Cinerama premiered on September 30, 1952, in Manhattan’s Broadway Theatre. The addition of three ­projection booths eliminated seating because the projectors, to prevent keystone distortion, were at the same height as the center of the screen, thus placing them directly on the orchestra floor. Belton reports that the Broadway lost 300 of its 1600 seats for the conversion, and a theater in Los Angeles lost 1300 of its 2756 seats. The screen at the Broadway was said to cover 146°, but it wasn’t a perfect section of a cylinder since only the center 120° portion followed the circumference of a circle, whereas the left and right end sections flattened out, a compromise due to the design of the theater’s proscenium (Groves 1953). The screen was 24 ft tall by 64 ft along its arc. It was 49 ft across the arc (cord length) with a depth of 17  ft. To inhibit cross reflections, it was made of 1100 vertically oriented Venetian blind-­like 7/8 inch wide louvers (Carr 1988). The louvers would be dropped a few years later when Cinerama substituted a conventional screen surface with a 120° arc. The published screen aspect ratio was 2.59:1, which was the aspect ratio of the camera images accounting for the blend overlaps, but due to the vagaries of installation in different theaters, this varied. The Cinerama camera movements were built by the Wall Manufacturing Company of Syracuse, New York; the ensemble was made up of three closely spaced 35 mm cameras set

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Fig. 60.11  Left, center, and right prints, from How the West Was Won, which together make up the Cinerama Triptych. (From material supplied by the Cinémathèque Française, and partly reconstructed.)

Fig. 60.12  A simulation of how How the West Was Won. looked in a theater.

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at 48° to each other. The film magazines had their intermittent movements built into them to facilitate loading. The six perforation frame ran at 26 fps to mitigate flicker during projection. Flicker might have been more noticeable at the standard rate of 24 fps since it is heightened at the periphery of the visual field and Cinerama’s calling card was its peripheral vision capability. Eastman Color negative stock was used, and photography was done with three matched 27 mm Kodak Ektar lenses. I’ve examined the Cinerama camera, and compared with today’s ciné lenses in their large mounts, they are small, but they had to be because they were placed so close together, which explains why their apertures were f/2.8, for cameras No. 2 through No. 7 (f/4.5 for camera No. 1). The three lenses took in a combined 146° horizontal angle of view with a single shutter passing in front of them to ensure synchronized exposures. The Cinerama clapboard was an amusing contraption made up of three sections set at angles to each other so that each of the three lenses could see its designated slate. The Cinerama projector was made by Century and used an oversized 8000 foot reel for a longer running time; nonetheless an intermission was required. A Cinerama performance required technicians in all three projection booths, a control booth, and a sound control station. (A fourth projector was required for the prologue reel.) The projector booths were some distance apart and located to throw their images on the portions of the screen directly opposite them, with their lens axes perpendicular to the chord that bisected their third of the screen. It has been reported that 17 technicians were required to run the show at the Broadway, and a labor dispute delayed the opening of the Chicago venue that was settled after a compromise was made

Fig. 60.13  The Cinerama camera. A view of the three f/2.8 27  mm Kodak Ektar lenses; each covered a third of the panorama. (The Widescreen Museum)

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reducing the technical staff to 12. Belton (1992) reports that Cinerama’s operating expenses ate up 50% of its gross, a result of the many technicians and their salaries, plus there was the revenue reduction due to the seats lost to make room for the booths. During a screening the technicians spoke to each other by means of an intercom system to coordinate their efforts. The observer in the control booth, which was close to the screen at the Broadway Theatre, called out corrections to the projectionists and the sound man, which might include instructions to adjust the framelines for drift, the arc lamps whose amperage and light output might vary, the focus that changed as the projectors heated up, and sound synchronization or balance. In most theaters the control booth was near the center projection booth. The sound system was designed by Reeves, one of the first film industry technologists to take up magnetic recording. He had been supplying magnetic tape and film with a polished iron oxide surface and had designed a multichannel recording system using 35  mm magnetic film. Cinerama’s magnetic sound was an innovation for exhibition, but Hollywood had been using tape for recording and post-production, even though feature films were released using optical sound-on-film. Reeves’ sound system used a fullcoat 35  mm seven-channel magnetic film playback machine to which the projectors were slaved by means of selsyn motors. This was necessary because the ear is more sensitive than the eye to changes in speed, hence pitch. Five speakers were located around the curved screen, with additional speakers located at the sides of the auditorium, and one at the rear for one configuration of the surround channels, but sound was also directed to speakers along the rear wall, a set in the orchestra section and another set for the balcony. Cinerama sound was mastered using seven channels, which is incorrectly given as only six by Carr and Hayes (1988), and noted here because it’s widely repeated mistake. A Westrex RA-1506 recorder was used in the field, having a flat frequency response to 12,000 Hz. According to Sherlock: “the control channel was never used. The two surround tracks were for the left wall and the right wall, or both walls from one channel and the rear wall for the other channel.” An issue for the historian of technology is whether it is appropriate to evaluate a technology in the context of its moment or the present (WS: Beyond Intractability 2003). When criticizing the effectiveness of Cinerama technology, should it be judged based on the standards of the celluloid cinema circa 1950 or by today’s? I submit that in this case either a past or a contemporary expert observer would find that the process was technically deficient with disturbing visual artifacts. As Cameron infers, the problems were so egregious that the company avoided presenting any technical papers despite having been invited to do so by the Journal of the SMPTE. Although the public and the popular press were enraptured by Cinerama, discerning observers such as

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Cameron (1953) were critical of its shortcomings. The essence of the problem was that Cinerama was an attempt at making a triptych seamless but failed to achieve an ­integrated panorama due to the photochemical, optical, and mechanical characteristics of celluloid cinema technology. The erratic nature of the artifacts made them especially distracting since the observer’s attention might be diverted by the anticipation of the defects, which were all the more vexing because of the sporadically splendid images. The major problem was the jarring visibility of the vertical areas or boundaries separating the middle from the side images, in part because Waller’s jigalos were not up to the task. In addition, the color balance of the three panels often did not match, corner vignetting of each projected frame called attention to itself, the images were independently unsteady, and the framelines shifted. Unfortunately for Cinerama, the eye is good at comparing side-by-side images and discerning their differences. In addition, it’s impossible to make three separate images, with their individual vanishing points, look like an image taken from one point of view. Sometimes the demarcation of the images was concealed through compositions that required vertical elements, like trees, to hide the joins, a technique which in and of itself became an attractive nuisance. A different class of issues had to do with the fact that close-ups were not possible and other focal lengths could not be used. The camera could move forward, but panning and traveling shots were a challenge. It was discovered, when filming two MGM theatrical features, that blocking required different eye lines for actors in different parts of the composition, but at least that was a problem that could be overcome. But how much did this concern the Cinerama shareholders as long as audiences kept buying tickets? And it didn’t even seem to matter that there were relatively few preferred seats where the kinesthetic effect induced by peripheral vision was most convincing. The company continued to release travelogues in the vein of This Is Cinerama, taking on a more international character: Cinerama Holiday, Seven Wonders of the World, Search for Paradise, and South Sea Adventure. The Soviets viewed the process as an instrument of American capitalist propaganda and responded with a similar process called Kinopanorama. According to Sherlock, there was some research into the feasibility of a triple-headed projector, but it did not go beyond a study. The Mir Theater in Moscow had six projectors to avoid an intermission, but most other Kinopanorama theaters used three projectors. Kinopanorama was screened using standard Cinerama equipment in the United States. Two MGM narrative features were made in Cinerama, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won, both released in 1962, but these were the last films produced in the three camera-­projector process, which was replaced by films shot in the Ultra Panavision 70, Super Panavision 70, and Super Technirama 70.

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How the West Was Won (1962), branded a Cinerama film, was primarily shot using the three-camera system, but some of the cinematography was done in Ultra Panavision and optically printed to the triptych format, and 70  mm was used for rear projection (Wysotsky 1971). 35 mm prints were projected in ‘Scope by compositing the three panels and using an anamorphic squeeze. The first 65/70  mm single-camera-­ projector film exhibited in Cinerama theaters, branded as Cinerama, was released November 1963, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The film was shot and projected in Ultra Panavision 70, which used 1.25:1 anamorphics for 65 mm cinematography and 70 mm projection to produce a 2.75:1 aspect ratio. Some films, like the 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, were shot in Super Panavision, using the same 65 mm cameras as were used for Ultra Panavision but with spherical lenses producing a 2.2:1 aspect ratio. 2001: A Space Odyssey was successfully projected on Cinerama screens. Prior to this in 1959, Ben-Hur was released in MGM Camera 65, a process later rebranded as Ultra Panavision. The image filled the Cinerama screen by using 65  mm cinematography based on the format established by Todd-AO plus anamorphic lenses having a 1.25 squeeze, as described in the chapter 65/70 mm and Technirama. The Cinerama organization went through a period of expansion winding up with more than 330 specialized theaters worldwide, with about half in the United States, but this may not be an exact count because there were temporary and noncommercial theaters built by the Cooper Foundation of Lincoln, Nebraska, including the Cooper Theatre in Denver that had a screen measuring 105 by 35  ft. The first of the theaters built specifically for the process, part of the company’s Super-Cinerama initiative, premiered in March 1961, in

Fig. 60.14  A clip from a print of the 70 mm Ultra Panavision feature Ben-Hur (1959). A 1.25:1 anamorphic squeeze allowed it to fill a Cinerama screen. Note the columns of iron oxide for the sound tracks. (Cinémathèque Française)

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Denver, Colorado, and later that year in Paris (Carr 1988). The stage area was eliminated, and for the biggest theaters, the house was broken up into two sections; those closest to the screen had a gradually upsloping floor, and a rear section with stadium seating, which is the design of the still operating 700-seat Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. For smaller theaters stadium seating was used throughout. Super-Cinerama appears to have been little more a marketing term, and some of the changes appear to have been a downgrade. Carr and Hayes (1988) report that the rate was dropped from 26  fps to 24  fps and the screen arc, in some theaters, was reduced from 145° to 120°. In reviewing my manuscript, Sherlock commented: “Super Cinerama was just

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a marketing term for theaters that used a larger screen that was close to floor-to-ceiling rather that behind a proscenium. It was not used to reference a photographic process, except in the imagination of Hayes. The rate was dropped to 24 fps to allow printing ‘Scope prints for general release, and the curvature was reduced in many theaters since there was less of an overall ‘fisheye’ distortion to compensate for with the narrower field of view lenses on the cameras.” The “narrower field of view lenses” to which Sherlock refers are those used by the 70  mm cameras that replaced Cinerama’s triptych camera. Features shot with these Todd-AO and Panavision 70 lenses rarely used a super-wide lens and had the same angular coverage as was used for 35 mm filmmaking.

Cinerama After Waller

Cinema began with the invention of Christiaan Huygens, a physicist who created the transparency projector, the magic lantern, the foundation of motion projection. He was a man who had little interest in profiting from his invention and even attempted to suppress it believing it to be an instrument that was being used frivolously. Joseph Plateau was a physicist who explored the nature of human perception, which led to his invention of his phenakistoscope and the first demonstration and recognition of the phenomenon of apparent motion, which is the perceptual basis of the celluloid cinema’s ability to depict motion. Plateau never profited from his invention. Étienne-Jules Marey came within a hair of inventing a practical photographic apparent motion cinema system, but Marey, a physiologist, was indifferent to developing chronophotography beyond his need to analyze the locomotion of living creatures. None of these men, purely motivated by science, had the need to raise investment capital because they had no need to create a product. Yet Fred Waller’s vision, the vision of a projected moving image isomorphic with the experiential world, was one that could only be realized with significant funding. Waller, by his own words, was captivated by the desire to create an immersive facsimile of the visual world. For him his work was more than a business opportunity because he was infatuated with the desire to create Cinerama. Waller used his powers of persuasion, proof-of-concept demonstrations, and intellectual property, to attract investors. He was able to leverage successively improved demonstrations to enlist them to fund the development of Cinerama. Investors must believe in the inventor’s ability and character as well as having some assurance that there is a market for the invention. The latter is all the more difficult to assess if the invention involves a new concept, a product so unlike anything else that nobody knows if there is a market for it. In the case of Cinerama, the investors were part of the market research since they were moviegoers themselves, and those who invested must have believed that a cinema of panoramic spectacle had good prospects. This kind of investor faith, as long as it persisted, gave Cinerama the freedom that comes

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with being an outlier. The company was organized as an entity apart from the Hollywood studios and their infrastructure; it was both the inventor and proprietor of its technology, the producer, distributor, and exhibitor of its films. Because of its strengths and limitations, it produced its own kind of feature film, unlike the narratives made by the Hollywood studios. Cinerama was the star of its films. Cinerama content was an assemblage of the world’s panoramic, kinesthetic, and photogenic locations, a throwback to the phantom rides. Lowell Thomas was the guiding force at Cinerama during its travelogue days, which was most of its history as a triptych process, continuing until the release of South Sea Adventure in 1958. Thomas had an affinity for such subjects, and they dovetailed neatly with his reputation as a globetrotter, a word that fit his image so well that it might have been coined for him. In the early days of the company, he and other members of the Cinerama board were determined to continue on with more of the same, but Mike Todd wanted different content, and he also agreed with Waller that the technology needed improvement. We don’t know what happened in the Cinerama board room, but we do know from at least one newspaper account that there was a conflict, and we can see the results of decisions and policies that were made (Belton 1992). Like today’s high-tech companies, Cinerama plowed its earnings back into building its business by outfitting older theaters or by building new theaters, and while it had cash flow, it didn’t make a profit, a strategy for growth that all the major owners needed to support, but Todd had a different vision (Belton 1988). My conjecture is that a conflict arose between Thomas and Todd, in part due to their dissimilar backgrounds and personalities that led to their different views regarding Cinerama content and a sense of urgency about improving the process. Thomas’ family had been in America for generations, and he was a well-educated man who had an MA from Princeton, amongst other degrees. Mike Todd (1909–1958) was a first-generation American, born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen, who became a street-smart businessman whose first professional ventures were in the rough and tumble con-

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Thomas-Todd company to produce This Is Cinerama, but Todd and his son, Michael Todd, Jr., ran afoul of Thomas because of cost overruns in the sequences of This Is Cinerama that they produced and directed, which may have been the proximate cause of the split that motivated Todd to go his own way in 1952. He sold his interest in Cinerama and was free to develop the technology to address Cinerama’s shortcomings, which is described in chapter 65 (Gitt 2007). Fred Waller died in 1954 before being able to carry out the improvements to Cinerama that he had publically stated he sought. His last patent filed on January 7, 1953, granted as USP 2,966,095, Shutter for multilens camera, offers no clue as the direction he might have taken. However, Waller and Willis Forest Dresser, in USP 2,563,892, Apparatus for Locating Images on Screens, filed December 14, 1946, describe using a photocell for picking up index marks printed on the projected triptych elements so that the images could be automatically aligned by means of projection lens movements. As far as I know, this was never implemented, but what is notable is how well developed the Cinerama concept was in 1946. Some improvements were supposed to have been made to the process beginning in 1956 with the third Cinerama feature, The Seven Wonders of the World. According to Wysotsky (1971), these improvements included a reduction in horizontal distortion, less unsteadiness between portions of the tryptic, and a lessening of triptych Fig. 61.1  Mike Todd panel color mismatches, but he doesn’t say how these might have been achieved. In fact, the “improvement” that elimistruction business before he became a Broadway producer. nated Cinerama’s vexing flaws was a total redesign, the proBut Thomas and Todd shared this: they were both showmen gram that was undertaken by Mike Todd, which resulted in who produced theatrical performances in which both demon- Todd-AO, a large format single-camera-projector process, strated a love of spectacle. Early in his career days, Todd discussed in chapter 65. gained attention by producing the Flame Dance at Chicago’s In 1960 Cinerama purchased the assets of its American Century of Progress Exposition in 1933–1934, an attraction imitator Cinemiracle, which had previously been acquired in which a striptease artist’s costume is consumed in fire by National Theatres from the developer of the system, the (Cohn 1958). As noted earlier, Thomas had somewhat simi- Smith-Dietrich Corporation. The only film photographed in lar theatrical ambitions and produced a lavish stage show Cinemiracle was Windjammer, which was produced and based on his reporting of T.  E. Lawrence’s active involve- directed by the father and son team of Louis De Rochemont ment in the Arabs’ guerrilla war against the Turks. But he and Louis De Rochemont III, who had made Cinerama was something of a pretender; while giving the impression Holiday (Slide 2013). (The Cinerama-produced Holiday in that he faced great dangers in desert conflict, Thomas (2017) Spain was shown in some Cinemiracle theaters.) Cinemiracle was almost certainly not present during raids and enemy opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood April 8, engagements, as pointed out in Mitchell Stevens’ foreword 1958, where it played for 37 weeks, after which it moved to to Thomas’ book With Lawrence in Arabia. the nearby Fox Theatre for an additional 15 weeks. The film Todd wanted to do two things that were antithetical to opened on April 9, 1958 at the Roxy in New  York. The Thomas’ view of the company’s mission: develop a process Cinemiracle organization failed, despite the fact that the prothat used one lens instead of three and to use the process for cess had a seeming advantage in exhibition because it narrative cinema rather than plotless travelogues. Thomas’ required only a single projection booth rather than Cinerama’s cultivated image was that of an adventurer who faced hard- three. (Some Cinerama theaters used a single booth.) ships and dangers in distant lands with equanimity, but when However, Cinemiracle’s three-projector booth also had to be it came to running Cinerama, he was a conservative busi- located on the orchestra floor like Cinerama’s, and it siminessman, whereas Todd’s approach was that of a go-for-­ larly reduced seating, but staffing requirements may have broke risk-taker. Thomas and Todd had formed the lessened. For projection the two outside projectors’ lenses

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Fig. 61.2 From McCullough’s USP showing the Cinemiracle projection layout.

faced into mirrors that reflected their images onto the screen. Like Cinerama the right projector projected the left panel onto the left side of the screen and the left projector the right panel onto the right side of the screen. The mirrors were front-surfaced, and, at least according to one version of the process, in place of the jigalos, the appropriate mirror edges were treated to reduce their reflective metal coatings to gradually decrease the image brightness and soften the blend. Wysotsky (1971) reports that this produced edge blends that were far less noticeable than Cinerama’s, but Sherlock believes that the edge of frame reduction in brightness was optically printed.1 Cinerama’s acquisition of the failed company was probably of its physical assets at a fire-sale price; although its intellectual property may have had some value, the Cinemiracle brand was of little value. A 25-page engineering analysis of Cinemiracle was written by Richard Babish, who had previously been with Cinerama, in a report that had been commissioned by Louis de Rochemont and distributed in June 1958. Thanks to the A detailed description of this can be found at widescreenmusuem.com.

1 

diligence of the online American WideScreen Museum (WS), this report has been preserved. The detailed analysis discusses a litany of vexing problems as serious as any of the issues facing Cinerama. Cinemiracle was not superior to Cinerama, and by the time it appeared in the marketplace, like Cinerama, it had become obsolete due to the quality and simplification of the Todd-AO process. A comparison of the US patents assigned to both companies for inventor Fred Waller of Cinerama and for inventor Russell H. McCullough of Cinemiracle, confirms that the major differentiators were the designs for the camera and projector optical arrangements. Cinemiracle used Mitchell CNC cameras rather than cameras made by Wall; for projection the ability to use a single booth may have been of some advantage. McCullough’s USP 3,101,643, Mosaic Motion Picture Projection Apparatus, filed August 26, 1954, teaches the projection setup. Hazard Reeves became the CEO of the Cinerama company at a time when it was strapped for cash. The Stanley Warner Theatre chain invested in the summer of 1953 acquiring the rights to exhibit Cinerama in its theaters. In 1954, Louis B.  Mayer, who had been chairman of the board for

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2 years, left the company without producing the films he had promised. In 1960 Reeves sold his shares to Nicholas Reisini who put together deals with MGM for feature productions. Cinerama films had steered clear of narrative to focus on pedestrian travelogues, but with new management storytelling was attempted with two MGM films released in 1962, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won. The frame rate was dropped from 26 fps to 24  fps to facilitate release in conventional venues in the 35 mm anamorphic format. Reisini, in 1963, sold his shares to William R. Foreman who owned a theater circuit which today is known as Pacific Theatres, a West Coast exhibitor with many screens, that at present operates the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. With the notable exception of MGM, the major studios passed on the original process because of production problems, increased cost, and exhibition issues. Similarly, theater owners were not climbing on board because of Cinerama’s burdensome projection requirements and a lack of films in the pipeline, but Cinerama made up for that to some extent, by establishing hundreds of special venues for screening its films. Projection and other issues have been described, and what follows is a partial list of production issues of concern: the cost of film stock for the three-camera system; a camera unable to use lenses of different focal lengths; a camera unable to do close-ups that might cause actors or objects to disappear standing too close to it; a camera with vexing blocking problems that strained the ability of a filmmaker like John Ford; for some shots three, not just one, vanishing points were visible; and cinematography required special compositions to help conceal the frame joins. Reeves (1982), focusing on the process’s positive attributes, lamented: “A new motion-picture art form was… acclaimed by the public, critics, and motion-picture industry, then allowed to become diluted and finally fall into neglect – Cinerama.” Reeves must have been thinking about how CinemaScope and Todd-AO replaced Cinerama, which he believed was capable of more exciting panoramic and kinesthetic effects. Without doubt Cinerama paved the way for CinemaScope and Todd-AO, and opened the door to a reconsideration of the Edison-Dickson aspect ratio. Many ­inventors have been influenced by Cinerama, as one might

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gather from a search of Google Patents that produced nearly 7000 hits for the word. Name recognition has endured even though Cinerama, Inc., was liquidated in May 1978, but long before that it had been superseded by processes like Todd-AO and its variants, Panavision 70, and Super Technirama. Audiences didn’t know or care if the process used one projector or three, when films made in these processes were projected onto its big curved screen. Moreover, the brand retained its value, and a Cinerama Theater was assumed to have Cinerama technology. Cinerama influenced the change in the shape and size of the cinema screen, making the 1.33:1 aspect ratio look quaint and 20 foot screens look dinky. It was important as a proof-­of-­concept, faint praise since it flourished for decade, and it pointed to new ways of thinking about moving images. It is rightly viewed as the precursor of IMAX and premium large format (PLF) theaters. Clearly influenced by Cinerama, triptychs using video technology were exhibited at tradeshows in the 1990s by Silicon Graphics and by projector manufacturers Barco and Christie, who successfully applied edge blending algorithms to the computer-generated graphics. Even the vexing problem of having three vanishing points was solved with computer graphics since the triptych was made up of one master image that was tessellated to become three segments with a single vanishing point. Cinerama pulled off a remarkable feat, a vertically integrated organization engaged in production, distribution, and exhibition that existed in parallel with the theatrical film industry that was, for most of its triptych years, independent of Hollywood. It retained reasonable compatibility with the 35 mm infrastructure, and in its day captured an eager audience that would have never tolerated travelogues of this ilk had they been projected with the usual 35 mm technology. There was no need to cast movie stars, since the process itself was the attraction. Single-camera-projector IMAX can be viewed as Cinerama’s successor, another giant screen process that successfully deployed venues around the world that at first exhibited family-oriented documentaries within a system independent of the theatrical cinema, but one that survived by adapting, as Cinerama did, by exhibiting Hollywood features.

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CinemaScope

Two decades after William Fox championed the wide screen Grandeur format in the late 1920s, the head of the studio he had founded, Spyros Panagiotis Skouras (1893–1971), born in Skourohorion, Greece, bullishly decided to produce all of the studios’ films in the wide screen CinemaScope. Skouras had managed Fox West Coast Theatres and been instrumental in putting together the merger of the Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935. Now, like William Fox, he wanted 20th Century Fox to perfect a new way to project bigger images on wider screens. It rankled Skouras that his studio had not made an investment in Cinerama when it had the opportunity to do so, a decision that was based on Head of Research Earl Sponable’s correct assessment that Cinerama was flawed and not suitable for the production and exhibition of narrative cinema. But despite the opinion of this member of the technology elite, This Is Cinerama ran for 122 weeks at the Broadway Theatre, which, together with its summer of 1953 run in Los Angeles at the Warner Pacific, grossed $4.7 million, a fine box office on a production cost of $1 million (Zone 2012). On the other hand, several years earlier, Skouras had nixed Sponable’s recommendation that the studio invest in developing a 50  mm motion picture ­format with a 1.80:1 aspect ratio that he wanted to use as a testbed for three-channel stereophonic optical sound. Such a program would have given Fox a head start with the development of a large format multichannel sound system. Skouras and Al Lichtman, director of sales at Fox, understood the threat and the opportunity created by Cinerama; only a few weeks after the arrival of This Is Cinerama they asked Sponable to design a practical alternative that was suitable for conventional exhibition (Belton 1992). The reader may recall that Sponable had worked with Theodore Case at the Case Research Laboratory in Auburn, New York, before joining the Fox Film Corporation in 1926 where he continued to develop the Fox-Case system, the basis for Fox Movietone, which in turn was the basis for Western Electric’s optical sound-on-film system. As Chief Engineer and Director of Research, a title he held until 1962, his career was in some respects similar to that of two other men, who

had been hired by their studios originally to head up audio research, Douglas Shearer at MGM and Loren Ryder at Paramount. These three men, in a similar turn of events, also managed the introductions of large format wide screen processes: Sponable with Grandeur, CinemaScope, and CinemaScope 55, Shearer with MGM Camera 65, and Ryder with VistaVision. Skouras and Lichtman knew they weren’t alone in the quest for big screen technology and that the other studios were similarly impelled by Cinerama’s success. To provide an even greater impetus for Skouras, he had a corporate problem to deal with, a major shareholder who was threatening to oust him and take over the company. Skouras wanted his studio to flourish, and he wanted to keep his job, and hopefully a new technology along the lines of Cinerama, a practical Cinerama, would do the trick. Cinerama’s big curved screen was only one of the factors creating fear in the film industry, in what was one of the most stressful and chaotic periods in its history. Skouras and Lichtman directed Sponable to devise an alternative to Cinerama on a crash basis, but one that could be exhibited on the 20,000 or so theater screens in the United States, without involving the costly conversion required for Cinerama. Heightening Skouras’ anxiety, less than 2  months after Cinerama’s introduction, the stereoscopic film Bwana Devil opened to excellent business. Unlike This Is Cinerama, it received truly abysmal reviews, but the public bought tickets and Bwana Devil sparked a 3-D renaissance of sorts. Perversely, the poor quality of the film only served to reinforce the perceived value of the 3-D process, for how else to explain its box office success? And to add to Skouras’ frustration, he had taken and let drop an option on the Gunzburgs’ Natural Vision stereoscopic camera that was used to shoot Bwana Devil. If people were going to turn off the dinky black and white boob tube and get off their couches, 3-D or the big wide screen might be the answer to declining attendance. In the two decades since the the industry’s stab at the big wide screen with Fox Grandeur et  al., as far as John Q. Public was concerned, color had been the only noticeable

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Fig. 62.1  Spyros Panagiotis Skouras

Fig. 62.2  Henri Jacques Chrétien

improvement to cinema technology, first with the addition of three-color Technicolor in the early 1930s and then with Eastman Color in 1950, but after the war attendance fell, even though many movies were in color and television was monochromatic. Some studio executives, like Fox’s Vice President of Production, Darryl Zanuck, were of the opinion that audiences’ return to theaters would be motivated by

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quality pictures and not technology gimmicks, but Skouras believed that the problem could be solved with the new technology. No studio boss knew for sure what would work, and there was a price to pay for guessing wrong, namely, losing his job or in a worst case bankrupting the studio. Earl Sponable (1954), and his assistant Herbert E. Bragg, researched the field to find technology they could use, and fortuitously Bragg recalled the work of optical designer and astronomer Henri Jacques Chrétien (1879–1956), who had demonstrated his Hypergonar anamorphotic lens at the 1937 International Paris Exhibition. Chrétien (1939) and his colleagues had written about their big screen projection effort at the Exhibition in the Journal of the SMPE in 1939. Chrétien described the lens he used in USP 1,962,892, filed September 25, 1929, Anamorphotic lens system and method of making the same.1 The optic did not form an image by itself but rather was an attachment that fit in front of a lens to double its angle of view in one direction. Spherical lens attachments are well-known for cinema and still photography, and when combined with the original lens, they can serve to lengthen or shorten its focal length or permit close focusing. As usually employed Chrétien’s anamorphic attachment leaves the vertical focal length intact but shortens the horizontal focal length, with the effect that the vertical angle of view is unchanged but the horizontal angle of view is increased. For a 2:1 anamorphic attachment, like the Hypergonar, mounted on the camera and projection lenses, given the 1.33:1 frame aspect ratio, the result will be a projected image having an aspect ratio of 2.66:1. The same attachment may be used for both taking and projecting images. For photography it compresses the image horizontally, and for projection it expands the image horizontally, restoring the proportions of objects photographed. French astronomer and lens designer Chrétien’s Hypergonar was used at the Palace of Light of the International Exposition in Paris in 1937, which is the subject of the aforementioned article that was published 2 years later. The image, it has been reported, was comprised of two edged blended 35  mm projections on an outdoor concave screen, 30 feet high and nearly 300 feet across, which was part of the façade of the Palace of Light building. (The report is suspicious since the anamorphic attachments would have required an outlandish 5:1 squeeze.) Hypergonars were attached to prime lenses on two cameras, each adjusted to encompass half of their total horizontal field of view. Projected side-by-side images created the elongated ­panorama with blending where they met achieved by slightly overlapping the images using vertical shutters with sawtooth edges. Chrétien’s long image was projected on a directional screen whose high gain surface was created by impregnating 1  Chretien was granted two other patents for panoramic imaging, USPs 1,829,633 and 1,829,634.

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Fig. 62.3  The USP cover sheet of Chrétien’s anamorphic attachment. It’s depicted here with anamorphisis in the vertical to best illustrate the elements of the cylindrical optics.

it with glass beads. High-amperage arc lamps were used in the lamphouses of the mechanically synchronized Simplex projectors. We encountered the concept of anamorphics in connection with the distortion produced by temporal sampling, a phenomenon described by Roget, one that had to be taken into account in the preparation of images for the phenakistoscope devices. The drawings made from photos of galloping horses Muybridge used for his Zoöpraxiscope projection come to mind, because they were elongated to compensate for the differential sampling caused by the device’s spinning radial shutter that would have otherwise horizontally compressed the images. A novelty device applied the anamorphic principal to distorted pictures printed on a flat surface, which were viewed in a curved mirror to restore them to normal proportions, was first used in the late fifteenth century. Depending upon the shape of the mirror, the device can be characterized as a conical, pyramidal, or cylindrical anamorphoser (Mannoni, email). For cinematographic applications there are three anamorphic optical arrangements: dual wedge prisms, ­cylindrical lenses, and convex mirrors. Images photographed with these kinds of optics can look the same, and any of the three types can be used interchangeably for photography and projection. Dual wedge prisms increase the angle of view in one direc-

tion with their doubly displaced optical path remaining parallel with the prime lens axis. Cylindrical lenses achieve their effect because they have a focal length, or optical power, in one direction only. The third approach is photography with the lens looking at a curved mirror surface. This requires an additional mirror so the objective doesn’t see itself. All three devices have been used for cinematography and projection and can give good results; examples are the cylindrical optics used for most camera zoom lenses, the prism optics used for the Panatar attachments for 35 mm projection, and the mirror optics of the Delrama attachment for Technirama. Cylindrical lenses became the most important embodiment of the art given their application to CinemaScope. Kingslake (1957, pp. 27, 35) provides a capsule history of photographic anamorphics. Sir David Brewster is credited with having first described the anamorphic effect of refracting prisms as noted in chapter 24. A single prism is unsuitable for stretching or compressing an image in one direction because of chromatic dispersion, and in practice ­achromatized prisms are used in optical series. Compression or expansion can be varied by rotating the prisms equally in opposite directions. Physicist John Anderton, who first described polarization image selection for stereoscopic projection, describes the use of prism anamorphics for “an instrument or toy” to squeeze or expand an image in BP 8409, which was

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issued in 1889. Willis E. Phillips, of Colorado, applied for what was granted as USP 818,553, Camera Attachment, on November 9, 1905, which teaches the mounting of a prismatic anamorphoser in front of a camera lenses with a mechanical system to rotate its prisms. Patents followed describing improvements to anamorphic prism systems. Although anamorphic optics are only infrequently used for still photography, they have been applied to motion pictures, and the first such application, according to Kingslake, was the invention of Ernesto Zollinger in 1910, as described earlier in these pages, which is given in USP 1,032,172, Process for Reducing the Size of Pictures on Kinematograph Films and of Projecting such Pictures to their Normal Proportions. It teaches a way to double the number of frames for a length of film to increase screen time and reduce the cost of photography and printing by squeezing the images in the vertical. Zollinger recommends the use of either prisms or cylindrical lenses. Lenses made of both positively and negatively curved sections of cylinders may be used for anamorphic lenses. One such device was described in 1862 in BP 1453 by Leon Farrenc of Paris and another by Paul Rudolph of Jena for Zeiss in BP 8512 in 1898. Unlike prism systems, those using cylindrical lens elements have a fixed compression or expansion ratio depending on the power of the lenses. Chrétien, the inventor of the Hypergonar, was an exponent of anamorphics for cinema, but he wasn’t alone. Physicist and mathematician Harry Sidney Newcomer, who had been his student, filed for his Anamorphosing Prism Objective on August 1, 1929, USP 1,931,992, which was based on prismatic rather than the cylindrical lens elements like those used by the Hypergonar attachment. Newcomer was active in the field of anamorphic camera and projector optics and also applied the concept to optical sound tracks, work described in more than ten granted US patents. In the early 1930s, the C. P. Goerz American Optical Company, later called the American Optical Company (as in Todd-AO), offered the anamorphic Staats-Newcomer-Goerz Cine-Panor attachment for 16 mm movies that expanded the prime lens’s horizontal angle of view by 50% (What’s New?…1931, p. 112). As noted in the chapter Grandeur et al., the anamorphic Fulvue process was demonstrated in Britain in 1930, and in the United States, an anamorphic lens was demonstrated by the Victor Talking Machine Company circa 1930. In the 1930s Paramount believed that Chrétien’s Hypergonar was of interest and optioned the technology, but by the early 1950s, their option had long lapsed. At the start of the research efforts for what became CinemaScope, Sponable and Bragg learned that the British Rank Organization had an option agreement with Chrétien, but one that was about to run out. Both Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros. had their own anamorphic epiphanies, but Fox’s man in France, Jack Muth, won the great anamorphic derby by being first to locate Chrétien at his home in Nice.

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Fig. 62.4  A pair of achromatized Brewster prisms for the anamorphic expansion of a projected image. (Reverse the optical path and it compresses.) Each prism is composed of two elements sandwiched together with different indices of refraction and dispersion.

Fig. 62.5  Two approaches for anamorphic lenses. Top: two positive cylindrical lenses with their axes perpendicular. Bottom: a spherical lens between a positive and a negative pair of cylindrical lenses with their axes parallel. (Kinglake)

Although Chrétien’s patent was in the public domain, Fox needed his lenses to get a head start with production. The hope was that the existing attachments would allow the studio to begin shooting their first anamorphic features as they had other lenses made for cinematography and projection (Belton 1992). Making cylindrically surfaced lenses meeting specification in quantity presented difficulties for both camera and projection lenses, and Bausch & Lomb had problems filling projection attachment orders, which led to Panavision’s successful prism anamorphic optic, as described in the chapter ‘Scope Variations. Fox bought the right to use the anamorphic lenses in Chrétien’s possession, but that was just one step in a complicated development process, and Skouras had other concerns, namely, the looming struggle for control by shareholder Charles Green, who was known for taking over corporations and milking them for their assets. Green bought up Fox stock in December 1952 at the moment when Skouras was in France negotiating with Chrétien. Skouras told Sponable and his team that if Green was successful, their jobs were on the line and depended on the outcome of their development efforts, an employee motivator if there ever was one. All told CinemaScope’s productization cost Fox $10 million, money

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spent in a heroic effort that took place in about 10 months. In February 1953, after Skouras and Sponable reached an agreement to pay Chrétien $2 million for his lenses, plus the exclusive world rights to use them, Skouras boldly announced to the press that all future Fox films would be made in CinemaScope. As one might expect, his nemesis Green responded by denouncing Skouras’ “putting all his eggs in one basket.” Fox engineers had been given the opportunity to redesign both the image and sound of the 35 mm format while maintaining the new process’s compatibility with the 35 mm infrastructure. The effort to improve Chrétien’s optics, for both cinematography and projection was, all by itself, a major challenge that was farmed out to Bausch & Lomb. Sponable et al. (1954) was not satisfied with the quality of existing optical sound tracks and wanted to use the stereophonic sound technology that Fox sound engineer, Loren D. Grignon, had been working on with Western Electric. In the 1940s they had experimented with three-channel stereophonic optical sound (Grignon 1949). As one of the principal inventors of optical sound-on-film, Sponable understood how high the bar had been raised by Reeves’ spectacular Cinerama sound system and wanted to match its quality. In the end, Sponable’s design for the image portion of CinemaScope was accepted by the exhibitors, but the sound track part of the new format, based on magnetic recording technology, provoked a backlash to which the studio would yield. The use of anamorphic optics to determine the aspect ratio didn’t require the heavily cropped Edison frame (or the resultant wide framelines) added at the inception of sound-­ on-­film to maintain the 1.33:1 screen aspect ratio. Thus, the frameline was reduced to a minimum increasing the image area by about a third. This helped meet the requirement to project on a screen that was twice as wide placing great demands on image brightness, sharpness, and the appearance of grain. CinemaScope, in its final incarnation, had the most efficient use of projected image area of any of the 35  mm wide screen formats of the 1950s: CinemaScope’s (final) 2.4:1 gate aspect ratio frame was 0.838 in  ×  0.700 in (0.587  in2), greater than widescreen’s 1.85:1 aspect ratio frame at 0.825 in × 0.446 in (0.368 in2). And compared with the Academy frame’s 1.37:1 aspect ratio based on a frame of 0.825 in × 0.600 in (0.495 in2), it had a third more area. A few years after CinemaScope’s introduction, in the United States there were only two screen shapes in general use: ‘Scope at 2.4:1, settled on in 1957 and the non-­ anamorphic widescreen practice with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 that was produced by cropping the frame. In practice, the projected aspect ratio varied from theater to theater with some projecting both ‘Scope and widescreen in a “compromise” aspect ratio of about 2:1. In its first decades, ‘Scope was achieved by widening a screen of constant height, but with the advent of the multiplex and new theater layouts, the ‘Scope screen was often smaller in area than 1.85:1 widescreen and projected with reduced height on screens of a con-

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Fig. 62.6  The CinemaScope release print of The Robe. The image is anamorphically squeezed by a factor of two. Shown is the original format with three magnetic stripe sound tracks and one thinner control track. Note the narrow Foxhole perforations. See the next illustration for the decompressed image. (The clip is reconstructed from various elements.)

stant width, thereby losing much of its impact. This practice is a reason to re-examine the opinions of Charles Barr and André Bazin and other scholars concerned with cinema aesthetics and their hypothesis that widescreen cinema offers “greater physical involvement” and a “more vivid sense of space” (Cossar 2011). At one time this may have been a ­correct assessment, but as a practical matter today, ‘Scope is the format often projected on a smaller screen. Had Sponable and his engineers been without an alternative to Technicolor, CinemaScope would not have been able to meet his design objectives. It was the introduction of the Eastman Color negative-positive system that made CinemaScope possible, just as it had enabled Cinerama and Natural Vision 3-D. One of several factors to consider was that the Hypergonar attachment could not get close enough to the Technicolor three-strip camera’s lens when the camera was housed in its blimp. In addition, the Technicolor imbibition printing process, while adequate for screens up to about

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Fig. 62.7  An unsqueezed frame of The Robe with the 2.55:1 aspect ratio of the original version of CinemaScope.

25  feet in width, proved to be inadequately sharp for the larger CinemaScope screens, an opinion Fox arrived at after having to make Technicolor prints because of the limited printmaking production capacity of the newly introduced Eastman Color. Technicolor addressed and solved the sharpness problem caused by the spreading of the imbibed dyes on the image bearing blank. Another issue that precluded the dye matrix printing process was the addition of four-channel magnetic sound to CinemaScope; this required the most radical change to the 35  mm format since the addition of the optical sound track, a redesign of the 35 mm perforations. The original version of CinemaScope had the width of the perforations reduced to increase the area available for the addition of four magnetic sound tracks. The narrower perfs were allowable because of the improved strength of cellulose acetate, which had recently replaced flammable cellulose nitrate base. Fox worked with Kodak engineers who determined that the narrow perforations were able to properly transport the film, and Sponable et al. (1954) report that the new perforation was even better in that regard than the existing Dubray-Howell design. The narrow projector sprocket teeth required for the original CinemaScope’s perforations worked equally well with prints using the older standard, but the new perfs presented a problem for the Technicolor printing process that used long metal belts with registration pins running their length. These pins kept the blank in place for each precision imbibing matrix pass, but they were too wide for the new perforations, dubbed Foxholes by the industry. Out of the small batch of the anamorphic attachments Fox obtained from Chrétien, only three of the box-shaped optics were good enough for feature film cinematography. Even these had problems, one of which was nicknamed “anamorphic mumps”; the attachments had a nonlinear compression factor across the horizontal field of view. The edges and the center of the frames were compressed by different amounts,

a nonlinearity that varied as a function of focusing distance. It can be found in the literature that the anamorphic mumps was so vexing that some actors objected to close-ups, but this story was the concoction of Panavision’s founder Robert Gottschalk, who used it in his campaign to market the industry his company’s improved lenses (Dave Kenig, interview with the author, Aug. 8, 2018). Another problem was that the Hypergonar, unlike a true afocal attachment, had to be focused in addition to focusing the prime lens. If either step was omitted, the result was an out of focus shot, and this quirk made follow focusing difficult. (Afocal attachments are used to change a lens’s focal length, but do not change the lens’s focusing scale, hence the name afocal.) In addition, the rectangular cross section of the Chrétien-built attachments produced vignetting, a darkening of the corners of the image, as well as another problem also related to the attachments’ boxy shape, namely, a reduction in transmission that Sponable estimated to be about 20% (Belton 1992, p. 105). With care the defects were worked around, and the images they produced were good; newly designed attachments were ordered from Bausch & Lomb. (Can it be that Fox paid $2 million for Chrétien’s attachments without having tested them?) Despite Skouras’ enthusiasm for the big wide screen, he hedged his bets: Fox’s first released CinemaScope production, The Robe, was shot for three kinds of exhibition: for screens with a 2.55:1 aspect ratio, the usual 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and 3-D.  Skouras was not going to gamble without a safety net and risk his and Fox’s future on CinemaScope, a process whose fantabulous quintessence could only be expressed by using medial capitalization. Prior to Fox’s coining the word CinemaScope, Warner Bros. had registered the brand WarnerSuperScope with the US Patent and Trademark Office on November 21, 1952, which became a source of contention between the studios (Belton 1992). In an open letter, appearing as part of an advertisement in industry publications, Jack

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L.  Warner touted the 2.66:1 aspect ratio WarnerSuperScope and claimed credit for the suffix Scope based on Warner Bros.’ longstanding scientific research. Although he announced a list of forthcoming productions in the process, there never was a WarnerSuperScope film (Carr and Hayes 1988). In 1949 Don Joy Fedderson, general manager of KLAC-TV in Hollywood, who became a television producer, trademarked CinemaScope, for the name of his station’s video to film kinescope recording process. Fox bought the right to use the marque from him (KLAC…, 1949). Cinerama was still going strong in Manhattan when The Robe premiered at the nearby Roxy Theatre on September 16, 1953. For the most part, the film was critically well received, and in its first week at the Roxy, it set a record grossing $265,000. Cinerama’s promotional campaign stressed the participatory nature of the process, and CinemaScope’s campaign was as cunning by telling the public that it was “the modern miracle you can see without the use of glasses.” In other words, one did not need to wear spectacles to see the spectacle. Every studio executive paid attention to the opening of The Robe because it had the potential to overthrow existing production and exhibition practices. The Robe, in CinemaScope (in my youth I thought The Robe in CinemaScope was the title), had the promise of becoming the most disruptive change to the conventional order since the introduction of sound. For decades the average screen width had been about 20 feet with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, but with the success of a single CinemaScope production, its size and shape was threatened. Did the most fundamental attributes of the celluloid cinema projection need to be overhauled? In addition, the new stereophonic multi-track magnetic recording technology challenged the viability of the under-achieving Academy optical sound standard. (Another spur to improve sound-on-film was Columbia Records’ 33 1 3 RPM long-­ playing phonograph disk, introduced in 1948, whose quality was superior to the celluloid cinema’s optical track.) The Robe, with its ability to use a single 35 mm projector for big wide screen projection and stereophonic sound, was an appealing solution for an industry seeking to reverse the decline in attendance attributed to television. But a troubling concern presented itself: what to do about films about to start production, or nearly completed, or in the can awaiting release? One estimate put the inventory value of completed films at $300 million. How could they be exhibited to successfully compete with films shot and projected in a big wide process? That quandary will be addressed in the chapter Wide Screen and VistaVision. Fox commissioned Bausch & Lomb to design a better attachment, which they did, but they were available only in small numbers for the first few CinemaScope productions. This attachment is described in William R.  Knowlton’s Anamorphic Cylindrical Lens Construction, USP 2,702,493, filed July 23, 1953, whose primary improvement is overcoming the rectangular cross-section limitations of Chrétien’s

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optic, as noted above. Bausch & Lomb also designed prime lenses that had anamorphic optics integrated into their design that did away with the need for focusing of both prime lens and attachment as described in USP 2,729,154, Focusing Lens Mount, filed January 3, 1956, by C.  J. De Grave, Jr., et  al., and USP 2,740,328, Focusing Lens Mounting for Cylindrical Lenses, by O. W. Boughton et al., filed July 24, 1953. Another Bausch & Lomb disclosure on the subject was USP 2,932, 236, Anamorphosing Lens System, by E. Delano, filed July 5, 1955, describing a design to reduce the chromatic aberration of anamorphic optics. Bausch & Lomb also set about to manufacture projection lens attachments using cylindrical lenses, and although they made thousands, they couldn’t deliver enough in time to meet the demand. Projection brightness was a challenge since the CinemaScope frame, although increased by about a third, had a screen image about twice as wide as the usual 1.33:1 screen aspect ratio. The heat emitted by an arc lamp increases with its light output increasing the likelihood that the print

Fig. 62.8  Bausch & Lomb’s improved anamorphic attachment, as taught in a USP by Knowlton, which overcame problems with the lenses Fox obtained from Chrétien.

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will be damaged, which is somewhat less of a problem with the color prints Fox initially mandated for CinemaScope because they absorb less heat than black and white prints. The heating of the gate itself may be a greater threat than the direct absorption of heat by the print. A component of Fox’s solution to the screen brightness was to require the use of their design for a high gain screen, the Miracle Mirror Screen, or another vendor’s Magnaglow Astrolight. These screens reflect light where it is needed, toward the audience preferentially, rather than the ceiling, floor, and sides of the auditorium, in this way increasing the brightness of the image. Fox’s new screen had a claimed gain of 2, or twice the brightness of the usual matte screen (Benford 1954). The Fox screen was of the lenticular type made up of embossed reflecting elements and was available optimized for two projector angles: one in which the projector was the same height as the screen and a version using tilted lens elements for the more typical setup in which the projector is higher than the screen (Grignon 1954). Fox engineers sidestepped the deeply curved screen that was Cinerama’s hallmark and specified one with a far shallower curvature but having enough to even out any hotspotting and help keep the image in focus. The most vexing product development issue that faced Fox had to do with the acceptance of the print’s magnetic sound tracks. The Foxholes, with their narrow perforations, permitted four sound tracks: three 1.6  mm wide tracks for left, center, and right channels and a 0.74  mm effects track. Since this narrow track had more tape hiss, it was used for off-screen or surround sound that was activated by a 12 KHz signal. The left and right tracks were located on opposite sides of the print between its edges and the perforations. The magnetic stripe used for both the center and effects track was located between a row of perforations and the frames. Magnetic striping was applied to the prints by laminating narrow bands of magnetic tape coated on a thin acetate substrate to the print’s acetate base in a process developed by Hazard E.  Reeves, who had designed the Cinerama sound system. CinemaScope prints cost about twice as much as those with an optical track. Notably, unlike Cinerama with its requirement for a separate magnetic playback machine to run in interlock with the picture, CinemaScope had both image and multichannel sound on one print. The usual optical sound prints were exposed separately for picture and sound, but in one pass using a printer designed for the purpose. This was different from the procedure for magnetic sound-on-film that required two extra steps: application of the magnetic striping and then recording. High-speed recording of the four tracks helped to increase production, and as Hans-Christoph Wohlrab (1957) describes, one way to accomplish this was with a tape ­duplication machine that the German firm Siemens & Halske built for Deluxe Laboratories of New  York that

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could record 30,000  feet of release print per hour. When first demonstrated for the industry, CinemaScope sound was played back from a 35  mm magnetic film playback machine run in interlock with the picture. Since there was no print area lost to sound track, the aspect ratio of the projected image was at its maximum, 2.66:1. The use of 35 mm magnetic sound run in interlock had become commonplace for viewing prints in post-production, but this technique was unsuitable for theatrical release prints (Stone 2017). The addition of mag-stripes reduced the CinemaScope print aspect ratio to 2.55:1, but as we shall see, the aspect ratio was further reduced due to the exigencies of the exhibition marketplace (Mitchell 1957, PP. 11–13, 30–32). Fox succeeded in marshalling leading suppliers to manufacture theater equipment for the new mag-­stripe soundon-film process, but the first-generation magnetic sound heads suffered from excessive wear. In addition, it was reported that projectionists often failed to degauss (demagnetize) the metal projector parts that came in contact with or were in close proximity to the print, which could lead to the full or partial erasure of the track. Nonetheless, within the first year or so, more than 3000 cinemas converted their projectors to Foxholes and added penthouse magnetic sound readers above the gate (optical sound readers were below the gate), in addition to amplifiers, speakers, and high gain screens. But there arose a rebellion in the ranks of the exhibitors, with one going so far as to sue Fox claiming that the studio’s insistence on magnetic sound violated the Paramount Consent Decree. Fox’s CinemaScope licensees, MGM and Warner Bros., would not use Foxholes and mag tracks and favored Perspecta for CinemaScope release prints, an ersatz but sophisticated multichannel optical sound process, as described in the chapter Multichannel, Magnetic and Digital Sound. It was backwardly compatible with existing installations, an advantage that undermined Fox’s hope for the universal acceptance of magnetic sound-on-film. For many theater owners, buying anamorphic attachments and a new screen was the total extent of the commitment they were willing to make. After mulling over the extent of opposition to magnetic sound, in the spring of 1954, Skouras changed the studio’s policy. A version of CinemaScope that used only optical sound was issued suitable for the many theaters that did not wish to convert their projectors to Foxholes, add magnetic sound readers, and new amplifiers and speakers. The ‘Scope projector aperture was narrowed to accommodate the usual optical track, thereby reducing the on-screen aspect ratio to 2.35:1. Another variation, the m ­ ag-­optical format, used Foxholes and combined magnetic and optical sound, also resulting in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This mag-optical variant was compatible with both four track mag sound and existing optical

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Fig. 62.9  Top: the original CinemaScope print had four magnetic tracks, three 0.063 in wide and one control channel 0.041 in wide. The narrow Foxhole perfs were 0.78 in × 0.073 in. The projector aperture was 0.91  in  ×  0.715  in (dotted lines), and the camera aperture was 0.94 in × 0.74 in The projected aspect ratio was 2.55:1. Middle: when prints had only an optical track, CinemaScope used the standard perfs 0.11 × 0.078 in and a projector aperture 839 in × 0.715 in (dotted lines). The camera aperture was 0.87 in × 0.74 in. The track was the standard .1 in wide. The aspect ratio was reduced to 2.35:1. Bottom: the magoptical version of CinemaScope maintained the four magnetic tracks, the optical track version’s perf and frame dimensions, and had a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The optical track was a narrow 0.038 in. The final version (not shown) used a wider frameline to conceal cement splices, which changed the aspect ratio to 2.39:1.

sound readers, but the new optical track was less than half the width of the standard optical track reducing its volume and increasing background noise. The mag-optical prints could be played back on any projector, even those that had been converted to Foxholes. Fox did not design the magoptical print, rather it was a recommendation of the Motion Picture Research Council, an entity supported by AMPAS.  Mag-optical release was first used by MGM in

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1955 for some of its prints for Kismet, according to Sherlock, and Fox offered it in 1956 for Bus Stop. The mag-­optical format was rejected in some European countries due to the reduction in optical sound quality. Yet another change occurred due to the visibility of splices. Sponable believed that there was sufficient projector aperture cropping to conceal camera negative cement splices for the original version of the format. However, in 1970 a small reduction was made to the height of the projector aperture to better conceal splice visibility. This change produced a CinemaScope’s screen aspect ratio of 2.39:1, based on a .838 in × .700 in projector aperture. The 2.35:1 ratio was maintained for prints that had only Perspecta optical sound and for monaural prints for drive-ins. The 35 mm format designed by Dickson had a frame that optimized picture area by extending horizontally between the two columns of perforations and vertically to the adjacent frames, separated from them by a narrow frameline. That changed briefly with the introduction of Fox’s Movietone that added a 2-mm-wide optical track between one of the columns of perforations resulting in a reduced frame width, which changed the screen aspect ratio. Dickson’s frame had an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, but the Movietone frame was 1.19:1. To return to the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, it was decided to reduce the height of the frame. The Academy and the SMPTE decided on a frame with an aspect ratio of 1.37:1  in order to achieve a screen aspect ratio of 1.33:1, which took into the downward angle of projection. The new wide frameline between the frames was wasteful of picture area, but it maintained compatibility with the existing production and exhibition infrastructure, requiring the relatively minor change of new aperture plates for cameras and projectors. (The addition of the optical track required a lens recentration of 1 mm.) Curiously, it was Earl Sponable who played a major role in determining the significant changes to the 35 mm format, first by the addition of the optical track and the concomitant changes producing the Movietone aspect ratio, and then to the format and aspect ratio changes caused CinemaScope. One bit of conventional wisdom has it that new developments in motion pictures were usually brought to the studios from outside the industry, but the industry also had a history of advancing technology, for example, with the creation of Grandeur and for improvements in the field of sound-­on-­ film. It should be born in mind that producing and distributing theatrical motion pictures, the ability to make entertaining content that people pay to see, requires a special set of skills that is different from the expertise required for the invention of technology and product development. If the studios licensed technology, so had Western Electric, which made it no less a research and development innovator. For example, it purchased the rights to de Forest’s audion tube, which it greatly improved, just as Fox had to do after the acquisition

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of its first lenses from Henri Jacques Chrétien; it was Fox and Sponable that were responsible for the creation of the CinemaScope system of image and sound. In a short period of time, with only three decent Hypergonar attachments on hand, the Fox engineering team succeeded in inducing a major change to motion picture production and exhibition. Within a 5-year period, about 85% of the approximately 21,000 motion picture theaters in the United States converted to CinemaScope. Belton (1992) reports that not all of them opted for the full package of four-track magnetic sound and many balked at installing the Miracle Mirror Screen. It’s possible to view the accommodations that Fox made for the exhibitors as a failure of resolve, but companies must pay attention to their customers. For the most part, the studio had succeeded in accomplishing its goal and emerged as a technology leader. The successful CinemaScope process, and its films, furthered the ends of its management by making the company profitable and fending off a hostile takeover. Moreover, Fox established a 35 mm format variation for wide screen projection, the first such change that was accepted since the addition of optical sound-on-film. This becomes an even greater accomplishment when one considers that the industry had a substantial inventory of 1.33:1 aspect ratio films waiting to be released, posing distribution challenges as wide screen was overwhelmingly accepted. How this issue was dealt with is described in the chapter Wide Screen and VistaVision. Cossar (2011), who studied the 1930 Fox Grandeur version of The Big Trail, found that the wide composition led

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to long takes and the number of shots required for a scene was greatly reduced. While The Robe emulates The Big Trail for dialog scenes, giving the audiences plenty of time to take in the lavish sets, it is otherwise conventionally cut. The film succeeded, to a large extent, because of the fascination with the new technique, including the expansive sound system that showed off the romantic score composed by Alfred Newman. The Robe is a story of love and sacrifice with the added entertainment of the broad performances of Richard Burton, as a convulsively guilt-ridden Roman tribune, and Jay Robinson as the snarling reptilian Caligula. Cinerama served up panoramic travelogue, but The Robe’s cinematography eschews panorama and big screen kinesthetic effects to follow established theatrical narrative cinema techniques. As I entered my teen years, I was witness to the introductions of all three of the new motion picture processes, Cinerama, Natural Vision 3-D, and CinemaScope, and to this day I cannot shake my affection for The Robe. MGM’s Quo Vadis, released just 2 years prior to The Robe, set in an ancient Rome a quarter of a century later, has a remarkably similar set of characters and themes, but the films are visually strikingly different and worth comparing to help understand the transformation wrought by CinemaScope. MGM’s lavish reconstruction of the Rome of Quo Vadis somehow feels constricted and confined to its narrow screen; at least that’s my response after witnessing the spectacle that Fox created for The Robe in CinemaScope.

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‘Scope Variations

Bausch & Lomb could not keep up with the demand for their CinemaScope anamorphic projection lens attachments to satisfy exhibitors, although by May 1954 they had supplied more than 4000 (and 200 camera lens attachments) (Grignon 1954). The unfilled demand created an opportunity for entrepreneur Robert Gottschalk’s Panavision, incorporated in 1954, as discussed in chapters 22 and 66. Gottschalk contacted mathematician and physicist Walter Wallin of Canoga Park, California, who used the optical approach first described by David Brewster to design an anamorphic attachment for existing projection lenses based on two moveable wedge prisms. There were two versions of the resulting Panatar lens that attached to the front of a projection lens, the bulky Super Panatar and its successor, the more compact Ultra Panatar, originally distributed by the Radiant Manufacturing Corp. of Chicago. Both of these used a rotating control to continuously vary the deanamorphosing (horizontal stretching) factor from zero up to 2:1. (Panavision also offered the variable anamorphosing Superama attachment, which used cylindrical lenses rather than prisms, for both 16 mm projection and cinematography.) Exhibitors valued variable anamorphosing because of the uncertainty with regard to projection practices, to a large extent caused by Paramount who announced various prospective aspect ratios for their imminent VistaVision. Similar concerns were created by RKO with their use of Superscope that could be projected in different aspect ratios. Panavision sold thousands of Panatars at $900 a set (pairs were required for changeover), which were less expensive than the Bausch & Lomb attachment (Yarrow 1988). In addition to American lenses by Bausch & Lomb, Panavision, and the Tushinsky Brothers, anamorphic projection attachments were made in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the USSR, and Sweden. In a few years, the Panavision integral anamorphic camera lens replaced Bausch & Lomb’s CinemaScope prime lens adapter for most of the Hollywood ‘Scope feature films. (In this book ‘Scope is used for anamorphic processes with an approximately 2.4:1 aspect ratio.) The literature favors the interpretation that the Panatar attachments were based on the

design of Walter Wallin, physicists and Panavision shareholder, as described in Anamorphosing System, USP 2,890,622, filed August 11, 1954. However Panavision historian David Kenig told me that “the Wallin patent was applied to the anamorphic taking lenses and not the Super and Ultra Panatar projection lenses that seem similar to a 1933 patent by Newcomer. The Wallin patent does cite both projection and taking but was only implemented in Panavision anamorphic taking lenses.” The Newcomer patent, to which Kenig refers, is USP 1,898,787, Prism Amamorphoser, filed February 25, 1932, cited in the prior chapter, which teaches a specific implementation of the Brewster double-prism design. Fox, bent on exclusivity, signed Newcomer to an agreement for his services. Although the Panatar projection optics are based on wedge prisms, Wallin’s patent, while describing both prism and cylindrical lens approaches, has claims that cover cylindrical designs that correct focus-induced nonlinear compression across the field, by compensating horizontal distortion with “…two weak cylindrical lenses that are rotated in opposite directions as the attachment is focused” (Laikin 2001). The improvement this made possible was to become the basis for future Panavision camera optics, integral lens designs incorporating anamorphic elements rather than lens attachments added in front of prime objectives, eliminating the need to focus both the attachment and the prime. The disclosure language specifies the elimination of astigmatism, or differential focus in the vertical and horizontal directions. Kenig told me that “…the result of using the counter-rotating elements (astigmatizers) was that you could do close-ups which were not possible with the B&L CinemaScope lenses. The ability to do undistorted close-ups is noted in Wallin’s patent, and was the basis for Panavision’s marketing campaign against ‘anamorphic mumps,’ the distortion that was seen when close-ups were shot of actors’ faces. As to inventorship, Kenig told me that “there is no documentation that I have found to prove who did what but from some notebooks and drawings I am of the opinion that Wallin did the optical design and Tak (Takuo Miyagishima) did the opto-mechani-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_63

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Fig. 63.1  The Super Panatar projection lens attachment offered variable image expansion based on Brewster’s prism design. (Cinémathèque Française)

cal design.” Panavision also developed the Micro-Panatar, a lens for optical printing that was welcomed by the studios and Technicolor, which enabled the conversion of movies shot in ‘Scope, allowing them to be projected using conventional spherical projection optics for 16 mm release prints for airlines; the technique was also used for broadcast television using the pan-and-scan technique, which maintains the height of the image but recomposes it to fit the narrower screen. In 1953 brothers Joseph and Irving Tushinsky, Sony audio products importers, promoted the Superscope process as an alternative to CinemaScope. Joseph Tushinsky, a musician, conductor, and writer, sold screenplays and also produced feature films, so he knew his way around Hollywood to help him market Superscope. It was adopted by RKO in 1954 and used until 1957 for 16 features, according to Sherlock. Superscope was photographed using a negative frame that was the same size as CinemaScope’s but achieved a wide aspect ratio through cropping rather than anamorphics. Cinematography used any of the wide selection of conventional spherical lenses, which could be faster, better corrected, and available in a wider range of focal lengths than ‘Scope attachments used with prime lenses. The Superscope negative was cropped to have a wide aspect ratio; the selected area was vertically expanded to fill the release print frame by Technicolor using optical printing (Carr and Hayes 1988). The Superscope projection lens could dial-in a desired aspect ratio, like the Panatars. Initially the Tushinskys recommended a screen aspect ratio of 2:1, which they alleged was based on “an extensive survey of physical limitations of the-

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aters throughout the country” (Cline 1955, p.  591). Presumably the Superscope projection attachment used art taught in USP 2,816,480, Prism Type Anamorphic Device, filed November 23, 1953, issued to Joseph S. Tushinsky of North Hollywood and his brother, Irving P. Tushinsky of Van Nuys, California. The first film in Superscope, Vera Cruz, was released in 1954 by United Artists and projected in the 2:1 screen aspect ratio. In 1956 RKO’s Run for the Sun, in Superscope 235, could be projected using standard ‘Scope attachments for a 2.35:1 screen aspect ratio (hence the name, Superscope 235). For the 235 variant, a 35 mm camera was used with an aperture that exposed the entire silent frame, in other words, the original frame designed by W. K. L. Dickson. The lens mount was (or should have been) shifted horizontally to recenter lenses so their optical centers corresponded to the Superscope 235 frame’s center. For composing the image, the camera finder used a reticule scribed for the desired aspect ratio(s). Since Superscope 235 used a cropped camera negative to achieve the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, its negative area was half that of CinemaScope’s. After a falling out with the Tushinskys, Howard Hughes, the owner of RKO, continued to use the technique renaming it RKO-Scope. Super 35 is the name given to a full-aperture technique, similar to Superscope 235, which is attributed to British cinematographer Joe Dunton, who used it for the film Dance Craze released in 1981. The Super 35 technique was widely embraced by the film industry as an alternative to shooting for both widescreen spherical (non-anamorphic lenses) 1.85:1 and anamorphic 2.4:1 release. Compared with Techniscope, to be described below, it offers some advantage due to a moderate increase in negative area; it was sometimes used in cameras modified with a three-perforation pulldown to conserve film. Dunton also promoted a process, Duntonvision, apparently identical to two-perforation Techniscope (Hume and Gareth 2004). Technicolor also offered a widescreen technique based on shooting silent aperture and release printing for widescreen projection. The CinemaScope imprimatur flourished for about a decade after its introduction, despite a seeming conflict: on one hand Fox sought to control the proprietary basis for CinemaScope technology, and on the other hand it was to Fox’s advantage to encourage its studio competitors to use the process and the marque because the more films released, the more likely exhibitors were to adopt the projection method. Many of the major studios licensed CinemaScope, with MGM and Disney as early adopters, both of whom signed up following the release of The Robe. Warner Bros. contracted with Zeiss to produce anamorphic lenses, but despite its distinguished pedigree, the German company failed to produce optics that met the studio’s expectations, and in October 1953, Warner Bros. gave up on its anamorphic initiative. Instead, Jack Warner, having previously pub-

63  ‘Scope Variations

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Fig. 63.2  A poster for Vera Cruz, the first Superscope film.

lically maligned CinemaScope, possibly miffed because Skouras rebuffed his offer to invest in the process, also got on board, as did Universal and Columbia. A few years after Fox’s introduction of CinemaScope, Republic Pictures, a conglomeration of the quaintly named Poverty Row studios, assembled by Herbert J.  Yates’ Consolidated Film Industries, purchased French Cinépanoramic cylindrical lens anamorphic attachments and assembled its own process compatible with existing ‘Scope practices, which was branded Naturama. Republic preferred to engineer its own system than pay tribute to Fox. Naturama used the Cinépanoramic attachments combined with primes of three focal lengths, 50  mm, 75  mm, and 100  mm, with “focusing linkage that couples both lenses and affords synchronous focusing.” The design by Daniel J.  Bloomberg, Republic’s chief engineer, overcame the early version of CinemaScope that required focusing both the prime lens and anamorphic attachment (Naturama… 1956). Naturama’s raunchy titles include The Wayward Girl, released in 1957, Juvenile Jungle, and Young and Wild, both released in 1958. (Republic Pictures went out of business in 1959.) A year later, an entirely different approach to wide screen appeared, ARC 120, designed by Leon W. Wells, a wide aspect ratio projection-only process using standard (spherical) projection optics and a prismatic attachment, whose inclusion here is based on its design eccentricity. The technique joined two subframes in a method somewhat similar to Elms’ two-projector Widescope, as described in chapter 57. ARC 120 projected a diptych, but unlike Widescope that used two

projectors, ARC 120 used one projector with a 35 mm frame divided into two subframes that were rotated through 90° using prism optics made by Zeiss. The subframe images were tiled side by side on a 120° curved screen resulting in an aspect ratio of 2.64:1 (Wysotsky 1971). In August 1960, ARC 120 was used to project a film titled Honeymoon at the Palace Cinema in Blackpool, England; it was also used for a film about ballet, Un Deux Quatre! screened at the Cinema Lutetia in Paris, which seems to have been the extent of its use for exhibition. On December 26, 1963, the Italian division of Technicolor designed the ‘Scope origination format Techniscope, as described in USP 3,396,021, Method of Making Wide Screen Motion Pictures, filed by Giulio Monteleoni and Giovanni Ventimiglia. The process required relatively minor modifications to a 35 mm camera: its intermittent was changed to a two-perforation pulldown, and a 2.33:1 aperture plate was substituted, plus a viewfinder reticle was added with the ‘Scope action area. The process profited from Technicolor’s wet gate optical printing expertise. Techniscope was shot with any 35 mm spherical camera lens; in addition to the savings in film stock, it had twice the running time from the same film load, speeding up production. The two-perforation high frame was optically stretched in the vertical to create prints compatible with the CinemaScope 35  mm format allowing for projection using standard anamorphic optics. For a 20 year run, beginning in 1960, Techniscope was used for hundreds of films, notably for Westerns directed by Sergio Leone and those produced for Paramount by the dap-

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Fig. 63.3  Comparing four methods used for 35 mm cinematography. Dimensions are for camera apertures. The image areas used are yellow highlighted and the sound track areas are gray. Superscope 235 and Super 35: The useful negative width extends from perf to perf. The format can be used to optically or digitally extract ‘Scope or widescreen. (‘Scope is shown.) A variant used a three-perf pulldown. CinemaScope: The optical track version is shown. The ellipse indicates cinematography with anamorphics. Widescreen: The 1.85:1 projection area is highlighted. The negative could be exposed full aperture and hard masked in printing. Techniscope: The process used a two-perf pulldown for cinematography with images optically expanded vertically and projected anamorphically.

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per A.  C. Lyles (Andrew Craddock Lyles, Jr.) who maintained a spacious office on the lot until his death at 95  in 2013. Technicolor licensed the process to other labs, who used it for features under the name Cromoscope, but in some countries these films were released under the Techniscope or CinemaScope marks (Carr and Hayes 1988). Techniscope negatives, when scanned and projected as DCP files, can produce very good images, as was demonstrated by the 2012 feature Argo. Techniscope has none of the artifacts associated with anamorphic camera optics. It is a comment on the stipulative and fugitive nature of aesthetics that what was once considered to be an artifact can become an attribute. Anamorphic camera lenses, aside from their intended purpose, depart in some respects from the performance of spherical lenses, and these differences have become sought after by some cinematographers. For this reason the marketing materials for the Arri/Zeiss master prime anamorphic lenses tout them as having “optimized anamorphic bokeh (a term to describe the characteristics of out of focus portions of an image) – evenly illuminated oval out of focus highlights,” and “anamorphic blue streak lines in a very unique new style that optimizes flares and reflections for additional artistic work.” Why oval out of focus highlights are preferable to circular highlights is no more readily explained than a preference for very unique blue streak flares and reflections. Some cinematographers also like the anamorphic artifact called breathing, the change in anamorphosis that occurs when focusing. In an attempt to improve CinemaScope’s projected image quality Sponable sought a potential remedy with CinemaScope 55, designed to produce a large negative master for reduction printing for 35 mm release. With the cooperation of Eastman Kodak, Fox performed tests to determine the optimum negative size for producing the highest-quality 35  mm anamorphic release prints. They empirically determined that a negative four times the area of the 35  mm CinemaScope frame significantly reduced grain and increased apparent sharpness and that no further increase in area made a contribution to quality. This finding led to the short-lived adoption of the CinemaScope 55 format for cinematography, using a Grandeur camera that had been built by Stein for Fox’s Nature Color. The camera was modified for the 55 mm format by Mitchell, which made a few more 55 mm cameras after the 1956 release of The King and I. The eight-perforation vertical-traveling frame of the 55.625-mm-­ wide format was photographed with 2:1 anamorphic lenses from which a 35 mm printing master was made by optical reduction using spherical lenses. The quality of the 35 mm prints were very good, and the film was also released in 70  mm with six-channel magnetic sound conforming to Todd-AO’s 2.2:1 aspect ratio and projected without anamorphics. Fox billed this 70 mm release of CinemaScope 55 as Grandeur 70, an affirmation of the studio’s roots and

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reminder that it was no Johnny-come-lately to large format. After a second film was released in the process in 1956, Carousel, which did poorly at the box office, CinemaScope 55 was abandoned. Fox may have concluded that Todd-AO and/or 70 mm had better marquee value than CinemaScope 55, and Fox purchased a controlling interest in Magna, the company founded by Todd. In addition, the Eastman Color system was improving, as were ‘Scope lenses, so it may be that any advantage CinemaScope 55 had as a mastering format was obviated. A 4K screening of a restored reel of The King and I at the Reel Thing conference in Hollywood in the summer of 2017 demonstrated that the CinemaScope 55 negative was capable of producing a superb image. What follows is a partial list of ‘Scope brands: America: ColorScope used by American International, of unknown origin; Megascope used by Columbia and others; Naturama used by Republic and made by Cinépanoramic; Panavision, at first under the CinemaScope marque but eventually under its own; RegalScope, for low-budget Fox releases produced by Regal Films Productions; Superscope used by RKO that also used the process under the name RKO-Scope; Vistarama by Simpson Optical England: CameraScope made by Cinépanoramic; Hammerscope made by Bausch & Lomb France: Dyaliscope, Franscope, Totalvision Italy: Cinescope, TotalScope Japan: DaieiScope, GrandScope (Shochiku), NikkatsuScope, and TohoScope Medial capitalization of the letter “S” is uncertain in some cases or inconsistently used (Reid 2004; Limbacher 1968). The American WideScreen Museum website, Carr and Hayes, and Wikipedia, all together each list about 60 ‘Scope brands, but it’s likely that the same optics were offered under different trade names (WS: The American WideScreen Museum). TohoScope is of special interest to me because of the hours I spent looking at films in the small Toho Theater in Manhattan’s Theater District in the early

Fig. 63.4  The French Totalvision anamorphic attachment.

1960s. The process was used with great skill in films directed by Akira Kurosawa. TohoScope was excellent, free from distortion or other anamorphic artifacts. It’s fitting that Fox, having introduced the failed big wide screen Grandeur 70 mm format two decades earlier, succeeded with CinemaScope, both of which were engineered under the direction of Earl Sponable. By 1956 there were 40,910 CinemaScope screens worldwide, with another 2039 on order or being installed. Out of a total of 23,430 screens in the United States and Canada, 17,591 were CinemaScope installations, but only 4609 were equipped to play magnetic track stereophonic sound, while Italy had 2441 stereophonically equipped theaters out of a total of 3544 (Thompson 1957). But one major studio was a holdout, Paramount Pictures, which defiantly announced it would not make films in CinemaScope (Belton 1992, p. 105). With the help of Technicolor, which had an incentive due to the fact that their printing process could not accommodate Foxholes, Paramount devised the excellent non-anamorphic widescreen process, VistaVision, as described in the next chapter.

Wide Screen and VistaVision

Fox’s vision for CinemaScope was achieved, for the most part, and within a few years, it reached near ubiquity becoming a valued main-­title marque, but both Warner Bros. and Paramount found it galling to use a technology developed by another studio. There was also the concern about doing business with a competitor who was, at least in the beginning, the sole source for camera lenses. Fox originally wished to restrict the use of CinemaScope to prestige big budget films in color; when the studio released ‘Scope low budget black and white films they were under the RegalScope brand, produced by the independent Regal Films Productions (Reid 2004). Whatever Fox’s licensing terms for the process, they had to tread lightly so as not to discourage its acceptance, since it was advantageous to encourage CinemaScope productions to further exhibitor installations. Fox’s desire to restrict the CinemaScope brand to quality productions led the studio to require some form of script approval (Belton 1992), and it’s not hard to understand why other studios would balk at this. There were technical reasons for resisting the process: in the first years, CinemaScope optics had problems such as nonlinear compression (distortion) across the horizontal field, and the choice of focal lengths was limited; the attachments worked only with longer focal length lenses, which might have been off-­putting for a process that was supposed to be ideal for capturing panoramic vistas. Aubrey Solomon (2002), 20th Century Fox historian, gives another reason for turning down CinemaScope, namely, the $25,000 licensing fee that a studio or independent producer had to pay per production. Alternatively, they could sign up for the right to produce an unlimited number for $100,000. When all was said and done, the celluloid cinema’s original aspect ratio, which had endured for more than half a century, had become passé. The motion picture medium is one in which appearances are literally everything and the original shape of the screen, the Edison-Dickson aspect ratio, had gone out of style. A film released for 1.33:1 projection, almost overnight, looked like a relic from a bygone era; it generated an even more invidious comparison with the low production value competitor that was disparagingly dubbed

64

the boob tube. The studios and exhibitors had more flexibility in changing the projected aspect ratio than did the television industry with its many millions of TV sets in households. Although nominally based on 1.33:1, in these early days of broadcast, the screens were not rectangular; TV sets with their small cathode ray tubes had screens that were either circular or had curved vertical edges cropping the 1.33:1 broadcast frame. Early TV screens were small, and in the years immediately after the World War II, a 10 in wide screen was considered to be a pretty good size (Keller 1991). Events had overtaken planning, and the studios had a large number of 1.33:1 films in unreleased inventory, an aggregate production cost on the order of $300 million. John Belton (1992) writes that the switch to wide screen motivated a sale of Edison-Dickson 1.33:1 aspect ratio features to television. For the studios the expedient solution for theatrical release was for the exhibitor to use a new projector aperture plate to crop the frame to a wider aspect ratio and project with a short focal length lens to fill a bigger screen. This left the composition up to the projectionist, who might adjust the framing knob to cut off the actors’ heads. A trip to a projection booth might turn up a wide variety of tarnished brass aperture plate masks filed to shape for whatever aspect ratio the projectionist thought was a good match for the film, the screen, and the focal length of the lens mounted on the projector. Standardization or recommended practices were nonexistent, so each studio was free to select whatever aspect ratio they favored between 1.33:1 and 2.40:1. Universal liked 1.85:1, Disney 1.75:1, MGM 1.66:1 (as did Europe), Fox obviously favored (approximately) 2.4:1, and Paramount couldn’t make up its mind. The projector aperture opening to determine the screen aspect ratio was in the hands of the projectionist and his file; he had become the filmmakers’ aesthetic collaborator (Haines 2003), a practice that ruined carefully planned compositions, to the consternation of directors and cinematographers. The procedure, in which a frame is cropped to achieve a screen aspect ratio by using the projector aperture plate, is called soft masking, which eventually gave way to hard masking in which the cropped wide screen

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_64

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image was printed as it was intended to be projected in an attempt to bypass the projectionists judgment. The frame with its reduced image area was now projected on a larger screen, with possibly increased graininess, reduced sharpness, and reduced screen brightness, a victory of commercial pragmatism over image quality, and a return to the Magnascope practice of the late 1920s. In the short run, nothing could be done to improve the projected quality of the films in inventory that were projected under such conditions, but techniques were being developed to mitigate the loss in release print quality for newly produced features, and Eastman continued to improve their camera, intermediate, and release print stock. By the early 1960s, two standard projection aspect ratios were settled on in North America, spherical lens (non-anamorphic optics) projected widescreen 1.85:1, and anamorphic lens projected ‘Scope 2.40:1. Europe preferred spherical lens wide screen 1.66:1 and anamorphic lens at 2.40:1. As noted earlier, some cinemas projected on a screen with a compromise 2.0:1, thereby cropping every shot of every film. For reference, these are the dimensions for some important 35 mm projector apertures: silent, 0.931 in × 0.698 in (1.333:1); Academy optical sound, 0.825  in  ×  0.600  in (1.375:1); CinemaScope, 0.838  in  ×  0.700  in (1.197:1, or 2.39:1 using a 2  ×  projection anamorphic lens); and VistaVision or widescreen in America, 0.825 in × 0.466 in (1.770:1, nominally 1.85:1). The silent frame had a projectable area of 0.650 in2, the Academy sound aperture 0.495 in2, Cinemascope 0.587 in2, and VistaVision 0.385 in2. (Projector apertures are given for direct comparison rather than camera apertures because VistaVision was photographed a using an eight-perforation horizontal-traveling 35  mm frame.) It’s evident that a substantial reduction in image area occurred with the adoption of the Academy optical sound format since the silent frame’s area was 0.650 in2 compared to 0.495 in2 for the Academy frame. This was the result of the need to devote area to sound track and then to restore the 1.33:1 screen aspect ratio, in effect by widening the framelines. Much of the lost area was restored with the CinemaScope frame. In America the 1.85:1 aspect ratio widescreen was, for the most part, the alternative to ‘Scope, although in exhibition the shape of the screen was determined by the exhibitor. The 1.85:1 format led to the smallest image area of any other 35 mm variation, at only 0.385 in2, which was now projected on bigger screens than when using the larger Academy frame. To address the reduction in image area for 1.85:1 projection, Technicolor developed an alternative to ‘Scope in which feature films were shot using the full silent frame but composed for wide screen, thus using the maximum negative area available. These negatives were cropped for the 1.85:1 aspect ratio and optically reduced for 35 mm release using

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liquid-gate printing to remove scratches and dust. This technique was used by Technicolor to produce matrices for making release prints using their dye transfer process. Using the silent camera, aperture for wide screen enabled a 25% increase in negative area compared with shooting with the Academy aperture. The similar Super 35 technique of a quarter century later had the same goal in mind (Zwerman 2010). Liquid-gate printing for improving image quality may have been brought to Technicolor’s attention by Kodak researchers (Turner et al. 1957). Wet-gate or liquid-gate printing was anticipated by Otto Sandvik of Kodak, and is described in USP 2,073,287, Method and Apparatus for Reproducing Sound, filed April 17, 1934, which teaches the technique for improving the duplication of optical sound tracks. Imus (1960) and Schmit of Technicolor describe liquid-­ gate printing to remove dirt and scratches and reduce grain because wide screen projection exacerbated the visibility of such defects. For image duplication the projector portion of the optical printer uses a gate designed for the immersion of camera negative in a liquid medium whose index of refraction is ideally between that of the gelatin emulsion (1.5) and the acetate substrate (1.48). The liquid used by Technicolor was perchlorethylene to conceal surface defects in both the acetate base and gelatin emulsion surfaces. It is also possible to use liquid printing in a contact step printer in which the camera and print film are advanced a frame at a time and immersed in liquid (Stott et  al. 1957). Technicolor’s early efforts to remove blemishes were based on lacquering the film and optically printing using a diffused light source. In 1957 Technicolor began to use the liquid-gate process to produce matrices from tripack camera negative, after which it extended the technique to formats from 16 mm to 65 mm. Both Warner Bros. and Paramount made no bones about their refusal to use CinemaScope, but while Warner Bros. capitulated, Paramount did not. For about a decade, Paramount was the anamorphic holdout, defying Fox by developing its own non-anamorphic process. Paramount initially announced Paravision, which would have used standard spherical lens cinematography with images cropped by the projector aperture plate to the 1.66:1 aspect ratio. To achieve a big screen image, a short focal length lens was required, which is the same approach suggested for repurposing the inventory of 1.33:1 films that were in the can, with the difference that the new features would be composed for 1.66:1. But this “solution” would have been unable to produce the production values and lustrous images associated with the studio. Paramount changed course under the direction of its chief engineer Loren L.  Ryder and developed a system based on the concept of John R. Bishop, the head of the studio’s camera department. Bishop remembered that the 35  mm Fox Nature Color camera used a vertical-traveling

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eight-perforation pulldown and decided to turn the camera on its side to photograph a horizontal-traveling frame eight perforations long. His concept was that the large negative would be the mastering source for widescreen 35 mm prints projected with short focal length spherical lenses. Bishop acquired one of the cameras, which had been built in 1926 by the William P. Stein Company for the bichromatic color process licensed to Fox by Kodak, as described in chapter 46 (Boone 1954). Bishop had the camera modified to expose a camera aperture 1.485  in.  ×  0.99  in. having a frame with a horizontal aspect ratio of 1.5:1. There were precedents for the concept of horizontal-traveling 35 mm to take advantage of a large negative. In 1928 the Englishman George Hill and the Italian Filoteo Alberini experimented with a horizontal-traveling ten-perforation 35 mm process (Katz and Nolen 2013). J. A. Ball, the inventor of the Technicolor three-strip camera, describes a horizontal-traveling 35 mm mastering negative in USP 1,844,377, Color Cinematography, filed Aug. 21, 1929. That year Fearless also showed the horizontal-traveling ten-­ perforation frame Fearless Super Pictures format, not to be confused by the vertical-traveling 65  mm format Fearless Super Film Magnifilm camera (Sherlock 1997). In 1953 the head of MGM’s camera department, John Arnold, came up with his horizontal-traveling ten-perforation 35 mm format dubbed Arnoldscope (Grant and Meadows 2016). Paramount enlisted the cooperation of Eastman Kodak and Technicolor in developing what they were to call VistaVision, whose negative area was nearly the same size as that of 70 mm. VistaVision was promoted with the tagline: “motion picture high-fidelity.” This eight-perforation horizontal-traveling 35  mm frame was the same as that introduced in the mid1920s by Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar, for the Leica camera designed by Oskar Barnack in 1913, and Paramount probably used Leica lenses for cinematography. But Paramount could not make up its mind about the projection aspect ratio. One concept was to exhibit using the 35 mm horizontal-­traveling format, and for this iteration, the studio reserved room for an optical track, which resulted in an eight-perf frame with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Many exhibitors settled on the 1.85:1 aspect ratio for VistaVision, which in this book is called widescreen as opposed to wide screen, a term used generically. The VistaVision 35 mm release print was derived from a camera negative that had more than two times the area of the print’s projected frame. 35 mm imbibition release prints were made by Technicolor by optically printing matrices from the VistaVision camera negative. VistaVision release prints were exceptionally crisp, free from grain, with highly saturated color. This is especially noteworthy since its projected frame area was a fraction of that of the CinemaScope frame, but it was projected on screens that were of comparable size. Six

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Fig. 64.1  Top: The VistaVision camera master negative format. 35 mm film travels horizontally exposing a frame 8 perfs long. Bottom: The 35 mm VistaVision print was made from 35 mm printing masters optically reduced from the 8 perf negative. The amorphously bounded yellow area represents the suggested projection aperture, which was up to the exhibitor who might select an aperture from these recommendations: 0.825  in  ×  0.497  in for 1.66:1; 0.825  in  ×  0.471  in for 1.75:1; 0.825 in × 0.446 in for 1.85:1; and 0.825 in × 0.412 in for 2:1.

Stein cameras were converted to VistaVision and used in their original blimps. The Mitchell Camera Corporation was given the assignment of building additional cameras and delivered seven by 1954 with 16 more on order. Mitchell also designed cast magnesium blimps for the c­ameras (Daily 1955). Technicolor converted 14 of their obsolete three-strip cameras and blimps to VistaVision (and Technirama). A lightweight VistaVision camera was introduced in 1955 suitable for offtripod cinematography, and Paramount developed its own optical printing capability (Daily 1955; Thompson 1957). While making up its mind about the VistaVision aspect ratio, Paramount sent confusing messages to the exhibitors. The studio initially seemed to have in mind the creation of a universal format that could be projected in various aspect ratios, possibly even anamorphically with a screen aspect ratio of 2:1. Announcements of the possibility of alternative screen aspect ratios provided an incentive for exhibitors to

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64  Wide Screen and VistaVision

Fig. 64.2  Marlon Brando directing the last Paramount VistaVision film, One Eyed Jacks.

buy variable anamorphic projection attachments, such as those made by Superscope, Panavision with their Super and Ultra Panatar lenses, and the Kalee Varamorph designed in Britain by Taylor, Taylor & Hobson (Cricks 1957, p.14). While 35  mm anamorphically projected versions of VistaVision were demonstrated, it was not used commercially used as far as I know. The studio made a few eight-perf VistaVision prints of White Christmas, released on October 14, 1953, which I saw projected at Radio City Music Hall on a very big screen. White Christmas was exhibited in its native mastering format in only a few theaters using projectors built by the Century Projector Corporation. The United Kingdom’s G. B.-Kalee Ltd., a manufacturer of 35  mm projectors, built prototype horizontal-traveling VistaVision projectors that were ready for production just as Paramount decided against using the format for exhibition. The G. B.-Kalee projector was so wide there was not enough space for it in many projection booths since two of the machines were required for changeover (Enticknap 2005). VistaVision settled in as a process for big negative mastering designed for 35  mm release, or on occasion 70  mm release for what the studio called Super VistaVision. In 1954 VistaVision was used for two feature films, and in the second year, 14 films were released, all but one in color. Although VistaVision 35  mm prints were released hard masked in the 1.5:1 aspect ratio, their backward “F” change-

over mark served as a target for the projectionist to set the frameline adjustment for either of two aspect ratios, 1.66:1 or 1.85:1. VistaVision demonstrated that the losses in image quality inherent in multi-­generation release printing could be overcome by starting with a larger negative. As part of its total repudiation of anything CinemaScope, Paramount’s VistaVision prints used the Perspecta optical sound system (rather than magnetic stereophonic tracks) that achieved directionality by means of inaudible cues that directed the sound signal to different speakers, a process described in chapter 39. As we shall see in chapter 66, the VistaVision format served as the basis for the anamorphically photographed Technicolor process with two theatrical release print options: Technirama for ‘Scope 35  mm release and Super Technirama (sometimes known as Super Technirama 70) for non-anamorphic 70  mm release. In the 1960s Paramount adopted Technirama as a mastering format. In less than a decade, advances made by the Eastman Color negative-positive system improved the look of widescreen and ‘Scope enough to erode the advantage of the VistaVision large negative for cinematography. Following the rest of the industry, Paramount adopted ‘Scope using Panavision’s 35  mm anamorphic lenses and terminated their use of VistaVision. In its heyday VistaVision was used by Universal, MGM, United Artists, and Warner Bros. All told about 100 features, and 10 short subjects

64  Wide Screen and VistaVision

were shot in VistaVision between the time of its introduction and the last Paramount feature to be shot in the process in 1961, the western One-Eyed Jacks, starring Marlon Brando, the only film he directed (Lev 2003). A 4k restored version, projected at the Reel Thing restoration and preservation conference at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood in the summer of 2016, demonstrated that the process was capable of superb quality. I also viewed a sampling of AMPAS archived imbibition quality control Technicolor prints in the Goldwyn Theater, which revealed that release prints made from the VistaVision negatives (including films by Hitchcock) were noticeably superior to those shot in standard 35  mm.1 After the process was deemed obsolete, the VistaVision cameras were sold by Paramount, but the process continued to be used for feature production in Europe and Japan and for the photography of process plates for rear projection. VistaVision found a use as a tool for visual effects cinematography for George Lucas’ pre-digital Star Wars films, especially for shots involving traveling mattes (Hearn 2005). VistaVision has

According to Sherlock “the Goldwyn screen is 54 × 22 feet with 4-way masking, with the projectionist adjusting the masking for the format screened. The VistaVision samples were projected at 1.85:1; since they were projected full screen height, they were 41 feet wide.

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also been used for other pre-digital effects-laden shows originating on film such as two of the Harry Potter films. CinemaScope and VistaVision demonstrated that 35 mm and its infrastructure remained adaptable and able to provide a big wide screen image and greatly improved sound without recourse to the impractical 35 mm triptych Cinerama. The wide screen sea change killed off the Edison-Dickson aspect ratio that had endured for half a century, which may have been the swiftest fundamental technological and aesthetic transition in the history of celluloid cinema technology. The conversion might have been held back by the industry’s fears about the fate of its substantial inventory of 1.33:1 aspect ratio films, but it addressed the problem with the rough and tumble expedient of cropping the projected frame, composition be damned. Television remained the bastion of 1.33:1 for many decades, and ‘Scope aspect ratio films were adapted to its screen using the pan and scan technique, which involved the recomposition (or mutilation) of film on a shot by shot basis.

65

Todd-AO

Mike Todd and his Cinerama board colleagues differed about the direction the company should take. He envisioned a two-­ pronged initiative: one to improve the technology and the other to abandon the travelogue format of This Is Cinerama, to embrace narrative content. But an agreement could not be reached, and in August 1952, Todd sold his stock and used the proceeds, and presumably those from his participation in the film This Is Cinerama, to finance a new venture. Todd raised $1 million and founded Magna Pictures Corporation, with former Fox chairman Joseph M. Schenck to help him develop the technology that came to be known as Todd-AO, a process explicitly intended to overcome the shortcomings of Cinerama. Todd had come to view Cinerama as a clumsy and misused process, but one that pointed in a new direction. When all was said and done, it was a triptych struggling to look like a coherent panoramic image. Todd asked his son, Mike Todd, Jr., to find the “Einstein of optics,” to help with the design of the new process, and so it was that Todd attempted to enlist the cooperation of physicist and Rochester Institute of Technology Professor Brian O’Brien (1898–1992), who was on leave to take charge of research and development at the American Optical Company (formerly C.  P. Goerz American Optical Company) in Massachusetts. O’Brien was a recipient of the United States’ highest civilian award, the Medal for Merit, for his efforts during the World War II, which included the development of a high-speed movie camera that operated in the range of tens of millions of frames a second to film atomic bomb explosions (Belton 1992). Todd wanted AO to design a one-lens system that had an angular coverage equal to that of Cinerama, and to that end, he attempted to enlist O’Brien, who turned him down during 3  weeks of pursuit by telephone. Undaunted, as was his nature, Todd chartered a plane and flew to AO’s headquarters in Southbridge, Massachusetts, in November 1952, where he met with O’Brien and Walter Stewart, the company’s president. He handed them a $60,000 certified check to demonstrate his commitment and expressed the desire to improve upon Cinerama, a task for which he sought their help. He

summed up his desire by requesting, allegedly in these words: “Doctor, I want you to get me something where everything comes out one hole,” which he told Stewart and O’Brien would be called the Todd Process (Hecht 1999). Todd’s rapid fire delivery was in marked contrast to O’Brien’s reserved demeanor, but the men got along well, and the result of their meeting was the formation of the joint venture that Todd agreed to call Todd-AO (Sayre 1955, p.  141–146). O’Brien and his team took on the task of product development and management by mustering the required technical personnel and by seeking out and managing other vendors. By May 1953, 100 American Optical engineers and research scientists were working on the design of the system and building its optics, and many others at Philips, in the Netherlands, were engaged to design and built 70  mm projectors. A quarter of a century old Fearless Super-Film 65 mm camera was taken out of mothballs to be refurbished and used for early Todd-AO tests. According to Sherlock, the 70 mm Mitchell FC, that had been stored in the darkness of its equipment case for two decades, was also brought into the light of day and modified for 65 mm to shoot the first Todd-AO production, Oklahoma! It’s worth noting that after such a lengthy hibernation, a celluloid film camera could be returned to service with the ability to perform to industry specifications, one whose capabilities were enhanced with the addition of new lenses and color film. On the other hand, a digital cinema camera, after such a span of time, would have been a collector’s item. The resurrection of the 65 mm cameras helped to get the Todd-AO process up and running, which undoubtedly led to ToddAO’s choice of 65 mm cinematography with release prints that were 70 mm wide for additional sound tracks. ToddAO’s success led to industry acceptance of the new format and the design and manufacture of new 65 mm cameras by Mitchell, Panavision, later by Arnold & Richter in Germany, and in the USSR (that accepted 70 mm stock). It took 3 years of work to develop the 70 mm projectors, to modify and improve the cameras, and to design a suite of

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Fig. 65.1  Brian O’Brien

lenses including Todd’s dream lens, the 90 pound 12.7 mm optic dubbed the Bugeye, which covered a 128° horizontal angle of view. O’Brien’s first Bugeye lens was not interchangeable, as were later versions, and was a built into the Fearless camera body. As far as Todd was concerned, the Bugeye was the jewel in the crown since it was able to nearly match Cinerama’s panoramic field of view. In addition, technology was developed to correct for the geometric distortion resulting from projection onto a screen of deep curvature. Todd’s significant accomplishment was that Todd-AO, a reembodiment of the 1929–1930 big format processes, was far less burdensome to shoot or project than Cinerama, had extremely high-quality image and sound, and was suitable for narrative productions. Todd was looking for a surefire hit to guarantee the success of the process and approached Rogers and Hammerstein, who were reluctant to permit any of their musicals to be adapted for the screen, but they conditionally agreed to allow Magna to produce Oklahoma!, which had opened on Broadway in 1943 to resounding success, becoming an American cultural icon (Purdum 2018). They were given seats on the Magna Board of Directors, but protective of their musical theater masterpiece they withheld approval until they saw the Todd-AO test film. They greeted the test results with enthusiasm and agreed to participate and created their own production company to oversee the effort, enlisting the former Paramount producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. and Magna principal Schenck (Eagan 2010). The sound-reproducing system was, naturally enough, of great concern to Rogers

65 Todd-AO

and Hammerstein, and a considerable effort was devoted to its development since Reeves’ Cinerama system had set a high bar. As noted, the new format was photographed on 65 mm stock but printed on 70 mm, the additional room for four of the six magnetic tracks, an approach that became standard all over the world except in the Soviet Union where 70  mm film was used for both production and release (Wysotsky 1971). The Todd-AO magnetic sound tracks were on the film; they did not require a separate playback machine like Cinerama. Todd-AO had six tracks on four magnetic stripes: two wide mag-stripes were laid down between the left and right edges of the film and the perforations, each divided into two channels. The other two mag-stripes and their channels were located between the left and right perforations and the vertical edges of the frames. Five of the six channels were played back by speakers located behind the screen, and the sixth channel was used for speakers placed throughout the auditorium. One of the leading inventors in the field, John G. Frayne of Westrex, helped to develop the magnetic sound system, and Fred Hynes supervised the recording of Oklahoma! (Belton 1992). The five perforation high frame had a negative image measuring 48.6 mm × 22 mm, with an aspect ratio of 2.21:1, with a bit more than 2½ times the area of the 1.37:1 Academy 35 mm frame, but with less image area than that of Cinerama. The total Cinerama picture area was more than four times the area of the 35 mm frame because it used three 35 mm frames six perforations high. Todd-AO’s running speed was 30 fps, fast compared to the standard 35 mm 24 fps and Cinerama’s 26 fps, which was chosen because Tod-AO projection would be on bright wide screens and flicker perception is exacerbated by a bright image that encompasses a wide field of view. Like CinemaScope’s mildly curved screen Todd-AO used a high gain ribbed or lenticular screen, and like Cinerama’s screen, it was deeply curved. At the Rivoli in Manhattan, where the process was introduced, the screen was 62 ft × 26 ft. The cord length between the ends of the screen was 52 feet, and the depth from the center of the cord to the center of the screen was 13 feet (Belton 1992). The Todd-AO screen’s extreme curvature caused geometric distortion, a problem that did not afflict CinemaScope to the same extent, with its flatter screen, while Cinerama’s tryptic process and three projectors mitigated certain kinds of projection distortion but created others. Projection onto a deeply curved screen with a single lens produces distortion because camera and projection optics are corrected for rectilinear rather than curvilinear perspective. The distortion can further be explained by the fact that the edges of the screen are closer to the projector than its middle, with the result that the projected image changes magnification for near and far portions of the screen. The image is less m ­ agnified at the edges and more magnified at the center of the screen. Another

65 Todd-AO

Fig. 65.2  Top: The Todd-AO 70 mm release print format. The perfs and their pitch are the same as 35 mm’s, but there are five perfs to a frame rather than four. The film runs at 30 fps rather than 24 fps using 140 feet per minute, in contrast to 35 mm’s 90 feet per minute. The dotted line is the 1.913 in × 0.866 in projection aperture. The camera aperture is 2.07 in × 0.91 in. There are six 0.059 in wide mag tracks. Bottom: A clip from a 70  mm release print of Ben Hur. (Cinémathèque Française)

issue is trapezoidal distortion, caused by the projector (usually) located in a booth that is higher than the screen, but this does not occur when the projector and screen are on the same level. Thus the Todd-AO projection booth, like that of Cinerama, was often located on the orchestra floor of the theater. American Optical’s methods for correcting Todd-AO prints for both curvilinear and trapezoidal distortion, separately or together, are described in USP 2,786,388, filed July 15, 1953, Printing Process, by Ethel D. O’Brien and Brian O’Brien, and USP 2,792,746, filed August 3, 1953, Wide Angle Picture Projection Optical Systems and Screen Apparatus, by Brian O’Brien.1 A third O’Brien disclosure uses a different method by calling for an integrated approach from cinematography to projection using a special wide

According to Hecht (1999), O’Brien knew that his wife Ethel was terminally ill when he took on the Todd-AO task.

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angle lens design as given in USP 2,857,805, Motion Picture Theater System, filed April 6, 1953. The art taught in ‘388 was tested but was not entirely successful and may not have been used for the production of release prints. Nonetheless, the method is ingenious: it replicates the theater geometry in the optical printer by projecting the camera negative onto film stock that has been placed in a gate that is curved and/or tipped to predistort the image to correct for the screen curvature and height of the projector. In effect, the optical printer conditions become a scale model, an optical analog, of the theater geometry. (As we shall see, Todd-AO would later use the D-150 process in an attempt to cure projection distortion.) The deeply curved screen also posed a challenge for sharp focus, but the wide angle projection lenses must have had enough depth of field (or curvature of field). The simplest, but only partly satisfactory approach used for 70 mm projection, was to fashion a projector aperture plate whose horizontal edges were bowed inward, resembling a pincushion, whose purpose was to prevent unwanted image from spilling onto the screen surround (mullion), but this does not address distortion. The deeply curved screen fell out of fashion as exhibitors found they needed to project both Todd-AO and ‘Scope on the same big wide screen, and today deeply curved screens are a memory except for a handful of dome installations, as noted in chapter 67. As noted American Optical subcontracted the design and manufacture of the 70 mm projectors to the Electro-Acoustics Division of Philips, machines that were sold under the Norelco brand in the United States. A projector design that had both 35  mm and 70  mm capability was mandated to enable exhibitors to project both formats, a decision that contributed to the passing of the deeply curve screen (WS: In70mm. Norelco Universal). The projectors could be rapidly converted from the 35 mm four perforation pulldown to the 70 mm five perforation pulldown since the perforation pitch and design were the same as 35 mm’s. The Todd-AO projectors played back any standard sound format with magnetic heads located above the gate in the penthouse positon for CinemaScope and 70  mm mag-tracks and with an optical sound reader located in its usual position below the gate. The machines ran at 24 fps or 30 fps and projected 35 mm ‘Scope and spherical wide screen. Between 1954 and 1968, 1500 of the highly regarded Philips DP70 machines, some labeled Todd-AO, were built with principal components manufactured in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and with the pedestals and lamphouses made elsewhere. The DP70 weighed 1000 pounds and cost $6000, lenses not included. The first batch was shipped in the fall of 1954 for the roadshow release of Oklahoma! Several other projector manufacturers, Century in the United States, Zeiss Ikon in Germany with the Favorit model 35/70  mm, and Cinemeccanica in Italy, also entered the field (Calhoun 1962). Most first run houses were equipped

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65 Todd-AO

Fig. 65.3  From the O’Briens’ USP teaching how to correct for projection on a steeply curved screen using a unique optical printing technique. The camera negative and print films are held in curved gates to replicate the theater’s geometry to predistort the image so it will project an image without distortion.

Fig. 65.4 The Philips DP70 Todd-AO projector. (Cinémathèque Française)

with 70 mm projectors in North America, almost all of which, like their 35 mm cousins, were scrapped in early days of the twenty-first century and replaced with digital projectors.

The world premiere of Oklahoma! took place at the Rivoli Theater in New  York on October 13, 1955. Some months later, as a teenager, I saw Oklahoma! at the Rivoli and vividly remember the Bugeye shot of the camera moving through the rows of “corn as high as an elephant’s eye.” There were two shows a day, but on holidays there were three, and tickets were sold on a reserved seat basis; in the evenings the best seats in the house cost $3.50, at the time when a ticket at a first run theater was $.75. The Todd-AO roadshow marketing strategy, which ended in the early 1970s, was designed to generate the excitement of a live performance. The practice included an overture and intermission, with exhibition limited to the best theaters in major cities to add to the show’s perceived value. Theaters were leased and converted to Todd-AO at a cost of about $40,000, and the company collected the entire box office, a practice called four-walling. After four-walling ran its course, the film was released to a wider audience in 35 mm ‘Scope. Oklahoma! had been photographed in both 30  fps 65  mm and 24  fps 35  mm Cinemascope because there was no acceptable way to convert the 30 fps rate to 24 fps since skip frame printing would have resulted in jumpy motion. By hiring the accomplished industry professionals, Fred Zinnemann to direct and Robert Surtees to photograph Oklahoma!, Todd’s fascination with the panoramic effect became subordinated to traditional narrative techniques. Todd’s original conception of the system as an improved Cinerama producing an engulfing panorama was laid aside as it became obvious that a narrative feature would not profit from being shot entirely (or even to a large extent) with the Bugeye lens. This lens, which could emulate Cinerama’s

65 Todd-AO

Fig. 65.5  A Spanish language poster for Oklahoma!

panoramic effect, was used for only a handful of shots in Todd-AO films. Oklahoma! was photographed with lenses that had focal lengths with horizontal angles of view similar to those commonly used for 35  mm cinematography, viz., 37°, 48°, and 64° (Popular Photography, 1956, Dec.,

571

p.  180). Although Todd-AO established the 65/70  mm ­process as a viable production and exhibition format, unlike Cinerama there was little about it that was proprietary to inhibit the format’s adoption by the industry. Todd deserves recognition as the prime mover in the creation of the first viable alternative to 35 mm, as does O’Brien for managing the project. By 1957 there were 60 Todd-AO theaters, a number that greatly increased in the United States after the company entered into a partnership with United Artists Circuit, and the exhibition of 70 mm spread to the rest of the world (Lev 2003, p. 124). Todd sold his ownership in Todd-AO to finance Around the World in 80 Days, characteristically cashing in his chips on one venture’s profits to finance the next. The 70 mm camera shot at 30 fps for Todd-AO and repeated takes at 24 fps, from which printing masters were photographed for 35 mm release (Warner 1957, p. 7). The 35 mm version was distributed in Todd’s Cinestage Theater process that used a 1.5× anamorphic optic to fill ‘Scope screens. (I don’t know why the standard ‘Scope format or projection optics were not used.) When released in the United Kingdom, to avoid the taxation imposed on foreign produced 35 mm features, the Technicolor plant in England shaved 1 mm from the edge of the prints to distribute them in 34  mm. Released in 1956, Around the World in 80  Days was a box office success, a critically acclaimed mélange that received five Academy Awards. Oddly enough, it was a return to the travelogue format, albeit enhanced with a serviceable narrative, which Todd had rejected for Cinerama. Todd, who was married to movie star Elizabeth Taylor, died in a private plane crash near Grants, New Mexico, on March 22, 1958, in an overloaded Lockheed Lodestar flying above its ceiling in conditions that caused icing. All four aboard the plane, whose engines failed, died in the crash including Todd’s biographer Art Cohn (1958), who had been working on a manuscript titled The Nine Lives of Mike Todd.

65/70 mm and Technirama

Canadian-born Douglas Shearer (1899–1971), head of MGM’s sound department and R&D efforts, the counterpart of Earl Sponable at Fox and Loren Ryder at Paramount, was faced with the introduction of a multiplicity of film formats; this led to his taking on the task of finding the best options for his company’s future production methodology. MGM had shown interest in producing narrative content in Cinerama; in fact, it was the only studio to make films in the triptych process. Considering the distribution possibilities offered by the recently introduced Cinerama, CinemaScope, wide screen, and Todd-AO, Shearer conceived of an MGM workflow based on a single mastering format for content origination, as he described in his August 22, 1955, inter-­ office communication, MGM Panavision Large-Film System, which was addressed to Arthur Loew, the corporate head in New  York, and E. (Eddie) J.  Mannix, the studio’s head of operations in Los Angeles. Shearer (WS: in70mm.com…) proposed 65  mm cinematography for the creation of the camera-negative to be used as the universal master for various distribution formats. To insure compatibility with threeprojector Cinerama, or a to-be-developed single projector Cinerama, MGM’s 65 mm cinematography would use a 1.25 squeeze to expand the format’s aspect ratio from 2.21:1 to 2.76:1. The following projection formats could then be derived by optical printing: Todd-AO with the 2.76:1 aspect ratio image cropped to 2.21:1; 35 mm ‘Scope to match the standard 2.4:1 aspect ratio; 35  mm wide screen projected non-anamorphically; and three-projector Cinerama by extracting three non-anamorphic 35  mm panels from the 1.25× squeezed 65 mm master. In addition, optical printing would be used to derive other release formats such as 16 mm prints. The new MGM process was to be named Camera 65, and this, as fate would have it, turned out to become a major opportunity for Panavision. Shearer’s had a working relationship with Panavision’s founder Robert Gottschalk (1918–1982) that led him to seek his help, and although MGM had a camera department, it did not have the product development capability that Gottschalk claimed for Panavision. Shearer gave

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Gottschalk the task of turning a Mitchell FC Grandeur camera into a quiet running 65  mm machine compatible with the format created by Todd-AO.  Gottschalk’s ace in the hole was California-born Takuo (Tak) Miyagishima (1928– 2011) who had joined the company in 1954, and had become its senior vice president of engineering. Miyagishima modified the Grandeur camera’s intermittent to the Todd-AO five-perf pulldown, and he designed a blimp to quiet it. Panavision also produced the APO Panatar camera lenses with the required 1.25:1 compression factor by harvesting (their engineers’ term) glass from existing products, often excellent Nikon optics for 35  mm Leicaframe photography, but for the 65 mm format, the company may have used medium format Hasselblad lenses designed to cover the 2¼ inch square 120 roll film format. The original lenses were taken apart and the glass remounted adding anamorphic elements and movie-style instrumentation, more suitable for following focus. Dave Kenig told me that the first 65  mm APO Panatars used the counter-rotating anamorphic mumps correcting prisms as taught in Wallin’s USP Anamorphosing System, USP 2,890,622, described in chapter 22. MGM’s 65 mm camera with APO Panatars were rebranded Ultra Panavision 70 and used as the basis for single camera-­ projector Cinerama. Anamorphic Ultra Panavision 70 cinematography filled the Cinerama screen, whose aspect ratio wide screen historian Martin Hart gives as 2.59:1 but which varied with theater architecture (WS: The American WideScreen Museum). (Ultra Panavision’s negative aspect ratio was wider that Cinerama’s projection aspect ratio to allow for the extraction of frames wide enough to permit edge blending.) Panavision removed the APO Panatar anamorphics to produce the Super Panavision 70 format that was compatible with Todd-AO projection, broadening the 65/70 mm format’s appeal and its acceptance as the first new theatrical format in more than half a century; the first published SMPTE recommended practice or engineering guideline I can find for the format was published in December 1969 (Index to…, 1982). MGM’s first Camera 65 film,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_66

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Fig. 66.1  Douglas Shearer

Fig. 66.2  Robert Gottschalk

Raintree County, was exhibited in 1957 but only in 35 mm CinemaScope because the studio judged that the Civil War melodrama lacked the spectacle required for release as a 70  mm event. Imbibition prints were made by Technicolor from 35  mm matrices made by optical reduction from the 65 mm negative. MGM’s remake of the 1925 silent Ben-Hur was released in both 70 mm and 35 mm in 1959, with a Camera 65 screen

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Fig. 66.3  Tak Miyagishima

credit. The MGM Camera 65 brand disappeared thereafter to be replaced by the Panavision 70 credit; it was used by MGM for their 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, released in both 70 mm and 35  mm (Haines 2003). It’s not always clear which ­version of Panavision 70 (super-spherical or ultra-anamorphic) was used for a production because of carelessness in attribution by the studio’s advertising department, a confusion that was compounded by Panavision 70 also referring to films shot in 35 mm and blown up to 70 mm for exhibition. The first use of Super Panavision 70 was in 1959 for Disney’s The Big Fisherman (Belton 1992). The most notable Super Panavision film, in a format differing from Todd-AO in name only, was Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Anamorphic Ultra Panavision was used for only a handful of films, the last of which was Khartoum, in 1966; Ultra Panavision was resurrected in 2015 for The Hateful Eight. One 1968 film, Ice Station Zebra, began production with Ultra Panavision lenses and switched to Super Panavision lenses. In 1989 the 65 mm Arriflex 765 quiet running reflex camera was introduced, but after the peak of interest in the format, at least for cinematography. A thorough description of the optical and mechanical design process that went into the creation of the 765 is provided by Ropin (1990). By the early 1990s, it had become customary to shoot productions on 35 mm with the option of releasing in 70  mm, if the film warranted being marketed as a special event, as described in chapter 66. In 1963 Cinerama abandoned its triptych process and used 70 mm projection beginning with the release of United Artists’ It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, shot in Ultra Panavision 70. The success of Panavision optics and the film

66  65/70 mm and Technirama

Fig. 66.4  Quentin Tarantino looking through the viewfinder of an Ultra Panavision 65 mm camera while shooting the 2015 production of The Hateful Eight.

caught the attention of 20th Century Fox, which switched to Panavision camera lenses because of their superiority to the Bausch & Lomb optics they were using. Fox also invested $600,000  in the Todd-AO organization and produced two films in a variation of Todd-AO, Dimension 150 (Lev 2003). Optical printing correction for Todd-AO’s deeply curved screen had been addressed during the development of Todd-AO by Ethel and Brian O’Brien of American Optical, but D-150 was offered as an up-to-date solution. Todd-AO marketed D-150, which asserted that it had three system components compatible with existing 65  mm cameras and 70 mm projectors: a new set of camera lenses designed by Richard Vetter and Carl Williams, an optical printing technique designed for the deeply curved screen to eliminate image distortion, and a projection lens designed to eliminate distortion. Projection expert Glen Berggren (2007) wrote that in practice, D-150 used the 2× magnifier attachment designed for the Kollmorgen BX-265 4 inch focal length projection lens. By changing the spacing between the magnifier’s four lens elements, it was possible to not only change the picture size but also the curvature of field allowing the 70 mm image to be in good focus over the entire Todd-AO screen. Optical printing correction was not required after it was determined that the Kollmorgen lens satisfactorily solved the problem of geometric distortion. The system was named after the 150° extreme wide angle lens that Vetter and Williams designed, but like O’Brien’s Bugeye, it was probably little used for the two D-150 features. The first film shot in Dimension 150 was Fox’s production of John Huston’s The Bible…In the beginning, released in 1966. The second and last film shot in Dimension 150 was Patton, released in 1970, the year that Dimension 150 went out of business (Holston 2013). Interest in deeply curved screens waned for several reasons: they were challenging to install given existing theater architecture; they ate up seating because of their depth and because the projection booth was best located on the orchestra floor to prevent distortion; only

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Fig. 66.5  Technirama used the same eight-perf horizontal-traveling format as VistaVision but added a 1.5× anamorphic squeeze.

a few audience members got the full impact of the peripheral effect; and cross-reflections diminished image contrast for bright shots (the use of lenticular-surface screens was claimed to reduce this); and it did not work well for 35 mm projection. The latter is the most important reason for the replacement of the deeply curved screen with a mildly curved screen. 65  mm cinematography was not the only source for 70  mm release; a viable alternative was created by Technicolor based on the work they did with Paramount to improve the quality of dye transfer prints for widescreen. For 35  mm widescreen projection, Technicolor and Paramount had engineered the eight-perforation horizontal-traveling 35  mm mastering format VistaVision, as described in chapter 64. Technicolor added an anamorphic squeeze to the process to create a mastering source for 35 mm ‘Scope 2.4:1 aspect ratio prints, which they called Technirama, and for non-anamorphic 70 mm prints compatible with Todd-AO’s 2.21:1 aspect ratio, which they called Super Technirama. The native aspect ratio of the eight-perforation format is 1.5:1 and by adding a 1.5× anamorphic compression attachment to prime lenses a 2.25:1 aspect ratio resulted, suitable for either ‘Scope or Todd-AO. Technicolor used liquid-gate optical printing to make dye transfer matrices for 35 mm release, or 70 mm prints using Eastman Print stock, their only choice since the 35 mm imbibition printing line was not designed for 70 mm prints (Carr and Hayes 1988). With cinematography using 35 mm, Technirama negatives could be developed in film labs without 65 mm capability. Engineer George Gunn, reporting to CEO Herbert Kalmus, headed up the Technirama development project for Technicolor in London, which included the conversion of the three-strip camera to the eight-perf format. Rank Laboratories managed at least some of the Technirama program for Gunn (Cricks 1957, p. 14). (After 1954, the widespread adoption of Eastman Color rendered the three-strip cameras obsolete for color cinematography.) Mitchell also manufactured

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eight-perf cameras for both Technicolor and Paramount, and a lightweight handheld VistaVision camera was built for Paramount and made ­available to Technicolor. Gunn also supervised the design of optical printing techniques and finding an anamorphic optic for Technirama cinematography. Anamorphic optics for the large format presented a challenge. Gunn and colleagues tested lenses made in France using cylindrical optics but rejected them because their image quality was not up to their standards (Pohl 1959). Fortuitously, Gunn was introduced to Dutch scientist and optical expert Albert Bouwers, the founder of Holland’s NV Optische Industrie De Oude Delft (Old Delft Optical Company) in Delft, who had invented a low aberration mirror anamorphic design, which was widely used in Europe for a projection attachment and sold in England under the Vistascope brand (Cricks 1957, p. 14). Bouwers’ attachment for cinematography was also based on the curved mirror principal using two prisms with reflecting surfaces joined at their common plane surfaces. The combination of the optical power of the cylindrically curved mirror surfaces of the two prisms produced a 1.5× squeeze. The attachment was said to be free from the aberrations of refracting cylindrical lens anamorphics, as described in Bouwers’ USP 2,780,142, Cylindrically Reflecting Mirror-Prism Anamorphotic Optical System, filed April 26, 1955. The Delrama attachment passed Technicolor’s tests and was accepted, contributing the “rama” suffix to Technirama (Bouwers and Blaisse 1956). Prints made using Technicolor’s dye transfer process through the early 1950s were good enough for projection on contemporary screens, but they lacked the sharpness essential for ‘Scope and wide screen projection, as noted earlier. For two decades, these prints were projected on screens that had a mean width of about 20 feet, but their sharpness now needed to be improved. The dyes Technicolor had been using spread too much during transfer to the blank, thereby

Fig. 66.6  This Technirama camera was a rebuilt three-strip camera.

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Fig. 66.7  The Delrama anamorphic optic. The device consists of two components, big prism C (highlighted) and smaller prism B (clear), which join at F, a semi-silvered mirror. A is a mirror-coated convex cylindrical surface. B is a mirror-coated concave cylindrical surface. Entering rays D are reflected by F downward to A. The rays are reflected upward by A to pass through F to B and are reflected back to F to be reflected outward to the lens as rays E. The mirror surfaces impart the required horizontal squeeze. Despite the use of prisms, this is a reflection-type anamorphic device. The prisms serve to keep the parts in alignment and shorten the optical path. The anamorphic ratio is the ratio of the radii of the convex and concave mirrors.

decreasing print sharpness. Moreover, the imbibition process had, on occasion, problems with registration of the individual dye images resulting in color fringing. This was confirmed by comments that were made to me by some members of the SMPTE Hollywood Section old enough to remember first run dye transfer prints and observations I made looking at AMPAS archived Technicolor prints made in the 1940s and 1950s. Technicolor began a program to solve the problem by improving the mordanting characteristics of the imbibition materials, and their longtime supplier Eastman Kodak agreed to help, but only after a bit of hesitation since the companies, after some 40  years of cooperation, were now competing for the color print business. Technicolor prints improved and became suitable for the big screen, but Technicolor had no 70 mm dye transfer printmaking capability because the long metal pin studded belts used for imbibing dye from the matrices were designed for 35  mm prints. Therefore Super Techniscope 70  mm prints were made on Eastman stock (Haines 2003). It adds to our understanding to know the relative sizes of the frames involved in the Technirama/Super Technirama process: The Technirama camera aperture was about 2.4 times times the area of the 35  mm CinemaScope aperture but somewhat smaller than the 70  mm frame; therefore Technirama was able to produce a good negative for making prints for both formats. The 70 mm camera aperture area is 1.88 in2, and the Technirama camera aperture area is 1.48 in2, a difference of about 20% (Offenhauser 1965). Since 35  mm Technirama and 70 mm Super Technirama originated from the same 1.5 times anamorphically squeezed eight-perf horizontally traveling 35 mm negative, a studio could defer the release format

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decision, 35 mm ‘Scope or 70 mm spherical, based on their perception of the film’s market potential. Titles and ­advertising collateral may have been prepared prior to a release decision; thus films were sometimes marketed with the Technirama instead of the correct Super Technirama credit. An attempt was made to use eight-perf horizontal-­traveling Super Technirama for exhibition in the United Kingdom. Projector manufacturer G.  B.-Kalee Ltd. built a horizontal format 35 mm machine for both VistaVision and Technirama (Crookes 1957, vol. 104, p. 370). The debut of Technirama took place on Saturday, June 1, 1957, at the Leicester Square Odeon in London’s West End for a screening of the British film Davy. It was attended by 2500 people in the film industry; Herbert and Natalie Kalmus were also in attendance. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff shot a demo film for the occasion, and clips of forthcoming Technirama films were also shown. Films originating in Technirama were projected on the 45 foot wide screen using three methods: standard 2.4:1 aspect ratio 35 mm ‘Scope using the Kalee Varamorph anamorphic attachment; non-anamorphically 35 mm widescreen with a 1.75:1 aspect ratio; and with the horizontal-traveling eight-perf format; to produce the required 2.25:1 screen aspect ratio Taylor-Hobson built a prismatic anamorphic attachment to compress the Technirama frame vertically by a factor of 1.5, rather than the usual horizontal decompression. According to Cricks (1957, p. 16), the difference in quality amongst the various projection methods was not discernable. Kalee and Taylor-Hobson’s eight-perf projection effort was not commercially deployed because 70  mm was rapidly becoming the standard large format for big screen projection. The first Technirama feature was released in 1956, The Monte Carlo Story (also known as Montecarlo and Monte Carlo Holiday), photographed in Italy and produced by United Artists, starring Marlene Dietrich. The first Hollywood­Technirama feature was Universal’s Night Passage, released in 1957, and the first live action Super Technirama film was Solomon and Sheba (1959). Many features were shot in the process, notably Spartacus (1960), released in 1960. The first Super Technirama film released was Walt Disney’s cell animated 1959 Sleeping Beauty, which was designed for the 2.55:1 aspect ratio during preproduction in 1953–1954, the original CinemaScope aspect ratio used for theatrical release. For 35 mm ‘Scope Sleeping Beauty was released in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and for 70 mm it was released in the 2.21:1 aspect ratio. Disney historian Theo Gluck told me (email 10/31/2017) that the restoration was done at 2.55:1, and that for the cinematography of Sleeping Beauty the four-­perforation pulldown 35 mm camera was replaced by a 35 mm camera with an eight-perforation horizontal-traveling intermittent and a 1.5× anamorphic lens supplied by Panavision. The last live action Hollywood

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feature released in Super Technirama 70 was Custer of the West, exhibited on Cinerama screens in 1967. The last Hollywood feature released in Super Technirama 70 was Disney’s 1985 animated The Black Cauldron (Carr and Hayes 1988). Technirama and Super Technirama, like VistaVision, continued to be popular in Europe after it was abandoned in the United States. 70 mm exhibition developed a significant cachet, and the format became associated by the public with high-quality event exhibition. Many films shot on 65 mm, VistaVision or Technirama, were well received and looked and sounded splendid in their big screen presentations, whatever the specific process. According to Belton (1992), by the mid-1960s, there were 1100 70 mm theaters in the world. By the 1980s the number of 70  mm theaters in America was given at almost 1500, which has been described as the peak for 70  mm projection (Williams and Michael 2006). 70  mm’s high-quality sound was an impetus for improving the sound of 35 mm prints. The use of magnetic stereophonic or multichannel sound for ‘Scope 35  mm release did not become

Fig. 66.8  Top: A Technirama negative frame from Spartacus with a 1.5 squeeze. Middle: A ‘Scope 35  mm release print with a 2:1 squeeze. Bottom: A 70 mm print without a squeeze. (Simulated for illustrative purposes)

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ubiquitous and the AMPAS standard for optical track, single channel or single channel cued for directional sound, constrained substantial improvement in audio quality. The Sound of Music, released in 1965  in Todd-AO, with its superior ­six-track magnetic sound, revived multichannel sound for 35 mm ‘Scope, as recounted by Gitt (2007). The 1977 box office success of Lucas’ first Star Wars film, shot in 35 mm (and eight-perf for effects shots) but blown up for release in some first run cinemas, gave Lucas the standing to insist on multichannel sound for 35 mm release prints. The release of Star Wars in 70 mm was part of a significant trend that had begun in the early 1960s, the optical blowup of 35 mm ‘Scope to 70 mm. It may seem peculiar, even ironic, that the practice became so widespread when so much time and effort had gone into the inverse process, improving the 35  mm image by reduction printing from eight-perforation 35  mm VistaVision, Technirama, and CinemaScope 55. Nevertheless, advances by Panavision, Eastman Kodak, and Technicolor enabled 35 mm camera negative to become a viable source for 70  mm prints. Panavision developed the optical printer’s anamorphic optics, Eastman Kodak the film stocks, and Technicolor the wet-gate optical printing techniques and manufactured 70 mm release prints (as did other labs). The blowups usually originated from 35 mm ‘Scope negatives but in some cases from films that were shot for wide screen. The studio could make a decision which format to use for release while the feature was still in production or close to completion. ‘Scope usually had tracks mixed for four channel sound, but they were remixed for six channels for 70 mm release. Between 1963 and 1999, more than 500 35 mm features, often shot in ‘Scope, were blown up to 70 mm, a practice that was worthwhile because of the large number of 70 mm venues and the good quality of the results. The diligent efforts of in70mm.com are responsible for compiling the titles of films shot in 35 mm and released in 70 mm by year, but to arrive at the round number 500, which gives a sense of the scale of the activity, I discounted several dozen titles that did not belong in the list because I considered them to be misattributions. Taras Bulba was the first 35 mm to 70 mm film, which was released on December 19, 1962, followed by The Cardinal on December 12, 1963. From 1963 to 1965, there were only about half a dozen 35 mm to 70 mm releases each year, but from then on, there was a steady increase that plateaued in the mid-1980s peaking in 1985 at 35 films, but beginning in the 1990s, there was a steady decline, until finally by 1999, there were none. It’s possible the practice declined because the perceived quality difference narrowed as 35  mm release prints and projection improved, to a large extent due to improvements to camera film and release print stock and to the use of CRI (color reversal intermediate) intermediate film according

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to Sidney Solow (1976), head of Consolidated Film Industries Laboratory. It’s also possible that the demise of 70 mm release was hastened by the addition of multichannel digital sound for 35 mm prints, thus lessening the advantage of 70 mm magnetic sound. The celluloid cinema’s love affair with 35 mm came full circle, after having been enamored with the 70 mm format, only to reaffirm the 35  mm format as its improvement led studios and exhibitors to drop 65 mm production and 70 mm exhibition. By 1999, 70 mm exhibition was almost entirely gone from the scene, as the humble 35 mm frame was projected on the big screens that had once been their exclusive province, although 35 mm would soon be replaced by digital projection. The durability of the 35 mm system strikes me as remarkable, an assessment made not out my sentimental attachment to the format but rather by a sense of wonder that instant photography, as motion pictures were called once upon a time, designed to capture the phases of motion, what today we call frames, endured for more than a century. Edison’s 35 mm celluloid cinema was designed as a system to sell novelty snippets of photographed apparent motion content to be viewed with a coin-operated single-user peepshow, the Kinetoscope. The size of the frame, its perforations, and the width of the film were designed for that specific purpose. Unlike Edison, Dickson and other inventors foresaw that projection had a greater potential, one that was realized soon after the public’s loss of interest in Kinetoscope exhibition. Inventors, like Jenkins, Armat, Dickson, Lauste, the Lumières, Paul, and others, had the vision to create motion picture projection, which they did by using the magic lantern as a starting point. Movies, for many decades, were projected on screens whose mean width was about 18  feet (Projection Practice, 1938, June). About three decades after the early projector inventors’ efforts, the desire to project on big wide screens for audiences of thousands in cinema palaces was attempted, albeit unsuccessfully. A stab at big wide screen projection was attempted in the late 1920s by blowing up 35 mm beyond its capability. This was superseded by attempts to use large format projection to fill a big wide screen, but that also fizzled, and the large format effort was not revived until the 1950s. The creation of the 65/70 mm infrastructure originally designed for the exhibition of feature films on big screens, contributed to the establishment of the specialized systems described in the next chapter, IMAX and PLF Exhibition. IMAX was at first a cinema of familyoriented location-based entertainment that, like Cinerama, emphasized its immersive characteristics. IMAX made a transition to the exhibition of narrative feature film spectacles, eventually turning to digital projection, and in doing so it became the model for Premium Large Format (PLF) exhibition, cinema projected on screens even bigger than those used by the processes introduced in the early and mid- 1950s.

IMAX and PLF Exhibition

Fred Waller, the inventor of Cinerama, designed an 11-­contiguous screen slideshow for Eastman Kodak at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, as noted in chapter 60. When it was in vogue, the slide-based multitych medium, called multimedia, invariably used the precise registration of slides provided by the Kodak Ektagraphic 35  mm projectors for multipanel projection, superimpositions, and dissolves (The Here’s How…, 1977). The Ektagraphic’s elaborate multimedia slide projections were the descendants of magic lantern shows -- now that 35  mm slide projection is obsolete, the term multimedia is applied to presentations using computers and electronic media. These bygone flashy magic lantern shows were often used for industrial promotions that involved the coordination of a battery of 35 mm slide projectors whose images were augmented with recorded sound. The 1960s witnessed an increased awareness of the medium, in particular as it was deployed for the 1964 New York World’s Fair as the 35 mm motion picture triptych, To Be Alive!, which was designed for the Johnson’s Wax Pavilion by Alexander Hammid and Francis Thompson. It won an Academy Award for the best documentary short subject due to its technique and humanistic message (Uroskie 2014). Multi-­ projector films like this owed more to Abel Gance’s three-projector Polyvision than to Cinerama, since Polyvision, like To Be Alive!, did not usually attempt to create a panorama, but rather its assemblage of discrete images was used to create collages. Motivated by the multimedia projections exhibited at world’s fairs, two Canadian filmmakers, Graeme Ferguson (born 1929) and Roman Kroitor (1926–2012), who later engaged the help of Robert Kerr (1929–2010) as business manager, formed the company Multiscreen, which was renamed IMAX. By 1967 the company was intent on devising a single-projector solution, for fairs and special venues, to take the place of the multiple motion picture projectors required for films like To Be Alive!. Toward that end they were joined by inventor William Chester Shaw

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(1929?–2002), to help them with the technical challenges of the system they were developing; it was based on a 70 mm horizontal-­traveling format with a frame 15 perforations wide, which became known as 15/70  mm (Shaw 1970, 1983). IMAX 15/70  mm has an image area three times that of the five-perforation 70 mm vertical-traveling frame used for Todd-AO et al. IMAX film runs at the standard 24  fps but with ten times the projected area of the 35 mm frame. It has a projection aspect ratio specified to be 1.47:1, close to the Edison-Dickson aspect ratio, rather than that of Cinerama, CinemaScope, or other wide screen wide aspect ratio processes. IMAX films had another commonality with the earliest days of cinema  – a return to actuality or documentary content. The 15 perforation 65 mm IMAX camera, designed by Norwegian-born Jan Jacobsen living in Copenhagen, used a traditional intermittent claw to advance each frame, but it was a more difficult task to transport such a relatively massive amount of film through a projector gate. The big frame had to withstand the large momentum changes associated with intermittent motion with the possibility of a great deal of perforation wear and tear and picture scratches. According to large format expert James Hyder, editor of the LF Examiner (communicated by email, April 2019), to address the problem in 1968, IMAX bought the design of Brisbane machine shop operator, Australian inventor Peter Ronald Wright Jones, for $140,000, which is described in USP 3,494,524, Rolling Loop Film-Transport Mechanism, filed on April 10, 1967. It was improved by Shaw as described in USP 3,600,073 Rolling Loop Film Transport Mechanism, filed on November 24, 1969, in which the film’s perfs are engaged by continuously rotating sprocket wheels and advanced between a rotor drum and an aperture slotted stator surrounding the drum. Loops of film, the length of a frame, are successively formed by each of four aperture slots placed equidistantly; the device is about 3 feet in diameter.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_67

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Fig. 67.1  Graeme Ferguson, IMAX co-founder, operating a 15 perf 70 mm camera.

Fig. 67.2  Comparing the camera apertures of 35  mm ‘Scope with 70  mm and IMAX.  Frame sizes are to scale. The images are from Dunkirk (2017) a film shot using different formats and released with different aspect ratios.

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In Shaw’s improvement the loop formation is encouraged by means of blowing jets of air against the film at the aperture slots. The loop that is formed to advance the ESTAR base print dissipates by the time it reaches the projector gate, and the frame is held in place by suction on a cylindrically curved optical quality window, called a field flattener. To insure steadiness (which is very good), four registration pins are inserted into the frame’s corner perforations when it is at rest in projection position. The field flattener is at least the height of two frames; when the projectionist notices dirt or dust on screen, the flattener is moved vertically to clean its surface with a stationary pad. The IMAX 15/70  mm lamphouse uses high brightness xenon arc lamps, up to 30,000 W. IMAX screens are nearly flat having several times the area of a typical multiplex screen. IMAX theaters vary in size having between 200 and 1000 seats. Hyder reports that: “the Melbourne, Australia, (is) the largest screen in the world (currently) at 76×102 feet…Lincoln Square NYC, (is the) largest in the U.S., 76×101... the average screen size for true GS (giant screen) IMAX theaters is 60×80.” Originally, six-track 35 mm magnetic film was run on a playback machine in synchronization with the projector but in the 1990s the analog mag track was replaced by a proprietary digital playback system developed by Sonics, Inc., of Birmingham, Alabama, a company that would later be acquired by IMAX and become its audio subsidiary. According to Hyder, Alvis Wales, formerly with Sonics, confirms that the first Sonics/IMAX digital playback system known as DDP-6, was introduced in 1990 and used three CDs to provide six tracks of uncompressed audio. A later version, DDP-8, added two tracks for alternate language playback). In the late 1990s, the Sonics/IMAX DTAC system was introduced with its sound tracks still delivered on CD, but they were no longer played back directly from the disk; rather, the files were loaded onto a hard drive for playback, an approach taken by the similar DDT system (see chapter 39). The first public IMAX presentation was in 1970, the film Tiger Child, shown at Expo ’70, Osaka, Japan. A permanent theater opened a year later in Toronto, the Cinesphere at Ontario Place. A minority of IMAX theaters originally branded OMNIMAX and now known as IMAX Dome, envelope the audience by projecting on the inside of a dome; they use a single 15/70  mm projector with wide-angle optics (Aitken 2006). The design of such a dome theater is described in independent inventor Morton L. Heilig’s USP 3,469,837 Experience Theater, filed May 9, 1966, which Heilig (1926– 1997) believed influenced the design of the IMAX dome theater.1 The first OMNIMAX implementation was at the Reuben H.  Fleet Science Center in San Diego, CA, which opened in 1973. IMAX Dome used stadium seating (which 1  Heilig and I were friends and he communicated this belief to me on several occasions.

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Fig. 67.3  Forming rolling loops, from Jones’ USP. Aperture slots in the stator are numbered 1 through 4. Sprocket wheels A and B drive film continuously. R is the rotor drum.

became commonplace in multiplexes) and a partial dome angled at about 30 degrees, unlike hemispherical overhead planetarium domes.2 While it is often desirable for a theater screen to have a high gain to improve brightness, which is anything greater than unity, dome screens have a gain of less than one to suppress cross reflections. Distributors have become disinclined to make such costly 15/70  mm prints, although Kodak continues to make the stock. There may be only one lab in the world capable of making these prints, FotoKem in Burbank, Kodak’s largest customer for motion picture stock and chemicals (according to FotoKem’s Andrew Oran in conversation at the GSCA Film Expo at Universal City, on March 13, 2019). The giant screen cinema is a family-oriented medium whose audiences are, to a large extent, made up of relatively affluent and well-educated people and children on school field trips. It is an uplifting cinema of educational documentaries with a running time between 20 and 45 minutes, projected in natural history museums, science cenSherlock believes that OMNIMAX can be considered to be an improved version of Cinerama 360, a 10 perf 70 mm format projected on a dome tilted 10 degrees. 2 

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ters, zoos, planetariums, aquariums, and facilities associated with natural wonders, using an exhibition practice known as location-­based entertainment. According to Hyder, the term location-based entertainment “is usually used to refer to commercial installations like theme parks, not non-profit institutions, which tend not to consider themselves as mere ‘entertainment’.” The giant screen’s signature film is considered to be To Fly!, a 26-minute documentary created for the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.  C., in 1976, directed by Jim Freeman and Greg MacGillivray. It’s on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry list of culturally significant films and is credited with kindling the giant screen cinema movement, whose films are exhibited in a total of about 225 flat and dome theaters. Giant screens remain an active motion picture circuit, although IMAX Corporation itself has transformed itself both in terms of technology and content, as will be described. The independent cinema of giant screen theaters is a parallel system of filmmaking, distribution, exhibition, and funding, only having a peripheral association with the Hollywood theatrical film industry, although there are some filmmakers, composers, post-production facilities, and production hardware common to both. This immersive documentary cinema and the theatrical cinema overlap most noticeably when its films use movie stars as narrators. Production budgets for giant screen films are much lower than for features, between $2 million and $15 million. Their funding is dependent on government grants or tax credits, corporate sponsors (Levison 2010), or pre-selling the film’s concept to the exhibitors at the venues noted above, who know their audience and provide input with regard to the content before and during preproduction and also influence the final cut; focus group testing is also used. Investors in these projects usually have little expectation of making a profit, unlike the motivation of theatrical film investors. The relationship between filmmaker and exhibitor is more intimate than that which exists in the theatrical film industry. There is an emphasis on content designed to provide an experience that is out of reach of most of us, such as deep-sea exploration or space travel, using both very high-definition stereoscopic images and powerful directional sound to heighten involvement. Stereoscopic projection became a part of the IMAX armamentarium beginning in 1986  in Vancouver with the film Transitions. IMAX 15/70 mm stereoscopic projection used linear polarization, which continued when IMAX transitioned to 2K digital projection. 3-D is the rule for museums and similar venues, with much of it created as computer-­ generated images or using live action conversion, a post-­

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Fig. 67.5  Heilig’s Experience Theater from his USP. Stadium seating 11, projector 12, screen S.

Fig. 67.4  The dome experience.

production process, but until the mid-2000s content was largely photographed “natively” using stereoscopic cinematography. The majority of giant screen theaters are located in North America and half of them can project 3-D. The stereoscopic medium is an intrinsic part of giant screen exhibition and has reached near ubiquity for new releases, which is not the case for the theatrical cinema in America. The majority of flat-screen IMAX theaters continue to use 2K projectors with xenon arc lamphouses, while 40 to 50 have made the transition to 4K digital projectors with laser lamphouses. 15/70  mm film and digital stereoscopic projection use the two-projector technique. There are approximately 40 IMAX Dome theaters, and these do not project stereoscopically, but once two of them did. IMAX 15/70 mm dome theaters used a 3-D projection process branded Solido, which was launched on April 1, 1990, at Expo ’90 in Osaka with the 20-minute film Echoes of the Sun, as described by IMAX engineer Gordon Harris (1994). Commenting on reactions to a demonstration

screening of Solido in Toronto, William A. Honan (1990) of The New York Times reported that: “…members of the audience found themselves exclaiming over the realism of the three-­dimensional color images and occasionally ducking or trying to fend off objects that appeared to be hurtling toward them.” Only two such Solido systems were installed, and Echoes of the Sun was the only film made specifically for Solido. The polarization method of image selection is not effective for dome projection because the concavity of the screen causes polarized light rays steeply reflected away from the center of the screen to depolarize. This is explained by Brewster’s law, in which case the resultant depolarized light reflected from the dome and passing through the eyewear lenses mixes the left and right images so that they are seen as double images (Jha 2009). In these venues IMAX turned to frame-sequential projection for left and right images viewed through shuttering eyewear, a technique anticipated by Laurens Hammond’s Teleview system of 1922, as described in chapter 68. Both Teleview and Solido used a two-projector frame-sequential technique, with Teleview using mechanical shuttering eyewear and Solido using liquid crystal shuttering eyewear. A later IMAX system, Personal Sound Environment (PSE), incorporated miniature speakers for 3-D audio effects or alternative language tracks. PSE was used in some flat-screen IMAX theaters but it was bulky and expensive and was not widely adopted, according to Hyder. Aspects of PSE were anticipated by inventor Morton Heilig’s USP 3,628,829, Experience Theater, filed July 8, 1969.

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Fig. 67.6  A Solido dome projection theater. Note the twin projectors. Fig. 67.7  The Sony Venice with its 6K VistaVision-size sensor can be used for films destined for PLF projection, like the other cameras mentioned in the text.

IMAX Corporation expanded beyond its established institutional documentary business by converting Hollywood theatrical features to its 15/70 mm format. In 2002 its first offering of this kind was a bridge between its customary science documentaries with Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (first released in 1995), which was edited due to the 2-hour limitation of the IMAX platter system. This was followed that year by Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, and in 2003 by The Matrix Reloaded. These features were shot on film and scanned to 15/70 mm printing masters from digital intermediate (DI) files, a process that sidestepped the usual celluloid cinema post-­ production techniques, as described in chapter 81. In addition IMAX used their proprietary DMR (Digital Media Remastering) process, which a­ccording to Hyder enhanced 35  mm images to make them suitable for 15/70 mm giant screen projection. The DMR process would later be used for content produced with electronic or digital cameras or animated films created using computer imaging, but its advantages for this use are unclear. When introduced the process received a mixed reaction, some of which was based on disappointment associated with the fact that ‘Scope aspect ratio films filled only a portion of the big screen (Whitney 2015, ch. 2). (Some of the DMR films I  saw exhibited ringing due to excessive sharpening.) As has been described, 35 mm to 70 mm blowups were a standard exhibition practice for decades and the repurposing of 35  mm films to the 70  mm IMAX format can be viewed as a return to this distribution strategy after a hiatus of only 4 years. In a next step leading to the expansion of giant screen theaters, as part of multiplex exhibition, IMAX began to move away from 70 mm prints by adopting digital projection, while the IMAX Dome venues continued to project

film. The motivation for the transition to digital files is obvious; a 2-hour stereoscopic film print for IMAX exhibition costs tens of thousands of dollars, whereas a digital print, using the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) that is distributed on a reusable hard drive, probably has an actual cost of tens of dollars per use. Beginning in 2008 the company began to install 2K digital projectors in theaters with screens much smaller than those usually associated with IMAX, to the distain of critics like Roger Ebert (2010) and the displeasure of aficionados. Hyder comments: “It is ironic that IMAX is still referred to a ‘giant screen company’ when nearly every theater it has built in the last decade has lowered the average screen size for IMAX theaters.” The IMAX film format has continued to be a content origination format, for example with much of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) shot in 15/65  mm, and with the film exhibited in the IMAX film format at the director’s insistence in accordance with his belief that it provides the highest-quality motion picture image. IMAX began rolling out new 4K digital projectors using laser illumination in early 2015. For planar projection IMAX says it uses what is known as pixel offset in which two 4K projectors are used in an attempt to increase resolution to a claimed 8K.  While the technique will improve brightness the ability to locate pixels with the precision required is unlikely to be effective over the entire surface of the screen since the two projectors are located some distance apart and will exhibit keystone distortion in equal and opposite directions. The IMAX film format is pretty much a thing of the past, although at least 100 theaters are capable of 15/70 mm projection (and for the moment dome projection requires film). Some experienced giant screen filmmakers maintain

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that to get the best resolution, especially for aerial shots, 15/65  mm is the preferred approach for cinematography. High-end digital cinema cameras with 6K to 8K resolution such as those made by Canon, Sony, Red, Arri, and Panavision, can be effectively used for cinematography for the giant screen. Of note is that at the 2016 Giant Screen Cinema Association Film Expo at Universal City in Los Angeles, for the first time, only 4K digital projection was used.3 At the 2019 GSCA Film Expo David Keighley, Chief Quality Guru of IMAX, during a brief talk, said that IMAX had spent $20 M purchasing a portfolio of Kodak patents, and that some of the acquired technology was used to allow IMAX projectors to dispense with the optical combiner prisms required for three-color DMD projection. He claimed that this contributed to the good contrast of its 4K digital projectors. These laser projectors are made for IMAX by Barco, while the original 2K xenon version was made by Christie. With the introduction of laser lamphouses, in 2015 IMAX began to use a stereoscopic selection technology licensed from Dolby, which Dolby licensed from Infitec (interference filter technology), a German company. This sophisticated anaglyph uses eyewear with different narrow bandwidth or dip filters rather than the broad bandwidth filters used for the traditional anaglyph, thereby enabling the perception of natural color. Each of the two projector laser lamphouses is tuned for the filtration characteristics of matching eyewear lenses; each lamphouse has sets of lasers for the red-, green-, and blue-sensitive cones, but each projector’s set of lasers uses different wavelengths. The eyewear use lenses with interference filters, made up of many thin film layers, to create the narrow bandwidth filtration required for each eye to pass only its perspective image and for blocking the unwanted view. The eyewear are expensive and require cleaning and reuse, with the attendant issues of wear and tear, cleanliness, and attrition, and are not well matched to giant screen since the lenses are relatively small, unlike eyewear with polarizing filters that can have much larger lenses. The Infitec system is discussed further in chapter 83. A different approach to heighten verisimilitude using the 70  mm infrastructure was designed by director and visual effects innovator Douglas Trumbull, as described in USP 4,560,260, Motion Picture System, filed October 10, 1984, in which he describes Showscan, a process using the standard 65/70  mm format but with photography and projection at 60 fps based on rigorous specifications for frame rate, resolution, and brightness. The 60 fps rate does not require the

Pross interrupting shutter for flicker s­uppression, and the high frame rate mitigates camera and object motion artifacts. The original frame rate for motion pictures, selected by Edison and Dickson, was approximately 40  fps for Kinetoscope viewing, which was dropped to 16 fps for silent era cinematography and raised to 24 fps for Vitaphone sound. Showscan provided a compelling illusion of actuality, and there is a case to be made for even higher frame rates. IMAX was primarily used in museums and science centers, but Showscan was usually used for ride films, which were sometimes combined with so-called 4-D embellishments such as seats vibrating in synchronization with on-screen action. While IMAX used three times as much film as the 5 perf 70 mm format, Showscan used two and half times as much. IMAX allocated its film resources to size and Showscan to high frame rate. IMAX HD upped the rate to 48 fps for its 1992 Expo in Seville, Momentum, which was also used for the OMNIMAX Disney theme park attraction Soaring. Something like 40 theater chains in the United States and other countries use their own versions of IMAX’s digital giant screen cinema for feature exhibition enabling them to charge ticket prices higher than the standard rate; these theaters serve as a draw for the other screens at the multiplex. The image quality of the content, usually distributed as 4K DCPs, often shot with high-resolution so-called fullframe digital cameras, is up to the task. The installation of a digital giant screen cinema is available to any exhibitor who can source off-the-shelf components; the installation of a giant screen venue has become one of system integration. These premium large format (PLF) theaters are growing in numbers and include those using specialized hardware by IMAX, Dolby, and RealD, with the exhibitor sometimes using its own brand, like Cinemark XD for the RealD PLF, or AMC’s Prime, and Regal’s RPX. Most of the generic PLF cinemas use RealD hardware, and there are about 100 installations branded as RealD Cinema or RealD Luxe. About 100 RealD PLF installations use polarization image selection and the Ultimate Screen having high gain, superior conservation of polarization, and angle of view characteristics.4 PLF installations are characterized by big screens, using either 2K or 4K projectors, sometimes with laser lamphouses, and almost all have stereoscopic capability. Based in part on information obtained from their 2016 SEC filing, IMAX uses two business models for sharing box office proceeds with its PLF theatrical exhibitor partners, who lease rather than buy systems. In the first case, the exhibitor fronts the installation cost, and in the second case, IMAX pays for

Some of the information presented in this chapter is based on information gathered at the 2016 and 2019 Giant Screen Cinema Association Film Expos at Universal City, Los Angeles.

4  Some of the information in this paragraph was supplied by RealD CEO Michael Lewis, by email, on March 16, 2019, and in later conversations.

3 

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the installation; in the former the exhibitor pays a lower royalty than in the latter (WS: last10k.com...). Exhibitors who chose to integrate their own systems are free from any IMAX royalty. The 15/70  mm format provided a strong intellectual property barrier to entry that does not exist for digital PLF venues. Screen Daily reports 2500 PLF theaters in existence by the end of 2016, with IMAX theaters included in that number (Pennington 2017). In 2016 there were 1200 IMAX theaters installed in 66 countries, typically located in multiplex complexes, with a total box office of almost a billion dollars. The global box office for feature films was $38.6 billion that year, with most of the revenue generated outside North America, as reported by the Motion Picture Association of America (Theatrical Market Statistics, 2016). IMAX and other PLF t­heaters usually have more seats and invariably charge more for tickets than the conventional multiplex theater, reminiscent of the glory days of the movie palaces that were responsible for the lion’s share of box office. According

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to Hyder, IMAX’s fiscal year 2018 report stated 1505 theaters as of December 31, all but about 100 in multiplexes. PLF has competition. By the end of 2017, there were 170,000 digital projector theater screens in the world of which 100,000 were equipped for 3-D projection, also allowing them to charge event pricing. A great many of these approximate the PLF effect, namely, the tens of thousands of theater screens using 4K projectors with big screens and very good sound. The reader may recall that until the advent of CinemaScope, in the early 1950s, the mean screen width was about 20 feet. Multiplex theaters have a mean width in the neighborhood of 40 feet, smaller than the usual PLF theater, but these multiplex theater screens are very big by historical comparison. What may be more important than absolute screen size is the angle of view of the screen or the retinal area it subtends. Attendees who wish to emulate the PLF experience can choose to sit close to the screen, and indeed there are many people who do just that even if most people seat themselves in the middle of the auditorium.

Part VIII THE CELLULOID CINEMA: The Stereoscopic Cinema

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Six decades after Plateau’s invention of the phenakistoscope and his demonstration of apparent motion, the elements fell into place to permit the creation of a practical celluloid cinema, but it took more than a century and a half after Wheatstone’s invention of the stereoscope and his demonstration of stereopsis before the stereoscopic cinema became technically viable and commercially successful. The quest for stereoscopic moving images began before the celluloid cinema’s creation; Ray Zone (2007) makes the case that many of the Victorian cinema inventors had aspirations to create a 3-D cinema. A related argument is made by H. Mark Gosser (1977) in his 1977 master’s thesis, which posits that the heightened visualization enabled by stereoscopes and stereoscopic magic lantern projection was the direct inspiration for the celluloid cinema, rather than its adjunct. This is far less creditable than Zone’s proposition since there is a clear causal progression between the Glass to the Celluloid Cinema Eras, as described in these pages, whose momentum began long before Wheatstone’s discovery. We see two different perspectives of the world with our eyes, views that are combined by the eye-brain into a single image of the visual world. These two views are fused into a single image having the unique depth sense binocular stereopsis (two-eyed solid seeing). Stereopsis provides humans with an evolutionary advantage, a heightened perception of depth, an asset for a predator and tool user. Euclid (1703) analyzed the perception of a sphere from the point of view of an observer and noted that there is a difference between what each eye sees. Leonardo (1957) observed that it was impossible to precisely reproduce how our two eyes see the world on a painted canvas. It’s not entirely clear what he meant by this observation, but he may have been referring to sparkle or luster rather than a depth effect. Euclid and Leonardo may have had an inkling of what was first articulated by Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) when he used his invention, the stereoscope, to illustrate his discovery of the depth cue stereopsis, to the Royal Academy in 1838. Until that moment there was no clear understanding of this unique perceptual entity (Wheatstone 1838). Wheatstone’s 1838 discovery of stereop-

sis has aspects that are in common with Plateau’s 1830 discovery of apparent motion, for in both case the scientist invented an instrument for observing a perceptual phenomenon that served as the demonstration of its existence. To demonstrate his discovery, Wheatstone invented the mirror stereoscope, cumbersome compared with the yet to be invented lenticular stereoscope, but it served its purpose. Wheatstone had an artist create left and right perspective views, line drawings of a few simple geometric figures, with ambiguous depth when seen with one eye. With the help of his stereoscope, each eye saw its intended image; when his colleagues looked into it, they perceived what those who came before them had not: line drawings that had genuine volumetric extent. Stereopsis is one of many depth cues, like perspective and interposition, but the only one that requires two eyes. The following year Wheatstone had the first photographic stereopairs taken, and in the years following binocular vision became a subject of great interest to psychologists and photographers. The first widely used device for viewing stereopairs, the lenticular stereoscope, was far more compact and convenient to use than the mirror stereoscope. In its original embodiment, popularized by Brewster, side-by-side stereopair paper prints, mounted on card stock, were viewed through two accommodating lenses that also provided prismatic image displacement, the latter necessary because the center-to-center distance of the stereopairs exceeded the interpupillary distance. Later models used a septum to separate the two optical paths to prevent the unwanted perspective view from being seen. The generally accepted story to account for the initial popularity of the stereoscope is that at London’s Great Exposition of 1851, Queen Victoria was delighted by the images she saw using the Brewster’s stereoscope. A contemporary account has it that “The Stereoscope attracted the particular notice of the Queen, and M. Soleil (Parisian optician Jean-Baptiste François Soleil) executed a beautiful instrument which was presented to Her Majesty in his name by Sir David Brewster.” The report in the North British Review (History of Sir D. Brewster’s…, 1852) of May–August 1852

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_68

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Fig. 68.1  Sir Charles Wheatstone

Fig. 68.2  Wheatstone’s mirror stereoscope and a schematic of how it works.

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goes on to say that as a result of her response to the gift, the public demand became so great that in a few months “many hundreds if not thousands of the instruments” were sold. Wheatstone also produced lenticular stereoscopes as reported in an 1855 publication: “…for small Daguerreotypes, the refracting or prismatic stereoscope (also constructed by Professor Wheatstone) is better adapted” (Frank Leslie’s…, 1855). Two versions of the device are well-known: one, designed by American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1861, was held by a pistol grip and used cardboard mounted stereopairs; the other, the View-Master, was invented by William B. Gruber and introduced in 1939, using circular cards on which stereopair transparencies were mounted. The Holmes stereoscope was open to admit light, and its stereopair cards were available with many different subjects, often hand colored. It became a medium of mass communications during the Victorian era. Its popularity only lessened with the arrival of improved photomechanical magazine reproduction. The discoveries of apparent motion and stereopsis, made just a few years apart in the 1830s, beckoned to inventors to combine phenakistoscope or zoëtrope techniques with the stereoscope. An early invention of this kind was made by Louis Jules Duboscq (1817–1886), who was born in northern France, and was apprenticed to the Parisian optician Jean-­Baptiste François Soleil. In 1839 he married the boss’s daughter and 10 years later took over the business when Soleil retired. He had a fruitful career making lantern slide optics and sophisticated projectors using carbon arc illumination. Brewster demonstrated the lenticular stereoscope for him, which led to his interest in stereography. In French Patent 13,069, he describes a “stereoscope-Fantascope or Bioscope,” combining a stereoscope with a phenakistoscope. It used 12 stereopair photos arranged in the above and below format around the circumference of the disk. The stereopairs were viewed through the phenakistoscope’s slots using a mirror for each eye, each tipped at different angles, one for viewing the upper and the other for viewing the lower set of images. Duboscq patented a second version, commercially as unsuccessful as the first, based on the zoëtrope, with stereopair photos arranged around the circumference of a cylinder. Duboscq sold daguerreotype stereopairs, taken sequentially with a twin lens stereoscopic camera, and he also manufactured and sold lenticular stereoscopes. Gosser and Coe believe that Duboscq’s patents for these devices are the first to specify photography as a source for apparent motion, and in the mid-1850s Duboscq may have been the first person to create photographed moving stereoscopic images. All that remains of the effort is his Bioscope disk array of moving images of a steam engine, which is in the collection of the Museum of the History of Science of the University of Ghent in Belgium (Hannavy 2007). This

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Fig. 68.3  One of the stereopair drawings made for Wheatstone’s stereoscope and the demonstration of binocular stereopsis.

Fig. 68.4  Sir David Brewster’s design for a lenticular stereoscope.

Fig. 68.6  Gruber’s View-Master stereoscope and circular stereopair card. Shown here is an improved version of the viewer from USP 2,511,334, Stereoscopic Viewer, filed April 28, 1947.

Fig. 68.5  Oliver Wendell Holmes’ widely adopted wooden stereoscope. Note this model’s wedge-shaped septum, designed to separate the left and right optical paths. The stereopair cards were held in one of the slots at the end.

attempt at stereoscopic apparent motion has been previously described in chapter 9 in which it was noted that the photography was done by Antoine Françoise Jean Claudet in London, using two tripod-mounted cameras with rotating plates for successive exposures taken a second apart (Hecht and Hecht 1993, 204H). Because of the inability to photograph a rapid sequence, it must have been necessary to select

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stereopairs from many still photographs steam engine’s cyclical action to create a motion sequence (Gosser 1977). Another early moving image stereoscope is described by Helmholtz (von Helmholtz 1962, Vol. 3, p. 357), the stereophoroscope of 1855, invented by Johann N.  Czermak of Bohemia, using stereopairs mounted side by side on the inside of a revolving vertically mounted cardboard polygon. The images were viewed through spinning slit openings cut into the cardboard to arrest the motion of the continuously rotating images, combining features of the zoëtrope and the stereoscope. William Thomas Shaw, in England in 1860, built devices that used both Wheatstone and Brewster stereoscopes, and other such peepshow devices are known such as Coleman Sellers’ flip card stereoscope viewer of 1861, described earlier in these pages, and Wheatstone’s stereoscope of 1870 that used a closed-loop sprocket-driven band of images viewed through twin eyepieces. The device had an intermittent action but lacked a shutter, and as far as is known, only one was built, which at one time was in the possession of London’s Science Museum, according to Zone (2007). Friese-Greene claimed to have created a moving image stereoscopic camera, but historian Brian Coe (1983) reports that after extensive research into the matter, the camera Friese-Greene claimed to have invented was designed and built by Frederick Henry Varley, although it is true that Friese-Greene had once operated it. Coe examined Varley’s camera and came to the conclusion that it was probably capable of operating at only “two or three pictures a second.” A handful of frames of Trafalgar Square shot on colloidal film remain as a testament to Varley’s effort. The camera is described in his British Patent 4704, issued on March 26, 1890, but Friese-Greene succeeded in patenting what Coe and Zone write is a design that is “practically identical” to Varley’s, as described in British Patent, 22,954, of November 29, 1893. As Hopwood (1899) also puts it: “…Friese-Greene filed an English specification chiefly remarkable for its resemblance to Varley’s invention of 1890.” It’s unusual to find an inventor who attracts so many negative comments in the literature. A stereoscopic peepshow moving image viewer, USP 588,916, Kinetoscope, filed on June 1, 1896, by American inventors W.  G. Steward and E.  F. Frost, used continuous bands of images on paper or celluloid, with an intermittent mechanism for advancing the images, as described in chapter 17. One embodiment of the handcranked device used image bands with side-by-side stereo pairs. The invention of motion picture pioneer Charles Francis Jenkins, Stereoscopic Mutoscope, is described in USP 671,111, filed March 7, 1898. It’s a frame-sequential viewing device of the Mutoscope type which alternated left and right perspective cards and used a shutter to occlude the cards’ images while in motion. Each eye was able to see its required perspective view, but half the time each eye saw no image, as is the case

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for any time-multiplexed stereoscopic display, like Hammond’s Teleview, to be described. It would have been far simpler for Jenkins to have used side-­by-­side stereopairs, and there seems to be no advantage to his time-multiplexing scheme. In an article published in the Transactions of the SMPE in 1919, Jenkins (1919) demonstrates a grasp of the several technologies that can be used for the projection of stereoscopic images, which would serve as a good tutorial  today. What may be the earliest device of its kind is described in Stereoscope, USP 578,337, which was filed September 14, 1896, by Louis Jeffery of London. It used real rather than apparent motion combining aspects of the glass cinema’s panning of slides with the stereoscope. Jeffery uses two bands of synchronized stereopair panoramic scrolls with the user panning the image(s) by turning a knob. The last part of the Edison Kinetoscope patent filed on August 24, 1891, USP 493,426, Apparatus for Exhibiting

Fig. 68.7  Jeffrey uses stereopair bands of panoramic perspective views that are handcranked to produce real motion when viewed through the eyepieces of his stereoscope, as illustrated in the cover sheet of his USP.

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Photographs of Moving Object, describes a curious design that may not have been built. The description given at the conclusion of the patent is a strikingly odd afterthought. The Kinetoscope was designed to be an individual viewing device, but this is a projection embodiment designed to turn the Kinetoscope into a 3-D projector using a side-by-side stereopair format. To make this work would have taken far more than what is disclosed, including a fiercely bright source of illumination since the Kinetoscope used an inefficient phenakistoscope-style rotating high-speed shutter. Moreover, there is no mention of how to view the projected stereoscopic images. Another puzzling aspect of the disclosure is that Edison and Dickson overlooked that the Kinetoscope, with only minor modifications, could have been used as a moving image lenticular stereoscope with dual eyepieces to view side-by-side stereopair movies. Dickson probably influenced this addition to the Kinetoscope patent, because Edison had scant interest in stereoscopy, although Ramsaye (1926) writes that Edison described a stereoscopic camera in the abandoned application 403,535. (His USP 1,266,778, Process for Making Screens for Projection, describes a ribbed metallically coated high reflectance screen, which might have been used for polarized light stereoscopic projection.) After leaving Edison, Dickson, an experienced photographer, patented two designs for still stereoscopic cameras, USP 728,584, Camera, filed January 13, 1903, which is also a panoramic slit scanning revolving camera, and USP 731,405, filed July 20, 1898, Stereoscopic Apparatus. In the latter disclosure, Dickson recognized that it is important to be able to vary the separation between lenses, but the two optical path have different lengths leading to images with different magnifications.

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Stereoscopic projection uses stereopairs that are presented so they are fused by the eye-­brain into a three-dimensional effigy. This method is called plano-stereoscopic projection, and it requires that the two images be superimposed on the screen. A selection device, usually eyewear, is needed to enable each eye to see its required perspective view, while preventing the unwanted view from being seen. For the projection of a plano-­stereoscopic image there are three image selection techniques: by color, called the anaglyph; by alternating frames, the frame-sequential or timemultiplex method (also known as the occlusion or eclipse methods); and by polarization. The earliest technique to be used for projection is the anaglyph, in which the left and right images are colored or filtered and superimposed on top of each other. The printed version uses left and right complimentary colored images superimposed on top of each other, usually on a white sheet of paper. The stereoscopic image is perceived through anaglyphic eyewear, in the jargon of the art, anaglyphoscopes, with left and right lenses corresponding to the colors used for the images. When one looks through the eyewear the lenses transmit the wanted perspective view and block the unwanted one, resulting in the perception of a stereoscopic image but without color perception. (So-called color-blind people can see anaglyphs stereoscopically.) Heinrich Wilhelm Dove (1851) (1803–1879), a Prussian physicist and inventor of the image-rotating Dove prism, ­prepared anaglyphs on white paper in 1841, using blue and red images. Wilhelm Rollmann (1821–1909) of Leipzig, in 1852, learned of Dove’s work and created stereopair drawings using complimentary colors using blue and yellow lines viewed using blue and red filtered eyewear. He may have

Fig. 68.8  Stereoscopic projection is a curious afterthought tacked on to the Kinetoscope patent.

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Fig. 68.9  Dickson’s design for a stereoscopic still camera with lenses whose distance apart can be adjusted, from his USP.

been the first person to have projected these images using a magic lantern. He created stereopair drawings using complimentary colors surrounded by a black background viewed through eyewear using complimentary colors (Kingslake 1967). As a boy I bought a book about celestial navigation during a visit to the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, which used Rollman’s method, Stereopix: The Principles of Celestial Navigation Explained by Means of Three-Dimensional Pictures, written by William Henry Barton (1943), curator of the planetarium. The illustrations used black backgrounds for the celestial sky with red and blue stereopair line drawings of stars and lines of longitude and latitude that seemed to jump off the page as they arced across the sky. Additive projection using a biunial lantern (twin magic lantern) was first demonstrated in 1855 by the French physicist Charles d’Alméida at the Académie des Sciences, according to Louis Lumière (1936), a fact generally accepted in the literature. The additive method requires two projectors with lenses covered by filters of complimentary colors for the projection of stereopair slides of monochrome photographs, or drawings, with eyewear using the same filters. The additive projection method is to be distinguished from the subtractive method that uses two differently colored pictures, left and right views, superimposed on a single slide (or printed on a sheet of white paper). The single projector subtractive method was not used at the time because of the difficulties in producing the complimentarily colored ­photographic slides. Because of its simplicity, at the time the additive anaglyph was useful for projection; the subtractive anaglyph remains preferred for printing. Many sets of color filters have been suggested, and patents have been issued claiming improvements specifying the wavelengths for new filter combinations. For example,

Fig. 68.10  Following the method of Rollman: an anaglyph illustration from Stereopix…, a handbook teaching celestial navigation (1943). The drawing is captioned: “Relation of the Equator and Horizon Systems of Coordinates.”

Louis Lumière was awarded USP 2,136,303, Color Screen for Stereoscopic Projections, filed December 17, 1933, giving such a prescription. In 1890, highly regarded Parisian magic lantern manufacturer Alfred Molteni had considerable success putting on ­additive anaglyph shows using a biunial magic lantern, with colored glass filters in juxtaposition with the slides rather than in front of the lenses (Zone 2007). Prolific French inventor Louis Ducos du Hauron, living in Algeria, who coined the term anaglyph (Greek for again-sculpture), proposed a method for making anaglyphic drawings or photographs using the

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Fig. 68.11  A subtractive anaglyph print from a stereopair taken in Monopoli, Italy, with two 35 mm Pentax cameras and 28 mm lenses about 6 inches apart. (Photo by the author)

s­ubtractive method with complimentary colors printed on white paper. In his patent he cites d’Alméida’s additive projection technique to point out the superiority of the subtractive technique requiring only one projector. The subtractive anaglyph work by Dove and Rollman preceded this disclosure by decades, but du Hauron’s Stereoscopic Print, USP 544,666, filed September 19, 1894, originally granted as French Patent 216,465, is often cited as the key disclosure in the field with the assertion that it is the basis for the photomechanically printed anaglyph. Its improvement over the prior art is probably the suggested use of transparent inks so that portions of the left and right images will not block each other. Despite having been in financial difficulties, du Hauron, the true believer, offered to waive royalties to encourage the use of the technique. Subtractive anaglyph magic lantern slides were available in 1910, made of two toned glass slides sandwiched together, as is confirmed by perusing M. E. Mazo’s (8 Boulevard Magenta, Paris) catalog of that year. Mazo (1910, pp. 22–24) was the coinventor of the technique, which he describes in the British Journal of Photography (Starkman 2016). Subtractive motion picture anaglyphs using a single projector have obvious advantages over the additive method requiring two projectors, but the technique had to wait for advances in duplitized color release printing. One of the earliest uses of the anaglyph for the celluloid cinema was by Edwin S. Porter who, working with William E. Waddell, privately d­ emonstrated the process on June 10, 1915, at the Astor Theater in New  York and again publicly a few days later to positive press reviews. The demonstrations used the two-projector additive method. The film, Jim the Penman, was photographed by Porter, which has several anaglyph

sequences; it was shown along with two anaglyph shorts, Niagara Falls and Rural America. These were the first publicly exhibited stereoscopic films in the United States (Zone 2007). Adolph Zukor (1953), founder of Paramount Pictures, who hired Porter for his Famous Players Film Company circa 1913, recalled that Porter and Waddell used two cameras for cinematography, and for exhibition two projectors with colored filters over their lenses. Lorgnettes with red and green glass filters were supplied to the audience without which, according to Zukor, “(the) pictures were a hopeless swirl.” The Fairall Process, also additively projected, was used for The Power of Love, which was previewed at the Ambassador Hotel Theater, in Los Angeles on September 27, 1922, to “continuous applause” as reported in the Film Daily of September 30, 1922, but the film was distributed thereafter only in 2-D, possibly due to the difficulties presented by two-projector exhibition (Zukor 1953). Cameraman and inventor Harry K. Fairall (1882–1958) designed the 35 mm stereoscopic camera described in USP 1,784,515, Binocular nonstop-­motion-­picture camera, filed November 21, 1925. His integral design was comprised of two side-by-side cameras having intermittents driven in synchrony for the exposure of stereopairs through left and right lenses.1 As far as I can determine, The Power of Love was the only anaglyph film exhibited that was shot with Fairall’s camera. On August 29, 1922, Fairall had filed the disclosure that was granted as USP 1,595,295, Double Emulsion Film, teaching the making of duplitized anaglyph prints, that is, subtractive prints with The Norling camera that was used to shoot a number of RKO features in the early 1950s used a similar design, as described in chapter 70.

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Fig. 68.12  The side by side 35 mm mechanisms of Fairall’s bilaterally symmetrical 35 mm stereoscopic camera.

complimentary colored perspective views printed on either side of the base. Fairall’s bakers’ interest in finding a subtractive rather than an additive stereoscopic projection solution led to the development of Multicolor and the successful bichromatic process Cinecolor, as described in chapter 48. The advantage of duplitized subtractive anaglyph printing and projection did not escape the attention of others, and in December 1922, color photography inventor Frederic Eugene Ives and motion picture apparatus inventor Jacob Frank Leventhal (?–1953) began to distribute short anaglyph films through Educational Pictures, the first of which was titled Plastigrams. Subtractive release prints were made by the two-color Technicolor duplitized process that cemented two dyed prints together, base to base. This was a significant simplification for exhibition compared to the two-projector method, and Ives and Leventhal continued to make novelty anaglyph films that were distributed by Pathé beginning in 1925 (Hayes 1998). Color pioneer William Van Doren Kelley, with co-­inventor Dominick Tronolone, sought to address the technical challenges of production and exhibition of anaglyphs by taking advantage of Kelley’s bichromatic color knowhow. Their Plasticon Pictures process is described in USP 1,729,617, Stereoscopic Pictures, filed July 24, 1924. Kelley adapted both his two-color camera and one or more of his release

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printmaking processes for anaglyph projection. For cinematography Kelley (1923) modified the lenses used by his color camera, as cited in chapter 47, which exposed two vertically stacked 35 mm frames, an arrangement similar to that used by Fox Nature Color cameras. For color cinematography the exposures were made on panchromatically sensitized stock through complimentary colored filters, in the optical paths of the lenses, to produced bichromatically analyzed records. For 3-D cinematography each unfiltered lens made its exposure through a prism assembly to align the lenses’ effective axes to have only the horizontal displacement required to photograph binocular perspective views, with an interaxial separation of 2¾ inches. However, a Mr. Beechlyn, during the discussion period after a paper Kelley (1923) presented on the process at an SMPE meeting in 1923, reported seeing vertical parallax in projection. Nonetheless, this camera’s optical design anticipates the above and below format that was used for stereoscopic cinematography in the early 1980s. Evidently 1922 was a year of great interest in stereoscopic cinema: the first public exhibition of Plasticon took place at the Rivoli Theater in New  York during Christmas week of 1922, three months after the opening of Fairall’s The Power of Love, at about the same time as the opening of Ives and Leventhal’s Plastigrams process. The New  York Times reviewer wrote favorably about Plasticon’s Movies of the Future premiere (Zone 2007), but like other reviewers he probably had never seen anything like it and had no basis for comparison, but given this proviso the positive reaction is worth noting. The audience was supplied with cardboard glasses equipped with gelatin filters colored red and blue-green. Kelley’s ‘617 disclosure is almost entirely devoted to a camera design, but the single granted claim covers stereoscopic shadow photography (which Hammond successfully pursued) using alternate frame additive projection. It’s likely that the examiner found there was nothing novel about the camera design, and as a result Kelley settled for a claim that was irrelevant to the major thrust of the disclosure. Kelley (1923), in a historical review of the art, Stereoscopic Pictures, briefly describes his print process: “All of the right eye pictures are printed on one side of double coated film and toned red, and the left eye pictures printed on the opposite side are toned blue-green.” He’s describing the duplitized process that he also used for bichromatic subtractive color release prints, but in this case it’s applied to subtractive anaglyph prints. It’s possible that as Plasticon short subjects continued to be exhibited Kelley also made prints using the singlesided rehalogenation method, but I have no proof of this and only suspect the possibility. Stereoscopic cinema developments continued into the 1930s by Louis Lumière (1955), who “had a persistent interest in 3-D images,” and in 1936 publicly screened a stereoscopic film titled L’Arrivee du Train, not to be confused with

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the well-known Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, of 1895 or 1896, that was monoscopic. Lumière (1936) presented a paper on the subject and may have demonstrated the process at the Chicago SMPE Meeting in the spring of 1936. Lumière’s design used an eight-perforation horizontally traveling 35 mm format placing the stereopair frames above and below each other. His camera’s lenses imaged through prisms to eliminate vertical parallax, as Kelley had attempted. For exhibition he projected through “light yellow and pure blue” filtered lenses for additive anaglyphic selection. The horizontal format is a clever design that solves a problem that afflicted above and below vertical-traveling 35 mm 3-D projection because it was all too easy to improperly thread the projector resulting in pseudostereoscopic and/or out-ofphase images, which is impossible to do with the Lumière approach. The frames were of good size, and the process could have been readily adapted to polarization image selection. Although it was compatible with much of the 35 mm infrastructure, it obviously would have required new cameras and projectors. The Technicolor three-color dye imbibition process was used to make anaglyphic 3-D prints for a few MGM comedy one-reelers, narrated by Pete Smith, head of their publicity department. Jacob F.  Leventhal and John A.  Norling sold anaglyph footage to MGM that edited it into comical short subjects wryly narrated by Smith. On January 15, 1938, the

Fig. 68.13  Top: Lumière’s 35 mm horizontal-traveling stereo format used above and below stereopairs. It’s a neat design that preserved much of the 35 mm infrastructure. Bottom: The viewing eyewear. (The eyewear were repaired in Photoshop)

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studio released an 8½ minute film with the title Audioscopiks, and three additional 3-D films narrated by Smith were released under the Metroscopix label, which were shot with an MGM designed camera. The first film under this marque was the 7½ minute spoof of the Frankenstein films that were so successfully produced by Universal Pictures, titled Third Dimensional Murder, released March 1, 1941 (Hayes 1998). A variant of the anaglyphic technique, the color or polychrome anaglyph, sought to add the perception of color to the stereoscopic effect. An early version was described in 1928 by George Lane (1928) who attempted to add color information to the usual monochromatic anaglyph with a two-camera process whose cinematography was done using complimentary colored filters over the left and right lenses when shooting on panchromatically sensitized black and white film. Lane claimed that when projected and viewed anaglyphically a mild color effect was perceived. Later work substituted color stock for both camera and print film, an approach that, like Lane’s, depended on the phenomenon of binocular color mixing. The April 1974 issue of American Cinematographer is devoted to stereoscopic cinematography and is of some interest because of the topics it covers and its expert inventor/authors, including Daniel Symmes, Alan Williams, Winton Hoch, Petro Vlahos, Linwood Dunn, Joseph Biroc, and Arch Oboler; and there’s an interview with Robert Bernier (Special Issue: 3-D…, 1974). The cover is a color anaglyph photo of actress Liv Ullmann, taken with a process described by Ken Wales using the Video West Camera, invented by Jimmy D. Songer, Jr. (the designer of an early video assist system), that combines the exposures of the left and right perspective views photographed through complimentary colored filters. Songer’s optics are described in USP 3,712,199, Three-dimensional color and photographic process, apparatus and product, filed September 23, 1974. Another example of an attempt at anaglyphic polychromatic filtration is described in USP 4,134,644, 3D Color Pictures with Multichrome Filters, filed January 10, 1977, by Alvin M. Marks and Mortimer Marks. In 2003 the Spy Kids 3-D feature, directed by Robert Rodriguez, was released printed in a 35 mm polychrome process. The film was shot in color stereoscopically without filters over the lenses of a digital camera rig designed by Vince Pace. Much of the film used computer-generated images combined with live action. The polychromatic effect was created in post-production by combining the two perspectives through filters of complimentary colors (or filtration was accomplished using the electronic equivalent). With careful composition and color choices, the polychrome anaglyph may be suitable for print media, but the process is not well suited for a feature-length film since retinal rivalry creates visual fatigue that is exacerbated with duration. However, Spy Kids 3-D was fairly well photographed, as I can attest having seen a digital print projected using the RealD process

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Fig. 68.14 The cover of the April 1974 issue of American Cinematographer, with a color anaglyph of Liv Ullman. Her face is in sharp focus when not viewed through the supplied eyewear but when used the background appears to be behind her and (hopefully) the foreground flowers appeared off the page.

that uses polarization combined with time-multiplexing for image selection. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first experimental steps were taken that established the principle of the time-multiplex or field- (frame-) sequential image selection technique, the basis for the stereoscopic projection process used on about 75,000 cinema screens, or half the total number of digital projection screens in the world. In 1851 Heinrich Dove reported that he could see stereoscopic images using a stereoscope when the stereopairs were briefly illuminated by an electric spark. Somewhat later the inventor of the tachistoscope, Alfred Volkmann, using his mechanical shuttering device, confirmed Dove’s observation (Wade and Tatler 2005). Also crucial to the development of today’s single-­projector frame-sequential technique is the seminal observation of William Barton Rogers published in 1860, as reported by Helmholtz (2005), that left and right perspective views can be fused when they are seen briefly and presented alternately to the left and right eyes. This established the physiological principle employed by the Teleview system,

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the first commercial projection of its kind, invented by American Laurens Hammond (1895–1973), which debuted in the Selwyn Theatre on Broadway in New  York City on December 27, 1922. Hammond, who later invented the eponymous organ, was aided in his efforts by fellow Cornell graduate electrical engineer William F.  Cassidy. This image selection approach is similar to others contemplated or built by magic lantern and early cinema inventors in the past decades, like those described by Thomas Cunningham Porter in 1897 in BP 12,921, the Lumières in their 1898 FP 305,092, or by Carl Schmidt and Charles Dupuis in their 1903 FP 331,406. Hammond’s invention, which is described in USP 1,435,520, Stereoscopic Motion Picture, filed March 2, 1921, and USP 1,506,524, Stereoscopic Motion Picture Device, filed May 29, 1922, is important because we know it worked, it was seen by paying customers, and was praised by Hammond’s contemporaries. Teleview used what is sometimes called the eclipse or occlusion method, in which a train of successive left and right perspective frames is projected and selected for each patron’s eyes by means of shuttering. Hammond employed two interlocked projectors, one for each perspective view, whose frames were projected alternately so that only one perspective view was on the screen at a time. The left and right frames were alternated at 16 or 18 fps (I assume), so that without eyewear a double image was seen on the screen. Lorgnettes incorporating motor-driven spinning mechanical shutters were mounted on adjustable goose necks on the back of every seat in the theater. The rotating paper-thin aluminum shutters were kept in sync with the projectors since both were driven by synchronous three-phase AC motors. Hammond’s Teleview feature film, The Man from M.A.R.S., was reviewed favorably by The New York Times, whose critic liked the 3-D effect (Zone 2007). Leventhal (1926) also commented that the quality of the stereoscopic images was excellent, and Kelley (1923) wrote “the results on the screen were close to perfection.” Variety, on January 5, 1923, ran these comments about Teleview images: “When viewed by the naked eye they are blurred and vague. Through the machine (the lorgnette) they are remarkably clear but seem restricted to a small projection space”(Munden 1971). The Selwyn Theatre was the only one to be so equipped, and the frame-sequential technique for the theatrical cinema lay fallow for eight decades. Teleview is a crucial link in the chain of discovery and invention that led to the digital stereoscopic cinema, which included the aforementioned experiments and observations of Dove, Volkmann, and Rogers. Hammond’s Teleview used two projectors because mechanical pulldown is too slow to provide a fast enough transition between left and right frames. In chapter 83, the technology permitting the use of a single digital projector for the presentation of flickerless frame-sequential stereoscopic movies is described.

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Fig. 68.15  A schematic of the Teleview frame-sequential process from Hammonds USP 1,435,520. The two projectors operated with their shutters out of phase, as shown. The shuttering selection device, through

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which each audience member watched the film, is highlighted. Projector and viewer shutters were kept in sync with AC motors.

Fig. 68.16  Savoye’s rotating raster barrier autostereoscopic motion picture display.

For cinema, plano-stereoscopic projection is the only viable technology we have until a practical autostereoscopic method (without eyewear) is invented. Frederic Ives, whose inventions in color photography and cinematography have been noted in these pages, invented the first of a family of eyewear-free selection devices, the raster barrier method, as described in USP 725,567, filed September 25, 1902, Parallax Stereogram and Process of

Making Same. A raster barrier is made up of a flat screen made up of vertical occluding columns alternating with clear ones positioned in front of columns of interdigitated left and right perspective views. If the observer is located at exactly the right spot each eye sees only its perspective view, and a stereoscopic image is perceived. Ives’ interdigitated stereogram was the basis for several autostereoscopic moving image inventions including those

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demonstrated by the Belgian Edmond Henri Victor Noaillon, as described in USP 1,772,782, Art of Making Cinematographic Projection, filed December 18, 1928, in which a stereopair is projected through a reciprocating raster barrier that serves to both interdigitate and select the images. A related approach was demonstrated by the Frenchman François Savoye, who on July 13, 1942, filed USP 2,441,674, Stereoscopic Motion Picture Projection System, in which stereopairs are projected onto a flat screen located within a rotating raster barrier overlaid on the frustum of a right circular cone. The only cinema raster barrier system I know of that was used for ongoing commercial exhibition was in the Soviet Union, engineered by S. P. Ivanov, which he first proposed in 1935 and demonstrated in 1937 (Valyus 1966, pp. 220– 225). It was a source of national pride during its run in the 384-seat theater the Moscow that had 24 rows of 16 seats. A stereopair was projected onto a metallic screen (presumably for high gain) through 30,000 fine vertically strung black-­ enameled copper wires (piano wires by one account). The wires formed a radial array that was narrower at the bottom than at the top. The wires were separated by a distance of 3 mm at the top of the screen and 1.5 mm at the bottom, and

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the open intervals between the wires were 1 mm at the top and .5 mm at the bottom. The metal-framed screen, 2.25 m x 3 m, was assembled in the theater and hoisted into place. The wire raster barrier, weighing several tons, both interdigitated the projected stereopair into alternating vertical columns of left and right image strips and served as the selection device. In 1943 a glass lenticular screen replaced the raster barrier, which presumably produced a brighter image. For either the raster barrier or the lenticular screen, audience members had to carefully keep their heads in position to see a proper stereoscopic (rather than pseudostereoscopic) image. The first film of this kind that was shown in the Moscow Theater was The Concert, which premiered February 4, 1941. The second feature, Day off in Moscow, played in the theater until it was closed in June of 1941. One of the 35  mm formats Ivanov used was based on stereopairs photographed on a single 35 mm frame divided vertically in half. This narrow aspect ratio image was filmed with the camera shooting into a simple arrangement of a pair of tipped mirrors joined at a vertical intersection, as Valyus (1966) reports in his comprehensive review of Ivanov’s raster barrier system and Soviet stereoscopic cinematography in general.

Polarization Image Selection

The phenomenon of double refraction, which produces polarized light, was discovered in calcite crystals now known as Iceland spar; although we don’t know who first noticed this phenomenon, its description was first published in 1669 by the Danish physician and scientist Rasmus Bartholin (Goldstein, 2011). Bartholin described that objects viewed through Iceland spar were seen as double images, and that as the crystal was rotated one of the images rotated around the other. Bartholin called the rays of light of the fixed image the ordinary rays and those from the rotating image the extraordinary rays. The terminology is still in use to describe what is now called double refraction or birefringence in which light emerging from the crystal is also polarized. As we learned in the first chapter Huygens was the inventor of the magic lantern, as described in his Traité de la Lumière, published in 1690; in that book he also explains his wave theory of light. Huygens, using this construct, mathematically models the phenomena of double refraction and polarization. Huygens and his contemporary Newton were at odds, with Huygens ­supporting the wave theory and Newton the particle or ­corpuscular theory of light, a duality that remains with us to this day. In 1828 Scottish physicist William Nicol created the first man-made polarizer using what is now known as the Nicol prism, constructed by slicing a rhombohedral calcite crystal and resembling it by polishing the resultant plane surfaces and cementing them together with Canada balsam. Unpolarized light entering one of the Nicol prism’s faces, after having passed through it, emerges double refracted as two linear (or plane) polarized beams of light whose absorption axes (where maximum polarization occurs) are at right angles (Joshi 2010). (The Nicol prism was used for the Kerr cell light valve for optical sound recording, but it is an awkward device to use for stereoscopic projection, especially for spectacles.) Polarization can be understood by using the model that light is a transverse electromagnetic wave in which the undulations of the wave are perpendicular to its direction of travel. (To explain polarization we can ignore the magnetic component of the wave and only consider the

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e­ lectric component.) By way of example, a transverse wave can be produced with a few feet of cord tied to a doorknob that is held at the other end and shaken up and down with a flick of the wrist. When light is emitted from a luminous body, like the sun or reflected from most surfaces, it is usually unpolarized, in which case the electric components (vectors) of the waves of light don’t lie in planes parallel to each other but are randomly oriented. If the vectors align in parallel planes, the light is linear polarized. The parallel planes, in which the waves lie, correspond to the transmission axis of a polarizer. When a polarizer, like a Nicol prism or a sheet polarizer, to be described, is held in front of a similar filter with their axes parallel, light will pass through the combination and is said to be transmitted, but if the filters’ axes are crossed, light will not pass through them, and is said to be extinguished. The filters do not have to be in contact for extinction or transmission to take place. The filter through which light first passes is called the polarizer, and the second filter is sometimes called the analyzer. A typical stereoscopic projection arrangement using linear polarized light employs a pair of polarizing filters in front of each projection lens, whose axes are orthogonal. The projected polarized light is reflected by the screen and analyzed by the eyewear’s similarly oriented polarizer filters. The setup is analogous to additive anaglyphic projection; while anaglyphic projection can use a matte screen, polarized light selection must use a screen having a metallic surface to conserve its properties. Unpolarized light can be turned into polarized light using different methods, but it was the availability of convenient sheet polarizer filters that made full-color stereoscopic projection viable. The first step toward the creation of sheet polarizers began in 1852 as the result of an accident in the laboratory of William Bird Herapath, a toxicologist who was investigating the properties of quinine and methods for extracting the alkaloid from bark, of some importance to the far-flung British Empire since quinine is a treatment for malaria. One of his pupils, a student named Phelps, mistakenly added iodine to the urine of a dog that had been fed

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_69

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Fig. 69.1  A Nicol prism made of two calcite prisms joined by Canada balsam adhesive (yellow line). Unpolarized light (left) enters the prism. The o- and e-rays are shown leaving the prism as linearly polarized with

Fig. 69.2  The electric component (vector) of a single ray of light whose wave lies in a plane. For linear polarization the light in a group of waves must have their electric vectors in planes parallel to each other.

large quantities of quinine. Herapath, observing the resultant little greenish crystals through a microscope saw that when they were laid on top of each other and rotated the light passing through them darkened, which is a clear indication of linear polarization. Herapath believed that there were commercial possibilities for his discovery, and on November 15, 1853, he and John Hall Brock Thwaites filed BP 2646, Manufacture of Quinine and other Alkaloids. The material, which became known as herapathite, was limited in its applications since it was fragile and difficult to make into sheets large enough to be useful, even after attempts were made by Herapath and others to make them larger (Thulstrup 1989)). An improvement was made by Ferdinand Bernauer whose version of herapathite was made into filters for use in microscopy in 1936, which were trade-named Bernotar by Zeiss (Kaiho 2015). Kingslake (1967) writes: “Processes utilizing Polaroid (meant in a generic sense) in the projection of ste-

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the reflected o-ray’s plane of polarization at right angles to the plane of the illustration, and the e-ray’s plane of polarization in the plane of the illustration.

reoscopic pictures have been devised by Land (in 1934, 1939), Bernauer (in 1935), Ardenne (in 1936), Käsemann (in 1938), Zeiss Ikon (in 1940), Dudley and many other workers.” The first suggestion for using polarization for stereoscopic image selection for magic lantern projection was, in all likelihood, made in BP 11,520, granted on July 7, 1891, to British physicist John Anderton of Birmingham, which also issued as USP 542,321, Method by which pictures projected upon screens by magic lanterns are seen in relief, filed on July 5, 1893. Anderton’s disclosure differs from modern practice only in his choice of polarizers, the piles-of-plates method, although his claims are broad enough to cover any kind of polarizer. A stack of thin glass plates set at an angle to the incoming rays of light produces linear polarized light, but it’s an impractically bulky design for eyewear. Anderton, who must have been aware of herapathite, did not suggest its use probably because of the inability to make it into sheets that were large enough. Stereoscopic magic lanterns using polarization image selection were sold in Birmingham by Field & Co; although Anderton’s design aroused a “great deal of interest” and was favorably reviewed, it did not gain traction in the marketplace. It seems that there was no ­commercial use of the polarization method of image selection until the advent of sheet polarizers (Liesegang 1986, p. 71). American inventor, scientist, and entrepreneur, Edwin Herbert Land (1909–1991), assiduously attempted to turn herapathite into a useful sheet polarizer. To pursue his quest, Land left Harvard after his freshman year, where he had been studying chemistry, and with the help of his former instructor George W. Wheelwright III, whose family funded the enterprise, they formed Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in 1932, which was renamed the Polaroid Corporation in 1937. Vivian Walworth, co-inventor of Polacolor, who spent her career as a Polaroid chemist, told me that Land autonomously steered product development and company policy. His proclivity was to hire based not on academic qualifications or prior experience, but rather based on his judgment of the person before

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Fig. 69.4  Edwin Land

Fig. 69.3  The USP cover sheet for Anderton’s polarization projection selection invention.

him, and he often employed women researchers at a time when that was out of the ordinary. Land was successful in the raising of capital, especially noteworthy when one considers the difficulties posed by selling the concept of sheet polarizers, an obscure technology with unproven applications. The charismatic but private Land, who lived for the laboratory, tried many approaches for creating a manufacturing process for making large-aperture sheet polarizers, at first by grinding up herapathite to produce microscopic crystals in a suspension of nitrocellulose lacquer that was placed in the gap of a 120-kilogauss electromagnet to align the crystals. The opaque brownish liquid suspension became transparent and was observed to be polarized when its light was passed through a Nicol prism. Land’s sheet polarizer was at first manufactured from the nitrocellulose lacquer by immersing a plastic sheet in it and then by drying it in a magnetic field. Land found a better approach with a process based on the

stretching of polyvinyl alcohol plastic sheets imbibed with a colloidal dispersion of submicroscopic needle-shaped crystals of herapathite, which became a product called the J-sheet, which Land invented in 1928 while still a 19-year-­ old undergraduate at Harvard (Keating 1988). To overcome its haziness, Land perfected the H-sheet by stretching heated sheets of polyvinyl alcohol or PVA, which absorbed iodine to provide an alignment direction for the long chains of iodine molecules. The deformation of the plastic sheet was maintained by laminating it to a sheet of cellulose acetate. Land succeeded in creating ways to make similar kinds of iodine-based sheet polarizers. Unpolarized light entering the sheet is turned into linear polarized light through the absorption of the electric component of light that is at right angles to the iodine molecules’ orientation. The result is that the light that emerges is linearly polarized with the absorbed light going into heating the sheet polarizer. Such a sheet polarizer cannot be more than 50% efficient; a sheet polarizer for stereoscopic selection, in a trade-off between transmission and extinction, usually passes about 40% of the light entering it as linear polarized light. For stereoscopic projection the light of the projected left and right images have their polarization axes at right angles to each other with the left and right eyewear analyzers (filters or lenses) similarly oriented. The falloff in extinction for linearly polarized light as the analyzing eyewear are tipped, even a few degrees, is significant and is given by the law of Malus, a cosine-squared law that predicts the rapid loss of extinction given a small rotation of the analyzer. Land may be the earliest advocate of the use of circular polarization for image selection (which is used by the RealD

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system) as described in USP 2,099,694, Polarizing Optical System, filed March 6, 1934. Circular polarization, unlike linear polarization, allows for a good deal of head tipping before the audience sees a double image, making the viewing experience more pleasing. While linear polarization has electric vectors oriented in planes parallel to each other, for circular polarization the electric vectors rotate. For image selection the projector lenses of a dual projection setup are covered by circular polarizing filters of opposite handedness. For oncoming rays of light, a clockwise spiral of the electric vector is defined as left circular polarized light, and a counterclockwise spiral is defined as right circular polarized light. For projection, lens filters and eyewear have similar left and right circular polarizing filters, which pass or block the appropriate images. A circular polarizing filter can be made using a linear polarizer laminated to a stressed sheet of plastic quarter-­ wave retarder. The polarizer and retarder axes are at 45° to each other; when unpolarized light enters the stack, it is polarized by the linear polarizer, which then enters the retarder and is split into two right-angle components of polarized light that become out of phase with each other. As they move through the retarder, one component is phase shifted by a quarter-wave, while the other is not. The vector sum of the two out-of-phase waves, as they leave the retarder sheet, produces circularly polarized light, either right or left depending upon whether or not the retarder axis is plus or

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minus 45° to the axis of the sheet polarizer. The retarder sheet causes the phase shift because it has two axes, a fast and a slow one; the speed of light in the sheet is faster along one axis than the other. Polaroid Corporation chemist Vivian Walworth (1984) was largely responsible for encouraging the use of circular polarization for stereoscopic image section based on an article she wrote published in 1984. In 1934 Wheelwright and Land visited Rochester to demonstrate 15 minutes of black and white stereoscopic film for the man who had set up Kodak’s research lab, Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, who liked what he saw and supplied them with early samples of the new Kodachrome 16  mm film. Using Kodachrome, they made the first stereoscopic movies in color with dual camera and projector setups. With a new single camera/single protector system using an optical attachment that photographed and projected a stereopair within one frame, Wheelwright and Clarence Kennedy, a professor of art at Smith College, demonstrated stereoscopic projection at a SMPE meeting in Washington D.C., in the autumn of 1935, an early public presentation of stereoscopic image selection using sheet polarizers. Land’s next demonstration was given at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan in February 1936, which was well received by The New York Times. A second demonstration for the SMPE took place in New  York in May 1936 at the Hotel Pennsylvania, which was described enthusiastically in the New York Herald Tribune. Beginning in December 1936, and lasting for sev-

Fig. 69.5  The cover sheet of Land’s USP teaching applications for circular polarization. Top, for windshields and headlights covered with polarizers to dim oncoming auto headlights. Bottom, for stereoscopic projection permitting head tipping.

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eral years, Polaroid 3-D movies were shown to the public at the New York Museum of Science and Industry in Rockefeller Center (Zone 2007; Wensberg 1987). But Land believed that a major market opportunity was to be found elsewhere, and made valiant efforts to interest the automotive industry in polarizers for reducing the headlight glare of oncoming cars. The windshields and headlights of every vehicle on the road would need to be covered with polarizer, but the industry declined to act, and drivers learned to deal with the glare of oncoming headlights. Polaroid found other applications for polarizers, first with Kodak for photographic filters to reduce reflections and darken the sky. In 1936 a major application turned out to be automotive but not for the reduction of headlight glare; rather, it was for the lenses of sunglasses to reduce glare reflected by road surfaces. An enormous amount of sheet polarizer is required worldwide for electronic display applications, but the manufacture of sheet polarizers is centered in Asia, not Massachusetts. In the twenty-first century, polarizers became required for every liquid crystal display, found in most consumer television sets, cellphones, tablets, and computer screens, and for the millions of pairs of 3-D glasses used by the motion picture industry, but Polaroid sold its business to 3 M in the spring of 2000, deciding not to invest in updating its manufacturing line, just as the demand for polarizer was taking off. Instead it concentrated on its snapshot business, which like Kodak’s was devastated by digital photography. Land’s Polaroid is no more, having declared chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001 (Fierstein 2015). A company of that name exists today, owning a brand in search of products. In 1934, inventor Joseph Mahler wrote to Land from his native Poland, describing a new concept for preparing stereopairs using polarization for image selection. Land invited Mahler to join Polaroid and in 1938, as the Germans were preparing to invade Poland, Mahler fled to the United States. Mahler worked with Land to develop the Vectograph, a printmaking process that uses polarizing dyes for creating monochrome or color stereo images (Wensberg 1987). In one embodiment the inks for each perspective view are imbibed on specially prepared plastic sheets, one sheet for each perspective, and then sandwiched together, with their polarization axes orthogonal to make a stereo print that can be viewed with polarizing eyewear. Land’s USP 2,289,714, LightPolarizing Image in Full Color, filed June 7, 1940, describes a version of the process. In the early 1990s, in a screening room in mid-­Manhattan, at a SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) meeting officiated by Pace College in Manhattan, I watched a Vectograph test reel prepared by Technicolor for Polaroid, of the Warner Bros.’ 1953 The Charge at Feather River. The Vectograph print, presumably a cemented duplitized print, was projected using a standard 35  mm projector without polarizing filters. (Decades earlier the first subtractive

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bichromatic Technicolor process used duplitized base-tobase cemented prints.) Sharpness, color, and brightness of the Vectograph print were very good, but there was crosstalk in some of the shots. It’s unknown why Polaroid and Technicolor did not pursue the promising process, but it may be that by the time production issues could have been ironed out it had become evident that interest in the stereoscopic cinema had declined, for reasons given in the next chapter. Had the Vectograph become a cinema product, three-dimensional projection would have been as a simple as projecting an ordinary planar print. Another approach for using a single projector for polarization selection is to divide the 35 mm frame into two subframes. Beginning in 1935, Otto Vierling of Zeiss Ikon in Germany, whose work entailed many aspects of stereoscopy, designed single camera stereopair formats for 35  mm by

Fig. 69.6 The cover sheet of Land’s USP for a motion picture Vectograph. In this version Land teaches using six laminated sheets with dichroic dye images, two RGB sets, producing images with linear polarization orthogonal to each other. He eventually figured out how to use only two dye receiving substrates, one for each perspective.

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dividing the frame into vertical halves, producing a tall and narrow aspect ratio image. (Zeiss and Leitz provided attachments for their Contax and Leica 35 mm still cameras that produced similar stereopairs.) To provide a more conventional landscape format image, Vierling used prism optics to rotate the side-by-side frames to project a 1.66:1 aspect ratio image. Vierling (1965), the author of a treatise on stereoscopic cinematography, Die Stereoskopie in der Photographie und Kinematographie, anticipated similar subframe approaches that would play a role in theatrical 3-D exhibition half a century later. In 1936 Zeiss sheet polarizers for projector and eyewear filters were used to exhibit the black and white Beggar’s Wedding, shot with an Italian camera system. According to Zone (2007), Beggar’s Wedding was the first 3-D feature film with sound. In May 1937, Vierling’s optics were used for the first commercially produced color and sound 3-D movie, which was shot 35  mm Agfacolor. Close Enough to Touch, a short advertising film made for an insurance company, was projected using Zeiss Herotar polarizing filters. German combat cinematographers covered the Second World War with cameras equipped with Zeiss/ Vierling 3-D optics, and about 300,000 feet of 35 mm film they shot was found in 1994 in a bombed out church that had survived the firestorms of Dresden (Zone 2007). In the United States a different approach from that of Vierling/Zeiss was used for stereoscopic filmmaking, with the two-camera/two-projector method. Polaroid’s technology was applied to two related films shown to a total of five million people at the World’s Fair of 1939–1940, in Flushing, New York, the three-­dimensional In Tune with Tomorrow, a step-by-step stop-­ motion depiction of the building of a Chrysler automobile, produced by Loucks and Norling and directed by John A.  Norling, an expert stereographer and advocate for the stereoscopic cinema. The film, originally shot in black and white and projected with interlocked 35  mm projectors, was so well received that it was reshot in Technicolor and retitled New Dimensions (later released theatrically as Motor Rhythm), for the second year of the fair. The stop-motion film was shot on black and white film using three successive exposures for each frame, through red, green, and blue filters, to create a three-color record for each perspective, from which imbibition matrices were derived for making Technicolor prints (Zone 2012).

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Fig. 69.7  Vierling’s stereopair format used frames with a 90° rotation. The sound track area is the gray column. Lacking an actual print or description with more specificity, this drawing is my best guess.

Before leaving this chapter, a few words will be devoted to Edwin Land’s resolute faith in the patent system, a subject of some interest in these pages since this legal system for the protection of intellectual property rights has greatly influenced the course of cinema’s technological deployment. This was the case for Edison’s monopolistic Trust, Kinemacolor vs. Biocolour, and the suit brought by William Fox based on his ownership of Tri-Ergon rights. Beginning in 1948 Polaroid’s major products were snapshot cameras and their rapid processing film. After initially dismissing the “instant” snapshot market as an opportunity, Kodak decided to compete as the much smaller Polaroid became a threat to its amateur photo business. This was realized with the introduction of Polaroid’s far more convenient (and magical) self-­processing SX-70 line of film and cameras in 1972. Polaroid filed suit against Eastman Kodak for patent infringement 6 days after it introduced its similar rapid-processing snapshot system, at 4:49 PM on April 26, 1976, at Boston’s USP District Court for the District of Massachusetts. About a decade later, on January 8, 1986, at 6:00  PM, Kodak’s final attempt to stay the verdict against it was denied, and a nearly billion-dollar judgment, the largest infringement award until that time, was upheld. One of Land’s lasting contributions is the strengthening of patent holders’ rights, which, until the decision in Polaroid’s favor, had diminished, asserts Ronald K. Fierstein (2015), one of the litigators who worked on Polaroid’s behalf.

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Lieutenant Colonel Robert Vincent Bernier (1911–1976) of the US Air Force, who was attached to the Stereo and Photomicrographic Unit at Wright-Patterson Base, described an intriguing stereoscopic projection method that foreshadows today’s single projector digital technology , which combines frame-sequential and polarization image selection (as used by the RealD system). The difficulty with applying frame-sequential selection to a single projector is that mechanical pulldown is too slow because too much of the duty cycle is taken up with transport. To address the issue Bernier (1951) adapted a Bell & Howell 16  mm projector designed for an additive color process using the Morgana movement (see chapter 45), which shuffles frames back and forth to increase the effective frame rate from 24 fps to 72 fps to reduce flicker (Cornwell-­Clyne 1951). A sheet polarizing filter curved like a half-cylinder, whose axis was at 45° to horizontal, rotated in front of the projector’s lens, toggling its axis through 90° in synchronization with the intermittent, polarizing successive frames accordingly. Bernier’s USP 2,478,891, filed November 4, 1947, Three-Dimensional Adapter for Motion-Picture Projectors, describes the process that was demonstrated at the SMPTE Convention in New  York on May 2, 1951. I have found no eyewitness account of how well the process worked. Bernier invented the SpaceVision over and under optic, to be described below. Held in 1951 the Festival of Britain commemorated the many significant advances that the British made in science and technology during the prior century. The event featured a specially designed theater, the Telecinema, in which a program of four short stereoscopic films were shown that were produced under the supervision of Raymond Spottiswoode with the help of inventor Leslie P. Dudley and the Technicolor company. The Festival’s stereoscopic projection technology does not seem to have advanced beyond that used for Norling’s 3-D films at the New York World’s Fair, a bit more than a decade earlier. One outcome of the Festival was an article appearing in the SMPE Journal in 1952 by Raymond Spottiswoode (1952), his mathematician brother Nigel, and stereographer Charles Smith, which was reworked by the

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Spottiswoodes (1953) into a book length treatise The Theory of Stereoscopic Transmission and its Application to the Motion Picture, describing the geometry of stereoscopic space relating the visual field to the projected stereoscopic image. The book rigorously develops the subject and provides a system for cinematography based on the rho, a reciprocal unit of measurement. A lucid article by David L. MacAdam (1954), a color researcher at Kodak who turned his attention to stereography, provides an antidote to the complexities of the Spottiswoodes’ intricate exposition. His paper uses examples that are of practical value for a stereographer or cinematographer.1 Prior to the Spottiswoodes’ exposition, a different approach was articulated in an article on the subject of stereoscopic transmission, by MIT professor John T.  Rule (1941), who describes the parallel axis projection method. Just as it sounds this method places projector lens axes parallel to each other and therefore perpendicular to the plane of the screen. In this approach the projectors’ distance from the screen, and their distance apart, determines what appears at the plane of the screen. The parallel axes systems, unlike the zero centerline system, made it difficult for filmmakers to control off-screen effects. The Spottiswoodes made many sound recommendations including their advocacy of the now widely used method of adjusting the interaxial separation to prevent distortion and to control the parallax values of distance image points. The Spottiswoodes correctly preferred the zero centerline system that produces zero parallax for objects meant to be perceived at the plane of the screen for any projector distance from the screen, unlike Rule’s approach. The zero centerline system, in which the axes of the left and right projection lenses coincide on the screen, retains the spatial location of objects with respect to the plane of the screen however far the projectors may be from the screen and no matter what its size. I have seen nothing in 1  In the early 1970s I corresponded with MacAdam about Spottiswoode’s theory and I remember a phrase he used in his response: “Science is commonsense.”

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_70

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Fig. 70.1  Two figures from Bernier’s USP describing the Morgana movement combined with framesequential projection and polarization selection. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show that the rotation of the half-cylindrical sheet polarizer rotates its axis of polarization through 90o.

the literature to indicate that the Festival of Britain, or the Spottiswoode’s book, influenced American theatrical stereoscopic activity of the early 1950s, except for Hayes (1989), who without substantiation, assumes that filmmakers on this side of the Atlantic were influenced by Festival of Britain. On November 27, 1952, Natural Vision, a stereoscopic process using two cameras and projectors for cinematography and projection, premiered with its first feature film, Bwana Devil, shot in Ansco Color. It was projected using the polarized image selection technique, unlike the prior anaglyph films released in America. Natural Vision, like Cinerama, was an independently engineered system developed without film industry funding. Both This is Cinerama and Bwana Devil had such immediate box office success that Hollywood sat up and took notice, but unlike its contemporary Cinerama, Natural Vision was not a proprietary process and others could readily emulate its technology. Bwana Devil was shot with the Natural Vision rig whose design and fabrication were commissioned by scriptwriter Milton Gunzburg and his optometrist brother Gunzburg (1953). The process had been intended for a 3-D film about teenagers and their hot rods, Sweet Chariot, a proj-

ect that never saw fruition. To design their 35 mm camera rig, the Gunzburgs engaged the help of cinematographer and inventor Friend Baker, who had been working with his colleague Lothrop Worth on a stereoscopic 16  mm camera rig (Zone 2007). After seeing Baker’s work, the Gunzburgs, using a setup put together by camera technician O. S. “Bud” Bryhn, shot a 35 mm 3-D test in a riverbed in Pasadena. Pleased with the results, the brothers engaged Baker to build what became the Natural Vision rig. The rig used two 35  mm Mitchell NC cameras aligned to face each other, with their lens axes coaxial, shooting into a “V”-shaped pair of mirrors, each reflecting its perspective view at a right angle to its respective camera’s lens. The mirror arrangement determined an interaxial spacing of about 3.5 inches, an inch greater than the average human interpupillary distance. The mirrors could be rotated about their vertical axis, or toed-in, so the lens axes converged on the subject that was meant to be located at the plane of the screen using zero centerline projection. Wideangle lenses could not be used due to the small size of the mirrors. Some photography, like close-ups, would have prof-

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Fig. 70.2  Three arrangements for stereoscopic rigs: Top: cameras side by side. Middle: cameras facing with lenses shooting into mirrors, like the Natural Vision rig. Bottom: the beamsplitter rig.

ited from a reduced interaxial separation, but that was not possible given the mirror arrangement. The patent application for the Natural Vision camera design was denied because of its lack of novelty, but that in no way interfered with the Gunzburgs’ ability to lease the rig or profit in other ways from what they were marketing. The Natural Vision rig was a bulky contraption, made up of two Mitchell cameras, even bulkier when housed in a blimp that was so unwieldy that for its first feature, Bwana Devil, cinematography was done with it mounted on a hydraulic platform on a four-wheel drive weapons carrier nicknamed the Blue Goose (Arch Oboler’s…, 1952). Like the other new processes of the time, two-camera Natural Vision was enabled by the new color camera stocks that allowed their designers to avoid the bulky Technicolor camera. (However, it was possible to use a beamsplitter rig made up of two Technicolor cameras as described below.) At first the Gunzburgs were unable to persuade the Hollywood studios or producers to use Natural Vision. Milton Gunzburg, in an oral history, related that Spyros Skouras, head of Fox, optioned Natural Vision for 6 months, but became wary of exhibition dependent on the use of eyewear (Lev 2003).

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Fortunately for the Gunzburgs, radio producer and scriptwriter Arch Oboler had become interested in 3-D movies after meeting inventor Robert Bernier. Oboler invested $50,000 to help Bernier develop his SpaceVision lens that placed stereopairs within a 35 mm frame in the above and below format (described below). After learning that Bernier’s SpaceVision optic would be delayed, Oboler agreed to work with the Gunzburgs and scrapped the footage of a 2-D film that had begun production, The Lions of Gulu, which became a 3-D project about a man-eating lion, Bwana Devil. Cinematography began on June 18, 1952, shooting on Ansco Color stock, but Oboler soon ran out of funds. He turned to his leading man Robert Stack, who with his mother invested in the production. Bwana Devil premiered in downtown Los Angeles and nearby Hollywood in two Paramount theaters on Thanksgiving Eve, November 27, 1952 (Zone 2007, 2012). It became an instant smash hit, and national and international distribution followed. Anticipating projection challenges, in an unsigned six-­ page proposal dated April 10, 1951, Milton Gunzburg (presumably) asks Polaroid to consider participating in funding the development of a “single” machine for projecting both left and right reels. In a related undated nine-page draft proposal Gunzburg claims to have such a machine “on the drawing boards,” asserting that fifty to one hundred thousand dollars was required for its development and that “in the country” there is a market for 5000 such machines. Polaroid declined the opportunity to help with the task of designing and manufacturing the, presumably, dual 35 mm projector.2 Lacking a specialized projector, the approach that was used was to press into service the two projectors in the booth meant for changeover. This setup using machines, not intended for the purpose, posed a far greater challenge than the cinematography. No matter what the shortcomings of Natural Vision and other rigs, they were handled by expert crews who usually, but not always, were able to uphold the technical standards of their respective studios. The projectionist, on the other hand, no matter how skilled, was sometimes a lone operator in a booth using a system dependent on two projectors lashed, kluged, jury-­ rigged, or cobbled together, in electrical or mechanical interlock. In addition, projection lenses needed to be matched, the arcs run at the same amperage, and the shutters adjusted so they were substantially in phase. If a frame was lost in one reel, the other reel required a slug, or black frame(s) to be added. The Gunzburgs formed The Natural Vision Corporation to sell the eyewear and the Theater Equipment Corporation A Proposal to the Polaroid Corporation from Natural Vision Corporation, dictated April 10, 1951, 6 pages; also undated, a ninepage memo to Polaroid, and a letter to Gunzburg by William H. Ryan of Polaroid, February, 1, 1952. M.  L. Gunzburg papers, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

2 

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Fig. 70.3  The Natural Vision rig, shown in a blimp on a boom.

Fig. 70.4  One of the many versions of the Bwana Devil poster.

Fig. 70.5  A well-dressed amused and awestruck audience wearing polarizing cardboard eyewear at a Bwana Devil screening. (Cinémathèque Française)

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Fig. 70.6  The cover sheet of Shurcliff’s USP, for a device that enabled the projectionist to visually determine if the projectors’ shutters were in phase. Figs. 6 and 7 illustrate patterns observed using the instrument: 6 indicates that the shutters are in phase and 7 that they are out of phase by half a frame.

to supply exhibitors with projection hardware including oversized 5500 foot reels and magazines that were required, since the projectors were otherwise limited to 2000 foot reels. The company also supplied selsyn motors for ­synchronizing the projectors and polarization conserving theater screens painted with aluminum pigment, supplied to them by Walker American. The Natural Vision Corporation claimed that theater conversions would cost no more than $750. The Gunzburgs made a deal with Polaroid to resell cardboard eyewear at 10 cents a pair, of which they would receive 3.3 cents on a worldwide exclusive basis through July 15, 1953. Polaroid also supplied a pair of sheet polarizers mounted in frames to be hung on the inside of the glass port of the projection booth to filter the left and right projectors’ images on their way to screen.

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As a result of the success of Bwana Devil, the Natural Vision Company earned more than $2.5 million from eyewear sales alone, plus the Gunzburgs had a 20% profit participation in Bwana Devil. Land had Polaroid engineers, on a crash basis, set up a manufacturing facility, which ran ‘round the clock to crank out cardboard eyewear, but despite their best efforts they could not keep up with the demand due to the film’s surprising box office success. However, Polaroid managed to manufacture and sell some 60 million pairs in the first year of production. Additional cardboard glasses using Polacoat material were made in Cincinnati by a company run by scientist John F.  Dryer (Arch Oboler’s…, 1952; Lev 2003). Polaroid also put an effort into designing and manufacturing synchronization and phase calibration equipment to help solve problems in the booth. These were designed by physicists R. Clark Jones (1954), who created the Jones calculus for predicting states of polarization, and William A.  Shurcliff, author of a standard text on polarization. Shurcliff (1954) also described a technique for measuring a screen’s ability to maintain polarization. 3-D screens are often made by applying aluminum-pigmented paint to a matte surface, but the process can be imperfect. If the screen doesn’t sufficiently conserve polarization ghost or double images will be seen when using the eyewear. Shurcliff tested a large number of screen installations and found that many of them were entirely inadequate. But audiences and critics placed the blame for any visual problem or discomfort on the eyewear, the only apparent change to the viewing experience; the 3-D glasses became the scapegoat for the system’s mechanical and optical failings. As far as many exhibitors were concerned, the need to coordinate the operation of two machines in the projection booth simply repeated the folly of Vitaphone. Almost 2 months after its opening, on February 19, 1953, The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, a veritable institution during his reign, pondered the phenomenon of Bwana Devil, writing that the film was: “…an illusion that fluctuates greatly and is crudely and artless used – there is little or no stimulation of a pictorial or dramatic sort to be had … a clumsy try at an African adventure film…meager and hackneyed…slap-dash…very poor color…inadequate story…torpid...without making sense or suspense, it is hard to see how the picture process could be fairly and purposefully displayed….” Crowther’s opinion proved to be beside the point as far as the public and industry were concerned, even though Bwana Devil (Bwana is a form of address but the only devil in the film was a lion) produced more spectacle at the box office than on the screen. (The film’s tagline was “a lion in your lap.”) Bwana Devil’s box office success was remarkable: in its first week at the Loew’s State Theater in Manhattan, where I saw the film as a boy, it took in $75,928 (or nearly three quarters of a million 2018 inflation

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adjusted dollars) as reported in the March 11, 1953, edition of Variety. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a few days after the release of Bwana Devil Jack Warner signed up for a license and hired Lothrop Worth as a camera operator. The first Warner’s film released in the process, with an optional (reportedly) four-channel sound track, House of Wax, was also extremely financially successful (Hayes, 1989). Bwana Devil ushered in what some enthusiasts have characterized as the Golden Age of 3-D, but it was a short-lived Pyrite Age, with major studios scrambling to get films into production and then abandoning the medium in little more than a year. This defection is attributable to the unreliability of the projection process, the higher cost of production and prints, and the alternative of the less expensive to produce and well-conceived CinemaScope, which neatly fit into the existing production, distribution, and exhibition regimen. Hayes (1998) is correct when he writes that the studios chose CinemaScope because it provided spectacle without the bothersome projection and eyewear. Conventional wisdom has it that the 3-D movies of the time were a poor lot of low-­ quality low-budget shows but that is not so. In fact, they were Hollywood’s usual mix of features in both color and black and white: cowboy movies, mysteries, musicals, and film noir, a far more eclectic collection than the 3-D movies of today. There were also short subjects like Three Stooges comedies and animated cartoons with Bugs Bunny, Donald

Fig. 70.7  From Norling’s USP for a camera design using erecting prisms for setting the lenses’ separation. As an experienced stereographer he understood the importance of varying the interaxial distance for controlling the depth effect.

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Duck, Woody Woodpecker, and Z films like Robot Monster and Cat Women of the Moon. The Natural Vision rig was used for 9 Warner Bros. productions, out of the 50 3-D films released in about a year and a half by all the producers. Some of the studios turned to vendors for cameras or designed their own, with variations such as side-by-side cameras with one upside down to reduce the interaxial spacing or with cameras at right angles with one shooting into a mirror like the Warner’s rig designed by A.  W. Tondreau, USP 2,868,065, Stereoscopic Camera System, filed May 11, 1953, or the similar design by Grover Laube and Sol Halprin of Fox, USP 2,838,975, Means for Making Stereoscopic Pictures, filed March 19, 1954. Charles G.  Clark, ASC, showed me the Natural Vision rig at the American Society of Cinematographers Clubhouse in the early 1970s. It was apparent to him that an integral camera, rather than a rig, would permit cinematographers to do their best work since it would be more compact and have easier-­ to-­use instrumentation for convergence and interaxial separation. An integral camera is one that exposes left and right images in one body but not necessarily on one strip of film. I know of only one such integral stereoscopic camera that was used for Hollywood feature production in the 1950s, designed and built by Norling, although similar cameras had been designed by Fairall, Kelley, and Dunning. The camera designed by John A. Norling is described in USP 2,753,774, Stereoscopic Camera, filed February 12, 1953, which was

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Fig. 70.8  This integral stereoscopic camera was built in London by renowned cinematographer Georges Périnal, circa 1945. The finder, right, built into the cover, permitted through-the-lens viewing. Like the Norling camera it incorporated two intermittent mechanisms and exposed two rolls of 35  mm film simultaneously. (Cinémathèque Française)

used to shoot six RKO 3-D features, including Second Chance and The French Line (Zone 2012; Lipton 1982). It combined two 35  mm intermittents and transport systems, side by side in a single body, allowing for handling more like a conventional 35 mm studio camera than the bulky blimped Natural Vision rig. The interaxial separation of the lenses could be varied continuously using a prism system that kept the images erect. There was provision for independent horizontal image translation of the lens axes to allow for zero parallax setting to place objects at the plane of the screen. The camera permitted the operator to preview the image using a rackover binocular viewfinder. The Norling camera was the most advanced instrument of its kind during the heyday of the stereoscopic celluloid cinema, an assessment that probably applies today. John Norling also designed the beamsplitter rig that was used to shoot the 1953 Paramount Martin and Lewis vehicle, Money from Home, to fulfill a contract obligation the studio had with Technicolor (Haines 2003). The rig, which allowed for the use of the large Technicolor three-strip camera, was anticipated by Floyd A. Ramsdell’s design that is described in USP 2,630,737, Apparatus for making the film exposures for three-dimensional moving pictures, filed on June 25, 1948, and issued on March 10, 1953. This arrangement permits one camera to see through a semi-silvered mirror and the other camera to see the image reflected from its surface. Ramsdell’s rig allowed for the low interaxial separations required for close-­ups and large-screen projection despite the camera bodies’ dimensions. Its antecedent is

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described in USP 1,595,984, Photograph and Art of Making the Same, filed March 14, 1921, and granted to Adelbert Ames, Jr., a psychologist known for his work in depth perception, who is known for his Ames Room illusion. In what is possibly the first design of its kind, Ames’ patent teaches using two cameras at right angles with their lens axes bisected at 45° by a semi-silver mirror. Nigel L. Spottiswoode and his brother Raymond, advocates of interaxial adjustment as a creative control, on May 24, 1954, filed the disclosure that became USP 2,916,962, Optical systems for stereoscopic cameras, a design in which the cameras, rather than being placed in a horizontal plane like Ramsdell’s, have one facing downward, making for a vertically oriented rig configuration with a smaller footprint. Spottiswoodes’ design is the basis for the rigs used during the first decade of the stereoscopic digital cinema, like those built by 3ality and Cameron-Pace. I saw a score of well projected 1950s stereoscopic films at the World 3-D Film Expo held at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood in the autumn of 2013 and noted that the cinematography of films like House of Wax, Hondo, Miss Sadie Thompson, Kiss Me Kate, and Dial M for Murder was good but there were other films that were difficult to view, like the first film released in the cycle, Bwana Devil or the last film, Revenge of the Creature. How much a film cost to produce was no indicator of how well it was photographed since one of the lowest budget films of the cycle, Robot Monster, released in 1953, was very well shot by cinematographer Jack Greenhalgh. These films were originally projected on screens whose average width was half that of those used today, which were less revealing of errors in alignment or excessive screen parallax due to the image’s lesser magnification. In an attempt to simplify the 3-D projection process, Nord and Polalite offered the studios and exhibitors optics designed for single project orstereoscopic capability, similar in concept to the Zeiss/Vierling design of the mid to late 1930s. Columbia Studios printed one reel test of the 1952 I, The Jury, using the Nord format, but it was not used for the film’s release. By the time subframe systems and optics appeared on the market, the 3-D boom was in decline (Hayes, 1998; Zone 2012). A technically more successful embodiment was the SpaceVision system that Oboler was finally able to use more than a decade after having invested in its development. The SpaceVision lens established the over and under (above and below) format that divided the frame into half-height two-perforation high ‘Scope aspect ratio stereopair subframes (similar to the Techniscope format), Oboler’s first feature using Bernier’s SpaceVision, The Bubble, was released on December 21, 1966; the lens was used for another Oboler film, Domo Arigato, which was filmed in Japan and released in 1972. The optics are described in Bernier’s patent, US 3,531,191, Threedimensional cinematography. Since the subframes are verti-

614 Fig. 70.9  The Ramsdell rig, from his USP. Camera 1 looks straight through the half-­ silvered mirror, and camera 2 sees the image reflected by the half-silvered mirror.

Fig. 70.10 The Spottiswoode’s rig. A vertical configuration that has been widely adopted for digital stereoscopic cinematography. Part 1 is the beamsplitter.

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cally offset, prisms are required to relocate the lenses’ effective axes so that there is no vertical offset of corresponding points in photography. This is the same kind of an optical system that was used for Kelley’s stacked full frame vertical traveling format and for Lumière’s horizontal-­traveling format. Bernier’s lens was also used for Flesh for Frankenstein, (also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein), released in May 1974, directed by Paul Morrissey. In the early 1980s there was a brief resurgence of the stereoscopic cinema based on the above and below format and its camera and projector lenses, whose most attractive attribute was that exhibition required only one projector. The first, of about a score of 3-D films exhibited using the format, was Comin’ at Ya!, released on August 14, 1981, by Filmways. Producers and studios paid attention to it because the film made money. Comin’ at Ya! was shot using the Optimax III lens, similar in function to the Bernier lens, but unlike

Fig. 70.11  From Bernier’s USP teaching the design of a stereoscopic optical system for the above and below format for 35 mm cinematography. The format itself is shown in Fig. 29.

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Bernier’s lens, it could be used on a reflex camera. Between the time that Bernier completed the SpaceVision lens and the 3-D activity of the early 1980s, 35 mm studio cameras added reflex viewing for composing through-the-lens. This required a moving mirror between the film gate and lens to reflect image forming light to the viewfinder optics. Bernier’s lens’s back focus was too long, i.e., its rear element got in the way of the reflex finder mirror, and so his SpaceVision lens was not used during the 1980s’ self-destructive cycle. On August 13, 1982, Paramount released a film in the above and below format, Friday the 13th Part III, shot with Depix optics designed by Alvin and Mortimer Marks of the Marks Polarized Corporation, of Whitestone, New  York, a company that also manufactured sheet polarizers and projection optics. The Depix lens is described in USP 3-Dimensional Camera Device, USP 4,178,090, filed on June 30, 1977, by Alvin M.  Marks and Mortimer Marks. In practice the lens was mounted on a modified Arriflex 35  mm camera, but Arriflex also offered its own above and below camera optic. A dozen or so films were produced in the above and below format in this cycle, in addition to the two noted above, including Amityville 3-D, Rottweiler: Dogs of Hell, Jaws 3-D, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Metalstorm, Parasite, Spacehunter, and Treasure of the Four Crowns (Zone 2012). One might have supposed that placing both images on a reel of film would lead to a better result than the twin projection technique of 30 years earlier, but it wasn’t so. The projected image quality of the films of the 1980s cycle was a step backwards. Good projection of the above and below format was a rare event, an opinion arrived at after attending many screenings in theaters and even studio screening rooms. Several companies leased projection optics using either mirror box or dual lens design. Mirror boxes are reminiscent of the Wheatstone mirror stereoscope, and the dual lens design uses vertically stacked lenses. One such design is described in USP 4,235,505, Film projection lens system for 3-D movies, invented by Christopher (Chris) James Condon (1923–2010). Its patentable feature is a heat sink to protect the internal polarizing filters. Condon, born Christo Dimitri Koudounis in Chicago, was a decorated airman who served on combat missions in the Pacific during the Second World War. Returning to civilian life, he founded Century Precision Optics to make and supply long focal length lenses for the film industry. The self-taught Condon also founded StereoVision International to offer stereoscopic camera and projection optics harvesting elements from off-the-shelf lenses, a practical manufacturing approach for relatively low production volume. Condon also designed 65/70 mm projection optics for a 1970 limited release of House of Wax, originally exhibited using 35 mm projection in 1953 (Zone 2012). At about the same time as Condon’s projection effort, NIKFI, the All-Union Motion Picture and Photography Scientific Research Institute, the Soviet national cinema

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R&D organization, introduced camera and projector optics for their Soviet 70  mm system. Both cinematography and projection used 70 mm stock, unlike the Western approach of shooting on 65  mm and printing on 70  mm. The Soviet 70  mm format used the standard 70  mm five-perforation pulldown but in this case placing two 25  mm x 18.2  mm frames side by side within the frame. These stereopair frames were about the same size as the silent 35 mm frame, and the location of the six magnetic tracks was the same as that originated by Todd-AO. The Soviets designed and built different kinds of 70 mm cameras including a reflex model for studio work, and one for off-the-tripod cinematography. They made stereo lenses with focal lengths from 28 mm to 300 mm, with various interaxial separations and side-by-side projection optics to work on standard 70 mm projectors. The films were projected on screens no bigger than 20  feet wide. This approach could have been the basis for a 3-D system in the West, taking advantage of the installed base of 70 mm projectors, but Condon, its chief advocate, was unable to persuade producers or the studios to use it (Lipton 1982). A dual 70 mm camera and projector polarization selection system was used for Disney’s Magic Journeys, which was introduced in 1982 at EPCOT Center. As noted in the chapter IMAX and PLF Exhibition, in 1986  in Vancouver, IMAX introduced the film Transitions exhibited with a two-­projector polarization selection system, which unlike Disney’s conventional five-perforation vertical-traveling format used the horizontal-traveling fifteen-perforation 70  mm format. The Disney theme park and IMAX location-based entertainment efforts kept the medium alive during its theatrical hiatus. However, these efforts represent no significant advance in projection methodology compared with the dual camera/projector 35  mm stereoscopic exhibition at 1939 World’s Fair, the 1950 Festival of Britain, nor during the Natural Visioninspired Hollywood excursion of the 1950s. Whatever its shortcomings the films of the so-called Golden Age demonstrated the aesthetic potential of the medium for heightening the presence of actors and their performances, as explored in House of Wax, for horror films; Miss Sadie Thompson, for melodramas; Hondo, for westerns; Dial M for Murder, for thrillers; and Kiss Me Kate, for musicals. Today that lesson has been ignored or forgotten, and the emphasis is on tentpole spectacles. In addition to design and implementation factors, the brief tenure of the stereoscopic cinema of the early 1950s is attributable to the industry having the alternatives of CinemaScope, VistaVision, and Todd-AO, which were easier to photograph and project, while offering audiences

70  3-D in the Last Half of the Twentieth Century

Fig. 70.12  The NIKFI Soviet 70 mm stereoscopic format. Top: A clip from a print. Middle: The camera negative specifications. Bottom: The release print specification showing the six mag tracks. (Cinémathèque Française)

a superior experience. The decades have not wiped away the bad impression made by the wayward efforts of the 1950s and the 1980s. The medium is still regarded as a gimmick by much of the public, many in the industry, and a goodly number of critics, although there are important directors who believe in a stereoscopic cinema. Stereoscopic motion picture technology has undergone a prolonged period of gestation, far longer than the development of sound or color; it finally became a viable medium with the advent of the electro-digital cinema.

Part IX TELEVISION AND THE DIGITAL CINEMA: Television

Vision at a Distance

In this chapter the origins of television are described, which in the beginning was called “vision at a distance.” First, let us recall that cinema’s evolution depended on scientific discoveries and technological progress beginning with Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern and its ability to project transparencies. Magic lantern projection was, almost from inception, enhanced by real motion techniques that anticipated celluloid cinema’s apparent motion photographic technology by about two and a half centuries. Plateau’s discovery of apparent motion in the early nineteenth century was applied to the magic lantern by adapting it to project a sequence of incrementally different images of the phases of motion. Drawings and paintings were the initial image source, but photography was used as soon as it was practical to do so in the 1860s. Perhaps the most famous example of this kind took place in the late 1870s with Muybridge’s equine motion studies that were projected with his Zoöpraxiscope using drawings made from his photographs. As the end of the nineteenth century approached, this hybridization of magic lantern and phenakistoscope technologies reached its zenith as Anschütz in Berlin, with his Projecting Electrotachyscope, took the glass cinema to the limits of its ability to depict photographed apparent motion for audiences on a big screen. The dream of reproducing real-world apparent motion advanced in two parallel directions: one led to the celluloid cinema and the other to television, which, after more than a century, came together as the electro-digital cinema. The evolution from the glass cinema to the celluloid cinema depended on magic lantern practice and three milestones: the discovery of apparent motion in 1832, the invention of photography in 1839, and the ability to manufacture celluloid photographic film in 1889. The motion picture projector may be viewed as a magic lantern augmented to rapidly advance transparencies of the phases of motion. Similarly, the celluloid cinema camera can be viewed as a Kodak No. 2 snapshot camera augmented to photograph a rapid sequence of images. The work of inventors like Edison and the Lumières was made possible by the newly available celluloid film’s physical properties and ability to capture and

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project the phases of motion. Compared with television’s development into a medium suitable for the theatrical cinema, the photochemical celluloid medium had great advantages: image storage was intrinsic and decent quality projection was demonstrated with a year or two of its introduction in the mid-1890s. However, the goal of the television pioneers, to transmit a moving image instantaneously, was different. Another difference is that unlike the creators of the celluloid cinema, the mechanical television inventors were unable to use the model of the camera as an image-capturing device. The piecemeal transformation of the celluloid cinema into the electro-digital cinema took advantage of having its accomplishments as a reference, but television lacked film’s intrinsic recording or storage and film’s projection capability, both of which are required for exhibition. Just as the invention of motion pictures depended on the invention of film, the invention of television depended on the invention of electronics. The development of all-electronic television (to distinguish it from early electro-mechanical technology) into the digital cinema came together as the twenty-first century approached, after which digital video technology bifurcates with one branch designed for consumer access at home or with handheld devices, and the other for theatrical exhibition, but the technologies are strongly related. Television’s creation was motivated by the success of commercial radio and became an analog broadcast service; after considerable effort it advanced to the point where it became a high-definition digital broadcast service. Its adaptation and adoption as a full-fledged substitute for the photochemical cinema came in stages, in its early stages without planning, until it became evident to the theatrical film industry that the transition was likely. Video (electronic moving images without necessarily being broadcast), on this new trajectory, has all but replaced celluloid cinema technology (Alexander and Blakely 2014). It’s been quite a journey: cinema, originally a medium of real motion projection, whose information carrier was glass, became a photochemical medium of apparent motion with color images and sound recorded on celluloid, which, after having reached a state of

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_71

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admirable technological accomplishment after a century of progress, was replaced by an advanced form of television in which the picture and sound information is encoded digitally. The celluloid cinema was an exemplar of the possibilities of the display of apparent motion setting a goal for television research, an international effort involving many inventors, some of whom were independent, but significant accomplishments were made by the communications laboratories run by RCA and EMI, who focused on all-electronic television (Magoun 2007). Although there were important independent inventors in the field like Philo Farnsworth, the technology of television was so complicated and dependent on developments in so many areas, requiring such deep pockets, that the garage inventor was at a serious disadvantage. The transition from the celluloid cinema to the digital cinema, the concern of this section, was more of an infiltration than a revolution, a multi-pronged effort, a decades-long effort that crept up on the theatrical motion picture industry and was, after a time, championed by some filmmakers and studios. The trepidations of the studio moguls, who were taken aback by television’s competition in the years after the Second World War, were both misplaced in the short run and justified in the long run. While the television medium unexpectedly provided a new market for the studios’ output, the moguls were nevertheless correct, but not as they had supposed, for the day would come when television technology replaced the celluloid cinema. In a 1925 paper titled Radio Movies, Jenkins (1925) writes about what we now call television, which is the radio transmission of a moving image over a distance. Radio movies development depended on the scientific discoveries of Faraday, Maxwell, and others, who showed that electricity and magnetism are aspects of the same force of nature and that light is an electromagnetic wave. As crucial were the discoveries of radio waves by Hertz and the photoelectric effect by Planck and its explanation by Einstein. Radio and television are electronic media that depended on the discovery of the Edison effect, its adaptation as the diode rectifier by Fleming, and the invention of the triode amplifier tube by de Forest. But the initial efforts to create television were based on mechanical and electrical technology. There was an abundance of such hands-on activity by many people in many countries in the early 1920s, as is affirmed by the many patents and conflicts that had to be resolved to allow television broadcasting to become a viable business. A summary of the history of television technology is given in the following chapters, but keep in mind that our primary interest is to explain how it evolved into the digital cinema. Television has an involved history whose origin one might ascribe to the venerable camera obscura, a purely optical device that achieves the instantaneous transmission of a moving image, but not over any distance. The word itself

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was likely coined in 1900 by Frenchman Constantin Perskyi (1854–1906) as télévision, for a presentation he gave at the Congres Internationale d’Electricité (O’Brien, 1991).1 Television’s line-by-line scanning method was proposed for text transmission by British clockmaker and inventor Alexander Bain (1811–1877), as described in BP 9745, Certain improvements in regulating currents and improvements in electric time pieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs, filed May 27, 1843, and issued November 27, the same year (Burns 1998). The technology is also described in USP 5957, granted to Bain on December 5, 1848, Automatic Telegraph. Bain’s is the first facsimile (fax) sending and receiving system, or what might be thought of as the slowly transmitted image implementation of “seeing by electricity.” Bain teaches that a page set in conductive metal type contained in a frame, like that traditionally used by printers, can be temporally and spatially dissected and turned into an electrical signal at a transmitter and reconstructed line by line at a receiver, after having been sent over the existing telegraph lines. In this disclosure Bain describes some of the attributes that a practical television system must have, namely, scanning to capture the image, the electrical transmission of the signal, and the reconstruction of the image by synchronizing scanning at receiver with that of the transmitter. As Lankes (1948) points out, “Bain’s plan was so correct basically that it embraced the fundamentals of all picture transmission, having recognized the particular problems posed by the need for synchronization between transmitter and receiver.” Although his method did not require a camera, Bain describes how to capture and reproduce a still page of text using scanning along a line to create a signal along each line made up of dots to be arranged into of a series of stacked lines. The transmission was a digital signal because it was made up of two values – either it had current or it had no current. At the transmitter a pointer at the end of a swinging pendulum makes contact with the raised surfaces of the type face, and this closes a circuit and provides a current. The transmitter’s points of contact become electrically signified image points at the receiver. Both pendulums are driven by similar “powerful clocks,” with the pendulum mechanism at the receiver kept in synchronization with that of the transmitter using an electromagnetic catch (break) that received a sync signal. A hardcopy of the transmitted image is produced using paper coated with conductive material overlaid on a surface made up of metal pins, embedded in a frame of the same size as that holding the type at the transmitter. A scanning current is carried by a metal probe at the end of the The term video is often used to describe the image component of television, with video also denoting a closed circuit or recorded electronic moving image, but the terms television and video are often used interchangeably.

1 

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Fig. 71.1  Bain’s telegraph facsimile. A frame of metal type (yellow) is moved vertically to position a new line to be scanned by a pointer making electrical contact with the type. The pointer is attached to an oscillating pendulum. The signal is transmitted to the receiver and the text is

reconstructed using an inverse process and recorded on conductively coated paper (pink). The patent describes the basic method of scanning that is used by television systems.

receiver’s pendulum moving across the top of the coated paper that serves to complete a circuit as it travels over the pins beneath the paper, writing a dot at a time by discoloring the conductive sheet as current passes through it. In 1847 Bakewell also showed his “chemical telautograph,” whose receiving machine used a wet paper treated in a solution of potassium ferrocyanide and ammonium nitrate, wrapped around its rotating drum that was written on by an electric spark that produced “a coloured mark” that transmitted a line drawing (Schubin 2017; Coopersmith 2015). According to Lankes (1948), Abbe Caselli transmitted the first such “electric picture” from Amiens to Paris, in 1862, a distance of 75 miles. Exploiting the telegraph’s extensive infrastructure was an active area of inventive endeavor, just as Edison had done for his earliest signal multiplexing inventions. Martin’s The

Electrical Transmission of Photographs, published in 1921, describes many facsimile transmission systems including the Bain’s pendulum scanner; Bakewell’s rotating cylinder scanning fax machine; Caselli’s pan telegraph that substituted rocking plates for a rotating cylinder; Charbonelle and Amstutz’s independent attempts to send and receive photos; Bidwell’s telephotograph rotating drum system that could transmit silhouettes that were produced as hardcopy on photosensitive paper2; the telewriter of Cowper that transmitted handwriting that was reproduced at the receiving end with a pen, a principle also employed by Ritchie, and Gray; a telephone line-based system, the writing telegraph, by Pollak and Virag; the telewriter system that Martin (1921) writes The telephotograph apparatus can be found in the Science Museum in London.

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had gained so much acceptance that it “is a recent competitor of the telegraph and the telephone;” and the electrograph that used the halftone method of photomechanical reproduction, requiring a zinc plate master that took a couple of hours to prepare for transmission but only 10 minutes for sending and receiving a picture, print, or handwritten script. Other early twentieth-century inventors in the field include the German Arthur Korn, the Frenchman Edouard Belin, and American C. Francis Jenkins. Both the Korn and Belin systems of 1907 are interesting because they used phototelegraphy, the combination of electrical transmission of a signal with photographic recording at the receiving station, both using scanning rotating cylinders. These are early hybrid systems used electrical transmission of signals and silver halide photography, like those that would one day play an important role in television recording and projection. Korn’s transmission system wrapped a celluloid film image around a glass cylinder with light from a lamp passing through the film to a selenium cell within the cylinder to modulate its electrical output. The receiving cylinder, run in synchronization with the transmitting unit, had photographic film wrapped around it exposed by a light valve made up of two metal strips whose opening was modulated by current passing through an electromagnetic field, similar in concept to the light valves used for exposing optical tracks (Abramson 1987). According to Martin (1921), the system was capable of grayscale reproduction. Belin’s system depended on Fox Talbot’s discovery of bichromated gelatin by using a pressure-­sensitive stylus with a sapphire point to scan the declivities of a photograph’s hardened gelatin surface. The hardened gelatin photograph was wrapped around a rotating cylinder for scanning, in effect a hill and dale phonographic approach to transmission. The up-and-down motion of the stylus was used to vary the resistance of a current to modulate a signal for transmission. Inventing a working television system required solving an even more difficult problem than that of facsimile transmission. Unlike celluloid cinema imaging, in which an entire image frame (or phase of motion) is exposed globally, practical television creates its image using scanning in which each image element, or pixel, is captured instant by instant and transmitted as a sequence of lines and reconstructed by an inverse scanning process. As described elsewhere, within a traditional movie camera the lens’s focused light creates a latent image in the film’s emulsion as photons ionize its silver bromide crystals. This exposure produces a latent image that, with chemical development, is turned into a picture made up of grains of silver metal whose shadows are used for making prints or, at a later time, projected onto a screen. A similar kind of global image capture and display as applied to television was conceived of by several inventors who suggested that it could be implemented using a mosaic of light-­sensitive elements at a camera’s imaging plane, with each element or cell directly wired to a display element, at some distant location.

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Such an approach turned out to be i­mpractical, unlike Bain’s scanning approach, which became the basis for television. According to Marshall (2011, pp. 72–73), the first “distance vision” proposal was made in March 1878, in Portuguese, by the Portuguese scientist Adriano de Paiva (1847–1907), of the Polytechnic Academy of Porto. de Paiva gave no practical suggestion for how to build his “electric telescope” other than to suggest the use of selenium.3 As noted in chapter 28, the early 1870s, it was discovered that selenium’s electrical resistance changed with its exposure to light. The phenomenon of selenium’s photoconduction was the basis for fax transmission using the global or multi-wire image capture and display approach, as described by George R.  Carey (1851–?), a surveyor employed by the city of Boston, in the article he wrote, The Telectroscope, published in the May 17, 1879, Scientific American. Carey’s concept for the transmission and display of still images (Burns 2004) was based on a December 9, 1876, article in Scientific American describing the work of brothers Werner and William von Siemens, the former having described the action of light on selenium and the latter having built what is now known as the Siemens Artificial Eye, essentially a camera with a single selenium cell sensor. Mark Schubin (2017), a historian of television arcana, points out that brother William’s description exaggerated the devices’ capability when he wrote: “Here we have an artificial eye which is sensible to light and to differences of colour….” Carey, inspired by the Siemens brothers, proposed an array of light-sensitive selenium cells, each picking up image intensity. Each cell was individually wired to a distant incandescent platinum filament to be heated to “expose” chemically treated paper to create an image array (Grabowski 2011). Carey designed his system in 1877 but never built it. In 1880 (or possibly as early as 1878), French lawyer Constantin Senlecq of Ardres proposed a modification to the one wire for each pixel approach that more closely than Carey’s concept resembles how television was successfully implemented. The mosaic elements were to be sequentially sampled by distributors (commutators) for transmission using image and synchronization signals sent to the display apparatus, each with its own circuit (Shiers 1997). Two other workers, John Perry and W. E. Ayrton, English scientists and engineers who taught in Asia for years, often as a team, had become acquainted with the Chinese magic mirror, which is described in the first chapter, Huygens and the Magic Lantern. In 1879, upon their return to London, where the magic mirror was little known, they lectured on the subject at the Royal Society and presented a lengthy paper that appeared in the Society’s Proceedings (Marshall 2011, pp.  77, 78). They believed that the magic mirror could 3  Marshall’s (2011) unpublished PhD thesis provides many references to early work in the field – too many to include here. His thesis can be downloaded from the University of Manchester’s website.

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Fig. 71.2  Carey’s still image transmission system. His camera’s lens projects an image onto a mosaic of selenium cells. Each cell is wired to one of an array of heated filaments making up mosaic. Each point, receiving current, “exposes” its pixel on chemically treated paper. (Design and Work, Vol. 8, June 1888, pp. 569 – 570)

become the basis for a vision at a distance system by using an array of electromagnets to somehow modulate the image formed by the mirror. As far as I know, nothing came of the proposal, but on April 21, 1880, an article in Nature written by Perry and Ayrton, describes a multi-wire system for achieving electrical vision at a distance by using an image pickup based on what they called a mosaic (possibly the first use of the word in connection with television), a large surface composed of small squares of light-sensitive selenium. Powered by a battery, each mosaic element was to simultaneously transmit its signal to a remote location using its own wire. They described two kinds of receivers to display the image: the first one reminds me of electronic ink, in which current passing through each wire controls the direction of magnetic needles to open or close individual shutters on a frosted glass surface; the second method reminds me of flat panel liquid crystal display but with the surface made up of squares of light modulators made of soft iron illuminated by polarized light with the polarization properties of the iron controlled by the current each square receives based on the Kerr effect, thereby controlling the light it reflects.

On April 30, 1880, in the English Mechanic, H.  Middleton proposed another multi-wire scheme that depended on a thermocouple mosaic to convert heat into electricity; another thermocouple at the display was to turn electricity back into heat and light (Abramson 1987; Lankes 1948). On November 2, 1880, in his article La Transmission Électrique: Des Impressions Lumineuses, Maurice Leblanc (1880), who had been a student at the École Polytechnique, described the scanning of an object for the transmission of an image in motion, using quite a different approach from the multi-wire scheme. One of the many ideas he proposed is a system of vibrating mirrors to scan the object that is picked up by a light-sensitive cell to create an electrical signal to be transmitted to a receiver where a similar vibrating mirror’s reflected light reconstructs and projects the image. A gray scale is created by modulating the projector’s arc light with a mechanical shutter vibrated by a telephone diaphragm attached to an induction coil energized by the video signal. The diaphragm is attached to a zebra-striped glass ruling to control the light passing between it and a window with fixed parallel rulings. Leblanc did not build the device

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(Shiers 1981; Shiers 1997, entry 145).4 Leblanc believed that the “persistence of vision” would then allow the image to be seen as a whole even though the image elements had been presented to the eye sequentially. Abramson (1987) points out that Leblanc’s concept contains the key elements of a modern television system: “(a) a transducer for converting light into electricity, (b) a means for scanning to systematically dissect the picture into its basic elements, (c) a means for synchronizing the transmitter with the receiver, (d) a light valve or modulator at the receiver to convert the electrical signals back into visible light, and finally (e) some kind of screen to display the reconstructed image.” This was the forerunner of other mirror scanning systems like the influential one designed by Polish schoolmaster and inventor, Jan Szczepanik, who was granted a British patent in 1897 teaching the use of two oscillating mirrors, one for slow-speed scanning, to vertically translate each line, and the other for high-speed scanning along a horizontal line, together forming an image raster (Marshall 2011, pp.  84, 85). This concept was put into practice by others, such as Rosing a decade later, using polygonal drum scanners. It was also used by GE’s Alexanderson in his determined effort to perfect mechanical television and by Scophony for an unusual electro-mechanical projection system compatible with all-electronic television that had some success producing high-resolution (400-line) images. Szczepanik’s

Fig. 71.3  A postcard commemorating Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow.

A similar vibrating grating mechanical shutter is described in USP 3,621,127, Synchronized Stereoscopic System, filed February 13, 1969, by Karl Hope. 4 

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improvement to mechanical scanning turned out to be a useful addition to the art. (Electro-mechanical scanning is a more complete description since these systems depend on electric motors, electric synchronization, and electric light.) Axel G. Jensen (1954), director of Visual and Acoustical Research at Bell Laboratories, divides the history of the evolution of television technology into three parts: “the period before 1930 was that of the all-mechanical television system, the period from 1930 to 1940 was the period of the partially electronic system, and the period from 1940 was that of the all-electronic system.” A selection of proposals for early television systems listed by Shiers (1977), beginning with entries described in the late 1870s, but not necessarily built, is as follows: 1878, de Paiva for an “electric telescope”; 1879, Redmond for a multi-cell multi-circuit mosaic system; 1880, Ayrton for a mosaic system using a Kerr cell to modulate intensity, Carey and Perry for multi-mosaic multi-circuit systems, Sawyer for a single circuit spirally scanning system, Leblanc for a two-axis scanning vibrating mirror and variable aperture modulator system; 1881, Senlecq for an incandescent mosaic system; 1882, Lucas for a linear scanning projection receiver; and Atkinson for a rotating mirror-­drum using a manometric flame (unpublished proposal). Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow (1860–1940), born in Prussia, was an engineering student living in Berlin when he wrote German Patent 30,105, Electrischer Telescop (Electrical

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Telescope), filed January 6, 1884, which teaches electromechanical scanning using a rotating apertured disk to produce a transmitted television image. This disclosure is recognized as one of fundamental importance in the history of television technology. The reason for this isn’t that Nipkow discovered the fundamental principles of transmitting a t­elevision image because these had been articulated or demonstrated by Bain, Leblanc, and others. The basis for practical live action television is the sequential transmission of fields made up of horizontally scanned lines, the raster, along with signals to synchronize the lines and fields of the dissected image with its display device. Most importantly, Nipkow suggested a r­ elatively ­simple to implement mechanism that made it possible to achieve a demonstration of the transmission of live action that at least hinted at what the photochemical cinema could accomplish. But Nipkow scanning proved to be only a tentative step along the way of picking up and displaying live action; rather its forte turned out to be the scanning of motion picture film to video, and the most successful mechanical scanning system for projection turned out to be Scophony using a mirror-drum rather than a Nipkow disk. All the same, Nipkow’s concept was the basis for the work of the major inventors in the field for many years, and it kept the concept of television alive motivating the development of an all-­electronic solution.

In a 1933 newspaper interview, Nipkow is quoted as saying that the inspiration for his invention came about as a result of the loan of a Bell telephone from the German post office that was in his possession for only 2 hours (Marshall 2011, p.82). The Nipkow disk system is properly described as electro-mechanical, as noted above, since electric motors are required, as is electricity for signal transmission and for playback illumination and modulation. Nipkow conceived of a large rotating motor-driven scanning disk, what has become known as the Nipkow disk, which he never built. Nipkow and Weiller’s (described next) scanning concepts provided the basis for determined efforts in the 1920s and 1930s, notably by independent inventors, Rosing, Jenkins, Sanabria, and Baird, but also for those working in corporate labs, principally Alexanderson and Ives. The heart of Nipkow’s concept is that the light originating from a scene (usually reflected light) is scanned and turned into brightness changes that are arrayed along a line, with the entire image dissected line by line and then transmitted to be reconstructed into an image at a receiver by an inverse scanning process. The technique requires the synchronization of image dissection at the transmitter and its reconstruction and display at the receiver. As proposed, Nipkow’s rotating disk has 18 small rectangular openings arrayed in a spiral running from the disk’s periphery toward its center. One rotation of

Fig. 71.4  The Nipkow television scanning system, from his German Patent 30105. The scanning disk is shown at the top, and to its right is a representation of the vertical raster pattern it produces. A schematic of the system is shown at the bottom: The drawing of the transmitter or pickup, left, depicts the scanning disk in profile (yellow). Light is focused through its an apertures by a lens onto selenium cell S.  The time varying intensity of the cell’s output is transmitted to the receiver

at the right. The receiver uses the signal’s strength to change the intensity of the light source (looks like an asterisk) by means of a Faraday effect device (polarizer P, lead glass G, analyzer A). The modulated light passes through the playback scanning disc (magenta) apertures to sweep out each line of the raster, to be seen by the eye (lower right) and integrated into a moving image by retinal retention.

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the disk scans an entire image field: light from the scene is dissected as it passes first through a lens and then through each rotating opening to impinge on the surface of a photosensitive device, a selenium cell. This cell produces a modulated electric current based on the intensity of light falling on it. (However, selenium’s response to changes in light intensity is too slow to make it ideal for this application.) For grayscale display the light passing through each aperture is modulated using the Faraday effect, which was discovered by Michael Faraday (1860–1960) in 1846. Faraday, who was the first to propose the unified nature of electricity and magnetism, demonstrated that silica borate or lead glass immersed in a strong magnetic field caused the axis of linear polarized light passing through them to rotate. Light passes through a Nicol polarizing prism and then through the silica borate or lead glass immersed in the magnetic field, to be analyzed (modulated) by another Nicol polarizing prism. The Faraday effect is based on the physics of optical activity, and it is a clear demonstration that electromagnetism and light are strongly related (Goldstein 2003; Jenkins and White 1981). Nipkow suggested that the transmitted electrical signal could be modulated by the Faraday effect to change the intensity of a fixed light source to represent the brightness of the dissected image points along a scan line. When viewed through the playback disk, the entire raster’s image can be built up due to retinal retention. Advocates of disk scanning, in the years to come, proposed and built a number of ways to play back an image, sometimes also taking advantage of the Faraday effect. In 1890 Englishman M. H. Sutton proposed a more practical approach to polarized light modulation using a Kerr cell (Herz, 1893). In October 1889 French engineer and industrialist Jean Lazare Weiller, in his article Sur la vision à distance par l’électricité, which appeared in Le Génie Civil (The Civil Engineer), describes his Phoroscope, a scanning system using a vertically rotating polygonal drum faceted with 300 tilted mirrors designed to dissect an image into lines, with light from the mirrors reflected to a selenium photocell to output an electrical signal (Burns 2004). Weiller’s scanning scheme was inspired by Jules Antoine Lissajous’ mirror apparatus for creating les courbes de Lissajous or Lissajous figures, which in my day were familiar to every engineering student who got his or her hands on an oscilloscope.5 A version of Weiller’s scanning mirror concept was later put into practice, most notably by Russian researcher Boris Lvovich Rosing. Rosing’s apparatus of 1907, described below, used motor-driven mirror scanning for pickup and a cathode ray Braun tube for display. His experiment occurred more than a decade before the commencement of activity in mechanical scanning that took place in England and America, and his use of a Braun tube for display is impressive. Shiers (1981) determined that from 1901 Llewelyn B. Atkinson, a British inventor in the field, claimed that the mirror-drum concept had been described 7 years earlier by British scientist William Lucas (Marshall 2011, p. 84). 5 

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through 1930, a total of 469 mechanical scanning systems were disclosed, which he classifies as apertured band designs; disk designs including those using apertures, lenses, mirrors, prisms, and prism-lenses; drum designs including those using apertures, lenses, or mirrors or with a polyhedral c­ onfiguration; mirrors; and mirror screw designs. More than 300 of the designs are based on the Nipkow disk. A bit more than a decade after Nipkow’s invention, what became the indispensable device for electronic television image pickup and playback, the cathode ray tube, was demonstrated independently, for different purposes, by two physicists working in their respective countries, Sir Joseph John (J. J.) Thomson (1856–1940) in England and Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850–1918) in Germany. A baby step on the path toward the cathode ray tube was taken with experiments performed in 1705 or 1706 by Francis Hauksbee, a self-taught British scientist who rapidly rotated an evacuated glass globe and observed a faint purple glow, according to Keller (1991). The work done by German glassblower Heinrich Geissler (1815–1879) furthered the development of the cathode ray tube. In 1855 he used his improved vacuum pump to build his Geissler gas discharge tube that emitted brief flashes of light created by electrical impulses. A few decades later it was used by Anschütz for his Tachyscope peepshow, and it also became the basis for tubes used for outdoor lighting and for neon signs. The Crookes tube, based on the Geissler tube, was invented by English physicist William Crookes circa 1870. Crookes was able to investigate the properties of cathode rays in a partially evacuated tube by interrupting the stream of “rays.” The rays or beam of electrons were produced at the negatively charged cathode and were attracted by the tube’s positively charged anode. When a hinged metal Maltese cross was swung into the path of the electrons, on their way to the tube’s faceplate, the cross intercepted them and showed up as a shadow image on the fluorescing glass faceplate. Thomson had been recognized as a prodigy by the time he was a teenager and became the Cavendish professor of experimental physics at Cambridge in 1884, where he improved the Crookes tube. Thomson built a device with a higher vacuum in which the bombardment of the rays on the glass faceplate of the tube produced a greenish glow. Using this apparatus Thomson was able to measure the displacement of the beam produced by an electric field, allowing him to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of the electron in May 1897. In this way he identified the electron (named years later) as a fundamental subatomic negatively charged particle and determined that “molecules of electricity,” which he also called corpuscles, actually existed as had been suggested by Maxwell (Davis and Falconer 1997). Cathode ray tubes vary greatly in design to suit their purpose, but generally they consist of a metallic base for supplying power where the cathode is housed, followed by a glass envelope in the shape of a cylinder containing the anode, after which

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Fig. 71.5  J. J. Thomson’s cathode ray tube. Shown are anode A, cathode B, apertures C and D to collimate (constrict) the beam, deflecting electrodes E and F, and faceplate G.  The impinging electron beam

caused the glass faceplate to fluoresce with green light. (Philosophical Magazine, Vol. 44, October 1897, pp. 293 – 316)

the tube becomes an outward flaring funnel that ends in a faceplate that has a phosphor-­coated screen. Although cathode ray tubes were usually made entirely of glass, some were made with a metal funnel. Braun, the same year as Thomson, attempted to measure electromotive force, which led him to devise a cathode ray tube that functioned as an oscillograph (oscilloscope), the workhorse instrument that has been used by electronics engineers for measurement and visualization. Braun tube is considered by some writers to be the direct precursor of the modern cathode ray tube since it combined the relevant design elements into one device for the first time, including a way to steer or sweep the electron beam and the phosphor screen, a transparent sheet of phosphor-coated mica within the tube near the faceplate. Braun’s design produced a much brighter image spot than Thomson’s tube that had depended on the phenomenon of glass fluorescence. (Later designs coated phosphor directly on the inside of the glass faceplate.) Braun’s phosphor screen set the pattern for future cathode ray tube displays, whose screens emit light after being bombarded with energetic electrons, causing the phosphor crystal’s electrons to jump to a higher energy level; they emit photons as they drop back to their ground state. Braun tube was built for him by Heinrich Geissler’s successor, Franz Müller, of Bonn. Cathode ray tube displays were widely used in many fields with hundreds of different designs, for monochrome and color displays and for vector and raster graphics. The use of the oscilloscope proliferated for science and engineering and it was widely used for military radar and civilian air traffic control. The number of tubes that were manufactured increased as their applications proliferated: in 1939 50,000 were made, but by 1944 two million were made that year. They follow the same general design established by Thomson and Braun: the tube’s negatively charged cathode emits electrons that are accelerated by the positively charged anodes (usually) located along its long neck. The beam is steered either (or both)

e­ lectrostatically or electromagnetically. The momentum of the electrons carries them past the anodes so they will impact the inside of a phosphor-coated faceplate. When operating at a typical value of 20,000 volts, a cathode ray tube accelerates electrons to more than a third of the speed of light, or 250 million miles per hour (Keller 1991). The cathode ray tube is a particle accelerator, one whose development has captured the attention of some of the best minds in physics, Nobel Laureates such as Thomson and Braun, the German Philipp E. Lenard who did fundamental work on the penetrating power of cathode rays and phosphorescence, and Hungarian-British Dennis Gabor, inventor of holography, who designed a thin flat cathode ray display tube. The CRT was widely used as a display device for more than six decades. Max Wilhelm Friedrich Dieckmann (1882–1960) born in Herrmannsacker, Germany, who was Braun’s assistant at the Physics Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm University in Strasbourg, defied Braun, who thought what he was up to was an unscientific stunt. Dieckmann and his colleague Gustav Glage, in 1906, used the Braun tube for displaying mechanically scanned images. Jensen (1954) cites their German Patent 190,102 of September 12, 1906, A Method for the Transmission of Written Material and Line Drawings by Means of Cathode Ray Tubes, as probably the first time that the cathode ray tube was suggested as an image receiver (display). Their transmission apparatus consisted of a stylus that scribed letters or drawings, with the orthogonal components of the stylus’s motion tracked through resistance changes producing changing current transmitted to the orthogonal sets of deflection plates of a CRT to steer the electron beam to write an image on its screen. This was a kind of autographic telegraphy or, in effect, an electronic and mechanical pantograph (Burns 1998, pp. 115–116). Jensen (1954), like Burns (1998), doesn’t classify the result as a true television image because the pickup didn’t sense light; nonetheless it is an early demonstration that a moving image can be transmitted electrically and written on the phosphor

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screen of a Braun tube, in this case a technique that would one day be called vector rather than raster scanning.6 Another seminal use of the cathode ray tube as a display is attributed to physicist Boris Lvovich Rosing (1869–1933), born in St. Petersburg, Russia, teacher of the foremost television inventor Vladimir Zworykin. In 1907 Rosing assembled a partly electronic television system using an electro-­mechanical pickup made up of rotating mirror-drums and a photocell. The video and synchronization signals were transmitted by wire to a cold-cathode Braun display tube. Rosing filed BP 27,570, on December 13, 1907, describing this apparatus. His USP 1,135,624, Electrical Telescopy, filed April 5, 1911, teaches a purely electro-­mechanical system with the same pickup, two polygonal surfaced mirror faceted scanning drums whose rotational axes are orthogonal (Abramson 1981, 1995). An object is scanned, a line at a time, by light reflected from the two cylindrical drums, one rotating horizontally for scanning along a line and the other vertically for positioning a new line.

Fig. 71.6 A drawing from German Patent 190,102, showing Dieckmann and Glage’s Braun tube used for a moving image display, in essence an electronic and mechanical pantograph. The stylus is highlighted. When Jensen wrote about Dieckmann and Glage’s experiments in the 1950s, their apparatus was housed in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. 6 

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USP 1,161,734, Art of Electrical Telescopy, also filed April 5, 1911, is a hybrid design that describes how the pickup scanner’s signals are transmitted to steer a cathode ray tube’s electron beam by varying the electric field near the cathode and the magnetic field further down the tube’s neck. Together these fields sweep the electron beam vertically and horizontally to scan the image raster on a transparent screen coated with fluorescing material placed adjacent to the tube’s faceplate. Rosing called his invention an electric eye or an electrical telescope, and it is discussed further in chapter 74. Jensen points out that the cathode ray tube, at this point in its development, was unable to focus a beam sharply enough to provide a good image; one reason for this was that there was

Fig. 71.7  Rosing’s electrical telescope as depicted in his 1907 British Patent. Fig 1: The image rectangle 3, is scanned horizontally along a line by mirror-drum 2, and vertically to position each new line by mirror-­drum 1. Lens 4 focuses the scanned light onto photocell 5, which produces an electrical signal. Fig.  2: The signal is transmitted to the CRT to display an image on the phosphor screen 12. The scanning mirror-­drums also send positional signals to the CRT’s deflection plates to steer the beam to scan the dissected raster.

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a lack of understanding of electron optics. Another probable reason for the tube’s lack of sharp focus was that, at the time, it was believed that adding gas at low pressure, usually argon or another rare gas, would help the beam’s performance, when in fact a hard (high) vacuum is to be preferred, but at the time it was difficult to achieve this before pumping techniques improved. (The same issue faced the designers of amplifier tubes, and de Forest, the amplifier tube’s inventor, also erroneously believed that the addition of gas was beneficial.) Whatever its shortcomings Rosing’s is probably the first example of a television image electro-mechanically picked up and displayed on a CRT. The importance of Rosing’s contributions goes beyond this accomplishment, since Vladimir Zworykin, the pivotal inventor in the field of all-electronic television, participated in Rosing’s experiments as his student. Frenchman Jules Armengaud, in a letter titled La Vision à distance par l’élictricité; l’appareil (Vision at a distance by electricity: the apparatus), published in La Nature, in April 1908, proposes a purely mechanical system he states will, within a year, be able to send television signals a distance of a hundred miles. A 1908 issue of Scientific American (Paris Correspondent 1908) gives details of the transmitting (or pickup) portion of Armengaud’s system, which at the time, to judge from the accompanying photographs, had been built, although the receiving portion had not. This mishmash of film and television may be the earliest combination of the two, but in a surprising way since the use of film is as a scanning shutter made of two closed loops of 35 mm film that crossed each other, one horizontal-traveling and the other vertical-traveling. Each film was opaque except for a thin clear line running at right angles to the direction of travel. Where the clear lines of the moving films crossed, a small moving square opening was created between the image to be transmitted and a selenium cell. In other words, the scanning raster was produced by the combination of the movement of the orthogonally traveling films’ slits. Englishman Shelford Bidwell (1848–1909), an inventor who designed a scanning fax system, was motivated to point

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out the impracticality of Armengaud’s concept. In a letter titled Telegraphic Photography and Electric Vision, ­published in Nature on June 4, 1908, Bidwell writes that Armengaud’s suggestion is “wildly impracticable” based on the number of (what we would today call) pixels required for even a small display and the need for more than a million synchronizing operations per second. Bidwell offers an alternative by revisiting the multi-wire concept, which had been suggested about three decades previously, as cited above, giving examples of proposed systems using 16,000 to 150,000 circuits, each one of which is devoted to a single pixel. A 90,000 pixel version would require a camera with a transmission screen made up of a mosaic of selenium cells 8 feet on a side, using a lens with an aperture 3 feet in diameter. Although he provides few details as to the nature of the display, he notes it would require a volume of 4000 cubic feet, which if built as a cube would be 16 feet on a side. Bidwell calculates that a bundle of cables some 8 to 10 inches thick, running from image pickup to display for a 100 mile length, would cost £1¼ million or $6 million in US currency at the time, or almost $200 million adjusted for inflation in today’s dollars (Magoun 2007; Jensen 1954). Bidwell’s letter had the salutary effect of prompting a response from Scottish electrical engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton (1863–1930), who had worked with Sir Charles Parsons on the development of the steam turbine. (The reader may recall that Parsons was the inventor of the Auxetophone, a compressed air audio amplifier.) Campbell-­ Swinton’s letter was published in Nature on June 18, 1908, titled Distant Electric Vision, in which he characterizes Bidwell’s concept as being “wildly impracticable.” His letter describes a television system using the Braun tube as the basic component for both pickup and display. Campbell-­Swinton’s response to Bidwell is credited with being a prescient proposal, the first such for an all-electronic television system. The term all-electronic television is used to denote systems that use electronics, eschewing mechanical scanning for the pickup and the display. In 1911 Campbell-Swinton was inducted as

Fig. 71.8  Armengaud’s proposal for a vision at a distance system between Paris and Rome. Fig. 2 is the scanning device made up of horizontally and vertically traveling slitted 35 mm film.

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Fig. 71.9  The schematic used by Campbell-Swinton to described his all-electronic television as presented in 1911 in his presidential address to the Roentgen Society. The transmitter is on the left, the receiver on

the right, with both using CRTs. (Journal of the Roentgen Society, Vol. 8, January 1912, pp. 1-5)

president of Britain’s Roentgen Society, in recognition for his experiments with X-rays and radio, at which time he gave a talk elaborating the concept he had described 3 years earlier. Although he attempted to build such a system, his essential contribution was to have served as an advocate for the Braun tube for both pickup and display. He describes a pickup for dissecting images, a scan line at a time, the tube having a twosided target plate, the front of which receives the lens’s focused image, with the rear of the target scanned by a sweeping electron beam, with the target plate consisting of a mosaic of photosensitive material. The concept and its details are a brilliant prediction of how much of broadcast television technology would unfold. Campbell-­Swinton knew there was no known photosensitive material at the time of his proposal, although he experimented with a selenium target and suggested a target plate made up of a mosaic of rubidium cubes, a structure similar to that used by Zworykin for the first successful CRT-based pickup, the Iconoscope pickup tube (Burns 1998). For display Campbell-Swinton called for a Braun-tube whose line scanning was synchronized to that of the pickup

tube. The display portion of his suggestion had already been attempted by Dieckmann and Glage in 1906 (as a vector scanning device) and independently by Rosing in 1907 (as a true raster scanning device). The creation of a working television system required years of work developing electronics, understanding electron optics, and the science of solid-state materials. The cathode ray tube had to be developed into two suitable devices, one for pickup and the other for display, which would require both laboratory and theoretical work by scientists and engineers in a number of countries. The first to be demonstrated, as the basis for a practical system, were the display tubes, designed at about the same time by Zworykin in the United States and von Ardenne in Germany. Zworykin is also the inventor of the first camera pickup CRT device suitable for broadcast television, which required more than a decade of determined effort after a promising display tube, the Kinescope, was announced. Advances in electronics were needed for creating broadcast radio in the 1920s, without which broadcast television would have been impossible.

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Jenkins and Baird

John Vincent Lawless Hogan (1954), who founded an early television station, Long Island City’s W2XR in 1930, wrote that the years 1920–1925 saw the beginning of the concerted efforts to build functional television systems; he asserts that this was the era that marked the end of a “hiatus of some thirty years,” which he calls the “speculative period,” of the development of television that began in 1890. It’s true that 1920–1930 marked a period of intense activity, but a perusal of Shier’s (1997) comprehensive bibliography Early Television, which covers the technology’s development from its antecedents to 1940, establishes that activity in the field was ceaseless even during the period Hogan characterizes as a hiatus. Shiers (1977, 1981) provides both an analysis of activity and examples of early work in the field in two SMPTE Journal articles, Historical Notes on Television Before 1900 and The Rise of Mechanical Television, in 1901–1930. He points out that any progress in television’s technology prior to 1900 was dependent upon developments by inventors in many of fields, a partial list that includes the following: 1829, Nicol’s polarizing prism; 1838, Page’s induction coil; 1843, Bain’s copying telegraph; 1845, Faraday’s magneto-optical effect; 1852, Stokes’ discovery of fluorescence; 1873, Smith’s discovery of selenium’s photosensitivity; 1875, Kerr’s discovery of electro-optical birefringence; 1876 Bell’s telephone; 1877 Edison’s filament lamp; 1884, Nipkow scanning disk; 1887, Berliner’s gramophone; 1889, Elster and Geitel’s phototube; 1896, Marconi’s wireless telegraphy; 1897, Braun’s cathode ray tube; and, 1898, Poulsen’s magnetic recording. The inventive activity cited by Hogan and Shier initially expressed itself as a determined effort to perfect mechanical scanning, which was undertaken by independent inventors and the American research labs of GE and AT&T. The best known independent inventors in the field were Charles Francis Jenkins in America and John Logie Baird in England. Although Baird has a following and is the recipient of the lion’s share of credit as the singular inventor in the field of mechanical television, his American counterpart was as well-known in his own country, but it must be acknowledged

that Baird was more accomplished. Jenkins also made a major contribution as the co-inventor of the Edison marketed Vitascope 35 mm projector (see chapter 16). In 1925 Jenkins succeeded in producing “electrical transmission from one place to another” at about the same time as Baird. Hogan writes that: “Historians do not agree as to which of these experimenters should be recognized as having been in the lead …credit should be more or less equally divided between them….” The beginning of Jenkins’ (1894) published interest in the field can be found in an article he wrote in 1894 for the Electrical Engineer. The subject of the article was a proposal for vision at a distance, which he called a Phantoscope (the term he used for many of his moving image inventions), which was similar to Carey’s multi-wire concept of individual light sensors for pickup and individual light emitters for playback, using one circuit for each pixel. Jenkins (1913), a prolific author, later claimed that his interest in television began with his article Transmission of Motion Pictures by Wire, which was written to promote his concept of radio vision as a way to transmit live theater to homes; the article appeared in the October 4, 1913, Moving Picture News. At the time of its publication, Jenkins was collaborating with Thomas Armat on what became the Vitascope projector that was manufactured and marketed by Edison in 1896, a contribution to the celluloid cinema that was described in chapter 14. Jenkins, as far as I can determine, has the distinction of being the only inventor of any stature who contributed to the early development of both motion pictures and television. His patent titled Telautograph was filed on February 7, 1908, and granted as USP 909,421, which describes a pantograph-like device linking the movements of a writing instrument at the transmitting station to one at the receiving station. As such it belongs to the category of facsimile imaging devices designed to take advantage of the telegraphic infrastructure, an actively pursued area of invention at the time, as described in the last chapter. His invention is only tangentially related to the transmission of a television image, because it does not use the crucial concept of scanning (Godfrey and Jenkins 2014).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_72

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Fig. 72.1  A schematic of Jenkins’ Phantoscope of 1894. Each pixel has its own circuit. (The Electrical Engineer, July 25, 1894.)

On March 12, 1922, Jenkins was granted his first television patent, USP 1,544,156; he would be granted 85 patents in the field (Abramson 1986). Jenkins called the discipline radio vision, and radio was a crucial model for the creation of broadcast television due to their commonalities in electronics and transmission technology and as a business model. Prior to the availability of suitable electronics, electro-­ mechanical scanning appeared to be the preferred path to take toward a working television system, but electronics enabled more than moving image transmission by radio waves; it was also the basis for pickup and display devices. Jenkins, a man of abundant energy, may have devoted himself to too many projects at the same time, but the celluloid cinema profited from his vision when he became the driving force behind the formation of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, the SMPE. On July 14, 1916, Jenkins sent invitations to a handful of like-minded engineers to meet at the Raleigh Hotel in Washington, D.C.  The 11 who attended appointed Jenkins as their chairman and set about incorporating the society, which grew over the years by extending its influence to television (as the SMPTE), and by advancing the art of moving images by encouraging the sharing of information and the fostering of standards. In May 1920, at an SMPE meeting in Montreal, Jenkins described the concept of his prismatic ring scanning device. In 1921 The Jenkins Laboratory began operations at 1519 Connecticut Avenue, near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., initially focused on facsimile radio transmission, such as ship-to-shore transmission of weather maps for the military. In 1922, Jenkins (1922) describes his scanning ring apparatus as being composed of two glass rotating disks, each having an annular band of stepped prisms, which working together to provide the same scanning function as the Nipkow disk’s spiral pattern of apertures. A band of step-like prisms is located at each disks’ periphery; together, the changes in refraction of the crossing prisms produce dissection of the

visual field. Light from the transmitter’s lens passes through both prisms, which are rotating past each other at right angles. One ring refracts light to scan the lines, and the other to move the scan to the next line; together they act to form an image field. To produce a gray scale, the receiver modulates light intensity using the Faraday effect, as suggested by Nipkow. Other patents supporting the rotating ring scanning concept followed, and for a while it was Jenkins’ preferred method, but that changed. Jenkins demonstrated how the concept of the prismatic rings could be applied to high-­speed motion pictures at a 1922 SMPE meeting. His prismatic scanning system is described in USP 1,544,156, Transmitting picture by Wireless, filed March 13, 1922, which teaches how the rings dissect the image field and how the playback, using a similar apparatus, reconstructs the scanned image. Jenkins was one of the two independent American inventors who determinately engaged in television research in the 1920s (the other is Ulises Armand Sanabria, discussed below); in Europe scientists also demonstrated sophisticated and interesting work. Some of these efforts have been reported above, including the work of Max Dieckmann and Gustav Glage, in 1906  in Munich, and the work of Boris Lvovich Rosing, in 1907 in Russia, both of which involved the display of transmitted images using a Braun tube. Ernst Ruhmer demonstrated the transmission of simple images on June 26, 1909, using a pickup consisting of a 5×5 row of selenium squares whose signals were received by an array of incandescent lamps. An important feature is that the image information was time-multiplexed and sent and received sequentially. Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in France, in December 1909, described the use of a multi-cell selenium screen with the cells’ signals sent in sequence by means of a commutator, which was displayed at the receiver using a Faraday effect light valve to provide image density. In Abramson’s (1992) opinion, Rignoux’s effort qualifies as the first true television system.

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surface. A lantern slide was scanned with his prismatic rings using a light-sensitive Case Thalofide cell, and the receiver reconstructed the image using a light valve. The scanning of the prismatic rings at the transmitter and receiver was synchronized using tuning forks. A tungsten lamp was the source of the image forming light that passed through the rotating prismatic rings. On December 4, 1924, Jenkins transmitted a message written with Japanese characters from Anacostia to Boston, and on June 13, 1925, he transmitted a silhouette image of the slowly rotating vanes of a windmill from Anacostia radio station NOF to his Washington, D.C., lab, which was witnessed by government officials and the press. Jenkins’ televising capabilities were limited to silhouettes for the next several years. Jenkins began demonstrating his television experiments for the press during the next 2 years, including one in December 1923 to the influential Hugo Gernsback, who had founded the Wireless Association of America and the magazines Electrical Experimenter, Radio-Craft, and Wireless World, and Watson Davis, who reported on the event for Popular Radio. They wrote that the apparatus was crude and cumbersome; it did not use the prismatic ring scanning technology that Jenkins had heretofore promoted. Rather, both ends of the system used Nipkow disk scanning with an ensemble of 48 lenses that revolved at 960 rpm. Gernsback said he could see small moving objects on the receiver, and Davis said that he could see Jenkins’ hand as it moved in front of the pickup. On June 15, 1924, Jenkins transmitted a 100line image of possibly improved quality, the year he founded Radio Pictures Corporation to market his radio vision facsimile devices to military and industry. For amateurs and hobbyists, he sold the snapshot photographic devices he invented, Fig. 72.2  The cover sheet of Jenkins’ first television USP for describing his prismatic ring mechanical scanner. Fig. 1.2 depicts a Faraday one of which was based on his prismatic ring scanner. That Effect light modulator (the highlighted area) for displaying the image year Jenkins was smitten by astronomer Percival Lowell’s with a gray scale. The top left figure shows the overlapping arrange- notion that there were canals on Mars. The reader may recall ment of the rings and the top right depicts a transmitted image produced that the subject of interplanetary communications also caught by the invention. the attention of Theodore Case (see chapter 31), who had considered but rejected attempting to receive radio broadcasts With the advent of the First World War, the US Navy from Mars. However, Jenkins continued listening for signals became the guardian of America’s radio intellectual prop- from Mars with the help of scientists at the US Army Signal erty. The ability to transmit sound, images, or telegraph code Corps (Godfrey and Jenkins 2014). wirelessly, using domestic technology, was a subject of great In 1924 Jenkins attempted to sell his television patents to concern to the military. This created an opportunity for Westinghouse, which turned the inquiry over to RCA, since Jenkins, as it had for Theodore Case, as described previ- the companies worked together in this area. Jenkins’ portfoously. On December 12, 1922, Jenkins transmitted still lio was examined by Swedish-born American Ernst Frederick images between his Connecticut Avenue lab and the Werner Alexanderson (1878–1975), the chief engineer of Anacostia Naval Station in Washington, D.C., about 6 miles GE/RCA, who in 1906 invented the eponymous high-­ as the crow flies, a demonstration that was attended by high-­ frequency alternator, an early radio transmitter used for long-­ ranking military officials. In April 1923 Jenkins again trans- distance communications. Prior to the Alexanderson mitted still images by radio, using his prismatic ring alternator, radio depended on the transmission of Morse transmitter, claiming that unlike other facsimile systems, his code, but the alternator broadcast a continuous wave that was the only one that could copy flat images because they could be modulated for the transmission of voice and music. did not have to be scanned laid out on a rotating cylindrical Alexanderson turned down Jenkins’ offer and continued on

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with his lab’s mechanical scanning television development efforts. By way of example, on October 20, 1923, he filed what became USP 1,787,851, Method and Apparatus for Picture Transmission by Wire or Radio, which describes a way to record and play back a (presumably) mechanically scanned images using perforated tape “for the transmission of pictures at a high rate of speed.” In 1924 GE’s Charles A. Hoxie (inventor of what became RCA’s Photophone variable area optical sound system) built a Nipkow scanning system, but Alexanderson was not pleased with the results. Late in 1925 Alexanderson assessed the approaches that might be required for a television system and arrived at the opinion that for the transmitter design, mechanical scanning using rotating prims and rotating lenses had a chance of being developed and for the receiver a cathode ray might work. On January 17, 1925, Frank A. Benson and Hoxie of GE transmitted a signal, a horizontal line, using Benson’s hexagonal rotating scanning prisms. The image scanned by Benson’s prisms passed through a tooted wheel to produce a 1000-cycle signal that was broadcast on the GE-owned Schenectady radio station WGY. Alexanderson had faith in mechanical scanning and continued to work on ways to ­project television images using the technique, having little

Fig. 72.3  Ernest Frederick Werner Alexanderson, on the cover of Hugo Gernsback’s Radio-Craft, September, 1930.

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faith in an all-electronic solution. A mechanical scanning effort also took place at America’s other major communications company, AT&T, at its Bell Labs, under the direction of Herbert Eugene Ives (1882–1953), son of color photography inventor Frederic Eugene Ives. As far as AT&T was concerned, it probably didn’t matter which system prevailed, since no matter the outcome, AT&T would collect revenue by carrying television signals using their landlines or microwave towers. AT&T’s Bell Laboratories had long been working on coaxial cable technology to handle large volumes of data, which was perfectly suited to television. On November 9, 1937, they transmitted a 240-line 24 fps disk scanned television signal originating from 35  mm motion picture film over their coaxial cable between New  York City and Philadelphia. The scanner had a 6-feet-diameter steel disk with 240 lenses arranged in a ring. On June 2, 1926, Jenkins applied for what became USP 1,683,137, Method of and Apparatus for Converting Light Impulses into Enlarged Graphic Representations, a rotating drum receiver and display device that he first demonstrated on May 5, 1928. The device he showed is a rapidly rotating 5-inch-long hollow cylinder 7 inches in diameter spinning around its axis, in the center of which is a hollow spindle housing a neon tube with four light sources activated by a commutator. Forty-eight quartz rods, acting as light pipes, extended from the inner wall of the cylinder to the spindle, where they are illuminated by the neon tubes, driven on-off in sync with the on-off signal from the pickup. The display was only capable of producing a silhouette. A portion of the display cylinder, about 30° in extent, is observed through a mirror and a magnifying lens. Each line consists of image elements represented by the on-off neon lights illuminating the quartz light pipes that are seen through the rotating cylinders’ apertures. The on-off neon lights are rotating fast enough so that by means of retinal retention, a moving image is perceived without flicker, or so Jenkins asserts. Jenkins abandoned this approach and retreated to 48-hole Nipkow disks (Burns 1998, p. 204). Despite strenuous efforts to find a superior alternative, the Nipkow disk remained the preferred mechanical scanning device for both pickup and reception. Jenkins’ drum receiver is like nothing else I have seen in the literature and despite the fact that it was very large for the size of its display, probably quite noisy and restricted to relatively low-resolution silhouettes, it’s a madly imaginative approach. It may be that this is the receiver Jenkins intended to sell as part of his radio movies initiative. It reportedly provided a good illusion of motion but, as noted, only for silhouettes. The transmitter used for the demonstration was a 35  mm ­projector adapted to serve as a film pickup. It used a powerful arc lamp to illuminate continuously driven film that was scanned by a disk 15 inches in diameter rotating at 900 ­revolutions per minute. The disk was mounted with an annu-

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Fig. 72.4  The USP cover sheet of Jenkins’ drum display. Fig. 72.5 illustrates the complete system.

lar arrangement of 48 f/3.5 lenses that outputted a video signal at 15 fps. Each lens scanned one line of video as it entered the projector’s gate. Jensen (1954) points out that “as late as 1939 and 1940 some of the best television pictures were produced with transmitting equipment using Nipkow discs.” He further states that “it is rather extraordinary that this should be the case, considering the Nipkow disc was invented sixty years earlier.” Intermediate-film pickups were an important part of early television and will be discussed. Jenkins filed Cell Persistence Transmitter on July 16, 1928, which was granted as USP 1,756,291, that teaches an extremely valuable method, a way to increase the sensitivity of the individual cells of a matrix system’s camera, whose signals are transmitted sequentially to the display, which is made up of individual illumination sources. The sensitivity of the camera cells is increased by exposing them continuously for the duration of the raster’s formation, rather than for the instant of transmission. The current produced by each

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photosensitive cell is used to charge its own capacitor, which is discharged in sequence to transmit each element, or pixel, of the raster. In this way the effective sensitivity of each cell is vastly increased. This method is precisely that used by Zworykin’s successful Iconoscope picture tube. Jenkins was unable to use the concept since RCA prevailed with their assertion that the Jenkins patent interfered (interferences 62,727 and 67,440) with one of Zworykin’s patents. The first American television station, Jenkins’ W3XK, began broadcasting on a regular schedule in the Maryland, Washington, D. C., area on July 2, 1928, with 48-line silhouette images at 15 frames per second; “it was claimed that the telecasts were received as far as Cedar Rapids, Iowa” (Abramson 1986).1 Jenkins also broadcast from station W2CXR in Jersey City, and in 1928 he sold radiovisor kits for $2.50, which included a 12-inch scanning disk, neon lamp, and all the hardware required but the motor. He compared his do-it-yourself TV receiver kit to the crystal radio set kits that were sold during radio’s earliest days. Interest in the stations attracted the attention of investors from all over the East Coast, which led to the formation of the Jenkins Television Corporation, incorporated on November 16, 1928, with the mission to manufacture and sell hardware made by The Jenkins Laboratory. The new company was run by James W.  Garside, who had a reputation for reviving distressed companies. The organization combined both Jenkins’ television and de Forest’s radio patents and took over the assets and liabilities of the nearly defunct de Forest Radio Company. Jenkins’ participation was an asset since he was known as America’s foremost television inventor. Garside’s stated goal for the Jenkins Television Corporation was to sell television sets to the home market just as RCA had successfully done with radio receivers. Founded only 10 months before the beginning of the Great Depression, the company was headed for hard times. The de Forest Company was revived by Garside as a separate entity to sell amplifier tubes, but the business soon declined. On December 13, 1930, some of the assets of the company were acquired by electronics entrepreneur and inventor Allen B. Du Mont. The de Forest Company was thereafter able to operate only on cash from the sale of stock, but it took over the Jenkins Television Corporation in 1932 to consolidate operations. However, its debtors soon forced it into bankruptcy, which the court authorized on March 3, 1933. RCA purchased the company to acquire its patents to eliminate the possibility of any conflict with Sarnoff’s television initiative. After suffering two heart attacks, Jenkins died at the age of 66, on June 6, 1934. His death marks the cessation of activity in the field of electro-mechanical television in America (Godfrey and Jenkins 2014).

O’Brien (1991) gives the year as 1927.

1 

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Fig. 72.5  Jenkins’ drum system, from pickup to display. Shown at the left is a four-segment ring pickup, but apparently the transmitter for demonstrations actually used disk scanned 35  mm film. The yellow highlighted area corresponds to the highlighted area of the prior illustration. The drum is a hollow cylinder 7 inches in diameter, 3 inches in length, with a 1/16th inch wall thickness and 48 apertures arranged in four helixes. A synchronous AC motor rotates the drum at 3600

RPM. The neon tubes within the cylinder are turned on and off in sync with the pickup signal to illuminate 48 stationary quartz rods (light pipes) extending from within the drum to the apertures on the cylinder’s surface. The silhouette image is viewed using a mirror and a magnifying lens, through which it appears to be about 6 inches square, according to Jenkins. (Radio News, August 1928, p. 116)

In England, another independent inventor having great determination, who began his investigations at about the same time as Jenkins, was also attempting to perfect mechanical scanning television. John Logie Baird (1888–1946), who was born in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, became a celebrity by promoting a seemingly ceaseless series of “firsts,” which heightened the appeal of his undertakings to speculative investors. Although there was often less bite to his bark than his promoters would have liked or admitted, his work paved the way for the adoption of the world’s first television broadcast service by the BBC, and his efforts produced results that exceeded those of Jenkins. Yet, his major contribution may well have been to have served as a foil for the far better all-electronic system created by Marconi-EMI, as described in chapter 75. Baird completed a 4-year engineering course and engineering apprenticeship and was awarded an Associateship of the Royal Technical College, Glasgow (Burns 2000). Baird began his television activities in 1923 by cobbling together odds and ends, which included using a hatbox as a Nipkow scanning disk. He transmitted silhouette images in April 1925 to a London department store, Selfridges, and the same year demonstrated a grayscale image of 30 scan lines at 5 frames per second. On January 27, 1926, for the press and

40 members of the British Royal Institution, Baird demonstrated a grayscale image, using a flying-spot scanner, producing 30 lines at 12.5 fields per second, which was characterized by O’Brien (1976) as being “generally recognized as the first in which gradations of tone scale in the moving images made it possible to recognize facial features and expressions, despite the very coarse scanning structure,” a pronouncement to which television historian Abramson (1992) agrees. On August 9, 1926, Baird transmitted television signals over station 2TV on the 200 meter wavelength at 250 watts. In 1927 Baird’s attention was focused on his Phonoscope (a name previously used by Demenÿ for a moving image educational device) system and its Phonovision disk video recordings. The 30-line image, at a rate of 12½ frames per second, was of sufficiently low information density to permit the recording of one minute of video using standard wax phonograph disk rotating at 250  rpm (Nmungwun 2009; McLean 1984). The recording arrangement, which was similar to that used for playback, consisted of a motor-driven horizontal turntable cutting lathe m ­ echanically coupled to a Nipkow disk. The disk with its spiral array of arc-shaped slots was a flying-spot scanner, with light projected through the slots onto a person’s face. Photocells were arranged

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Fig. 72.6 Jenkins’ Cell Persistence Transmitter USP cover sheet. Jenkins describes the concept of charge accumulation in the context of an electro-mechanical system. This principal was crucial to the functioning of the Iconscope tube, the first practical video camera, one of the cornerstones of allelectronic television.

above and below the subject to capture the reflected light, and the electrical signals generated by the photocells were combined, amplified, and sent to the cutting stylus where an analog recording of the video signal was scribed into the wax surface of the rotating disk. The recorded 30-line images were played back using neon lights to illuminate the receiver disk’s apertures. Abramson (1995) writes that Baird discovered flying-spot or spotlight scanning on October 2, 1925, and demonstrated the process to members of the Royal Institution on January 27, 1926. Baird applied for a patent for the flying-spot version of the Nipkow process 8 days prior to this demonstration, although it had been patented by Georges Rignoux in France in 1908, and A.  Ekstrom in Sweden in 1912, and a patent had been applied for by John Hayes Hammond, Jr., in August 1923 in America. Flying-spot scanning is an example of the concept that optical systems are reversible. In the case of Nipkow disk scanning, as it was conceived, flood-light scanning was used, in which light from the conventionally illuminated subject enters the optical system of apertures and lens(es) and are seen by a photosensor. For a Nipkow disk repurposed for

flying-spot scanning, a bright light is projected onto the subject through the disk’s apertures and optics, with photosensors picking up light reflected by the subject. The rotation of the disk is the same for both implantations, but for the original Nipkow flood-­light scanning method the transduction of light to video takes place behind the disk. The flying-spot stage is lit by the scanning beam produced by the disk apparatus with transduction by photosensors pointing at the set. According to electronics engineer Donald H.  McLean (WS: The Dawn of TV…), whose series of articles based on his study of the Phonoscope began to appear in the early 1980s, the vibrations of the recording mechanism contributed to their poor quality. Baird abandoned the Phonoscope after a year, having made a considerable investment in the project, never having been able to play back his recordings. McLean (1984) uncovered five of the disks and succeeded in restoring the images, but they are quite poor. They look like slowly moving monochrome portraits seen through an exceedingly coarse vertically patterned glass shower door. If these reconstructions give any indication of the quality of Baird’s television images, he and his backers must have been

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Fig. 72.7  Jenkins Televsion Company’s 1931 conception of a TV studio. The actress is illuminated by a flying-spot produced by a Nipkow disk scanner. Photocells pick up the reflected light to transmit a

t­elevision signal. To the left is the control room shown with an intermediate-­film transmitter. I doubt that Jenkins built such an elaborate installation, but Baird did.

Fig. 72.8  John Logie Baird

both courageous and optimistic. A candid view of the Baird enterprise was given by McLean (WS: LES DÉBUTS DE LA TÉLÉVISION…) in a lecture-demonstration presented at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. In his opinion the Baird Television Development Company Ltd. (which became Baird Television Limited) was focused on stock promotion and engaged in staging demonstrations to show off technology that had little or no intellectual property value. Keller (1991) had a similar assessment implying that Baird’s demonstrations of technological prowess lacked substance, and that he had a reputation for being a promoter, but Keller lays the blame on the company he kept, namely, his financial backers. Baird had the ability that every effective independent inventor must have, the power of persuasion, and he enticed important people to invest and become part of the board of directors of the Baird Television Development Company Ltd. In the end Baird was forced to limit his participation to the laboratory, where he had no operational control, which is similar to the fate that befell Jenkins. Events were overtaking Baird, but he and his backers were, to some extent, insulated from them by the Atlantic Ocean. On April 7, 1927, Bell Telephone Laboratories (AT&T) demonstrated what Abramson characterizes as “the finest exhibition of television yet given,” a wired ­transmission between Washington, D.C., and Manhattan of a sharp video

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Fig. 72.9  Baird’s TV system circa 1925. At the left is a hand that is scanned by a rotating Nipkow disk pickup outputting a video signal sent to the receiver (right). The light, highlighted, is viewed through a disk

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whose rotation is synchronized to that of the pickup. The received image (right) was a silhouette. (Wireless World and Radio Review, January, 1925)

Fig. 72.10  A Phonovision disk record made September 20, 1927. (From the Benjamin Clapp collection, University of Glasgow)

signal transmitted by a mechanically scanned 50-line 18 fps image. This was followed by sending the video signal by radio between Whippany, New Jersey, and Manhattan, a distance of 22 miles. The televised image was displayed using a scanning disk receiver and a 2 foot screen composed of a matrix of glass tubes filled with neon, with each tube excited by connections made by a commutator. The demonstrations were the work of Herbert E.  Ives, Frank Gray, and Frank Hofele; when Baird and his inner circle learned of it they were unnerved, since they had represented to their investors that they were without peer in the field. Abramson (1987) expressed it this way: “Baird now settled into a p­ attern of

Fig. 72.11  A Phonovision image of a face played back by a Phonoscope player. The neon light’s color was simulated in Photoshop.

many variations of his basic television system in order to keep his financial backers happy.” In July 1928, Baird covered the Nipkow disk holes with color filters to demonstrate a trichromatic additive color television image, and later that year he demonstrated stereoscopic and then infrared night vision television, but the quality of the results is subject to doubt. The next month in San Francisco, in August 24, Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a television system for executives of the Pacific Telephone Company that used electronic scanning with his image dissector pickup tube; the images were displayed on a cathode

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ray tube monitor. The infallible judgment of hindsight leads to the observation that this Farnsworth held more promise than anything attempted by Baird, Jenkins, GE, or AT&T. Although they may have been able to demonstrate better looking images at that moment, this was a passing advantage for within a few years, mechanical television would be surpassed by all-­electronic television. The first American demonstration of color television occurred on June 27, 1929, for an invited audience of scientists and journalists. The system was designed by Herbert Ives of Bell Labs, using a mechanical scanning pickup with three phototubes, each filtered by a primary color. The three channels were transmitted separately and played back using Nipkow disk scanning and special water-cooled argon and neon glow tubes whose images were optically combined using a viewer like the Kromskop invented by Ives’ father, Frederic. Although the peepshow viewer’s display was the size of a postage stamp, the images of the American and British flags, and of a man picking up a piece of watermelon were reportedly “true to nature” when viewed through the magnifying optics (Abramson 1987, Abramson 1955a, Abramson 1955b; Burns 1998, pp.  234– 236) (see chapter 42). Ives’s demonstration may have served as a motivation for the indefatigable Baird to continue to set records, including the long-distance transmission and projection of sporting events such as a boxing match and the Epsom Downs Derby. On September 30, 1929, Baird transmitted a 30-line 12½ frames per second image, without sound, from his studio in Long Acre through London station 2LQ with, it was claimed, “fairly clear images.” A major coup occurred for Baird when, from 1929 to 1932, the BBC allowed him to use their medium-wave transmitters to broadcast experimental half-­ hour programs from London 5 days a week, using his 30-line 12½ frames per second system. Baird’s transmission over an existing radio station had been anticipated on September 11, 1928, with the first broadcast television drama (with audio), The Queen’s Messenger, written by London ­playwright John

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Hartley Manners, using a 24-line mechanical scanning system developed under the direction of GE’s Head of Research Alexanderson. GE used its Schenectady radio station WGY for the broadcast. Three flying-spot scanners were used as pickups, one each to cover the two actors and one for closeups and props. The director viewed the televised action on a monitor using controls to allow for fading between the pickups (Wilcox 2000). Other organizations soon followed with television broadcasts: RCA’s National Broadcasting Company with their station W2XBS and Hogan’s (1954) W2XR, both eventually transmitting 60 lines per frame at 20 frames per second. In January 1932, Gaumont British Film Corporation Ltd., which operated a cinema chain in Britain, purchased Baird Television Limited, because of their interest in applying television to theatrical exhibition and for broadcast to the home (Marshall 2011, p. 50, 267). On August 22, 1932, the BBC began producing TV programs using Baird’s 30-line system, still restricted to the low-resolution medium-wave band, ignoring Campbell-­ Swinton’s outspoken warning that mechanical television would never be acceptable for a broadcast service. For these BBC broadcasts, Baird initially used both flood-light and flying-spot Nipkow disk scanning. Flood-light scanning, even with very bright stage lighting, was insufficiently sensitive and was superseded for live pickup by the far more efficient flying-­ spot scanning. The insensitivity and slow response of the existing photocells made it a challenge to produce a strong enough a signal. Flying-spot scanning, as Abramson (1995) notes, made it possible to project a bright moving spot of light on the subject whose reflected light was picked up by a number of photocells that faced the subject. These combined to produce a video signal capable of reproducing a reasonable grayscale. The system somewhat resembles the laser illumination technique used for h­ olography, and both are similarly limited since distant objects, such as mountains or sky, cannot be scanned. By this time flyingspot scanning, whatever its d­rawbacks, was the favored

Fig. 72.12  Like father like son: Herbert Ives used his father Frederick’s Kromskop optics to display mechanically scanned color video. (AT&T)

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method for picking up live studio action, and it proved to be useful for film to video scanning. The broadcast image was played back at home using Baird’s Televisor, which was probably the first television receiver sold to the public (not parts or a kit to be assembled). Its 1.5 in x 2.0 in image was produced using a Nipkow scanning disk whose holes were rear lit by a neon tube whose orange illumination’s intensity was modulated to produce tonality. The spinning disk’s rotation was electrically synchronized to the studio’s image-capturing disk. The Televisor went on sale in the United Kingdom in 1929 and sold about 10,000  units by 1932 or 1933, including one installed at Number 10 Downing Street. One model of the receiver had a mirror-reflected image viewed through a magnifying lens (Burns 1986; Wilcox 2000). Nipkow disk scanning held fast as the primary choice for a pickup for mechanical television, but it was becoming evident that the disk was limited to low definition for live pickup and reception. Jenkins and Baird were men with extremely different inventive styles. Jenkins was an original thinker, who had unusual problem-solving insights. His prismatic scanner is a worthy concept, different from any other electro-mechanical scanner. It was probably protectable because of its originality, but it would seem he could not make it work well enough for commercial exploitation. His drum display is an intriguingly novel device, but the remarks made about the prismatic ring apply. Baird, for the most part, stuck with attempting to improve Nipkow scanning to demonstrate its extensibility any which way. His attempts at firsts, night vision, 3-D, color, and so on, feel like a man attempting to pour 2 quarts of milk into a 1 quart jug. As we shall see, when push came to shove, for the BBC showdown with EMI, his pragmatism won out, and he attempted to employ, to the extent circumstances permitted, electronic as well as electro-mechanical technology.

Fig. 72.13 Baird’s mechanical disk Televisor. (Cinémathèque Française)

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A contemporary of Baird and Jenkins, Ulises Armand Sanabria (1906–1969), born in the Chicago area, founded Western Television, Inc., of Chicago, Illinois, to develop, market, and broadcast television based on electro-­mechanical principles. Marshall (2011, p.  112) claims that there is an argument to be made that Western Television was commercially more successful than the companies formed by Jenkins or Baird, but according to Marshall (2011, p. 122), Sanabria “…is almost completely forgotten…”, which is an assertion supported by the dearth of information about him in the literature. However, Marshall’s assessment of Western Television’s commercial success may be difficult to corroborate. Sanabria was one of the electro-mechanical television specialists who were active in the United States, Great Britain, Hungary, Germany, France, the USSR, and Japan, who have not received the same attention as Jenkins and Baird. Sanabria, recounting how he entered the field, wrote that he was (remarkably) “Hired by Hearst Newspapers to direct (a) project to create television in six months during the last year of high school because television inventions appealed to the publisher’s technical advisers.” Marshall (2011, p.  122) puts the date of Sanabria’s hiring as 1924, when he was probably 18 years old and attending Oak Park and River Forest High School, in Oak Park, Illinois. Sanabria’s electro-mechanical efforts, between 1926 and 1934, were based on Nipkow disk technology. Sanabria realized that photoconductive selenium reacted too slowly to changes in light to be a good detector for an electro-mechanical pickup and turned to photoemissive devices, but these were also not sufficiently sensitive and hard to fabricate. Thus, in 1926 he and his team set out to develop better sensors. Sanabria used the flying-spot pickup as proposed by Georges Rignoux in 1908, Baird in 1926, and Frank Gray of Bell Telephone Labs in 1927. It seems that the possibility of intellectual property conflict did not inhibit his use of the technique. In 1926 Jenkins’ technology was limited to moving silhouettes, but Baird had publically demonstrated grayscale images at Selfridge’s department store in London that year; but it’s unclear what Sanabria had been able to demonstrate by this time in terms of grayscale reproduction. By October 10, 1926, at the Chicago Radio World’s Fair at the Chicago Coliseum, Sanabria demonstrated a system using interlace scanning, possibly a first. Interlace became part of all future TV broadcasting. According to Marshall (2011, p.  127), interlace scanning may have first been described in a British Patent No. 15,720, granted in 1915 to Samuel Lavington Hart. Sanabria used threefold interlace enabled by a disk with three spiral apertures, allowing him to transmit a higher line count picture in three fields, which he describes in Method and Means for Scanning, USP 1,805,848, filed June 7, 1929. Interlace can be applied to improving definition or reducing flicker for a given bandwidth, and for a low-definition mechanical scanning system

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capable of only a few tens of video lines, threefold interlace might have made a substantial improvement in apparent image quality. The interlace method depends on the eyebrain’s image retention to build a complete image frame out of the partial constituent fields. In 1929 Sanabria operated television station WX9AO that piggybacked on the facilities of radio station WIBO. Three years later, at the B. S. Moss Broadway Theater in Manhattan, he projected a 45-line threefold interlace image on screen that may have been as big as 40 square feet. His projector used a triple spiral 3½-feet-diameter Nipkow disk with a high-power neon light (Abramson 1955a, Abramson 1955b; Marshall 2011, p. 130) (see chapter 82). Sanabria’s work was covered in the motion picture and radio trade press in the early 1930s, but I suspect from the coverage he received that he did not have anything like the commercial success, such as it was, realized by either Baird or Jenkins, and the reports in the press indicate that his results may not have been any better than theirs. The Heinl Radio Business Letter (1931, p.8) of July 1931 reports that Sanabria displayed images on a small screen as well as projecting them on a screen “six feet square.” A demonstration for the press and others took place at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., where Sanabria transmitted both live and filmed images by wire and also showed live images of the guests present. James J.  Finn (1931, p.  32), writing in International Projectionist of November 1931, reports projection of a “9-foot picture” that was “no great shakes,” which sacrificed detail and was not up to the quality of demonstrations by Jenkins, Bell Labs, or RCA. Oswell Blakeston (1931, p. 317), writing in Closeup of December 1931, reports projection “in colours” on a screen “10 feet square,” using an intense light source invented by Sanabria, but probably the report of color is mistaken. Sanabria gave up on mechanical scanning technology and turned to manufacturing television picture tubes, a business that endured until 1955. During World War II, he founded a correspondence school that offered a 4-year engineering curriculum. Like Jenkins and Baird, Sanabria’s inventive efforts were limited by electro-mechanical scanning, capable of images of probably not more than a thousand pixels. It gives one pause when considering that today’s little cell phone displays have millions of pixels. This does not diminish the accomplishments of Sanabria and his compatriots, but it puts their work, near the beginnings of the televisions’ steady climb, in perspective. And as noted, while these inventive efforts to perfect mechanical scanning were underway, Campbell-­Swinton, the originator of the concept of cathode ray tube-­based all-electronic television, clearly grasped mechanical scanning’s limitations, acerbically attacking its proponents (Marshall 2011, p.  193). In the late 1920s and early 1930s, inventors Jenkins, Baird, Alexanderson, Sanabria, and Ives were, in terms of what

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they could d­emonstrate, further along than inventors Zworykin, Farnsworth, and von Ardenne, at this point in the development of all-electronic television. A measure of the activity in the field at this time can be gauged by counting patents granted covering major systems and subsystems for mechanical and electronic television. By 1930 Jenkins had assigned 31 patents to his company (or companies) and Baird 69. Shiers (1981) provides a list of patents in the field by corporation: Bell Labs, 63; General Electric, 26; RCA, 25; Telefunken, 31; and Westinghouse, 20. Zworykin and all-electronic television inventors would soon overtake and far surpass what mechanical television inventors ever accomplished. A critical turning point in the acceptance of all-electronic television was to come with the well-known 1936 BBC competition between Baird’s electro-­ mechanical system and Marconi-EMI’s all-electronic television system, in which the latter prevailed, as will be described in chapter 75. Mechanical television inventors in the late 1920s struck a barrier preventing them from transmitting live action with good image quality; this was a flaw inherent in the Nipkow disk process. Since flood-light scanning was relatively insensitive, and flying-spot scanning was only able to pickup nearby frontally lit subjects, and both had low resolution for live pickup, some inventors turned to hybrid systems using film to pick up, transmit, and display the video image. The first disclosure covering an attempt to improve the transmitted television image by means of the intermediate-film process is attributed to Ralph V.  L. Hartley and Herbert E. Ives, of AT&T, which is given in BP 297,078, granted March 19, 1928, and announced on September 14, 1927 (Abramson 1955a, Abramson 1955b, February). The image was photographed by a motion picture camera whose film was rapidly processed to prepare it for disk scanning for transmission using three channels, one for picture, one for sound, and one for a synchronization signal. The video receiver exposed film using disk scanning, which was rapidly processed and projected. In this way pickup and playback involved film scanning, to which Nipkow technology was better suited, but this technique posed other issues with regard to implementation. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the technique was actively pursued especially in Germany. Hartley and Ives asserted that they used the method of “interposed” film because “television of back-ground detail is improved and increased illumination is obtained by taking a kinematographic film of the scene to be transmitted.” Hartley and Ives retained mechanical disk scanning but took advantage of film technology as a key element in transduction for both pickup and playback (Abramson 1955a; Abramson 1955b). In 1928 there was such a swell of mechanical television activity that it may have seemed to observers that ­commercial implementation was right around the corner: Jenkins gave a

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demonstration of “motion pictures by radio” to members of the Federal Radio Commission (the predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission); in Japan Takayanagi demonstrated images that had been captured using a flyingspot mechanical scanner; in Berlin Dionys von Mihaly demonstrated a similar system; in Chicago Sanabria demonstrated his interlaced projection technology; in Britain Baird demonstrated seemingly advanced versions of his system (Godfrey and Jenkins 2014); and demonstrations of systems were given by the major US corporations GE, AT&T, and Westinghouse. But all-electronic television was soon to overtake mechanical scanning; an inkling of this is that on November 18, 1929, Zworykin gave a paper on the subject of his new Kinescope display tube, one of the foundations of electronic television (Abramson 1992; Abramson 1981). In a few years, he and his team announced the Iconoscope, which would do for the pickup tube what they had done for the display tube. The only other television research program in America that was comparable to RCA’s was that of Philo Farnsworth.

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Independent inventor Philo Farnsworth was an innovative self-taught television engineer with an intuitive grasp of electronics and electron optics. Eschewing mechanical systems, he invented unique approaches for electronic camera pickup technology, which became indispensable for the creation of a broadcast television service. The young and gifted Farnsworth approached or sometimes exceeded the accomplishments of RCA’s Zworykin and his team of university-­ trained engineers and scientists, but he could not match their resources. No independent inventor, or any company he might found, could raise the money required to develop an all-electronic television system or to devote resources to developing and purchasing the necessary patent portfolio to protect or defend such a business. No independent inventor’s company could compete with RCA’s access to the capital markets because it did not have the revenue and earnings history that allowed it to do so. Even so, Farnsworth’s patents could not be gotten round to the chagrin of the dominating boss of RCA, David Sarnoff, as we shall learn in the following chapters.

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Farnsworth

Philo Taylor Farnsworth (1906–1971) was born in Indian Creek, Utah, and lived his early years with his parents and four siblings in a small log cabin that had been built by his grandfather. The family moved to a ranch in Rigby, Idaho, in 1918, and by the spring of 1922 the precocious Farnsworth, who read every technical magazine and journal he could get his hands on, was dreaming of creating an all-­electronic television system after mathematically analyzing Nipkow scanning and rejecting it as a solution. He designed an all-electronic television system, which he described in 1922 to his chemistry teacher at Rigby High School, Justin Tolman, who was also the school’s superintendent. The concept entailed what would become his Image Dissector pickup and a cathode ray display tube, with a way to synchronize the scanning of both rasters. Years later Tolman testified in a patent interference action between Farnsworth and RCA, at which time he produced one of Farnsworth’s sketches to affirm the origin of the concept of the Image Dissector. The Farnsworths moved to Provo, Utah, in 1923, where Philo’s father died the following year. In 1924 Farnsworth ranked second in the national test for admission to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, but after learning that anything he invented while he served would become the Navy’s intellectual property, he decided to leave the academy. As the eldest surviving son of a family without a father, he was able to be released from service and return to civilian life after only several months at Annapolis. While working as a janitor at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, he took courses in math and electronics and in 1926 started a radio repair business with his future brother-in-law, Cliff Gardner (Stashower 2002). That summer he went to work for George Everson and Leslie Gorrell, who listened to his accounts of the independent mechanical television experimenters American Charles Francis Jenkins and Englishman John Logie Baird. He also told them about the major corporations working on mechanical television: GE’s, led by Ernst Alexanderson, and AT&T’s, led by Frederic Ives. After hearing about his concept for an all-­electronic television system, Everson and Gorrell decided

to fund this enthusiastic and persuasive young man allowing him to begin his experiments, which at first he undertook in the Hollywood, California, home he shared with his wife Elma, where they had moved to be near the California Institute of Technology. Everson raised additional working capital, and Farnsworth moved his lab to a loft at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, which began operations in October 1926. Brother-in-law Gardner helped the cause by setting up a glass blowing shop for making the envelopes required for pickup and display tubes. The independent inventor Farnsworth was not alone in this endeavor: Vladimir K.  Zworykin at Westinghouse, who had begun an all-­ electronic television program in 1924, became his admirer and competitor, and in France Edouard Belin and Fernand Holweck demonstrated television images on July 26, 1926. Also in France Alexandre Dauvillier announced his electronic system the following month, and in Japan Kenjiro Takayanagi, of the Hamamatsu Technical College, asserted that he had transmitted television images on December 25, 1926. But without an electronic camera tube, all of these experimenters used mechanical scanning pickups for their demonstrations (Abramson 1992). In California Farnsworth formed the Crocker Research Laboratories, named after the bank that organized additional financing allowing him to begin his patent program. His company would wind up with about 150 US patents covering television inventions, some of which turned out to be extremely valuable (Hall 2008). Farnsworth had a mind jam-­packed with novel ideas in many fields like Jenkins and Baird, but television remained his lifelong passion, and like them he was both persistent and of poor health. These independent inventors worked in a multidisciplinary field in which they were (or would be) competing against the deep pockets of RCA in the United States and EMI in the United Kingdom. Farnsworth would find himself up against two men at RCA: the company’s extraordinary boss, the Russian-born David Sarnoff (1891–1971), the tireless mastermind behind the commercial exploitation of radio, and the brilliant and resolute Russianborn inventor, Vladimir Zworykin. In marked contrast to the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_73

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Fig. 73.1  Philo Taylor Farnsworth holding a display CRT.

Fig. 73.2  David Sarnoff (New Jersey Chamber of Commerce)

chancy path taken by Farnsworth, Zworykin’s life as an inventor was that of a man enjoying employment stability with access to a world-class laboratory and its specialists. This kind of security was important to a man who, in his early years, had endured the political turmoil of the First World

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War and the Bolshevik Revolution. In Farnsworth’s favor, a transition was taking place in the America in the 1920s in which it became recognized that technological advances and industrial capitalism were more important to economic growth than agriculture (Montgomery 1985). In his Green Street lab, using his prototype pickup tube, the 21-year-old Farnsworth built an electronic scanning television system that became functional on September 7, 1927. It used a motor generator, an electro-mechanical component, so it doesn’t strictly qualify as a true all-electronic system. To those not in the field, this demonstration might not have appeared to have been impressive. Farnsworth televised simple moving images, including those of a triangle, drawn on slides that were rear-illuminated by an arc light and transmitted by the electronic pickup that he called the Image Dissector. Later moving images were transmitted using a 35 mm projector that was modified to operate with its intermittent removed. It projected onto the face of the Image Dissector, whose scanning was synchronized to the film’s motion. The basis for this accomplishment is given in Television System, USP 1,773,980, filed January 7, 1927, in which Farnsworth describes the Image Dissector, a highly evacuated rectangular glass box, which later would take a cylindrical shape. The Image Dissector operates this way: light from the lens passes through the glass faceplate and focuses on the front surface of a cathode grid made of a fine mesh screen coated with light-sensitive cesium oxide, sodium, potassium, or rubidium. On the other side of the mesh screen, facing away from the lens, photoelectrons are emitted in proportion to the local intensity of the image light focused on the cathode mesh, in this way forming an analog of the optical image. These slowly moving photoelectrons are attracted to the positive potential of the anode plate located parallel to and facing the cathode mesh screen. The scanning raster is produced by moving all of the photoelectrons up and down and side to side by means of varying electric fields produced by facing vertical and horizontal sets of charged plates. A sawtooth ramping voltage creates the varying field strength between the vertical and horizontal sets of plates to steer the photoelectrons vertically and horizontally. The photoelectron’s analog image is scanned as it is attracted to the anode by this mechanism: the momentum of the photoelectrons allows some of them to pass through its stationary aperture. The current produced by the photoelectrons sampled as they pass through the aperture is the basis for the video signal. The method of accelerating and capturing photoelectrons through an aperture, by moving the entire photoelectron population, is reminiscent of the way light is scanned by the holes of a Nipkow disk. The earliest versions of the Image Dissector were not very light sensitive, the inefficiency attributable to the relatively few photoelectrons that passed through the anode’s aperture, because it lacked the charge-storing capability of the Iconoscope, to be described. Eventually the Image Dissector was sensitive enough to be used in bright light,

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Fig. 73.3  The cover sheet of Farnsworth’s Television System, USP 1,773,980. The highlighted area, shown enlarged in the next illustration, contains the Image Dissector.

and while it never became widely used for live action, it was used for motion picture scanning because its linear output accurately reproduced the tonalities of photochemical photography (Jensen 1954). The Image Dissector is not a cathode ray tube, like the first pickups used for broadcast television, RCA’s Iconoscope and EMI’s twin, the Emitron. In a cathode ray tube, electrons are emitted from a negatively charged source, the cathode or electron gun, to form an electron beam, which is attracted by an anode or anodes and steered either (or both) electromagnetically or electrostatically. The electron beam is accelerated by positively charged anodes as it travels down the neck of the highly evacuated glass tube. A pickup, like the

Iconoscope or Emitron, accelerates, steers and focuses the electron beam to impinge on a target plate as part of the process to produce a video signal representing a line-by-line raster of the image formed by the pickup’s lens. Farnsworth’s dissector tube used a scanning process that is different since it depended on the controlled sampling of slowly moving photoelectrons emitted by a cathode target plate. Farnsworth’s Image Dissector had been anticipated by Max Dieckmann and Rudolph Hell in Germany, who had filed a disclosure for a similar design on April 5, 1925, which was granted as DRP 450,187. Hell is reported to have said that they could not make it work (Abramson 1995). It is extraordinary that an independent inventor had produced

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Fig. 73.4  Lens A focuses its image onto B, the mesh screen of the Image Dissector, which is enclosed in a glass envelope (not shown). The rear side of B emits photoelectrons that are attracted to the facing anode plate, F. These photoelectrons are steered vertically and horizontally by the electrodes labeled C and D, one each of a set of two facing plates. Some of photoelectrons pass through aperture E to form the image raster.

73 Farnsworth

attendees representing the Pacific Telephone Company saw a demonstration and reported that the 1.25 in x 1.50 in image was of low brightness of hard to identify images. Synchronization was still accomplished using a motor generator, although scanning at both the transmitter and receiver was electronic. Farnsworth eliminated the motor generator thus qualifying his system as being truly all-electronic at a demonstration that took place at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in April 1933 (Abramson 1992). Based on Farnsworth’s success, Baird Television, now owned by British Gaumont, paid $50,000 for Image Dissector Technology hoping it would be used in BBC tests to help them prevail against their competitor, Marconi-EMI (Marshall 2011, p. 268). Farnsworth’s display tube, the Oscillite, may have held him back because of its dim image, but it proved to be important in the history of the art because it introduced the magnetic focus coils that became widely used for TV receiver tubes after the Second World War (Keller 1991, p. 59). The Oscillite’s technology is described in USP 2,099,846, Thermionic Oscillograph,1 filed June 14, 1930. Its electron beam is focused using a magnetic coil wrapping around the length of the tube. A concentration electrode is used to create an electrostatic field to accelerate the electron beam through an aperture to focus it on the screen by the magnetic coil. The Oscillite had a major defect: after operating for a short time the screen built up a large negative charge that slowed down the approaching scanning electrons, which reduced image brightness (Abramson 1987, p.169). Farnsworth continued to improve his television system, but the beginning of the Great Depression, in the winter of 1929, put a financial strain on his investors. Once again an attempt was made to interest GE/RCA in the Farnsworth patent portfolio and an invitation was sent out, but this time it would be given more careful consideration. The organization of the GE/RCA effort was changing as Sarnoff’s grip on the company tightened and he came to believe in all-electronic television; the program’s leadership was given to his fellow émigré Zworykin. Farnsworth’s lab was visited at different times by Zworykin, Sarnoff, and an RCA patent lawyer, according to Abramson, at the behest of an independent organization that had an option to buy Farnsworth’s Television Laboratories, Inc. stock. There had been so many legal actions, and consequentially technology disclosures between the two groups, that Farnsworth felt there was little to be lost by being forthcoming. The invitation to RCA came to the attention of the newly empowered Sarnoff, who had become head of RCA on January 3, 1930.

such advanced results, but improvements came slowly and required repeated infusions of capital. The most prudent course, Farnsworth’s investors decided, was to try to sell the company, and with that in mind, on March 1, 1928, a demonstration was given to L. F. Fuller and James Cranston of GE. The equipment failed to operate properly, but even under the best of circumstances, the display portion of the system, Farnsworth’s picture tube, displayed a small and dim image and the demonstration was unimpressive. On May 22, 1928, with Farnsworth’s system now able to produce recognizable images, one of his investors and engineers, Roy Bishop, contacted the GE patent department to see if the company was interested in a license but was turned down by its chief engineer Ernst Alexanderson. Zworykin and his colleague Gregory N. Ogloblinsky, on March 10, 1932, filed Television System, which was granted on October 31, 1939, as USP 2,178,093, describing improvements to the Image Dissector. E. Wilson at Westinghouse built the RCA version of the tube, which was superior in performance to Farnsworth’s. In fact, the first electronic images taken outdoors in daylight were produced by one of these Westinghouse/RCA pickups. For Farnsworth to have used the improvements, he would have had to license RCA, and for RCA to have sold their new pickup, they would have had to obtain a license from Farnsworth. Alexanderson, who had been disinclined to license Farnsworth technology, was the manager of GE’s television program. He was actively inventing devices based on mechanical scanning, and he believed that an electronic pickup could never become the basis for a television broadcast system. However, GE vice president Albert G.  Davis offered Farnsworth a job with the proviso that allowed GE to buy his granted patents, and that inventions made while an employee would become GE property, but Farnsworth turned 1  down the offer. His laboratory was now named the Crocker-­ The term oscillograph is now used for a device that records waveforms of changing currents, voltages, or phenomenon that can be represented Bishop Research Laboratory, and Farnsworth and colleagues electrically, like sound waves, but it has also been used to describe a continued to show off their system. On August 24, 1928 CRT display or an oscilloscope.

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Fig. 73.5  The top half of Farnsworth’s Thermionic Oscillograph patent cover sheet. The funnel of the CRT display tube is surrounded by a coil that when energized produces a magnetic field to steer the electrons to impinge on the screen to form the image. Charge buildup on the screen repelled the scanning electrons reducing its brightness.

Sarnoff sent Zworykin to Green Street to study Farnsworth’s work, where he spent 3 days, beginning on April 16, 1930. On the first day of his visit, after the Image Dissector had been demonstrated, he held the tube in his hands and told Farnsworth and his business colleagues: “This is a beautiful instrument; I wish I might have invented it.” However, as Abramson (1995) points out, Zworykin was well aware that the Image Dissector was a device without the storage capacity required to make it sufficiently sensitive to light to be a practical pickup for live television transmission. Zworykin and Farnsworth were birds of a feather, and Zworykin walked away with a good impression of Farnsworth and his Image Dissector, but he had serious reservations about Farnsworth’s Oscillite display tube, which was inferior to the Kinetoscope. Alexanderson studied Zworykin’s report and told Sarnoff that Farnsworth’s efforts were without merit, but Sarnoff doubted Alexanderson’s objectivity since he was such a staunch advocate of mechanical television. At this point in time, Sarnoff was becoming increasingly convinced that Zworykin was on the right track with regard to all-electronic television, and he sent RCA’s head of advanced development Albert Murray and patent attorney Thomas Goldsborough to Green Street to learn more. Based on their visit RCA decided to pass on the Farnsworth licensing opportunity, but Farnsworth may have encouraged Zworykin by demonstrating that an electronic pickup was a possibility. According to Abramson (1987, pp.  150–151) Zworykin wrote a report about his visit, which is no longer available, in which he may

have been loath to admit the superiority of the Image Dissector to his own faltering pickup tube efforts, but he may have noted the superiority of his Kinetoscope compared to the Oscillite with its dim image. In November 1930, Farnsworth’s all-electronic system consisted of his Image Dissector tube, a wide-band amplifier and other electronic improvements involving synchronizing the picture and display tubes; his Oscillite tube was displaying a 200-line image at 15-fields per second (Abramson 1987, p. 159). Also at the end of 1930 Farnsworth sent a low-­ power television signal from Green Street to the mile-away Merchants Exchange Building where the low-quality image was received, which may be the first electric television image transmission. In December Farnsworth was invited to appear before the FRC, which enhanced his credibility as a television expert. From the end of 1930 to the middle of the next year, Farnsworth received a great deal of public attention as the press told the tale of the young inventor, in which the accounts of his accomplishments were probably misunderstood and exaggerated. In May 1931, Sarnoff was made aware that The Farnsworth Television and Radio Corp. was for sale, at a moment when he was frustrated by the failure of Zworykin and Ogloblinsky to demonstrate a pickup tube with a two-sided target, along the lines that had been described by Campbell-Swinton. They abandoned this design turning their attention to the design that became the first viable camera tube, the Iconoscope, but at the moment they had no working pickup.

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Sarnoff, having received intriguing reports about the Image Dissector, visited Green Street in the middle of May 1931 where he also received a demonstration of Farnsworth’s cathode ray display tube, the Oscillite, which had a 200 line 15 fields per second image. The Oscillite produced images similar to that which Zworykin could demonstrate at about the same time at the RCA lab in New Jersey, but with a disappointingly dim image (Jensen 1954). The 24-year-old Farnsworth, who ought to have been in the meeting, was in Philadelphia negotiating the sale of his company to the largest manufacturer of radio sets in America, Philco Radio Corp. The company was founded in 1892 as the Helios Electric Company and renamed the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company. With the advent of broadcast radio it began to manufacture consumer receivers. Sarnoff met with Everson and offered to buy Farnsworth’s firm for $100,000, a substantial offer in the depression year of 1931, which inflation adjusted is about $1.5 million in today’s money. He also offered to employ Farnsworth in the RCA lab, but Farnsworth declined, for he was temperamentally unsuited to working in an organization like RCA, as he would learn at Philco. After having been turned down, Sarnoff is said to have commented that it didn’t matter since he had seen nothing that RCA could use, television history’s version of the fable of The Fox and the Grapes. Philco, realizing that Farnsworth’s all-electronic television technology was a potential alternative to RCA’s technology, offered to set him up in his own lab in Philadelphia, with the retention of the ownership of his patents, making him an advance against future royalties of any patents they would license. But after coming on board, Philco and Farnsworth were unable to establish a functional working relationship. The Philco culture was an anathema to Farnsworth’s style, and they parted company in the summer of 1933, after which Fig. 73.6  Farnsworth’s USP 2,087,683, filed April 26, 1933, Image Dissector. This pickup tube is the first to use low velocity scanning electrons to increase image contrast, a principal that proved to be crucial for the development of advanced camera tubes. The lens, not shown, is to the right, its light passing through window 2. The focusing coil surround the tube is not shown in this drawing. Farnsworth refers to it as a solenoid.

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he returned to San Francisco and his original backers and a staff of two (Marshall 2011, p. 268). Before he left Philco, Farnsworth filed what turned out to be a disclosure that was crucial to the development of advanced electronic pickups. Although Farnsworth’s USP 2,087,683, filed April 26, 1933, is titled Image Dissector, it uses different technology from the previously described ‘980, and is the first storage-­ type camera tube patent to teach the concept of low-velocity scanning electrons. In an evacuated tube image forming light passes through an optical glass window past an adjacent finger-­like anode structure that houses a hot scanning cathode electron gun located behind an aperture. The lens’s light is focused on a screen at the end of the tube facing the anode finger. The screen’s surface is made up of “small discrete, insulating areas or islands of photoelectrically emissive material.” The sensitivity of the screen or plate is enhanced since the islands are continually exposed to image forming light. The beam from the cathode is steered to scan the plate, on which it is “electrically focused” to form a small spot. “The potentials within the device are so adjusted that the cathode ray stream is decelerated as it approaches the plate, the velocity of the electrons actually reaching the plate being extremely small.” The islands of photosensitive material emit electrons due to the light falling on them. The focused beam of cathode rays provides a constant rate of electrons for replenishing the islands’ lost charge. The beam is focused by a “solenoid” surrounding the tube. The cathode supplied electrons unabsorbed by the screen are reflected from its surface and return to the anode to which they are attracted. They represent the photoelectric emission of the islands and are measured by the change in anode current to produce the video signal. The point of scanning at low velocity is to preclude the cathode ray beam from causing the ejection of extraneous or

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secondary electrons from the plate’s surface producing no useful image signal, which would instead reduce image contrast, an artifact called shading. Apparently Farnsworth never built the tube, but it uses principles that were important in later successful pickup designs. Low velocity scanning was used for improved versions of the Iconoscope and the Emitron, to be described in the next chapter. Farnsworth neither made a lowvelocity scanning pickup like that described in his ‘683 nor one that used the principal of charge storage, like Zworykin’s Iconoscope that was announced in June 1933. Farnsworth’s dedication to the original Image Dissector crippled his ability to create a pickup that was a general solution for television image capture. The Image Dissector outputted a high-quality image when it was used in a telecine, but even on a bright sunny day, it was not sufficiently sensitive. Successful electronic pickups, like the Iconoscope, were based on the principal of charge storage, with the charge points (micro-capacitors) representing image points that were exposed to light during an entire video field. The Iconoscope’s cathode ray beam scanned tens of thousands of picture elements, sweeping across one at a time, but each held the charge accumulated during a field until it was impinged by the electron beam. The Image Dissector’s light sensitive surface sampled image points that had not accumulated charge during the interval in which a field was scanned. The Iconoscope’s light sensitive surface sampled image points that had accumulated charge during that interval. As a result the Image Dissector had far less sensitivity than the Iconoscope (Webb 2005, p.30). Farnsworth pursued what he called an electron multiplier to address the problem of his dissector’s inefficiency. This multipactor, filed February 21, 1938, Radio Frequency Multipactor Amplifier, was granted as USP 2,172,152. It was claimed to improve the dissector’s sensitivity by accelerating electrons using a radio frequency field to augment the impact they made when striking a target to release more photoelectrons (Halloran 1988, 1934). This amplification phenomenon was discovered by French physicist Camille Gutton in 1924 and applied by Farnsworth to his Image Dissector, but the ­multipactor, although it showed promise, was of limited usefulness since it proved to be unstable. Farnsworth made major contributions, as Abramson comments: “Farnsworth’s (low velocity scanning) patent was so powerful that it dominated the field. This was one of Farnsworth’s greatest triumphs.” (Jensen 1954) There were engineers at RCA who recognized that his concepts would play a central role in future camera tube design. They understood that Farnsworth had filed so many interesting television patents that interferences were likely to arise making it imperative for RCA to license his portfolio to safeguard its ability to manufacture and market their all-­electronic television system. In the early 1930s Farnsworth made licensing agreements with Philco, Baird Television Company Ltd., and Fernseh AG (a German company specializing in television, founded in 1929 by Bosch Magneto Company, Zeiss Ikon Optical Company, and Lowes Radio Company) (Marshall

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2011, p.  213, 276). AT&T came to the conclusion that its mechanical scanning television program was at a dead end and, on July 22, 1937, after 4 months of analysis of Farnsworth 150 patents, and signed a non-exclusive license with his company. RCA would fall in line. The rivalry between Farnsworth and RCA resulted in a well-known interference case, 64,027, involving a Zworykin pending application filed on December 29, 1923, Television System, in part describing a pickup, granted as USP 2,141,059 15 years later, and Farnsworth’s Image Dissector, whose application was filed January 7, 1927, and granted as USP 1,773,980. On July 22, 1935, the Examiner of Interference ruled that Farnsworth had priority. RCA’s patent attorneys had failed to persuade him that Farnsworth’s Image Dissector used the same technology as Zworykin’s pickup. This led to negotiations between Otto Schairer of RCA and E. A. Nicholas, formerly the head of licensing at RCA now representing The Farnsworth Television Corporation. In September 1939 an agreement was signed in which RCA agreed to a license paying The Farnsworth Television Corporation a million dollars upfront (more than $18 million inflation adjusted in today’s money) plus ongoing royalties, on a non-exclusive basis (Abramson 1987; Haupert 2006). Farnsworth remained active improving his system, licensing technology, and setting up a factory to build television receivers, but with the advent of the Second World War, its activity was diverted to the defense effort. After the war The Farnsworth Television and Radio Corp. experienced financial hardship and ceased operations. In 1949 it became a subsidiary of International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), and Farnsworth exited the field. Long suffering from poor health, he succumbed to pneumonia in January 1971 at the age of 65. I conclude this chapter on a personal note, and with a footnote from Abramson’s (1992) admirable SMPTE Journal article about Farnsworth. I lived in the Bay Area for almost four decades beginning in 1965, and because of Farnsworth’s connection with San Francisco, from time to time his life and work were featured by the local media. Without giving the matter much thought, I discounted these accounts believing them to be the ritual celebration of a local hero. I was wrong. Philo Taylor Farnsworth was one of the major inventors in the history of moving images and television despite RCA’s corporate propaganda effort, 90 years ago, to take credit for all-electronic television. Today the once mighty RCA exists only as a brand-for-hire, and both Farnsworth and Zworykin are forgotten by the public. The final footnote of Abramson’s SMPTE Journal article reads, in part: “(RCA engineers) regretted the treatment that Farnsworth received at the hands of the RCA patent and Publicity Depts....all of the engineering staff I interviewed, who worked on the Zworykin project from 1928 on, had nothing but the highest praise for Farnsworth and his work. They encouraged me to investigate his work and report on it objectively. This I believe I have done.”

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Zworykin

The most concerted and successful effort to develop broadcast television was made by the RCA television research lab on the top floor of the RCA Victor factory in Camden, New Jersey. At this time the company was firmly under the leadership of David Sarnoff, who fully supported lab director Vladimir Kosmich (Anglicized as Kosma) Zworykin (1889– 1982) and his efforts to create an all-electronic system. Zworykin, credited as the seminal inventor and research leader in the field, found his calling as a student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute working in the lab of his mentor Professor Boris L’vovich Rosing (also given a Rozing). Rosing was one of the first to use the Braun tube as an image display device for what he called electrical telescopy. His student Vladimir was born to a well-off family in Murom, a commercial center 150 hundred miles east of Moscow. Zworykin had originally entered the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute as a physics student, but his father, who ran a passenger ship line on the Oka River, a tributary of the Volga, decided the school was a hotbed of liberal values and had him transfer to the Imperial Institute of Technology in St. Petersburg, where as fate would have it, he met Rosing (Abramson 1995, p. 10). Zworykin remained in St. Petersburg for 6 years, three of them, between 1910 and 1912, were spent working in a cramped basement lab with Rosing. In 1907 Rosing put together a hybrid television system using an electro-mechanical (mirror-drum) pickup and an electronic (Braun tube) display, as described in the chapter Vision at a Distance. On May 9, 1911, while Zworykin was at St. Petersburg, Rosing made an entry in his notebook describing what he observed on his CRT’s screen as a “distinct image (that) was seen for the first time, consisting of four luminous bands,” which was the most successful transmission he would achieve (Stashower 2002). It was left to Rosing’s pupil to improve his teacher’s design and create the basis for the TV sets that were manufactured in the hundreds of millions. After graduation in 1912 Zworykin left Rosing’s lab and studied X-ray physics in Paris at the Collège de France, with physicist Paul Langevin, who introduced the concept of

e­lectron spin. With the outbreak of the First World War, Zworykin returned to Russia and was drafted to work in its Signal Corp, after which he worked for the Russian Marconi Company. With the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled to the United States on December 31, 1918 by obtaining a visa from an American official stationed with the Allied expedition that had landed in Archangel in September 1918. He traveled to the United States and then returned to Russia and back to the United States, where in 1920 he found work at the Westinghouse factory in East Pittsburgh. For 3 months he assembled vacuum tubes, a job whose bleak routine Zworykin recalled, almost drove him crazy. During his brief tenure at this job, he devised a test to greatly improve tube manufacturing throughput. He was injured in an accident in the plant, and to mollify him he was given the opportunity to work on high vacuum cathode ray tubes. In 1920 he left Westinghouse after a dispute but was rehired in March 1923, when the manager of the patent department informed the head of its research lab that they had let a talented man get away. With a 3-year contract and triple his previous salary, he was now ensconced in the research department where he began work on an all-electronic television system, intent on following up on Rosing’s use of the cathode ray tube as a display, and to develop it as a pickup (Magoun 2007). On December 29, 1923, Zworykin filed Television System, which 15 years later was granted as USP 2,141,059, on December 20, 1938, a disclosure that laid out the general outline of his efforts to create an all-electronic television system. Television System describes the display of a video image and the synchronization of a CRT to a pickup’s signals transmitted by radio. For reference purposes, a motion picture film pickup is briefly described based on a CRT flying-spot scanner.1 Zworykin’s display tube uses a cathode whose emitted electrons travel through a modulating grid and past

1  Marshall (2011, p. 215) credits von Ardenne as first to put the CRT flying-spot into practice, but at the time, its light output was not bright enough to be useful.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_74

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Fig. 74.1  A monument to Vladimir Kosmich Zworykin in Moscow at the Ostankino Television Center’s pond.

an accelerating anode; this beam is steered electrostatically by charged internal plates and deflected magnetically by external coils on its way to striking the transparent fluorescent screen in front of the faceplate. Zworykin understood that the problem of the CRT pickup design was even more difficult than that of the display tube. For the time being, only mechanical scanning was able to supply the images needed to demonstrate the display tube (Jensen 1954). The display tube needed improvement, and a trip to Paris to the Laboratoire des Établissements Édouard Belin, as we shall see, furthered Zworykin’s understanding. The RCA patent lawyers used Television System as the basis for an attempt to challenge the priority of Farnsworth’s Image Dissector, but as noted in the last chapter, the attempt failed. Westinghouse had a minority interest in RCA, the sales and marketing organization General Electric had setup to handle radio, and electronics patents at the behest of the US Navy. Westinghouse, which used RCA for electronics sales, would prove to be Zworykin’s gateway to RCA. While still at Westinghouse in 1924, Zworykin demonstrated the potential of an all-electronic television system by transmitting and displaying the images of a small cross and a pencil picked up by a camera with an electronic camera tube and displayed on a CRT screen. Zworykin said that he learned afterwards that H. P. Davis, general manager of Westinghouse, told the demonstration’s attendees to “put this guy to work on something useful.” (Burns 1998) Although there is some question about the date, Abramson (1981) writes: “…even a 1925 date gives Zworykin priority over every other inventor in the

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c­onstruction and operation of an electronic camera tube,” including Farnsworth. The camera pickup, made from a Western Electric oscillograph tube, used a two-sided target with the image formed by the lens focused on the target plate, which was scanned from its rear by an electron beam. The two-sided pickup target followed the suggestion of Campbell-Swinton, which after considerable development and the license of Farnsworth technology, became the basis for the pickup tubes that supplanted the first successful pickup, the Iconoscope/Emitron. In 1926, Zworykin received his Doctor of Philosophy in Physics from the University of Pittsburgh. After returning from a trip to Europe, having been impressed by the demonstrations he saw at RCA-associated laboratories, Sarnoff told Zworykin that he would profit from such a visit. As a result, in November 1928, Zworykin visited England, France, and Germany to become acquainted with the continent’s latest electronic television and fax developments. In France, following the recommendation of a colleague he had met before the start of the First World War, he visited Laboratoire des Établissements Édouard Belin, where they had been working on television since 1903 and had considerable expertise designing CRTs. They had mastered the art of impinging the phosphor screen with a sharply focused electron beam to create the small spot required for a sharp image. To properly focus the beam Belin used electrostatic fields that were produced by charged plates located within the tube’s glass envelope. Making changes to their design required building a new tube, which is why the use of magnetic fields had been common for steering the beam; electromagnets could be placed outside the tube’s neck so that changes to the parts could be made without having to build another tube. The design of CRTs was, to a large extent, cut and try, because of the absence of theoretical understanding and the ability to perform mathematical analysis; the physics of magnetic and electric field focusing and deflection, called electron optics, turns out to be directly analogous to the optics of lenses; but at the moment that Zworykin visited Belin at the end of 1928, the theory of electron optics was in its infancy. Zworykin recognized the superiority of what the French had accomplished, in particular the design of F. Holweck and P. E. L. Chevallier. On Christmas Eve, 1928, he arrived in America with one of their cathode ray tubes (Magoun 2007). In an historic and pivotal meeting that took place early in January 1929, lacking Westinghouse’s permission to move forward, Zworykin explained to Sarnoff his concept for an allelectronic television, telling him that for $100,000 and in 2 years he’d have a lab demonstration.2 It probably didn’t hurt that the two men were Russian émigrés with a common ances2  Marshall (2011, p.  215) suspects the account is apocryphal and c­ omments that the project must cost more nearly $50 million dollars, which is nearly a billion dollars today.

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Fig. 74.2  Zworykin’s 1923 concept for an all-electronic Television System. Fig. 3 is a diagram of a CRT flying-spot motion picture film scanner as a source for the receiver and its CRT display, shown at the bottom of Fig. 2.

try; Sarnoff approved the investment, which was begun while Zworykin was still at Westinghouse, and arranged for the transfer of Zworykin and his staff to the RCA Victor plant in Camden, New Jersey. Zworykin was now running an R&D operation with a staff of 45 researchers solely focused on developing all-electronic television (Weber 2018); the operations of the RCA lab were managed by Elmer W. Engstrom. The intuitive, aggressive, and not formally educated Sarnoff understood that mechanical television systems would never become commercially viable and saw the electronic solution as a way to follow up on the public’s growing acceptance of radio, which had become a lucrative industry, abetted substantially by his vigorous support of the RCA-owned NBC radio networks. Sarnoff, in the late 1920s with the first CEO of RCA, Owen D. Young, had been one of the people who figured out how to turn radio broadcasting into a business, and he was determined to do the same for television. He became the president of RCA in 1930, strengthened the company as a research and ­development organization, and turned it into a successful manufacturing and sales entity independent of General Electric and Westinghouse. In 1933 these companies’ control of RCA ended, and Sarnoff assumed the helm of RCA ­without their supervision; this coincided with a consent decree issued by the

Justice Department allowing other potential ­manufactures of radio equipment to enter the field (Webb 2005, p. 48). Zworykin’s trip to Europe led to new design insights and the building of his new tube, which by April 1929 was operational. He improved upon the Belin tube, in part by changing the arrangement of the deflection plates and adding a silver metallic anode coating on the inside of the funnel-­shaped portion of it, which collected and drained the electrons that impacted the green phosphor that coated the inside of the faceplate. Draining the electrons prevented the charge buildup that reduced the brightness of Farnsworth’s Oscillite. A clear, bright and sharp image was seen on the new Kinescope tube’s screen even in daylight, and it was going to be relatively inexpensive to manufacture. By the summer, in his home, using a Westinghouse-built receiver with a 6 inch tube, Zworykin watched 60-line 12 field per second film loops broadcast by radio station KDKA that lasted for 1 hour beginning at 2:00  AM, 3 days a week. Abramson (1987) believes that this is likely the first instance of the reception of broadcast television using a TV set without any moving parts. Like many other great inventors and their inventions, as with Edison and the Kinetograph, Zworykin borrowed ideas from wherever he could to create a working design but, unlike Edison, Zworykin, was a truthful man who would not

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fabricate dates to help RCA win its intellectual property disputes. The Belin lab was only one such source of inspiration, and in the 8 years before the Kinescope patent issued RCA patent lawyers were busy buying up the rights to related inventions to head off infringement law suits. Zworykin presented a talk about, but did not demonstrate, his Kinescope to the Institute of Radio Engineers in Rochester, New  York, on November 18, 1929. The Kinescope3 was one of the earliest high vacuum cathode ray tubes, and according to Abramson (1981), this was the first use of electron optics to design a display tube, which greatly contributed to its performance. Zworykin claimed that he had improved the cathode ray picture tube in a number of ways in order to produce a well-defined spot whose intensity could be readily varied (to produce a grayscale) across the entire phosphor coating on the inside of the tube’s faceplate. The Kinescope operated at the thousands of volts required without needing repeated pumping to maintain its high vacuum, it had improved compact electrodes, the deflection of the beam did not change the quality of the image, and it used a system of two-stage deflection, of low and then high voltage, with the deflection occurring between the two. Unlike some prior devices, there was no gas within the envelope, and the second accelerating stage was a metal coating on the inside of the tube that served as the anode. Horizontal deflection was magnetic and vertical deflection was electrostatic, and these were external to the tube. And unlike some prior devices whose picture was red, the Kinescope’s image was green and sufficiently bright to be seen in a well-lit room, and large enough to be seen by several people at the same time (Abramson 1987, pp. 141–145). Since Zworykin did not have an electronic pickup for live action at this time, the video source was a film scanner designed by Westinghouse’s Frank Conrad that was first demonstrated on August 8, 1928. It used a continuous drive 35 mm projector whose film was mechanically scanned with a 60-hole Nipkow disk to produce a 60-line picture at 12 images per second. Light from the film passed through the disk’s spinning apertures to impinge on a cesium photocell to generate the video signal. Abramson (2003) writes that in 1929, in order to demonstrate his Kinescope, Zworykin also used a film scanner of his own design that used a moving mirror scanning system. Zworykin’s disclosure of his Kinescope design was filed on November 16, 1929, and granted as Vacuum Tube, USP 2,109,245, on February 22, 1938. It was the antecedent of the tube used in television sets and computer monitors until it was replaced by the flat panel display, a transition that began in the last years of the twentieth century. In the context of the TV set, the Kinescope was usually called a cathode ray tube, and Kinescope was also used to describe the motion picture made by filming the face of a CRT. 3 

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Hamburg-born researcher Manfred von Ardenne (1907– 1997), about a half a year before Zworykin, demonstrated a tube similar to the Kinescope in Berlin, according to CRT historian Peter A. Keller (1991). Zworykin and von Ardenne met and found their approaches had much in common and continued to independently invent similar devices sometimes only a few weeks apart. Von Ardenne’s demonstrations used a cathode ray tube pickup rather than a mechanical disk scanning telecine. Von Ardenne invented the scanning electron microscope in 1937, and at the end of the Second World War relocated to the Soviet Union where he received the Stalin Prize in 1947 for his contributions to the USSR’s atomic bomb project (Hydrick 2016). French inventor Pierre Emil Louis Chevalier had also worked on the CRT display tube, in particular with regard to improving image brightness by electrostatic focusing and beam acceleration. Sarnoff deemed Chevalier’s patent to be important enough to buy it (Webb 2005, p. 49). Zworykin’s Kinescope uses a heated cathode to produce the electron beam that was initially shaped and accelerated by magnetic field deflection as it moved down the neck of the tube. Expanding on the above explanation, the beam is accelerated by the electric field produced by anodes located just before the tube assumes its funnel shape. Both the magnetic and electrostatic deflection plates are external. The anodes’ varying electric field focuses the beam to a small spot as it scans the raster on the tube’s phosphor-­coated faceplate. Another anode, in the form of a silver coating applied to the inner surface of the tube’s funnel-­shaped section, enhances the beam’s acceleration and serves to collect the reflected electrons that wrote the image. The Kinescope, by the end of 1933, differed in detail from the one described here and in Zworykin’s patent filed in 1929. Electron optics were used to calculate how to sharply focus the beam on the phosphor screen, whose magnetic deflection plates and fields were the analog of glass lens optics made up of four elements of different curvatures and indices of refraction, in three groups, one of which was a focusing doublet made up of cemented negative and positive elements. The high vacuum tube was 19 inches long with a faceplate 9 inches in diameter, displaying 120 lines per frame at 24 fps (Jensen 1954). As the electron beam scans the raster in sync with the pickup’s raster, the line-by-line image structure of the video signal is built up as the beam varies its intensity to mimic the brightness of each point of the picture transmitted by the pickup. Each line of the image is created by the beam horizontally sweeping across the phosphor screen, and each image field is made up of a collection of scanned lines to complete the raster. Each video field is scanned from top to bottom in a fraction of a second with successive fields ­making up the images required to create apparent motion. The illusion of motion is produced by the same apparent motion mechanism as that of the celluloid cinema: the eye

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Fig. 74.3 Zworykin’s Kinescope USP cover sheet. Top: the overall design of the tube. Bottom: a detail of the electron gun.

cannot discern the difference between a sufficient number of incrementally different rapidly presented images and real motion, as described in the chapter A Persistent Myth. Zworykin’s Vacuum Tube patent cited above contains a frank admission: “I am not, at this time, prepared to state exactly how the high positive potential applied to the metallic coating (on the inside of the funnel) functions to assist in focusing the cathode-­ray to a well-defined spot….” An inventor does not need to know how an invention works, and even if his explanation is incorrect, the invention remains valid as disclosed. Celluloid cinema’s Kinetograph camera was invented by Edison in anticipation of the Kinetoscope display, but television’s Kinescope display tube was invented before Zworykin’s Iconoscope camera. On Thursday July 30, 1931, Zworykin’s birthday, he and his colleagues Randall C. Ballard, Sanford Essig, Les Flory, Harley Iams, Gregory N.  Ogloblinsky (who had been recruited from Belin), and

Arthur Vance, completed the design for the breakthrough Iconoscope television pickup tube, the second major cathode ray tube-based invention that made broadcast television possible. Still lacking a working Iconoscope tube, in 1931 and 1932, Zworykin and his team put together a television system using mechanical scanning for the pickup and the Kinescope for display so that RCA could demonstrate the transmission of television images to a group of licensees and manufacturers’ representatives, from which the press was excluded, on May 17, 1932. Sarnoff, stationed at RCA’s Empire State Building transmitter, which had been ­operational since March, addressed the attendees who were located a little more than a half a mile away at 153 East 24th Street. The picture and sound were broadcast on separate frequencies. The live images were created using a Nipkow disk flying-­spot scanner, with other moving images originating from 35 mm film that was similarly mechanically scanned. The 120 line images were broadcast at 24 fps and displayed

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on a 5 inch Kinetoscope. Although the images were described as being “fairly clean,” Abramson (1987) tells us that the filmed content was reported to be of higher quality than the live transmission. When Zworykin’s Iconoscope finally arrived it was the world’s first all-electronic pickup having the required image quality to meet the needs of a broadcast service. It was introduced at the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) Convention at the World’s Fair in Chicago, on June 26, 1933. The Iconoscope’s electron beam scanned the photocathode’s sensitive target surface from the same side on which the image was formed by the camera lens. Later pickups, like the Image Orthicon, had the image on one side of the target plate with an electron beam scanning the other side, following Campbell-Swinton’s proposed configuration. These smaller Orthicon tubes had improved sensitivity and image quality, but they were not on the civilian market until after the Second World War. Zworykin’s first design attempts were based on this dual-sided target layout with the lens’s light passing through the tube’s faceplate, forming an image on one side of the target and the target’s inward face (or that of a surrogate), scanned by the electron gun’s beam. Neither RCA nor EMI, in England could make this straightforward design work for their initial efforts.4 Zworykin and his RCA team based the Iconoscope on the concept of Hungarian engineer Kálmán (Kolomon) Tihanyi (1897–1947), which was based on a single-sided target configuration in which the target plate is scanned by the electron beam on the same side as the image formed by the camera’s lens. Although the RCA team at first felt it was a counterintuitive design concept, they made it work, and it continued to be used for broadcast television for many years. In 1977 Abramson interviewed Tihanyi’s daughter Katrina Glass, at the time living in Los Angeles, who was firm in her belief that her father had been cheated out of the credit for his invention. Abramson (1987) comments: “Again, I was faced with the fact that many inventors had the ‘ideas’ that were so necessary to build a practical camera tube, but only one man, Zworykin, actually built and operated tubes of this type when almost all of the ‘experts’…claimed that such a tube could never work. Zworykin’s faith in his ability to perfect an electric television system was his strength. With a superb technical staff he simply went ahead and made the system work.” Tihanyi’s daughter’s complaint is one that resonates with those who sympathize with a creator, especially one who has been denied recognition, but each case needs to be evaluated on its merit. In addition to Farnsworth and Zworykin, other inventors were working on creating an electronic television camera, including Kálmán Tihanyi in Hungary, Franscois Charles Pierre P. Henrouteau in Canada, George J. Blake and Henry D. Spoor in England, Riccardo Bruno in England, S. I. Kataev in Russia, and Kenjiro Takayanagi in Japan (Webb 2005, p. 31). 4 

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The Iconoscope is described in USP 2,021,907, Method of and Apparatus for Producing Images of Objects, filed November 13, 1931, by V. K. Zworykin. For the next 7 years, Zworykin and his associates would be occupied with their effort to improve the device’s performance. It uses a target plate made of a mica sheet a few millimeters thick, one side having a mosaic of photosensitive silver globules. Each minute globule is capable of holding a charge, and each globule is isolated from the others by insulating material so it cannot migrate from one globule to another. The other side of the target, called the signal plate, has a sputtered-on thin metallic coating. The photoelectric globules on the target plate side and the metal coating on the signal plate side form micro-­ capacitors. The image focused by the camera’s lens on the target plate’s globules causes them to emit electrons that are collected by a positively charged electrode. The emitted photoelectrons result in the positive charge of the globules with respect to the signal plate side of the target plate, and in this way charge is stored by the globules creating a mosaic of charge representing the image. The charge is accumulated for the duration of a field, until it is discharged by the scanning beam, as light continues to be focused on the globules. It is this continual exposure to light that permits charge to be gathered and stored increasing the tube’s sensitivity to light, and is one of its most important features. The target plate mosaic is scanned by the focused electron beam emitted from the cathode, which is steered by two sets of magnetic coils in the two directions required to create the raster. The beam’s scanning spot covers a number of globules discharging them thus creating a current flowing through the signal plate that become the video signal. RCA engineer Sanford Essig accidentally discovered the method for making the mosaic target plate into mini-­ capacitors after having left a silvered mica sheet in an oven longer than intended. Under the microscope it was revealed that exceedingly small silver globules resulted from the baking process. Each globule of this array had the ability to store charge, which tests revealed significantly increased image sharpness (Magoun 2007). While the image forming lens’s axis is at a right angle to the target plate’s surface, since the Iconoscope’s electron beam also scans the target plate side, the electron gun’s axis must depart from orthogonality, which would result in the scanned image being trapezoidally distorted. However, a geometric compensation can be made electronically by adjusting the length of the scan lines, thus making it possible to scan the target plate surface at an angle but avoiding distortion. An improved version of the Image Iconoscope became RCA’s standard pickup from the mid-­ 1930s until it was superseded by the Image Orthicon design a few years after the end of the Second World War. Zworykin describes the nonhomogeneous structure of the image capture-charge surface as follows: “Preferably the photoelectric material is potassium hydride, deposited in

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Fig. 74.4  The Iconoscope pickup tube’s patent cover sheet. The camera lens is at the top right. 16 (highlighted) designates the scanning electron beam.

such a manner that it is in the form of small globules, each separated from its neighbor and insulated therefrom by ­aluminum oxide.” He is describing a photocathode that is a mosaic made up of micro-capacitors to hold charge, but RCA’s lawyers had a problem: the patent does not specifically state that the globules hold charge. The filing was revised and dived into two parts in an attempt to clarify and extend the coverage of its claims to charge storage. In 1938 the courts upheld Zworykin’s patent position, but the details of this and many similar conflicts in the field are beyond the scope of this book. The matter of worldwide conflicting intellectual property rights, when RCA was attempting to create an all-electronic television broadcast service, had to be resolved in order to create a stable business. RCA collected a portfolio of thousands of patents by buying or licensing their rights and by dint of its in-house efforts. As noted, RCA licensed the patent rights to Farnsworth’s inventions on a non-exclusive basis, as well as the original design for the Iconoscope devised by Tihanyi, whose patent covering the invention had been filed in Hungary in 1926. RCA’s television efforts had a counterpart in the United Kingdom, EMI (Electric & Musical Industries Ltd.), which from its formation in 1931 engaged in a development effort that, although beginning later than those of Westinghouse-­ GE/RCA, resulted in the creation of the world’s first all-­

electronic television broadcast service. In this it was materially aided by basing their efforts on RCA’s designs for the Kinescope and Iconoscope. EMI was a merger of the British division of the American Columbia Graphophone Manufacturing Company and the British Gramophone Company Ltd. In America RCA Victor was created on January 1, 1930, when RCA purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company, which wholly owned Columbia Graphophone (Radio, 1929, November 2). (RCA Victor manufactured and marketed the radio products of RCA, Victor, General Electric, and Westinghouse.) Thus RCA acquired EMI stock through Victor’s ownership of Columbia Graphophone and the British merger, and as a consequence David Sarnoff, president of RCA, sat on EMI’s board. EMI was aware of what RCA was attempting with all-electronic television, not only from issued patents and published papers but from a visit to RCA in April 1930. As a result of what had been observed during the visit, EMI decided that it would attempt to develop a 150-line electronic scanning system based on a display, or receiving tube, as they called it, and that experimental work would go forward using a cathode ray tube or as they (and others) called it an oscillograph (Burns 1998). The development effort was directed by engineer Isaac Shoenberg (1880–1963), who, like Zworykin and Sarnoff, had been born in Russia. He was neither an inventor like

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Zworykin nor a business manager like Sarnoff; rather he was something of both, an experienced and gifted engineering project manager, visionary, and an expert in obtaining patent protection. In 1914 he worked for Marconi in Russia and for the Russian Wireless and Telegraph Company. After immigrating to the United Kingdom, he was admitted to the Royal College of Science and worked toward a degree in higher mathematics. The outbreak of the First World War led to employment at the Marconi Wireless and Telegraph Company where he became joint head of their patent department. His next job was with the Columbia Graphophone Company, and after the merger of that company with EMI, Shoenberg assumed control of the EMI television project in the winter of 1931. He decided to abandon the ongoing electro-­mechanical scanning effort and turned his group’s attention to electronic scanning, but he put a moratorium on pickup tube development thinking it would be best to concentrate solely on display tubes, a position he was to modify. Because of the Great Depression, Shoenberg had no trouble attracting an outstanding staff of talented scientists and engineers who were looking for work. By 1934 the EMI effort was staffed with more than 100 people including scientists, engineers, research assistants, glass blowers, draftsmen, mechanics, and so on, with nine of the hires being PhDs. Shoenberg had been able to persuade the EMI Board to invest £100,000 a year on the project, a decision which may have been influenced by the broadcasting tests Baird was performing in cooperation with the BBC. Burns (1998) relates that EMI, in a report dated April 15, 1932, recognized that the following technology needed to be developed: broadcast transmitters, film scanning equipment, scanning circuits, and cathode ray tubes for displaying and capturing images. EMI’s report was not simply a list of what it needed to create a commercially viable all-­electronic system, it was also an analysis of the path that EMI perceived RCA was taking and offered suggestions for improving on their efforts, which indicated that EMI knew a great deal about RCA’s program. Another report focused more on understanding the missing bits of basic science, which was authored by James Dwyer McGee (1903–1987), born in New South Wales, Australia, who had been a student at Cavendish laboratory engaged in nuclear research under Lord Rutherford and Sir James Chadwick. Economic conditions were so bad that even with the recommendations of two of the most distinguished physicists in the world, McGee couldn’t find a job until one was offered to him by EMI, which Chadwick urged him to take. McGee joined the company at the beginning of 1932. McGee’s report set out to describe a number of areas in which the lack of theoretical understanding stood in the way of television’s development. To summarize his report:

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Fig. 74.5  Sir Isaac Shoenberg

Although Planck and Einstein established the basis for understanding photoelectricity, there was no working model for the physics of photosensitive materials. Solid-state ­physics was required to explain the behavior of phosphors for display tubes, but the subject was undeveloped. The ability to make hard or high vacuum glass tubes was in such a primitive state that their dangerous explosions were the source of gallows humor. The subject of electron optics, required for cathode ray tube design, had yet to be fully worked out, or as McGee put it: “Only with the publication in 1932 of the classic paper by Knoll and Ruska did we realize the complete analogy between light-optics and electronoptics.” Secondary electron emission, an important phenomenon that had to be addressed for the design of pickup tubes, was not understood. And finally, on a practical hardware level, the performance of radio communication equipment, amplifiers, power supplies, scanning circuits, and transmitters was in a relatively embryonic state. McGee and EMI were not alone in needing to have a theoretical underpinning for their work for it to make the required advances, so did Farnsworth, Zworykin, and every inventor working on all-electronic television. With regard to the ­non-­trivial problem of broadcast transmitters, EMI had no experience with them and sought the help of Marconi (Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, MWTCo). It’s ­possible they were selected over the British Metropolitan

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Vickers Ltd., a company that also had the ability to make high-power radio transmitters, because Marconi had demonstrated in interest in television with its own mechanical scanning program, which while derivative was competent. EMI first planned to buy the transmitters from Marconi, but in the end Shoenberg led an effort to form a venture with Marconi to build them. In 1934 the Marconi-EMI Telegraph Co. Ltd. was formed with Shoenberg as its director of research. Ignoring Shoenberg’s stricture with regard to pickup tube development, McGee went ahead designing a double-sided target pickup, which was patented in 1933, but like RCA, EMI was unable to get it to work. There were other EMI attempts to design this kind of a tube by English electronics engineer Alan Dower Blumlein (1903–1942), holder of 128 patents, who is credited as the inventor of stereophonic sound. Burns (1998) writes: “In the United Kingdom the 1933 news of Zworykin’s iconscope (sp) seems to have been received with some eagerness by McGee and Tedham at EMI… Now with Zworykin’s ‘momentous step forward,’ McGee and Tedham were to take up this aspect of their work.” The EMI lab switched its approach away from the double-sided pickup and followed Zworykin’s lead, with the Emitron resulting from their efforts. As Marshall (2011, p.  259) put it, it is virtually certain that RCA passed information about the design of the iconoscope to Marconi-EMI. Zworykin (The David Sarnoff Library 1971), reporting on a 1934 trip to Europe wrote: “In England, television was largely concentrated in two rival concerns, Electric and Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI) and Baird Television Limited (BTL, formed from Television Ltd. and the Baird Television Development Company Ltd.), both of which were building a complete television system for the Government Post Office (in effect the BBC). EMI was building a television system for 240 lines with 25 pictures per second. The general system was very similar to ours, in fact it was almost an exact copy. The picture also compared favorably with our own.” EMI and RCA pooled television patents, to their mutual benefit, with EMI telling RCA about their findings leading to improvement of the Emitron/Iconoscope. It made business sense for the companies to cooperate to further the creation of a viable system, or at least there seems to have been no fear of a conflict since they were in broadcast television markets separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Sarnoff visited EMI as part of a 10-week trip to Europe, and by the time he returned in October 1935, he acceded to Shoenberg’s desire to be entirely independent of American influence by selling RCA’s interest in EMI for $10,225,917. The reason for this divestment is that tension had been mounting between Baird Television and Marconi-EMI, who were competitors for the BBC’s acceptance of their systems as the basis for a broadcast service. Baird had

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Fig. 74.6  A Super-Emitron tube. (tvcameramuseum.org)

asserted, to a sympathetic public, that it would be against British national interests for Marconi-EMI to prevail since it was offering up an American-controlled technology. With RCA’s divestment of financial interest in EMI, the argument lost its bite (Abramson 2008). Forgotten in Baird’s public relations onslaught was that he had teamed up with the American Farnsworth. Assertions that the Marconi-­EMI television system was independently developed run through Burn’s (1998) otherwise evenhanded account of the British effort, but Marconi-EMI and RCA cooperated. However, the extent to which they did is hard to access, but there is no doubt that the camera pickup and the display tube were invented by Zworykin.5 The major players in the pivotal British television competition were Baird and MarconiEMI, but their technologies were unevenly matched and championed by organizations of unequal strength. EMI engineers discovered that the Emitron/Iconoscope lost sensitivity because some electrons released by the mosaic were attracted back to it. These secondary electrons, impinging on the mosaic’s photosensitive globules, were seen by the target as a spurious signal that produced shading or background noise that lowered image contrast. Hans Gerhard Lubszynsky and Sidney Rodda, in B.P. 442,666, filed May 12, 1934, and USP 2,244,466, Television, filed May 4, 1935, describe how they improved the Emitron with a modification to its design that made it at least an order of magnitude more sensitive. They added a dual target structure in which low-velocity photoelectrons are attracted to a secondary target anode that is scanned by the electron beam. The new pickup, the Super-Emitron, was used for the first all-electronic BBC TV broadcast in 1937. It was the mainstay of British broadcasting for many years, just as the According to Marshall the EMI-Marconi, records are sealed.

5 

662

Image Iconoscope, an improved version of the Iconoscope was used for the first years of RCA’s broadcast efforts in America. The Image Iconoscope was ready in 1934 “partly from a collaboration with engineers from Telefunken, RCA’s German licensee” (Nebeker 2009). From 1934 to 1938, other organizations made their own versions of the Iconoscope, according to Marshall (2011, p.  258). These include Philco (USA, 1934); SAFAR (Società Anonima Fabbricazione Apparecchi Radiofonicic) (Italy, 1934);

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Leningrad Institute Telemechanics (USSR, 1934)6; Philips (The Netherlands, 1936); Telefunken AG (Germany, 1936 or possibly earlier)7; Hamamatsu Higher Technical College (Japan, 1937?); and BTL (Britain, 1938). 6  In 1937 RCA, with the concurrence of the American government, sold technology and hardware to the USSR, worth about $10 million (Marshall 2011, p.p. 38, 39). 7  Telefunken and Fernseh licensed the Iconoscope from RCA to further Nazi propaganda efforts (Marshall 2011, p. 290).

Broadcasting Begins

The BBC had the urgent need to get a high definition television service up and running; they were motivated by the fast approaching December 31, 1936, expiration of their original radio charter. If they began a regular television service before that date, they hoped to establish a precedent allowing them to continue broadcasting television in addition to their regular radio service, as a part of the renewal of their charter (Marshall 2011, p.  312). High definition in the mid-1930s was deemed to be a system with hundreds of lines, far more than the scant tens of lines offered by mechanical television. And so the BBC mandated a competition between Baird and Marconi-Emi to determine who might best supply them with a broadcast system. From the outset Marconi-EMI was the obvious choice, not simply because of the promise of the quality of the images an all-electronic system afforded, but in addition it was a company with substantial financial resources and a remarkably accomplished staff of researchers. On the other hand, Baird’s outfit appeared to be a oneman band of comparatively limited technical depth and resources promoting an outmoded technology. The BBC was probably counting on the competition between the two to lessen the embarrassment of telling the disappointing truth to Baird and his colleagues, with whom they had been cooperating for 6  years. Moreover, Baird had the backing of the press, and the appearance of an evenhanded selection process was beneficial for public perception; in fact, it was an imperative as far as a publically chartered company was concerned. So with nothing to lose, and everything to gain, the BBC mandated a two company competition to objectively determine which of the two systems they would choose for the world’s first broadcast television service. Specified as high definition, no directive was made as to the technology to be employed, be it mechanical or all-­ electronic, but the images had to be of very much better image quality than Baird had heretofore been able to transmit. The BBC’s 30-line 12½ frames per second service, using Baird’s mechanical scanning system, was suspended on September 25, 1935. The 6  years of Baird Television Limited (BTL) and the BBC working together had ended,

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and the 10,000 or so Baird Televisor Nipkow-disk TV sets would never again receive a signal. Marconi-EMI set up their hardware at what had been dubbed the London Television Service, for the trial in an atmosphere of open hostility rife with charges of sabotage; on November 2, 1936, the competition began with Baird transmitting first as the result of a coin toss. At 3:30 PM, speeches by luminaries and a bit of entertainment were televised using the Baird system, followed by a repetition of the half-hour program broadcasted using the Marconi-EMI system (Abramson 2008). For 3 months the competition between the Baird Television Co.’s electro-­mechanical television system and the Marconi-EMI all-­ electronic television system carried on to determine which was most suitable. The competitors alternated broadcasting, each given a week, with transmissions originating from BBC’s studios in Alexandra Palace in North London. Three companies offered television sets that received signals using either transmission protocol, which for Baird’s was 25 frames per second with a 240-line progressively scanned picture using the motion picture frame’s 4:3 aspect ratio. EMI had used vertical scanning until 1933, but with the formation of the EMI-Marconi venture in 1934, a change was made to horizontal scanning with an aspect ratio of 5:4, at 50 fields per second with a twofold interlaced 405-line picture (Marshall 2011, p. 262). BTL’s high-power transmitter was provided by Metropolitan-Vickers of Manchester, but another crucial component, the Farnsworth electronic camera, did not perform as expected. At the beginning of 1936, Baird, apparently realizing the hopelessness of competing with mechanical scanning for live pickup, and had hoped to use a Farnsworth Image Dissector in the studio, for which BTL had purchased rights. The camera for the test was obtained through the German company Fernseh AG (fernsehen is the German word for television), which had affiliations with both Baird and Farnsworth, but it was useful only in “very bright weather,” giving images that were “quite poor,” compared with the EMI Emitron. Therefore the camera was not used for the competitive evaluation (Abramson 1992), and in

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_75

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its place, Baird used his spotlight or flying-spot scanner for title cards and studio head shots. The intermediate-film process was pressed into service, which produced 240 lines at 25 progressive frames per second. The flying-spot for live action was generated by a vacuum enclosed Nipkow disk having 4 spirals of 60 apertures each running at 6000 rpm. Each spiral was uncovered in succession by a secondary shutter disk operating at 15,000 rpm, and both disks’ motors were powered by three-phase 50 Hz AC. Their source of illumination was a 120-ampere arc whose heat required the scanner mechanism to be water cooled. For live pickup, four large photocells of the photomultiplier type were used to sense the light of the flying-spot reflected from the stage; their combined outputted signals were the source for the video transmitted. Broadcasting an even better quality image was hopefully achieved by using the intermediate-film process, probably influenced by Fernseh’s efforts in Germany. For image pickup and transmission BTL built a ciné camera to expose 17.5  mm film, with optical sound recorded single system (Marshall 2011, p.  269). The film was processed in 65-seconds, and while still wet was run through the water-filled gate of a projector that had been modified for continuous motion. This telecine used a Nipkow disk with 60 apertures arranged annularly near the circumference of the disk rotating at 6000 rpm. The continuous motion of the film provided the vertical motion of the frame required for scanning successive lines. A 60-ampere carbon arc illuminated the film whose line-by-­ line image passed through the disk’s rotating apertures, which was seen by a photomultiplier photocell and then amplified to create the video signal for broadcast. “In essence the 405 line system (Marconi-EMI’s all-­ electronic system) was RCA’s 343 line system adopted for use in a 50 c/s mains electrical environment,” according to Marshall (2011, p. 317). Marconi-EMI built six Super-­Emitron

Fig. 75.1  Farnsworth with his Image Dissector camera. This is probably the same kind of camera that Baird hoped to use for the BBC trial.

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cameras for the trial, four of which were used for live action and two for telecines that used 35 mm projectors. The Emitron cameras required longer focal length lenses than 35 mm ciné lenses since the pickup’s target was 4.75  in wide. (The Academy frame is .825 in wide.) The normal Emitron studio lens was a 6.5 in f/3.0 lens, while the 35 mm equivalent was typically a 2  in f/2.0 lens. For the TV set Marconi-EMI designed the Emiscope tube, based on Zworykin’s Kinescope. A movie studio-style boom-mounted moving coil microphone was used on-set, and a ribbon microphone was used for the orchestra. The Emitron cameras, like video cameras for the next few years, used optical viewfinders that were parallax corrected. (Before the advent of the zoom lens, a television studio camera might have a four-lens turret.) The Marconi-­ EMI system ran dependably and produced good images, but the Baird live action flying-spot scanner, in addition to being trouble prone, was clearly obsolete by the time of the trial. A fire at the BBC’s Crystal Palace destroyed Baird’s research facility on November 30, 1936, adding to his woes. As the BBC realized at the outset, live mechanical scanning and the intermediate-film process were inadequate for a broadcast service when compared to all-electronic television using live camera pickup, especially one that could display higher resolution images that did not flicker. After the trial period, it was obvious to one and all that all-electronic television, as implemented by Marconi-EMI, was the correct choice. Despite the failure of his efforts, Baird’s place in the history of television is assured, as the inventor’s biographer, Russell Burns (2000) wrote: “Sir Noel Ashbridge once remarked: ‘There is no doubt that the experiments of J L Baird accelerated serious and urgent consideration of the practical possibilities of a public television service.’” Bridgewater (1967) has written that he should be remembered, as a “kindly, courteous, sensitive and brave man—a man with a passionate faith in television’s destiny in the service of mankind....” But this is the kind of praise that is given as a consolation prize. Although electro-mechanical television was found to be inadequate for live broadcast, it used many of the same signal handling protocols required by an electronic system, like the requirements to synchronize the scanning of pickup and display devices, and the need for blanking between fields. Baird’s system, however crude it may seem today, paved the way for the world’s first television broadcasting service at the BBC (Burns 1998). Shoenberg’s Marconi-EMI effort had paid off. The BBC proceeded to initiate a quality high definition (for that time) service demonstrating that a dependable all-electronic broadcast television service was technically feasible. With the recommendation of the Television Committee, headed up by Lord Selsdon (the American equivalent of what would one day be called the Federal Radio Commission), and the approval of the United Kingdom’s general Post Office, under whose aegis the BBC operated, the world’s

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Fig. 75.2  The Baird system for the BBC competition. The schematic shows flying-spot scanning of live action at the upper left, below that disk scanning of continuously moving film. To the right is home reception.

Fig. 75.3  The Marconi-EMI Emitron camera, 1937. The taking lens is behind a matte box, and the parallax correcting viewfinder’s lens is clearly visible. (Virtual Museum of the Broadcast TV Camera)

first electronic television service, the London Television Station, using Marconi-EMI equipment and staff, began broadcasting from Alexandra Palace on VHF channel B1 beginning on February 8, 1937, from a tower some 306 feet above sea level overlooking London from its north end (Marshall 2011, p. 320). Unfortunately the tower was built on top of the broadcast station, which resulted in induction interfering with the operation of its equipment. At the time of the London Station’s official opening on November 6, 1936, only 400 TV sets had been produced each coasting as much as a small car.1 A wide variety of programs were broadcast to the few members of the public who owned TV receivers including the coronation of George VI on May 12, 1937, and Shoenberg had predicted that 5000 TV sets would be sold in Britain by 1936 (Marshall 2011, p. 299). 1 

tennis matches from Wimbledon in July of that year. American experts who came to evaluate the system, with minor carping, viewed what they saw favorably. At this time about 23,000 TV sets were in the hands of the British public at prices ranging between $300 and $800. These early adopters must have been frustrated when the service was abruptly suspended at noon on September 1, 1939, a step that was probably due to the exigencies of the war effort. Remarkably, the BBC’s television transmitter became part of the defense effort during the Battle of Britain, with its redeployment to emulate and effectively disable the German Luftwaffe’s highly effective directional beam navigation system, Y-Gerat, which had been used to guide its bombing of London (Abramson 2008). The BBC resumed television broadcasting at the end of the World War II with the 405-line service, which after some decades was deemed to be unable to meet the requirements of the growing size of TV receiver screens, and was supplanted in 1985 by a 625-line system. Broadcast television developments unfolded utterly differently in the United States where there were many competing players having different ideas about the specifications required for such a service. For here, there were many customers, broadcasters, and networks, not just a single government chartered corporation. In 1927 the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) had given permission for limited testing of broadcast television, and in 1928 C.  Francis Jenkins prompted the Radio Manufacturers of America (RMA) to petition the FRC to standardize on a 48-line 15 fps mechanical system. GE’s Ernst Alexanderson had also been advocating for a mechanical television service for several years. He held a press conference in January 1928 promoting the concept by demonstrating TV images using a less than 2 inch square screen to display people’s faces and cigarette smoke. (Farnsworth also liked to televise cigarette smoke.) The use

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of mechanical scanning for a television system also seemed like a practical proposition to Bell Telephone Laboratories’ Herbert E.  Ives, but the FRC was having none of it, and declined to make a ruling that would standardize a low definition service. Had it made one in favor of a low-resolution low sampling rate system, it might have set back commercial television efforts in America. In 1934 Congress reconstituted the FRC as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose members toured the facilities of RCA-GE, Philco, and Farnsworth Labs, only to declare that television was not ready to become a broadcast service. In addition to these companies, by the mid-1930s, Allen B.  Du Mont Laboratories, the Don Lee Broadcasting System, and the Zenith Radio Corporation were only some of the organizations attempting to commercialize television. In the United States, the adoption of broadcast television hinged on the activities of RCA, the leader of its development efforts. David Sarnoff had a lot on his plate in 1930, the year he became the president of RCA. The Justice Department had brought an antitrust suit against RCA, GE, and Westinghouse, as a result of which RCA became an independent corporation. Sarnoff had dreamed of being the boss of RCA and of expanding its scope before the breakup, and with that in mind, RCA had purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company, which it formally took over in December 1928 (Gomery 2005). This gave RCA a factory in Camden, New Jersey, as the basis for making and marketing its own consumer products in addition to those manufactured by GE and Westinghouse. The top floor of the RCA Victor Camden plant became the home of Sarnoff’s new Electronic Research Group headed up by Zworykin, which combined RCA engineers with those transferred from GE and Westinghouse. Sarnoff was now managing a major electronics corporation that also owned the National Broadcasting Company’s Red and Blue radio networks. The prior year, 1929, had also been an active one for Sarnoff as he created RKO Radio Pictures by buying and merging several entities to create a studio to exploit the well-designed GE variable area (or width) sound-­ on-­film system sold under the RCA brand. RCA created a good customer, in this case its own movie studio, to serve as a reference for its variable area Photophone optical sound system, which was late to the marketplace but worthy competition for Western Electric’s variable density system (Gitt 2007). (See chapter 36.) Although RCA had far-reaching prospects and significant assets, the organization had challenges during the Great Depression as it experienced falling revenue, causing Sarnoff to lay off many employees. The idea of television became increasingly important to him because he believe it was RCA’s growth opportunity, one that would expand its telecommunications empire by leveraging existing radio stations to thereby profit from the same commercial sponsorship business model. Sarnoff believed that what had worked for

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radio could be applied to the television system whose creation he was determined to guide and exploit. In 1930 NBC began America’s first experimental electronic TV broadcasts that were transmitted from the Empire State Building. Despite the fact that Sarnoff was in a hurry to turn television into a profit center, his plans were set back by Zworykin’s development hurdles, the need to satisfy the concerns of the government, trade groups’ diverse desires including those of his competitors, and the delay caused by the shift in priorities due to the Second World War. It’s also possible that any attempt to launch broadcast television during radio’s growth might have detracted from that effort. The introduction of television in America was also of greater difficulty than it had been in the United Kingdom because the United States was a vast territory in which broadcasting was a competitive business with many radio stations that would likely operate TV stations. In the United Kingdom there was one customer, the nationally controlled BBC, and Marconi-EMI had only one competitor, Baird Television Limited, whereas RCA had many corporate competitors who proposed standards of their own. In addition, the FRC and its FCC successor, were staffed by commissioners who knew little about technology and whose impartiality was blemished by the notorious revolving door in which the regulators and the regulated fluidly moved between government and industry, whose priorities were what was best for business rather than the public. The Washington environment was unlike the one in which Lord Selsdon’s Television Committee operated to ensure a public trust (Burns 1998). Whereas European governments played an active role in establishing television standards, in the United States, the attitude was one of laissez-faire free market capitalism – let ‘em fight it out, and that’s what happened, surprisingly to the benefit of the public. For several years a flood of proposals were made concerning line scanning, field rate, interlace, and other specifications for a television broadcast service, put forth by companies jostling for their share of the opportunity. In 1940 this led to President Roosevelt’s attempts to intervene by setting up a meeting between Sarnoff and the head of the FCC, Commissioner James Fly, but Sarnoff, as recounted by the Executive Director of the David Sarnoff Library, Alexander B. Magoun (2007), was so frustrated and aggrieved by delays that he turned Roosevelt down saying: “Mr. President … there’s no room for compromise.” From Sarnoff’s point of view, RCA had made an enormous investment in television technology, and those who opposed his will or had contrary opinions had no right to them because they had no standing. Sarnoff was publicly annoyed at the delays and was in turn vilified in an industry advertisement in which he was depicted as King Kong (appropriately a character from an RKO film) attempting to smash his ­competitors, the little guys. Sarnoff was under pressure from a board of directors who had approved about $10 million for

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television research (about a quarter of which went for patent activity). Though he was champing at the bit and annoyed at setbacks, the years of delay helped his technologists improve television, thus avoiding the fate of the pioneering British whose 405-scan line system that was replaced (after several decades) service with a better image. Surpassing their test broadcasts of 1930, RCA gave demonstrations of their new 343-line twofold interlaced 60 fields per second system at their Camden, New Jersey facility on April 24, 1936, and on June 29, 1936, they set up a trial broadcast from NBC’s Radio City studios using a transmitter 1250 feet above ground level from the Empire State Building’s dirigible mooring mast, a setup that cost RCA a reported $1 million. But a more demanding standard was recommended to the FCC by the Television Committee of the Radio Manufacturers of America, who preferred 440 or 450 lines at 30 frames per second (60 fields interlaced). On August 11, of the same year, Philco demonstrated a similar system to the press, and Farnsworth transmitted a 343-line 30-frame interlaced image using a sensitive and relatively compact camera. Farnsworth Television began broadcasting from its new studio in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, in May 1937. An improved version of RCA’s 343-line system was shown to their licensees on July 7, 1939 at Radio City, which was also seen on three TV sets in the area, soon to be increased to 100 receivers, having 7  in  ×  5  in green phosphor screens; these were located within a 45 mile line-of-sight of the Empire State Building transmitter (Abramson 2008). But this was far from the final word on broadcast television practices since proposals continued to be made by RCA and its competitors. For example, Philco proposed services of progressively scanned 441-­line 24 frames per second and interlaced 525-line 30 fields per second in 1937 and 1938. Practical television systems would not use progressive scanning, in which the entire frame is written in one field; rather the interlace system prevailed since it increased the effective number of lines in an image. In other words, it allowed for a better image within a given bandwidth. Brooklyn-born inventor and entrepreneur Allen Balcom Du Mont (1901–1965), who founded Du Mont Laboratories in the basement of his home, established The Du Mont Television Network in February 1938. He advanced the concept of fourfold (4:1) interlace, a 15-frame per second system that he and his colleagues believed to be superior in quality. Requiring half the bandwidth of a progressive transmission. Du Mont asserted that this system did not require synchronizing signals to maintain the scanning, relationship between transmission and reception (Abramson 1987). He also claimed his experiments verified that fourfold transmission could be used to reduce the field frequency to 30 per second with “detail corresponding to 567 lines with interlace scanning…” as reported in Electronics and Television & Shortwave World (A New Method of Television Transmission 1940, pp. 103, 104, 106). Du Mont stated that this approach required long persis-

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tent phosphor for the display tube, but this might have led to image smearing with motion. The industry consensus was that RCA’s version of twofold (2:1) interlace was preferable. Du Mont also promoted the concept of an open standard, one in which TV sets had the ability to display video signals broadcast using a wide range of scan lines and field rates based on a sweep circuit “which is always ready whenever a synchronizing pulse is required…,” a concept that could have led to upgrades in picture quality without having to change the video protocol. Although it was not accepted at the time, DuMont’s concept of an open protocol found favor with the FCC eight decades later when it was applied to a digital television broadcast service. Randall C. Ballard of RCA filed for a patent covering an interlace system, which he called skip line scanning, Television System, USP 2,152,234, filed July 19, 1932. This twofold interlace system became ubiquitous and was used by the American television industry, EMI, and worldwide. Similar approaches, also known by the terms intercalation or interdigitation, were filed on March 8, 1927, by M.  Latour, Improvements in the transmission of photographs or other images to a distance, BP 267,513; by Baird, filed October 15, 1927, Improvements in or relating to television or like systems, BP 289,307; and by Sanabria, Method and Means for Scanning, filed June 7, 1929, USP 1,805,848. Ballard’s system depends on having an odd line count, with the first scanned set of odd fields (1, 3, 5, etc.) followed by a second scanned set of even fields (2, 4, 6, etc.). This division of a frame into two parts (fields) by scanning and interleaving sets of lines is performed by both the camera tube and the television display tube. Together, the sets of odd and even lines create one image frame, whose perception as an integral image, is dependent upon the image retention of the eye-brain, even if they are scanned moments apart. In the United States and other countries using 60 Hz AC power, the television standard became 60 fields per second, each field comprising half a complete picture with an effective frame rate of 30 per second. In countries using 50  Hz  AC power, the TV image was made up of 50 fields or 25 complete frames per second. Scanning was not locked to the AC frequency, but rather chosen to be the same to avoid electrical interference that might show up as noise or patterns in the image. The arrangement of scanning two half frames, first the odd numbered lines then the even numbered, to form a complete image, is the electronic analog of the Pross interrupting shutter with this important difference: for intermittent motion picture projection, the Pross shutter interrupts each frame to double the effective repetition rate, but the repeated images are identical. For television interlace each field is half of a complete frame; because each field is captured at a different times, interline artifacts can sometimes be seen due to rapid action or vertical camera motion. The Pross and Ballard techniques can be considered to be information conservation techniques

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Fig. 75.4  Ballard’s twofold interlace as illustrated in his USP. This interlace technique is the electronic analog of the mechanical celluloid cinema’s Pross interrupting shutter.

that also mitigate flicker. One reduces the number of required frames (or film stock), and the other reduces the bandwidth. Paul Nipkow’s scanning protocol starting the first line at the top left corner of the image has been followed in all commercial systems. On January 15, 1940, public hearings were held as a result of the industries’ inability to agree on a broadcast standard; the Zenith Radio Corporation called a halt to the proceedings claiming television technology was not ready for commercialization, Du Mont favored a flexible 15 frame per second 625-line fourfold interlace scheme, and Philco liked 605 lines at 24 frames per second, but it serves little purpose to chronicle the many proposals and machinations that went on within the nascent American television industry. A battle was waged to determine the standard for television broadcasting

that would further the interests of the industry and the public, and many important issues such as radio spectrum allocation, fears of getting locked into a standard that would rapidly become obsolete, and the cost of TV sets will not be discussed, since they are not germane to our main concern: how television became cinema. RCA in March announced that it was going to sell 25,000 TV sets at discounted prices, which caused the FCC to view this as an attempt to bypass them in order to create a de facto standard, which only led to another hearing to determine if RCA had nefarious motives designed to retard television experimentation. Following the model that had been used by Lord Selsdon’s committee, the Radio Manufacturers of America proposed the creation of the National Television Standards Committee, open to parties who would like to participate in the creation

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of broadcast television standards. This, the first NTSC (the second coming of the NTSC was devoted to color television standardization) met on July 31, 1940, at which time the following organizations were asked to participate in television standards discussions: Bell Telephone Labs, Columbia Broadcasting System, Don Lee Broadcasting System, Du Mont Labs, Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, General Electric, Hazeltine Service Corporation, John V. L. Hogan, Hughes Tool Company, Institute of Radio Engineers, Philco Corporation, RCA, Stromberg-Carlson Telephone Manufacturing Corporation, Television Productions, and the Zenith Radio Corporation (Abramson 2008). As a result of an agreement reached at this meeting, the FCC issued its initial report on January 27, 1941, and on May 2, the NTSC announced the analog television standards that remained in place for the next 70  years in North and most of South America based on 525 scanning lines with a 60 field per second scan rate, a 2:1 interlace, with a 4:3 aspect ratio image (Burns 1998). As a practical matter, only 480 of the lines contain the picture signal; the rest are reserved for housekeeping, the vertical interval, or blanking between fields. The vertical blanking interval is required for the electron beam, after having completed a field, to fly back to the top of the next field, and for the addition of a vertical synchronization pulse. A horizontal blanking interval is also required based on the fact that the electron beam, after having written a line, must have time to return to start scanning the next line. RCA was prepared to advance its cause by adding TV stations and by building tens of thousands of TV receivers, but all-electronic efforts were diverted to defense later that month, on May 27, 1941, when President Roosevelt proclaimed a national emergency in one of his radio broadcast Fireside Chats in which he warned the nation of the dangers of Nazi domination (Buhite 1992). The involvement of the United States in World War II delayed the arrival of broadcast television, but it produced another kind of reward for Sarnoff, the title of General, as he preferred to be known after having been made a Brigadier General of the Army. So it was that years of brutal warfare delayed the implementation of the broadcast television. Conventional wisdom has it that electronics technology was greatly advanced during the World War II to the benefit of the electronics industry, which may be the case, but the scientists and engineers at RCA, if left to peacetime endeavors, would have continued to advance the art. On the other hand, the aftermath of the war left the government with a large manufacturing capacity that it no longer required, and factories were turned over to industry at a fraction of their actual cost and in this way helped with the manufacturing of television receivers. Early broadcast television was entirely dependent upon the Image Iconoscope, but Zworykin’s pickup “left much to be desired,” according to Abramson (1986). It required bright and hot illumination, its spectral response extended into the

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infrared distorting facial tonality, and it was a large device that led to bulky cameras. RCA’s efforts at an advanced pickup, the Orthicon (a shortened version of Orthiconoscope) designed by Rose and Iams (1939), were announced in an article in the RCA Review in 1939. It was based on a low velocity beam striking the photocathode to produce photoelectrons in a tube that was 20 inches long and 4 inches in a diameter with a target plate 2½ in by 2 in. It had a sensitivity claimed to be at least an order of magnitude greater than that of the Iconoscope. In 1943, with the help of government funding, a new design that kept the Orthicon name was developed, using a two-side photocathode target plate. The new Image Orthicon was a tube with two to three orders of magnitude better signal-to-noise ratio than the Image Iconoscope (Magoun 2007). In 1944 RCA delivered 250 of their new Image Orthicon pickup tubes to the US Air Force for aerial reconnaissance. The tube was big, 3  inches in diameter and 15¼ inches long. The patent application for the first version of the Orthicon was, applied for on September 30, 1940, serial number 357,543, was never issued since it was classified as top secret during the World War II (Abramson 1987, pp. 264, 265). The Image Orthicon was invented by RCA’s Albert Rose, Harold B.  Law, and Paul Weimer. Rose’s USP 2,407,906, Low Velocity Television Transmitting Apparatus, filed August 27, 1942, and 2,458,205, Television Pickup Tube, filed September 27, 1946, was characterized at the time as the world’s most complex vacuum tube. The Image Orthicon’s cylindrical shape was far more compact than the Iconoscope’s bulky envelope, and it had little shading with far greater sensitivity and the appearance of sharpness, in part attributable to a characteristic of the tube that added edge enhancement – a thin black fringe surrounding highlights. However, like the Image Iconoscope, its spectral response significantly departed from that of the eye, and it overloaded in bright light, which required exposures that produced limited detail in the highlights and shadows. Nonetheless, the Orthicon is an admirable example of the application of the relatively recently learned principles of electron optics. Important features of the tube were anticipated by Farnsworth in his patent Image Dissector USP 2,087,683, filed April 26, 1933, which is described in chapter 73. Time has not altered the fact that it is a complex device, but it’s worth taking a stab at explaining how it works because it was both a milestone in pickup tube design and the architype of the even more advanced designs that followed. The Image Orthicon is a cylindrical cathode ray tube with three main sections: the image section, the scanning section (the CRT proper), and the multiplier section. In the image section, light from the camera lens passes through the tube’s optically flat faceplate to form an image on the front surface of a transparent photocathode that, as a result of the light striking it, emits photoelectrons from

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Fig. 75.5  A schematic of the Image Orthicon. (RCA)

Fig. 75.6  An ad for RCA Victor TV sets that ran in the December 4, 1949 New York Herald Tribune. (On the screen are Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.)

its rear surface. These electrons form a charge “image” that is analogous to the optical image formed on the front of the photocathode. The photoelectrons are drawn to a positively charged two-sided target screen at high velocity

causing electrons to be emitted from it. This loss of electrons, from the two-sided target, produces a charge that is much stronger than that of the photoelectrons that were emitted by the photocathode. The rear of the target plate, which is located at the boundary of the image and scanning sections, is scanned by the electron gun’s beam. When the beam is in close proximity to the target plate, deceleration grids slow it down to prevent dislodged secondary electrons from producing shading, or a reduction in image contrast. Lining the inside walls of the tube are acceleration and deceleration grids, in addition to focusing and alignment coils to provide their namesake functions. The scanning of the beam creates the video raster as the target plate absorbs electrons proportional to its local positive charge density. A return beam is reflected from the surface of the target plate whose current is proportional to its absorption of electrons. In this way the return beam’s current represents a point by point analog signal of the optical image formed on the transparent photocathode. An electron multiplier section near the electron gun amplifies the return beam’s current (Jensen 1954). Although demonstrably superior, when it was commercially introduced in 1946, its use was opposed by NBC broadcast engineers who had grown comfortable with the Iconoscope’s characteristics, but they had to accept the cameras with the new pickup by corporate fiat. TV pickups kept getting better: the Vidicon, invented by RCA engineer Paul K. Weimer, used the principle of photoconductivity rather than photo-emissivity like the other pickups described above. The Vidicon is covered in Weimer’s USP 2,687,484, Photoconductive Target, filed February 24, 1951. In the Vidicon the camera’s lens formed an image on the transparent conductive target or signal plate’s front surface, whose rear surface was deposited with photoconductive surface elements that were scanned by electrons slowed down to prevent shading. In brief, the ­elements of the photoconductive rear surface were scanned

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to supply electrons to neutralize the charge of the photoconductive elements. The front and rear surfaces of the signal plate form minute-capacitive elements, and the scanning of the photoconductive surface caused a voltage change in the signal plate circuit that became the video signal output of the tube. In 1948, after having seen its use in a CBS telecine, the Vidicon was given the endorsement of eminent cinematographer Karl Freund, the director of photography of I Love Lucy, which he shot on film (Benson 1981). The

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Philips tube, the Plumbicon, used a photoconductive lead oxide sensor; it was introduced in 1965. It was widely used in color cameras for 15 years, including compact models, because it could be made in small sizes; it eventually replaced the Image Orthicon (Webb 2005. P. 75). Other advanced designs were the Saticon by Hitachi developed with NHK, introduced in 1976, and the Newvicon developed by Matsushita, which gained the industries’ attention in the early 1980s.

Color Wars: CBS vs. RCA

In 1954 three of my friends and I dropped our nickels into the turnstile and boarded an IRT subway train, from the center of Brooklyn, to Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. We arrived at the RCA Exhibition Hall across the way from the skating rink decorated with a colossal Christmas tree and giant nut crackers, to join a line of people who were waiting in the cold to see themselves on a color television set. Inside the showroom, we inched our way along, with the eager crowd, up an incline to a raised platform, a little stage from which we were televised by a great big color camera inscribed with the legend NBC, and for a moment we watched as we goofily waved and looked at ourselves on what was, for its time, a great big color TV set. What we saw that day was the result of RCA’s engineers applying technology first used for color photographs and movies, and some new ones that required signal processing beyond the capabilities of photochemical moving images. What we saw that day was an additive color display rather than the subtractive color projection of the celluloid cinema; RCA’s dot-sequential color system had borrowed a technique from an obsolete photographic process, the réseau. What we witnessed that day almost seven decades ago was an example of the first commercial color television system, and while it has remained a memorable experience, any color feature film projected at a neighborhood cinema looked vastly superior. All was not perfect, for even here in the shrine of the mighty corporations’ power and prestige, the images we gawked at had quite a bit of color fringing. Based on what we saw that day, it would have taken a giant leap of faith to believe that television technology could be transmogrified into cinema technology. John Logie Baird was first to demonstrate color television in the form of a field-sequential mechanical scanning disk system in England in July 1928. The transmitter and receiver Nipkow disks were made up of three sets of spiral holes, each set covered with red, green, or blue filters. The transmitter had photocells behind the holes, and the receiver used gas discharge tubes activated by a commutator. The red image component of the display spiral was illuminated by a neon tube, and the blue and green spirals were illuminated by

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tubes filled with helium and mercury vapor. The image was small and very low definition, 20 to 30 lines per frame. A year later, in July 1929, Bell Telephone Laboratories in New  York demonstrated a three-color system using three separate video channels. Their live action flying-spot disk scanner transmitter used three banks of photocells, with each bank’s color sensitivity selected to pick up its third of the spectrum. The receiver reconstructed the color image using a scanning disk whose apertures were illuminated by discharge tubes whose component images were superimposed through color filters and mirrors using an optical system like that of Frederic Ives’ peepshow Kromskop slide viewer of the late nineteenth century, as described and illustrated in chapter 72. Goldmark et al. (1942), in reviewing the prior art, make the point that the Bell Labs system required three times the transmission bandwidth as that of a comparable black and white video signal.1 In BP 473,323, issued May 9, 1936, Television, Baird also describes a system using a filter wheel made up of red, green, and blue segments rotating in front of a cathode ray tube screen producing frame-sequential additive color television images. In addition he describes a simplified version that, like Kinemacolor, used only two colors (Abramson 2008). Baird continued his experiments and in 1938 demonstrated a mechanically scanned three-color system, and then in 1939 a mechanically scanned two-color system. The President of Columbia Broadcasting System’s research laboratories, Peter Carl Goldmark (1906–1977), (born as Goldmark Péter Károly in Budapest) disrupted the gathering momentum for a monochrome service by asserting that a color service ought to have priority; specifically, he advocated for a field-sequential color television system. Goldmark, who describes his approach in USP 2,304,081, Color Television, filed September 7, 1940, began his experiments as a young man in England when he bought a field-­ sequential additive color Nipkow disk kit from one of Baird’s 1  Goldmark (1942) appends thorough bibliographies covering the prior art.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_76

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c­ ompanies. Recalling the experience he wrote: “The picture came through in postage stamp size. You could hardly make it out. It flickered so. It was also in color, all red, but it was the most exciting thing in my life.” In 1940  in the United States, now a vice-president of CBS laboratories, Goldmark went to the movies to see Gone with the Wind, which heightened his interest in color television (Edson 1968). On August 28, 1940, CBS made the first experimental broadcast of “high definition” field-sequential color television. The source material for the demonstration was a Kodachrome 16  mm movie running non-intermittently in an adapted projector at 60 frames per second, as it was scanned by a Farnsworth Image Dissector. The image had 343 TV lines at 120 fields per second and required a 12-MHz bandwidth or 3 times that required for NTSC monochrome transmission. It was i­ncompatible with the NTSC’s recommendation that was expected to be accepted

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by the FCC, which had ­specifications of 525 scanning lines with a 60 field per second scan rate, or 30 frames per second with a 2:1 interlace. Goldmark’s color image was displayed on a receiver through a 7.5-inch-­diameter rotating color disk that resembled a pinwheel, with red, green, and blue segments that was motor driven at 1,200 revolutions per minute. The color wheel was located in front of a CRT with a 9 inch white phosphor screen, and the filters’ positions were synchronized with the transmitted 1/20th second additive color video fields. Goldmark promised that his system would be ready for the marketplace on January 1, 1941, which it was not, but on January 9 he gave a public demonstration in New York City to the Institute of Radio Engineers; prior to that a live broadcast test had taken place on December 2 (O’Brien 1991). RCA and its competitors were taken aback by CBS’s position; with the FCC poised to approve a monochrome service the motivation for CBS’ proposal is worth pondering. CBS was a company that was not in the manufacturing business, so what was it up to? Two possibilities are offered by Magoun (2007): the first is that William S. Paley (1901– 1990), the head of CBS who had, built the network based on the assets of AT&T in 1928, and was NBC’s chief competitor, didn’t want anything to interfere with his lucrative radio network; moreover, he was disinclined to make a major investment in television broadcasting and wanted to stall the FCC’s approval process. The second possibility, put forward by Magoun, is that Paley was a visionary who believed television would only succeed if it leapfrogged a black and white service; thus, he positioned Goldmark’s color system as a proof-of-concept to encourage RCA to create a viable compatible alternative. The system’s color was reportedly good, but it had significant problems. An expert eyewitness, Richard C. Webb (2005, p. 78) reported: Color breakup (fringing) for objects in motion; the images flickered but not as much as they would have had they been bright; the images were not as sharp a monochrome video; the rotating color filter wheel was an obtrusive presence visible as a “dirty window.” It also lacked backward compatibility with the proposed black and white service by requiring a dedicated color TV receiver and a separate and generous allocation of bandwidth eating up several NTSC broadcast channels. CBS field-sequential additive color also had lower resolution than the proposed monochrome service, and there was another serious issue of a practical nature, since receivers with larger screens required a rapidly spinning color wheel measuring several feet in diameter, an unwieldy addition to any room.2 RCA engineers were well versed in field sequential color after Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics of Sunnyvale, California, manufactured bichromatic additive color cockpit displays and Tektronix, of Beaverton, Oregon, sold an oscilloscope using similar field-sequential technology based on pi-cell electro-optical color switches mounted over CRT screens. 2 

Fig. 76.1  Goldmark’s field-sequential color television USP cover sheet, a technology that takes us back to Kinemacolor with its spinning color filter wheel. The figure in the upper right, looking like a pinwheel, is the RGB filter wheel.

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having spent several years trying to get it to work, but abandoning the approach because of the aforementioned issues. Ironically RCA was criticized “for not being willing to fall into step with CBS,” according to Webb (2005, pp. 79–82). Although, the FCC liked the CBS test, they wanted a live pickup demonstration, which Goldmark obliged in November 1941, using a camera having an RCA Orthicon tube and a spinning color wheel. RCA, Philco, Farnsworth, GE, and Du Mont decried a technology that ran counter to their plans to introduce a monochrome service. Moreover, Goldmark’s system was a regression to an electro-mechanical technology at a time when, after many years and a massive investment, all-electronic broadcast television was on the verge of becoming a commercial reality. On May 1, 1941, NBC gave a closed-circuit demonstration of a color system that was similar to CBS’s, using rotating trichromatic color wheels at the transmitter and receiver. NBC’s chief engineer, O. B. Hanson, designed the demonstration to make the point that only an all-electronic system was practical (Abramson 2008). That month the FCC did not approve Goldmark’s color system, but approved the NTSC’s 525-line monochrome recommendation as a broadcast standard and allowed transmission based on this protocol to commence in July 1941. However, the entry of the United States into the World War II thwarted the American television broadcast effort. After the war, CBS remained resolute about the necessity for color and commenced broadcasting 6 months of color television tests beginning in October 1945. According to O’Brien et  al. (1991), the color was excellent. In mid-1946, in an effort to stave off the CBS initiative, NBC demonstrated a crude proof-of-concept of a three-color system, sans color wheel, that used three simultaneously transmitted signals that, unlike the CBS approach, was backwardly compatible; i.e., the transmitted image could be seen in color on a color set and in black and white on a conventional set. Possibly as a result of that demonstration, the FCC, in March 1947, made known its decision that the NTSC monochrome effort should continue. In 1948 the unwavering Goldmark demonstrated color video of closed-circuit surgery with a version of his system using less bandwidth. The drawbacks of a fieldsequential electro-mechanical color system remained, but the demonstration was well received, and the matter, which had been tabled for about 9  years, was reopened, leading to the July 11, 1949 FCC call for proposals for a color broadcast service. Another counter-demonstration to establish the impracticality of the CBS color system was put together by physicist Thomas Toliver Goldsmith, Jr. (1910–2009) (co-inventor of what is possibly the first video game, Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device, USP 2,455,992, filed January 25, 1947). As the director of research of Du Mont Laboratories, he was motivated to demonstrate the infeasibility of Goldmark’s approach.

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Two historians differ as to the size of Goldsmith’s receiver: Keller gives it as having an image 20 inches in d­ iameter, and Magoun gives it as 30 inches, but whatever the screen size, the 700 pound TV set used a rapidly rotating 4-footdiameter color wheel in front of the screen, which was driven by a four-horsepower motor that blew a fuse during the demonstration (Keller 1991; Magoun 2007). Du Mont had its own ideas on how to make a compatible system, but in the end, RCA’s dot-sequential colorplexed system prevailed. RCA executives and engineers met at their Princeton laboratory to figure out how to come up with a convincing technology demonstration to win over the FCC. Research engineer George Harold Brown (1908–1987), who argued on behalf of the feasibility of a backwardly compatible color system, was given authority to use the resources of the company to accomplish the feat in 10 weeks. Brown revived a project that had been lying fallow for a few years, during the time that the company’s major R&D effort had been directed at expanding the number of TV channels by adding the UHF (ultra-­high frequency) part of the radio spectrum to the originally allocated VHF (very high frequency) part of the radio spectrum. Alda V. Bedford (1904–1989) was given the go ahead to apply the concept that a good-looking picture could be had despite a reduction of color information in finely detailed portions of images. This permitted the addition of reduced resolution color information by placing it between the TV lines, in the horizontal blanking area of the video signal. Clarence Hansell (1898–1967), based on research done in the war, was assigned to apply what he had learned about multiplexing signals. Randall C.  Ballard (1902–1987), inventor of the widely used twofold interlace technique, conceived of the dot-sequential technique that was eventually used in the shadow mask display tube. The new tube presented color information as a dot pattern with RGB pixels arrayed adjacent to each other, like that of additive color Dufaycolor réseau. Zworykin’s Television System, USP 1,691,324, filed July 13, 1925, foreshadows the shadow mask by describing a “color screen” made of a checkboard pattern of trichromatic filters covering a white phosphor screen. Werner Flechsig (1908–1988) of Fernseh Aktiengesellschaft, in his DRP 736,575, which was applied for on July 12, 1938, describes a similar concept. In 1941 RCA had opened its Princeton, New Jersey, laboratories, with a staff of 125 scientists and engineers, under the directorship of electrical engineer and evangelical minister Elmer William Engstrom (1901–1984) (Webb 2005, p. 60). (Zworykin was head of electronics development.) He assigned Edward W. Herold (1907–1993) with the task of building a tube that could display the three primaries. Herold selected five approaches to investigate for possible ­development, and Sarnoff signed off on the winning design,

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Fig. 76.2  Zworykin’s 1929 USP describing a réseau phosphor screen for a color television display.

Alfred C. Schroeder’s shadow mask had been described in two disclosures both titled Color Television Tube, which were filed on the same day, June 11, 1946, USPs 2,446,791 and 2,545,974. Schroeder’s tube uses three electron guns arranged at the three corners of an isosceles triangle, whose beams are focused and steered by a single deflector yoke (or coil). As was the case for most monochrome TV cathode ray tubes, electromagnetic rather than electrostatic deflection was used. The three beams, one for each additive color primary, are aimed to pass through the shadow mask, a metal grill with many small apertures. The key to the concept is that the geometry of the parts permitted each beam to exclusively reach its assigned set of phosphors to produce its designated third of the spectrum. The phosphors’ electrons jump to a higher energy state when excited by the electron beam and then return to a lower energy state emitting light of the required color. By December 1949 the first crude shadow mask tube was completed, with hundreds of RCA R&D

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p­ ersonnel working to make improvements during the next 3 months. The first shadow mask tube was built by Harold B. Law, having a faceplate that was 9 inches in diameter and an image that was 5 in × 4 in. Law, an expert in phosphors, invented the “lighthouse” manufacturing technique that applied the phosphor dots directly through the tube’s mask by a photographic lithographic process to insure their alignment with the mask’s holes. RCA showed their color television to the FCC on March 23, 1950, in Washington, D. C. During the demonstration the image was troubled by dot crawl, with a checkerboard pattern of noise appearing in the portions of the image that had the most detail. However, although the demonstration was judged to be a success by many of those who witnessed it, it was not by the FCC commissioners. Electronics engineer Bernard D. Loughlin, vice president of Hazeltine, a company that had a cross-licensing patent agreement with RCA, solved the dot crawl problem by moving the color information from the horizontal blanking to the brightness signal, as described in USP 2,774,072, Color-Television System, filed May 25, 1950. This is an application of a concept conceived by French engineer Georges Valensi, as described in USP 2,375,966, System of Television in Colors, filed January 14, 1939, in which it is pointed out that the eye is more sensitive to luminance and that the lack of color information in detailed areas is difficult to perceive. Loughlin’s method added the low-resolution chrominance (RGB) signals to the luminance portion of the video signal, which upon reception were extracted at the TV set, a technique with the benefit that the transmitted signal could be received and displayed successfully using a black and white receiver. As noted above, Alda Bedford had added the reduced color information to the horizontal blanking area of the signal. Despite the clumsiness of the CBS approach and its lack of backward compatibility, and disregarding the advantages of the RCA approach, in an infamous decision, the FCC approved the CBS system in October 1950. Sarnoff immediately filed a lawsuit, and in 1951 the case was heard by the Supreme Court that ruled that the FCC had the right to approve any standard without regard to its merit, a decision in which the law and commonsense parted company. Manufacturing began for the CBS receivers, but they proved to be a product that could not be produced in quantity. CBS was saved from continued embarrassment by the advent of the Korean War, at which time the government declared that color TV was non-essential to the War effort (Chisholm 1987). Attention shifted away from color television, but when all was said and done, CBS had invested about $50 million in a failed effort. A second NTSC was organized to study the RCA system and create broadcast standards. In May 1953 it approved a standard for color broadcasting that remained in place for more than half a century, which became the basis for the

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Fig. 76.3  Left: A schematic of the shadow mask geometry. Two of the three electron guns are visible (37). Their beams are aimed through the mask’s apertures to strike phosphors that emit the appropriate colors.

Fig. 76.4  A schematic of a shadow mask tube. At the left is the neck of the tube with its three guns. Their beams pass through the apertured shadow mask 50, to strike their assigned phosphors. From USP 5,045,009, assigned to TV set manufacturer Zenith.

PAL (Phase Alternating Line) system used in much of Europe, and the SECAM (Séquentiel Couleur Avec Mémoire) system used in France and the Soviet Union. The motion to approve the standard was graciously seconded by Goldmark, and by the end of the year the FCC, with new commissioners in place, rescinded the CBS decision and approved the NTSC recommendation making it a broadcast

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Right: A photo of the excited phosphor réseau coated on the inside of the CRT’s faceplate. (Cinémathèque Française)

standard. RCA, under Sarnoff’s leadership, had made its mark: RCA had spearheaded the creation of both monochrome and color television broadcast services through an exemplary research and development effort spanning three decades. RCA’s first color camera, first publically demonstrated on October 15, 1953 for the FCC, was based on the design of Richard C. Webb (2005, p. 123) and subsequently used by NBC. The camera, the RCA TK-41, and it successors, numbering up to TK-47, remained in service for two decades; the TK-41 was almost 5 feet long and weighed 300 pounds. Initially color television sets sold so poorly that by 1956 the only manufacturer left in the field was RCA itself, and Time magazine characterized color television as “the most resounding industrial flop of 1956.” Sarnoff held firm despite his board’s trepidations, and RCA endured losing large sums of money before breaking even in 1962. As the sole source for shadow mask tubes, RCA began supplying them to 20 other manufacturers beginning in 1964 (Weber 2018). By the end of 1959, two decades after Sarnoff made the announcement that RCA would begin a regular broadcast service, 86% of American homes had a monochrome TV set, and there were 522 television stations (Shukair 1972). By the end of 1973, 97% of all homes, or 66.2 million were equipped with TV sets of which 66%, or 43.4 million were color receivers, two decades after the FCC’s approval of NTSC color (Broadcasting Yearbook 1974, p.  68). Early monochrome television receiver screens commonly used 7- or 10-inch-diameter tubes with images that were circular or had rounded corners that were sometimes viewed through magnifiers. By 1949, 19 inch tubes were common, and in 1950 Du Mont sold TV sets with 30  inch tubes, and tubes with

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images having more or less square corners became preferred (O’Brien 1991). As screens grew larger, there was a growing demand for a better quality image, one that was sharper with-

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out visible scan lines. As we shall see, television’s decades of technical development were, in effect, an effort that led directly to the electronic-digital cinema.

High Definition Television

In an historical review, Freeman (1984) summarizes the development of high definition analog television and points out that the term high definition is relative. In the context of Nipkow in 1884, in which his patent drawing shows a disk with 18 rectangular holes, a television image having greater than 18 video lines would have been so characterized. Through the early 1930s, none of the mechanical scanning efforts at broadcast exceeded about 60 lines at 20 frames per second for live pickup. This transmission protocol was used by CBS New York’s W2XAB, based on a mechanically scanned but electronically displayed image. The highest definition disk scanning achieved used the intermediate-film process, like the one built by Baird for the 1936 BBC competition, outputting 240 lines at 50 frames per second. As far as electronic scanning goes, Farnsworth may have set an early record during 1927–1928 with his 100line 30-frame per second Image Dissector tube. In 1931 his Oscillite tube was able to display 200 lines at 15 frames per second and in 1934 240 lines running at either 16 or 30 frames per second. During 1931–1932 RCA was mechanically scanning a 180 horizontal line image to be displayed on Zworykin’s Kinescope tube. An early RCA system using an electronic pickup and electronic display achieved 240 lines in 1933, and by 1937 they were up to 441 lines, which was the state of the art before the United States entered the World War II. Proposals for broadcast were made by Farnsworth, GE, Hazeltine, Philco, and Germans and Italians, for 441 line systems, although their details differ. Du Mont proposed a variable scan rate system with a fourfold interlace with up to 800 TV lines. Almost all of these systems called for an image aspect ratio of 4:3, with some advocating progressive scan and others interlace. Systems were adopted and approved by governmental regulatory agencies such as Marconi-EMI’s in Great Britain in 1937 with a 405-line twofold 50-field per second image; NTSC in the United States in 1941 with 525 lines and 60 fields; the French after the war at 819 lines and 50 fields; and PAL and SECAM in 1967  in Europe at 625

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lines at 50 fields for color broadcasting. In the early 1980s, proposals or demonstrations were made for high definition systems, such as that of the American Electronic Industries Association for a monochrome system of 1023 lines at 60 fields with a 4:3 aspect ratio, the BBC for a color system of 1501 lines at 60 fields with an 8:3 aspect ratio, and by NHK working with Sony, Panasonic, and Ikegami, for a color system with 1125 lines at 60 fields and either a 2:1 or a 5:3 aspect ratio. All of these systems transmitted analog video using CRT camera pickups and display tubes. Efforts to create a high definition broadcast service produced a technology that was, as might be expected, vastly superior to the efforts of Jenkins or Baird three quarters of a century earlier, and also superior to the NTSC, PAL, and SECAM protocols; serendipitously these efforts became the basis for the electronic digital cinema. A major motivation for furthering work in the field came about due to the activities of the research lab of the Japanese national television network, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK). Based on NHK’s work, Japanese manufacturers attempted to commercialize their hi-def analog technology, which led to competitive efforts in America and Europe that eventually bypassed the Japanese technology and also obsoleted analog television standards. The high definition digital protocols that were developed eliminated analog signal losses and, as important, made it possible to compress and interpolate the signal. It took decades of effort to develop the technology and to achieve an accord amongst government and industry parties before American and international digital broadcast standards were realized. In the process the technology and production tools of high definition digital television made manifest the prospect of an electro-digital cinema. The electronic digital cinema uses elements drawn from digital television and computer graphics with its binary digital handling of information. A digitally encoded closed circuit video telephone conference system, in which the user sat at a workstation with a telephone handset, was designed for Eisenhower’s White

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_77

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House. Although Ike tried it out, he never actually used it because it was installed in 1961 just as the Kennedy’s moved in. The system was implemented under a contract from the US Signal Corps by former RCA engineer Richard C. Webb (2005), the designer of RCA’s first color camera (WS: Eyes of a generation…). Webb based his video compression technique on a digital audio method that had been invented by Philips engineer Frank de Jager that was in use in Eindhoven in 1952. De Jager’s delta coding for audio turned out to be suited to digital video compression and transmission. The video image had a square aspect ratio picture with 405 scan lines, the British broadcast system’s line count, based on Webb’s belief that its audience found it to be pleasing. It used a line-of-sight 6  MHz microwave channel that linked the White House, Camp David, and CIA headquarters. Eisenhower wanted to see the facial expressions of those who were briefing him (Magoun 2007). Webb (2005, p. 144) heard that Eisenhower said: “If Allen Dulles (then Secretary of State) ever calls me to push the big red button, on Russia, I want to be able to see the expression on his face.” This secure videophone system may have remained in use for many years, according to one not entirely reliable account. Whatever its tenure, it was probably the first digital television system to be deployed (Webb 2005, p. 150). By the time high definition digital television was being seriously considered, solid state digital electronic circuitry was already being used for film to video telecines, studio cameras by Bosch Fernseh and others, and in video recorders by Ampex, RCA, and Sony. Digital technology was gradually being introduced to television, a medium that had been based on an analog signal from its electro-mechanical days to its all-electronic embodiment, which even extended to the first implementations of high definition television. As noted above, a major step leading to a high definition television service was the NHK analog high definition television project that was initiated in 1968–1969. The government controlled NHK is not a manufacturer, so whatever their lab might develop had to be turned into products and manufactured by others. The NHK program was an R&D investment designed to advance television technology, showing off results to all interested parties, but favoring Japanese manufacturing interests. By 1972 the NHK group, under project leader Masao Sugimoto, made a recommendation for an advanced television system based on psychophysical studies. They specified a system with 1125 scan lines, operating at 60 fields per second interlaced, with an aspect ratio of 5:3 (1.67:1). NHK called this scheme Hi-Vision, which required a 20–25 MHz bandwidth, some five to six times that of the standard 4.2 MHz NTSC service (NHK, Science and Technical Research Laboratories 1993). The system’s line count and resolution assumed the

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images were viewed by an observer a distance of 3.3 times the height of the display.1 The Japanese HDTV (high definition television) service proposal also called for a satellite broadcast system to avoid the bandwidth limitations inherent in terrestrial transmission, which was well suited to the Japanese archipelago. Two of Sugimoto’s suggestions that were especially open to question were the choice of aspect ratio, which is subjective, and the implicit assumption that large screen images were feasible in the home, which at the time of the report could only be accomplished using projection. There would be little or no benefit to watching HDTV on relatively small cathode ray tube receivers. The remarkable advances in flat panel displays, requiring the many billions of dollars that Japanese and Asian companies invested in their development and manufacture, played a major role in making HDTV a viable medium. The Japanese government, seeking to move the system into production and gain a worldwide market for its corporations, brought Hi-Vision to the attention of the European based Comité Consultatif de la Radio (CCIR), an international standards body. To increase the system’s attractiveness by making it practical for terrestrial broadcasting, NHK turned its attention to video compression technology and came up with MUSE (multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding) compression, which was developed between 1980 and 1984, to reduce the bandwidth of the high definition analog system to 8.1 MHz, for a video signal with 1125 scan lines, 60 fields per second interlaced, and a 16:9 aspect ratio. In 1986 the Japanese proposed this to the CCIR as the basis for a new broadcast service, but the MUSE system, because it was based on analog transmission, was subject to its limitations (Hart 2004). In 1990, in a Tokyo department store, I saw NHK’s analog Hi-Vision television, a broadcast presumably using MUSE, displayed on a large cathode ray tube monitor. The images, of a live sporting event, were impressively superior to NTSC television. Since the MUSE analog system would be proprietary to Japanese manufacturers, Sony in particular, European and American interests were disinclined to go along with the NHK proposal. In the United States there were hard feelings about the Japanese having taken over what had been the American consumer electronics manufacturing industry, especially the television receiver market. The original US commercial HD protocol was 1920 × 1080 pixels. TV sets with 4K displays are commonly available with 3840 × 2160 pixel screens. NHK and others continue efforts to extend TV image resolution. NHK calls their program 8K Super Hi-Vision, but it is generically known as 8K-UHDTV, signifying display screens that are 7680 × 4320 pixels. Present well-equipped theaters project at 4K or 4096 × 2160 pixels. Many, if not most, productions for television or cinema are shot and postproduced at a minimum of 4K.

1 

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European interests rejected the Japanese Hi-Vision MUSE proposal, and between 1986 and 1990, 30 European labs worked on MAC (Multiplexed Analog Components), a system that had been originated at England’s Independent Broadcasting Authority. A disadvantage of MAC was that it could only be handled and broadcast as component signals. Magoun (2007) reports that a billion dollar was spent on developing MAC and that it was never used for broadcasting. Although development of high definition broadcasting went forward with government support and oversight in both Japan and Europe, in the United States, the approach taken was similar to that which had established NTSC monochrome and color services: let the marketplace find the ­solution but with government approval and regulation. The FCC was reluctant to take a step in the wrong direction, possibly due to its embarrassing approval of the CBS color system. In 1987 the FCC mandated that HDTV broadcasts must be compatible with the existing NTSC service. By 1988 the FCC had received 23 proposals for compatible systems, but in 1990 it dropped the backward compatibility directive, which would have maintained analog transmission, stating a preference for digital broadcasting proposals that were independent of the NTSC protocol. That year General Instruments was first to submit such a plan, which was followed by proposals from Zenith, AT&T, MIT, and others. In 1992 Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Center for Advanced Television Studies (funded by the TV industry beginning in 1983) at MIT’s Media Lab, and Peter Leibold of Apple, petitioned the FCC to emphasize the digital aspect of the new medium and made the case for an open architecture to embrace both computer and video protocols. The idea in the air, especially favored by Silicon Valley interests and computer mavens, was the coming convergence of television and computers. Although the concept gained little support from the TV industry, it is indeed how digital television evolved. In February 1993, the FCC committed to digital transmission and began a program to test the various systems that had been proposed, none of which survived its scrutiny, despite the fact that Zenith teamed up with AT&T, General Instruments with MIT, and the David Sarnoff Research Center (RCA) with Philips. In the early 1990s, video engineer and inventor Yves C.  Faroudja, at the Ikegami booth at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) trade show in Las Vegas, showed me a demonstration of the Super NTSC technology he had developed that improved the signal coding of the NTSC colorplexed signal and played it back through a line doubler incorporating de-interlacing interpolation circuits. A large CRT monitor displaying the improved NTSC signal was adjacent to a similar monitor that was receiving a signal from a high definition television camera with twice the NTSC line count and several times its bandwidth. Both a standard NTSC camera and an analog high definition camera were looking at the same setup of colorful objects on a rotat-

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ing stand that are used for such a purpose. Both monitors displayed images that were excellent and indistinguishable from each other, an indication that with Faroudja’s improvements the basic NTSC system might have persevered, but in the words of outspoken columnist John C.  Dvorak (1997) “none of this went anywhere.” The FCC’s rejection of the major organizations’ team efforts infuriated the new president of General Instruments, Donald Rumsfeld, who would become the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush. He proposed to the industry a cooperative effort combining the most promising features of the various systems. In this way the HDTV Grand Alliance was formed, and remarkably, the FCC on Christmas Eve 1996 accepted all 18 digital TV system proposals that were submitted to it, variations on a theme from modest to high definition, with a highest possible resolution option of 1920 pixels by 1080 TV lines, scanned at 60 progressive fields, with a 16:9 aspect ratio (McGregor et al. 2010). This open standard approach was similar in spirit to the proposal made by Du Mont Labs more than half a century earlier, when the FCC was considering standards for America’s first all-­ electronic broadcast television service. The FCC Christmas Eve decision was predicated, in part, on the concept that the technology was improving to the point where an incoming signal could be interpolated, by the TV set’s circuits to match the resolution of its display screen, and in this they were correct. The cathode ray tube was replaced by flat panel displays, cable and satellite services flourished significantly supplanting terrestrial broadcasting, and video on demand using the Internet became commonplace, as did the viewing of moving images on PCs, tablets, and cell phones. Most importantly, as far as we are concerned, the technology of high definition television led directly to the creation of the electro-digital cinema. As late as the year 2000, only projected images rather than direct view cathode ray tube or flat panel displays were big enough to take advantage of the broadcast HDTV signal, which typically was transmitted at either 720 lines progressive or 1920 lines interlaced. In an article in the SMPTE Journal that year, van Kessel et al. (2000), of Texas Instruments, measured the image quality of front and rear projection displays using DLP, LCD, and CRT technology, for screen widths from 40  inches to 48  inches. The CRT displays had the highest resolution at 1920  ×  1035 (TV lines) but subjectively were deemed to have the poorest images. Receivers with flat panel liquid crystal and plasma displays soon began to appear that were a better match for transmitted HDTV than CRT receivers, and more convenient for use in the home than projectors. Almost two decades later, the viability of home theater projection is challenged by the availability of large flat panel monitors that are brighter and more convenient, some of which use organic light emitting diodes (OLED) that innately produce high dynamic range images.

Film to Video and the VTR

An early example of the working relationship between the electrical transmission of images and silver halide photography, called phototelegraphy, was the Kopiertelegraph (from the German Kopagraphegrafen for copying telegraphy), the invention of engineer Gustav Grzanna, born in Breslau. In 1901 Grzanna presented his fernschreiber (teleprinter) that used a scanning stylet at the transmitter to send an electrical signal via telegraph lines. At the receiver the image was written by a mirror galvanometer, a small mirror on a magnet held within the field produced by two electromagnetics, one for X and the other for Y translation. Light projected onto the mirror was reflected to scan and expose photographic paper (Huurdeman 2003). The Grzanna Kopiertelegraph Company of Dresden went out of business in 1905, unable to compete with the Telautograph of German physicist Arthur Korn that was introduced in 1902, as noted in chapter 75 (Suplee et al. 1906, p. 1105). Korn’s rotating scanning drum was a precursor of the photographic facsimile machines used by organizations like newspapers and police departments for many years. In 1927 Hartley and Ives of AT&T described the intermediate-­film process, designed to address the shortcomings of mechanical scanning by photographing images on motion picture film, using a disk telecine for transmission, video to film at reception, and projection for display, as described in chapter 72 (Abramson 1955b). The intermediate-­ film process had the ability to produce a better quality image than live action when mechanically disk scanned and transmitted. It’s unclear if Hartley and Ives built such a system but Fernseh did in 1932 and demonstrated their intermediatefilm transmitter at the Berlin Radio Exhibition. A motion picture camera’s exposed film was rapidly processed and fed into the gate of a projector and disk scanned for transmission. After the film was scanned, its emulsion was removed, a new emulsion coated, and the film went back to the camera to be exposed, and so forth. A version of the Fernseh process was used by Baird for the 1936 competition staged by the BBC, pitting his mechanical scanning technology against EMI’s all-electronic system, as previously described. It took 65  seconds for Baird’s Nipkow disk intermediate-film

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t­ransmitter to process the film, scan it while still wet film, and transmit the video signal. Once all-electronic services were established, the intermediate-film process was no longer required for broadcast, but conversion from video to and film and vice versa was important as broadcasting services were established due to their need to transmit film content and for recording television images for rebroadcast or archival purposes. These requirements were a motivation for the development of electronic video recording. After television broadcast services were established film played a significant role for the transmission of theatrical features, episodic television, news coverage, commercials, and television shows recorded on film, which were played back using a device called a telecine to turn film images into a video signal. Similarly, television broadcasting frequently required turning a video image into a film recording using a motion picture camera to photograph the cathode ray tube screen of a video monitor to produce what came to be known as a kinescope recording, abbreviated simply as a kinescope. The BBC operated the first broadcast television service before Britain entered World War II and developed approaches for both film to video and video to film. For film to video, they modified Leitz Mechau continuous motion 35 mm projectors (see chapter 17) to function as flying-spot scanners using an Emitron pickup, which was undoubtedly the first broadcast telecine. As told by BBC technician Arthur Dungate: “The original Emitron cameras as developed in the mid-1930s needed a continuous image and so the Mechau projector was a convenient and practical way of making an early telecine machine for the studio.” The Mechau was used by the BBC Designs Department, at Lime Grove, which they called the Flying-Spot Mechau. For video to film transfers, the Mechau was modified to function like a movie camera to photograph a high-quality monitor to expose 35  mm film. The Mechau, since it was a projector, was not designed to be light tight, so BBC technicians operated it in a room illuminated by a dim red lamp (WS: Dungate). For film to video, the General Electric Company of England, on June 1, 1939, announced a mechanical film

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_78

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scanner using on a Nipkow disk that operated in a vacuum. The film moved continuously, and the scanner had the ability to compensate for film shrinkage. Although mechanical scanning could produce good results, it became obsolete with the advent of telecines based on the cathode ray tube used as a flying-spot scanner. The CRT’s electron beam created a moving spot of light to illuminate the film as it move continuously through the projector gate. The light produced by the spot passed through the film and was seen by a photocell whose output was turned into the video signal. Problems had to be addressed with regard to translating film to video and vice versa because they use different methods for the organization of information, differences that make interfacing the two a challenge. Cinematography creates an entire frame with one exposure, but video divides each frame into two parts, odd and even fields, with each frame completed by these two interlaced fields. 35  mm and 16  mm sound film runs at 24 frames per second, but television, depending on

Fig. 78.1  Grzanna’s Kopiertelegraph. The stylus transmitter is in the background and the receiver is in the foreground. (Bert Bostelmann)

Fig. 78.2  The schematic of a Fernseh intermediate-film transmitter. The components: 3, motion picture camera; 4, chemical film processor; 5, Nipkow disk scanner to turn the film image into video; 6, emulsion removal by washing; 7, drying cabinet; 1, re-emulsion process; and 2, drying the newly applied emulsion to prepare the film for exposure. (Televsion Today, Newnes, London, 1935, pp. 252–255)

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the broadcast region, runs at either 25 or 30 frames per second, using either 50 or 60 interlaced fields per frame, respectively. Additionally, the interval between one video field and the next (vertical blanking) and one frame of film and the next (pulldown) is different: television’s vertical blanking interval was about six times faster than the pulldown required for film. Therefore, even if a film camera were run at the same rate and in synchronization with the television image, it would fail to record many video lines. In February 1939 RCA reported that it had filmed television images from the face of a cathode ray tube broadcast from the United Kingdom, which according to Abramson was the first American kinescope recording. The reception of a transatlantic television signal was a noteworthy event and the RCA engineers wished to record it. The images in the 4 minutes of film were unsteady and unsharp, but from time to time clear enough to recognize the face of BBC announcer Jasmine Bligh (1913–1999) (a descendant of William Bligh, Captain of the HMS Bounty). It “certainly sets a record for the long-distance recording of television images,” according to Abramson (2008). BBC’s television service would soon go off the air on September 1, 1939, due to the wartime emergency (Bennett 2011). Bligh is remembered for having nonchalantly welcomed viewers back to its first post-war broadcast, on June 7, 1946, with these words: “Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?” Transferring film to video uses a device called a telecine, and recording a video image onto film uses a kinescope, as noted, a term also frequently used for the recording itself. The kinescope recordings were usually filmed using special 35 mm or 16 mm cameras focused on a cathode ray tube’s faceplate with sound recorded either single or double system. Efforts were made to improve the quality of kinescope recordings, including designing high-quality small flat-faced cathode ray tubes. During World War II, both the American and German militaries used the kinescope technique to turn video images into 35 mm film for studying guided missile flight paths. In the

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United States, beginning in 1946, kinescope recordings were made of programs by the DuMont Television Network using 16 mm film, of which about 400 survive (Weinstein 2004; Du Mont 1946). In 1948 Kodak announced the Eastman Television Recorder that had been developed in cooperation with the Allen B. Du Mount organization for video to 16 mm transfers. The camera had a fast pulldown, separate synchronous motor drives for the shutter and film transport, and a “bloop” light to provide a start mark for double-system sound recording (Jensen 1954). According to Webb (2005, p. 125), kinescope recording, both black and white and color, was “dull and lifeless” and “universally disliked.” In 1947, for kinescope recording, the BBC attempted to use a movie camera to film video from the faceplate of a monitor. Their challenge was to reconcile the standard film rate of 24 fps with their 50 fields per second interlaced or 25 frames per second TV system. One solution involved recording 188½ lines, half of the active lines of the British 405 line system. They next attempted a 16 2 3 frame per second system that was similarly abandoned. A number of other schemes for devising video to film transfers were entertained such as the BBC’s adaptation of the Mechau continuous motion projector to a camera, as noted above (Abramson 1955). The BBC simplified things for themselves by accepting changes in motion and pitch by playing back film shot at the 24 fps motion picture standard at 25  fps in their telecines. In America, one early telecine technique took advantage of the Iconoscope pickup’s charge storage characteristic by using intermittently advanced film that was illuminated by bright flashes 60 times per second timed to avoid the Iconoscope’s banking interval. The introduction of the Image Orthicon and Vidicon made it possible to use adaptations of intermittent projectors using a five-bladed shutter and a special pulldown to produce an effective 120 frames per second (5 × 24 fps) to permit the video camera to capture 60 fields per second. Some projector designs used shutter blades that moved past the frame horizontally rather than vertically to better sample the film given video’s horizontal scanning. After the introduction of color, the camera portion of the telecine used Vidicons with an optical system separating the image into three filtered paths for three-tube trichromatic analysis, with some versions having a fourth Vidicon to produce a separate luminance channel. These telecines had limitations: there were difficulties in making shot-by-shot color corrections, the Vidicon did not have the ability to handle the dynamic range of film, and there were difficulties maintaining alignment of the component images (Cvjetnicanin et al. 1994). By 1953 it was estimated that 100 million feet of kinescope film was shot annually by the New  York television studios, much of it programming to be played back on telecines and transmitted to parts of the country in different time zones for delayed broadcast, a costly process that produced compro-

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mised image quality (Abramson 1955b). Although both 16 mm and 35 mm kinescopes were routinely used, 16  mm recordings often led to “dissatisfaction,” according to Abramson (1955). On the other hand, 35 mm feature film prints were used as a source for transmission with good results. The ability to electronically record video, without an intervening photochemical step, loomed as a possibility given the example of magnetic audio recording, but film remained the recording medium of necessity until Ampex introduced the first video recorder that met broadcasters’ needs. The Du Mont Television Network greatly surpassed kinescope recording quality with its Electronicam system, which was designed to combine film recording with the ability to monitor and edit video real time so that shows could be produced using techniques employed for live broadcast and for syndication. Du Mont had expertise in television electronics and was a manufacturer of TV sets, but it was in its role as the proprietor of a small broadcast network that it needed to distribute good-quality recordings to its stations. Beginning in 1954 Electronicam was used to record TV shows on either 35 mm or 16 mm film maintaining the essential techniques of live video production. The 1954–1955 seasons of The Honeymooners were recorded on 35  mm, and Captain Video and his opticonscalometer were deemed to be adequately recorded on 16 mm. The 35 mm version of the Electronicam combined a modified Mitchell camera housed in a blimp plus an Orthicon pickup camera, mounted side by side, and operated on a wheeled pedestal. A prism beamsplitter was mounted in front of the Mitchell to divert part of the light to the TV camera. The Mitchell produced a high-quality motion picture film, far better than the kinescope alternative. Electronicam remained viable for a few years prior to the introduction of Ampex’s quad video recorder. It was designed with the three-­ video camera setup in mind that had become the norm for televising TV sitcoms, which were edited real time for broadcast by the director in the control room. The Orthicon camera provided the director with real-time video images and a reference for editing. A kinescope recording, called a tele-transcription, was filmed during production to provide a record of the director’s cut to be used as a guide for conforming (matching) the Mitchell’s negatives to the shots selected to create an episode for broadcast (Caddigan and Goldsmith Jr 1956; Thorpe 2016). A decade later, Mitchell offered the System 35 using the Mitchell S35R, with a through-the-lens reflex video assist tap, but with a different optical arrangement for the entirely different workflow required by feature film cinematography. Various schemes were employed to produce color film recordings of video, which was a greater challenge than recording monochrome. In 1956 an additive color lenticular process devised by Kodak was first used by NBC, similar to the one invented by Rudolphe Berthon in 1909 and licensed by

686 Fig. 78.3  An Electronicam filming an episode of Captain Video, the 16 mm version reserved for kids’ shows. The process maintained the director’s ability to edit real time, providing syndication using film prints from negatives shot with the 16 mm camera rather than a kinescope recording.

Fig. 78.4  The Electronicam workflow for a three-camera sitcom.

78  Film to Video and the VTR

78  Film to Video and the VTR

Kodak in 1928 for its 16 mm Kodacolor process, as described in chapter 45. Eastman lenticular embossed film, a black and white film, was manufactured with a calendared base through which it was photographed to film columnar primary triads through the vertical-going lenticules. The film, Type 5308, was exposed using the optically combined images of three kinescope tubes. Playback of the processed film used a three Vidicon telecine. The system was used until mid-1958 when it was replaced by color video tape. In 1957 NBC also experimented with making kinescope recordings on 16 mm film by shooting the face of a shadow mask tube using Anscochrome; a later approach used 16 mm Ektachrome Commercial film. Technicolor established its Vidtronics Division in 1966 to transfer video to 35 mm, 16 mm, and the Super 8 format. The colorplexed signal was separated into three monochrome channels and played back on three monochrome monitors to produce RBG kinescopes as the source for making matrices for dye imbibition printing. (See chapter 50.) In the winter of 1966 NHK, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation showed a color kinescope system with three separate color tubes adjusted to produce an optimum film recording (Abramson 2008). My interest in this technology is not so much with the broadcast television industry’s need to replace film as a storage medium but rather with the creation of a video recording technology, which is a necessity for an electronic cinema system. The first attempt at this was Baird’s 1927 Phonovision that recorded video using a phonograph disk, as described in chapter 72. The same year a scheme for the use of a magnetic medium for recording video was described by Georgianborn scientist Boris Rtcheouloff living in London who based his work on the sound recording efforts of Oberlin Smith, described in the September 8, 1888, edition of Electrical World (amongst other methods) using a string impregnated with iron filings for the magnetic recording of sound. Rtcheouloff’s Means of Recording and Reproducing Pictures, Images, and the Like, USP 1,771,820, filed March 9, 1927 (BP 288,680, filed January 4, 1927), teaches a way to record a television signal magnetically, in which the video is recorded on one side of the tape’s base and the audio on the other. Abramson comments that there is no indication that the device was built, and it is possible that given the June 27, 1922, date of the Russian application, this is the first description in the literature of magnetic video recording. It would take almost three decades after Rtcheouloff’s disclosure before there was a practical method to magnetically record, store, and playback video. Lee de Forest and associates investigated an imaginative process for recording television signals using silver-coated 35  mm film etched with electrical discharges from current conducting needle points to write a video image in optical density, a scan line at a time. The purpose of the project, which was abandoned, was to create a storage medium for theatrical projection. The work is described in BP 386,183,

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filed on April 24, 1931, and granted on April 14, 1932. In 1934 Edison Bell Ltd. of England attempted to use conventional film for what they called a Visiogram to record an analog of the video signal as a variable density optical video track. The signal was designed to be read with a special optical reader to output a video signal to a television receiver; the results were poor (Abramson 1955b). This was the optical track equivalent of Baird’s Phonovision. The pressing need to record television images electronically motivated three American organizations to attempt to develop technology based on the audio magnetic tape recorder, whose introduction to the United States is described in chapter 39. In 1951 RCA embarked on a program to create such a recorder, a considerable challenge since the NTSC video signal needs some 250 times the bandwidth of an audio signal. As a reference high-quality audio tape recorders used one-quarter-inch-wide tape running at 15 inches per second past the recording head. Given this as the basis for an estimate, a video signal would require magnetic tape running at a rate of more than 200 miles an hour. Clearly a new approach was needed if magnetic recording was to be viable for video. The leader of the RCA VTR (video tape recorder) project, Harry Ferdinand Olson (1901–1982), the director of their Acoustic Laboratory, had considerable experience with magnetic recording technology, and by 1956 Olson and his team designed and built a magnetic video machine with five inline heads to record five parallel tracks on 2-inch-wide tape running at 229  inches per second (ips), for 15  minutes of video on a reel 20 inches in diameter. The speed of the tape posed a risk that required the operator to wear protective gloves and goggles. Although earmarked for manufacture, it did not go into production because of the introduction of a far better design by the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Corporation of San Carlos, California. But before discussing Ampex’s contribution, another attempt will be described. Singer, actor, and entrepreneur Bing Crosby directed his company, Bing Crosby Enterprises, to develop a VTR under the supervision of its chief engineer John (Jack) T.  Mullin, who had brought a German Magnetophon magnetic audio recorder to America after the end of the Second World War. Crosby and Mullin had been active in introducing magnetic recording for Crosby’s radio shows, which were produced on the West Coast and rebroadcast at an appropriate time on the East Coast. In 1951 Mullin, using a concept similar to RCA’s, built a 12-head machine that ran at 100 ips using 8000 foot reels of tape giving a run time of 16 minutes. By 1952 Mullin showed a black and white VTR whose tape ran at 240  ips using three heads and half inch tape, and a color version was demonstrated in 1955. Like the RCA effort, the Bing Crosby Enterprises machine never reached the market because of the introduction of the first practical VTR from Ampex, a small company that got into the business of making world-class audio tape recorders at the behest of Crosby, based on Mullin’s captured recorder, as described in chapter 39.

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As 1951 came to a close Ampex embarked on a video tape recorder project based on the work of Marvin Camras (1916– 1995) (1988) of the Armour Research Foundation of Chicago, whose design used heads mounted on a rotating drum spinning orthogonally to the direction of tape travel to increase the effective recording speed. Walter Theodor Selsted (1921– 2011), chief engineer of Ampex, with the agreement the company’s founder and president, Alexander Poniatoff (1892–1980), licensed the Armour technology (Abramson 2008). To manage the development program based on Camras’ invention, Ampex hired San Francisco-born Charles Paulson Ginsberg (1920–1992), who had undergraduate degrees in engineering and mathematics and was working at San Francisco radio station KQW as its transmitter engineer (Ginsburg 1957; Abramson 1992). By 1954 the program was staffed with engineers Ray Dolby, Charles Anderson, and others, a team that became celebrated for the design of the Ampex VRX-1000 quadruplex analog magnetic VTR, which was able to record 525 line NTSC. Eventually, machines for the higher line rate but lower field rate of the European video protocols was also offered. The design used an array of four heads equally spaced around the circumference of a spinning drum to lay down parallel tracks that were nearly perpendicular to the direction of tape travel. In this way the tape traveled at a manageable speed, with its linear motion serving to separate the tracks laid down vertically and recorded at a much higher speed. This was a more elegant concept than the other efforts to record video using machines with tape that flew past fixed multiple heads at prohibitive speeds. The Ampex heads

Fig. 78.5  The head drum of the Ampex quadruplex machine recorded a video signal nearly orthogonal to the tape’s motion. The recording heads are numbered 1 through 4. (Ampex Corp.)

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rotated past the tape at 14,400 rpm and the tape ran at a linear speed of either 7.5 or 15 ips. A 4800 foot reel at 15 ips stored an hour of video. The audio track was recorded in the conventional manner using a fixed head at the tape’s edge. A major goal of the Ampex project was to assure that the recorder’s picture quality looked as good at home as in the studio, reports Ray Dolby (1958) writing in 1958. Ginsberg led the team that steadily improved the technology, which enabled quad recorders to produce images that were indistinguishable from live broadcast. By March 1955, Ginsberg’s team had a compelling monochrome demonstration, and in Chicago in April 1956, at the National Association of Broadcasters convention where the machine was exhibited, orders were taken for 82 Ampex VRX-1000 (to be renamed the Mark 1V) recorders for $45,000 each, which saved ABC and CBS the $10,000 a week they were spending making kinescope film recordings. The first broadcast use of the Ampex VTR was for a CBS time-delayed transmission, originating from its New  York studio that was transmitted to the West Coast, of Douglas Edwards and the News, which took place on November 30, 1956 (Nmungwun 2009). For the first-generation machines, to insure that the heads aligned properly with their recorded tapes, they had to be used together for playback. A major step occurred when electronic editing, rather than cutting and splicing tape, was perfected making tape editing viable. When on his birthday, Sarnoff was invited to see the multi-head “simplex” efforts of the RCA team under Harry Olson, he rejected the gift and immediately canceled the program and negotiated a license with Ampex. RCA engineer Webb (2005, p.p. 128–129) reports, with considerable exasperation, that a spinning magnetic head video recording concept, remarkably like the one devised by Camras and licensed to Ampex, was described by RCA engineer Earl E. Masterson in Magnetic Recording of High Frequency Signals, USP 2,773,120, filed November 30, 1950, which was unaccountably overlooked by Olson. A cross-licensing agreement followed with a payment of $200,000 by RCA to Ampex. RCA developed the technology to add the colorplexed signal to the Ampex quad recorder, and both companies made color VTRs using shared technology (Magoun 2007). Film continued to be used for the production of commercials, episodic television, and the broadcast of feature films. For a time film and video were intermixed, notably by the BBC for dramatic productions, with tape for studio interiors and film for exteriors. Consumer Beta and VHS products used a modified rotating head scheme with a helical configuration as did second-generation Type C broadcast recorders. Industrial video flourished with the reel-to-reel video cartridge U-Matic format using ¾-inch-wide tape, which had a lower-quality image than the quad 2 inch format. Today, all feature film archival material is recorded on video tape using the LTO (linear tape open) digitally encoded format.

Part X TELEVISION AND THE DIGITAL CINEMA: The Electronic Cinema

Early Adopters: Electronic Cinematography and CGI

Some influential filmmakers were early adopters of video technology; their vision and active participation played a part in making the transition from photochemical-­celluloid technology to electro-digital technology. The elements of the craft that contributed to a transitional hybridization include the use of video assist to help with content creation, the early use of high definition video cameras in place of film cameras, and the use of computer-­generated images (CGI) in place of cell and stop motion animation. Filmmakers’ motives for adding electronic tools were diverse; actor and director Jerry Lewis (1926–2017) used a direct approach for adding video review capability to a 35 mm production camera, with a far simpler method than Du Mont’s Electronicam, or the more sophisticated video assist techniques that came a few years later, such as Mitchell’s System 35 as noted in chapters 22 and 78. After having honed his slapstick skills as part of a team on stage, television, in films, and solo in movies directed by Loony Tunes animated cartoon director Frank Tashlin, Paramount Pictures gave Lewis an opportunity to direct and act in his own films. The first such film was released in 1960, a comedy without dialog, The Bellboy, which was shot on a shoestring on location at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel. Lewis’ methods and directorial philosophy are articulated in his book, The Total Film-­Maker (Lewis 1971), which rhapsodically praises celluloid cinema technology and a visceral love for film emulsion itself. Lewis mounted a video camera to the side of a Mitchell to enable him to record and playback shots, an indispensable technique for reviewing his own performance. The concept of using a video assist camera and monitor must have been evident to someone who had spent so much time in front of broadcast TV cameras. Lewis did not invent the technique, but his is perhaps the best known and possibly the most influential early use, since video assist patents date to 1947, 1954, and 1955, according to Waelder (2014). Lewis had also been anticipated by the British Cyclops 35  mm camera with an electronic viewfinder that was used at the Denham Studios in London in June 1948, and a similar system by CameraVision of Hollywood in 1955 (Abramson

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1955). Video assist became widely accepted technology as an on-set creative tool by the film industry. Lewis went on to make a number of profitable films for Paramount using the technique he said he had begun developing in 1956. His embodiment had limitations, since it only gave an approximate view of the shot’s composition, but it served its purpose for reviewing performances. The way to provide a video image that accurately reflects what the camera sees to evaluate composition, zooming, focusing, and depth of field, is for the video camera to see through the same lens as the film camera, using a device called a video tap, as was the case for Mitchell System 35 that became available in 1966. Such a through-the-lens video assist tap was added to the Panavision PSR, by Jimmie D. Songer, Jr., who modified its reflex optical system by adding a beamsplitting pellicule to divert light to a sensitive high-resolution Saticon camera tube built into the camera’s door. Songer’s design replaced the camera’s ground glass focusing screen with a fiber optics screen to improve light transmission. The system was designed at the behest of director Blake Edwards and first used on his 1968 film The Party, and then for his 1970 Darling Lili. Like Lewis’ effort, the video was recorded and played back for review, but in this case, it also allowed Edwards and his cinematographer to see an accurately framed video version of each shot before, during, and after photography. These productions established the Songer system, which was in active use thereafter, eventually leading to the creation of the video village, stationed nearby the set but away from the camera setup. At the video village members of the production team could evaluate their work without interfering with the shot being set up. British cinematographer Joe Dunton, who trained as an electronics engineer, also contributed to video assist technology by designing a video tap tape recording system that was used for the 1968 musical Oliver! In the early 1980s, Francis Ford Coppola used a video assist closed circuit system for his production of a musical set in Las Vegas, One from the Heart, released by Paramount in 1982. Coppola called the technique “electronic-cinema” and

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Fig. 79.1  Auteur Jerry Lewis riding a boom with a video assist camera visible on the side of the film camera.

used it for what he called “pre-visualization,” with scenes rehearsed and recorded on tape before being filmed (Phillips and Hill 2004). Although video assist was beneficially employed as an aid for cinematography from the 1960s onward, there were even earlier advocates for purely electronic cinematography. In a prescient intimation that video technology could be used for cinema, EMI labs advocated the possibility as was described in a 1940 article in Electronics and Television & Shortwave World (Photographing Television Programmes 1940, p. 124), which was summed up as follows: “(It is) conceivable that motion picture studios will one day replace their cameras by Emitrons and photograph their films from a monitor tube…. Higher standards of definition would be required, of course, but this involves no insuperable technical problems, and (would result in) increased flexibility… from the fading and superimposition facilities, particularly in regards to trick shots involving expensive sets.” The article is, for the most part, devoted to a description of a kinescope recorder design that uses a polygonal mirror-drum to transfer video to film at 25 fps. (See chapter 71 for more information about mirror-drum scanning.) A book written by Albert Abramson (1955a), a television engineer who wrote extensively about the history of television technology, Electronic Motion Pictures: A History of

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the Television Camera, enthusiastically makes the case that film might imminently be replaced by video. He is particularly optimistic about the work of a British organization active in the early 1950s, High Definition Films Limited, whose mission was to adapt television technology to feature film production. The cameras for the effort were made by Pye Radio Ltd. of Cambridge, England, using a pickup tube based on the Image Orthicon, which Pye called the Photo Electron Stabilized Photicon. These 1954 cameras were based on pickups made by General Precision Laboratory that could operate at 834 lines at 24  fps. The video signal was turned into 35  mm film using refined kinescope recording techniques. To demonstrate the efficacy of the approach, a half-hour dramatic show was made for the BBC, but it would be decades before video technology advanced sufficiently for producing motion pictures for theatrical release. Other technologists thought about how to use video electronics for filmmaking, such as 1965 Walter Beyer (1965) in his article Traveling-Matte Photography and the BlueScreen, in which he proposed using a video tap to aid travelling-matte photochemical cinematography. He recommended using a Mitchell Reflex camera with a Vidicon through-thelens tap as part of a process he called Shoot-and-Tape. The Vidicon output was to be used with the chroma-key technique, an electronic travelling matte process, so that the user could visualize the compositing of foreground and background. His concept was that the chroma-keyed video viewed during cinematography would permit accurate previewing of the final composition, but as of the writing of the article, it remained a proposal that had not been put into practice. Another more advanced proposal called for video technology to be used for travelling mattes and other effects, as described in the prescient USP 3,772,465, Image modification of motion pictures, filed June 9, 1971 by Petro Vlahos and Wilton R. Holm. They disclose an electronic system for effects and compositing beginning with the scanning of camera negative to video. The video, presumably recorded on tape, is used for editing and image manipulation and then scanned back to film for exhibition. The patent states: “Useful types of modifications include changes of definition, contrast, hue and brightness, elimination of unwanted objects, reduction of graininess and other random noise, and insertion of color.” This disclosure, which may be the first detailed suggestion of its kind, foreshadows the digital intermediate process that was introduced more than a quarter of a century later when it had become possible to implement with theatrical cinema quality. The notion that a television camera might be able to achieve film quality was raised in 1981 when CBS engineers wrote the specifications for such an instrument (Streeter 1981). In an attempt to meet these criteria, Ikegami introduced the EC-35 studio camera, whose “purpose was to replace the 35 mm film camera in single camera ‘film-style’

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Fig. 79.2  From Vlahos and Holm’s USP, filed in 1971, teaching scanning film to produce video for electronic effects and correction. The video would then be scanned back to film.

production for TV,” Stumpf (1987) reports. The Ikegami camera used three 2 3 -inch Plumbicon pickup tubes, with a beamsplitter optical system to separate the lens’s light into three paths for trichromatic analysis. The video output was adjusted to match that of film’s Hurter and Driffield characteristic curve. Because of the small diagonal of the Plumbicon’s imaging surface the camera had far more depth of field than some theatrical cinematographers preferred, and it also had highlight streaking artifacts. The Plumbicon, developed by Philips, followed the cylindrical shape of RCA’s Image Orthicon tube, but was better able to represent the visible spectrum in terms of gray scale and was presumably capable of more accurate color reproduction. Emulating the EC-35, Panavision introduced the Panacam that accepted ciné lenses (Thorpe 2016). Both cameras were used for the effects shots of Universal Studios’ TV show Portrait of an Invisible Woman, which depended on the chroma-key

t­ravelling matte technique. Although the cameras did not gain acceptance for theatrical filmmaking, the EC-35 and Panacam were steps leading to the creation of an instrument that would satisfy the demands of the industry and its gatekeepers for imaging excellence, the cinematographers. Director Peter Del Monte was probably the first filmmaker to use an electronic video system to make a feature film, Julia and Julia, released in 1987, produced by the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana). It was shot and postproduced with the Sony Hi-Vision system, using a Sony HDVS analog high definition video camera that notably replaced CRT pickups with RGB filtered 2 3 inch CCD sensors. The Sony Hi-Vision HDVS outputted 1125 lines at 60 interlaced fields per second whose video was recorded on 1 inch tape. After post-production was completed, the video was turned into 35 mm film using a Sony electron-beam recorder or similar scanner (Haney and Thomas 1987). Sony introduced the

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camera in October 1985, along with production equipment that included a VTR and 40 inch monitor. The system involved the support of other manufacturers including the Ultimatte HD chroma-key travelling matte system, a Rank telecine, and the Cintel film scanner (Cianci 2012). The best known early adoption of electronic production and post-production for a theatrical film was that of George Lucas. He had been using motion control for filming models of spaceships and stop-motion for puppet animation (which he called go-motion), for his original Star Wars trilogy, the first of which was released in 1977. Lucas’ films were also heavily dependent on travelling mattes. His desire to move beyond these traditional photochemical-optical celluloid cinema techniques using video required technical advances to successfully combine electronic cinematography with film that included an improved video camera, computer-­generated visual effects, video composting for matte shots, and computer-­enabled offline editing. Offline editing is a process that stores a list of the editor’s decisions for cuts and effects that are executed during final assembly when the camera original, film, or digital files are conformed to match the stored instructions. Additionally, Lucas was inclined to entirely eliminate film and exhibit his movies electronically. One can readily understand why Lucas, faced with hundreds of shots that required visual effects in a film, would prefer an alternative to the labor intensive and limited techniques in use for so many decades. Moreover, electronic cinema technology might allow him to create images that could not have been otherwise created. Matte shots, at first accomplished with in-camera techniques but later on with optical printing, came into use in the early days of studio filmmaking. The matte shot allowed the filmmaker to add (typically) backgrounds that would be otherwise too expensive to achieve with on-location cinematography, impossible to photograph because they did not exist, or too expensive to build. Optically printed travelling mattes combined a foreground shot against a solid blue or green screen ; the camera negative was used to print a high-contrast moving image silhouette or matte. These mattes were used to hold back the foreground image to superimpose it over a separately photographed background. Raymond Fielding (1963) describes the career of one of the cinematographerinventors of many matte techniques that became commonplace, Norman Dawn, who introduced the art to the Hollywood film industry in 1911. Dawn first painted backgrounds on large sheets of glass positioned in front of the camera during principal photography, but for increased flexibility he and others designed optical printing techniques. Linwood Dunn was another highly regarded visual effects practitioner who created the rear screen compositing technique that was used to combine live action with puppet animation for the 1933 King Kong. Other accomplished matte painters were Albert J.  Whitlock and Peter Ellenshaw, who

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used an expressionistic rather than photographic painting style. An alternative to the travelling matte was the widely used rear screen projection, which required the synchronization of the projector with the camera (Miller 2006). Less common was Zoptic front-screen projection perfected by Zoran Perisic (1979) that, like rear screen, allowed for an accurate on-set real-time evaluation of the composition of the combined front and rear elements when viewed through the camera’s reflex viewfinder, a process used for a series of Superman films, released beginning in 1978. Disney, in its film Dinosaur, released in 2000, used a hybrid approach combining computer graphics and film by compositing animated dinosaur characters with background plates photographed on film, with the intent of creating a photorealistic look (Theo Gluck, October 23, 2018, email). Lucas must have been aware of Disney’s effort, which may have served as a stimulus for his own work. To some of his contemporaries, Lucas appeared to be jumping the gun because they felt that electronic cinematography images were not good enough for feature film production, but he was a visionary fortunate enough to have the wherewithal and clout to get his way. Lucas, in an interview conducted by Ron Magid (2002), spoke both as a creative filmmaker and as the manager of a production line who wanted to both improve the look of visual effects and throughput. Film and its visual effects technology, for his purposes and in his view, had become cumbersome and were verging on obsolescence. He yearned to abandon the limitations of traditional techniques such as stop-motion animation and model shots when planning the production of Episode II–Attack of the Clones, which was released in 2002. Lucas wanted an expedient way to place actors into a universe that could be best realized using computer-generated visual effects of alien characters, machines, and otherworldly backgrounds. What he achieved influenced the dominant workflow and aesthetic template for the blockbuster Hollywood cinema. Concerns about the difference between the film look and photography using an electronic cinema camera were articulated by technologists Laurence J. Thorpe and A. Takeuchi (1996), who wrote that the ability to emulate the superlative quality of film was a high bar for video to match and emphasized the importance of film’s mystique, which is partly attributable to the artifacts that add to the unique film look. This is the product of the physical nature of the photographic emulsion given its grain, the optics of ciné lenses and their depth of field, and the 24 fps sampling rate using the 180° shutter angle that exposed film for half the intermittent cycle. This global exposure of a frame is unlike the scanning technique used by video, and the 24 fps capture rate for film is less than the 30 fps used for video in the United States and many other countries. The film look depends, in part, on these factors: 24 fps is too low a sampling rate to produce smooth motion for rapid camera moves and fast action, and

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film grain produces complex and subtle variations from frame to frame (especially in areas like the sky without any detail), both of which have become an indelible part of the moviegoing experience for audiences. Notwithstanding Thorpe and Takeuchi’s reflections, aspects of the photochemical cinema had become an inhibition to Lucas’ ambitions to visualize a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away. Why start with camera negative for compositing his characters into his CG Star Wars world when he might just as well shoot with an electronic camera and avoid scanning film? When Lucas realized that computer visual effects better suited his needs, he founded the Graphics Group in 1979, later renamed Pixar under the ownership of Steve Jobs, which became the leading animated feature film production company. Lucas first used the computer-­generated imaging capabilities of his Graphics Group to improve model shot sequences for the TV and theatrical rereleases of his first Star Wars films, and then for visual effects for the last three Star Wars films, created by his Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) visual effects division; the transition from the cinematography of models to CGI was managed by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren. For Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Lucas encouraged Sony to adapt its HDW-F900 CineAlta video camera, designed for ENG (electronic newsgathering) and industrial video, a high definition 2 3   inch diagonal three-chip color video camera, with an image output of 1920  pixels  ×  1028  pixels. The HDW-F900’s digital signal was recorded on Sony’s HDCAM digital video tape recorder. Lucas specified that the HDW-F900 run at the standard film rate of 24 fps instead of NTSC television’s 30 fps (60 fields per second interlace), and he also induced Panavision to make a set of lenses to work with this camera with a frame that was much smaller than 35 mm’s. The camera, like others of its kind, used a beamsplitter arrangement to separate the lens’s image-forming light into three separate paths so each would pass through red, green, and blue filters to its solid-­ state sensors. His use of the Sony HDW-F900 to replace film was controversial with some industry professionals critical of the result. When Magid (2002) asked him about industry acceptance, Lucas was testy: “There is so much misinformation being put out there by people who have interests other than the quality of film. They’re determined to slow down or stop it (the coming of digital cinema), but they can’t...” (Parentheses are in the original.) However, those who bought the tickets, the audience, also bought the look. Other aspects of Lucas’ push to create an all-electronic workflow were the computer-based offline editing system EditDroid, used for the 2002 release of Episode II—Attack of the Clones, and the digital projection trial for the 1999 release of The Phantom Menace, which will be described in the chapters Post-production and the Digital Intermediate and Digital Projection.

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Fig. 79.3  Sony’s HDW-F900 CineAlta 2 3  inch CRT three-tube video camera was adapted to George Lucas’ cinema specifications for Episode II–Attack of the Clones.

The workflow chosen by Lucas and like-minded directors was different from what had been established for the celluloid cinema: it began with videography, then electronic post-­ production, and ended with release on film. His early adoption of the electronic-digital cinema was in the forefront of similar enthusiasm by a handful of early adopters, but full industry acceptance required buy-in from the studios and the exhibitors. One early adopter was director Sidney Lumet who used the 1080-line 24 fps version of the HDW-F900, to shoot 100 Center Street, a series for an American cable channel whose first episode was released on January 15, 2001. It was the first television series shot in high definition and introduced the now familiar credit DIT, for Digital Imaging Technician (Cianci 2012). Director Robert Rodriguez became interested in the Sony HDW F-900 after visiting Lucas and having seen its images projected. He used the camera to shoot the feature Once Upon a Time in Mexico, released in 2001. When I saw the film, knowing nothing about its production, I took it for granted it was shot on film. Director Alexander Sokurov, using a Steadicam mounted HDW F-900, shot The Russian Ark, released in 2002, a 96-minute walking tour of the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum, which appeared to be a single Steadicam shot. Director Michael Mann, unwilling to wait for the perfection of the all-electronic cinema, shots two feature films electronically, the 2001 Ali and the 2004 Collateral, both of which demonstrated the effectiveness of electronic cinematography, at least for these productions. For his 2004 film Collateral, Mann used Thomson’s Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital camera with RGB-filtered 2 3   inch 9.2 megapixel CCD sensors, outputting 1920  ×  1080 video. Mann preferred the camera’s look to film because so many of

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the shots in Collateral were in low light or at night, and he felt that d­ igital cinematography produced more detail under these conditions. Night photography demonstrations I’ve seen reveal that for electric signs and bright lights, like street lamps, an electronic camera can produce an image without halation, unlike high-­speed film stock. Mann’s choice of digital cinematography and workflow, and the look of his film was effective, but shooting with a small format camera using RGB sensors was a non-starter for many cinematographers. One representative opinion was given by Richard P. Crudo, at the time president of the American Society of Cinematographers, as follows: “Repurposing an ENG camera as a cine camera would not (help cinematographers do their job)” (Swartz 2005). Three-tube digital cameras’ optics did not produce images equivalent to those of the 35 mm instruments with which cinematographers were accustomed. The electronic cameras used short focal length lenses to achieve an angle of view the equivalent of a 35 mm lens, so they had more depth of field for a given lens aperture. Limiting what’s in focus can direct the attention of the audience to a particular portion of a scene by isolating foreground from the background, a concern made more urgent with the use of widescreen formats and big screen projection. Depth of field provides a purely photographic depth cue, one that is not apparent in the visual world but one that audiences have learned to accept. (Contrarily, having a lot of depth of field, with everything in focus, can also emphasize the textural gradient depth cue.) Some cinematographers desired a digital camera with a single sensor the size of the 35 mm frame with the ability to use existing 35 mm lenses, but it took years of effort to create the high-­ quality solid-state chips required that met professional expectations. The case for the developmental effort to create such cameras probably benefited from their potential acceptance for episodic television because the market for high-end cameras for theatrical filmmaking is relatively small. Just as important is that the research and development for such solid-state sensors and their required image processing circuitry was also needed for digital still cameras, a far bigger market. The first electronic camera that approached what cinematographers like Crudo might prefer was the Panavision Genesis, whose body was designed by engineer Al Mayer, Sr., to have the familiar look and feel of a 35 mm production camera, in particular the Panavision Millennium. The Genesis was based on a Sony CCD chip using a columnar RGB filter pattern that outputted a 1920 × 1080 pixel color image (similar to the high definition TV protocol that specifies 60-field interlace at that resolution) at 24 fps progressive scan. It used a single chip with an active area of .930 in × .523 in, the same size as that of the Super 35 frame allowing cinematographers to use 35  mm ciné lenses

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(Wheeler 2007). The camera, which took good-looking images but had a tendency to produce a vertical streak when bright lights were included in the shot, was used for about 70 feature films between 2006 and 2012. Contemporaries of the Genesis, with a similar design philosophy were the Arriflex D-20 (followed by the upgraded D-21) with a CMOS sensor the size of a Super 35 frame and the Sony F35 that used the same sensor as the Genesis. The Dalsa Origin, introduced in 2006, had a 4K CCD sensor, larger than a 35 mm frame and capable of recording a generous amount of information, in a body the size of a blimped Mitchell; the camera’s size is sometimes given as a reason for its disappearance from the marketplace. According to Dalsa’s then president, Rob Hummel, the camera’s size was based on the recommendation of Ed DiGiulio, former Mitchell executive and CEO of Cinema Products, but times and tastes had changed, and smaller camera bodies were in vogue. Hummel attributes the demise of the Origin to the efforts of a dissident minority shareholder and not to any technical reason since the image was excellent and a smaller body was in the works.1 The Origin was used for shooting parts of a handful of features. The RedOne, introduced in 2007, was offered by the Red Digital Camera Company of Irvine, California, run by Jim Jannard who had founded Oakley, Inc., a manufacturer of sunglasses. Red originally followed a strategy of offering digital cinema cameras for price conscious independent filmmakers. Some cinematographers were dubious of Red’s claims of image quality and were wary of its marketing approach, but a trip to a local multiplex in 2009 with cinematographer and director John Leonetti demonstrated to us that a feature shot with the Red was up to professional standards. The Red Digital Camera

Fig. 79.4  The Panavision Genesis in its off-tripod configuration, for Steadicam or shoulder mounting. The camera is shown without a lens. (Cinémathèque Française)

In conversation August 23, 2019, at Los Balcones, Hollywood.

1 

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Company put digital cinematography within the reach of many independent filmmakers. The Arriflex Alexa line of cameras was introduced in the middle of 2010 (Stump 2014), becoming widely accepted for both feature film production and adopted for episodic television cinematography. For Arriflex the Alexa may have been something of a do or die project, according to industry chatter, because sales of their film cameras were dwindling. The camera’s appearance design resembled that of an ENG video camera, following a different philosophy from that of the Genesis’s film camera look. At its introduction the camera photographed optimum images at an ISO equivalent of 800 and had 14 stops of dynamic range. Some cinematographers believe the quality of later models of the camera exceed that of Eastmancolor negative film. The camera was widely accepted, and I mark its arrival as the beginning of the Digital Cinema Era, which is clearly a matter of judgment, but with the introduction of the Alexa one could convincingly argue that all of the elements were in place for the entire electro-­ digital cinema infrastructure. Lee Dewey Garmes (1898–1978), born in Peoria, Illinois, must be one of the few cinematographers to have experienced most of the key phases of the celluloid cinema’s evolution from its silent days to the electronic cinema. In his 54-year career, he shot more than 100 features, beginning in 1918 as a handcranking camera operator (Kirsner 2008). He made transitions to the motor-driven camera, sound films, panchromatic film, tungsten lamps, coated lenses, Technicolor, Eastmancolor, CinemaScope, 65/70  mm, and his last effort, the movie Why, which he shot in 1972, was a Technicolor experiment to determine the viability of shooting on video for transfer to 35 mm for theatrical release. One can only wonder what he would make of today’s state of the art. For one thing, digital production cameras allow for changing underlying imaging parameters. While the ability

Fig. 79.5  The Arri Alexa EV with a 2888 × 1620 CMOS sensor, one of many Arriflex digital ciné cameras branded Alexa, this one for shoulder mounting.

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to make such custom alterations may appear to be an indication of the power of the new medium, it may actually be an indication of its technological immaturity, like the manual choke cars once needed. In the days of film, such concerns were the province of color scientists and experts in film sensitometry working at Kodak Park. In Garmes’ day, timing was limited to the basics, and the cinematographer did his best to produce a negative to further the intentions of the director and the need of the studio to manufacture release prints. Today, the cinematographer, although responsible for lighting and able to use filtration, may be required to provide a properly exposed neutral looking and pliable digital file to which significant manipulations may be made by the colorist following the instructions of the person in authority in the post-production suite. A number of different single sensor cameras for the theatrical cinema have been produced, some with considerably greater than the 2K resolution (2048 pixels along a horizontal line) common for sensors approximately the size of the Super 35 negative. The demand for both television and cinema progressed to cameras with sensors about the size of an eight-perforation (double frame) 35 mm VistaVision or the 65 mm negative. New cameras from Arri, Red, and Panavision began to appear in 2015–2016 with these larger higher-­ resolution sensors. Many Hollywood features shoot, master, and release in 4K, and there are both 2K and 4K projectors in cinemas. 4K (or higher) mastering is done to future-proof content (Kennel 2007), with an additional motivation based on the belief, held by some, that 4K mastering leads to better looking 2K release files, a concept that is analogous to the use of VistaVision for a camera negative from which 35 mm release prints may be derived. The large format has gained currency and is referred to as full-frame, a term that formerly referred to the Edison or Super 35 image area but now usually refers to the Leica format. The outputs of these cameras, which are up to 8K, use cropping to achieve the 1.78:1 aspect ratio required for matching the shape of home television screens or the 1.85:1 aspect ratio for theatrical exhibition. These cameras can use anamorphic lenses to achieve the 2.4:1 ‘Scope aspect ratio, which is used for both television and theatrical release. Digital cameras have, to a large extent, replaced film, but 35 mm and 65 mm film is still being used for features and is favored by some directors and cinematographers. Some filmmakers have also chosen to shoot all or parts of features using consumer or prosumer cameras and have used digital still cameras with the ability to output decent quality video, and even cell phones. Digital ciné cameras offer file formats that can be outputted uncompressed to provide a signal with the greatest possibility for color timing or compositing using raw RGB files. Raw files are the equivalent of having access to the individual RGB emulsions layers of camera negative. To nitpick, raw files are not necessarily a perfectly faithful record of

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Fig. 79.6  The Red Ranger Helium 8K camera. Its digital sensor is 29.9 × 15.77 mm compared with the Super 35 film format’s dimensions of 24.89 × 18.66 mm. Size of a digital sensor is no guide to its pixel count. Red also makes the Monstro 8K sensor that is 40.96 × 21.6 mm. The 6.5K Arri Alexa 65 uses a 6.5K sensor that is 54.12 × 25.59 mm. Panavision offers an 8K camera using a Red sensor, and Sony makes its 6K Venice with a sensor the size of 35 mm VistaVision, 36 × 24 mm. Canon and Nikon also offer cameras with VistaVision size sensors.

what the sensor saw since the camera may use a lookup table (LUT), based on a mapping of the sensor, to identify dead pixels. An algorithm uses the LUT to interpolate ­missing pixels’ using information based on adjacent pixels to create a proxy value. Digital cinema cameras use on-board solidstate storage that can be removed and ingested onto a hard drive for post-production. A digitally shot production of any size has an IT (information technology) department on-­set whose DIT is responsible for backing up the files and testing their integrity. By the early 1980s, the computer generation of images for theatrical films became a subject of interest for visual effects and animated content. Disney’s 1982 Tron and Universal’s 1984 The Last Starfighter are cited as early applications of CGI to live action feature film production. Tron portrays a world in which the hero has fallen into a video game, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Although the film is about a computer-­generated world, only about 15 minutes of the movie uses actual CGI, which was scanned to 35 mm film and inserted into the body of the film. To replicate the look of 1980s’ wire frame computer imagery, the production used live action practical techniques including outlining characters and objects with ultraviolet reflecting material illuminated by black light, and by using high-contrast Kodalith film to simulate the appearance of wireframe images (Sito

Fig. 79.7  A poster for The Last Starfighter (1984), the first live action feature to extensively use computer-generated visual effects. Judged almost four decades later the images lack texture, but how will today’s visual effects look to audiences in a few decades?

2013). Gary Demos (2005), whose career in computer-generated visual effects spans its development, worked on Tron’s preproduction with John Whitney, Jr. He told me that its ­computer visual effects were done by the companies Digital Effects, Abel, and Magi and that VistaVision photography was used for effects shots. Demos also worked on the 1984 The Last Starfighter, directed by Nick Castle, the first space opera to use CGI rather than models. The film had 250 effects scenes with 22 minutes of them created by Digital Productions, a company founded by Demos and Whitney, which used a Cray X-MP supercomputer to render the computer-generated images. Today similar results can be achieved with a PC or laptop equipped with a high-end graphics card. The 22 minutes of the 2560 × 2048 resolution computer visual effects for The Last Starfighter were scanned to film and cut into the camera negative. Although the images lack the kind of textural complexity we have come to expect, it was a noteworthy accomplishment, and when I first saw the film I accepted the look. The computer imagery aspect of the

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film was not ­promoted by Universal, the studio that distributed it. The film was not profitable, and it took a while for the ­technique to gather momentum, but computer-generated visual effects have returned with a vengeance, making possible the genre of superhero tentpoles, the Electro-Digital Era’s most financially successful films. Another early adopter production was that of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). Other relatively early influential productions include Terminator 2 (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Independence Day (1996), and Titanic (1997). Special effects laden films use a preproduction process called digital pre-visualization (written previs or previz), which was introduced in the late 1980s for the analysis of complex scenes that by the mid-1990s was used for entire films. The process uses wireframe-style animated CGI and story board drawings to create a version of the finished film to be used for planning (Zwerman and Okun 2012). Toy Story, released in 1995, produced by Pixar, was the first animated feature to demonstrate the feasibility of an entirely computer-generated feature motion picture. The film had a profound effect, by way of example, on the video game industry’s motivation to improve its graphics, and it may have been an impetus to both software and hardware developers to improve their products for personal computing and for industrial applications. Its art director Ralph Eggleston reasoned “that the style of Toy Story, would be shaped by two primary factors: story and available technology” (Holian 2018, p. 59). In this case, a story about toys made of plastic was a cunning choice since the technique, at that time, was more or less limited to giving characters the appearance of their being made of plastic. Pixar used using both off-the-­shelf software tools and ones they developed themselves, which is now a common practice for feature animation studios. One hundred and seventeen Sun Microsystems graphics workstations were used to render the film’s frames, which took 800,000 hours of computer time. The throughput

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doesn’t get better as the animation studios’ render farms’ computational capacity is increased, since improvements are gobbled up by even more computationally intensive imaging. The completed digital files of Toy Story were used to scan the 35 mm film print masters used for making release prints. The film was released on film since there were no electronic projectors in theaters; there would be no installed base of electro-­ digital projectors for about a decade. The success of the feature led other studies to adopt the technique and today, at least in the United States, cell animating for features is passé. The digital cinema added new capabilities for content creation with advances in the post-production manipulation of cinematography combined with computer-generated imagery. A computer-based technique for content creation, pregnant with possibilities, is motion or performance capture using data inputted from sensor adorned black formfitting suits worn by actors. The motion data that is captured is used to create a volumetric database of the actors’ positions, movements, and even facial expressions, which can be used for guiding the creation of computer-generated characters. The process is the modern equivalent of cell animation’s rotoscoping. The characters may take the form of any conceivable creature and may be added to any conceivable visual world. The possibilities of this hybrid art, combining aspects of live action and computer-generated imagery, have been exploited in a number of films. The process gained attention with actor Andy Serkis’s performance of the character Gollum in the first installment of the Lord the Rings trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring, released in 2001. French chronophotographer Etienne-Jules Marey is the father of performance capture; between 1883 and 1888, he used his trolley camera for locomotion studies, and just like today’s process Marey’s subjects’ wore tight black suits arrayed with white fiducial markers. (See chapter 11.)

Fig. 79.8  A motion study made by Marey between 1883 and 1888, the precursor of performance capture. (Cinémathèque Française)

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Digital Technology

Background  The transition from the celluloid cinema to the electro-digital cinema was the second consequential transformation of moving image technology. The first was the transition from the paintbrush glass cinema of the magic lantern to the photochemical celluloid cinema. The transition from the magic lantern to the celluloid cinema was also a conversion from the technique of real motion to apparent motion projection. Notably, the Celluloid and the Digital Eras have apparent motion and photography in common, with the transition from one to the other involving the replacement of photochemical technology with electronic and digital imaging technology. During its run the celluloid cinema became increasingly technologically advanced in several major phases, but no matter how radical the changes brought about by the introductions of color, sound, 3-D, or the big wide screen, the transition to an electro-­digital cinema was more profound because it eradicated the foundation of the prior technology, replacing the entire theatrical filmmaking infrastructure of production, postproduction, distribution, and exhibition. The enumerated enhancements to the celluloid cinema were means to increase attendance, whereas the studio’s motive for the transition to the electro-digitally medium was principally to reduce the cost of distribution. The adoption of the digital infrastructure was more or less transparent to cinema patrons. That is not to say that content didn’t change as a result of the transition, most noticeably with the reliance on CGI visual effects that enabled profitable tentpole productions. The inventors of the celluloid cinema and television drew their inspirations from Joseph Plateau’s discovery of apparent motion, which he demonstrated with his phenakistoscope in 1832, and William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the negative-positive system of photography, which he announced in 1839. Together these discoveries worked their way into inventors’ awareness, leading to their extending the capabilities of the magic lantern to project apparent motion. The early television inventors had to have been keenly interested in the work of the early cinema inventors whose goal

was to record and playback moving images, whereas the goal of the television pioneers was to create instruments for the instantaneous transmission of moving images. The pivotal proposal toward that end was made by Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow, who in 1884–1885 conceived of using a rotating scanning disk with a spiral array of apertures for image pickup and display. This mechanical scanning disk technique produced the raster required for the electrical transmission of analog video information, a concept taken up by independent inventors C.  Francis Jenkins, John Logie Baird, and others, and corporate researchers like Herbert E. Ives, and Ernst F. W. Alexanderson. By the early 1930s, mechanical scanning efforts were being overtaken by the allelectronic television created by independent inventor Philo Taylor Farnsworth and corporate researchers at RCA led by Vladimir Zworykin in America, and Isaac Shoenberg in Britain. These efforts were based on electronically picked up and displayed images that were transmitted by radio, using a signal with a waveform. Broadcast television was established in Britain before World War II and in the United States after the war, and these services, based on the transmission of an analog video signal, were improved in the ensuring years especially with the addition of color, but as the twentieth century progressed, it was evident that the established broadcast standards had to give way in order for there to be a substantial improvement in image quality. The Japanese, in work they began in the late 1960s, demonstrated the potential of high definition television, but this effort remained based based on the analog transmission of a video signal. The inventions of the transistor and integrated circuits, which were readily adapted to binary digital circuity and computation, opened the door to improvements using digital transmission. On Christmas Eve, 1996, the American regulatory body, the FCC accepted an open standard for digital television broadcast protocols from moderate to high definition, creating both a threat and an opportunity for the cinema: a threat since HDTV was likely to overtake cinema’s quality given the electronic industry’s

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proclivity to rapidly obsolete and improve its products and an opportunity, albeit disruptive, due to the potential to develop advanced digital video to replace and even improve upon the photochemical cinema. Traditionally, audio and television had been transmitted and recorded using analog techniques in which continuous changes in voltage are an analog of the information, but no electrical analog transmission can be, in theory, an exact representation of the original because of the random noise that is invariably part of any signal (Webb 2005, p.  137). The simplest electrical communications system, the telegraph, was essentially a digital transmission system consisting of spaced apart electrical impulses. The tempo of the tapping of the telegraph key was idiosyncratic and based on the operator’s skill, whose rate of transmission might be as high as 60 seven-character words per minute, but for the average operator only 20 words per minute. French engineer J.  M. E.  Baudot (1845–1903) sought to systemize telegraphic transmission using a mechanical clock to time the release of the marks (impulses) and spaces, as they were called (or in today’s digital lingo, ones and zeros), into uniform groups with a character rate of about ten per second. Baudot’s contribution was memorialized by the computer software terminology Baud, denoting one bit per second. In the rest of this chapter, I have attempted to present a history of how scientists and engineers came to develop an alternative to analog transmission using digital encoding and circuits to mitigate distortion, noise, and interference. In addition, the increased flexibility of digital circuit design allows for advantages in areas such as recording and transmission accuracy, security, and the ability to reduce bandwidth using compression.

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theories of logic and probabilities, published in 1854. These books established the discipline that came to known as Boolean algebra, a method for organizing and manipulating logic that designates variables as true or false expressed in base-2 notation (Boole 2009, 1847, 1958, 1854). Boolean algebra became the underpinning of binary digital electronics after American mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001) in 1937, in his MIT master’s degree thesis, demonstrated that Boolean algebra can be applied to circuit design using binary digital numbers to represent analog waveforms (Shannon 1938). In 1940 Shannon realized that Boolean algebra can also be used to describe telephone switching circuits. He was hired by Bell Labs to determine the best way to send information over a system of wires, and in 1948 he made a major contribution with the creation of information theory, which is used to determine how to best store or transmit a digital signal (Shannon 1948, 1953). A step toward implementing digital circuits came in 1947 when Bell Labs physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, built the first functional solid-state amplifier, the transistor, made of silicon, the most common ingredient in sand. The transistor has supplanted vacuum tube-based electronics, except for high-power requirements. The Bell Labs researchers succeeded in creating the transistor by implementing the concept of German physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, as described in USP 1,745,175, Method and Apparatus for Controlling Electric Currents, filed Oct 8, 1926, which had been filed in Canada the previous year.

Digital Electronics  The transistor, or variable resistor, is able to modulate a low-power input current and amplify it Binary numbers and Boolean Algebra  The basis for the while using less power, giving off less heat, lasting longer in storage and manipulation of digital information is the binary operation with greater robustness, and is much smaller than number system that was known for centuries, and apparently a vacuum tube amplifier (Shockley 1958). Specifically, the first enunciated in an article written by German philosopher bipolar junction transistor was ideal for use in circuits perand mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), forming Boolean algebraic operations, which led to their who independently invented calculus at the same time as becoming the basis for binary digital computation (Nahin Newton. Leibniz was led to his interest in binary numbers by 2013). In 1958 Jack Kilby, of Texas Instruments, demonstudying the Chinese book of oracular wisdom, the I Ching, strated the integrated electronic circuit (IC), a way to create whose hexagrams are organized according to the binary sys- solid-state circuits made up of many transistors on a small tem. His Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire was pub- chip, thus enabling the manufacture of low cost ever more lished in 1703  in Memoires de l’Academie Royale des complicated circuits expanding the capability of computers Sciences (WS: Leibniz-translations; Leibniz 1879, Vol. VII). and other electronic devices like digital cameras, as described Our commonly used numerical system is expressed in base-­ in USP 3,138,744, Miniaturized Self-Contained Circuit 10 notation, but the binary system uses the base-2 whose dig- Modules and Method of Fabrication, filed May 6, 1959. its are often written as 0 and 1. The concept of binary Beginning in the mid-1950s, vacuum tubes were steadily numbers became the basis for English mathematician George replaced by transistor and integrated circuits, and in the film Boole’s (1815–1864) The Mathematical Analysis of Logic: industry for sound recording products, not just portable ones being an essay towards a calculus of deductive reasoning, like the Swiss Nagra and Stellavox magnetic tape recorders, published in 1847, and his second book, Investigation of the but in studio mixing consoles and for theater amplifiers (Gitt Laws of Thought: on which are founded the mathematical 2007; Nicelli 1966).

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Fig. 80.1  I Ching hexagrams are made up of broken and unbroken lines, like the 1s and 0s of binary numbers. The ordering of the 64 hexagrams shown here, is called the Fu-Hsi organization, and is in binary number sequence. These hexagrams were Leibniz’s inspiration for his elucidation of binary numbers.

The digital computer, which plays a vital part in the electronic cinema’s cameras, editing hardware, servers, projectors, and sound equipment, was devised in 1953 by British mathematician Tom Kilburn (1921–2001) at the University of Manchester. Kilburn built the first transistorized computer as described in USP 2,856,126, Multiplying Arrangements for Electronic Digital Computing Machines, filed April 13, 1954. In 1957 Russell A.  Kirsch and his colleagues at the National Bureau of Standards, created the Standards Automatic Electronic Computer, which used an input patterned on the fax scanner’s rotating cylinder (Kirsch 1998). A photomultiplier tube scanned a drum wrapped with a rotating photo and divided it into 30,976 pixels, or 176 × 176 pixels, to produce the world’s first digital images.

Fig. 80.2  A vacuum tube amplifier, left, and a transistor, right. (Not to scale)

Flat Panel Displays  RCA was to play a major role in the introduction of digital displays, although not as decisively as it had with the analog Kinetoscope. On September 27, 1951, in Princeton New Jersey, David Sarnoff, RCA’s boss, gave an aspirational speech during the ceremony to mark the renaming of the RCA laboratory to the David Sarnoff

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Research Center. He addressed the engineers and scientists in attendance telling them of his vision for the flat-panel display, a device that would go beyond the capabilities of Zworykin’s Kinescope cathode ray tube, the cornerstone of RCA’s broadcast television business. A device that would help enable the flat-panel was invented by RCA researcher Paul Kessler Weimer, the first practical thin film transistors (TFT) that could be fabricated on glass making it suitable for rear illuminated liquid crystal displays (LCDs), as described in USP 3,290,569, Tellurium Thin Film Field Effect Solid State Electrical Devices, filed February 14, 1964. In 1969 the invention that would make liquid crystal displays a household item was rejected by RCA because the company incorrectly believed that it would be too expensive to manufacturer. Wolfgang Helfrich conceived of the twisted nematic (TN) shutter, based on the principle of optical a­ ctivity, made up of a liquid crystal glass cell sandwiched between sheet polarizers. (In effect a miniature low powered Kerr Cell.) Helfrich left RCA and joined HoffmanLaRoche in Basel, Switzerland, where the following year he built a prototype. At about the same time James Fergason at Kent State University, also came up with the twisted nematic device, which he commercialized through his company ILIXCO. Twisted nematic technology is the basis for the display panels that enabled high definition digital television. Also required for display implementation is the contribution of Bernard J.  Lechner of RCA, who in 1969 announced the active-matrix circuit, based on field-effect transistors that are used for addressing the pixels in a liquid crystal flat-panel display (Weber 2018).

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The CMOS sensor samples a line of video at a time, not altogether different from the way an electron beam scanned television pickup tube functions. In the Image Orthicon, as we have seen, the tube’s two-sided faceplate, which is a photocathode, emits photoelectrons from its rear surface as its front surface is struck by photons. These photoelectrons are accelerated to a secondary target plate which is scanned by an electron beam whose focusing and motion are controlled by charged deflection plates to provide the line-by-line scanning of the video raster. High voltage is required, and the cylindrical tube needs to be long enough to meet the requirements of electron optics. The far more compact CMOS device requires none of this complexity, but both devices convert an optical image into an electrical signal. A CMOS array, like an Image Orthicon and other tube pickups, is an analog device outputting a continuously varying signal that can be stored digitally. Like the Image Iconoscope, the CMOS sensor uses charge storage to increase its sensitivity since each individual sensor is sampled once every frame (or field) as it accumulates charge during the time it continues to be exposed to light. A CMOS device resides behind each of the filters of the Bayer pattern (described below); as photons strike the filtered sensors an electrical charge is generated and stored. Each CMOS photosensor is a filtered member of an RGB triad whose electrical output represents the long, medium, and short wavelength portions of visible spectrum. Each is amplified, and each line of its array is scanned and stored until every line of the entire sensor’s surface is sampled. A microlens covers the individual subpixels to focus light where it is needed that would otherwise be wasted in the non-image-forming interstices between each CMOS Sensors  Electronic image-capturing technology photosensor that are required for transistor hookups (Durini was also being actively developed; specifically the now dom- 2014). Widespread use of the CMOS sensor took place after inant solid-state sensor, the CMOS or complementary metal-­ the invention and deployment of the CCD sensor. oxide silicon (or semiconductor) image sensor, was invented by Fairchild Semiconductor electronics engineer Frank CCD Sensors  In 1969 Willard S.  Boyle and George M.  Wanlass (1933–2010), as described in USP 3,356,858, E. Smith, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, demonstrated the Low stand-by power complimentary field-effect circuitry, charge-coupled device (CCD), as described in USP filed June 18, 1963. It has been observed that an inventor 3,384,794, Superconductive Logic Device, filed March 8, doesn’t foresee the most important application of his or her 1966. Boyle and Smith were hoping to invent a new kind of invention, and so it was with Wanlass who thought his device computer memory device but realized that what they had was destined to be a power saving substitute for resistors, but invented had an application as a solid-state light sensor. it turned out to be a good analog photodetector. It does the Their sensor is made up of a stacked set of linear CCD arrays same job as the photocathode used in pickup tubes, but based that, after exposure to light, can scan a line at a time using a on different physics and using less power than the CCD method called a bucket brigade. Before being turned into an (described below). CMOS sensors have less blooming or electrical signal the photon-induced charge is moved from spreading of highlights for bright areas than CCD sensors, an cell to cell along a line to the readout cell, the last bucket at artifact also associated with film halation caused by the end of the line of cells, or brigade. Gareth A. Lloyd and ­reflections at the emulsion and base interface. CMOS sen- Steven J. Sasson, of Eastman Kodak, created what is accepted sors when arrayed for imaging have excellent geometric lin- as the first digital camera using CCDs, which they described earity and superb steadiness for moving image applications, in USP 4,131,919, Electronic Still Camera, filed May 20, as do CCD sensors. 1977. It produced a 10,000 pixel photographic image that took 23 seconds to be recorded on magnetic tape.

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Beginning in 1973 Sony aggressively pursued CCD technology when the head of their Yokohama lab, Kazuo Iwama, who would become the president of the company, initiated an 11-year program spending $200  million to bring CCD cameras to the marketplace. In 1978 the CCD program, now under the direction of Makoto Kikuchi, demonstrated a functioning CCD camera for the press; however, mass produced consumer camcorders, a camera and tape recorder rolled into one package, did not begin to ship until the beginning of 1985. In 1984 RCA produced the first commercial broadcast CCD cameras (Magoun 2007). In 1994 Kodak manufactured the world’s first consumer digital still camera, with a 640 × 480 pixel resolution, which was marketed by Apple as the QuickTake 100 (Peres 2007, p. 782). In a matter of a few years, conventional cameras and the film they used, began their downward slide as they were replaced by consumer and advanced digital still and movie cameras. Today most photography is done with the billions of solid-state sensor built into cell phone cameras, a source of lamentations for lovers of film, but the mass acceptance of electronic photography stimulated research and development and exercised manufacturing capabilities that advanced the art of the sensors required for high end digital cinematography. Digital camera sensors use the Bayer pattern, invented by Kodak engineering physicist Bryce Bayer (1929–2012) in 1974, made up of two greens, one red, and one blue sensor, as described in his USP 3,971,065, Color Imaging Array, filed March 5, 1975. Bayer teaches “a solid state sensor array with a board wavelength sensitivity…with a superimposed filter mosaic…arranged in one-to-one registration with elements of the sensor array.” The Bayer checkerboard pattern forms a color pixel or triad made up of four subpixels arranged in a square with two green filters on a diagonal to each other, repeating within a Cartesian grid. Such a sensor is usually composed of millions of tessellated pixels that determine its resolution. The Bayer pattern results in a pixel sensitivity that is 50% green, 25% red, and 25% blue. One color pixel is made up of four subpixels, but the term triad is justified since three colors are used for Maxwellian analysis. Bayer believed that it was desirable to have two green filtered pixels to provide more luminance information since the eye’s middle wavelength cones’ sensitivity extends to the long and short wavelengths, and the green channel accounts for the greatest perception of sharpness. This kind of a chromatic subpixel analytical arrangement is similar to what elsewhere in this book has been called a color réseau, as exemplified by its photochemical cinema embodiment Dufaycolor. Digital Recording  What may have been the beginning of the concerted efforts to apply digital conversion to an analog video signal was motivated by the need to eliminate losses in image quality that occur with successive duplications. In 1979 Ampex,

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Fig. 80.3  Sony’s first Video8 camcorder, the Handycam CCD-M8, introduced in 1985.This device recorded analog video and audio using tape 8  mm wide housed in a rapid-loading cassette. The first Video8 products, launched in 1984, were by Kodak, the Kodavision camcorders which resembled ENG machines. Video8 was superseded by Hi8 and then Digital8, using the same cassette, but digitally recording video and audio. These products were aimed at home moviemakers, and used helical scan recording.

Bosch, and Sony, at the Montreux Symposium, d­ emonstrated digital VTRs. Baldwin (1986), writing in the SMPTE Journal, reports on a number of digital recorder products using the helical scanning configuration, in which the tape wraps around a cylindrical drum with recording heads moving at an angle to the direction of tape travel. This is different from the Ampex quad design (using analog recording) in which the heads move orthogonally to the tape direction, but similar in that the rate of the tape past the head is independent of its linear rate. Whatever the design differences, Baldwin notes, that once a tape format standard was accepted by the manufacturers, different helical scanning VTR designs would be able to record and playback tapes using the same format. Preceding chapters have discussed both sound and television as analog signal but, as noted above, such signals have shortcomings, the most serious of which is waveform distortion that degrades information. This distortion is cumulative as the signal moves through transmission or

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Fig. 80.4  A Bayer pattern of filters overlaid on top of a CCD or CMOS sensor array.

recording processes. The situation for analog video is similar to copying or printing film’s image because successive generations reduce the quality of the image. In analog transmission systems, like those for television, attempts to handle large volumes of data can result in signal distortion. Digital television samples the signal at a frequency whose effectiveness is determined by the Nyquist Sampling Theorem that relates sampling intervals to the highest frequency of the analog signal, namely, that ­sampling must be equal to or less than half its period. (A period is the time it takes the wave to complete one cycle.) The transformation of an analog signal, like one that might be emitted by a Vidicon tube, to a digital signal, requires an electronic circuit called an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, which turns the signal into a series of base-2 numbers. In a digital electronic circuit made up of solid-state logic gates, there are two levels or ranges of voltage associated with information, rather than the continuous voltage changes that characterize analog signals. The circuit will ignore voltages, or noise, outside the range of the two levels. The two voltage levels, the ground level at zero volts and the higher or supply voltage, correspond to the Boolean values of 0 (zero) or false, and 1 (one) or true, the basic elements of binary code. An NTSC television signal is 4.5  MHz, which requires a sampling frequency of 11  million times a second, compared with the 8000 samples a second required for an audio signal (Howell 1975). The sampling rate for what today is considered to be a television signal of moderate resolution exposes one of the concerns about digital encoding, which is that it requires a lot of bandwidth. But engineers and scientist have found a way around the problem by compressing the digital signal to produce good-looking images when they are decompressed for display. However, image artifacts may be introduced such as banding (discrete steps of what should be continuous tonality) depending on the sampling rate and compression algorithm.

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It may have seemed that digital recording for consumer applications was on the distant horizon when, at the end of 1978, the analog encoded LaserDisc was released in the United States. The 12 inch disk, similar in appearance to an LP record, was cooperatively developed by the Music Corporation of America and Philips, but for the most part its acceptance was limited to collectors. The LaserDisc and the widely accepted analog VHS (Video Home System) magnetic tape system were superseded by the digitally encoded DVD (digital versatile disk or digital video disk) format that was introduced in 1995 and reached the US market in 1997 (Chandler 2005). The 12-cm-diameter 1.2mm thickDVD and its players, jointly developed by Philips, Sony, and Toshiba, were introduced as a consumer video content distribution system, the first to use digital encoding. The DVD reproduced a good quality NTSC video signal for North America, and PAL for other areas. It used a spiral of minute pits to digitally encode binary information on layers of plastic coated reflective aluminum that was played back by scanning its surface with a red laser diode whose reflections were sensed, processed, and outputted as video and sound. To offer uninterrupted feature length playback, it had two stacked layers of information with the laser changing focus to address the second layer as needed, an echo of the projection booth’s changeover. Sony’s Blu-ray digitally encoded disk, capable of high definition (1920  ×  1048) video, the same diameter and thickness as the DVD, was announced in 2002  in cooperation with nine other companies; it uses a shorter wavelength blue laser diode and correspondingly finer pits to increase its digital storage capacity (Paulsen 2011). The shift to high definition, and the possibility of using a digital signal, led to a 1983 SMPTE Journal article by Kodak researchers who reported the results of experiments demonstrating that the current Eastman 5247 35 mm negative camera stock was capable of producing images that would be able to “support an HDTV system with up to 2000 lines…” (Kriss and Liang 1983). The intention of the article is clear: Kodak understood the inevitability of the replacement of the present television services with an HDTV service, a change that would render obsolete content produced and stored as video tape. The article posits that shooting TV shows on Kodak color film will safeguard the producer’s investment and futureproof the content’s image quality making it compatible with a high definition system. The article correctly further asserts that: “Advanced digital signal processing can be used to enhance the image-structure and tone scale characteristics of film in a way that is not possible with existing electronic image-recording devices.” The same is true for making film prints from current or archival materials using the digital intermediate process: digital transfers and manipulation of the camera negative image can produce results than photochemical duplication cannot, revealing ­information

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lost in film duplication, an assertion that might justify the choice of filmmakers who prefer to shoot on film since their work will be postproduced using the DI process and exhibited in theaters using digital projection. Despite what has been written here about the ability of digitally transmitted and record information to retain its accuracy, digital magnetic recording media has problems related to long-term storage. The accepted method for the archival storage of color motion pictures photographed on camera negative, given the fugitive nature of dyes, is not necessarily to transfer it to digital tape. Rather the favored ­technique is to make black and white RGB separation copies on black and white film, a procedure that may cost $90,000 for a feature length film. These copies must be stored in a vault under specified conditions of relative humidity and temperature. This material has an estimated life of a century, but the process is imperfect due to shrinkage and other issues. The approach is different for digital material, although digital masters can be transferred to film for archival storage. The motion picture studios and produc-

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ers, seeking to protect their digitally produced assets, or those originated on film that have used the DI post-production process, which is just about everything made in the last decade or so, have the option of storing the productions on magnetic tape using the LTO (linear tape open) scalable and adaptable format. The LTO format is an attempt to make existing media compatible with new and improved format versions as they are offered. Although an LTO recording is supposed to last a few decades, every 4 or 5 years the content is rerecorded to another tape to preserve the information, a process called migration. Possible causes of tape deterioration, sometimes called bit rot, can be the flacking of magnetic oxide, defects of the base, print-through, cosmic rays from solar flares, magnetic fields, data corruption bit flips, repeated migrations producing wear due to contact with record or playback heads, and the doomsday scenario of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack caused by a nuclear weapon. It can cost a studio tens of millions of dollars each year to maintain its library (The Digital Dilemma 2007, 2012).

The Hybridization of Post-production

In the beginning, editors did their jobs by looking at 35 mm film and holding it up to a light as they studied the frames, measuring lengths of film against their arms to gauge a shot’s running time. A great advance took place with introduction of the Moviola, the invention of Leiden-born electrical engineer Iwan Serrurier (1878–1953). In its first incarnation, the Moviola was an upright handcranked intermittent projection viewer that was used by Hollywood studio executives to view movies in their offices (Kirsner 2008). After discovering that there was an additional market for editing, Serrurier reworked the machine and in 1924 sold one to Douglas Fairbanks’ studio. With the new Moviola an editor could study shots and the construction of scenes in motion to their heart’s desire on a small rear screen viewer. In November of that year the Mitchell Camera Company built 12 machines for MGM. With the introduction of sound the Moviola, with an optical sound reader, was used for syncing up image and track; it was so ubiquitously deployed that during the next half century, the word Moviola became a generic for an editing machine (Slide 2013). The Moviola’s clattering intermittent drive was operated by foot treadles, appropriate since it was driven by a modified sewing machine motor. The small rear screen projected image was deemed to be adequate for the purpose of viewing workprints and making editorial decisions. Flatbed editing tables, whose work surfaces were laid out like tape decks, were introduced in Germany in 1931 by Wilhelm Steenbeck, and a second such machine, the KEM (Keller-Elektro-­ Mechanik) soon followed; like the Steenbeck it was adopted by film editors at first in Europe (Koppelman 2005), as were other makes of flatbeds, which used a rotating prism rather than the Moviola’s intermittent drive. The prism’s optical image stabilization made it easy to move the image back and forth to study a shot and its connection with other shots, and it permitted the frame rate to be varied over a very wide range, even for studying still frames (just like Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope). In 1971 the CMX-600, a nonlinear or random access editing station designed for monochrome video tape, based on a

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Digital Equipment Corporation computer, was introduced by a joint venture of CBS and Memorex. In 1980 CBS introduced a computer-based system to allow television programs, often edited real time by the director who selects a shot from multiple cameras, to instead be edited using an approach like the celluloid cinema’s that, according to Flaherty and Nicholls (1980): “permits single camera film style production shooting using an electronic camera with a single videotape recorder.” Nonlinear editing stores the editor’s decisions to be later assembled into the final cut. It’s also called offline editing since no modification is made to the workprint or original camera material during the editorial process. Nonlinear editing of video image files is characterized as random access editing since any shot, wherever its location, can be rapidly accessed, which is a significantly different process from editing motion picture workprint with a Moviola or a flatbed editing machine. Nonlinear editing has significant advantages compared with the physical cutting and splicing of a film workprint, primarily because it allows for the orderly filing of shots and makes changes easier to accomplish. The system in which the camera negative is scanned to digital files for editing, color timing, and insertion of effects, and back to film for release, became known as the DI (digital intermediate) process. A number of companies like Avid, CMX, Ediflex, Editing Machines Corp., E-Pix, Montage, and Lightworks, offered computer-based editing system systems compatible with the DI process (Kirsner 2008). George Lucas needed a tool for editing the digital video files recorded from the Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta video camera for his Episode II–Attack of the Clones, released in 2002, as described in chapter 79. The EditDroid was developed by Lucasfilm as a computer-based nonlinear offline system for editing CineAlta footage. EditDroid was introduced in 1984, but Lucas never used it for editing a feature film, and in 1993 he sold the system to Avid Technology. Avid agreed to incorporate EditDroid features in its dedicated computer-based editing system, and by the late 1990s many Hollywood’s feature films were edited using the Avid

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Fig. 81.1  Iwan Serrurier and his Moviola.

workbench. Others developed digital editing systems using existing PC hardware: Adobe introduced the nonlinear editing application Premiere in 1991, which ran on Apple Macintosh computers, and in 1994 they introduced After Effects, a visual effects application. Other similar programs followed in the years to come for both Apple and Windows laptops and desktops. In the last years of the twentieth century, and early years of the twenty-first century, prior to the widespread use of electronic cameras and the deployment of digital projectors, a growing number of features shot on film were post-produced using editing and post-production systems based on the ability to turn motion picture camera negative into high-quality digital files and back again to 35 mm film prints for exhibition. This hybrid DI post-production capability was a perfect fit for the growing use of computergenerated visual effects. With the installation of digital projectors, digitally encoded files rather than film prints, were distributed recorded on hard drives using the DCP format. The Kodak Cineon, introduced in 1992, was part of the first complete digital intermediate system, consisting of a film to digital scanner (the Cineon itself), the required software for manipulating and storing files, and a scanner or film recorder to produce printing masters from the digital files. The introduction of the Cineon, and its concomitant digital intermediate process, was one of the major steps that enabled the acceptance of the digital cinema by the film industry. Development of the system took place at the Kodak research facilities in Rochester, Palo Alto, and Australia, principally by Glenn Kennel and Brad Hunt, managed by Mike Inchalik. The initial focus was to improve the integration of computergenerated effects into live action content. Although the system has been out of production for many years, its software survives as the DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) file format, an SMPTE standard. The Cineon Digital Film Scanner was

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designed around a 4096 element stack of three CCD line sensors with red, blue, and green dichroic filters to scan each line. Dichroic or interference filters are different from the usual color filters that absorb light; they are made up of layers of thin plastic films laminated on glass to filter color in the same way that it is produced by an oil slick or a butterfly’s wings. A xenon lamp was chosen as part of a diffuse illuminating source rather than a conventional tungsten light source because it has far more energy in the blue part of the spectrum, making it a good match for scanning negative camera film with its orange masking layers. The diffuse nature of the light source helped to conceal abrasions and dust. Film was transported over a curved drum using pin registration to hold it flat in the gate where it was exposed. The analog signal produced by the CCD scanner was converted into a 14 bit per color digital signal. A lookup table (LUT) was used to transform the scanner’s linear output to match that of standard color print film’s characteristic curve. Kodak also designed a film recorder using laser scanning because of its high energy and small spot size, according to Kennel (1994). The lasers were chosen to match the spectral sensitivity of the recording film, and the laser beams were steered by acousto-optical pixel-rate modulators and other optics. The system was capable of 4K resolution at 4096 × 3037 pixels. In 1993, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937 by Disney, became the first complete film to use the Cineon DI process, in this case for restoration. The film was originally shot frame sequentially on black and white stock through RGB filters and printed using Technicolor’s imbibition process. The original RGB filtered negatives were scanned to digital files and digitally composited to produce a trichromatic image. Negative shrinkage and other physical deterioration issues were addressed, such as dirt and scratches that were removed; the film was also color and density timed. Some of the repairs could be made algorithmically, but others required frame-by-frame intervention by artist-technicians. The digital files of the restored film were used to produce tape masters for VHS home distribution and a master for making prints for theatrical distribution. Scanners by other organizations like that of Scanity or the Lasergraphics Director use techniques like constant illumination of the frame and a line array. The ARRISCAN, developed by Arriflex and Zeiss, uses intermittent pin registered motion with the film illuminated by LEDs and imaged by a CMOS chip to turn camera negative into digital files. In the early 2000s Arri also produced the Arrilaser film recorder for turning digital files into film. As high definition digital television became a broadcast service, the difference between the telecine and the film scanner became blurred and the same can be said for many aspects of digital television and digital cinema technology. Film scanners for the 35 mm 1.3:1 screen aspect ratio frame were initially designed for a minimum of

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Fig. 81.2  The screen of a desktop computer monitor showing an Avid Editing program.

video’s linear output; log output from digital cameras for recording has become commonplace. The Spirit was used for the 1998 feature Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross, which transitioned freely between color and black and white and different levels of color saturation. Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) became an exemplar of the DI process because, unlike Pleasantville, O Brother’s effects could not have been achieved using celluloid cinema techniques. Pleasantville’s transitions from black and white to color could have been done photochemically, but selectively changing the colors of foliage to represent different seasons required using digital files and a computer with image editing software. Cinematographer Roger Deakins suggest that the entire film be scanned and timed using the DI process, and so the film’s camera negative was scanned to digital files, color edited, and turned back into film for release using a Kodak Lightning II film recorder. Fig. 81.3  The Cineon Digital Film Scanner. (Derek Tidman) These three projects, one restoration of an animated feature shot as three-color separation negatives, and two live 2K resolution, 2048 × 1536 pixels, but today the requirement action shows requiring special color timing, demonstrated for many films is 4K, or 4096 × 3072 pixels, and even higher-­ the quality and usefulness of the DI process. The introducresolution scans may be offered. tion of the Cineon system had a major effect on the film After the close of the Cineon project, Kennel helped industry, as Douglas Bankston points out: “(The Cineon) Philips adapt their Spirit DataCine scanner to the DPX high caused a radical shift in the visual-effects industry. In just a definition digital file format. It was Kennel who recognized few short years, the traditional, labor-intensive optical died the advantages of recording the 10-bit DPX files in the loga- out” (Prince 2012). The optical printer had been used for rithmic format to emulate the H&D1 curve rather than using visual effects for decades for countless theatrical films, but it could leave traces of its labors. With the DI process routine 1  The Hurter and Driffield curve is a plot of values of the photographic effects like fades, wipes, and dissolves, and the far more density (a logarithmic value) of an emulsion versus the log of its expo- complex traveling mattes, became seamless without noticesure. The curve is a visualization of how much silver is produced in a able differences in photographic quality or obtrusive matte developed emulsion as a function of exposure; it looks like a flattened lines. Actors could be placed in any environment, real or S. It is also known as the characteristic curve and the D-log E curve. It imagined, using the kind of technology that had been enviis the foundation of the science of photographic sensitometry.

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sion in 1971 by Petro Vlahos in his USP Image modification of motion pictures, as noted in chapter 79. Post-production suites replaced film timers with colorists, experts at manipulating digital files to correct or enhance photography with far more facility than was possible with the tools of the photochemical celluloid cinema. DI facilities opened in Los Angeles, like EFILM in 2002, or another group organized by a Technicolor, both of which developed their own software in addition to using off-the-­shelf products. Post-production was the first of the three elements that fell into place for an allelectronic cinema. The other two elements were projection and cinematography, which were accepted in that order. Hollywood studios began to take the arrival of the digital cinema as something to be reckoned with and sought to shape their shared destiny. A proximate impetus may have been the May 16, 2002, release date of the fifth film in the Lucas Star Wars Cycle, Episode II—Attack of the Clones. Lucas arranged for special exhibition in about 70 theaters equipped with two kinds of electronic projectors requiring new kinds of support hardware and the mastering of content for their file formats. Concerned that a plethora of digital release formats would be costly and increases the danger of slipups, in March 2002 Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. organized a joint venture that was eventually named Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI), to which each contributed one million dollars for operating expenses. Its stated goal was to create an open architecture for digital cinema to encourage excellent motion picture imaging, quality control, and reliability, so films could be distributed and p­ rojected with an assured level of high performance, which would be even better than the film technology it was to replace.

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Walt Ordway, who became DCI’s Chief Technology Officer, told me that on August 3, 1993, he coined the term digital cinema, while a project manager at the Hughes Satellite Division. At inception the organization had no formal name and was referred to internally as NewCo for several months beginning on July 15, 2002, until the formal creation of the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) as an incorporated entity. According to Ordway, in conversation in December 2018 at the ASC Clubhouse, after DCI got rolling the SMPTE, DC28 committee, which had been set up to establish digital cinema standards, was given a clear direction to pursue. (The work of the DC28 committee is discussed in the next chapter.) In addition, the concept of the virtual print fee, a loan mechanism to help exhibitors acquire digital projectors, was conceived by the DCI. In 2003 The American Society of Cinematographers formed its Technology Committee, to further the adoption of electro-digital technology, chaired by cinematographer Curtis Clark. One of its first projects followed in the footsteps of the Mazda Test as described in the chapter Optical Sound Evolution. The committee, along with the DCI, managed the production of the StEM or Standardized Evaluation Material film, photographed in August 2003. The StEM film was shot on 35 mm on the Universal lot by cinematographer Allen Daviau. It provided a reference standard for comparing and evaluating film and digital prints based on images typical of those found in feature films, which were lit and shot under controlled and documented conditions. The ASC also cooperated with AMPAS, in an effort that took several years, to create a cross-platform workflow tool to control color reproduction, ACES, the Academy Color Encoding System.

Electro-Mechanical to Digital Projection

Introduction  The history of television’s development is a voluminous one, spanning facsimile, electro-mechanical, allelectronic, and digital technology. After the advent of broadcast radio, work in the field became focused on the creation of broadcast television services following radio’s business model and taking advantage of its technology. While television developed along these lines, the concentration in these pages is on the creation of the electro-digital cinema, which unlike broadcast TV requires projection. In this chapter we’ll take a look at video projection methods that invariably were more complicated than those required for the celluloid cinema, which when all is said and done, uses a magic lantern to rapidly project a series of frames. The magic lantern, a transparency projector, even in its incarnation as a motion picture projector, is relatively straightforward to understand and build. But a television projector is a far more complicated device because basic television technology doesn’t innately store images, and it can’t readily use the transparency projection method. It’s been a challenge for inventors to come up with good video projection techniques, and it has taken many decades and advances in technology to achieve performance comparable to, and at last superior to photochemical-celluloid film motion picture projection. Moreover, high definition video had to be developed for television to become a candidate to replace celluloid cinema projection. Electro-mechanical Projection  An early design for a television projector, the Téléoscope, was presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1898 by Zurich-born physicist François Dussaud (1870–1953) using the disk scanning technique Nipkow disclosed in 1884. Dussaud, who for a time worked for Pathé, was principally known for his sound recording technology for film, the cinémacrophonographe, or Phonorama, for which he was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honor in 1900. He proposed mechanical disk scanning to create a video signal for transmission to a projector-­receiver that reconstructed the image using disk scanning in conjunction with a variable aperture mechanical shutter to produce a grayscale

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image. A similar concept, based on mirror scanning, had been articulated in 1880 by Maurice Leblanc (see chapter 71). Projection using mechanically scanning, in which a moving spot of light writes the image on a screen, intrinsically has low optical efficiency. A light valve is needed to produce a gray scale; to achieve this the light valve must modulate the constant output of an electric light, and even a carbon arc is not bright enough to produce an image on other than a small screen. The action of the moving spot of light is the inverse of flying-spot scanning and resembles that of the electron beam writing an image on the phosphor screen of a CRT. Following Nipkow’s suggestion, many inventors turned to the Kerr Cell as a light modulator to produce a gray scale, because it is electrically controllable and offers the speed that comes with no moving parts, but it was difficult to develop into a useful device. Another issue has to do with image quality since mechanical scanning of live action generally achieved about a tenth the number of lines of the first all-­electronic systems. A way had to be found round this limitation for projection, which demands many lines, since no display is successful if the observer is aware of its image structure. One way to overcome the limitations of mechanical scanning was to combine it with photochemical motion picture technology, an approach that was pursued even after the advent of all-electronic television. Television projection using the intermediatefilm process was described in chapter 78, such as Hartley and Ives’ 1927 original suggestion to combine video and film technology and Lee de Forest’s 1931 unrealized concept for converting a video signal into an optically projectable motion picture image using an electrically etched silver coating on 35 mm. Alexanderson continued to pursue mechanical scanning at GE/RCA, and in 1927 demonstrated a projected television image. Alexanderson had been inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s play, Back to Methuselah, that has a scene in which a video conference takes place in the year 2170 (Burns 1998, pp.  207–210). Alexanderson’s projector used a ­ scanning polygonal drum 2½ feet in diameter, about 10 inches wide,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_82

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with twenty-four 4 in × 4 in mirror facets, reflecting seven beams of light onto a 4 foot square screen. The device was first demonstrated on September 18, 1926. Alexanderson discussed the challenges of handling the large amount of information required for transmitting and displaying such an image, but according to Burns he divulged few details. Burns also relates that a demonstration of the projector on December

Fig. 82.1  François Dussaud, shown with his Téléoscope apparatus. (Université de Caen Normandie) Fig. 82.2  How to make a Nipkow disk projector. The illumination source is a carbon arc (right). An optical system focuses the light passing through the rotating disk’s apertures to project a scanning spot of light. Gray scale is achieved using a light valve, in this case a Kerr Cell. (Electronics, June, 1930, p. 147)

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24, 1926, reportedly “gave very poor results.” AT&T was also mounting a mechanical scanning television effort at the time, and reportedly got better results in a demonstration that Alexanderson witnessed on May 21, 1927. Direct projection using mechanical scanning continued to be pursued by GE/RCA and was demonstrated on January 16, 1930, at the RKO 58th Street Theatre in Manhattan where RCA projected a 60 fields per second image on a 10-foot-wide screen using a carbon arc to project light through a Kerr Cell light valve and a Nipkow disk scanner. GE staged a similar and well-documented mechanical scanning broadcast and projection demonstration at the RKO Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady, New  York, on May 22, 1930, under the direction of Alexanderson. Lip-synchronized head and shoulder shots of vaudevillians were transmitted from a mile away using a sound stage put together at the GE plant, and live performers interacted with those televised and projected in the theater. RCA engineer Ray Kell, whose name is now attached to the Kell Factor (that provides a measure of video image sharpness), operated the equipment in the theater, adjusting it on a small teloptican monitor as it was projected by means of what was described by the press as a light valve projector. For image pickup, a Nipkow disk with 48 holes was used for flying-spot image scanning at 20 frames per second with four photoelectric tubes sensing the scene’s reflected light. For projection a Karolus light valve, a version of the Kerr Cell, was used by Alexanderson to modulate the arc light to produce a gray scale. The 48 line image was rear projected on a screen 6 feet wide (Television on the Screen, p. 23, 24, 1930; Martin 1930). Alexanderson had a tenacious commitment to mechanical television despite the fact that he was a university trained electrical engineer, but perhaps it’s to be expected since his major contribution to radio, the Alexanderson Alternator, was an electro-mechanical device. In England between July 28 and August 9, 1930, Baird demonstrated a Nipkow disk scanned image on a 6 ft × 3 ft

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screen at the London Coliseum using an array of 2100 light bulbs that were turned on sequentially using a commutator’s contact switches, for a 12 field per second image; while it was not a projected image it’s given here because it was a large screen display. The signal was broadcast to a truck located outside the London Coliseum, which was fed into the theater and to the display (Progress in the Motion Picture Industry 1930). On August 8, the penultimate demonstration in the series was described as a “talking film.” By way of comparison, many TVs and cinema screens have 4K images, or about 4000 pixels along a horizontal line. Baird’s display

Fig. 82.3  Alexanderson’s mirror-drum mechanical scanning projection system used multiple scanning beams to increase image brightness. (Wireless World, April 1927, p. 479) Fig. 82.4 Alexanderson’s mechanical scanning broadcast television system was demonstrated on May 22, 1930, in Schenectady, New York. Flying-spot scanning was used for pickup, as shown (left). The signal was transmitted to RKO’s Proctor Theater a mile away where the image was projected. (Electronics, June, 1930, p. 147)

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would have had perhaps 50 pixels along a line (and probably a pretty limited gray scale). On October 24, 1931, Ulises A. Sanabria, at the B. S. Moss Broadway Theater in Manhattan, projected a mechanically scanned 45 line image on a 10 foot square screen using a 3½ foot diameter scanning disk on which were mounted 45 lenses (Abramson 1955b). Marshall (2011, p. 130), probably referring to the same event, puts the date at October 22, at the Broadway Theater, and reports that Sanabria used a triple spiral Nipkow disk whose illumination source was a high power neon “crater” lamp, to project threefold interlace images on a screen that was (possibly) 40 square feet in area. Sanabria’s interlace approach was ahead of its time, and it might have given the appearance of an image with a higher line count. Baird also gave two true projection demonstrations in 1931, first of the British Derby at the London Metropole Cinema using his 30 line system, which was characterized as producing images of a “barely recognizable horse race.” A year later, Baird employed three 30 line units in tandem to project a 90 line image for an audience of 4000, which was met with acclaim (Marshall 2011, p. 148). Baird soldiered on and demonstrated a two-color 120 line mechanically scanned interlaced picture, projected on a 12-foot-­wide screen at London’s Dominion Theater on February 4, 1938. Scophony Projection  No description of electro-­ mechanical television efforts is complete without an account of Scophony Ltd., a British company based in Soho, at the time London’s motion picture business district. The company’s focus was television projection – it had no image pickup technology (Marshall 2011, pp.  146–148). The organization originated as Scophony GmbH in Germany, which was based on technology developed in

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Hungary and Germany. It was founded by German financier Paul Kressman and Soviet émigré Solomon Sagall who reorganized the company in Britain as Scophony Ltd. after Kressman’s death in 1931. Sagall succeeded in attracting engineering talent and an investment from the founder of Odeon Cinemas, Oscar Deutsch. Scophony was eventually capable of projecting a 405 line mechanically scanned image of reportedly good quality, making it the crowning achievement of mechanical television display efforts. Scophony projection reportedly rivaled the quality of CRT displays, but unlike the Kinescope it was designed solely for projection rather than direct viewing, although it was applied to rear screen projection. Scophony used a unique electo-optical light valve to achieve a gray scale, which was unlike other electromechanical systems that used a Kerr Cell (described in chapter 30). The light valve was a Jeffree Ultrasound Diffraction Cell, the invention of optical scientist John Henry Jeffree (1938, pp. 461–464). Jeffree’s modulator is based on a piezo-electric quartz crystal transducer that transmits a supersonic video signal through a glass cell filled with a liquid such as heptane. The acoustical signal passes through the medium producing rarefactions and compressions, a transverse wave analog of the video signal. A beam of light is passed through the liquid and focused on a slit to produce a diffraction pattern. Changes in the diffraction pattern are used to produce the changes in image destiny that occur along a scanned line. Scophony’s electro-­acoustical light valve was combined with mirror-drum scanning. A low-speed polygonal mirror scanner vertically relocates the modulated beam to scan each new horizontal line, and a high-speed polygonal scanner steers the projected light beam to scan each line; in this way drum scanning writes a video field.

Fig. 82.5 Scophony electro-mechanical projection. The video signal is fed to the Jeffree electro-acoustical modulator to create gray scale. An intense light beam is projected through the modulator and scanned using mirror-drums. Depicted here is rear screen projection. (www.modulatedlight.org)

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Its widespread adoption was probably curtailed due to demonstrations of RCA’s all-electronic television system in the early 1930s, which led to a collapse in investor ­confidence in mechanical television developments. However, by 1939 Scophony projection was working well enough to be used in a number of British motion picture theaters. A further setback to Scophony is attributable to the onset of the Second World War and the diversion of effort that it entailed. However, as we shall learn below, Scophony was contemplated for theatrical projection in the late 1940s by Paramount and Fox, but the effort was scuttled. Intermediate-Film Projection  At the Berlin Radio Exhibition in 1933, the German company Fernseh AG used the intermediate-film system to create a television signal from rapidly processed motion picture film that was scanned to video and transmitted to a receiver where it was scanned to film and rapidly processed for projection. At reception a print was made from the video signal by scanning film that moved continuously, using a flying-spot produced by a disk with 90 hexagonally shaped holes rotating at 3000 rpm. The disk did not use the Nipkow spiral arrangement, but rather the apertures were arranged annularly; the motion of the film was used for the vertical translation required to scan successive lines to produce a 180-line field. The film was developed, fixed, washed, dried, and run through a projector at 25 fps and projected on a 13 ft × 10 ft screen. This was the first television recording process, according to Abramson’s (1955b, Feb.). Fernseh continued to develop the process, but results were reportedly of poor quality, exhibiting blotching and other defects. A similar intermediate-film approach was deployed beginning on March 22, 1935, by Reichs Rundfunk in Berlin, also a 180-line system, which in one installation was projected on a 4 ft × 3 ft screen (Burns 1998). Fernseh,

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in 1936, used the intermediate-­television system for broadcasting the Berlin Olympic Games. The transmitted 180-line signal was received and projected in 28 small screening rooms in Berlin on screens 4 feet wide.1 Paramount and Fox turned to the projection system developed by Scophony, at the time owned by Paramount. Possibly as a result of an antitrust suit accusing the two studios of conspiring to inhibit theatrical television exhibition, Paramount turned to an alternative and used the intermediate-­ film system (Lev 2003). It’s also possible that the Scophony approach was dropped because the intermediate-film system had better image quality. Paramount premiered their system in April 1948 at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan to exhibit a prize fight, but by the end of 1951, only six theaters had installations. The approach used a 35 mm single-system sound camera built by the Akeley Camera Co. to film the transmitted video images from a cathode ray tube displaying a negative image. The camera used a 12,000 foot load giving it more than a 2-hour capacity. Fine-grain positive film was used and processed in 66 seconds and fed directly to the theater’s projector (Abramson 1955b). Also, between May and September 1951, intermediate-film images were projected in a 400 seat theater at the Festival of Britain. In September 1952 a boxing match in which Rocky Marciano KOed Jersey Joe Walcott was broadcast to paying customers in 50 theaters in 31 US cities, but the intermediate-film pro-

Fig. 82.6  The Fernseh-German Post Office intermediate film processing and television transmission truck was used for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. The motion picture camera was on the roof; its exposed film was fed to the processing machine within the truck. The film was disk scanned for transmission, re-emulsioned, and returned to the camera. (Televsion Today, Newnes, London, 1935, pp. 252–255)

Marshall (2011, p. 296) says while there is ambiguity with regard to the actual line count, which may have been as high as 375 lines, but the results were reportedly poor. 1 

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cess may not have been used for this event (WS: boxinghalloffame.com). High Brightness CRT Projection  On May 12, 1937, in New York City, R. R. Law and Vladimir Zworykin of RCA, demonstrated a high brightness CRT-based projector using a special Kinetoscope tube for the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) (Abramson 1955b). RCA’s next high brightness video projection effort used Schmidt-CRT projection optics in conjunction with high brightness cathode ray tubes. This approach was the forerunner of projection products for the home and industry (such as trade shows), but it was not taken up for theatrical exhibition, as far as I know. Schmidt optics were designed to improve catadioptric telescopes by adding a refractive correction plate at the telescope’s exit, a variation on the reflecting telescope invented by Newton. For the RCA application, the projectors used a high brightness cathode ray tube whose phosphor screen was in the same position as that of the Schmidt telescope’s photographic plate. The tube’s image was reflected by a concave mirror and then passed through the correcting refractive plate to form an image on the screen. On February 14, 1939, RCA demonstrated Schmidt-CRT technology at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan projecting on a 6 ft × 4 ft screen. An RCA television system demonstration at the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York City, on April 20, 1939, used as its subject David Sarnoff dedicating the RCA exhibit. Sarnoff’s image may have been projected on a large screen as well as displayed on a Kinescope receiver (or perhaps rear projected) on a 24  in  ×  18  in screen (Abramson 2008). For Sarnoff this may have been a bittersweet moment since in 1928 he had optimistically predicted that there would be a television service operating in 4 years, which was not achieved until after the end of the Second World War. Abramson marks the formal debut of television in the United States as occurring a week and a half later, on April 30, 1939, with the televised speech of President Roosevelt at the official opening of the Fair. In 1940 RCA projected a Madison Square Garden boxing match and a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game with a 441 line image on a 15-foot-wide screen at the New Yorker Theatre (probably using Schmidt projection technology). As part of his crusade to make television part of people’s daily lives, David Sarnoff promoted RCA’s ability to project television images on big screens and encouraged his researches to improve their demonstrations. In the middle of 1947, RCA was able to project in color on a 10 ft × 7.5 ft screen using a triple-headed Schmidt projection system designed by cathode ray tube expert David Epstein who used 8 inch diameter high brightness tubes. For the demonstration “Tough,” red, blue, and green phosphors were developed by H. W. Leverenz the “long unsung guru of phosphor chemis-

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try” (Webb 2005). The tubes ran at “an unprecedented” 75,000 volts using a Westinghouse X-ray power supply, an arrangement that may have produced X-ray emission at unsafe levels. The tubes were made in near-production quantities since they burnt out after a few hours of operation and had to be replaced frequently. For these demonstrations, a flying-spot projector scanner was used to transmit motion picture content from film running at 30 fps (which may have been shot at 24 fps). That year Zworykin used the apparatus for a demonstration at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia where he received an award for science and engineering. RCA continued to demonstrate projection TV and in May 1948, working with Warner Bros., showed off a 20 ft × 15 ft image. In April 1949, at the SMPTE convention in New York, RCA demonstrated high brightness 12 in and 21 in diameter Schmidt designs, projecting images on a screen 80 ft × 45 ft, in conjunction with Fox and Warner Bros. Eidophor Projection  According to O’Brien et  al. (1976), in an article originally published in 1972, there were “as many as 500 to 600 theaters in the U.  S. alone…(that) provided closed-circuit feeds of certain major sporting ­ events…” in which “large screen television projectors are employed.” The Eidophor was widely used for this application because it projected an image bright enough to fill a theater screen. It was invented by Swiss physicist Friedrich (Fritz) Ernst Fischer (1898–1947) in a development that began in 1939 while he was at the Department of Applied Physics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. An early version of the Eidophor is described in USP 2,391,451, filed on June 10, 1941, which was granted to F. E. Fischer. On December 31, 1943, the Eidophor projection

Fig. 82.7  David Epstein of RCA with his high brightness color projector using 8 in diameter CRTs with RGB phosphors and Schmidt optics.

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system was demonstrated for the first time, and after Fischer’s death in 1947, the program was continued by Edgar Gretener. The Eidophor light valve itself is a concave reflective disk covered with a smooth oil film target 20 millimicrons (billionths of a meter) thick; the oil film is deformed into minute grooves forming diffraction patterns by the action of a scanning electron beam. After the beam writes each field, the disk is wiped clean of the diffraction pattern by a doctor blade to permit a new field to be scanned and written. The Eidophor and electron gun unit are in a vacuum enclosure, and the oil on the disk is continually replenished since it is degraded by the electron bombardment. Unlike the approach used for a CRT, in which the beam is intensity modulated, the Eidophor’s beam is spot size modulated by changing its instantaneous scanning rate with zero modulation corresponding to the black state. An arc lamp projects light onto the oil film’s surface to reflect the diffraction patterns through a Schlieren (from the German streak) optical system composed of rulings called Schlieren stops (in this case a slotted semi-reflecting mirror) and other optics, to form the projected image (Labin 1950; Settles 2001). The quality of the Eidophor’s large screen image was usually limited by broadcast standard video, the basis for industrial and audiovisual products, probably making it just adequate for big screen projection. However, military command and control centers used higher line count Eidophor projection. To produce additive color, both a field-sequential color filter wheel and RGB projection heads were used. The Eidophor could project on screens up to 50 feet wide, and the GE Talaria based on related technology, introduced decades later, could project on screens a bit less than half that width. It’s of interest to note that both the Scophony and the Eidophor techniques used a liquid medium for the creation of a physical analog of the video signal’s waveform and both used diffraction to turn these video analogs into image density. Industrial and Consumer Projection  Three-tube projectors were introduced as models suitable for home theaters, military simulators, and corporate presentations, and were widely used at tradeshows, using 7, 8, and 9 inch diameter tubes. There were also home TV sets designed as rear projection cabinet models using 7 inch tubes. These projectors came into their own with a design that dispensed with the more costly Schmidt optics. Instead they used three high brightness tubes with red, blue, and green phosphors projecting directly through refractive lenses, but they required a high gain screen, in the range of 4 to 6 feet wide, with a highly reflective rigid concave surface that had a useful but relatively narrow viewing angle. Their optics consisted of the tube’s emissive faceplate itself, a liquid coupling (a cell filled with liquid) interface for cooling, and a field lens built as an integral unit. Extremely fast refractive optics from f/0.9 to

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Fig. 82.8  An Eidophor theater projector, in this case the schematic of one using field-sequential color, which is shown projecting a blue field.

f/1.1 were common (Stupp and Brennesholtz 1999). As late as 2006, a consumer handbook advised: “CRT projectors, particularly front-projection systems, can provide the highest resolution (including full HDTV support), the most excellent color, and a bright picture with superb contrast” (Briere and Hurley 2006). The decline of the cathode ray tube projector, which had been commonplace for several decades, was so swift that they seemed to disappear within a vertical blanking interval. AMLD Projection  CRT projectors were replaced by new technologies such as the AMLCD (active matrix liquid crystal display) that offered better image quality with projector designs that were far more compact, lighter, and portable (Tannas and Glenn 1992). The AMLCD was invented by electronics engineer Bernard J. Lechner (1932–2014); it was based on the liquid crystal display efforts of his colleague at RCA Laboratories, George H. Heilmeier (1936–2014), who described the new technology in a number of patents including USP 3,551,026, Control of Optical Properties of Materials with Liquid Crystal, filed on April 26, 1965. Lechner overcame the difficulties of addressing a display made up of an array of minute liquid crystal shutters, as described in his USP 3,532,813, Display Circuit Including Charging Circuit and Fast Reset Circuit, filed on September 25, 1967. The novel feature is that a pixel, made up of a liquid crystal shutter, is addressed by using what is called the

sample-and-hold technique by adding capacitors in series with each shutter and controlling its charge using field-effect transistors; it was first demonstrated in 1968 as a 36 pixel display. Other LC variants that became the basis for projection products are ferro-electric liquid crystal on silicon (FLCoS) and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS). Projectors using these displays internally combined the output of three RGB filtered displays for full color using a single projection lens. These products used additive color mixing optics identical in concept to Ive’s Kromskop. TI’s DMD Projection  Theatrical electronic-digital cinema projection was made possible by the TI (Texas Instruments) light engine, which is the core technology of 80% of the theater screens in the world. At the heart of these projectors (branded as DLP for digital light projector) is the digital micromirror device or DMD, a reflective spatial light modulator or SLM, a subset of micro-electrical-mechanical systems or MEMS technology. The DMD light engine is one of the most significant inventions in the history of cinema, providing an alternative to the celluloid cinema’s integral tripack transparency projection. This fast reflective digital light switch was invented by American physicist Larry J. Hornbeck, who was born in 1943 in St. Louis, Missouri. A digitally addressed version of the device, one of 38 on the subject he was granted, is described in USP 5,061,049, Spatial light modulator and method, filed on September 13, 1990. An analog version, USP

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4,596,992, Linear Spatial Light Modulator and Printer, which was filed on April 31, 1984, was designed for a hardcopy printer component, which at the time Hornbeck and TI thought was the device’s most likely commercial application, specifically for the rapid printing of airline tickets. Hornbeck made a major conceptual breakthrough in 1987 when he realized that the performance and instability issues he observed exhibited in the lab by his SLM (spatial light modulator), an analog device, could be overcome by addressing the part with a digital signal. Renamed the DMD, one of the attractions for Texas Instruments was that it can be made on the same fabrication lines used for the company’s integrated circuits. TI isn’t in the projector business but rather sells light engines made with a DMD chip or chip sets to manufacturers to incorporate into their projectors. The DMD uses light reflected from a Cartesian grid of millions of micromirrors each of which represents a pixel (or subpixel, required for three-color synthesis). Reflection projection technology, catoptrics, was described in the first chapter of this book. Its mid-­seventeenth-­century origins are attributable to the work of Daniel Schwendter and its principal advocate Athanasius Kircher. This technology, for the most part, lay fallow for three and a half centuries until Hornbeck’s micromirrors, which modulate reflected light by rapid tipping, creating a matrix that reminds me of pinscreen animation. Schwendter and Kircher’s approach blocked light from reflecting and projecting by painting silhouettes on a concave mirror, but the DMD creates an image with a gray scale using each micromirror as a vibrating modulator (Stupp and Brennesholtz 1999). DMD projection also resurrected additive color projection, which had been last used commercially for motion pictures, in the late 1910s by Kinemacolor, Technicolor, and Prizma Color. Each aluminum micromirror is about 16 micrometers wide and is mounted on a hinge system made of a yolk with an underlying mechanical stop with pairs of electrodes under each mirror to vibrate it. A semiconductor memory part, a static random-access memory cell or SRAM, is associated with each micromirror controlling the charge on the electrodes producing electromagnetic fields to vibrate it, a design that allows each to be addressed with a different value. Each micromirror may be tilted to plus or minus 10° and can be vibrated thousands of times a second; the hinge has a long lifetime before failure. The light reflected from the mirror array passes through refractive optics to form an image on a screen (Swartz 2005). The brightness of the pixel is determined by the length of time a micromirror is in its reflection position, a scheme called pulse width modulation, which provides a color depth of 12 bits at 24  fps. In its original deployment the device had an on-screen contrast ratio of about 2000:1, less than that of Eastman Color Vision print stock, which is about 3000:1. The DMD dynamic range has

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been improved to 3000:1, according the manufacturers’ published specifications, and some projector models, using laser lamphouses and additional techniques, can now produce a dynamic range superior to that of film prints. Each of the mirror elements determines only the brightness or gray scale of a pixel, not its color; thus the theatrical cinema version of the light engine uses three DMD chips filtered to produce trichromatic Maxwellian synthesis. The light reflected by the three DMDs is optically combined to pass through a single projection lens (using Kromskop-type optics) for additive color synthesis; this is not a réseau

Fig. 82.9  Larry Hornbeck holding an Oscar and a DMD chip.

Fig. 82.10  A 1280 × 1024 pixel DMD. (TI)

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Fig. 82.11  The elements of a DMD image engine. Light modulation is achieved by changing the frequency of the hinged micromirrors’ vibrations. The micromirrors are actuated by underlying electrodes (not shown). (TI)

approach because the micromirrors’ pixels are projected in superimposition (Hornbeck 1998). The DMD device is well suited to big screen projection because there is only a small area between the micromirrors, the grout between the tiles, which means the pixels’ fill-factor is high, making for an unobtrusive image structure because its interstices are barely discernable. DMD chips are available in 2K and 4K resolution with a 1.78:1 (HDTV) aspect ratio; wide screen (1.85:1) and ‘Scope (2.35:1) are formatted through cropping, but scope can be projected using the full frame with an anamorphic lens (Rast 2001). The process is capable of reproducing a wide gamut of colors, and compared with film projection digital light projection has superior image steadiness and geometric linearity plus there’s a lack of dirt, dust, scratches, and wear and tear, no matter how often a digital file is screened. Zoom projection lenses are usually used to facilitate precise screen coverage, which was not the custom for film projectors that used fixed focal length lenses. These lenses may also cover a larger area than the size of the DMD display to allow for optical recentration in the vertical to mitigate or eliminate the trapezoidal distortion caused by the downward tilt required in most theaters. Hornbeck is now head of the University of Texas Dallas Center for the Study of Digital MEMS Technology, following his 43-year tenure at TI, most of which was spent working on what became the DMD light engine. It’s unusual for a core technology to have but a single named inventor on the many patents covering not only the basic technology, but also its manufacturing processes. When I asked him about this he replied: Yes, it is fairly unusual for one person to invent a new technology and also the manufacturing process that enables it. Consider however, that I worked nearly five years devel-

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oping the first CMOS compatible manufacturing for MEMS analog micromirrors (studied a lot of plasma chemistry) and valiantly attempted to get analog micromirrors with performance sufficient for printing applications. Failed at that and so out of desperation, went digital in 1987. As expected, the mirrors stuck after a few minutes of operation. However, the analog problems were solved. With digital compared to analog, I achieved higher deflection angles, greater deflection uniformity and lower operating voltages. I went on to invent an electro-mechanical “reset” to launch the mirrors to assist in freeing them from stiction. But more was needed, so I studied surface chemistry & came up with a means to apply a self-assembled monolayer “lubricant” to the surface. This process and lubricant are still used today. If you look at my 38 patents, you will see how the technology evolved over time…TI formed a venture project in 1992 that took on the simultaneous development of DMD (DLP chip), optics & algorithms. From 1992–1998 TI lost more than 500 million dollars before breaking even in a single year. Following that break-even year they went on to become one of the most profitable businesses at TI (Hornbeck, February 4, 2017, by email). In 1997 the first projectors and rear screen TV sets incorporating DMD image engines became available, using the field-sequential additive color principle, as described in these pages in the context of Kinemacolor. The DMD was ideal for this purpose because it can refresh fields extremely rapidly. A few years later TI produced an image engine with three DMD chips using filtration and optical combining for additive color. Using this new image engine audiovisual products suitable for corporate and tradeshow presentations, capable of projection on screens up to about 15 feet in width, were built by TI’s licensees. They were superior to other video projection products of this class with 1.3 K resolution (1280 pixels  ×  720 pixels) and other desirable attributes (Van Kessel et al. 2000). Researchers and marketing people at TI realized that it was probable that they could develop an image engine that was suitable for the theatrical cinema, but would it pass industry scrutiny? Their goal was to do at least as well as existing theatrical projection, but an objective analysis of the required specifications was not going to provide TI with all the information required to satisfy the demanding movie industry customers who had grown accustomed to the film look that had evolved over the course of a century. TI decided to demonstrate their 1.3K engine to the industry learn about the theatrical market. With the help of Paramount they did demonstrations on the lot to introduce the concept to the studios and to gather information by asking questions and listening (Kirsner 2008). They learned that they needed to improve the color gamut and dynamic range of their DMD engine and that the industry would not accept 1.3K resolution (Kriss and Liang 1983). Color gamut refers to the range of colors that can be

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displayed; the industry told them that they needed to do more work. They were told that they had to have a blacker black, the hallmark of higher dynamic range or contrast ratio. And they learned that while the most studios seemed to be happy with a 2K (2048  ×  1080) image specification, one studio, Warner Bros., wanted 4K (4096 × 2160) resolution. Some of this had to do with specsmanship rather than anything perceptual, but they were dealing with an opinionated and persnickety manufacturer and distributor, who was in fact not the paying customer. It was the exhibitors and the retailers who would be writing the checks for new projectors, and convincing them would entail even more effort. The Star Wars Test  George Lucas, after having seen electronic projection demonstrated at his Skywalker Ranch Studio, became an early advocate. His enthusiasm for it was expressed on June 18, 1999, with a trial deployment of electronic projectors, half of which used the Hughes-JVC projector and the other half an early version of the Texas Instruments DLP with the DMD engine, for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, exhibited in two theaters on the East Coast and two on the West Coast. The tests confirming the promise of electronic projection also pointed out problems that needed to be solved. The screenings of the film were managed by LucasFilm’s THX division, a service organization that had been established as a consultancy for exhibitors to help them achieve superior theater sound. For the screenings, uncompressed files were played back using disk arrays and a Silicon Graphics International (SGI) workstation loaded with the film on hard drives hand carried to the theater booths by studio representatives who remained to guard them, making apparent the need for an antipiracy protocol (Swartz 2005). In 1992 Hughes and JVC (Victor Company of Japan, Ltd.) formed a venture to produce projectors using the Hughes’ liquid crystal light valve under the trade name ILA, an acronym for Image Light Amplifier (Castellano 2005). The ILA employed three cathode ray tubes that produced infrared images that were transmitted to a special liquid crystal light valve that outputted modulated polarized light from which image density was produced using polarization analysis. The RGB analyzed images were passed through primary color filters to be optically combined for trichromatic additive color synthesis. It sounds like an overly complicated, but perhaps it was no less an improbable technology than Hornbeck’s little wiggling mirrors. During The Phantom Menace test, the Hughes-JVC projectors exhibited the streaking artifact associated with CRT’s slow phosphor decay, and they exhibited unstable color reproduction over time (Kirsner 2008). Although these projectors appeared on the market prior to TI’s, and shipped in the thousands for industrial applications, they failed to gain theatrical cinema acceptance.

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Projection Standards  The electro-digital cinema was introduced in unplanned stages due to the different rates of the technological maturation of its major components and the film industry’s acceptance of them. The technologies that were ready for widespread adoption occurred in this order: post-production, projection, and cinematography. Once a strong case was made that electronic projection might well replace celluloid projection, the studios came on board promoting industry standardization, primarily motivated by the significant reduction in the coast of release prints. In 2002 the studios organized the DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) to address their technical concerns and to explore a business model for the deployment of electronic projection, as noted in the previous chapter, which gave an urgency to the SMPTE’s efforts. In 1999, in anticipation of the conversion to electro-digital distribution and exhibition, the SMPTE formed the DC28 committee to work toward industry electronic projection standards. Its chair, Wendy Aylsworth, Senior Vice President of Technology at Warner Bros. Technical Operations, created subcommittees mandated to focus on distribution and exhibition. The subcommittees formed were DC28.10, Digital Cinema Technology; DC28.20, Mastering; DC28.30, Exhibition; and DC28.40, Stereoscopic Cinema. The SMPTE tasked itself to produce a set of standards to encompass what was called the digital cinema package (DCP) that included specifying compression protocols and standards for the delivery of digitized moving image and sound content to theaters (Aylsworth 2007). DCP files use JPEG 2000 compression and offer a variety of frame rates and resolutions of 2K from 24 to 60 fps, 4K from 24 to 30 fps, and for stereoscopic files at 2K for either 24 or 48 fps. Formats or frames sizes for various aspect ratios are also specified, but projectors and servers may have greater capability than the specifications. Electronic-digital projection, in addition to visual excellence, required antipiracy features to make it acceptable to the studios. Aspects of this initiative included a secure server to play back encrypted files and a secure delivery system for ingestion of these files onto servers (Ulin 2014). Principal differences between digital television and cinema are how the content is delivered, the frame rate, and the kind of and amount of compression. Television uses much greater compression and is delivered to the home or handheld device and not to a theater. Television in America and many countries operates at 60 fields or 30 frames per second, and movies are universally projected at 24 frames per second. It should also be pointed out that the color space for HDTV, Rec. 709, is smaller than that used for digital movies, DCI-P3. In other words, TV can represent fewer colors, which isn’t important unless the colors are very bright, in which case it is most likely they are produced by emissive sources like neon signs. While terrestrial broadcasting and

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physical media for the home are being supplanted by cable, and cable in turn by streaming internet content, hand delivery of hard drives for digital cinema is the rule for theatrical distribution. Theatrical motion pictures must have no visible compression artifacts for them to be an experience that is superior to television. The first link in the production chain are the files produced by the digital camera. Cameras can output files using colorplexing protocols identified as 4:4:4 or 4:2:2. The former uses the full luminance and RGB information and the latter luminance and two lower resolution color difference signals, from which three-color video is derived. Uncompressed digital cinema files are huge: a 2-hour movie file for a film shot at 24 fps with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, with a 4K image, or frames 3996 by 2160 pixels in a 4096 horizontal pixel container, with each pixel triad made up of 12-bit values, requires 7 terabytes of storage, the equivalent of 700 DVDs, to hold the data (Swartz 2005). Therefore JPG 2000 compression is required for distribution. Studios and Exhibitors  Despite TI’s having two studios initially interested in digital projection, first Paramount and then Disney, with other studios coming on board, there was resistance to electronic projection. Outspoken film critic Roger Ebert was openly hostile to it, a feeling shared by others including some influential cinematographers. But the first projector manufacturer to sign on with TI, in March 2000, Christie, Inc., was so gung-ho it changed its name to Christie Digital. Other TI licensees that followed were Barco and NEC.  In addition to these DMD machines, Sony, late in 2005, offered two projector models based on its LCoS technology under the SXRD brand. These 4K machines used RGB reflective displays whose light is mixed within the projector to produce additive color synthesis to permit the use of a single lens. The liquid crystal shutter pixel elements use a special alignment to heighten their contrast ratio, and like other liquid crystal displays, polarization creates image density resulting in substantial light loss. To make up for this, twin 2KW xenon lamps were used in both projectors. The color timing of Digital Cinema Distribution Masters was the same for both TI DMD and Sony LCoS machines, so DCP files played back properly on either DLP or Sony projectors. Because the Sony projectors were based on a hold-type display, they were unable to use the frame-sequential technique for stereoscopic projection, as is the case for DMD-­based projectors. Instead they use the above and below format described in chapter 70 (Kennel 2007). The studios, who control production and distribution, knew they would save a great deal of money by distributing digital files rather than celluloid prints, a savings estimated at $0.5  billion a year by Squire (1992) and $1.2  billion a year by Bowen (2005). A photochemical celluloid feature film print might be priced about $1200, but the true cost is

Fig. 82.12  A first-generation DLP projector made by Christie Digital. (Cinémathèque Française)

hard to determine because of year-end rebates given to the studios by the laboratories, but about $800 net for a print is a fair guess. A digital print, on a hard drive, which is erased and rerecorded for reuse and distributed by conventional wheels-­on-­the-ground delivery, costs far less than a film print and can provide an image in pristine condition with repeated use, whereas a film print has an average useful life of less than 70 times through a projector before dirt and scratches catch up with it. Yet the theater owners, the exhibitors, who would be required to buy digital projectors to fulfill the studio’s goals, saw no financial advantage for doing so. The familiar 35 mm projector was a well-proven design, a product with thoroughly understood characteristics that exhibitors could keep running for decades, with a predictable and relatively small expenditure for maintenance and repair, while the new digital machines had unknown characteristics and an unknown lifespan, with the added threat of obsolescence like other high tech electronics products. Thus exhibitors were content to continue screening 35 mm film prints using the projectors they owned, having perhaps a third of the cost of a new digital projector and server, or only a few tens of thousands of dollars compared with many tens of thousands of dollars. The studios continued their push for digital release and by September 2003, according to Kirsner (2008), the tally of films released digitally is as follows: Disney, 19; Warners, 15; Fox, 8; Miramax, 4; Sony, 3; and MGM, New Line, and

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Universal, one each. The vast majority of screens at the time these films were released used conventional 35 mm projection, so most playdates were satisfied with celluloid prints. The studios did two things to encourage the switch to digital projection: the first was based on the attraction of additional revenue made possible by the exhibition of stereoscopic films, which could not be readily projected using 35 mm, and the second was an arrangement to finance the installation of digital projectors to be repaid in installments each time a film was shown, a payment called the digital or virtual print fee. By 2008, Paramount, Fox, Universal, Disney, and finally Lions Gate, pooled their resources to help theaters finance digital projectors at an average cost of $70,000 per screen. The studios and lendors were paid back between $800 and $1000 for each DCP (digital cinema protocol) print booked by a theater, comparable to the amount saved by not making celluloid prints. This virtual print fee went toward paying off the cost of the projectors and interest on the loan over an 8- to 10-year period. The major theater chains, Regal, Cinemark, and AMC, formed Digital Cinema Implementation Partners

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(DCIP) to work with the studios to help finance the loan package of a billion dollars, which was secured with the help of J.P. Morgan Chase and the Blackstone Group (Plunkett 2009). The dream of distribution by satellite or the Internet to theaters’ projection booths has, as noted, not materialized. Feature film files on hard drives are delivered by hand to the theater encrypted requiring a software key linked to a device called a media block that manages the KDM, or key delivery message, to unlock the encrypted file for each show. There are two media block configuration, one in which it is part of the server and the other in which it is part of the projector. The hard drive recorded with the DCP file is inserted into the server, essentially a specialized PC, and copied or ingested onto the server’s hard drive for playback of the file’s contents, which travels to the media block and then to the projector (Lemieux 2007). The digital key system is effective: at a screening on the Warner Bros. lot in 2009 I attended, the projectionist was unable to project the file of one of the studios films until the key was obtained, which took an hour.

Digital Projection and 3-D Converge

For the 2004 Christmas season, in IMAX theaters only, Warner Bros. released a stereoscopic version of The Polar Express, an animated feature film by Robert Zemeckis. It was projected using two 15 perf 70 mm prints, one for each perspective view, using the same kind of interlocked projector technique that had been for the 1939 World’s Fair. The 3-D projection was on huge screens using linear polarization, a selection technique that would have been familiar to Loucks and Norling, the producers of the fair’s stop motion animated In Tune with Tomorrow, but the images were created by a technique that would have astonished them. The Polar Express’ stereopairs were computer-generated images, establishing a precedent for the exhibition of animated features that continued with the advent of the electro-digital stereoscopic cinema. The Polar Express was released in 3000 theaters using conventional 35  mm planar projection, but 30% of its revenue came from the 3-D IMAX theaters that were only 2% of the venues exhibiting the show. A year later, on November 5, 2005, Chicken Little was released, a film distinguished by two things: it was Disney Animation’s first entirely computer-generated feature film, and in 84 of the 3654 screens on which the film was exhibited in the United States (there were five additional screens in Canada and Mexico), it was projected stereoscopically using Texas Instruments DLP projectors and RealD electro-optical image selection technology. It did especially well exhibited in 3-D its opening weekend, averaging $25,000 per screen versus $8650 in the theaters where it was projected in 35 mm 2-D. The fact that 3-D tickets cost more was responsible for some for the increased revenue (Zone 2012). The film was especially important to Disney because the cell-animated features that had been its foundational content had lost their popularity, like DreamWorks’ 2003 Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, and their own 2004 Home on the Range. Moreover, their distribution deal with computer-generated animated feature film studio Pixar had just ended and Disney needed CGI feature films. Up until Chicken Little, Disney had used computer animation for backgrounds with c­ hanging perspective to produce the depth cue motion parallax, an

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effect that been introduced using animation cells photographed in front of a model constructed on a rotating horizontal table, as described in Max Fleischer’s Art of Making Motion Picture Cartoons, USP 2054,414, filed on November 2, 1933; the process was used in 1930’s Popeye animated cartoon. Disney, if it wished to continue on as a studio with its signature animation product, had to demonstrate expertise in the creation of computer-generated features. In addition, Disney was a major studio advocate for making the transition to digital distribution; as part of its strategy to motivate exhibitors to accept the new technology it was counting on Chicken Little, which had originally been produced as a 2-D film using computer generated character animation. The decision to release the film stereoscopically came late, only 14 weeks before its release date, giving little time to accomplish the conversion to 3-D by Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic visual effects house, under the supervision of Phil (Captain 3D) McNally. Although the stereoscopic effect turned out to be uneven, future animated features designed to be in 3-D from inception, from various studios, were well executed taking advantage of the capability inherent in threedimensional modeling. Releasing Chicken Little stereoscopically using projectors with the TI image engine involved a cooperative effort managed by Disney from their “war room” at the studio, with the help of Dolby providing its servers and RealD, a Beverly Hills company with no track record, providing the electro-optical ZScreen polarization modulator (Kirsner 2008). The ability to project stereoscopically, and to do so well and routinely with a single projector, was the crucial element missing from prior theatrical cinema efforts. The successful exhibition of Chicken Little, both a technical accomplishment and financially rewarding, provided a motive for exhibitors’ to accept digital projection. In addition, the studio’s offered an economic model for digital projector acquisition to ease the pain of the transition, as described in the prior chapter. The technology that enabled stereoscopic digital exhibition depends on the ability to use a

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_83

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single digital projector for a flickerless image using the frame-sequential method and a selection technique, in this case the ZScreen polarization modulator and eyewear with polarizing filters (Lipton 2001). DMD projection technology, with the necessary high refresh rate and rapid vertical blanking, was described in the previous chapter, and the ZScreen technology will be described below. The frame- or field-sequential technique that has made stereoscopic exhibition practical using a single digital projector, the reader is reminded, has as its basis the chain of discovery and invention that was given in chapter 38: In 1851 Dove observed being able to see stereoscopic images when stereopairs were briefly illuminated by an electric spark, soon after which Volkmann confirmed the observation using his invention, the mechanical shuttering tachistoscope. von Helmholtz (1962, Vol. III, 456) wrote that Rogers, in 1860, reported that he could see stereoscopically when left and right perspective views were presented to the eyes rapidly in sequence. This last observation is the basis for the framesequential stereoscopic Teleview system, invented by Hammond, which premiered in the Selwyn Theatre on New York City on December 27, 1922. Teleview used two electrically synchronized projectors, with out-of-phase shutters, projecting left and right images in superimposition. We recall that intermittent film projection requires a shutter to occlude the film’s image during pulldown (and when at rest to mitigate flicker) with the result that half the time there is no image on the screen. But for Teleview, the left and right images alternate on the screen so there is always an image on the screen. To observe Teleview’s stereoscopic moving images, each audience member looked through a gooseneck

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seat-mounted spinning mechanical shutter electrically synchronized with the projectors’ shutters. With the selection device’s shutter in sync with the projector shutters, each eye saw only its required perspective view, and the unwanted one was blocked. Part of the requirement for making stereoscopic projection a routine process in the projection booth is to be able to so with a single projector, but the temporal selection technique for 35  mm projection is impractical because mechanical pulldown is too slow. Happily, DLP projectors can run at a high frame rate and have extremely rapid vertical blanking (the analog of film’s pulldown), which is ideal for frame-sequential stereoscopic displays. In the mid-1970s there were a handful of experimenters working on field-sequential stereoscopic video displays, which flickered because they ran at 60 Hz, or 30 Hz per eye. Among them were systems demonstrated by Honeywell and by John A. Roese working for the US Navy, as described in USP 3,903,358, PLZT Stereoscopic Television System, filed on May 22, 1974. I visited Roese in his laboratory in San Diego, and while the stereoscopic effect of the video tapes he showed me was good, the 30 fields per second per eye refresh rate produced severe flicker. The improvement that proposed itself was to increase the field rate to 120 Hz so that a 60 Hz image would be seen by each eye. Half the time, each eye would see no image due to shutter occlusion, but this would replicate the conditions of 35 mm projection and therefore ought to be similarly free from flicker or so I reasoned. But as far as I could tell, having done a literature search, no one had ever demonstrated a flickerless stereoscopic image using a single display, like a CRT.  The first demonstration of a single display flickerless stereoscopic image took place on

Fig. 83.1  Hammond’s Teleview had every seat back equipped with a gooseneck mounted mechanical shutter rotating in sync with the projectors’ shutters. Patrons looked through the selection devices that directed the appropriate perspective view to the appropriate eye.

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November 20, 1981, in Berkeley, California, as engineer Jim Stewart and I observed stereoscopic images of ourselves produced by two monochrome closed circuit video cameras whose alternating video signals were displayed field-­ sequentially on a Conrac monitor. Stewart had modified the cameras and monitor to run at twice the 60 fields per second NTSC rate to 120 fields per second. The flickerless stereoscopic image, running at 60 fields per eye per second, was viewed through PLZT (lead zirconate titanate) electro-optical shutters mounted in a welder’s helmet. The ceramic PLZT shutter, invented at the Sandia National Laboratories and manufactured by both Honeywell and Motorola, had a transmission of about 12%, required more than 200 volts to operate, and was relatively slow, which made it far from ideal, but it was the best device of its kind available in 1981 (Efron 1995, p. 577). The ability to use time-­multiplexing depended on the fast blanking of CRT television and computer monitors and the modifications to run them at a high field rate. The left and right PLZT shutters opened and closed out of phase with each other and in synchronization with the monitor’s video fields as described in USP 4,523,226, Stereoscopic television system, filed on January 19, 1983, by Lipton, et al. This experiment demonstrated that under the right conditions, a single electronic display could produce flickerless field-sequential stereoscopic images (Lipton and Meyer 1984), the principal that is the basis for the stereoscopic projection capability of the 70,000

Fig. 83.2  The author adjusts cameras while demonstrating that a CRT monitor can display a flickerless field-sequential stereoscopic image, November 1981.

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or so DMD theatrical projectors deployed in cinemas throughout the world. After several years of working in the independently funded laboratory I founded, StereoGraphics Corp., of San Rafael, California, we replaced the PLZT shutters with much brighter and faster pi-cell liquid crystal shutters that operated at a low voltage and could be made in sizes large enough to cover a monitor’s screen. The push-pull pi-cell was originally applied to a communications device as described by its inventor, James Lee Fergason (1934–2008), in USP 4,436,376, Light modulator, modulator and method of communication employing the same, filed on February 17, 1981. Fergason, one of the most prominent inventors in the field of liquid crystal displays, in ‘376 teaches circular polarization modulation for electromagnetic communications, the technique used by the aliens (royalty free) in Carl Sagan’s book Contact (1985). Fergason suggested to me that his invention might be applied to stereoscopic image selection, which my colleagues and I at StereoGraphics set about to do. Two products emerged from this effort: the ZScreen modulator (1988) and CrystalEyes shuttering eyewear (1989), which were used for projection at tradeshows, for corporate presentations, and for computer workstations. The ZScreen’s first commercial application was in 1988 by Evans and Sutherland for workstations displaying stereoscopic computer-generated models of molecules. The ZScreen was placed in front of the E&S Ikegami monitor’s screen and stereoscopic images were viewed through polarizing eyewear. The technology is described in USP 4,792,850, Method and System

Fig. 83.3  James Fergason applying his pi-cell liquid crystal shutter to electronic stereoscopy in the lab at StereoGraphics Corp., circa 1987.

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Fig. 83.4  The ZScreen is in use on more than 30,000 theater screens. The projector’s light is linearly polarized by a sheet polarizer. The axes of the parts, which are laminated together, are indicated by parallel lines. The pi-cells are switched on and off out of phase to function as variable quarterwave retarders to produce a sequence of left and right circularly polarized images.

employing a push-pull liquid crystal modulator, filed on November 25, 1987, by Liptoh (sic) et al. For cinema, the ZScreen is made up of laminated parts in optical series, mounted like a filter in front of the projection lens of a TI DLP projector. Closest to the lens is a linear sheet polarizer whose axis bisects the axes of two pi-cells arranged with their axes at right angles. The pi-cells are driven electrically out of phase to switch on and off to alternate between zero and quarter-wave retardation. In this way the linear polarized light introduced by the sheet polarizer is turned into left and right circularly polarized light in synchronization with the frame-sequentially presented train of perspective views.1 Circular polarization has been described in chapter 69, and just as is the case for linear polarization, a polarization conserving screen is required. The ZScreen is the active component of image selection that is completed by viewing the image using eyewear fitted with left and right circular sheet polarizer analyzers. This stereoscopic projection method uses both polarization and time-multiplexing for image selection. StereoGraphics Corp. licensed ZScreen technology to RealD in 2004, which acquired StereoGraphics on March 4, 2005 (Zone 2012), at which time I joined RealD for 4 years as its Chief Technology Officer. The ZScreen single projector flickerless frame-sequential technology was offered to the theatrical film industry and was first used for the release of the Disney animated feature as described above. As noted, The Kerr Cell is mentioned a number of times in this book in connection with both optical sound recording and light modulation for Nipkow disk television displays. The pi-cell is a liquid crystal version of the Kerr Cell, operating at far lower voltage. In addition, the sheet polarizer makes this electro-optical modulator far easier to use than a Nicol prism.

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exhibitors had no compelling reason to buy digital machines since their 35 mm projectors worked well and were capable of years of continued service. Moreover, the direct beneficiaries of such a costly acquisition were the studio-distributors. Given that there were about 30,000 theater screens in America in the first few years of the twenty-first century, and assuming an average cost of $70,000 per digital projector and server, some $2.1 billion would be needed to fund the transition. Estimates vary, but at the time there were between 130,000 and 140,000 theater screens in the world. Taking the lower number, we arrive at a figure of $9.1 billion as the price for outfitting the world’s cinemas with the new projectors. The exhibitors who were asked to fund the transition didn’t see the need until the arrival of digital stereoscopic projection. As described in the prior chapter, the studios created a kind of mortgage whose payments were characterized as a virtual print fee, which allowed the exhibitors to pay off the new projectors over time (Finney and Triana 2010). TI DMD licensed DLP projectors have about an 80% share of the world market. In 2020 there were about 170,000 digital theater screens in the world with about half of them equipped to project stereoscopically. About 35,000 of them use the XL ZScreen with greater light output, as described in Combining P and S Rays for Bright Stereoscopic Projection, USP 7,857,455, filed on October 18, 2006, by Matt Cowan, Lenny Lipton, and Jerry Carollo. RealD uses a lease model and also extracts a per seat royalty, a model similar to that used by Western Electric when its sound-on-film system was introduced. The Sony SXRD projectors are the alternative to the DMD machines, with Sony’s image engine using a different technology they call the Silicon X-tal (liquid crystal) Reflective Display, as noted in the prior chapter. Sony X-tal uses liquid crystal on silicon displays rather than reflecting

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Fig. 83.5  The first version of the RealD theatrical ZScreen, shown mounted on a DLP projector. It used a single modulator, but the current XL model uses two modulators and outputs images that are about twice as bright.

micromirrors, but they cannot switch as rapidly as the DMD device, so its stereoscopic projection method is based on using the above and below format using dual lens projection optics. Like the TI DMD, the Sony technology uses three filtered images to produce additive color synthesis. Although the ZScreen uses a single projection lens so that both illumination and image geometry are congruent (Lipton 1982), the frames must be projected out of phase, which can cause a second-order artifact, a spurious temporally generated parallax that is somewhat mitigated with frame rates that are higher than 24 fps, or even better with cinematography that captures the left and right images out of phase, as described by Johnson et  al. (2017), of Bankslab at the University of California at Berkeley, and put into practice by Douglas Trumbull in demonstrations of his 4K 120 frames per second (60 per eye per second) Magi system (Towlson 2016). Since the Sony SXRD projects both images simultaneously, they have no such issue, but careful engineering is required to maintain equal and even illumination and geometrical congruence because of the two optical paths required for projection. For plano-stereoscopic projection (two planar images with different perspective views), like that under discussion here, there are three selection methods: polarization, time-multiplexing, and color (wavelength). As noted above, when the ZScreen polarization modulator is used with the DMD image engine, it is combined with temporal selection. Pure temporal selection can be achieved with DMD projection using tetherless battery powered eyewear with liquid crystal shutters. There were intimations of such a t­echnique in the prior art, such as USP 3,621,127, Synchronized Stereoscopic System,

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filed on February 13, 1969, by Karl Hope, describing active eyewear using mechanical shutters synchronized to the video signal by means of a radio link, an improvement over Hammond’s Teleview gooseneck mounted mechanical shuttering (Lipton 1991). StereoGraphics solution was CrystalEyes, the first product of its kind using battery powered active eyewear with pi-cell shutters occluding in synchronization with the video’s sync pulses by means of an infrared link broadcast by an emitter. Like many other inventions, it was an agglomeration of prior art technology but with one novel contribution, an improved pi-cell shutter whose contrast ratio was increased by 20 times, thereby greatly diminishing crosstalk or ghosting, as described in USP 5,117,302, High Dynamic Range Electro-­Optical Shutter for Stereoscopic and Other Applications, filed on September 19, 1991, by your author. Shown at SIGGRAPH in 1988, CrystalEyes eyewear began shipping in 1989 as an OEM product for Silicon Graphics workstations; its application was molecular modeling, which continued to be its major application for the next 15 years. With its introduction the importance of the workstation ZScreen modulator diminished, to a large extent because CrystalEyes was less expensive. For cinema the advantage of active eyewear is that they can be used with a standard matte projection screen rather than a special one that conserves polarization, which is a good fit for studio screening rooms where the resident experts prefer the characteristics of the familiar screen. Although CrystalEyes was not used for cinema, other companies like XpandD offered active eyewear for theatrical exhibition. Currently Volfoni offers wireless active shuttering eyewear that are available, for the most part, in Europe. Active eyewear were also used for the failed attempt to introduce stereoscopic television to the consumer market beginning circa 2006. A far better approach was offered, principally by LG, with image selection using a display screen overlaid with interdigitate polarization elements viewed with spectacles using circular polarizing filters. In 2006 Dolby licensed technology from Infitec GmbH, founded in 2002, which began as a research project in 1999 under the aegis of DaimlerChrysler AG, in Ulm, Germany. This technique uses what Infitec (interference filter technology) calls the wavelength multiplex visualization system, which when all is said and done is an anaglyphic, or as Minoli (2010) refers to it, a super-anaglyph. It’s described in Method and facility for light-beam projection of images on a screen, EP 0909517, filed on April 28, 1998, by Helmut Jorke. The traditional anaglyph divides the spectrum into two parts, each approximately half of the visible spectrum, one incorporating mostly the short wavelengths of the visible spectrum and the other mostly the long wavelengths. But the Infitec approach is different; it uses two sets of dip fi ­ lters in the short, medium, and long wavelength portions of the visible spectrum, one for

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Fig. 83.6  Hope’s USP, filed in 1969, shows the essential elements of a field-sequential plano-stereoscopic system using wireless eyewear; in this case mechanical shutters are proposed that are made up of one fixed and one oscillating grating.

Audience members are equipped with eyewear using interference filters like those used for projecting so that each eye sees its required image and not the unwanted image (Brennesholtz and Stupp 2008). An advantage of the system is that the theater owner does not have to replace a matte screen with a polarization conserving screen. Like much of the field-sequential stereoscopic projection as practiced, the image can be fairly dim because half of the light is lost due to the sharing required by time-multiplexing, which is further reduced (multiplicatively) by whatever additional light is lost caused by the particular process used: polarization, electrooptical shutters, or wavelength selection. Practically speaking, a major cause of dim images is the exhibitor practice of using xenon lamps beyond their recommended expiration. Fig. 83.7  CrystalEyes, the first wireless shuttering stereoscopic eyewear, introduced in 1989. It used optically compensated pi-cell electro-­ While there is no recommendation for stereoscopic projecoptical shutters and is shown here with its companion infrared emitter. tion, there is no reason why both planar and stereoscopic proBetween 1989 and 2004, more than 100,000 were sold, many for chem- jection ought not to have the same illumination reach the ists modeling drug molecules. eyes. In 2015 Dolby sublicensed the system to IMAX, which each perspective. The technology depends on the phenome- uses two projectors with different sets of monochromatic non called metamerism, which as applied here allows the eye lasers producing the necessary spectral lines, abandoning the to see a full range of colors even if only three specific wave- linear polarization selection they used for decades. Premium lengths are used to excite the short, medium, and long wave- Large Format Theaters (PLFs), as described in chapter 67, length sensitive cones. Dolby’s frame-sequential version although growing in number, are a minority of the installed requires adding a spinning color wheel with the required base; they often use polarization selection and sometimes interference filters within the DLP projector. In this way a single projector frame-sequential selection. single projector can be used for frame-sequential Infitec Stereoscopic feature content is, for the most part, bifurselection, whereas formerly it required two projectors. cated into the categories of tentpole spectacle and cartoon animation, the former heavily dependent and the latter totally

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Fig. 83.8  The three kinds of 3-D eyewear. Top: Volfoni shuttering eyewear. Middle: RealD polarizing eyewear. Bottom: Dolby wavelength selection eyewear. All three allow for adequate head tipping. Volfoni and Dolby eyewear will work with a standard matt screen, but the RealD eyewear require a polarization conserving screen.

dependent on CGI; thus the digital stereoscopic cinema is, to a large extent, a cinema of a computer generated imagery. Stereography is a good fit for computer visual effects and animation since it uses a 3-D data base with the inherent ability to create two perspective views (Block 2013). James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar blurred the lines between live action and computer animation with the characters inhabiting the computer-generated world created using performance capture technology, with content produced using both stereoscopic cinematography and computer-generated animation. Avatar is often cited as a milestone in terms of the acceptance of the stereoscopic digital cinema, and it’s likely that it provided exhibitors with the motivation to install digital projectors, but like other 3-D tentpoles it was distributed both planar and stereoscopically. The film is said to be the highest grossing feature film in absolute dollars, having taken in $2.7 billion at the box office, which adjusted for inflation, makes it the 14th highest grossing film of all time (Keegan 2010).

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Fig. 83.9  From Jorke’s EP 0909517, transmission curves for his narrow bandpass super-anaglyph Infitec filters; the top for one eye, the bottom for the other. The filtration, although sharp, will excite the appropriate cones for the required color response.

In addition to its computer-generated imagery, Avatar used live action or so-called native stereoscopy, but some shots used planar cinematography converted to stereo. The conversion of planar cinematography to stereo images is the usual workflow used by the Hollywood studios in which live action superhero spectacles are most often shot in 2-D (and sometimes on film) and converted to stereopairs in a post-­ production process. This technique has been offered by companies like StereoD, In Focus, and Legend3D. USP 4,925,294, Method to convert two dimensional motion pictures for three-dimensional systems, filed on December 17, 1986, by David Geshwind and Anthony H. Handal, teaches methods for the conversion of 2-D motion pictures to stereoscopic 3-D motion pictures. A few years after the patent was issued Geshwind showed me an effective NTSC video clip he made from the original King Kong. Based on the prior art cited during the examination of ‘294, this is probably the first granted USP teaching the stereoscopic conversion of a planar motion picture image.

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Fig. 83.10  Geshwind and Handal’s USP describes a process for converting planar to stereoscopic movies. This may be the earliest patent issued teaching this for live action although animated cartoons in the

early 1950s were produced stereoscopically by horizontally shifting cells prescribed distances for a second exposure.

One of the earliest commercial entities devoted to the conversion process was In-Three, of Westlake Village, California, founded by Michael C.  Kaye in 1997. It offered what it dubbed dimensionalization as described in USP 6,208,348, System and method for dimensionalizing processing of images in consideration of a predetermined image projection format, filed on May 27, 1998, by Kaye. In-Three used Imagineer’s

Mocha tools to help with rotoscoping, or in plain English, outlining objects, which is but one of many steps required for conversion. Turning even a single planar image into a stereopair can require significant effort, and film, with its many frames, is a far more difficult task, despite efforts to create algorithms to do the job. A machine cannot, at this time, look at a planar array of pixels and decide which is near and which

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is far. A solution using artificial intelligence is sought, but the ability to convert a feature film and every one of its 24 frames per second has remained a herculean task. The process requires hundreds of artists or technicians who usually work in low wage countries. Under pressure from the studios, the conversion houses have reduced the price of their services for a tentpole feature from about $8 million to $3 million. In order to make day and date, the studios usually distribute the workload to several vendors.2 Conversion is a subset of the art of visual effects and both use similar off-the-shelf and proprietary software tools. The techniques employed by conversion, especially rotoscoping, have similarities with those employed for colorization. Lateral shifting of the objects for 3-D conversion is one possible approach, as is projection mapping of a two-­ ­ dimensional onto a three-dimensional surface. One technique uses depth maps made by painting in rotoscoped areas with grayscale images of different densities, for example, with bright areas assigned as closer and dark tones further away. The depth mapping technique for conversion may have been first used by Sassoon Film Design of Venice, California. Tim Sassoon, who runs the effects house that bears his name, responded to my email query on March 29, 2019, writing that he first used depth mapping for the IMAX film Siegfried & Roy: The Magic Box, released on October 1, 1999. Although depth maps were used, he wrote: “… we mostly used projection mapping for that. The credit for projection mapping as a technique goes to John Knoll at ILM.” Conversion of a planar image to a stereopair creates holes, areas empty of content. The greater the parallax difference between near and far objects, the wider the holes to be filledin either by an artist or an algorithmic process. Problems also arise with images that include fog, smoke, rain, or reflections, given that conversion usually produces a quasi-3-D data base, essentially of solid false fronts. The process has, been widely used for current production tentpoles (big budget movies that are expected to be extremely profitable) but has been applied successfully to previously released films such as Jurassic Park, The Wizard of Oz, and Titanic (Tricart 2017). The decision to release in 3-D using conversion is based on financial considerations since the studio can fairly reliably estimate the incremental revenue for the expenditure. This can lead to distribution of the stereo version only in selected markets, such as China where it is de rigueur. In addition, using a conversion workflow relieves the cinematographer and director of responsibility for the stereoscopic version helping them to complete cinematography as scheduled. Whatever the quality of a conversion, and with time and money it can be good, as far as the art of stereoscopic Described to me in 2019 by a conversion vendor’s manager, who wishes to remain anonymous. 2 

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cinema is concerned, it’s a setback since directors and cinematographers learn little about how to use the medium given a workflow in which their work is “thrown over the wall” as a post-production process. Some filmmakers like Michael Bay, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Ang Lee, and John Favreau, prefer shooting what has been termed native 3-D, yet much of the screen time in their films is computer generated. Stereoscopic cinematography uses 3-D rigs based on the Spottiswoode version of the Ramsdell rig, with a vertical camera arrangement as described previously. These rigs are more difficult to operate than planar cameras and their use brings to mind the three-strip Technicolor camera in terms of their size and crew requirements. The rigs used after the release of Chicken Little fell into two design camps, as exemplified by the philosophies of Cameron-Pace and its chief designer Vince Pace, and 3ality and its chief designer Steve Schklair. Pace felt that fixes to geometric problems produced in cinematography were properly addressed through rectification in postproduction, and Schklair felt that they ought to be addressed with suitably designed hardware (and some software) during photography. Based on a Wikipedia tally, I figure that between 2005 and 2018, over 600 feature films have been released stereoscopically (WS: List of 3D films…), having earned billions of dollars in incremental revenue for the industry, but the medium remains mostly confined to tentpoles and animated features. This is a more limited and different kind of content from that of the early 1950s when an eclectic collection of stereoscopic

Fig. 83.11  A side view of a beamsplitter rig. The digital cameras lens’s axes are at right angles to each other, but they are not in the same plane. The top camera sees an image reflected by the semi-silvered mirror beamsplitter (BS) and the bottom camera sees straight through it.

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Fig. 83.12  The 3ality stereoscopic rig on a crane on location. The actors are wearing performance capture suits while filming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). The rig follows the configuration shown in the previous illustration. (Steve Schklair)

films was produced. The concentration on spectacle, ­superheroes, and apocalyptic disaster is a reflection of the current state of the cinema, in which the stereoscopic medium plays a part along with giant screens and booming directional sound. And yet, the medium remains in a state of quasi acceptance; unlike every other theatrical cinema technology that became part of cinema, like sound, color, and widescreen, stereoscopic films maintain a pattern of dual release with films distributed both in planar and 3-D versions. As far as some critics are concerned, the stereoscopic medium is an outlier, a criticism that is possibly justifiable on technical grounds because projection is frequently insufficiently bright and on aesthetic grounds because stereoscopic composition may be indifferent or an afterthought. Even so, an article appearing in Forbes Online at the end of 2017 asserts that: “…despite press claims of declining attendance, box office slumps, and waning popularity for 3-D, the prospects for cinema and 3D continue to be quite positive…” (Hughes 2017). Half of the cinema screens in the world are stereo equipped, with the strongest demand for feature exhibition in China, Russia, Brazil, and a few other areas. However, interest in the medium for theatrical exhibition has declined in recent years in the United States with audiences

showing a desired to see only certain films projected stereoscopically. This is not the case for the giant screen exhibition circuit (see chapter 67) where stereoscopic projection is expected because children like it. The DLP’s stereoscopic capability helped to overcome exhibitors’ reluctance to make the change to the new projectors, with stereo viewed as a special event justifying an increase in ticket price, the so-called up-­ charge. Larry Hornbeck put it this way, in an email I received from him on April 13, 2012: “ZScreen technology has made a huge impact on our DLP Cinema business, accelerating the conversion from film to digital as theater owners realized the audience appeal and profit potential of 3-D movies and the need to stay competitive.” As such, Hornbeck and I, working fifteen hundred miles apart, during the same span of years, pursuing our own development efforts on unrelated technologies, unintentionally contributed to end of the hegemony of the celluloid cinema and the acceptance of the digital ­cinema. Cinema’s first great transition was from the Glass Era to the Celluloid Era, with the attendant transition from real to apparent motion. Cinema’s second great transition was from the Celluloid Era to the Digital Era; the history of these eras has been the subject of this book.

Afterword and Acknowledgments

In 2009 I was invited by the Cinémathèque Française to present a talk about my work in the field of stereoscopic cinema. It was Christmastime and the wind across the Seine was bitterly cold; the streets of Bercy were crowded with scores of motorcycle club Santa-clad members on their bikes. The Cinémathèque had mounted an exhibit, from its extensive collection, devoted to the magic lantern era called Trois siècles de cinéma de la lanterne magique au Cinématographe (Three centuries of the cinema from the magic lantern to the Cinématographe). The Cinémathèque’s Directeur scientifique du Patrimoine et du Conservatoire des techniques, Laurent Mannoni, walked me through the exhibit of magic lanterns and slides. Mannoni occupies a respected place in the world of motion picture scholarship, and his enthusiasm about the history of cinema’s technology is reflected in the shows and programs he has produced in the Cinémathèque theater and museum, and his books have helped us to better understand the origins of cinema. His wife and coworker, Laure Parchomenko, demonstrated a magic lantern movie using a reconstruction of Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Projecting Praxinoscope. As she turned its handcranks, I watched the same charming animated projected movies that had been first exhibited to paying audiences a few years before the invention of the celluloid cinema. It’s one thing to read about it but seeing this lovely machine at work was a revelation. Those few days spent in the Cinémathèque’s museum, exploring its collection of thousands of pieces, which at that time was housed in a warehouse with a view of Paris directly across the Seine on the seventh floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale, led me to the realization that I knew very little about the history of the technology of the medium I love. I had accepted the conventional thinking that cinema was set in motion with the work of Edison and the Lumières, but as I took in the message of Mannoni’s exhibit, I began to reject this dogma and came to understand that the era of the magic lantern, the incunabula of motion pictures, was not something apart, a quaint pre-cinema – it was cinema itself. This experience in Paris was the first step on the path that led to the writing of this book, which may serve not only as a history of the evolution of cinema but provide some understanding of its underlying science and technology, without which

Fig. 1 A reconstructed Projecting Praxinoscope. (Cinémathèque Française)

any comprehension of the subject is bound to be incomplete. It’s my hope that my experience as an inventor and entrepreneur has added to my ability to understand and better explain the motivations and personalities of cinema’s inventors, as well as aspects of product development, business, and patent issues. I’d like to thank some of the people who helped with a work that took many years to complete, or at least to reach the point where I’d had enough of a good thing. Scholar and author Erkki Huhtamo, media archaeologist, exhibition curator, and professor at UCLA, took the trouble to check the chapters devoted to the glass cinema and to offer many suggestions. James Hyder, editor and publisher of LF Examiner, an expert on the premium large format cinema, did a heroic job of offering many corrections and suggestions for the chapter IMAX and PLF. Jay Holben, a scholar of the history of cinema lenses, who is writing a book on the subject with Michael McDonough, both of whom like your author are members of the ASC Motion Imaging Technology Council,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4

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greatly helped with his input on the chapters dealing with ciné lenses. In the course of many lunches I received an enormous amount of information from Dave Kenig, an expert on the history of Panavision and movie cameras and their design. Dave, I am grateful. Curtis Clark, ASC and Richard Edlund, ASC, provided me with background in the course of several conversations. Dan Sherlock, formerly with AMPAS, is an outstanding scholar specializing in large format technology who went above and beyond with his generous help. Bob Gitt, founder of the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Preservation Department, met with Laurent Mannoni and me in his home in the San Fernando Valley; he opened my eyes to the intricacies of optical sound recording and its convoluted history. Thank you, Janet Bergstrom, associate professor of film at UCLA; you set me straight about the finer points of motion picture scholarship. Larry Hornbeck, inventor of the DMD image engine, readily answered my questions about his important contribution. Caleb Deschanel was kind enough to share opinions about cameras and film. Josh Pine and Todd Mitchell supplied 35 mm footage that I used for an illustration. Pine’s outspoken and droll opinions about color timing workflow were also helpful. Stephanie Boris, who once helped me at StereoGraphics Corp., did a splendid job organizing the bibliographies and index. The SMPTE digital library was of inestimable value to my researches. Thank you, Society. I express my heartfelt gratitude to Lantern, a co-production of the Media History Digital Library and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Communication Arts. It’s simply one of the wonders of the age to be able to search these relevant media periodicals from a PC.  And another wonder of the age is Google Books, an application that allowed me to search a distant computer that in an instant can locate a source, a reference, a quotation, or an attribution, so I can find the book and page number, on the shelf of my office library. And I must not forget the US Patent Office and the Google patent search engines, which when used together are a marvel. Laurent Mannoni and the Cinémathèque Française have generously giving me access to their vast collection of illustrations and many of the photographs and posters reproduced in these pages came from their collection. The photographs were taken by its staff photographer, Stéphane Dabrowski and are copyrighted by the Cinémathèque. For many months, as part of the completion of this manuscript, I searched and prepared its illustrations, a task that I unknowingly was prepping for as a painter (of sorts) and a photographer (much better at that) from boyhood. My addiction to Photoshop began 20 years ago when I took up digital photography and I

Afterword and Acknowledgments

have applied what I learned and discovered new things in the course of painting, drawing, and editing the illustrations for this book. In some cases the best photos I could find were damaged, or of such low resolution that I went beyond what anybody might reasonably call touching up or restoration. The task of helping me to determine the copyright ownership of the 574 photos and illustrations used here, took several months and was managed by Ashley Benedict. She and I made a strenuous effort to clear their rights. I began writing this book in the home that my wife Julie and I moved to with our children Noah, Jonah, and Anna, at the end of 2001. I owe my loving family a debt for tolerating mercurial me. I worked in my small office crammed with the many books I bought to add to those I already owned to help me write The Cinema in Flux. I realized that I had to have my own library because writing this book was going to be an around the clock job, but I could not do all of my research ensconced in my office, and I would like to thank the Margaret Herrick Library of AMPAS for allowing me access to the M. L. Gunzburg papers in their Special Collections. In addition to my office and the Herrick, I did some of my work in the tub; thinking is not the right word for this method since ideas float into the mind unbidden while soaking. The same may be said for their arrival while walking with Belle, Maisie, and Lord Astor, through the hills of Laurel Canyon (and before them with Snowy). For the past 8 years much of my thinking has been concerned with the history of motion picture technology, a bit of a change since the prior 38 years were spent thinking about electronic stereoscopic displays. I am grateful to Sam Harrison of Springer who believed in this project and to a publishing company with the ability to produce this handsome and profusely illustrated book in a way that will make it accessible to anyone who loves cinema or technology. I would also like thank Springer’s far-flung production staff for the work they put into turning this manuscript into a book. Thanks to my lawyer, Bennett Fidlow, for his patience and penetrating advice, and I must not forget to thank John Grenner, who suggested that I write a book, in fact any book, which turned out to be this book. My last book was published about 40 years ago and written with an electric typewriter and edited with scissors and scotch tape. Writing this one was a different experience using a PC and word processor, which made the concept of numbered drafts obsolete. Day after day, I made changes to the text that became a humongous Word file, and now alas, time has come to submit my struggle with a keyboard to publisher and public, both of whom I hope, will profit from the experience.

Bibliographies

Books and Miscellany Explanatory note on books referenced: When an author’s name appears in the text, the year of publication along with other information as required is placed in parentheses following the name. If the author’s name does not appear it is placed in parenthesis, along with other information as required. Songs are listed in order of composer(s), with [song] after the title; films in order of director’s name, with [film] after the title; correspondence under the name of the sender; and court cases under last name of first party. Abel, Richard, ed. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Abingdon, UK/New York: Routledge, 2005. Abramson, Albert. Electronic Motion Pictures: A History of the Television Camera. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955a. Abramson, Albert. The History of Television, 1880 to 1941. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1987. Abramson, Albert. The History of Television, 1942 to 2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008. Abramson, Albert. Zworykin, Pioneer of Television. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Adams, Mike. Lee de Forest: king of radio, television, and film. New York: Springer, 2012. Aitken, Ian, ed. Encyclopedia of the documentary film,1. New  York: Routledge, 2006. Alberti, John. Screen Ages: A Survey of American Cinema. London/ New York: Routledge, 2015. Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2004. American Society of Cinematographers. American Cinematographer Manual. Hollywood: A.S.C. Holding Corp, 1966. Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Anthony, Barry, and Stephen Herbert. The Kinora: Motion Pictures for the Home, 1896-1914. London: The Projection Box, London, 1996. Arguments Before the Committees on Patents of the Senate and House of Representatives, Conjointly, on the Bills S. 6330 and H.  R. 19853, to Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, December 7, 8, 10, and 11, 1906. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906. Armitage, John. Virilio and the Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012. Aronson, Michael. Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-­ 1929. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Assis, A.K.T., and J.P.M.C. Chaib. Ampère’s Electrodynamics: Analysis of the Meaning and Evolution of Ampère’s Force between Current Elements, Together with a Complete Translation of His Masterpiece: Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience. Montreal: C. Roy Keys Inc., 2015.

Bach, Hans, and Norbert Neuroth, eds. The Properties of Optical Glass. Berlin-Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag, 1995. Balio, Tino, ed. The American Film Industry. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. Balzer, Richard. Peepshows: A Visual History. New  York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998. Barton, William Henry. Stereopix: The Principles of Celestial Navigation Explained by Means of Three-Dimensional Pictures. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Press, 1943. Basten, Fred E. Glorious Technicolor: The Movies’ Magic Rainbow. Camarillo, CA: Technicolor, 2005. Bell, A.E. Christiaan Huygens and the Development of Science in the Seventeenth Century. London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1947; (reprinted 1950). Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. New  York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2018. Belton, John. Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Bennett, Colin N. The Handbook of Kinematography: The History, Theory, and Practice of Motion Photography and Projection. London: The Kinematograph Weekly, 1911. Bennett, James. Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen. London/New York: Routledge, 2011. Betancourt, Michael, ed. Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux. Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2006. Bitzer, G.  W. Billy Bitzer: His Story. New  York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1973. Bjelkhagen, Hans, and David Brotherton-Ratcliffe. Ultra-Realistic Imaging: Advanced Techniques in Analogue and Digital Colour Holography. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013. Block, Bruce, Philip Captain 3D McNally. 3D Storytelling: How Stereoscopic 3D Works and How to Use It. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2013. Bock, Hans-Michael, and Tim Bergfelder, eds. The Concise CineGraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema. New  York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristen Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Routledge, 2003. Boole, George. An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: on which are founded the mathematical theories of logic and probabilities. Mineoloa, NY: Dover Publications, 1958; (Originally published by MacMillan, 1854). Boole, George. The mathematical analysis of logic: being an essay towards a calculus of deductive reasoning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009; (originally published by Cambridge: MacMillan, Barclay, & MacMillan, 1847). Bordwell, David, et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985. Boreman, Glenn D. Modulation Transfer Function in Optical and Electro-Optical Systems. Bellingham, WA: SPIE Press, 2001.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4

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738 Bowen, Jonathan L. Anticipation: The Real Life Story of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005. Bowers, Q. David. Nickelodeon Theatres and Their Music. Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, Ltd., 1986. Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Boyer, Pierre. Le Cinéma d’Amateur Pas à Pas. Paris: Éditions Prisma, 1960. Branigan, Edward. “Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History.” In Movies and Methods Volume II: An Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-­ 1904). Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Brayer, Elizabeth. George Eastman: A Biography. Reprinted edition. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011. Brennesholtz, Matthew S., and Edward H. Stupp. Projection Displays. 2nd ed. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2008. Brewster, Sir David. Treatise on Optics. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, and John Taylor, London, 1831. Reprinted by Elibron Classics Replica Edition, 2005. Brideson, Cynthia, and Sara Brideson. He’s Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Briere, Danny, and Pat Hurley. Home Theater for Dummies. 2nd Edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, 2006: 208. Brock, William H. William Crookes (1832-1919) and the Commercialization of Science. New York: Routledge, 2016. Brown, Simon, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins. Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive. New York: Routledge, 2013. Sarah Street, “Glorious Adventures with Prizma.” Browne, Turner, and Elaine Partnow, eds. Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists & Innovators. New  York, Macmillan, 1983. Buhite, Russell, ed. and David W.L. FDR’s Fireside Chats. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Burns, Russell W. British Television: The Formative Years. London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1986. Burns, Russell W. Communications: An International history of the Formative Years. London: The Institution of Electric Engineers, 2004. Burns, Russell W. John Logie Baird: Television Pioneer. London: The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2000. Burns, Russell W. Television: An International History of the Formative Years. London: The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1998. “Bwana Devil” (dir. by Arch Oboler). Press and Exploitation Book, 1952. From the Margaret Herrick Library collection. Cameron, James R. Third Dimension Movies and ExP A N D E D Screen. Coral Gables, FL: Cameron Publishing Company, 1953. Camras, Marvin. Magnetic Recording Handbook. New  York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1988. Carr, Robert E., and R.M. Hayes. Wide Screen Movies: A History and Filmography of Wide Gauge Filmmaking. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1988. Castellano, Joseph A. Liquid Gold: The Story of Liquid Crystal Displays and the Creation of an Industry. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2005. Chambers’s Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People. Rev. ed. VIII, 398. New York: Collier, 1889. Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. Inventing the electronic century: The epic story of the consumer electronics and computer industries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Chesbrough, Henry, et  al., eds. Open innovation: Researching a new paradigm. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006. Chisholm, Bradley Francis. The CBS color television venture: a study of failed innovation in the broadcast industry. Vol. 2. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Bibliographies Cianci, Philip J. High definition television: The creation, development and implementation of HDTV technology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012. Cianci, Philip J., editorial director. The honor roll and honorary members of the SMPTE, White Plains, New York: The SMPTE, 2016. Cleveland, Cutler J., and Christopher Morris. Handbook of energy: Volume II: Chronologies, top ten lists, and word clouds. Waltham, MA: Elsevier, 2014. Coe, Brian. The birth of photography: The story of the formative years, 1800-1900. London: Ash & Grant, 1976. Coe, Brian. Colour photography: The first hundred years, 1840-1940. London: Ash & Grant, 1978. Coe, Brian. The history of movie photography. Westfield, NJ: Eastview Editions, 1981. Coe, Brian. Muybridge & the chronophotographers. London: Museum of the Moving Image, 1992. Cohn, Art. The nine lives of Mike Todd. London: Hutchinson, 1958. Collins, Douglas. The story of Kodak. New  York, Harry N.  Abrams, Inc., 1990. Cook, Olive. Movement in two dimensions: A study of the animated and projected pictures which preceded the invention of cinematography. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1963. Coopersmith, Jonathan. Faxed: The rise and fall of the fax machine. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Coote, Jack Howard. The illustrated history of colour photography. London: Fountain Press, 1993. Cornwell-Clyne, Adrian. Colour cinematography. London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1951. The author later changed his name to Adrian Kline. Cossar, Harper. Letterboxed: The evolution of widescreen cinema. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011. Cox, Arthur. Photographic optics, a modern approach to the technique of definition. Garden City, NY: Amphoto, 1974. Craft, Edward B. The voice from the screen. Video copy from original film. Bell Laboratories, 1926; Warren, NJ: AT&T Archives and History Center, copyright 2018. http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2011/4/20/ AT&T-Archives-The-Voice-from-the-Screen Crafton, Donald. The talkies: American cinema’s transition to sound, 1926-1931. History of the American Cinema, edited by Charles Harpole 4. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Crespinel, William T. v. Color Corporation of America. Civ. 22747. District Court of Appeal, Second District, Division 1, California. Decided: May 13, 1958. Crisp, Colin. The classic French cinema, 1930-1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Cros, Émile-Hortensius-Charles. Solution Générale du Problème de la Photographie des Couleurs. Paris: Chez Gauthier-Villars, 1869; Published as a pamphlet. Translation by Wall. Crosland, Maurice. Science under control: The French Academy of Sciences, 1795-1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cvjetnicanin, George, et  al. Film into video: A guide to merging the technologies. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 1994. Darrigol, Olivier. A history of optics: From Greek antiquity to the nineteenth century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012. Davis, E.A., and I.J. Falconer. J.J. Thomson and the discovery of the electron. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1997. Day, Lance, and Ian McNeil, eds. Biographical dictionary of the history of technology. London: Routledge, 1996. Decisions of the Commissioner of Patents and of the United States Courts in Patent and Trade-Mark and Copyright Cases, 1922. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923. Dewey, Donald. Buccaneer: James Stuart Blackton and the birth of American movies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Bibliographies Dick, Bernard F. Engulfed: the death of paramount pictures and the birth of corporate Hollywood. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Dickson, W.K.L. and Antonia Dickson. History of the kinetograph, kinetoscope and kineto-phonograph. Facsimile edition. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000. The digital dilemma. 1–2. Beverly Hills, CA: The Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2007, 2012. Disney, W. Theatre Optique. Segment from a 1955 television program, showing Walt Disney demonstrating the praxinoscope. YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLySlVyxpa0. Dokland, Terje, et al. Techniques in microscopy for biomedical applications. Manuals in biomedical research, 2. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2006. Dove, H.W. “Ueber die Ursachen des Glanzes und der Irradiation, abgeleitet aus chromatischen Versuchen mit den Stereoskop.” Annalen der Physik und Chemie. Herausgegeben zu Berlin von J. C. Poggendorff, 83. Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1851. Dunlap, Richard A. The golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers. Toh Tuck, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 1997. Durini, Daniel, ed. High performance silicon imaging: Fundamentals and applications of CMOS and CCD image sensors. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014. Eagan, Daniel. America’s film legacy: The authoritative guide to the landmark movies in the National Film Registry. New  York: Continuum, 2010. Ebert, Roger. Roger Ebert’s movie yearbook 2010. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2010. Edgerton, Gary Richard. American film exhibition and an analysis of the motion picture industry’s market structure, 1963–1980. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1981. (University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI) Edison v. The American Mutoscope Company, 114 Fed. Rep., 926. Edison v. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 151 Fed. Rep., 767. Efron, Uzi, ed. Spatial light modulator technology: Materials, devices, and applications. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1995: 577. Eisenstadt, Peter R. The Encyclopedia of New York state. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Eisenstein, Sergei. “The dynamic square.” In Film essays and a lecture, edited by Jay Leyda. New York: Praeger, 1970. Enticknap, Leo. Moving image technology: From zoetrope to digital. London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2005. Euclid. “Optica” In Euclidis Quae Supersunt Omnia, edited by David Gregory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1703. Evans, Ralph M. Eye, film and camera in color photography. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1959. Evans, Ralph M., W.T. Hanson, Jr., and W. Lyle Brewer. Principles of color photography. New York: Wiley, 1953. Everson, William K. American silent film. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Eyman, Scott. John Wayne: The life and legend. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Eyman, Scott. Lion of Hollywood: The life and legend of Louis B. Mayer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Eyman, Scott. The speed of sound: Hollywood and the Talkie revolution, 1926-1930. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Ezra, Elizabeth. Georges Méliès: The birth of the Auteur. Manchester, UK/New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Faraday, Michael. Lectures on the various forces of nature. The Floating Press, 2009a. From the 1859 edition. Faraday, Michael. Lectures on the forces of matter and their relations to each other. Auckland: The Floating Press, 2009b. From an 1859 edition.

739 Faraday, Michael. On the various forces of nature and their relations to each other. Based on lectures given in 1860. New York: The Viking Press, 1960. Fell, John L., ed. Film before Griffith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Robert C. Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906-1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon.” Feynman, Richard P., et al. The Feynman lectures on physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly mechanics, radiation, and heat. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel: 1911-1967. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Fierstein, Ronald K. A triumph of genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War. Chicago: American Bar Association, 2015. Finney, Angus, Eugenio Triana. The International film business: A market guide beyond Hollywood. 2nd Edition. London/New York: Routledge, 2010. The first color moving pictures at the National Science and Media Museum. Bradford, UK: National Science and Media Museum, 2012. YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XekGVQM33ao. Flory, John, et al. The Dollars and Sense of Business Films, study of 157 business films; A report on the production and distribution costs of representative advertising and public relations motion pictures. New York: Association of National Advertisers, 1954. The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography. (Desk edition). New  York: The MacMillan Company, 1960. Friedman, Joseph S. History of color photography. Boston: The American Photographic Publishing Company, 1945. Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn H., ed. Hollywood in the neighborhood: Historical case studies of local movie going. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. George Potamianos, “Building Movie Audiences in Placerville, California, 1908-1915.” Gabler, Neal. An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Anchor Books, 1989. Gaudreault, André, et al., eds. A companion to early cinema. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. Geduld, Harry M. The birth of the talkies: From Edison to Jolson. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1975. Gernsheim, Helmut. Creative photography: Aesthetic trends 1839-­ 1960. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. Gitt, Robert. A century of sound: The history of sound in motion pictures. 5 videodiscs. Los Angeles: UCLA Film & Television Archive, 2007. Godfrey, Donald G.C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of film and television. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of colors. London: John Murray, 1840; Dover reprint, 2006. Goldmark, Daniel. Sound for the silents: Photoplay music from the days of early cinema. New York: Dover Publications, 2013. Goldstein, Dennis H. Polarized light (rev. and expanded) 2nd ed., New  York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 2003; 3rd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2011. Gomery, Douglas. The coming of sound: A history. New  York: Routledge, New York, 2005. Gomery, Douglas. “The coming of sound: Technological change in the American Film Industry.” In The classical Hollywood reader, edited by Steve Neale. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2012a. Gomery, Douglas. “The Rise of RKO.” In The classical Hollywood reader, edited by Steve Neale. London/New York: Routledge, 2012b. Gomery, Douglas. “Writing the history of the American Film Industry: Warner Brothers and Sound.” In Movies and methods volume II: An anthology, edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Gomery, Douglas, and Clara Pafort-Overduin. Movie history: A survey. 2nd ed. New York/London: Routledge, 1991. Gosser, H. Mark. Selected attempts at stereoscopic moving pictures and their relationship to the development of motion picture technology, 1852-1903. New York: Arno Press, 1977.

740 Grabowski, John. Television. Technology 360. Farmington Hills, MI: Lucent Books (Gale, Cengage Learning), 2011. Grant, August E., and Jennifer H. Meadows. Communication technology update and fundamentals. New York: Routledge, 2016. Grudens, Richard. Bing crosby: Crooner of the century. Stony Brook, NY: Celebrity Profiles Publishing Company, 2003. Gunning, Tom, et  al. Fantasia of color in early cinema. Amsterdam: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Guynn, William. The Routledge companion to film history. London: Routledge, 2011. Haines, Richard W. Technicolor movies: The history of dye transfer printing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003. Hall, Carl W. A biographical dictionary of people in engineering: From earliest records until 2000. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008. Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman. Instruments of the imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Hannavy, John, ed. Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography. New  York/London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, p. 435, 2007 and 2008. Stephan Herbert Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold, ed. Early discourses on colour and cinema: Origins, Functions, meanings. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International/Stockholm Universitet, 2006. Gorham Kindem, “The Demise of Kinemacolor.” Hart, Jeffrey A. Technology, television and competition: The politics of digital TV. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Haupert, Michael J. The entertainment industry. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Hayes, R. M. 3-D movies: A history and filmography of stereoscopic cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, Jefferson, 1998 (1989). Haynes, Williams. Cellulose, the chemical that grows. New  York: Doubleday, 1953. Hearn, Marcus. The cinema of George Lucas. New  York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005. Hecht, Hermann, and Ann Hecht, ed. Pre-cinema history, an encyclopedia and annotated bibliography of the moving image before 1896. London: Bowker-Saur, in association with The British Film Institute, 1993. Hecht, Jeff. City of light: The story of fiber optics. Rev. and expanded ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. Heide, Lars. Punched-card systems and the early information explosion, 1880-1945. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Helmholtz, Hermann von. Treatise on physiological optics. Vol. II. Mineola, NY: Dover Phoenix Editions, 2005 (reprint); based on two volumes published by the Optical Society of America, Rochester, NY, 1924; based on the third German edition by Leopold Voss, Hamburg and Leipzig, 1911. Originally published by Leopold Voss as Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 1867. Helmholtz, Hermann von. Treatise on physiological optics. Vol. III.  Mineola, NY: Dover Phoenix Editions, 1962 (reprint); based on two volumes published by the Optical Society of America, Rochester, NY, 1924; based on the third German edition by Leopold Voss, Hamburg and Leipzig, 1910. Originally published by Leopold Voss as Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 1867. Hendricks, Gordon. Beginnings of the biograph: The story of the invention of the mutoscope and the biograph and their supplying camera. New York: Beginnings of the American Film, 1964. Hendricks, Gordon. Eadweard Muybridge: The father of the motion picture. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975. Hendricks, Gordon. The Edison motion picture myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. Hendricks, Gordon. The kinetoscope: America’s first commercially successful motion picture exhibitor. New York: G.P.O., 1966. Henney, Keith, and Beverly Dudley, eds. Handbook of photography. London/New York: Whittlesey House, 1939.

Bibliographies Herbert, Stephen and Luke McKernan, eds. Who’s who of Victorian cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1996. Herbert, Stephen. A history of early film. 2. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. The here’s how book of photography. 2. Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Company, 1977. Hijiya, James A. Lee de Forest and the fatherhood of radio. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992. Hill, Charles, and Gareth Jones. Strategic management theory: An integrated approach. 8th ed. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Hirth, Friedrich, Chinese metallic mirrors: With notes on some ancient specimens of the Musée Guimet, Paris/New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1907. Hodges, James F. Opening and operating a motion picture theatre: How it is done successfully. New York: Scenario Publishing Co., 1912. Holian, Heather L., “New and inherited aesthetics: Designing for the toy story trilogy one film at a time,” in Toy story: How pixar reinvented the animated feature, edited by Susan Smith, et al. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Holston, Kim R. Movie roadshows: A history and filmography of reserved-seat limited showings, 1911-1973. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Publishers, 2013. Hopwood, Henry V. Living pictures: Their history, photo-production, and practical working. London: The Optician and Photographic Trades Review, 1899. Reprinted as part of the series The Literature of Cinema by Arno Press & The New York Times 1970. Hughes, Thomas Parke. Networks of power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Huhtamo, Erkki. “Natural magic: A short cultural history of moving images.” In The Routledge companion to film history, edited by William Guynn. London: Routledge, 2011. Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in motion: Media archaeology of the moving panorama and related spectacles. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013a. Hulfish, David S. Motion-picture work. Chicago: American School of Correspondence, 1913. Hull, David Stewart. Film in the third Reich: A study of the German cinema, 1933-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Hume, Alan, and Gareth Owen. A life through-the-lens: Memoirs of a film cameraman. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2004. Hummel, Rob. “Comparisons of 1.85, anamorphic and super 35 film formats.” In American cinematographer manual, edited by Stephen H. Burum. Hollywood, CA: ASC Press, 2007. Hurst, Richard Maurice. Republic studios: Between poverty row and the majors. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979. Huurdeman, Anton A. The worldwide history of telecommunications. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Huygens, Christiaan. Treatise on light. English translation. Project Gutenberg eBook, University of Chicago Press; tredition GmbH, Hamburg, 2012. Also from Echo Library, 2007. Huygens, Christiaan. Oeuvres Complètes. The Hague: Société Hollandaise des Sciences, 1888–1950. Hydrick, Carter Plymton. Critical mass: How Nazi Germany surrendered enriched uranium for the United States’ Atomic Bomb. 3rd Edition. Walterville, OR: Trine Day LLC, 2016. Iles, Chrissie. Dreamlands: Immersive cinema and art, 1905—2016. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Israel, Paul. Edison: A life of invention. New York: John, 1998. Jackson, Peter, They shall not grow old [film]. Warner Bros Burbank, CA, 2018. Jacobson, Brian R. Studios before the system: architecture, technology, and the emergence of cinematic space. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Bibliographies Jenkins, C.  Francis Animated pictures. Washington, DC: C.  Francis Jenkins, 1898; reprinted by Arno Press and The New York Times, New York, 1970. Jenkins, Francis A., and Harvey E.  White. Fundamentals of optics. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981. Jewell, Richard B. RKO radio pictures: A Titan is born. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Jewell, Richard B. The RKO story. London: Octopus Books Ltd., 1982. Jha, A. K. A textbook of applied physics. New Delhi: I. K. International Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 2009. Johnson, B.  K. Optics and optical instruments. London: The Hatton Press, Ltd., 1947. Reprint, Dover Publications, New York, 1960. Jones, Bernard E., ed. The cinematograph book: A complete practical guide to the taking and projecting of cinematograph pictures. London: Cassell and Company, 1915. Jones, Bernard E., ed. How to make and operate moving pictures. New York/London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1917. Joshi, Dattuprasad Ramanlal. Engineering physics. New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill Education Private Limited, 2010. Kaganovsky, Lilya. The voice of technology: Soviet cinema’s transition to sound, 1928-1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Kaiho, Tatsuo, ed. Iodine chemistry and applications. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015. Kalmus, Herbert T., Eleanore King Kalmus. Mr. Technicolor: An autobiography. Absecon, NJ: MagicImage Filmbooks, 1993. Karel, David. Dictionnaire des Artistes de Langue Française en Amérique du Nord. Québec: Musée du Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992. Kattelle, Alan. Home movies: A history of the American industry, 1897-­ 1979. Nashua, NH: Transition Publishing, 2000. Katz, Ephraim, and Ronald Dean Nolen. The film Encyclopedia: The complete guide to film and the film industry. 7th ed. New  York: Collins Reference, 2013. Kaufman, Lloyd. Sight and mind: An introduction to visual perception. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Keating, Michael P. Geometric, physical, and visual optics. Boston, MA: Butterworths, 1988. Keegan, Rebecca. The futurist: The life and films of James Cameron. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010. Keller, Peter A. The cathode-ray tube: Technology, history, and applications. New York: Palisades Institute for Research Services, Inc., 1991. Kennel, Glenn. Color and mastering for digital cinema. New  York/ London: Focal Press, 2007. Kenny, Tom. Sound for picture: Film sound through the 1990s. 2nd ed. Vallejo, CA: MixBooks/artistpro.com, 2000. Kerins, Mark. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the digital sound age. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011. Kindem, Gorham, ed. The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2002. Kingslake, Rudolf, ed. Applied Optics and Optical Engineering: The Detection of Light and Infrared Radiation. New  York: Academic Press, 1967: 103. Kingslake, Rudolf. A History of the Photographic Lens. Boston: Academic Press, 1989. Kingslake, Rudolf. Lens Design Fundamentals. New York: Academic Press, 1978. Kingslake, Rudolf. Optics in Photography. Bellingham, WA: SPIE Press, 1992. Kirsner, Scott. Inventing the Movies: Hollywood’s Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. CinemaTech Books, 2008. Klingender, F.D., and Stuart Legg. Money Behind the Screen. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937.

741 Koppelman, Charles. Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2005. Koszarski, Richard. Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New  York from Griffith to Sarnoff. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Krefft, Vanda. The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox. New York: Harper, 2017. Laikin, Milton. Lens Design. New  York and Basel: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 2001. Lambrecht, Ralph W., and Chris Woodhouse. Way Beyond Monochrome: Advanced Techniques for Traditional Black & White Photography. 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Focal Press, 2011. Lavédrine, Bertrand, and Jean-Paul Gandolfo. The Lumière Autochrome: History, Technology, and Preservation. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013. Lawton, Anna, ed. The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema. London/New York: Routledge, 1992. Layton, James and David Pierce. The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935. Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 2015. Lebo, Harlan. Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey. New  York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, ed. C.I.  Gerhardt. “Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire.” In Die Mathematische Schriften, VII. Berlin: A. Asher, 1879. Leonardo da Vinci. The Art of Painting. Edited by Alfred Werner. New York: Philosophical Library, 1957. Lescarboura, Austin C. The Cinema Handbook. New York: Scientific American Publishing Co., Munn & Company, 1921. Lesch, John E., ed. The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. first published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Lev, Peter. Transforming the Screen: 1950-1959. History of the American Cinema, edited by Charles Harpole, 7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Levison, Louise. Filmmakers and Financing: Business Plans for Independents. 6th ed. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2010. Lewinsky, Mariann, and Luke McKernan, eds. I Colori Ritrovati: Kinemacolor e Altre Magie. Bologna: Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna, 2017. Lewis, Jerry. The Total Film-Maker. New York: Random House, 1971. Liesegang, Franz Paul. Dates and Sources: A Contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography. Translated and edited by Hermann Hecht. London: The Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain, 1986. Limbacher, James L. Four Aspects of the Film. New York: Brussel & Brussel, 1968. Lipton, Lenny. Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema. New  York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1982. Lipton, Lenny. Independent Filmmaking. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Revised 1983. Lipton, Lenny. The Super 8 Book. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975. Loesser, Frank. Make a Miracle [song]. New York: Frank Music Corp 1949. Loiperdinger, Martin. Oskar Messter. Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1994. Lowell, Percival. Mars as the Abode of Life. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1908. Lumière, Louis and Auguste Lumière. Letters: Inventing the Cinema. Edited by Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Macfarlane, Alan, and Gerry Martin. Glass: A World History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Magoun, Alexander B. Television: The Life Story of a Technology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007. Macgowan, Kenneth. Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of the Motion Picture. New York: Delacorte Press, 1965.

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744 Slide, Anthony. The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Slide, Anthony. A Special Relationship: Britain Comes to Hollywood and Hollywood Comes to Britain. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Smith, Susan, et al., eds. Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Solomon, Aubrey. The Fox Film Corporation, 1915-1935: A History and Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014. Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002. Spehr, Paul. The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing Ltd., 2008. Spottiswoode, Raymond. The Focal Encyclopedia of Film & Television Techniques. London: Focal Press, 1982. Spottiswoode, Raymond, and Nigel L.  Spottiswoode, The Theory of Stereoscopic Transmission and Its Application to the Motion Picture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953. Squire, Jason E. The Movie Business Book. 2nd ed. New York: Fireside, 1992. Starr, Kevin. Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. New York/Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985. Stashower, Daniel. The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Stone, David, and Vanessa Theme Ament Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter: A Case Study of the End of the Analog Age. New  York/London: Focal Press, 2017. Article by Rick Mitchell, “More History of 4-Track 35mm 4-Track Magnetic Stereo: The Undocumented Years.” Street, Sarah, and Joshua Yumibe. Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Street, Seán. The A to Z of British Radio. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009. Street, Seán. Crossing the Ether: British Public Service and Radio Commercial Competition 1922-1945. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2006. Streible, Dan. Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Stump, David. Digital Cinematography: Fundamentals, Tools, Techniques, and Workflows. London/New York: Focal Press, 2014. Stupp, Edward H., and Matthew S. Brennesholtz. Projection Displays. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1999. Sturge, John M., ed. Neblette's Handbook of Photography and Reprography: Materials, Processes and Systems. 7th Edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1977. Suplee, Henry Harrison, et  al., eds. The Engineering Index. Volume IV – Five Years – 1901-1905. New York/London: The Engineering Magazine, John R. Dunlap, 1906. Swartz, Charles S., ed. Understanding Digital Cinema: A Professional Handbook. Burlington, MA/Oxford, UK: Focal Press/Elsevier, 2005. Talbot, Frederick A. Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1926. Talbot, Frederick A. Practical Cinematography and Its Applications. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1913. Tannas, Lawrence E., Jr., and William E.  Glenn. JTEC Panel Report on Display Technologies in Japan. Final Report, June 1992. NSF, DARPA, USAF under NSF grant ENG-911133. Taylor, Peter, and Michael Gagan, eds. Alkenes and Aromatics. Cambridge, UK: The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2002. Technicolor Companies. Annual and Cumulative Income from Royalties on Troland Patents, October 18, 1951. Interrogatory

Bibliographies Correspondence, Technicolor Corporate Archive, Moving Image Department, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. Theatrical Market Statistics 2016. Washington, DC: Motion Picture Association of America. Thomas, D.  B. The First Color Motion Pictures. London, UK: A Science Museum Monograph, 1969. Thomas, Lowell. With Lawrence in Arabia. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., London, 1924; New York: Explorers Club, 2017. Thomas Edison: Thomas Edison National Park, New Jersey. Brochure. Washington, DC: National Park Service, U.S.  Department of the Interior, [date uncertain]. Thomson, David. Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2017. Thulstrup, Erik W., and Josef Michl. Elementary Polarization Spectroscopy. New York: Wiley-VCH, 1989. Timbs, John. Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the Most Rare and Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis; with Nearly Fifty Years’ Personal Recollections. London: David Bogue, 1855. Tosi, Virgilio. Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography. London: British Universities Film Council, 2005. Towlson, Jon. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Constellations: Studies in Science Fiction Film and TV.  Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur, 2016. Tricart, Celine. 3D Filmmaking: Techniques and Best Practices for Stereoscopic Filmmakers. New York: Routledge, 2017. Tümmel, Herbert. Laufbildprojektion. Vienna, New  York: Springer-­ Verlag, 1973. Tuska, Jon. The Vanishing Legion: A History of Mascot Pictures, 1927-­ 1935. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Classics, 1999. (Originally published in 1982). Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900. Issue 276. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Office, 1901-02. Ulin, Jeffrey C. The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV, and Video Content in an Online World. 2nd. New York/London: Focal Press, 2014. United States v. Motion Picture Patents Co., J.  District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 225 Fed. Rep. Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Valyus, N. A. Stereoscopy. London: The Focal Press, 1966. Vierling, Otto. Die Stereoskopie in der Photographie und Kinematographie. Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft MBH, 1965. Wachhorst, Wyn. Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981. Wade, Nicholas J., and Benjamin W. Tatler. The Moving Tablet of the Eye: The Origins of Modern Eye Movement Research. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. Walker’s Directory of Northern California Directors and Corporations (including Northern Nevada). San Francisco, CA: Walker’s Manual Incorporated, 1931. Walker’s Manual of Far Western Corporations & Securities. Vol. 17, 1928: 419 Walker’s Manual Inc. San Francisco. Wall, E.  J. Practical Color Photography. Boston: American Photographic Publishing Company, 1922. Wall, E. J. The History of Three-Color Photography. Boston: American Photographic Publishing Company, 1925. Walls, Howard Lamarr. Motion Pictures 1894-1912: Identified from the Records of the United States Copyright Office. Washington, DC: Copyright Office, Library of Congress, 1953. Walsh, Robert, Eliakim Littell, and John Jay Smith, eds. Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art. E.  Littell, Philadelphia 21, 1832.

Bibliographies Ward, Richard Lewis. When the Cock Crows: A History of the Pathé Exchange. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. Washington, Harriet A. Deadly Monopolies. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. Webb, Richard C. Tele-Visionaries: The People behind the Invention of Television. Piscataway, NJ/Hoboken, NJ: IEEE Press/Wiley, 2005. Weinstein, David. The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. Weis, Elisabeth, and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Weiss, Stephen, and Bernie Baum. Music! Music! Music! [song] New York: Chappell & Co., 1949. Welford, Walter D, and Henry Sturmey. The “Indispensable” Handbook to the Optical Lantern: A Complete Cyclopaedia on the Subject of Optical Lanterns, Slides & Accessory Apparatus. London, England: Iliffe & Son, 1888. Wensberg, Peter C. Land’s Polaroid: a Company and the Man Who Invented It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Wheeler, Paul. High Definition Cinematography. 2nd. Oxford, UK: Focal Press, 2007. Whitney, Allison. “Cinephilia Writ Large: IMAX in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘The Dark Knight Rises’.” In The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy, eds. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Williams, Linda Ruth, and Michael Hammond, eds. Contemporary American Cinema. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2006. Wilcox, James R. Video Conferencing: The Whole Picture. New York: Telecom Books, 2000. Wilson, Anton. Anton Wilson’s Cinema Workshop. 4th ed. Hollywood: A.S.C. Holding Corp., 1983. Wirth, Edward. Thomas Edison in West Orange. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008. Wysotsky, Michael Z. Wide-Screen Cinema and Stereophonic Sound. London/New York: Focal Press Limited, 1971. Yewdall, David L. The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound. 2nd ed. Boston: Focal Press, 2003. Yumibe, Joshua. Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Zone, Ray. Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-­ 1952. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Zone, Ray. 3-D Filmmakers: Conversations with Creators of Stereoscopic Motion Pictures. Filmmakers Series, 119. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005. Zone, Ray. 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012. Zukor, Adolph, with Dale Kramer. The Public is Never Wrong: The Autobiography of Adolph Zukor. New York: Putnam, 1953. Zwerman, Susan, and Jeffrey A.  Okun, Jeffrey A, eds. The VES Handbook of Visual Effects. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2012.

Articles Explanatory note on articles referenced: When an author’s name appears in the text the year of publication, along with other information as required, is placed in parentheses following the name. If the author’s name does not appear it is placed in parentheses, along with other information as required. Periodicals are listed here by name if

745 no article citation is given. The SMPTE was originally known as the SMPE. In addition, the organization has changed the title of its publication several times. Abramson, Albert. “Pioneers of Television – Charles Francis Jenkins.” SMPTE Journal 95, no. 2 (February 1986) 224. Abramson, Albert. “Pioneers of Television – Philo Taylor Farnsworth.” SMPTE Journal 101, no. 11 (November 1992) 770. Abramson, Albert. “Pioneers of Television – Vladimir Kosma Zworykin.” SMPTE Journal 90, no. 7, (July 1981), 579. Abramson, Albert. “A Short History of Television Recording.” SMPTE Journal 64, no. 2 (February 1955b) 72. Adelson, Edward H., and James R.  Bergen. “Spatiotemporal Energy Models for the Perception of Motion.” Journal of the Optical Society of America A 2, 2 (February 1985) 284. Aiken, Joseph E. “Technical Notes and Reminiscences on the Presentation of Tykociner’s Sound Picture Contribution.” Journal of the SMPTE 67, no. 8 (August 1958). Alexander, Helen, and Rhys Blakely. “The Triumph of Digital Will Be the Death of Many Movies.” New Republic (September 12, 2014). Allen, Ioan. “The Production of Wide-Range, Low-Distortion Optical Soundtracks Utilizing the Dolby Noise Reduction System.” Journal of the SMPTE 84, no. 9 (September 1975) 720. Alvey, Mark. “Motion Pictures as Taxidermy, Karl Akeley and His Camera.” In the Field: The Bulletin of the Field Museum of Natural History (September–October 2000). American Stationer (New York) 30, no. 22 (November 26, 1891). Anderson, Joseph, and Barbara Anderson. “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited.” Journal of Film and Video 45, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 3-12. Anderson, L. Sprague. In Operating Cameraman (July–December 2000). Anderson, William T., Jr. “High Brightness Xenon Compact Arc Lamp.” Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 3 (September 1954) 96. Armat, Thomas J. “My Part in the Development of the Motion Picture.” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) 24, no. 3 (March 1935) 241. Arturo Hernandez, Authority on Color Photography, Dead. Moving Picture World 46, no. 6 (October 9, 1920). ARRI Centennial History. Film and Digital Times (September 2017). Aylsworth, Wendy. “Digital Cinema Technology (DC28).” SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 116, no. 9 (September 2007). Back, Frank G. “Zoom Lenses – Their Development.” SMPTE Journal 90, no. 9 (September 1981) 760. Baker, T.T. “Negative-Positive Technic with the Dufaycolor Process.” Journal of the SMPE 31, no. 3 (September 1938) 240. Baldwin, John L.E. “Digital Television Recording  – History and Background.” SMPTE Journal 95, no. 12 (December 1986) 1206. Barnack’s Leica 1912 35mm Cine Camera. Film and Digital Times (Spring 2015). Batsel, M. C., and E.W. Kellogg. “The RCA Sound Recording System.” RCA Review (October 1936). Battle, J. A. “Improvements in Sound Quality of Newsreels.” Journal of the SMPE 25, no. 2 (August 1935) 154. Bello, H. J., Jr., et al. “A New Color Intermediate Positive-Intermediate Negative Film System for Color Motion-Picture Photography.” Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 4 (April 1957) 205. Belton, John. “The Development of CinemaScope by Twentieth Century-Fox.” SMPTE Journal 97, no. 9 (September 1988) 711. Belton, John. The Origins of 35mm Film as a Standard. SMPTE Journal 99, no. 8 (August 1990a). Belton, John. Todd-AO: A History. SMPTE Journal 99, no. 6 (June 1990b). Benford, James R. The CinemaScope Optical System. Journal of the SMPTE 62, no. 1 (January 1954). Bennett, Colin N. A Bold Adventure. Kinematograph Weekly (January 26, 1922).

746 Benson, K. Blair. SMPTE Historical Note: A Brief History of Television Camera Tubes. SMPTE Journal 90, no. 8 (August 1981). Berggren, Glenn. The Evolution of the Cinema Lens—Part 2: The Cinema Revival: 1962-1974. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 116, no. 2–3 (February–March 2007). Bernhard Named Cinecolor Chief. Showmen’s Trade Review 48, no. 16. (April 17, 1948). Bernier, R. V. Three-Dimensional Motion Picture Applications. Journal of the SMPTE 56, no. 6 (June 1951). Berry, M. V. Oriental Magic Mirrors and the Laplacian Image. European Journal of Physics 27, no. 1 (November 24, 2005). Beyer, Walter. Traveling-Matte Photography and the Blue-Screen System. Journal of the SMPTE 74, no. 3 (March 1965). Blair, G. A. The Tinting of Motion-Picture Film. Transactions of the SMPE 4, no. 10 (May 1920). Blake, E. W. A Method of Recording Articulate Vibrations by Means of Photography. American Journal of Science, Series 3  Vol. 16, p. 54-59. (July 1878). Blakeston, Oswell. Checkup on Technique: Number Two. Closeup, Vol. VIII, No. 4. (December, 1931). Bolas, Thomas. Photography in Colors by Iridescence. The Work of Lippmann, His Predecessors and His Followers. The Photographic Times 29, no. 8 (August 1897): 372. Boone, Andrew R. Hollywood Now Shoots Movies Sideways. Popular Science 165, 1 (July 1954). Bouwers, A., and B.S. Blaisse. Anamorphic Mirror Systems. Journal of the SMPTE 65, no. 3 (March 1956). Bowen, Harold G.  Thomas Alva Edison’s Early Motion-Picture Experiments. SMPTE Journal 64, no. 9 (September 1955). Bridgewater, T.H. Baird and Television. Journal of the Royal Television Society 9, no. 2 (March 1967): 108. The British Journal of Photography. Supplement. (June 7, 1907). Broadcasting Yearbook 1974 (Broadcasting Publications, Inc., 1974): 68. Brock, Gustav F.O. Hand-Coloring of Motion Picture Film. Journal of the SMPE 16, no. 6 (June 1931). Brown, B.S. Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World. The Moving Picture World, no. 3 (July 15, 1916). Business: New Kodak Developments. Time Magazine 65, n. 1 (January 3, 1955). Caddigan, James L., and Thomas T.  Goldsmith, Jr. An Electronic-­ Film Combination Apparatus for Motion-Picture and Television Production. Journal of the SMPTE 65, no. 1 (January 1956). Calhoun, John M., Chairman. Progress Committee Report for 1961. Journal of the SMPTE 71, no. 5 (May 1962). Capstaff, John G. Biographical Note. Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 2 (August 1954). Capstaff, John G.  An Experimental 35-mm Multilayer Stripping Negative Film. Journal of the SMPTE 54, no. 4 (April 1950). Capstaff, John G., et  al. Report of Color Committee: May, 1930. Journal of the SMPE 15, no. 5 (November 1930). Capstaff, John G., O.E.  Miller, and L.S.  Wilder. The Projection of Lenticular Color-Films. Journal of the SMPTE 28, no. 2 (February 1937). Capstaff, John G., and M.W.  Seymour. The Kodacolor Process for Amateur Color Cinematography. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 36 (September 1928). Card, James. The Historical Motion-Picture Collections at George Eastman House. Journal of the SMPTE 68, no. 3 (March 1959). Carson, W.H.  The English Dufaycolor Film Process. Journal of the SMPE 23, no. 1 (July 1934). Chambers, Frank V. Camera 46 (1933): 64. Chicago Reports Many Variations in Picture Shows. Moving Picture World (July 15, 1916): 413. Chronochrome: The Gaumont Natural Color Process. Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 5 (June 14, 1913).

Bibliographies Clark, D.B.  Methods of Using and Coördinating Photoelectric Exposure-Meters at the 20th Century-Fox Studio. Journal of the SMPE 33, no. 8 (August 1939). Clark, D.B., and G. Laube. Twentieth Century Camera and Accessories. Journal of the SMPE 36, no. 1 (January 1941). Clarke, Charles G. Practical Utilization of Monopack Film. Journal of the SMPE 45, no. 5 (November 1945) Cline, Wilfrid. The Superscope Process. American Cinematographer 36 (October 1955): 591. Coe, B.W.  The Truth about Friese-Greene. The British Journal of Photography 102 (September 9, 1955). Color Cinematography: Hernandez-Mejia’s Colorgraph Process. Motion Picture News 14, no. 22 (December 2, 1916): 3524, 3529–3530. Color to Play Important Part in Future Fox Productions. Exhibitors Daily Review and Motion Pictures Today 28, no. 126 (May 28, 1930)1-2 Colorgraph Laboratory Is Ready for Business. Motion Picture News 19, no. 1 (January 4, 1919). Committee Activities: Report of the Color Committee. Journal of the SMPE 17, no. 1 (July 1931). Committee Activities: Report of the Historical Committee. Journal of the SMPE 17, no. 6 (December 1931). The Cornell Alumni News 18, no. 33 (May 18, 1916). Crabtree, J.I. The Motion Picture Laboratory. SMPTE Journal 64, no. 1 (January 1955). Crabtree, J.I. The Work of Edward Christopher Wente. Journal of the SMPE 25, no. 6 (December 1935). Crawford, Merritt. Pioneer Experiments of Eugene Lauste in Recording Sound. Journal of the SMPE 17, no. 4 (October 1931). Cricks, R.  Howard. The Place of Friese-Greene in the Invention of Kinematography. British Kinematography 16, no. 5 (May 1950). Cricks, Howard R.  From the British Viewpoint. International Projectionist, 32, no. 3 (May 1957). Crookes, William, et  al. The British Journal of Photography 104 (1957): 370. Cushman, George, Curtis Randall. Biography of an Idea. Home Movies, 11 406 (January 1944). Daily, Charles R.  New Paramount Lightweight HorizontalMovement Vista Vision Camera. Journal of the SMPTE 65, no. 5 (May 1956). Daily, Charles R. Progress Committee Report. SMPTE Journal 64, no. 5 (May 1955). Dartnell, Lewis, et al. The Ancient Roots of the Internal Combustion Engine. Scientific American 319, 3 (September 2018). De Forest, Lee. The Phonofilm. Transactions of the SMPE 7, no. 16 (May 1923). De Forest, Lee. Phonofilm Progress. Transactions of the SMPE 8, no. 20 (October 1924). De Forest, Lee. Pioneering in Talking Pictures. Journal of the SMPE 36, no. 1 (January 1941). De Forest, Lee, Recent Developments in ‘The Phonofilm’. Transactions of the SMPE 10, 27 (October 1926). De Forest, Lee. Tendencies in Sound. Exhibitors Herald-World (October 26, 1929). Demos, Gary. My Personal History in the Early Explorations of Computer Graphics. The Visual Computer 21, no. 12 (December 2005): 961-978. Dickerson, Mary Cynthia, ed. Museum Notes. The American Museum Journal, The American Museum of Natural History, New York 17 (1917): 150. Dickson, W.  K. Laurie. A Brief History of the Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Kineto-Phonograph. Journal of the SMPE 21, no. 6 (December 1933). DiGiulio, Edmund M. A Crystal Controlled Cordless Drive Motor for Motion-Picture Cameras. Journal of the SMPTE 80, no. 6 (June 1971).

Bibliographies DiGiulio, Edmund M. Developments in Motion-Picture Camera Design and Technology  – A Ten Year Update. SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). DiGiulio, Edmund M., et  al. A Historical Survey of the Professional Motion-Picture Camera. SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). Reprinted from the Journal of the SMPTE 76, no. 7 (July 1967). Dimmick, G.  L., and L.T.  Sachtleben. An Ultraviolet Push-Pull Recording Optical System for Newsreel Cameras. Journal of the SMPE 31, no. 1 (July 1938). Dolby, Ray M. The Video Processing Amplifier in the Ampex Videotape Recorder. Journal of the SMPTE 67, no. 11 (November 1958). Doody, William G., et al. Flashing of Eastman Ektachrome Video News Film for Intercutting with Eastman Ektachrome Commercial Film 7252. SMPTE Journal 87, no. 6 (June 1978). Drummond, Thomas. On the Means of Facilitating the Observations of Distant Stations in Geodætical Operations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116 (January 1, 1826). du Bois-Reymond, Emil. Science and Fine Art II (Concluded). Popular Science Monthly 41 (May 1892). Du Mont, Alan B.  The Relation of Television to Motion Pictures. Journal of the SMPE 47, no. 3 (September 1946). Duboscq, M. Jules. Note sur un régulator électrique. Comptes rendu des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris (July–December 1850). Duerr, Herman H. The Ansco Color Negative-Positive Process. Journal of the SMPTE 58, no. 6 (June 1952). Duerr, Herman H., and H.C.  Harsh. Ansco Color for Professional Motion Pictures. SMPE Journal 46, no. 5 (May 1946). Dvorak, John C. Inside Track. PC Magazine 16, no. 20 (November 18, 1997): 89. Edison, Thomas A. The Phonograph and its Future. The North American Review 126, no. 262 (May–June 1878). The Edison Kinetogram 8, no. 1 (February 1, 1913). Edson, Lee. His Invention May Make You Your Own TV Producer. Popular Mechanics 129, no. 5 (May 1968): 88. Edwards, E.A., and J.S.  Chandler. Format Factors Affecting 8mm Sound-Print Quality. Journal of the SMPTE 73, no. 7 (July 1964): 537-543. Elms, John D.  Demonstration and Description of the Widescope Camera. Transactions of the SMPE 6, no. 15 (October 1922): 124-129. End music worry. Moving Picture World 52, no. 4 (September 24, 1921): 373. Engl, J.  B. A New Process for Developing and Printing Photographic Sound Records. Transactions of the SMPE 11, no. 30 (August 1927). The English Mechanic and World of Science and Art (E.J. Kibblewhite, London) 52, no. 1348 (January 23, 1891). Eugene Augustin Lauste (Obituary). Journal of the SMPE 25, no. 3 (September 1935). Evans, Porter H.  A Comparative Study of Sound on Disk and Film. Journal of the SMPE 15, no. 2 (August 1930). Evans, Ralph M.  Maxwell’s Color Photograph. Scientific American 205, no. 5 (November 1961). Famulener, K. Some Studies on the Use of Color Coupling Developers for Toning Processes. Journal of the SMPE 32, no. 4 (April 1939): 412. Faraday, Michael. On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deception. Journal of the Royal Institution of Great Britain I (February 1831). Fernstrom, Ray. Introducing Dunning Color. International Photographer (November 1936). Fielding, Raymond E. Norman O. Dawn: Pioneer Worker in Special-­ Effects Cinematography. Journal of the SMPTE 72, no. 1 (January 1963). Film History 12. Florence, KY: Taylor & Francis, 2000. Five Companies in Talking Film Deal: Firms to Map Programs ‘to Standardize Systems and Methods’ Film Daily 39, no. 45 (February 23, 1927). Flaherty, Joseph A., and William C.  Nicholls. Editing Systems for Single Camera Videotape Production. SMPTE Journal 89, no. 6 (June 1980).

747 Flory, John. The Challenge of the 8mm Sound Film. Journal of the SMPTE 70, no. 8 (August 1961). Forch, Carl. Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron: In Memoriam. Photo-Era 44–45 (January–June 1920): 281. Fordyce, Charles R. “Motion-Picture Film Support: 1889–1976 an Historical Review.”SMPTE Journal. 85, no. 7 (July 1976).. Forrest, John L.  A New 16mm Camera Color Film for Professional Use. Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 1 (January 1957). Forrest, John L. 16mm Super Anscochrome Films. Journal of the SMPTE 67, no. 10 (October 1958). Forrest, John L., and F.M. Wing, The New Agfacolor Process. Journal of the SMPE 29, 3 (September 1937). Frank Leslie’s New  York Journal, of Romance, general Literature, Science and Art 1, Part 1 (January 1855): 173. Frayne, John G.  Comparison of Recording Processes. Journal of the SMPTE 59, no. 4 (October 1952). Frayne, John, G.  A Compatible Photographic Stereophonic Sound System. SMPTE Journal 64, no. 6 (June 1955). Frayne, John G. Earl I. Sponable (Obituary). SMPTE Journal 87, no. 2 (February 1978). Frayne, John G.  Electrical Printing. Journal of the SMPTE 55, no. 6 (December 1950). Frayne, John G. Motion Picture Sound Recording. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 24, 6 (August 1976a). Frayne, John G., et  al. An Improved 200-Mil Push-Pull Density Modulator. Journal of the SMPE 47, no. 6 (December 1946). Frayne, John G. Motion Picture Sound Recording. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 24, no. 6 (August 1976b). Frayne, John G., et  al. A Short History of Motion-Picture Sound Recording in the United States. SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). Freeman, John P.  SMPTE Historical Paper: The Evolution of High-­ Definition Television. SMPTE Journal 93, no. 5 (May 1984). Friedman, J. S. Monopack Processes. Journal of the SMPE 42, no. 5 (May 1944). Finn, James J. The New York Television Demonstration. International Projectionist, (November, 1931). Gamble, William. Mr. William Gamble on the Warner-Powrie Process. The Amateur Photographer 46, no. 1, 202 (October 15, 1907). Garity, William E., J.N.A. Hawkins. Fantasound. Journal of the SMPE 37, 8 (August 1941). Gaumont, Leon. Gaumont Chronochrome Process Described by the Inventor. Journal of the SMPTE 68, no. 1 (January 1959). This article is based on a paper found among the effects of Léon Gaumont after his death in 1946. Gillett, A., H.  Chretien, and J.  Tedesco. The Panoramic Screen and Projection Equipment Used at the Palace of Light of the International Exposition (Paris, 1937). Journal of the SMPE 32, no. 5 (May 1939). Ginsburg, Charles P.  Video Tape Recorder Design: Comprehensive Description of the Ampex Video Tape Recorder. Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 4 (April 1957). Goldmark, P.C., J.N.  Deyer, E.R.  Piore, and J.M.  Hollywood. Color Television. Journal of the SMPE 38, no. 4 (April 1942). Gomery, Douglas. Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the Coming of Sound. Cinema Journal (University of Texas Press) 16, no. 1 (Autumn 1976). Green, Allan, and Thomas J. Kraner. Wide-Screen Dictionary. Popular Photography 39, no. 6 (December 1956): 180 (Todd-AO for Oklahoma!). Greenslade, Thomas B., Jr. The Rotating Mirror. Physics Teacher 19, no. 4 (April 1981). Gregory, Carl Louis. The Early History of Wide Films. Journal of the SMPE 14, no. 1 (January 1930). Gregory, Carl Louis. Motion Picture Cameras. Transactions of the SMPE 5, no. 12 (May 1921).

748 Grignon, Lorin D.  CinemaScope. In Charles R.  Daily, ed., Progress Committee Report, Journal of the SMPTE 62, no. 5 (May 1954). Grignon, Lorin D. Experiment in Stereophonic Sound. Journal of the SMPE 52, no. 3 (March 1949). Groves, George R. Progress Committee Report. Journal of the SMPTE 60, no. 5 (May 1953). Gundelfinger, Alan M. Cinecolor Three-Color Process. Journal of the SMPTE 54, no. 1 (January 1950). Gunzburg, J. The Story of Natural Vision. American Cinematographer 34 (November and December 1953). Hall, Mordaunt. “The Theatergoer’s Reaction to the Audible Picture as it Was and Now.” SMPE Journal. (May, 1935). Hall, Mordaunt. The Reaction of the Public to Motion Pictures with Sound. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 35 (September 1928). Halloran, Arthur H.  The Farnsworth Multipactor Tube. Journal of Borderland Research 44, no. 5 (September–October 1988). Originally published in Radio 16, no. 10 (October 1934). Haney, Frank J. and Thomas W. Hope. Television (A report on the previous year’s state of the art). SMPTE Journal 96, no. 4 (April 1987). Hanson, Wesley T. Color Negative and Color Positive Film for Motion Picture Use. Journal of the SMPTE 58, no. 3 (March 1952). Hanson, Wesley T. The Evolution of Motion Pictures in Color. SMPTE Journal 89, no. 7 (July 1980). Hanson, Wesley T., and W.I. Kisner. Improved Color Films for Color Motion-Picture Production. Journal of the SMPTE 61, no. 6 (December 1953). Hanson, Wesley T., and F.A.  Richey. Three-Color Subtractive Photography. Journal of the SMPE 52, no. 2 (February 1949). Hardy, A.  C., Chairman. Report of the Standards and Nomenclature Committee. Journal of the SMPE 17, no. 3 (September 1931). Harris, G., et al. 3-D for the Nineties – A Wide-Field Stereo IMAX® Camera. SMPTE Journal 103, no. 10 (October 1994). Harriscolor Picks Site for Eastern Laboratory. The Film Daily 49, no. 5 (July 7, 1929). Hedden, William D., and Kenneth B.  Curtis. Early 8mm Sound Developments. Journal of the SMPTE 70, no. 8 (August 1961). Hedvall, Yngve. The Speaking Film. The American-Scandinavian Review 10 (1922): 108. Live Broadcast. Heinl Radio Business Letter, (July 2, 1931). Hernandez-Mejia, Arturo. The Colorgraph Process of Animated Natural Color Photography as Applied to Moving Pictures. The Moving Picture News 6, no. 14 (October 5, 1912). Highley, Samuel. Photography and the Magic Lantern Applied to the Teaching of History. The Journal of the Society of Arts, and of the Institutions in Union 17, no. 844 (January 22, 1869). Hilliard, John K.  Basic Sound Recording and Reproducing Practices between 1927 and 1940. SMPTE Journal 92, no. 2 (February 1983). Hilliard, John K.  A Brief History of Early Motion Picture Sound Recording and Reproducing Practices. J. Audio Eng. Soc. 33, n. 4 (April 1985). History of Sir D.  Brewster’s Lenticular Stereoscope. North British Review 17, no. 33 (May–August 1852): 177. Hochheiser, Sheldon. What Makes the Picture Talk: AT&T and the Development of Sound Motion Picture Technology. IEEE Transactions on Education 35, no. 4 (November 1992). Hoffman, D.M., V.I.  Karasev, and M.S.  Banks. Temporal presentation protocols in stereoscopic displays: Flicker visibility, perceived motion, and perceived depth. Journal of the Society for Information Display 19(3) (March 1, 2011): 255-281. Hogan, John V.L. The Early Days of Television. Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 5 (November 1954). Honan, William H. A Movie Process in Which the Screen Disappears. The New York Times (March 19, 1990). Hope, Adrian. A Century of Recorded Sound. New Scientist 76, no. 1083 (December 22/29, 1977).

Bibliographies Hope, Thomas W.  Market Review: Nontheatrical Film and Audio-­ Visual  – 1967. Journal of the SMPTE 77, no. 11 (November 1968). Hornbeck, Larry J.  Digital Light Processing  – Introduction. Texas Instruments Technical Journal 15, no. 3 (July–September 1998). Horner, W. G. On the Properties of the Daedaleum, a New instrument of Optical Illusion. The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 4 (January 1834): 36. Howell, David A.  A Primer on Digital Television. Journal of the SMPTE 84, no. 7 (July 1975). Hughes, Mark. 3D Movies Fuel Overseas Box Office, Driving Expansion of New Theaters in Asia and Pacific Region. Forbes (December 29, 2017). Huhtamo, Erkki. The Dream of Personal Interactive Media: A Media Archaeology of the Spirograph, a Failed Moving Picture Revolution. Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 4 (2013b). Imus, Henry O., and Joseph W.  Schmit. Optical Printing of Liquid-­ Coated Negatives at Technicolor. Journal of the SMPTE 69, no. 8 (August 1960). Index to SMPTE-Sponsored American National Standards, Society Recommended Practices, and Engineering Guidelines. SMPTE Journal 91, no. 12 (December 1982). Jeffree, John Henry. Light Modulation with the Supersonic [Ultrasound] Cell. Television and Short Wave World, London (August 1938): 461-464. Jenkins, C. Francis. Motion Pictures by Wireless. Moving Picture News 8, no. 14 (October 4, 1913). Jenkins, C. Francis. Prismatic Rings. Transactions of the SMPE 6, no. 14 (May 1922). Jenkins, C. Francis. Stereoscopic Motion Pictures. Transactions of the SMPE 3, no. 9 (October 1919). Jenkins, C.  Francis. Transmitting Pictures by Electricity. Electrical Engineer 18 (July 25, 1894). Jensen, A.  G. The Evolution of Modern Television. Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 5 (November 1954). Johnson, Paul V., Joohwan Kim, and Martin S. Banks. Visible Artifacts and Limitations in Stereoscopic 3D Displays. Information Display 33, no. 1 (January–February 2017). Johnson, Paul V., Joohwan Kim, and Martin S Banks. The Visibility of Color Breakup and a Means to Reduce it. Journal of Vision 14, no. 14 (December 2014). Johnston, William A. The Public and Sound Pictures. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 35 (September 1928). Jones, Chapman. Developments of Three-Colour Photographic Processes. Nature 70 (October 6, 1904). Jones, R. Clark, and William A. Shurcliff. Equipment to Measure and Control Synchronization Errors in 3-D Projection. Journal of the SMPTE 62, no. 2 (February 1954). Jones, Loyd A. Tinted Films for Sound Positives. Transactions of the SMPE 13, no. 37 (May 1929). Jones, Loyd A., and J.I.  Crabtree. Panchromatic Negative Film for Motion Pictures. Transactions of the SMPE 10, no. 27 (October 1926). Jones, Loyd A., and C.W.  Gibbs. The Absorption of Light by Toned and Tinted Motion Picture Film. Transactions of the SMPE 5, no. 12 (May 1921). Jones, W.C., and L.W.  Giles. A Moving Coil Microphone for High Quality Sound Reproduction. Journal of the SMPE 17, no. 6 (December 1931). Jurgens, John. Steadicam as a Design Problem. SMPTE Journal 87, no. 9 (September 1978): 587-591. KLAC-TV Unveils Its Cinema-Scope. Billboard 61, no. 30 (July 23, 1949). Kalmus, Natalie M. Color Consciousness. Journal of the SMPE 25, no. 2 (August 1935).

Bibliographies Kelkres, Gene G. A Forgotten First: The Armat-Jenkins Partnership and the Atlanta Projection. Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 1 (Winter 1984). Kelley, William V.D.  Adding Color to Motion. Transactions of the SMPE 3, no. 7 (April 1919). Kelley, William V.D.  Color Photography Patents. Transactions of the SMPE 9, no. 21 (May 1925). Kelley, William V.D.  The Handschiegl and Pathéchrome Color Processes. Journal of the SMPE 17, no. 2 (August 1931). Kelley, William V.D.  Imbibition Coloring of Motion Picture Films. Transactions of the SMPE 10, no. 28 (October 1926). Kelley, William V.D. Stereoscopic Pictures. Transactions of the SMPE 7, no. 17 (October 1923). Kellogg, Edward W.  The Development of 16-MM.  Sound Motion Pictures. Journal of the SMPE 24, no. 1 (January 1935). Kellogg, Edward W.  History of Sound Motion Pictures. Three-part article. SMPTE Journal 64, no. 6–8 (June–August 1955). Kennel, Glenn. Digital Film Scanning and Recording: The Technology and Practice. SMPTE Journal 103, no. 3 (March 1994). Kerns, Robert V.  The Mitchell Camera Story. American Cinematographer 49 (April 1968). Kindem, Gorham. The Demise of Kinemacolor: Technological, Legal, Economic, and Aesthetic Problems in Early Color Cinema History. Cinema Journal 20; 2 (Spring 1981): 3-14. Kingslake, Rudolf. A History of Anamorphic Lenses. International Projectionist 32, no. 3 (March, 1957) Kingslake, Rudolf. The Reversed Telephoto Objective. Journal of the SMPTE 75, no. 3 (March 1966) Kirsch, R.A. SEAC and the start of image processing at the National Bureau of Standards. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 20, no. 2 (April–June 1998). Köche, Hans. Bild und Ton, Zeitschrift für Film- und Fototechnik Image and Sound, Journal for Film and Photo Techniques 19 (1966). Koerner, Allan M. The Problems of Control of the Color Photographic Processes. Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 6 (December 1954). Komar, V.G., and Deane R.  White. Recent work in Varioscopic Cinematography. Journal of the SMPTE 78, no. 10 (October 1969). Krainock, Mildred B.  An Annotated List of the Articles Pertaining to the History of Motion-Pictures  – 1950-1956: Including Some Historical References on Television. Journal of the SMPTE 67, no. 11 (November 1958). Kriss, Michael A., and Jeanine Liang. Today’s Photographic Imaging Technology for Tomorrow’s HDTV System. SMPTE Journal 92, no. 8 (August 1983). Labin, E. The Eidophor Method for Theater Television. Journal of the SMPTE 54, no. 4 (April 1950). Land, Edwin H. Experiments in Color Vision. Scientific American 200, no. 5 (May 1959). Lane, George. A Projector for Stereo, Color and Standard Films. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 36 (September 1928). Lankes, L.R. Historical Sketch of Television’s Progress. Journal of the SMPE 51, no. 3 (September 1948). Leblanc, Maurice. Étude sur la Transmission Électrique: Des Impressions Lumineuses. La Lumière Électrique, Journal Universel d’Électricité 2, no. 23, au Bureaux du Journal, Paris (December 1, 1880): 477-481. Lemieux, Pierre-Anthony. D-Cinema Content Protection Architecture: A Primer. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 116, no. 2–3 (February– March 2007). Leventhal, Jacob Frank. The First Use of Stereoscopic Pictures in Motion Picture Theatres. Transactions of the SMPE 10, no. 26 (May 1926). Leventhal, Jacob Frank. A New Optical Compensator. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 36 (September 1928a). Leventhal, Jacob Frank. Projectors with Optical Intermittents. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 34 (April 1928b).

749 Levinson, Nathan. A New Method of Increasing the Volume Range of Talking Motion Pictures. Journal of the SMPE 26, no. 2 (February 1936a). Levinson, Nathan, and L.T. Goldsmith. Vitasound. Journal of the SMPE 37, no. 8 (August 1941). Lipton, Lenny. The Evolution of Electronic Stereoscopy. SMPTE Journal 100, no. 5 (May 1991). Lipton, Lenny. The Evolution of the Bluejays. Popular Photography 56 (May 1965). Lipton, Lenny. The Stereoscopic Cinema: From Film to Digital Projection. SMPTE Journal 10, no. 9 (September 2001). Lipton, Lenny, and Lhary Meyer. A Flicker-Free Field-Sequential Stereoscopic Video System. SMPTE Journal 93, no. 11 (November 1984). Longair, Malcolm S.  Maxwell and the science of colour. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A (May 28, 2008). Loudon, James. A Century of Progress in Acoustics. Science 14, no. 365 (December 27, 1901). Lovette, Frank H., and Stanley Watkins. Twenty Years of Talking Movies. Bell Telephone Magazine (Summer 1946). Lubschez, Ben J.  The Beginnings of the Cinema: Birth of the Final Form of the Motion Pictures—The Work of C.  Francis Jenkins. American Cinematographer 3, no. 2 (May 1, 1922). Lumière, Louis. The Lumière Cinematograph. Journal of the SMPE 27, no. 6 (December 1936a). Lumière, Louis. Stereoscopy on the Screen. Journal of the SMPE 27, no. 3 (September 1936b). MacAdam, David L. The Fundamentals of Color Measurement. Journal of the SMPE 31, no. 4 (October 1938a). MacAdam, David L. Stereoscopic Perceptions of Size, Shape, Distance and Direction. Journal of the SMPTE 62, no. 4 (April 1954): 271-293. MacAdam, David L. Subtractive Color Mixture and Color Reproduction. Journal of the Optical Society of America 28, no. 12 (December 1938b). MacDonald, Margaret I.  Prizma Color Demonstration. The Moving Picture World (February 24, 1917). MacKenzie, Donald. Sound Recording with the Light Valve. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 35 (September 1928). Magid, Ron. Exploring a New Universe: George Lucas discusses his ongoing effort to shape the future of digital cinema. American Cinematographer (September 2002). Malkames, D. Karl. Centennial of the Biograph Motion Picture System. SMPTE Journal 108, no. 12 (December 1999). Malkames, D.  Karl. The Theatrical Newsreel Cameraman: Part 1. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 112, no. 9 (September 2003). Malkames, D.  Karl. The Theatrical Newsreel Cameraman: Part 2. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 113, no. 2–3 (February–March 2004). Malkames, Don G. Early Projector Mechanisms. Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 10 (October 1957) Mannes, L.D., and L.  Godowsky, Jr. The Kodachrome Process for Amateur Cinematography in Natural Colors. Journal of the SMPE 25, no. 1 (July 1935). Originally presented at the Spring, 1935, meeting at Hollywood, California. Markle, Wilson. The Development and Application of Colorization. SMPTE Journal 93, no. 7 (July 1984). Martin, Robert E.  Mystery Cell Aids Television. Popular Science Monthly 117, no. 2 (August 1930). Matthews, Glenn E. A Motion Picture Made in 1916 by a Two-Color Subtractive Process. Journal of the SMPE 15, no. 5 (November 1930). Matthews, Glenn E., and Raife G.  Tarkington. Early History of Amateur Motion-Picture Film. Journal of the SMPTE 64, no. 3 (March 1955).

750 Mazo, M. E. The Tauleigne-Mazo Stereo Projection and Three-Colour Process. The British Journal of Photography (Supplement), (March 10, 1910). Max Handschiegl. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 34 (April 1928). McLean, Don. Moving Pictures from Wax  – ‘Phonovision.’ Radio & Electronics World (February 1984). McCormick, Donald Toscanini Legacy: Part II, The Selenophone. ARSC Journal 22, no. 2 (Fall 1991). McCullough, John B., Joseph T. Tykociner Pioneer in Sound Recording. Journal of the SMPTE 67, no. 8 (August 1958). McFadin, Phillip G.  Accurate Film Edit Decision Making Using Videotape as the Medium. SMPTE Journal 90, no. 11 (November 1981). McInnis, Walter. The Newsreel Cameraman. Journal of the SMPE 47, no. 5 (November 1946). Mead, Bill. Dean of Dolby: Audio pioneer Ioan Allen looks back on five decades of innovation. Film Journal International (December 27, 2016). Interview with Ioan Allen. Mees, Dr. C.E.K. Color Photography. Transactions of the SMPE 6, 14 (May 1922). Mees, Dr. C.  E. K.  Halation. Kodakery, A Journal for Amateur Photographers 5, no. 1 (September 1917). Milburn, G.D. American Films, vs. Dry Plates for Outdoor Photography. The Photographic Times and Amateur Photographer 19, no. 401 (May 24, 1889). Miller, T.H. Masking: A Technique for Improving the Quality of Color Reproductions. Journal of the SMPE 52, no. 2 (February 1949). Mitchell, Robert A. Film Standards for Picture and Sound. International Projectionist 37, no. 7 (July, 1957) Motion Picture Herald 123 (1936). Moving Picture World 25, no. 7–9 (August 21, 1915). Narath, Albert. Oskar Messter and His Work. Journal of the SMPTE 69, no. 10 (October 1960). Narath, Albert, and Eric I. Guttmann. The Work of Film Pioneer Max Skladanowsky. Journal of the SMPTE 75, no. 12 (December 1966). Naturama  – Republic’s New Wide-Screen Process. American Cinematographer 37, no. 11 (November 1956): 668. Neil, Iain. Iain Neil on Designing Summilux-C Lenses. Film and Digital Times, Special Report, no. 64 (September 2014). New Color Photography Process Perfected. New  York Times (March 26, 1916). A New Method of Television Transmission. Electronics and Television & Short-Wave World 13, no. 145 (March 1940). New Patents for 1908. The Electrical Review 63 (December 20, 1908): 728. News of the Industry: Fox Widescope. Projection Engineering 1, 1 (September 1929): 47. Newsline: It’s a Wonderful Life. Billboard 98, no. 16 (April 19, 1986). Nicelli, Vittore. Solid-State Theater Sound System. Journal of the SMPTE 75, no. 4 (April 1966). Nickolaus, John M.  Mood Tones for Motion Pictures. Popular Mechanics 69, no. 3 (March 1938). Niver, Kemp R.  Paper Prints of Early Motion Pictures: A Reprint. Journal of the SMPTE 75, no. 12 (December 1966). Obituary Notices. Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 54, no. 260 (June 1916): 688. O’Brien, Richard S., et al. 101 Years of Television Technology. SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). Reprinted in SMPTE Journal 100, no. 8 (August 1991). O’Connell, L.  William. The Photographing of 16-mm Kodachrome Short Subjects for Major Studio Release. Journal of the SMPE 39, no. 11 (November 1942). Offenhauser, William H., Jr. Letter to the editor: Re: Wide-Screen Film Performance. Journal of the SMPTE 74, no. 5 (May 1965). Olson, Harry F. The Ribbon Microphone. Journal of the SMPE 16, no. 6 (June 1931).

Bibliographies Paul, Robert W. Kinematographic Experiences. Journal of the SMPE 27, no. 5 (November 1936). Pautz, Michelle C. The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, 1930-2000. Issues in Political Economy 11 (2002). Pennington, Adrian. Imax Now Have Serious Rivals in the ‘Premium Large Format’ Sector. Screen Daily (June 15, 2017). Perisic, Zoran. Flying with Superman. American Cinematographer (September 1979): 882. Photographing Television Programmes. Electronics and Television & Short-Wave World 13, no. 145 (March 1940). Plakun, Bernard D. “Early Projector Mechanisms.” Journal of the SMPTE, Vol. 66, October 1955. Plakun, Bernard D. “Early Projector Mechanisms.” Journal of the SMPTE, Vol. 66, October, 1957. Pohl, W.E.  Large-Area Negative Printing. Journal of the SMPTE 68, no. 2 (February 1959). Pörs, Peter. Monitoring and Authoring of 3D Immersive Next-­ generation Audio Formats. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 125, no. 9 (November–December 2016). Powrie, John H.  A Line Screen Film Process for Motion Pictures in Color. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 34 (April 1928). Prizma, Inc. v. Technicolor, Inc. Patent Suits. Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office 307, no. 1 (February 6, 1923) The Prizma Process of Color Photography. Motion Picture News 15, no. 12 (1917). Progress in the Motion Picture Industry. Journal of the SMPE 15, no. 6 (December 1930). Pulling, M.J.L.  Sound Recording as Applied to Broadcasting. B.B.C. Quarterly 3, no. 2 (July 1948). Pylipow, Peter E.  Improved-Strength Eastman 35mm Motion-Picture BH Perforations. SMPTE Journal 100, no. 11 (November 1991). Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 37. The Library of Congress (1980). Radio Merger Links Victor with RCA, GE, Westinghouse. Exhibitors Herald-World (November 2, 1929). Rainey, P.M. Some Technical Aspects of the Vitaphone. Transactions of SMPE 11, no. 30 (August 1927). Raleigh, Charles. Reminiscences of Commercial Colour Cinematography – Its Possibilities. British Journal of Photography, Monthly Supplement on Colour Photography 16, no. 189 (August 4, 1922). Ramsaye, Terry. Early History of Sound Pictures. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 35 (September 1928). Rast, R.M. SMPTE Technology Committee on Digital Cinema—DC28: A Status Report. SMPTE Journal 110, no. 2 (February 2001). Rawls, Richard B. 8mm Sound Film: A Professional News Medium for Television. Journal of the SMPTE 71, no. 8 (August 1962). Reeves, Hazard E. The Development of Stereo Magnetic Recording for Film. Part 1. SMPTE Journal 91, no. 10 (October 1982a). Reeves, Hazard E. The Development of Stereo Magnetic Recording for Film. Part 2. SMPTE Journal 91, no. 11 (November 1982b). The Repertory of Arts and Manufactures…: Transactions of the Philosophical Societies of All Nations 16 (1802). Printed by Nichols and Son, London. Report of Lens-Calibration Subcommittee. Journal of the SMPE 53, no. 4 (October 1949). Subcommittee members included Chairman Rudolf Kingslake, Head of Kodak lens design; Frank Back, Zoomar designer; and I.C. Gardner of the National Bureau of Standards. Report of the Historical and Museum Committee. Journal of the SMPE 22, no. 1 (January 1934). Report of the Projection Practice Committee. Journal of the SMPE 30, no. 6 (June 1938a). Report of the Projection Practice Committee. Journal of the SMPE 31, no. 5 (November 1938b). Republic’s December Releases Named. Motion Picture News 20, no. 14 (December 6, 1919): 4061.

Bibliographies Richardson, F.H. What Happened in the Beginning. Transactions of the SMPE 9, no. 22 (September 1925). Richardson, F.H.  Wide Film. Exhibitors Herald-World 97, no. 3 (October 19, 1929). Riordan, Kevin and Corbin Treacy. A Translation from Félix Mesguich’s Tours de Manivelle. Modernism/Modernity 18, no. 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press (April 2011). Roget, Peter Mark. Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel seen through vertical apertures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 115 (January 1, 1825). Ropin, Kurt H.  Designing a 65mm Motion-Picture Camera: The ARRIFLEX 765. SMPTE Journal 99, no. 6 (June 1990). Rose, Albert, and Harley Iams. The Orthicon, a Television Pickup Tube. RCA Review 4, no. 2 (October 1939): 186-199. Rowan, Arthur. ‘The Wild North’ introduces MGM’s new Ansco Color process. American Cinematographer 33 (March 1952). Rowland, Richard. The Speed of Projection of Film. Transactions of the SMPE 10, no. 27 (October 1926). Rubin, H.  The Magnascope. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 34 (April 1928). Rule, John T. The Geometry of Stereoscopic Projection. Journal of the Optical Society of America 31, no. 4 (1941): 325-34 Runcie, W. Osborne. A New Transparent Rotary Shutter. Transactions of the SMPE 6, no. 14 (May 1922). Ryan, Roderick T. “Color in the Motion-Picture Industry.” SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). Ryder, Loren L. “Looking to the Future in Sound.” Journal of the SMPTE 65, no. 11 (November 1956). Ryder, Loren L. “Magnetic Sound Recording in the Motion-Picture and Television Industries.” SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). Ryder, Loren L. “Motion Picture Studio Use of Magnetic Recording.” Journal of the SMPTE 55, no. 6 (December 1950). Santee, H.B. “Western Electric Sound Projecting Systems for Use in Motion Picture Theatres.” Part 2. Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 35 (September 1928). Sayre, Joel. “Mike Todd and His Big Bug-Eye: Film Process Caps His Gaudy Up-and-Down Career.” Life Magazine 38, no. 10 (March 7, 1955): 141-146. Schmidt, W.A., et  al. “Photographic Color-Forming Development Reaction.” Industrial & Engineering Chemistry 45, no.8 (1953). Schubin, Mark. “Searching for the Perfect Aspect Ratio.” SMPTE Journal 105, no. 8 (August 1996). Schubin, Mark. “What Sparked Video Research in 1877? The Overlooked Role of the Siemens Artificial Eye.” Proceedings of the IEEE 105, no. 3 (March 2017). Schuller, Edgar A., Chairman. “Historical Equipment Collections: A Report of the SMPTE Archival Papers and Historical Committee.” SMPTE Journal 107, no. 12 (December 1998). Schulman, Michael. “Oscar Dearest.” The New  Yorker 93, no. 2 (February 27, 2017). The Screen: ‘The Glorious Adventure,’ with Lady Diana Manners. The New York Times 71, no. 23, 466 (April 24, 1922). Section Activities, New England, Meeting—February, 1922. Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society, New York 17, (January–December 1922). Sehgal, Parul. “Solving the Infinite and the Infinitesimal.” The New York Times 168, no. 58,328 (May 15, 2018). Shannon, Claude E. “Communication theory – Exposition of fundamentals.” Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Information Theory 1, no. 1 (1953). Shannon, Claude E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July, October 1948). Shannon, Claude E. “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.” Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57, no. 12 (December 1938).

751 Shaw, William C. “New Large-Screen and Multi-Image Motion-Picture System.” Journal of the SMPTE 79, no. 9 (September 1970). Shaw, William C., and J.  Creighton Douglas. “IMAX® and OMNIMAX® Theatre Design.” SMPTE Journal 92, no. 3 (March 1983). Sherlock, Daniel J. “The Lost History of Film Formats.” SMPTE Journal 106, no. 3 (March 1997). Shiers, George. “Historical Notes on Television before 1900.” SMPTE Journal 86, no.3 (March 1977). Shiers, George. “SMPTE Historical Note: The Rise of Mechanical Television, 1901-1930.” SMPTE Journal 90, no. 6 (June 1981). Shockley, William. “An Invited Essay on Transistor Business.” Proceedings of the IRE 46, no. 6 (June 1958). Shurcliff, William A. “Screens for 3-D and Their Effects on Polarization.” Journal of the SMPTE 62, no. 2 (February 1954). Silent, H.C., and J.G.  Frayne. “Push-Pull Recording with the Light-­ Valve.” Journal of the SMPE 31, no. 1 (July 1938). Silent, H.C., and J.G. Frayne. “Western Electric Noiseless Recording.” Journal of the SMPE 18, no. 5 (May 1932). Slain Inventor’s Lover Sentenced. Los Angeles Times (July 19, 1983). Smith, G.  Albert. “Animated Photographs in Natural Colours.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 57, no. 2925 (December 11, 1908). Smith, Oberlin. “Some Possible Forms of the Phonograph.” Electrical World 12 (September 8, 1888). Smith, Willoughby. “Effect of Light on Selenium During the Passage of an Electric Current.” Nature 7, 173 (February 20, 1873): 303. Solow, Sidney P. “Milestones in the History of the Motion-Picture Film Laboratory.” SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). Sponable, Earl I. “Historical Development of Sound Films.” Journal of the SMPE 48, no. 4–5 (April–May 1947). Sponable, Earl I. “Historical Development of Sound Films.” International Projectionist 22, nos. 7–12(23 no.1) (July 1947–January 1948). Sponable, Earl I. “Some Technical Aspects of the Movietone.” Transactions of the SMPE 11, no. 31 (September 1927). Sponable, Earl I., et al. “Design Considerations of CinemaScope Film.” Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 1 (July 1954). Spottiswoode, Raymond, Nigel L.  Spottiswoode, and Charles Smith. “Basic Principles of the Three-Dimensional Film.” Journal of the SMPTE 59, no. 4 (October 1952): 249-86. Starkman, David. “3-D Format Rarities: Anaglyph Lantern Slides.” Stereo World 41, no. 5 (March/April 2016). Staud, C. J., and W. T. Hanson. “Some Aspects of 8mm Sound Color Print Quality.” Journal of the SMPTE 71, no. 8 (August 1962). Stott, John G., George E.  Cummins, and Henri E.  Breton. “Printing Motion-Picture Films Immersed in a Liquid: Part I: Contact Printing.” Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 10 (October 1957). Streeter, Richard G. “Design Considerations for an Electronic Cinematography Camera.” SMPTE Journal 90, no. 11 (November 1981). Study of Animals Led to Movie Films. The Camera: A Practical Magazine for Photographers 21, no. 3 (March 1917): 159. Stumpf, Richard J. “A Film Studio Looks at HDTV.” SMPTE Journal 96, no. 3 (March 1987). This is a revised version of the original presented at the 127th SMPTE Technical Conference in Los Angeles on October 31, 1985. Sulzer, Albert F. “The Epoch of Progress in Film Fire Prevention.” Journal of the SMPE 34, no. 4 (April 1940). Synchroscope. The Billboard 20, no. 51 (December 19, 1908): 33. Ramsaye, Terry. “The Romantic History: A Human Story of Amazing Interest.” Photoplay 21, no. 6, (May 1922): 32. “Television on the Theatre Screen.” Projection Engineering 2, no. 7 (July 1930): 23–24. Thalberg, Irving. “Technical Activities of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.” Journal of the SMPE. vol. 15, July, 1930. Theisen, E. “The Historical Motion Picture Exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum.” Journal of the SMPE 26, no. 3 (March 1936).

752 Theisen, W.  E. “Pioneering in the Talking Picture.” Journal of the SMPE 36, no. 4 (April 1941). Theisen, W. E. “Willian Van Doren Kelley.” Journal of the SMPE 24, no. 3 (March 1935). Thompson, Lloyd, Committee Chairman. “Progress Committee Report for 1956.” Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 5 (May 1957). Thorpe, Laurence J. “The SMPTE Century: Evolution in Cameras and Lenses from 1916 to 2016.” SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 125, no. 6 (August 2016). Thorpe, Laurence J., and A. Takeuchi. “The All-Digital Camcorder – The Arrival of Electronic Cinematography.” SMPTE Journal 105, no. 1 (January 1996). 3-D Motion Pictures – Past, Present and Future. Special Issue. American Cinematographer 55, no. 4 (April 1974). Trade Notes. Wilson’s Photographic Magazine (Edward L.  Wilson, New York ) 49 (1912): 335. Turner, John R., et al. “Part II: Optical Printing.” Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 10 (October 1957). Tuttle, Harris B., Sr. “Some Notes on the Early Reversal Processing of 16mm Film.” Journal of the SMPTE 75, no. 12 (December 1966). Tykociński-Tykociner, J. “Photographic Recording and Photoelectric Reproduction of Sound.” Transactions of the SMPE 7, no. 16 (May 1923). Uhlig, Ronald E. “Two- and Three-Channel Stereophonic Photographic Soundtracks for Theaters and Television.” Journal of the SMPTE 83, no. 9 (September 1974). Van Kessel, Peter F., et  al. “A Comparison of Alternative High-­ Definition Display Technologies to CRT.” SMPTE Journal 109, no. 8 (August 2000). Van Nooten, S.  I. “Contributions of Dutchmen in the Beginnings of Film Technology.” Journal of the SMPTE 81, no. 2 (February 1972). Victor, Alexander F. “The Portable Projector; its Present Status and Needs.” Transactions of the SMPE 2, no. 6 (April 1918). Waelder, David. “Jimmy Songer and the Development of Video Assist.” 695 Quarterly 6, no. 4 (Fall 2014). Walworth, V., et  al. “Three-Dimensional Projection with Circular Polarizers.” Proceedings of the SPIE 462, Optics in Entertainment II (May 23, 1984). Warner, Carl E. “Around the World in 35mm.” International Projectionist 37, no. 7 (July, 1957). War of Wireless Co’s., Arrest of Abraham White for Contempt of Court Ordered. New-York Tribune (March 22, 1906): 12. Weber, Larry. “David Sarnoff, Display Industry Visionary.” Information Display 34, no. 3 (May/June 2018). What’s New? Photo-era: The American Journal of Photography (William A. French, Boston) 66 (1931): 112. Wheatstone, Charles. “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, Part the First: On Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 128 (June 21, 1838). William P. Stein. Obituary. New York Times (October 7, 1953). With the Trade. Photo-Era: The American Journal of Photography (Thomas H.  McCollin & Co., Publishers, Philadelphia) (October 1916): 154. Wohlrab, Hans-Christoph. “Highlights of the History of Sound Recording on Film in Europe.” SMPTE Journal 85, no. 7 (July 1976). Wohlrab, Hans-Christoph. “A Multiple Magnetic Printing Equipment for CinemaScope.” Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 4 (1957). Yarrow, Andrew L. “Joseph S. Tushinsky, 78, Inventor, Musician and First to Import Sony.” The New York Times (March 23, 1988). Young, Thomas. “The Bakerian Lecture: On the Theory of Light and Colours.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 92, 1802): 12-48. http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/ Zworykin, V., et  al. “Kerr Cell Method of Recording Sound.” Transactions of SMPE 12, no. 35 (September 1928).

Bibliographies

Web Sites Explanatory note on internet site references: When a site is a source its name is placed in parenthesis and preceded by WS. The American Widescreen Museum. “Cinerama Specification Sheet.” http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/cinerama_specs. htm (no date). The American WideScreen Museum. Richard Babish, “Some Factors Contributing to the Deficiencies in the Appearance of Cinemiracle Pictures” (1958). http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/ cinemiraclememo01.htm (2002-2003). BBCTV. “Emil Mechau.” By Helmut Krueger. http://bbctv-ap.co.uk/ mechau2.htm BBCTV. “The Flying (spot) Mechau.” http://bbctv-ap.co.uk/mechau. htm Beyond Intractability. Norman Schultz, “Historical Facts” (June 2003). https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/historical-facts (copyright 2003-2017). Big Site of History. “The Impact of World War One in France, 1918-­ 1928: The Democracies,” by Marge Anderson, June 15, 2008. https://bigsiteofhistory.com/the-impact-of-world-war-one-infrance-1918-1928-the-democracies Bloomberg. bloomberg.com/research/stocks/ Bowery Boogie. “Street Beat: Goerck, Mangin, and Thomas Edison’s Lower East Side Stint.” https://www.boweryboogie.com/2015/02/ street-beat-goerck-mangin-thomas-edisons-lower-east-side-stint/ (February 19, 2015). The Bowery Boys: New  York City History. “The Curious Tale Behind the First Film Ever Made.” http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2013/02/the-mystery-behind-first-film-ever-made.html (February 20, 2013). Boxing Hall of Fame. “This Day September 23, 1952 Rocky Marciano KOs Jersey Joe Walcott.” https://boxinghalloffame.com/ marciano-kos-walcott-september-23-1952/ Bristol Museums, Galleries, Archives. “William Friese-Greene: Photographer, Inventer, Experimenter.” http://museums.bristol.gov. uk/narratives.php?irn=10556 British Cinematographer. Kevin Hilton, “Coming Soon… Innovator/ Joe Dunton” (Interview). https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/ joe-dunton-bsc/. Christie’s. “Choreutoscope Slide.” Auction Lot 106 (Magic Lanterns, Optical Toys and Cameras). https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/ choreutoscope-slide-2048773-details.aspx (May 11, 2001). Cinémathèque Française. “Les Débuts de la Télévision: John Logie Baird et René Barthélémy.” Lecture by Don McLean and Bernard Tichit. June 16, 2017. http://www.cinematheque.fr/video/1085. html The David Sarnoff Library. V.K. Zworykin, with Frederick Olessi, “An Autobiography of Vladimir Zworykin.” From an unpublished manuscript, 1971. http://www.davidsarnoff.org (copyright 2001-2007). The Dawn of TV: The Mechanical Era of British Television. Don McLean, 2013. www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/ phonovision-experiments-1927-28/ E.J.  Wall Collection. ­library.syr.edu/digital/guides_sua/html/ sua_wall_ej.htm Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Chester Moor Hall.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chester-Moor-Hall Eyes of a generation… Television’s Living History. Bobby Ellerbee (copyright 2017). http://eyesofageneration.com. FascinatE Project. “Arnold & Richter Cine Technik GmbH (ARRI).” http://www.fascinate-project.eu/index.php/partners/partner-biographies/arri/ (no date) Film-Tech Cinema Systems. John Cannon, “The Simplex Projector” (copyright 1999-2018). http://www.film-tech.com/main.php.

Bibliographies The First Colour Moving Pictures. A film by The National Science and Media Museum. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XekGVQM33ao Grahame N’s Web Pages. Taillibert, Christel (trans. Martyn Stevens), “Pathé Rural or The Ups & Downs of 17.5mm.” http://pathefilm.uk/ seventeen/175frtrans.htm Grauman’s Chinese. http://graumanschinese.org/. Hall, Brenda J. “Freeman Harrison Owens.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net The History of AT&T (lecture). http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~narayan/ Course/Wireless_Revolution/LL1-%20Lecture%201%20 reading-%20ATT%20History.doc IMDb.com. “The Alchemist in Hollywood” (The American Chemical Society, 1940). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496923/ IMDb.com. “John W. Boyle.” www.imdb.com/name/nm0102270/ IMDb.com. “Oklahoma! (1955).” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048445/ (copyright 1990-2018). IMDb.com. “Robert Gottschalk.” https://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0332050/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm (copyright 1990-2018). In70mm. Douglas Shearer, “The MGM PANAVISION Enlarged-Film System” (August 25, 1955). http://www.in70mm.com/news/2012/ camera_65/index.htm. In70mm. “Norelco Universal 70-35 Projector.” New  York: North American Philips Company (no date). http://in70mm.com/dp70/ library/brochures/pdf/Universal_70_35_Projector.pdf. In70mm. “70mm Blow-Up.” http://www.in70mm.com/library/blow_ up/index.htm (updated February 24, 2018). Kodak. Chronology of [Ciné-Kodak] Motion Picture Films: 1889-1939. https://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/about/chronology_of_film/ default.htm Kodak. Laboratories Directory. kodak.com/US/en/motion/support/ laboratories_directory/index.htm?blitz=off Kottke.org. “High-Def Queen Victoria.” May 30, 2019. https://kottke. org/19/05/high-def-queen-victoria Leibniz Translations.com. “Explanation of Binary Arithmetic.” http:// leibniz-translations.com/binary.htm Lusznat, Hans Albrecht. “Die Arriflex Story.” http://www.lusznat.de/ cms1/index.php/kinomuseum-muenchen/die-arriflex-story/die-arriflex-story-01 (copyright 2010-2018). Lye, Len. http://www.lenlyefoundation.com McKernan, Luke. https://thebioscope.net Mitchell Camera. Richard and Erin Bennett, “The Mitchell FC Fox Grandeur Camera.” www.mitchellcamera.com/foxgrandeurcamera. html (no date). The New  York Times Magazine. nytimes.com/2008/08/24/ magazine/24wwln-medium-t.html 1923-1927 Ford Model T. https://auto.howstuffworks.com/19231927-ford-model-t5.htm Nobelprize.org. “Gabriel Lippmann  – Biographical” (1908). https:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1908/ lippmann-bio.html Nobelprize.org. “J.J.  Thomson  – Biographical” (1906). https://www. nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1906/thomson-bio. html (copyright 2018). Projector Screen.com. “Edison Motion Picture Equipment Chronology” (November 30, 2013). www.projectorscreen.com/Edison-MotionPicture-Equipment-Chronology (copyright 2018). Ranger. museumofmagneticsoundrecording.org/ ManufacturersRangertone.html Rutgers University Libraries. “Edison Projectoscope or Projecting Kinetoscope” (1897). https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/ rutgers-lib/23936/. Rutgers University Libraries. “No. 107, Instructions for Setting Up and Operating the Edison Projecting Kinetoscope.” https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/23954/record/ (copyright 2018).

753 Science Museum Group. “Lumière Cinématographe.” http:// c o l l e c t i o n . s c i e n c e m u s e u m . o rg . u k / o b j e c t s / c o 8 0 9 0 1 4 0 / Lumière -cinematographe-35mm-motion-picture-camera-printerprojector Statista. “Number of IMAX Movie Screens Worldwide from 2012-2020.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/717463/ imax-screens-worldwide/ Terra Media. http://www.terramedia.co.uk/ (copyright 2000-2016). Timeline of Historical Film Colors. Developed and curated by Barbara Flueckiger since 2012. http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/. University of Exeter. “Pioneer of Film Technology Immortalized at Cinema Museum.” University of Exeter News (August 20, 2012). https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/news/college/title_226570_en.html. Wikipedia. “List of 3D Films (2005 onwards).” https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/List_of_3D_films_(2005_onwards)

US Patents Aiken, Edward L. Kinetoscope. US Patent 937,746, filed July 14, 1906, and issued October 26, 1909. Aiken, Edward L.  Kinetoscope. US Patent 967,293, filed April 12, 1905, and issued August 16, 1910. Allen, Clile C. Optical objective. US Patent 696,788, filed February 25, 1901, and issued April 1, 1902. Ames, Adelbert, Jr. Photograph and art of making the same. US Patent 1,595,984, filed March 14, 1921, and issued August 17, 1926. Amet, Edward H.  Apparatus for producing companion auditory and visual records for simultaneous reproduction. US Patent 1,221,407, filed April 21, 1913, and issued April 3, 1917. Amet, Edward H.  Combination apparatus for synchronizing motion and sound reproductions. US Patent 1,065,576, filed September 5, 1911, and issued June 24, 1913. Amet, Edward H. Combined phonographic and motion picture apparatus for producing indexed synchronous sounds. US Patent 1,162,433, filed December 27, 1912, and issued November 30, 1915. Anderton, John. Method by which pictures projected upon screens by magic lanterns are seen in relief. US Patent 542,321, filed July 5, 1893, and issued July 9, 1895. Armat, Thomas. Vitascope. US Patent 580,749, filed November 25, 1896, and issued April 13, 1897. Back, Frank G. Varifocal Lens for Cameras. US Patent 2,454,686, filed July 30, 1946, and issued November 23, 1948. Bailey, William F., et  al. Electronic previewer for simulating image produced by photochemical processing. US Patent 2,976,348, filed May 28, 1957, and issued March 21, 1961. Bain, Alexander. Automatic telegraph. US Patent 5,957, issued December 5, 1848. Ball, Joseph A.  Color cinematography. US Patent 1,844,377, filed August 21, 1929, and issued February 9, 1932. Ball, Joseph A.  Subtractive color photography. US Patent 1,926,255, filed March 3, 1931, and issued September 12, 1933. Ball, Joseph A., and Gerald F.  Rackett. Cinematographic camera. US Patent 2,072,091, filed August 20, 1931, and issued March 2, 1937. Ballance, John. Combined photograph and stereopticon. US Patent 823,022, filed September 11, 1905, and issued June 12, 1906. Ballard, Randall C. Television system. US Patent 2,152,234, filed July 19, 1932, and issued March 28, 1939. Bausch, Edward. Objective. US Patent 660,747, filed May 31, 1900, and issued October 30, 1900. Bayer, Bryce E. Color imaging array. US Patent 3,971,065, filed March 5, 1975, and issued July 20, 1976.

754 Bell, Alexander Graham. Apparatus for signaling and communicating, called Photophone. US Patent 235,199, issued December 7, 1880. Bell, Alexander Graham, et al. Transmitting and recording sounds by radiant energy. US Patent 341,213, filed November 18, 1885, and issued May 4, 1886. Berliner, Emile. Gramophone. US Patent 564,586, filed November 7, 1887, and issued July 28, 1896. Bernier, Robert V. Three-dimensional adaptor for motion-picture projectors. US Patent 2,478,891, filed November 4, 1947, and issued August 16, 1949. Boughton, Olin W., et  al. Focusing lens mounting for cylindrical lenses. US Patent 2,740,328, filed July 24, 1953, and issued April 3, 1956. Bouwers, Albert. Cylindrically reflecting mirror-prism anamorphotic optical system. US Patent 2,780,142, filed April 26, 1955, and issued February 5, 1957. Boyle, Willard S., and George E. Smith. Superconductive logic device. US Patent 3,384,794, filed March 8, 1966, and issued May 21, 1968. Brown, O.B. Optical instrument. US Patent 93,594, issued August 10, 1869. Brewster, Percy D.  Camera for color cinematography. US Patent 1,752,477, filed March 14, 1921, and issued April 1, 1930. Brewster, Percy D.  Color photography. US Patent 1,191,941, filed February 11, 1913, and issued July 25, 1916. Brewster, Percy D. Film for color cinematography. US Patent 1,222,925, filed June 24, 1914, and issued April 17, 1917. Brown, Garrett, and Arnold O. DiGiulio. Support apparatus. US Patent 4,208,028, filed June 28, 1976 and issued June 17, 1980. Bullis, Henry C. Talking picture apparatus. US Patent 1,335,651, filed December 15, 1915, and issued March 30, 1920. Case, Theodore W. Method and apparatus for translating or transmitting sound waves. US Patent 1,718,999, filed October 7, 1922, and issued July 2, 1929. Case, Theodore W.  Microphone. US patent 1,588,168, filed July 18, 1923, and issued June 8, 1926a. Case, Theodore W. Photographic apparatus. US Patent 1,865,055, filed December 14, 1928, and issued June 28, 1932. Case, Theodore W.  Resistance element. US Patent 1,342,842, filed March 15, 1920, and issued June 8, 1920. Case, Theodore W. Slot unit. US Patent 1,605,529, filed June 1, 1925, and issued November 2, 1926b. Case, Theodore W. Sound picture apparatus. US Patent 1,896,682, filed July 24, 1926, and issued February 7, 1933. Case, Theodore W.  Source of light. US Patent 1,975,768, filed November 19, 1927, and issued October 9, 1934. Case, Theodore W.  Variable resistance. US Patent 1,301,227, filed October 9, 1917, and issued April 22, 1919a. Case, Theodore W.  Variable resistance. US Patent 1,309,181, filed October 9, 1917, and issued July 8, 1919b. Casler, Herman. Consecutive view apparatus. US Patent 666,495, filed February 26, 1896, and issued January 22, 1901. Casler, Herman. Kinetographic camera. US Patent 629,063, filed February 26, 1896, and issued July 18, 1899. Casler, Herman. Mutoscope. US Patent 549,309, filed November 21, 1894, and issued November 5, 1895. Casler, Herman. Photographic camera shutter. US Patent 509,841, filed March 1, 1893, and issued November 28, 1893. Cawley, Aloysius J.  Sound recording process and apparatus. US Patent 1,825,441, filed January 8, 1921, and issued September 29, 1931. Chase, Charles A. Stereopticon panorama machine. US Patent 545,423, filed September 24, 1894, and issued August 27, 1895. Chrétien, Henri. Anamorphotic lens system and method of making the same. US Patent 1,962,892, filed September 25, 1929, and issued June 12, 1934.

Bibliographies Comstock, Daniel F. Cinematographic film. US Patent filed February 9, 1916, and issued June 5, 1923. Condon, Chris J.  Film projection lens system for 3-D movies. US Patent 4,235,503, filed May 8, 1978, and issued November 25, 1980. Cowan, Matt, Lenny Lipton, and Jerry Carollo. Combining P and S rays for bright stereoscopic projection. US patent 7,857,455, filed October 18, 2006, and issued December 28, 2010. Crespinel, William T.  Gate for multiple films. US Patent 1,927,887, filed February 24, 1930, and issued September 26, 1933. Cuttriss, Charles, and Jerome Redding. Telephone. US Patent 242,816, filed November 28, 1877, and issued June 14, 1881. de Forest, Lee. Device for amplifying feeble electric currents. US Patent 841,387, filed October 25, 1906, and issued January 15, 1907. de Forest, Lee. Means for recording and reproducing sound. US Patent 1,446,246, filed September 18, 1919, and issued February 20, 1923b. de Forest, Lee. Talking motion picture apparatus. US Patent 1,843,972, filed September 28, 1928, and issued February 9, 1932. De Grave, Charles J., Jr., and Olin W. Boughton. Focusing lens mounting. US Patent 2,729,154, filed December 10, 1954, and issued January 3, 1956. Del Riccio, Lorenzo. Motion picture exhibiting. US Patent 1,646,855, filed January 4, 1927, and issued October 25, 1927. Del Riccio, Lorenzo. Projection apparatus. US Patent 1,879,737, filed December 22, 1928, and issued September 27, 1932. Delano, Erwin. Anamorphosing lens system. US Patent 2,932,236, filed July 5, 1955, and issued April 12, 1960. Dickson, William K.-L. Camera. US Patent 528,584, filed January 13, 1903, and issued May 19, 1903a. Dickson, William K.-L.  Stereoscopic apparatus. US Patent 731,405, filed July 20, 1898, and issued June 16, 1903b. Dufay, Louis. Manufacture of screens or colored surfaces for color photography. US Patent 1,003,720, filed May 23, 1908, and issued September 19, 1911. Du Hauron, Louis D.  Stereoscopic print. US Patent 544,666, filed September 19, 1894, and issued August 20, 1895. Eastman, George. Roll holder indicator. US Patent 407,396, filed July 18, 1885, and issued July 23, 1889. Edison, Thomas A.  Apparatus for exhibiting photographs of moving objects. US Patent 493,426, filed August 24, 1891, and issued March 14, 1893a. Edison, Thomas A. Electric-lamp. US Patent 223,898, filed November 4, 1879, and issued January 27, 1880a. Edison, Thomas A.  Electrical indicator. US Patent 307,031, filed November 15, 1883, and issued October 21, 1884. Edison, Thomas A. Improvement in printing telegraph instruments. US Patent 134,866, issued January 14, 1873. Edison, Thomas A.  Improvement in telephones. US Patent 221,957, filed March 31, 1879, and issued November 25, 1879. Edison, Thomas A. Improvement in telephones or speaking-telegraphs. US Patent 203,018, filed December 13, 1877, and issued April 30, 1878b. Edison, Thomas A.  Kinetographic Camera. US Patent 589,168, filed August 24, 1891, and issued August 31, 1897. Edison, Thomas A.  Phonograph. US Patent 227,679, filed March 29, 1879, and issued May 18, 1880b. Edison, Thomas A. Process of making screens for projection. US Patent 1,266,778, filed June 24, 1912, and issued May 21, 1918. Edison, Thomas A. Stop Device. US Patent 491,993, filed August 24, 1891, and issued February 21, 1893b. Elms, John D. Lens focusing device. US Patent 1,447,173, filed July 23, 1921, and issued March 6, 1923. Elms, John D. Motion picture camera. US Patent 1,783,463, filed April 10, 1928, and issued December 2, 1930.

Bibliographies Fairall, Harry K.  Double emulsion film. US Patent 1,595,295, filed August 29, 1922, and issued August 10, 1926. Fairall, Harry K. Binocular nonstop motion picture camera. US Patent 1,784,515, filed November 21, 1925, and issued December 9, 1930. Farnsworth, Philo T.  Thermionic Oscillograph. US Patent 2,099,864, filed June 14, 1930, and issued November 23, 1937a. Farnsworth, Philo T. Image Dissector. US Patent 2,087,683, filed April 26, 1933, and issued July 20, 1937b. Farnsworth, Philo T.  Television system. US Patent 1,773,980, filed January 7, 1927, and issued August 26, 1930. Fergason, James L.  Light modulator, demodulator and method of communication employing the same. US Patent 4,436,376, filed February 17, 1981, and issued March 13, 1984. Fine, Clarence R.  Perspective sound systems. US Patent 2,714,633, filed October 8, 1953, and issued August 2, 1955. Fischer, Friedrich E.  Process and appliance for projecting television pictures. US Patent 2,391,451, filed June 10, 1941, and issued December 25, 1945. Fleischer, Max. Art of Making Motion Picture Cartoons. US Patent 2,054,441, filed November 2, 1933, and issued September 15, 1936. Fleming, John Ambrose. Instrument for converting alternating electric currents into continuous currents. US Patent 803,684, filed April 19, 1905, and issued November 7, 1905. Fox, William F.  Photographic process. US Patent 1,166,123, filed February 3, 1915, and issued December 28, 1915. Fox, William F. Production of colored pictures. US Patent 1,256,675, filed January 13, 1917, and issued February 19, 1918. Frederick, Charles W. Lens. US Patent 1,627,892, filed June 5, 1922, and issued May 10, 1927. Fritts, Charles E.  Recording and reproduction of pulsations or variations in sounds and other phenomena. US Patent 1,203,190, filed October 22, 1880, and issued October 31, 1916. Gall, Adolph F.  Kinetoscope. US Patent 1,204,424, filed October 12, 1911, and issued November 14, 1916. Gaumont, Léon. Synchronizing device. US Patent 1,053,946, filed February 17, 1909, and issued February 18, 1913. Gerlach, Erwin. Electrodynamic loud speaking apparatus. US Patent 1,557,356, filed January 12, 1924, and issued October 13, 1925. Geshwind, David M., and Anthony H. Handal. Method to convert two dimensional motion pictures for three-dimensional systems. US Patent 4,925,294, filed December 17, 1986, and issued May 15, 1990. Goldmark, Peter C.  Color television. US Patent 2,304,081, filed September 7, 1940, and issued December 8, 1942. Goldsmith, Thomas T., Jr. Television film recording and projection. US Patent 2,373,114, filed June 21, 1941, and issued April 10, 1945. Goodwin, Hannibal. Camera. US Patent 700,140, filed April 22, 1899, and issued May 13, 1902. Goodwin, Hannibal. Photographic pellicle and process of producing same. US Patent 610,861, filed May 2, 1887, and issued September 13, 1898. Goodwin, Hannibal. Phototypography. US Patent 265,669, filed November 30, 1881, and issued October 10, 1882. Gray, R.D.  Series photographic camera. US Patent 540,545, filed March 9, 1895, and issued June 4, 1895. Griffith, David Wark. Means and method for taking moving pictures. US Patent 1,767,668, filed April 12, 1926, and issued June 24, 1930. Griffith, David Wark. Method and apparatus for projecting moving and other pictures with color effects. US Patent 1,334,853, filed May 14, 1919, and issued March 23, 1920. Griffith, David Wark. Method and means for taking moving pictures. US Patent 1,476,885, filed November 17, 1921, and issued December 11, 1923.

755 Hammond, Laurens. Stereoscopic motion picture. US Patent 1,435,520, filed March 2, 1921, and issued November 14, 1922. Hammond, Laurens. Stereoscopic motion picture device. US Patent 1,506,524,filed May 29, 1922 and issued August 26, 1924. Haskin, Byron C. Color photography. US Patent 2,374,014, filed April 28, 1942, and issued April 17, 1945. Heilig, Morton L. Experience theater. US Patent 3,469,837, filed May 9, 1966, and issued September 30, 1969. Heilig, Morton L. Experience theater. US Patent 3,628,329, filed July 8, 1969, and issued December 21, 1971. Heilmeier, George H.  Control of optical properties of materials with liquid crystals. US Patent 3,551,026, filed April 26, 1965, and issued December 29, 1970. Hernandez-Mejia, Arturo. Process and apparatus for coloring color motion picture films. US Patent 1,525,423, describes his machine process to color duplitized print stock, filed December 18, 1922, and issued February 3, 1925. Hernandez-Mejia, Arturo. Process of making color photographic transparencies. US Patent 1,174,144, filed June 21, 1912, and issued March 7, 1916. Heyl, Henry R., and August Brehmer. Improvement in machines for making boxes of paper. US Patent 132,078, issued October 8, 1872. Higham, Daniel. Phonic apparatus. US Patent 1,036,235, filed April 17, 1908, and issued August 20, 1912. Hohenstein, Carl J.  Sound recording apparatus. US Patent 356,877, filed August 10, 1886, and issued February 1, 1887. Hornbeck, Larry J. Linear spatial light modulator and printer. US Patent 4,596,992, filed August 31, 1984, and issued June 24, 1986. Hornbeck, Larry J.  Spatial light modulator and method. US Patent 5,061,049, filed September 13, 1990, and issued October 29, 1991. Howell, Albert S. Motion picture machine. US Patent 1,038,586, filed October 25, 1911, and issued September 17, 1912. Hoxie, C. A. Recording apparatus. US Patent 1,456, 595, filed April 13, 1918, and issued May 29, 1923. Hyatt, John W., Jr., and Isaiah S. Hyatt. Improvement in treating and molding pyroxyline. US Patent 105,338, issued July 12, 1870. Ives, Frederic E. Camera. US Patent 475,084, filed February 12, 1892, and issued May 17, 1892. Ives, Frederic E.  Composite heliochromy. US Patent 432,530, filed February 7, 1890, and issued July 22, 1890. Ives, Frederic E. Motion picture apparatus. US Patent 1,262,964, filed February 18, 1914, and issued April 16, 1918. Ives, Frederic E. Motion picture in colors. US Patent 1,320,760, filed May 27, 1918, and issued November 4, 1919. Ives, Frederic E.  Parallax stereogram and process of making same. US Patent 725,567, filed September 25, 1902, and issued April 14, 1903. Jeffery, Louis. Stereoscope. US Patent 578,337, filed September 14, 1896, and issued March 9, 1897. Jelley, Edwin E., and Paul W.  Vittum. Color photography. US Patent 2,322,027, filed December 26, 1940, and issued June 15, 1943. Jenkins, C. Francis. Cell persistence transmitter. US Patent 1,756,291, filed July 16, 1928, and issued April 29, 1930. Jenkins, C.  Francis. Method of and apparatus for converting light impulses into enlarged graphic representations. US Patent 1,683,137, filed June 2, 1926, and issued September 4, 1928. Jenkins, C. Francis. Phantoscope. US Patent 536,569, filed November 24, 1894, and issued March 26, 1895. Jenkins, C. Francis. Stereoscopic Mutoscope. US Patent 671,111, filed March 7, 1898, and issued April 2, 1901. Jenkins, C.  Francis, and Thomas Armat. Phantoscope. US Patent 586,953, filed August 28, 1895, and issued July 20, 1897. Jones, Loyd A. Apparatus for producing kaleidoscopic designs. US Patent 1,690,584, filed April 21, 1924, and issued November 6, 1928.

756 Jones, Peter R.W.  Rolling loop film-transport mechanism. US Patent 3,494,524, filed April 10, 1967, and issued February 10, 1970. Kaye, Michael C. System and method for dimensionalization processing of images in consideration of a predetermined image projection format. US patent 6,208,348, filed May 27, 1998, and issued March 27, 2001. Kelley, William V.D.  Color photography. US Patent 1,278,161, filed February 7, 1916, and issued September 10, 1918. Kelley, William V.D. Exhibiting device. US Patent 876,907, filed April 30, 1906, and issued January 14, 1908. Kelley, William V.D., and Carroll H. Dunning. Motion picture film. US Patent 1,431,309, filed February 10, 1919, and issued October 10, 1922. Kelley, William V.D., and Dominick Tronolone. Stereoscopic picture. US Patent 1,729,617, filed July 24, 1924, and issued October 1, 1929. Kellum, Orlando E.  Method of producing assembled synchronous kinetograph and phonograph records. US Patent 1,294,672, filed April 28, 1915, and issued February 18, 1919a. Kellum, Orlando E.  Synchronizing apparatus. US Patent 1,292,798, filed June 29, 1914, and issued January 28, 1919b. Kilburn, Tom. Multiplying arrangements for electronic digital computing machines. US Patent 2,856,126, filed April 13, 1954, and issued October 14, 1958. Kilby, Jack S. Miniaturized self-contained circuit modules and method of fabrication. US Patent 3,138,744, filed May 6, 1959, and issued June 23, 1964. Kitsee, Isidor. Synchronizing picture-exhibiting and sound-record machine. US Patent 1,083,498, filed August 5, 1911, and issued January 6, 1914. Knowlton, William R.  Anamorphic cylindrical lens construction. US Patent 2,702,493, filed July 23, 1953, and issued February 22, 1955. Köhler, August, and Johannes Lehmann. Utilizing Lippmann photographs. US Patent 890,863, filed September 3, 1907, and issued June 16, 1908. Land, Edwin H. Polarizing optical system. US Patent 2,099,694, filed March 6, 1934, and issued November 23, 1937. Land, Edwin H.  Light-polarizing Image in full color. US Patent 2,289,714, filed June 7, 1940, and issued July 14, 1942. Latham, Woodville. Projecting Kinetoscope. US Patent 707,934, filed June 1, 1896, and issued August 26, 1902. Laube, Grover, and Sol Halprin. Means for making stereoscopic pictures. US Patent 2,838,975, filed March 19, 1954, and issued June 17, 1958. Le Prince, A. Method of and apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life. US Patent 376,247, filed November 2, 1886, and issued January 10, 1888. Lechner, Bernard J. Display circuit including charging circuit and fast reset circuit. US Patent 3,532,813, filed September 25, 1967, and issued October 6, 1970. Lee, Frederick M., and Edward R. Turner. Kinetographic camera. US Patent 645,477, filed October 14, 1899, and issued March 13, 1900. Lee, Horace W. Lens. US Patent 1,955,591, filed November 11, 1932, and issued April 17, 1934. Leonard, John E. Film moving mechanism for motion picture cameras. US Patent 1,390,247, filed March 30, 1920, and issued September 6, 1921. Leonard, John E. Finder in combination with camera shifting mechanisms for focusing. US Patent 1,297,704, filed April 20, 1917, and issued March 18, 1919. Levinson, N. Sound Record. US Patent 2,039,173, filed June 24, 1935, and issued April 28, 1936b. Levinson, N. Control Track. US Patent 2,367, 294, filed April 12, 1944, and issued January 16, 1945. Lilienfeld, Julius E.  Method and apparatus for controlling electric currents. US Patent 1,745,175, filed October 8, 1926, and issued January 28, 1930. Lincoln, William E. Toy. US Patent 64,117, issued April 23, 1867.

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Index

0-9, and Symbols 16M, 480 16mm, 471, 473, 475–479, 483, 485, 486, 489, 491, 492, 496, 499 100 Center Street, 695 2001: A Space Odyssey, 506, 538 20th Century Fox, 217, 290, 294, 307, 309, 393, 419, 420, 454, 520, 525, 530, 545, 561, 575 21BV condenser microphone, 327 240EE, 478 2TV, 636 35mm, 114, 117, 118, 121, 125, 130, 148, 176, 215, 232, 233, 376, 463–466, 503, 504, 506, 514, 519, 525, 534, 549, 550, 553, 554, 557, 562, 563, 565, 578, 597, 684 39th Street Theatre, 235, 386 3ality, 613, 733 3-D, 522, 525, 530, 534, 545, 582, 593, 594, 596–598, 606, 607, 613, 615, 616, 725–734 3-D conversion, 733 3-D process, 545 3-D projection, 582, 585, 597, 605, 613 3M, 338 44th Street Theater, 483 5245 internegative film, 457 7th Heaven, 303 8mm Type S, 492 A Abbe, Ernst (1840–1905), 38, 207 ABC, 688 Abel, Peter, 68, 698 Académie des Sciences, 56, 95, 96, 100, 231, 235 Academy aperture, 562 Academy Award, 293, 309, 440, 459, 579 Academy Color Encoding System (ACES), 712 Academy frame, 549, 562 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), 12, 140, 224, 329, 339, 340, 439, 443, 459, 504, 505, 515, 553, 562, 565, 576, 712 Academy of Music, 335 Achromat, 37, 213 Achromatic doublet, 37, 208 Achromatic lens, 37, 65, 208 A Clockwork Orange, 340 ACL quiet running camera, 480 A Color Box, 353 Acres, Sidney Birt (1854–1918), 132–133, 169, 171, 464 Actinophone-Apparatus, 262 Active eyewear, 729 Active-matrix circuit, 704 Actograph, 466

Actologue, 224 Adams, Mike, 277 Additive color, 28, 76, 227, 300, 324, 355, 357–360, 364, 365, 367, 371, 373, 375, 380, 382–394, 426, 438, 483, 497, 675, 685, 718, 721 Additive color mixing, 357, 360, 363, 380 Additive color photography, 358, 363, 366 Additive color process, 81 Additive color projection, 360, 367, 371, 372, 385, 388–390, 393, 425, 426 Additive color synthesis, 375, 392, 720, 722, 723, 729 Additive method, 385, 594, 595 Additive process, 386, 403, 447 Additive projection, 363, 366, 424, 426, 594–596 Additive system, 388, 428 Adobe, 710 AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft/German Electricity Company), 266, 267 AEG Magnetophon tape recorder, 337, 338 Aeolian Hall, 425 Aeo light, 274, 275, 277–280, 282, 283, 287, 290, 291, 307, 308, 317 AEO-Photion, 275 Aeroscope, 192, 470 After Effects, 710 Agfa Ansco, 370, 415, 522 Agfachrome, 29 Agfacolor, 363, 370, 371, 402, 445–448, 453, 458, 606 Agfacolor Neu, 445 Agfa-Gevaert, 448, 458 Agfa Products, Inc., 213, 370, 389, 396, 403, 441, 445–450, 456, 458, 477 Aida, 535 Aijala, Eric, 428 Aiken, Joseph E., 262 Akeley Camera Co., 192, 717 Akeley, Carl E. (1864–1926), 191–193 Akeley Gyro tripod, 306 Aktiengellesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation (Aniline Manufacturing Corporation), 445 Alamo, 466 Alberini e Santoni, 508 Alberini, Filoteo, 508, 532, 563 Albert, E., 449 Alberti, Leone Battista, 17 Albumen print paper, 345 Alcohol-oxygen jet, 32 Alcott, John, 200 Alexanderson alternator, 633 Alexanderson, Ernst Frederick Werner (1878–1975), 174, 624, 625, 633, 634, 640, 642, 645, 648, 649, 665, 701, 713, 714 Alhambra Theater, 263

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021 L. Lipton, The Cinema in Flux, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4

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760 Allefex, 224 All-electronic broadcast television service, 659, 664, 681 All-electronic cinema, 695, 697 All-electronic pickup, 658 All-electronic service, 683 All-electronic system, 624, 636, 646, 649, 653, 660, 664, 675, 683 All-electronic television, 619, 620, 629, 642, 643, 645, 648–651, 653–655, 659, 663, 664, 701, 713, 716 Allen B. Du Mont Laboratories, 78, 202, 666, 667, 669, 675, 681 Allen, Clile C., 22, 215 Allen, Ioan, 340 Allied Chemical Corporation, 346 All-Union Motion Picture and Photography Scientific Research Institute, 615 Almendros, Nestor, 200 Altec, 319, 327 Altec Lansing, 329 Altoona Publix theater chain, 323, 324 Alvery, Glenn H., Jr., 506 Alvin, Marks, 615 Amateur-Kinetograph, 463 Ambassador Hotel Theater, 595 Ambassador Theater, 417 AMC, 584, 724 American Bell Telephone Company, 246 American Biograph and Mutoscope, 259 American Cinematheque, 443 American de Forest Wireless Telegraph Company, 269–270 American Film Technologies, Inc., 353 American Fotoplayer, 222, 224 American Graffiti, 200 American Gramophone Company, 237 American Graphophone Company, 229 American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 260, 271 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 111, 120, 124, 141, 144, 146, 148, 172, 174, 176, 185, 366, 413, 465 American Optical Company, 548, 567, 569, 575 American Parlor Kinetoscope Company, 463 American Pathé, 466 American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), 329, 712 American Society of Cinematographers Clubhouse, 127, 145 American Sportagraph, 507 American Talking Machine Company, 238 American Talking Picture Co., Inc., 241 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), 229, 244, 246, 247, 262, 266, 269, 271, 273, 282, 286, 288–290, 294, 295, 297, 299, 300, 304, 308, 311, 313, 315, 323, 335, 631, 634, 638, 640, 642, 643, 645, 651, 681, 683, 714 American Tri-Ergon Corporation, 323, 324 American WideScreen Museum, 543, 559 America the Beautiful, 533 Ames, Adelbert, Jr., 613 Ames Room illusion, 613 Amet, Edward Hill (1860–1948), 188, 238, 303 Amityville 3-D, 615 AMLCD (active-matrix liquid-crystal display) light valve, 719 Ampère, André-Marie, 313 Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Corporation, 336, 338, 339, 680, 685, 687, 688 Ampex quad, 705 Ampex VRX-1000 quadruplex analog magnetic VTR, 688 Amplification, 235, 236, 244, 246, 247, 271, 279, 301, 347, 511, 651 Amplifier, 235–237, 240, 246–248, 262, 263, 270, 274, 277, 281–283, 296, 301, 305, 312, 313, 316, 319, 328, 336, 338–340, 552, 649, 660, 702 Amplifier attachment, 215

Index Amplifier lens, 215 Amplifier tube, 271, 337, 629, 635 Amstutz, 621 Anaglyph (Greek for again-sculpture), 278, 366, 408, 417, 418, 584, 593–597 Anaglyphoscope, 593 Anamatophone Company, 238 Anamorphic camera lens, 558 Anamorphic Cylindrical Lens, 551 Anamorphic lens, 216, 217, 504, 530, 538, 547–549, 551, 556, 558, 562, 564, 571, 575, 577, 578 Anamorphic projection lens, 555 Anamorphic taking lens, 555 Anamorphoser, 548 Anamorphosing Lens System, 551 Anamorphosing System, 555, 573 Anamorphotic lens, 546 Anastigmat, 210, 213 Anderson, Charles, 688 Anderton, John, 547, 602 Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, 615 Angénieux, 216, 479, 480 Anger, Kenneth, 479 Aniline dye, 345, 348, 349, 365 Animato-Graph, 469 Anna and the King, 200 Anorthoscope, 44, 45 Anschütz, Ottomar (1846–1907), 11, 17, 50, 53, 56, 60, 79, 85, 87, 93, 109, 111, 114, 127, 137, 152, 165, 166, 169, 186, 619, 626 Anscochrome, 29, 450, 687 Ansco Color, 370, 420, 421, 445–450, 522, 609 Ansco color duplicating negative film Type 846, 450 Ansco color positive release printing film Type 848, 450 Ansco Color Type 132, 449, 450 Ansco Color Type 732, 449 Ansco Color Type 735, 449 tungsten-balanced camera stock Type 844, 450 Type 843 Ansco Color daylight-balanced negative camera film, 450 Type 845, 450 Ansco Color Compensating traveling matte film, 450 Ansco Photo Products, Inc., 402, 420, 441, 445, 448–450, 456 Anthony & Scovill Company, 445 Antireflection coated lens, 330, 697 Antireflection coating, 211, 218 Antoine Lumière & ses Fils, 161 Aplanat, 210 APO Panatar camera lens, 203, 547, 555, 556, 573 Micro-Panatar, 556 Pantar variable attachment, 217 Super Panatar, 555 Ultra Panatar, 555 Apollo 13, 583 Apollo Theater, 237 Apparent motion, 257, 380, 589–591, 619, 701 Apple, 681, 705, 710 Apple Macintosh computer, 710 ARC 120, 557 Archer, Frederick Scott (1813–1857), 68, 70, 345 Archimedes, 4 Archive du film du CNC, 122 Arch Oboler, 597, 609, 613 Arena, 450 Argand, Aimé (1750–1803), 31 Argand lamp, 22, 23, 31 Argand burner, 32 Argo, 499, 558

Index Aristotle (384–322 BCE), 3, 10 Armat Company, 172 Armat, Thomas J. (1866–1948), 89, 102, 120, 142, 151–160, 164, 168, 171, 172, 175, 185, 321, 346, 578, 631 Armengaud, Jules, 629 Armour Research Foundation, 688 Armstrong, Edwin Howard, 271 Army Pictorial Service, 478 Army Signal Corps, 273, 338, 633 Arnold, August, 199 Arnold, Harold D., 246, 271 Arnold, John, 450, 563 Arnold & Richter Cine Technik GmbH, 191, 201, 204, 479, 567 Arnoldscope, 563 Around the World in 80 Days, 571 Arri, see Arriflex Arri 16BL, 480 Arricam, 201 Arriflex, 191, 199, 201, 203–205, 480, 615, 697 35, 199 535, 201 535B, 201 765, 574 Alexa, 205, 697 35BL, 200, 201 camera, 201, 558, 584 D-20, 205, 696 laser film recorder, 710 16S, 480 scan film scanner, 710 Series II 35mm camera, 200 16ST, 479, 480 Arriflex, 535, 201 Arriflex, 535B, 201 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 597 Arrival of a Train at the Station, 303 Arrowsmith, John, 64 Asahi Pentax still 35mm (Leica format) camera, 204 ASC Motion Imaging Technology Council, 207 A Soldier’s Plaything, 517 Association of National Advertisers, 491 Astor Hotel, 247 Astor Theater, 513, 595 Astro Company, 213 Astro Kino Portrait, 214 Atkinson, 624 Atmos, 234 Audio Akeley, 306 Audion (audio ion), 245–248, 262, 270, 271, 273, 277, 312, 553 Audioscopiks, 597 Audo-Moto-Phone, 238–239 Auguste, Bob, 163, 478 Auricon, 478 Austrian Radio Corporation, 255 Autant-Lara, Claude, 530 Autochrome, 363, 364, 367, 389, 390 Autokine, 192 Autopleograf, 192 Autostereoscopic method, 599 Autostereoscopic moving image inventions, 599 Auto-stereoscopio, 508 Autry, Gene, 417 Auxetophone, 235, 236, 629 Avatar, 731 Avid Technology, 709 A Visit to the Seaside, 379

761 A World Without Friction, 531 Axt, William, 297 Aymar, Gilbert Henry, 381 Ayrton, W.E., 622–624 Azomethine, 446 B Baby-Pathé, 468 Bacall, Lauren, 199 Back, Frank Gerard (1902–1983), 211, 216 Back to Methuselah, 713 Badgley, Gerald J., 466 Baillie, Bruce, 479 Bain, Alexander (1811–1877), 620–622, 631 Baird, John Logie (1888–1946), 152, 384, 625, 631, 636–643, 645, 660, 661, 663, 664, 667, 673, 679, 683, 687, 701, 715 Baird Television Company Ltd., 638, 648, 651, 661–664, 666 Baker, Thomas Thorne, 392 Bakewell, 621 Balagny, Georges (1837–1919), 99, 113 Balboa Amusement Producing Company, 285 Balkan War of 1912, 379 Ballance, John, 253 Ballantyne of Omaha, 188 Ballantyne projector, 188 Ballard, Carroll, 200 Ballard, Randall C. (1902–1987), 667, 675 Ball, Joseph Arthur (1894–1951), 215, 426, 427, 429, 435, 440, 563 Bankslab, 729 Banks, Martin S., 52, 53 Bankston, Douglas, 711 Barbaro, Daniello (1514–1570), 8 Barber, T.W., 527 Barco, 544, 584 Bardeen, John, 702 Barker, Robert (1739–1806), 62, 523 Barnack, Oskar, 166, 563 Barnes, Frederick W., 473, 489 Baron, Auguste Blaise (1855–1938), 231, 234 Barr, Charles, 549 Barrymore, John, 293, 297 Bartholin, Erasmus, 601 Barton, William Henry, 594 BASF, 338 Bass, George, 208 Batchelor, Charles, 115 Bathing Girl, 401 Batman, 506 Baucus, Joseph D., 132 Bauer, Fritz Gabriel, 201 Bausch, Edward (1854–1944), 213 Bausch & Lomb Baltar, 196 Baltar lens, 214, 516 Series B lens, 209 Super Baltar lens, 214 Bausch & Lomb Optical Company (B&L), 38, 120, 202, 203, 209, 213, 214, 400, 516, 548, 549, 551, 555, 575 Bayer, Bryce (1929–2012), 705 Bayer pattern, 459, 704, 705 Bazin, André, 549 BBC, 249, 255, 256, 480, 640, 642, 660, 661, 663–666, 679, 683–685, 692 Beadnell, William J., 183 Beale, Lionel Smith (1828–1906), 47–50, 131 Beam-splitter, 403, 426, 435, 440

762 Beam-splitter rig, 613 Beasts of the Southern Wild, 481 Beater-cam intermittent mechanism, 100, 102, 153, 158, 168, 233, 372, 377, 506 Beater movement, 102, 158, 185 Beater pulldown, 379 Beaulieu, 479, 490, 495 Beauviala, Jean-Pierre, 480 Beck, Martin, 241, 242 Becky Sharpe, 440 Becquerel, Alexandre-Edmund, 361, 362 Bedford, Alda V. (1904–1989), 675, 676 Bee, Watkins, 419 Beggar’s Wedding, 606 Being There, 200 Belin, Edouard, 622, 645, 656 Belin tube, 655 Bella Donna, 280 Bell, Alexander Graham, 151, 194, 229, 230, 246, 251, 252, 259, 274, 288, 300, 311, 312, 631 Bell, Chichester Alexander, 252 Bell, Donald Joseph, 194 Bell & Howell, 29, 164, 191, 194, 213, 261, 277–278, 387, 397, 401, 402, 418, 427, 476–479, 489, 492–493, 607 Cooke Varo Lens, 215 Eyemo, 164, 191, 194, 195, 306 Filmo (Model 70), 164, 191, 194, 195, 476, 489 model 2709 camera, 191, 193–195, 215, 277, 290, 306, 424 model E printer, 413 Bell Laboratories, 244, 246, 247, 254, 255, 260, 271, 282, 283, 286, 290, 291, 294, 297, 299–301, 327, 335, 634, 640, 642, 673 Bell, Monta, 428 Bell System, 247, 297 Bell Telephone Company, 246, 311, 625 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 246, 260, 313, 638, 641, 666, 669, 673, 704 Bel-O-Tone, 318 Ben Bernie’s Orchestra, 281 Ben-Hur, 226, 538, 574 Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering, 353 Benjamin Smith and Associates, 421 Bennett, Charles Harper, 68 Bennetto, John Wallace, 368 Benshi, 225 Benson, Frank A., 634 Berggren, Glen, 575 Berggren, P. John, 217, 518 Bergh, Nicholas, 301, 328 Berglund, Sven, 250, 261 Berkenstein, 19, 36 Berkowitz, Mike, 183 Berliner, Emile (1851–1929), 132, 229, 230, 244, 631 Berlin Laboratory, 288 Berlin Olympic Games, 717 Berlin Polytechnic, 253 Berlin Radio Exhibition, 683 Bernard, Claude, 95 Bernardi, Anton, 388 Bernauer, Ferdinand, 602 Berndt, Eric, 478 Bernhard, Joseph, 421 Bernhardt, Sarah, 232, 235 Bernier, Robert (Major), 388, 597, 607, 609, 615 Bernotar, 602 Berry, Michael, 3 Bertele, Ludwig Jakob (1900–1985), 213

Index Berthiot, 215 Berthon, L.A., 232 Berthon, Rudolphe, 392, 393, 445, 447, 685 Besserer, Eugenie, 298 Beta, 688 Beuther, Johann Conrad, 36 Bichromated gelatin, 364, 622 Bichromatic analysis, 371, 378, 384, 395, 399 Bichromatic camera, 424 Bichromatic cinematography, 399, 401 Bichromatic color, 386, 451, 596 Bichromatic color portrait process, 483 Bichromatic commercial process, 378 Bichromatic duplitized coupler process, 417, 420 Bichromatic films, 383 Bichromatic filter, 387, 399 Bichromatic filtration, 380 Bichromatic process, 387, 395, 399, 401, 411, 414, 419, 440, 443 Bichromatic simplification, 377 Bichromatic system, 371 Bichromatic Technicolor, 420 Biderectional velocity ribbon microphone 44A, 327 Bidwell, Shelford (1848–1909), 621, 629 Bielicke, W.F., 213 Big Five Agreement, 296, 315 Big Five studios, 294, 315 Big wide screen, 324, 424, 520, 521, 525, 534, 545, 550, 551, 559, 565, 569, 701 Bilateral track, 331 Billy the Kid, 518 Bing Crosby Enterprises, 338, 687 Biochrome, 385 Biocolour Ltd., 382, 383, 407, 606 Biograph, 118, 144–148, 168, 171, 174–176, 179, 189, 225, 285, 405 See also American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Biograph camera, 145, 146, 529 Biograph 68mm camera, 189 Biograph Company, see American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Biographe, 102, 158, 159, 233, 506 Biograph group, see American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Biograph printer, 145 Biograph projector, 144, 146, 148, 153 Biograph Studios, see American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Biokam, 373, 463, 464 Biophantic, 79 Biophone, 318 Biophon projector, 237, 238, 263 Bio-pleograf, 192 Biopticon, 142 Bioschemes, 383 Bioscope, 75, 168, 372, 373, 379, 590 Bioscope projector, 91, 372 Bioskope, 165, 166, 168 I, 165, 506 II, 165, 506 projector, 165, 168 Bipack, 363, 368, 378, 396, 397, 399, 401–404, 411, 412, 414, 415, 417–420, 435, 436, 442, 451, 483, 484 Bipolar junction transistor, 702 Biroc, Joseph, 597 Birtac, 463, 464 Bishop, John R., 562 Bishop, Roy, 648 Bittini, Georges, 469 Bitzer, Billy (Johann Gottlob Wilhelm) (1872–1944), 137–148, 189–191, 210, 366, 506, 507, 529

Index Biunial magic lantern, 55, 57, 594 Biunial projector, 79 Biunial, triunial, and quadunial projector, 25 Bjerregard, R., 405 Black Maria, 120, 121, 130, 131, 139–141, 146, 148, 169, 171, 172, 179, 189 Black Narcissus, 440, 443 Blackstone Group, 724 Blackton, James Stuart (1875–1941), 155, 156, 407, 409 Blair Camera Company, 72, 74, 118, 121, 128, 131, 171, 427, 507 Blake, E.W., Jr., 251, 252, 259, 311 Blanc, Mel, 224 Blanquart-Evrad, Louis-Désiré, 345 Blattner, Louis, 255 Blattnerphone, 255 Bligh, Jasmine, 684 Blimp, 199, 202, 204, 328 Bliss Electrical School, 152 Bliss, Louis D., 152 Blood and Sand, 439 Bloomberg, Daniel J., 557 Blumlein, Alan Dower (1903–1942), 661 Blu-ray digitally encoded disk, 307, 706 BNC (blimped newsreel camera) studio camera, 328 Bödecker, 91 Boeger, Henry F., 195 Bogart, Humphrey, 199 Bogopolsky, Jacques, 471 Bol Cinegraph, 471 Bolex, 471, 479, 492, 495 Bonamico, Charles, 391 Boolean algebra, 702 Boolean value, 706 Boole, George, 702 Bosch, 705 Bosch Fernseh, 680 Bosch Magneto Company, 651 Boughton, O.W., 551 Bouly, Léon-Guillaume (1872–1932), 161–163, 165 Bouly projector, 162 Bouton, Charles Marie (1781–1853), 62, 63 Bouwers, Albert, 217, 576 Bowen, James Kline, 109, 215, 381 Boyd, Alan, 403 Boyle, John W., 420 Boyle, Willard S., 704 Bragg, Herbert E., 546, 548 Brainstorm, 506 Brakhage, Stan, 353, 380, 479 Brande, William Thomas, 32 Brando, Marlon, 565 Brattain, Walter, 702 Braun & Co., 376 Braun display tube, 626–630, 632, 653 Braun, Karl Ferdinand (1850–1918), 626, 627, 630, 631 Bray Productions, 398 Bréguet, Antoine, 95 Breil, Joseph Carl, 225, 226 Brenkert, 187 Brenkert theatrical projector, 513 Brewster Color, 396–398 Brewster, David Sir (1781–1868), 4, 21, 52, 56, 217, 547, 555, 589, 590, 592 Brewster, Percy Douglas (1885–1952), 397–400, 426 Brigadoon, 450 Brighton School, 371, 383

763 Bristolphone, 318 Britain Prepared, 384 British Acoustic Films Ltd., 325 British Acoustics, 325 British Crown Glass Company, 38 British Film Institute, 380, 506 British Movietone, 288 Broadcast CCD camera, 705 Broadcast telecine, 683 Broadcast television, 641, 653, 655, 657, 658, 661, 665, 667, 669 Broadcast television service, 643, 683 Broadcast transmitter, 660 Broadway Melody, 432 Brock, Gustav F.O., 347, 352 Broken Blossoms, 348 Bronk, 259 Brooker, Leslie, 484 Broughton, James, 479 Brown, Bessie Kate, 470 Brown, Charles A., 110, 111 Brown, Edmund Congar, 139 Brown, Garrett W., 200 Brown, George Harold (1908–1987), 675 Brown, George W., 230 Brown, Obadiah B., 50 Brown, Theodore (1870–1938), 470 Bryhn, O.S. “Bud”, 608 B. S. Moss Broadway Theater, 335, 523, 535, 642, 715 Bucket brigade, 704 Buckley, Lord Justice, 383, 384 Bugeye lens, 568, 570, 575 Bugs Bunny, 224 Bull, A.J., 366 Bullis, Henry C., 265 Bull, Lucien (1876–1972), 100 Bulworth, 443 Bureau, Fréderic, 231 Burr, George H., 381 Burton, Richard, 554 Busby, Jaime, 403 Busch Optical Manufacturing Company, 215 Bus Stop, 553 Butler, 370 Bwana Devil, 524, 545, 608, 609, 611–613 Byrd Polar Expedition, 305 C Cagliostro, Count Alessandro (1742– 1795), 21, 22 Calotype paper print, 65, 68, 345 Calvin Company, 490, 491 Camcorder, 478, 496, 498, 499, 705 Cameo Theater, 514 Cameragraph, 157 Camera obscura, 3, 6–8, 11, 19, 61, 62, 64, 67, 208, 620 Cameraphone, 237–240 Cameraphone Company, 238 Camera pickup, 654, 679 Camera Service Co., 204 Camera tube, 645, 649–651, 658, 667 CameraVision, 691 Cameron, James, 52, 188, 733 Cameron-Pace, 613, 733 Campani, Giuseppe, 11 Campbell-Swinton, Alan Archibald (1863–1930), 629, 630, 640, 642, 654

764 Campro, 471 Camras, Marvin (1916–1995), 255, 338, 688 Cannock, Frank B., 135, 183 Canon, 218, 490, 495, 584 Cantor, Eddie, 281 Capital, 225 Capital Theater Orchestra, 315 Capstaff (Cappy), John George (1879–1960), 74, 386, 396, 397, 399, 400, 404, 431–432, 467, 473, 474, 483, 489, 531 Captain Video, 685 Carbon arc, 32–34, 39, 91, 186, 261, 329–330, 425, 426, 428, 440, 443, 507, 529, 590, 664 Carbon microphone, 105, 229, 231, 246, 261, 263 Carborundum Company, 423 Carbutt, John, 73, 113, 114, 117 Cardiff, Jack, 440, 577 Card, James, 162 Carey, George R. (1851–?), 622, 624, 631 Carey Lea layer, 484 Carleton, Leroy (1880–1910), 224 Carl Herbert, 237 Carnegie Hall, 335 Carousel, 559 Carpenter, Philip, 24 Carpentier, Jules (1851–1921), 232, 233, 507 Carthay Circle Theatre, 516 Caruso, Enrico, 238 Cascade Movie Palace, 293 Caselli, Abbe, 621 Case Research Laboratory, 244, 248, 255, 262, 265, 272–277, 279–283, 286–288, 290, 300, 306, 308, 312, 316, 545 Case Thalofide cell, 273, 274, 278–280, 283, 287, 290, 317, 633 Case, Theodore Willard (1888–1944), 187, 248, 249, 252, 254, 264, 265, 269–283, 287–291, 296, 307–309, 315–317, 545, 633 Case, Willard Erastus, 272 Casino de Paris, 231 Casler, Herman, 142–145, 147, 152, 153, 168, 172 Cassavetes, John, 481 Cassidy, William F., 598 Castel, Louis-Bernard, 28 Castle, Nick, 698 Catchings, Waddill, 293, 295, 296, 322 Caterpillar Company, 491 Cathode ray pickup tube, 499, 693 Cathode Ray Tube, 495, 561, 626–631, 642, 645, 647, 653, 654, 656, 657, 659, 660, 669, 673, 676, 681, 683, 684, 717, 722 Amusement Device, 675 display, 627, 681, 716 monitor, 639–640, 680 projector, 719 receiver, 680 Catoptric/mirror projection, 3–5, 7 Catoptric projector, 34 Catoptrics, 6, 720 Cavendish Laboratory, 244 Cawley, Aloysius J., 324, 325 Cayuga Museum, 277 CBS telecine, 671 CCD camera, 705 Cell Persistence Transmitter, 635 Celluloid Corporation, 131 Celluloid film, 117, 118, 120, 121, 127, 128, 131, 140, 253, 259, 340, 411, 470, 567, 619, 713 Celluloid Manufacturing Company, 72–74, 117 Cellulose acetate safety film, 455, 457, 467, 468 Cellulose nitrate base film, 117, 122, 445, 503, 550

Index Cellulose triacetate safety film, 458, 486 Center for Advanced Television Studies, 681 Century, 188, 537, 569 Century City, 307 Century of Progress Exposition, 542 Century Precision Optics, 615 Century Projector Corporation, 564 Century Theater, 280 Cerwin-Vega, 339 Cesariano, 7 Chance-Pilkington Optical Glass Works, 38 Chance, Robert, 38 Chance, William, 38 Chandler, Jasper S., 464, 492 Chang, 511 Channel B1, 665 Chaplin, Charlie, 194 Chapman, Michael, 200 Charbonelle, 621 Charge at Feather River, 605 Charge-coupled device (CCD), 704, 710 Charles Cooper & Co., 109 Chase, Charles A., 316, 527, 534 Chase Electrical Cyclorama Company, 527 Chase National Bank, 318 Chauvre-Souris (The Bat), 308 Chemical Society of Philadelphia, 32 Chemical telautograph, 621 Chemist’s Club, 483 Chesterfield Pictures, 414 Chevalier, Charles Louis (1804–1859), 64, 65, 208, 209 Chevalier lens, 209 Chevallier, P.E.L., 654 Chicago World’s Fair, 89, 130, 152, 518, 641 Chicken Little, 725, 733 Chiesa, Pete, 494 Childe, Henry Langdon (1781–1874), 25, 26, 79 Child, J.F., 249 Chinese magic mirror, 3, 622 Chinnock, Charles E. (1845–1915), 171, 172 Chinon DS-300, 496 Choreutoscope, 47–50 Chrétien, Henri Jacques (1879–1956), 217, 525, 530, 546, 548–551, 554 Christie Autowind platter system, 187 Christie Digital, 723 Christie, Inc., 188, 544, 584, 723 Chromatizing, 398, 399, 403, 404 Chromatrope, 26 Chromogenic camera negative, 424 Chromogenic film, 450 Chromometer, 365 Chromoscope, 364, 366, 367 Chromotrope, 28 Chronochrome, 233, 235, 375, 380, 385, 386 Chrono-de-Poche (Pocket-Chrono), 465 Chronomégaphone system, 235, 236 Chronophone Phonoscènes, 236 Chronophone synchronized sound system, 233–235, 238, 242, 297, 341, 386 Chronophotographe, 98–100, 102, 168, 233, 506 Chronophotographic, 143 Chronophotographic camera, 117, 249 Chronophotography, 93, 249, 541 Chronophotophone, 253 Cibachrome, 402

Index Cinecolor, 368, 406, 409–421, 441, 442 Cinecolor Corporation, 391, 421 Cinecolorgraph (Colorgraph), 395, 396, 425 Cinecolor Process, 391 Cinécosmorama, 527, 528 Ciné-Kodak, 473–476 lens, 393 8 Model 20, 489, 490 Model A camera, 474 Model B, 474 Cinema Digital Sound System (CDS), 340 Cinema Products Corporation, 191, 200, 204, 478, 479, 696 Cinema Products CP-16, 204, 478 Cinemark, 724 Cinemark XD, 584 Cinema-Scope, 216 CinemaScope 55, 545, 558, 559, 578 CinemaScope (Scope) format, 62, 128, 202, 203, 217, 255, 309, 333, 335–337, 339–341, 442, 505, 519, 520, 522, 525, 530, 538, 539, 544–559, 561–565, 568–571, 573–579, 585, 612, 697, 721 CinemaScope magnetic stripe format, 339 Cinémathèque Française, 24, 28, 116, 161, 459, 508, 638 Cinematograph, 183, 382 Cinématographe, 33, 60, 88, 99, 102, 133, 141, 142, 155, 158, 161–164, 168, 169, 189, 190, 194, 197, 222, 232, 233, 244, 507 Cinématographe projector, 158 Cinématographe projector-camera-printer, 132 Cinematophone, 238 Cinemeccanica, 569 Cinemiracle, 542, 543 Cinéorama, 62, 164, 508, 527–530 Ciné-Panor, 519 Cinépanorama, 527 Cinépanoramic, 557 Cinephone, 238, 239, 281, 282, 318 Cinephonic, 491 Cinerama, 62, 255, 306, 333, 335, 336, 340, 384, 386, 443, 508, 513, 514, 520, 522–525, 527–539, 541–545, 549, 551, 552, 554, 565, 567–571, 573, 574, 577–579, 608 Cinerama 360, 581 Cinerama Corporation, 532, 543, 544 Cinerama Dome, 539, 544 Cinerama Holiday, 538, 542 Cinerama magnetic sound multichannel format, 339 Cine-Simplex Corporation, 196 Cinesphere, 580 Cinestage Theater process, 571 Cineteca di Bologna, 379, 380, 386 CineVoice, 478 Cinor, 216 Cintel film scanner, 694 Cirkut, 508 Citizen Kane, 353 Clark, Charles G., 612 Clark, Curtis, 712 Clark, D.B., 196 Clark, L.E., 312 Clarke, Harley L., 187, 308, 323, 514–516 Claudet, Antoine Françoise Jean, 75, 76, 591 Clavilux light organ, 28 Close Enough to Touch, 606 C-Man, 339 CMX, 709 Cocteau, Jean, 479 Coen, Ethan, 711 Coen, Joel, 711

765 Cohl, Emile, 232 Cole-Robertson studio, 317 Collateral, 695, 696 Collège de France, 96 Colony Theater, 298 Color anaglyph, 597 Colorart Pictures, 420 Color broadcast service, 675 Color camera, 442, 458, 522, 596, 671, 680 Color cinematography, 81, 371, 382, 387, 397, 402, 423, 429, 442, 445, 450, 453, 469, 483, 563, 596 Color Corporation of America, 421 Color coupler, 395, 403, 415–417, 421, 445, 446, 449, 450, 452–457, 459, 484, 485 Colorcraft, 430 Color development, 347, 348, 445, 446, 449, 455–457 Color film, 346, 361, 384, 389, 414, 417, 419, 445, 448, 451, 452, 457, 459, 469, 478, 483, 484, 489, 522, 567, 706 Color Film Positive type 275, 417 Colorgraph Company of America, 395 Colorgraph Laboratory Incorporated, 396 Colorization, Inc., 353, 733 Color kinescope system, 687 Color Negative 5248, 457 Color organ, 28 Color photography, 355, 356, 359, 361–370, 377, 384, 391, 392, 395, 399, 403, 423, 427, 435, 440, 445, 451, 453, 483, 484, 599, 634 Color Reversible Intermediate Type (CRI), 459 Color screen, 373, 594, 675 Color slide film, 29 Colorsnap, 370 Color Snapshots Limited, 370 Color system, 358, 361, 362, 371, 378, 382, 385, 393, 414, 420, 443, 445, 450, 453, 457, 483, 515, 522, 674, 675, 679, 681 Colortek, 340 Color television, 353, 384, 478, 640, 669, 673–677 Color television set, 673, 677 Color-Television System, 676 Color Television Tube, 676 Color video, 374, 393, 674, 675, 687, 695 Color wheels, 358, 674, 675, 730 Colosseum, 62 Columbia, 203, 247, 294, 299, 308, 318, 404, 454, 557 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 384, 413, 414, 669, 673–679, 681, 688, 692, 709 Columbia Graphophone Manufacturing Company, 659, 660 Columbia Phonograph Company, 151 Columbia Pictures, 454, 548 Columbia Records, 229, 551 Columbia Studios, 613 Combined Motion Picture and Sound Camera, 278, 290 Combined Optical Industries, 38 Commité Consultatif de la Radio (CCIR), 680 Compander, 335 Complementary metal-oxide silicon/semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor, 704 Comptoir Général de Photographie (The General Counter of Photography), 102, 233 Computer controlled nonlinear offline editing system, 709 Computer generated animation, 731 Computer generated images (CGI), 597, 691, 698, 699, 725 Computer generated visual effects, 298, 694, 695, 698, 699, 710 Comstock, Daniel Frost (1883–1970), 423–427, 429, 430 Comstock & Wescott, 423, 426 Condax, Louis, 363 Condenser microphone, 246, 247, 263, 313, 327

766 Condon, Chris (1923–2010), 402, 615, 616 Conduit Electricity Railway, 152 Coneybear, John F., 400 Congres Internationale d’Electricité, 620 Conner, Bruce, 479 Conrac monitor, 727 Conrad, Frank, 656 Conradi, Johann Michael, 31 Conscience, 396 Conscience Film Company, 396 Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 99 Consolidated Film Industries (CFI), 413–418, 421, 459, 578 Constant speed bridge-balance, 300 Constitution Hall, 335 Contact, 727 Continental Commerce Company, 132 Continuous drive sprocketless film scanner, 58 Control Track Stabilizing Method and System, 335, 336 Cook, Willard B., 468 Coolidge, John Calvin, Jr. (President), 278, 311 Coolidge, William C., 423 Cooper Foundation, 538 Cooper, Merian C., 511, 533 Coote, Jack H., 403 Coppola, Carmine, 530 Coppola, Francis Ford, 200, 691 Copying telegraph, 631 Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight, 466, 507 Corning, 38 Cortellaphone, 318 Cosmocolor, 402 Cotton Exchange, 154 Cotton States Exposition, 153, 168, 346 Courbes de Lissajous, 626 Coutant, André, 480 Cowper, 621 Cox, Arthur, 493 C. P. Goerz American Optical Company, 519, 548, 567 Crabtree, John Ickeringill (1891–1979), 118, 366, 402, 411, 412 Craft, Edward B., 247, 282, 283, 314 Craftsman, 413 Crandall, Irving, 247 Crane, G.R., 331 Cranston, James, 648 Crawford, Jack, 169, 353 Crawford, Merritt, 169 Cray X-MP supercomputer, 698 Crespinel, William T. (1890–1987), 384, 410, 418, 419, 421, 432 Criterion Collection, 443 Criterion Theater, 307, 313, 430 Criterioscope, 159 Crocker Research Laboratories, 645 Crofts, William Carr (1846–1894), 79 Cromoscope, 558 Crookes tube, 626 Crookes, William, 626 Crosby, Bing (1903–1977), 338, 687 Cros, Émile-Hortensius-Charles, 250, 352, 364, 365, 367, 371, 385, 430 CRT, see Cathode Ray Tube Crudo, Richard P., 696 Cruz, Vera, 556 CrystalEyes, 727, 729 CrystalEyes eyewear, 729 Crystal Palace, 664 Crystal Palace Exhibition, 68

Index Cullinan, George, 247 Cummings, Irving, 307 Curtis, A.L., 254 Cushman, Blin Sill, 273, 277 Custer of the West, 577 Cuttriss, Charles, 327 Cuvillier, R.H.R., 216 Cyclops 35mm camera, 691 Cylindrical lens, 216, 217, 547, 548, 551, 555, 576 CYM subtractive system, 360 Cynégraphe camera-projector, 233 Cytharea, 428 Czeija, Oskar, 255 Czermak, Johann N., 55, 249, 592 D D-21, 205, 696 Daedaleum, 55–56 d’Alméida, Charles, 594, 595 Daguerre, Jacques Mandé (1787–1851), 62 Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé (1787–1851), 61–65, 67, 81, 208, 209 Daguerreotype, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 76, 93, 94, 111, 208, 209, 345, 361, 503, 590 Dailygraph, 255 DaimlerChrysler AG, 729 Dallmeyer, John Henry (1830–1883), 94, 209, 213, 215 Dallmeyer Kalostat, 214 Dallmeyer, Thomas Rudolf (1859–1906), 215 Dalsa, 696 Dance Craze, 556 Dance of the Rustic, 463 Danger Lights, 518 Daniel, T.C., 152 Darling, Alfred, 191, 373, 375 Darling Lili, 691 D’Arsonval, Jacques-Arsène, 86, 235 Dartnell, Lewis, 124 Das Schönheistsfleckchen (The Beauty Mark), 393, 447 Dauvillier, Alexandre, 645 Davanne, Alphonse, 364 Daviau, Allen, 712 Davide Turcone Frame Collection, 346 David Sarnoff Research Center, 52, 681, 703–704 Davidson, William Norman Lascelles (Captain), 373, 375, 377, 382, 469 da Vinci, Leonardo, 61, 589 Davis, Harry, 134 Davis, H.P., 654 Davis, J. Warren, 324 Davis, Watson, 633 Davy, Humphry Sir (1778–1829), 33, 186, 577 Dawn, Norman, 694 Day off in Moscow, 600 Dayton, Richard, 428 Day, Wilfred E.L., 80, 399 Digital camera, 205, 218, 357, 389, 583, 584, 597, 696, 697, 702, 704, 711 DDP-6, 580 DDP-8, 580 Deakins, Roger, 711 De Bedts, Rider, 164 Debrie, André, 508, 511, 529 Debrie bipack camera, 399 Debrie Parvo, 191 Debrie Sept, 471

Index Decaux, Leopold René, 386 Defender Film Company, 181 de Forest Company, 277, 635 de Forest, Henry, 269 de Forest, Lee (1873–1961), 228, 243–246, 248, 250, 255, 260, 265, 269–282, 288, 289, 291, 295, 300, 308, 309, 312, 317, 318, 553, 620, 629, 713 De Forest Radio, Telephone & Telegraph Company, 273 De Grave, C.J., Jr., 551 de Hymel, Leo, 318 De Jager, Frank, 680 de Lancey, Darragh, 72, 74 Delano, E., 551 Delhi Durbar, 372, 379, 381, 382, 384 Deliverer, 82 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista (1535–1615), 4, 6, 61 Delrama, 547, 576 del Riccio, Lorenzo, 511 Deluxe, 442, 459 Deluxe Laboratories, 552 de Martinville, Édouard-Léon Scott, 249, 250, 257 Demenÿ, Georges (1850–1917), 96, 99, 153, 158, 159, 161, 164, 166, 168, 185, 233, 253, 372, 465, 506, 636 DeMille, Cecil Blount, 158, 179, 318, 351–353, 428 DeMille-Wyckoff Process, 351 Demos, Gary, 698 Denecke, C.L., 34 Denham Studios, 691 de Paiva, Adriano (1847–1907), 622, 624 Depix lens, 615 Depth map, 733 Der Brandstifer (The Incendiary), 263 Deren, Maya, 479 De Rochemont, Louis, 542, 543 de-Sainte Victor, Abel Niépce, 361 de Saint-Victor, Claude Félix Abel Niépce (1805–1870), 68 Descartes, René (1596–1650), 10 Deschanel, Caleb, 200, 459 de Sepi, 12 Desvignes, Peter Hubert (1808–1883), 55, 77, 78, 89, 93 Deutsche Bioscop GmbH, 164, 238 Deutsche Mutoskop und Biograph, 238 Deutsch, Oscar, 716 de Vallemont, M.I.L., 31 Devin Tricolor, 368 DeVry, 476 Dial M for Murder, 613, 616 Diamond Disk, 230 Diamond-Cameo-Cameras, 76 DiBona, Dick, 478 Dickson, William Kennedy Laurie (1860-1935), 17, 50, 60, 73, 78, 88–90, 100, 105–122, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 137–148, 161, 164, 168, 169, 172, 175, 186, 189, 244, 259, 270, 411, 413, 463, 465, 468, 469, 503, 506, 525, 553, 556, 578, 584, 593 Didier, Léon, 352, 430 Dieckmann, Max, 630, 632, 647 Die Nibelungen, 280 Diesel, Rudolf, 83 Dieterle, William, 513 Dietrich, Marlene, 577 Digital broadcasting, 681 Digital Cinema Implementation Partners (DCIP), 724 Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI), 712 Digital Cinema Package (DCP), 583, 584 Digital Effects, 698 Digital encoding, 706

767 Digital Equipment Corporation, 709 Digital image, 451, 703 Digital intermediate (DI) process, 481, 583, 692, 706, 710, 712 Digital light projection, 721 Digital light projector (DLP), 721, 722, 725, 726, 728, 730, 734 Digital micromirror device (DMD) image engine, 7, 384, 584, 719–723, 726, 728, 729 Digital Productions, 698 Digital projection, 506, 578, 581, 584, 598, 695, 707, 725 Digital projector, 570, 582–585, 598, 710, 712, 723–726, 728, 731 Digital recorder, 705 Digital sound, 335–341, 578 Digital stereoscopic projection, 582, 728 Digital still and movie cameras, 218, 696, 697, 705 Digital television, 667, 679, 681, 701, 706, 710 Digital transmission, 681 Digital video, 619, 702, 709 Digital VTR, 705 DiGuilio, Ed (1927–2004), 200, 204, 478, 480, 696 Dillon, Read & Co, 316 Dimension 150, 569, 575 Dimensionalization, 732 Dinosaur, 694 Diode tube, 245, 271, 359, 364, 620, 706 Fleming diode, 271 Dionys von Mihaly, 643 Diorama (through scene), 25, 62–65, 527 Directional Electrostatic Microphone, 327 Directional microphone, 328 Direct projection, 714 Disk embodiment, 11, 132, 230 Disk mastering, 247 Disk recorder, 230, 299, 330, 338 Disk scanning, 626, 641, 642, 679, 713 Disk system, 300, 315, 337, 469, 625 Disney Animation, 725 Disney Studio, 12, 64, 196, 225, 281, 313, 318, 335, 401, 420, 440, 441, 476, 521, 556, 561, 574, 577, 584, 616, 712, 723–725, 728 Disney, Walt, 335, 371, 440, 577, 694 Display device, 50, 127, 239, 632, 634, 653, 664 Display tube, 630, 643, 645, 648, 649, 653, 654, 656, 657, 660, 667, 679 Dissolvent biunial lantern, 25, 26 Dissolving projector, 27 Dixie, 225 DMR (Digital Media Remastering) process, 583 Döbler, Ludwig, 47 Dog movement, 158 Dolby Atmos, 340 Dolby CP 100, 340 Dolby Digital, 580 Dolby Laboratories, 234, 339, 340, 584, 725, 730 Dolby optical multichannel sound, 340 Dolby, Ray Milton (1933–2013), 339, 688 Dolby SR-D, 340 Dolby SVA (Stereo Variable Area) track, 340 Dolland, John (1706–1761), 37, 208 Dolores the Beautiful, 419 Dome theater, 580–583 Dominion Theater, 715 Donders, Franciscus Cornelius, 215, 216 Donisthorpe, Wordsworth, 76, 78, 79, 89, 124, 169 Don Juan, 244, 287, 289, 295, 297, 298, 300, 303, 307, 315 Don Lee Broadcasting System, 666, 669 Donner Corporation, 421 Doom Town, 403

768 Dot-sequential colorplexed system, 675 Dot-sequential technique, 673, 675 Double 8mm, 469, 483, 489–499 Double-printing patent, 321, 323 Double-sided pickup, 654, 661 Double-string light valve, 254 Double-system sound recorder, 204, 236, 254, 260, 261, 265, 279, 282, 306, 321, 330, 479, 685 Douglas Edwards and the News, 688 Douglas, Justice William O., 522 Dove, Heinrich Wilhelm, 593–595, 598 Dove prism, 593 DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) file format, 710, 711 Drake, Whitford, 265 Dramagraph, 224 Dramaphone, 318 Dramatone group, 224 Dream Street, 239, 398 DreamWorks, 725 Dressler, Charles E., 466 Drexel Morgan & Company, 316 Drop-back camera, 370 Drummond light, 26, 33 Drummond, Thomas, 32 Dryer, John F., 611 DTAC system, 580 DTS (Digital Theater System), 340, 580 D-type Mitchell intermittent, 306 DuBois, Charles G., 247 Du Boise-Reymond, Emil, 90, 91 Duboscq, Louis Jules (1817–1886), 34, 50, 75–84, 590 Dubray-Howell design, 550 Duchamp, Marcel, 97, 99 Duddell, 252, 311 Duddell oscillograph, 267, 311 Dudley, Leslie P., 602, 607 Dufaychrome, 403 Dufay-Chromex Ltd., 391, 403 Dufaycolor, Inc., 392 Dufaycolor Ltd., 391 Dufaycolor motion picture process, 364, 384, 385, 390–392, 469, 675, 705 Dufay, Louis, 391 du Hauron, Louis-Arthur Ducos (1837–1920), 76, 77, 96, 173, 360, 363–365, 370, 385, 440, 445, 446, 483, 594, 595 Dulles, John Foster, 280 Du Mont, Allen Balcom (1901–1965), 635, 667, 685 Du Mont, Henry-Désiré, 76, 124, 667, 668, 677, 679, 685, 691 Du Mont Television Network, 667, 685 Dungate, Arthur, 683 Dunkirk, 583 Dunning, Carroll H. (1881–1975), 403, 407, 408, 612 Dunning Color, 402, 403 Dunning Process Company, 408 Dunn, Linwood, 597 Dunphy, Natalie, 438 Dunton, Joe, 556, 691 Duntonvision, 556 Duoscope, 464 Duplex, 466, 469 Duplex variable area or push-pull track, 331, 333, 337 Duplitized print, 366, 396, 399, 408, 417, 418, 427, 428, 515 Duplitized print stock, 395–399, 401–403, 407, 411, 414–418, 426, 427 Duplitized printing, 395, 396, 403, 410, 415, 431, 596 DuPont, 330, 396, 404, 417, 418

Index DuPont DuPac Negative, 414, 418 DuPont Duplicoat, 414 Dupuis, Charles, 598 Durniak, John, 492 Dusker, Alfred, 238 Dussaud, C.F., 232 Dussaud, François (1870–1953), 713 Duvall, Mathais, 95 Duxochrome, 363 DVD (digital versatile disk or digital video disk), 353, 706, 723 Dyer, Frank L., 181 Dye transfer, 363, 370, 395, 400, 403, 404, 427, 430, 437, 443, 496, 562, 575, 576 Dynamic Frame, 506 Dynamic Square, 506 Dynamo, 44 E Eagle Lion, 420 Earhart, Amelia, 305 Earthquake, 339 Easter Parade, 368 Eastman Bi-Pack Negative, 414 Eastman Business Park, 451 Eastman Co., 451 Eastman Color, 370, 371, 393, 404, 417, 420, 421, 438, 439, 442, 443, 450–459, 478, 522, 523, 535, 550, 559, 564, 575, 697 Eastmancolor 5250, 452, 458 Eastman Color film, 360, 537, 697 Eastman Color negative-positive system, 549 Eastman Color Negative Safety Film, Type 5247, 442, 452, 454–456 5247 camera negative, 420 Eastman 5247 35mm negative camera stock, 706 Eastman Color Print Film, Type 5381, 420, 442 Eastman Color print film, Type 5382, 417, 457 Eastman Color Vision print stock, 720 Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, 69, 97, 113, 451, 503 Eastman Duplicating Stock, 412 Eastman Duplitized Positive, 414 Eastman Duplitized Positive Safety Film Type 5509, 420 Eastman Dye Transfer process, 363 Eastman Embossed Kinescope Recording Film, 291, 393 Eastman Fine Grain Release Positive 5302 stock, 403 Eastman, George (1852–1932), 51, 69, 70, 72–74, 79, 82, 95, 99, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121, 122, 128, 131, 181, 194, 330, 363, 365, 393, 396, 399, 404, 411, 414, 416, 417, 420, 424, 427, 438, 442, 443, 445, 450, 451, 457, 466, 467, 470, 473, 474, 483, 485, 486, 503, 562, 576 Eastman Kodak Company, 38, 69, 72, 74, 175, 361, 396, 441, 445, 450, 451, 458, 466, 469, 476, 489, 522, 531, 532, 558, 563, 578, 579, 606, 704 Eastman Kodak Television recording camera, 685 Eastman lenticular embossed film, 687 Eastman Multilayer Stripping Film, 404 Eastman Print stock, 575 Eastman School of Music, 74 Eastman 5375 sound recording film, 333 Eastman Supersensitive Negative, 190 Eastman Transparent Film, 503 Eastman Two-Color Print Safety Film, Type 5380, 415 Eastman Type Two Panchromatic film, 516 Easy Ride, 199 Ebert, Roger, 353, 723 ECE, 204 Echoes of the Sun, 582

Index Echophon, 255 Éclair, 479, 480 Éclair Caméflex, 199, 200 Éclair Camerette, 191, 199 Eclair CM3, 199, 200 Éclair-Coutant, 199 Éclair NPR (noiseless portable reflex), 480 EC-35 studio camera, 692, 693 Edengraph, 183 Eden Musée, 157, 172, 177, 183, 507 Edeson, Arthur, 516 Edge, Selwyn Francis, 383 Ediflex, 709 Edison Bell Ltd., 687 Edison Company, 157, 178, 179, 241 Edison-Dickson aspect ratio, 145, 213, 303, 345, 505, 506, 534, 544, 561, 565, 579 Edison effect, 105, 132, 244, 620 Edison Electric United Manufacturing Company, 131, 132, 137, 159, 171, 172, 180, 181, 183 Edison Film Patent, 173, 174 Edison General Electric Company, 108, 114, 132 Edison Illumination Company, 171 Edison Laboratory, 259 Edison-Lalande large current capacity storage battery, 172 Edison Machine Works, 108 Edison, Mina, 118 Edison Model B Projecting Kinetoscope, 293 Edison Studio, 240 Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, 107 Edison, Thomas Alva (1886–1931), 17, 34, 50, 51, 55, 60, 70, 72–74, 79, 81, 83–85, 87–89, 91, 99, 100, 102, 105–122, 124, 125, 127–135, 137–145, 147, 148, 151–153, 155–157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 169, 171–181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 221, 222, 227–233, 236, 238–245, 247, 249, 250, 253, 255, 257, 259, 260, 269, 270, 278, 297, 302, 303, 311, 318, 346, 349, 350, 372, 373, 438, 463, 465, 467–469, 503, 504, 506, 512, 517, 523, 578, 584, 592, 593, 606, 619, 621, 631, 655, 657, 697 Edison Trust, 321, 463 EditDroid, 695, 709 Editing Machines Corp., 709 Edlund, Richard, 194 Educational Pictures, 596 Edwards, B.J., 352, 395, 464 Edwards, Blake, 691 Edwards, Evan A., 492, 493 EFILM, 712 Egan, Hames, 132 Eggleston, Ralph, 699 Egyptian Theater, 443, 613 E. & H. T. Anthony & Company, 142, 445, 469 Eidoloscope Company, 142 Eidoloscope projector, 140–142, 168, 259, 506 Eidophor projection system, 718 Eidophor projector, 718 Einlock, Kino, 464 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 254, 620, 660 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 29, 680 Eisenstein, Sergei, 196, 506 Ekstrom, A., 637 Ektachrome, 29, 370, 453, 478, 499 Ektachrome 160, 494 Ektachrome Commercial, 478, 486, 687 Ektachrome G film, 494 Ektachrome SM, 495 Ektacolor, 453

769 Ektasound, 494 El Capitain Theater, 225 Electrical distribution, 129, 132 Electrical Engineering Society, 260 Electrical Telescope, 622, 624, 625, 628, 653 Electric and Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI), 620, 645, 647, 658–661, 663, 667, 683, 692 Electric arc, 33, 106, 252, 260 Electric eye, 628 Electric generator, 44, 307 Electric lamp, 106, 145, 172, 238, 244, 468 Electric light, 105, 108, 132, 172 Electric telegraph, 32 Electric television, 649, 658 Electrodiamagnetic recorder, 259 Electrodynamically oscillating mirror light valve, 267 Electrodynamic Loud-Speaking Apparatus, 327 Electrograph, 622 Electrolytic detector, 269–271 Electromagnetic light valve shutter, 267, 317 Electromechanical projection, 624 Electromechanical scanning, 624, 632, 642, 660 Electro-mechanical system, 642, 664, 675 Electromechanical television, 635, 641, 663, 664 Electron, 270 Electronicam, 202, 685, 691 Electronic amplification, 229, 231, 235, 236, 242, 244, 248, 259, 270, 277, 288, 327 Electronic amplifiers, 262, 273 Electronic amplifier tube, 245, 248, 269 Electronic camera, 663, 695, 696, 709, 710 Electronic camera pickup technology, 643 Electronic camera tube, 654 Electronic-cinema, 691 Electronic compression, 332 Electronic display, 13, 384, 605, 679, 727 Electronic editing, 688 Electronic Industries Association, 679 Electronic pickup, 648, 649, 656, 679 Electronic projection, 712, 722, 723 Electronic projector, 712, 722 Electronic scanning, 639, 659, 660, 679 Electronic scanning television system, 646 Electronic system, 624, 645, 664 Electronic television, 626, 629, 643, 654, 675 Electronic television service, 665 Electronic TV broadcast, 666 Electron multiplier, 651 Electron spin, 653 Electro-optical modulator, 728 Electro-Optical Shutter, 729 Electro-printing, 327 Electrostatic loudspeaker, 264 Electrostatic Telephone, 263 Electro-Tachyscope (Electrical-Swift seeing), 17, 50, 56, 88, 89, 91, 109, 111, 114, 127, 152, 186, 626 Electro-Voice 642 Cardiline shotgun microphone, 327 Electrozoom, 216 Eleman, Mischa, 298 Elgeet, 215 Elgeet Golden Navitar, 215 Elgéphone, 235, 236 Elinor, Carli, 225 Ellenshaw, Peter, 694 Elmo, 491 Elms, John D., 508, 514, 532, 557

770 Elster, 631 Embassy, 304 Embossed print safety film, 393 Emil, 165 Emiscope tube, 664 Emitron, 647, 651, 654, 661, 663, 692 Emitron camera, 664, 683 Emitron pickup, 683 Emitron studio lens, 664 Enchanted Forest, 420 England Bisected by Steam Launch, 527 Engl, Josef (Jo) (1893–1942), 263–265, 274, 287, 512 Engstrom, Elmer William (1901–1984), 655, 675 ENG video camera, 697 Enslen, 23 EPCOT Center, 616 Episcope, 23 E-Pix, 709 Epstein, David, 717 Erbograph, 413 Ericson, Rune, 481 Erland, Jonathan, 52 Ermanox camera, 213 Ernostar, 213 E.R.P.I. (Electrical Research Products, Inc.), 244, 257, 265–267, 281, 288–291, 296, 297, 299–301, 304, 308, 311–319, 322, 323, 325, 327–329, 332 Escape from Fort Bravo, 450 Eschinardi, Francesco (1623–1703), 9 Essanay Studios, 174, 238, 285 Euclid, 589 Euler, Leonhart, 208 Eumig, 394, 468, 491 Evans and Sutherland, 727 Evans, Mortimer, 80, 122 Evans, Ralph M. (1906–1974), 357, 450, 451 Everson, George, 645, 650 Everywhere with Prizma, 409 Excela Soundograph Company, 224 Exciter lamp, 256, 282, 308, 315, 319, 321, 415 Experience Theater, 580, 582 Expo ’70, 580 Expo ’90, 582 Exposition Internationale de Paris, 100 Extended range loudspeaker, 332 Extruded nitrocellulose filament, 107 Eyes and Ears of the World, 304 F Faber, Erwin F., 86 Fabritius, Carel (1622–1678), 17 Faces, 481 Facsimile (fax) sending and receiving system, 620–622, 629, 633, 654, 703, 713 Facsimile imaging device, 631 Facsimile radio transmission, 621, 632 Fairall, Harry K., 402, 417, 418, 595, 612 Fairall Process, 595 Fair and Square Ways, 512 Fairbanks, Douglas, 293, 352, 428, 709 Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, 491, 495 Fairchild 8, 491 Fairchild Semiconductor, 704 Fake newsreel, 239 Famous Players Film Company, 181

Index Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, 351, 352 Famulener, 347, 415, 416 F&B/Ceco, 204 Fantascope Lantern, 22, 23, 25, 188, 513 Fantascope-Megascope, 22 Fantascope Stereoscope, 76, 590 Fantasia, 313, 335, 521 Fantasound, 335, 521 Fantom Screen, 509, 512–514 Faraday Disk, 44 Faraday Effect, 632 Faraday, Michael (1860–1960), 32, 43–45, 626, 631 Faraday Wheel, 44 Farmer, E. Howard, 363 Farmer, H. Howard, 366 Farnsworth, Philo Taylor (1906–1971), 620, 639, 642, 643, 645–651, 654, 655, 659–661, 663, 665–667, 669, 674, 675, 679, 701 Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, 649, 651, 667, 669 Farrenc, Leon, 548 Favorit model 35/70mm, 569 Favreau, John, 733 Fay, Hervé, 94 FBO (Film Booking Office of America), 308, 317 Fearless, 563, 568 Fearless Silent Super-Film, 517, 567 Fearless Super Film Magnifilm camera, 563 Fearless Super Pictures, 563 Feature Productions, 515 Fedderson, Don Joy, 551 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 643, 666–669, 674–677, 681, 701 Federal Radio Commission (FRC), 643, 664–666 Feedback circuit, 271 Ferguson, Graeme, 579 Fergason, James Lee (1934–2008), 704, 727 Fernschreiber (teleprinter), 683 Fernseh Aktiengesellschaft, 651, 663, 675, 683, 716 Ferrania, 458, 469 Ferro-electric liquid crystal on silicon (FLCoS), 719 Fessenden, Reginald, 270 Festival of Britain, 607, 616, 717 Feynman, Richard, 95 Field & Co., 602 Field-sequential additive color, 674 Field-sequential additive color disk, 673 Field-sequential color television, 673 Field-sequential electro-mechanical color system, 675 Field-sequential mechanical scanning disk system, 673 Fierstein, Ronald K., 606 Filament lamp, 631 Film Classics, 421 Film perforations, 58, 59, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124, 127, 128, 140, 145, 146, 255, 257, 278, 279, 322, 333, 335, 336, 340, 373, 374, 383, 387, 404, 427, 430, 464–471, 474, 477, 489, 491, 492, 503, 505, 506, 508, 512, 517, 522, 534, 550, 552, 553, 563, 568, 578–580 film perforating, 118 film perforating machine, 231 film perforator, 373 Film recorder, 710 Film scanner, 656, 710 Film scanning, 660 Filmsparlants, 236 Filmtone, 318 Fine, Clarence Robert, 336 Fireproof Film Company, 427

Index Firnatone, 318 First National Pictures, 175, 185, 293, 297, 298, 308, 315, 317, 428 Fischer, Friederich (Fritz) Ernst (1898–1947), 441, 718 Fischer, Rudolf, 446 Fischinger, Oskar, 402 Fitton, William Henry (1780–1862), 52 Five Cornered Agreement, 315, 317, 519 Flaherty, Robert J., 199, 329, 533 Flatbed editing machine, 478 Flat panel light emitting diode display, 384, 389, 656, 680, 681 Flat response low noise condenser microphone, 313 Flechsig, Werner (1908–1988), 675 Fleischer, Max, 419, 420 Fleming, John Ambrose (1849–1945), 244, 245, 270, 271, 620 Fleming valve (diode), 271 Flesh and the Devil, 315 Flesh for Frankenstein, 615 Fletcher, Harvey, 335 Flexichrome, 353 Flipbook/flick-book, 144, 165, 172, 465 flip-card viewer, 373 Flood-light mechanical scanning, 640 Florence Plate, 390 Florimond, Joseph, 350 Flory, John, 491 Flory, Les, 657 Flowers and Trees, 281, 440 Fluorescence, 627, 631 Fly Away Home, 200 Flying-spot, 640, 641, 664, 714, 716 Flying-spot Mechau, 683 Flying-spot scanner, 495, 636, 640, 643, 653, 657, 664, 683, 684, 718 Flying-spot scanning, 637, 640 Fly, James, 666 Flywheel, 306, 312, 321, 323, 324 Foley, E.H., 254 Ford, George, 519 Ford, Henry, 194 Ford, John, 417, 544 Ford, Julia Ellsworth, 403 Fordyce, Charles R. (1902–1994), 457 Foreman, William R., 544 Forrest Gump, 699 FotoKem, 459, 581 Foucault, 34 Fourfold interlace, 668, 679 Fournier, A., 632 Fox-Case Corporation, 196, 265, 278, 281, 282, 287–291, 296, 303, 304, 515 Fox-Case Movietone, 280 Fox-Case Movietone process, 287 Fox-Case optical sound-on-film system, 290, 545 Fox Color, 385, 515, 596 Fox Film Corporation, 253, 285, 290, 291, 308, 309, 322, 323, 336, 337, 339, 340, 450, 513–516, 545, 550–557, 567, 712, 716, 718, 723 Foxfire, 442, 523 Fox-Hearst Corporation, 304 Foxhole, 552, 553, 559 Fox Grandeur Corporation, 514 Fox Grandeur 70mm wide screen system, 187, 286, 309, 337, 513, 514, 554 Fox Hills Studio, 285, 306 Fox Movietone, 192, 308, 545 Fox Movietone Follies of 1929, 516 Fox Movietone News, 303, 304

771 Fox Movietone single-system newsreel camera, 278 Fox Nature Color, 286, 308, 309, 324, 386, 396, 397, 399–401, 483, 514, 515, 558, 562 Fox Nemo Theater, 287 Fox newsreel, 287, 303, 307, 516 Fox, Sam, 222 Fox Studio, 248, 296, 303, 323, 324, 516 Fox Theaters, 323 Fox, William (1879–1955), 134, 173, 175, 187, 196, 202, 227, 243, 244, 264, 265, 281, 283, 285–291, 296, 298, 300, 303, 304, 306–309, 315–318, 321–325, 398–401, 418, 428, 442, 504, 513–516, 522, 525, 545, 546, 548–550, 558, 559, 561, 562, 573, 575, 606, 609, 612, 717 Fox, William Francis, 384, 398, 409 Foy, Bryan, 295 Française d’Appareils de Précision, 189 François Binetruy, 50 Franklin Institute, 77, 78, 230, 271, 366, 474, 648, 718 Frauen Sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women are Better Diplomats), 447 Frély, 234–236 French Academy of Sciences, 250 Fresnel (1788–1827), 207 Friday the 13th Part III, 615 Friend Baker, 608 Friese-Greene Ltd., 382 From Bud to Blossom, 379 Front-screen projection, 348 Fraunhofer, Joseph (1787–1826), 38 Frawley, Patrick, 443 Frayne, John G., 327, 331, 337, 340, 568 Freeman, James P., 151, 581 Freund, Karl, 671 Frezzolini, Jim, 478 Friese-Greene, William (1855–1921), 79–81, 113, 122–125, 137, 161, 166, 373, 382, 383, 407, 592 Fritts, Charles Edgar (1850–1903), 250, 252, 255, 277, 288 Frost, Ellis F., 168, 463, 592 Fujica, 490 Fujicolor, 458 Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., 458, 494 Fuller, L.F., 648 Fulvue, 519, 548 Funk, Christlieb Benedickt, 19 G Gable, Clark, 306 Gabor, Dennis, 627 Gaiety Theatre, 516 Gallant Bess, 420 Galvanometer, 237, 259, 306, 311, 313 Gammon, Frank, 132, 155 Gance, Abel (1889–1981), 509, 529, 579 Gardner, Cliff, 645 Gardner, I.C., 188, 211, 645 Garmes, Lee Dewey (1898–1978), 697 Garside, James W., 635 Gaspar, Béla (1898–1973), 402 Gaspar Color, 402, 456 Gaspar Color Ltd., 402 Gaumont British Film Corporation Ltd., 640 Gaumont Color, 235, 385, 401 Gaumont, Léon-Ernest (1864–1946), 102, 106, 158, 168, 174, 192, 227, 232–237, 242, 243, 297, 300, 337, 341, 351, 381, 385, 386, 405, 412, 465, 477, 648

772 Gaumont-Messter Chronophon-Biophon, 237 Gaumont Palace, 235 Gaumont Studio, 236 Gauss, Johann Carl Friedrich, 207, 210 Gauze screen, 348 G. B. Kalee Ltd., 564, 577 GC, 197 Geeyr, Karl, 238 Geissler gas discharge tube, 127, 261, 626 Geissler, Heinrich (1815–1879), 89, 626, 627 Geitel, 631 Gelatin emulsion, 346, 363, 365, 503, 562 General Aniline and Film Corporation (GAF), 402, 424, 442, 445, 448, 522 General Camera Corp., 204 General Electric Company (GE), 108, 131, 229, 246, 262, 266, 271, 273, 282, 283, 286, 288, 289, 291, 299, 311–313, 315–317, 331, 477, 624, 631, 634, 640, 642, 643, 645, 648, 655, 666, 669, 675, 679, 713, 714 General Film Company, 175, 285 General Instruments, 681 General Precision Laboratory, 692 General Talking Pictures Corporation, 281, 289 General View of the Beach at Atlantic City, 463 Geophysical Laboratory, 38 George Eastman House, 162, 346, 364 George V, King, 372, 379, 382 George VII, King, 381 Gerlach, Erwin, 327 German System, 209 Gernsback, Hugo, 633 Geshwind, David, 731 GE Talaria, 718 Gevaert, 402 Giant Screen Cinema Association (GSCA) Film Expo, 584 Gibbs, 346, 347 Gifford, Walter S., 323 Gilmore Color, 386 Gilmore, William Edward, 131, 137, 139, 140, 144, 157, 172, 176, 181 Giltay, J.W., 249 Ginsberg, Charles Paulson (1920–1992), 688 Girl from Everywhere, 401 Giroux, Alphonse, 65 Glage, Gustav, 627, 630, 632 Glastechnische Laboratorium Schott & Genossen, 38 Gliewe, Max, 185 Gluck, Theo, 440, 577 Glow Discharge Tube, 264, 275, 640 emissive glow-light tube, 274 glow lamp, 261, 291 glow-light, 264 Godowsky, Leopold, Jr. (1900–1983), 384, 441, 442, 445, 483–485 Goebbels, Joseph, 447, 448 Goerz, C.P., 89, 548 Goethe, 358 Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, 72 Golden Rectangle, 506 Goldman Sachs, 289, 293, 295 Goldmark, Peter Carl (1906–1977), 384, 673–675, 677 Goldsmith, Thomas Toliver, Jr. (1910–2009), 675 Goldwyn, 294 Goldwyn, Samuel, 428 Go-motion, 694 Gone with the Wind, 439, 440, 674 Goodwin, Hannibal (1882–1900), 73, 74, 113, 445 Gorky Cine-Studio, 506

Index Gorman, Don, 494 Gorrell, Leslie, 645 Gotham Photochemical, 403 Gottschalk, Robert Edward (1918–1982), 201–204, 550, 555, 573 Gramercy Studio, 518 Gramophone, 229, 234–238, 250, 469, 631 Gramophone Company Ltd., 236, 659 Gramophone disk, 11, 229, 230, 235, 253, 470 Grandeur, Inc., 187, 286, 324, 400, 511–521, 525, 545, 553, 558, 559 Grandeur projector, 187, 217 Grandeur Studio Camera, 573 Grand Opera House, 238 Graphics Group, 695 Graphophone, 229 Graphophonoscope studio, 231 Grassmann, Hermann Günter (1809–1877), 363 Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital camera, 695 Gratioulet, Clément-Maurice, 232 Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, 511, 513, 516, 542 Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, 298 Grauman, Sidney Patrick, 511, 513 Gravesande, Willem Jakob Storm van ‘s (1688–1742), 31 Gray, 166, 458, 505, 558, 621 Gray, Frank, 138, 639, 641 Great Exposition of 1851, 589 Greenbaum, Jules, 238 Green, Charles, 369, 375, 376, 548, 549 Greenhalgh, Jack, 613 Gregory, C.L., 393 Gretener, Edgar, 718 Griendel, Johann Franz (1631–1687), 15 Griffith, David Wark, 28, 146, 148, 158, 179, 188, 189, 194, 210, 239, 348, 352, 353, 366, 381, 398, 529 Griffo-Barnett fight, 141, 303 Grignon, Loren D., 549 Grimoin-Sanson, Raoul (1860–1941), 164, 349, 527, 530 Groove-on-film, 253 Gruber, William B., 590 Grzanna, Gustav, 683 Grzanna Kopiertelegraph, 683 Guillaume Tell, 60 Guinand, Pierre-Louis (1748–1824), 38 Gundelfinger, Alan M., 418, 420, 421 Gundlach Optical Company, 120, 213 Gunn, George, 575, 576 Gunzburg, Milton, 490, 608, 609 Gunzburgs, 545, 608, 609, 611 Gurney, Goldworthy (1793–1875), 32 Gutton, Camille, 651 Guy-Blaché, Alice, 236 H Haines, Robert Thorn, 259 Hale, George C. (1849–1923), 529 Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World, 529 Hale’s Tours railway car ride simulation, 224, 528 Hall, Chester Moore (1703–1771), 37, 208, 243 Hall, Conrad Lafcadio, 199 Hall, Mordaunt, 243, 301, 302, 430 Hallwachs, Wilhelm, 250 Halprin, Sol, 612 Hamamatsu Higher Technical College, 662 Hamburger, Aron, 399 Hammerstein, Oscar, 146 Hammid, Alexander, 579

Index Hammond, John Hayes, Jr., 637 Hammond, Laurens (1895–1973), 273, 582, 592, 596, 598, 726, 729 Handal, Anthony H., 731 Handschiegl, Max (1880–1928), 365, 400, 410, 430 Han-A-Phone, 318 Handschiegl Color Process, 313, 349, 351–353, 363, 410 Handschiegl-Wyckoff Process, 351 Hansell, Clarence (1898–1967), 675 Hansen, Arnold, 352 Hanson, O.B., 675 Hanson, Wesley T., Jr., 451, 453, 454, 456, 457, 492, 504 Happy Days, 516 Hardy, A.C., 312 Hare, Robert, 32 Hargrave, Thomas, 485 Harlan, Viet, 447 Harriscolor, 401 Harris, Gordon, 582 Harris, John P., 134 Harris, Joseph B., Jr., 262, 401 Harris, Joshua, 262, 295, 401 Harrison, G.B., Dr., 392 Harrison, Henry C., 244, 247 Harry Potter, 565 Hartley, Ralph V.L., 642, 683, 713 Hart, Samuel Lavington, 641 Harvey, Michael, 374 Haskin, Byron Conrad, 403 Hasselblad lens, 573 Hawkeye Plant, 473 Hawthorne, 247 Hays Motion Picture Production Code, 519 Hays Office, 519 Hays, Wil, 298 Hazeltine Service Corporation, 669, 676, 679 HDCAM digital video tape recorder, 695 HDTV Grand Alliance, 681 Hearst Corporation, 304 Hearst Newspapers, 641 Hebrew University, 353 Hedwig Film Laboratories, 413 Heilig, Morton L., 580, 582 Heilmeier, George Harry (1936–2014), 719 Heise, William, 117, 121, 130–132, 139, 140 Held, Robert, 263 Helfrich, Wolfgang, 704 Helichromy, 361, 366 Heliochrome plate, 361, 390 Heliocinegraphe, 168 Heliography (sun writing), 62, 359 Helio light, 274 Hell, Rudolph, 647 Hell’s Angels, 511 Hendricks, Gordon, 125, 127, 130, 133, 138, 143, 145 Hennessey, Raymond G., 495 Henry, O., 307 Hepworth, Cecil Craddock, 373, 412 Hepworth, Thomas, 464 Herapathite, 602, 603 Herapath, William Bird, 601, 602 Herbert, Victor, 226 Hernandez-Mejia, Arturo (1870–1920), 395, 396, 398, 425, 426 H. Ernemann AG, 213, 464 Herold, Edward W. (1907–1993), 675 Herschel, John Frederick William Sir, 64, 67, 361 Hertel, Christian Gottlieb (1663–1745), 7

773 Hertz, Heinrich Rudolph (1857–1894), 250, 254, 269, 299, 620 Hess-Ives Corporation, 370 Heyl, Henry Renno, 77, 78, 86, 93, 169 Hiblock system, 370 Hiblock tripack, 370 Higham, Daniel, 240 High brightness cathode ray tube, 717, 718 High definition, 56, 503, 581, 663, 664, 679, 681, 695, 701, 706 High definition analog television, 680 High definition digital broadcast service, 619 High definition digital protocol, 679 High definition digital television, 679, 704, 710 “High definition” field-sequential color television, 674 High Definition Films Limited, 692 High definition television (HDTV), 680, 681, 701, 706, 719 High definition television service, 663 High definition video, 691, 713 High fidelity, 327 High frequency alternator, 633 Highley, Samuel, 31, 32 High vacuum cathode ray tube, 653, 656 High vacuum glass tube, 660 High vacuum tube, 656 Hill-and-dale method, 229, 256 Hill, George, 563 Hilliard, John K., 328, 329, 333 Hill, Levi L., 361 Hillotype, 361 Hindemith, Paul, 226 Hindenburg airship disaster, 305 Hitachi, 671 Hitler’s Hollywood, 447 Hi-Vision television, 680, 681 Hoch, Winton, 597 Hodges, James F., 135 Hofele, Frank, 639 Hoffman-LaRoche, 704 Hogan, John Vincent Lawless, 640, 669 Hohenstein, Carl J., 252 Holbein, Hans, 7 Holben, Jay, 207 Holiday in Spain, 542 Holland Brothers, 131 Holm, Wilton R., 692 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 590 Holweck, Fernand, 645 Home on the Range, 725 Home Projecting Kinetoscope system (the Home P.K.), 176, 467 Homolka, B., 446 Hondo, 613, 616 Honegger, Arthur, 226 Honeymoon, 557 Honeywell, 726, 727 Hoogstraten, Samuel van (1627–1678), 17 Hooke, Robert (1605–1703), 9 Hoover, Herbert, 306 Hope, Karl, 624, 729 Hope, Thomas W., 496 Hopkins, George M., 130 Hopper, Dennis, 199 Hopwood, Henry Vaux (1886–1919), 75, 122, 132, 151 Horizontal Lieutenant, 404 Horizontal scanning, 663 Hornbeck, Larry, 384, 719, 720, 722, 734 Hornblow, Arthur, Jr., 568 Horner, Thomas (1785–1844), 55, 62

774 Horner, William George (1786–1837), 55 Hot-cathode microphone, 263 Hotel Pennsylvania, 604 Hough, James Edward, 172 House of Wax, 612, 613, 615, 616 Houston Fearless Corp., 421 Howard, Ron, 583 Howard, William H., 239 Howell, Albert Summers (1879–1951), 194 Howe, Lyman H. (1856–1923), 224 How the West Was Won, 538, 544 Hoxie, Charles A. (1867–1941), 252, 311–313, 316, 634 Hoyt, K.R., 403 Huang-ti, Emperor, 3 Hughes, 107, 367, 418, 464, 722 Hughes, Howard, 418, 511, 556 Hughes-JVC projector, 722 Hughes Satellite Division, 712 Hughes Tool Company, 669 Hughes, W.C., 49 Huhtamo, Erkki, 9, 17, 62 Hulfish, David S., 26–28, 227 Hulsmeyer, 252 Hummel, Rob, 696 Humonova troupe, 224 Hunt, Brad, 710 Hunt, Brian, 353 Hunter, C. Roy, 387, 413 Hunt Machine Company, 195 Hurter and Driffield curve, 693 Huston, John, 438, 575 Huygens, Christiaan (1629–1695), 3–13, 15, 17, 19, 34, 36, 43, 100, 132, 183, 221, 356, 541, 601, 619 Hyalotype, 68 Hyatt Brothers, 117 Hyatt, Isaiah Smith, 72 Hyatt, John Wesley (1837–1920), 72, 74 Hyder, James, 579–583 Hydrotype/hydrotypie color printmaking process, 352, 365, 430 Hypergonar, 530, 546, 548–550, 554 Hypergonar anamorphic lens, 530, 546 Hypergonar cylindrical anamorphic lens adapter, 217 Hynes, Fred, 568 I Iams, Harley, 657, 669 Ibert, Jacques, 226 Ica Kinamo, 471 Ice Station Zebra, 574 Ichazuka, 215 Iconoscope, 643, 646, 647, 649, 651, 654, 658, 659, 661, 662, 669, 670, 685 Iconoscope camera, 657 Iconoscope pickup tube, 630, 657, 685 Ikegami, 679, 681, 692, 693 Ikonograph, 466 Ilfochrome, 402 Ilford Ltd., 389, 391, 392 Illuminating Engineers Society, 409 I Love Lucy, 671 Il Sacco di Roma (The Sacking of Rome), 508 Image Dissector, 639, 645–651, 654, 663, 669, 674 Image Dissector pickup tube, 645, 647, 649, 679 Image Dissector Technology, 648 Image engine, 721, 728

Index Image Iconoscope, 658, 662, 669 Image Light Amplifier (ILA), 722 Image Orthicon, 658, 669, 685, 692, 704 Image Orthicon pickup tube, 669, 693 Image stabilization, 45, 53, 56–58, 423 Imagineer, 732 IMAX, 62, 145, 506, 544, 578–585, 616, 725, 730, 733 corporation, 581, 583 dsome, 580, 582, 583 HD, 584 Imbibition, 351, 352, 363, 365, 403, 420, 424, 427, 431, 432, 436–438, 441–443, 450, 485, 563, 565, 574, 576, 606 Imbibition printing, 393, 395, 403, 404, 424, 430, 442, 522, 523, 549, 575, 687 Immagine Ritrovata, 380 Ince, Thomas Harper, 158, 179 Inchalik, Mike, 710 Incandescent lamp, 107, 255, 329, 330, 468, 632 Incandescent mosaic system, 624 Independence Day, 699 Independent Broadcasting Authority, 681 Indoaniline, 446 Induction coil, 631 Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), 695, 725, 733 Infinity optical system, 17 Infitec (interference filter technology), 584, 729, 730 In Focus, 731 Infrared night vision television, 639 Injection molding machine, 72 In Old Arizona, 307 Institut Marey, 97 Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), 271, 338, 656, 658, 669, 674, 717 Insull, Samuel, 131 Integral stereoscopic camera, 417, 612 Integral tripack, 363, 370, 393, 402, 416, 417, 424, 440, 442, 445, 446, 449, 451–454, 457, 458, 477, 483, 484, 497, 522, 562 monopack, 417, 421, 426, 440–442, 445, 448, 451, 477, 483 Integrated circuit (IC), 701, 702, 720 Integrator, 336 Intercalation, 667 Interdigitated stereogram, 599 Interdigitation, 667 Interessens-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (Amalgamated Color Company Corp.), 445 Interference, 307 Interlace, 641, 642, 663, 666, 667, 669, 674, 679–681, 684, 685, 693, 695, 696, 715 Interlace scanning, 641, 667 Intermediate-film, 634, 642, 664, 679, 683, 713, 716, 717 Intermittent dual film projector, 53 International Exposition, 530, 546 International Paris Exhibition, 546 International Projector Corporation, 183, 187, 188, 323, 515 International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), 651 Interrupting shutter, 57, 148 Interstate Amusement Company, 303 In-Three, 732 Intolerance, 210, 352 In Tune with Tomorrow, 606, 725 Investiture of the Prince of Wales, 379 Iron camera-projector, 188 Iron oxide coated acetate tape, 338 Isaacs, Walter, 372 ISCO, 217 Isensee, Hermann, 371 Israel, Paul, 89, 105

Index It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, 538, 574 It’s a Wonderful Life, 353 Ivanov, S.P., 600 Ives, Frederic Eugene (1856–1937), 359, 364, 366, 367, 370, 374, 386, 402, 405, 418, 430, 432, 596, 599, 625, 634, 642, 645, 673, 683, 713 Ives, Herbert Eugene (1882–1953), 634, 639, 640, 642, 666, 701 Iwama, Kazuo, 705 J Jackson, Peter, 52, 299, 733 Jacobs, Ken, 479 Jacobsen, Jan, 579 Jaglom, Henry, 353 James A. Sinclair & Co., 192 Jamieson, Andrew, 249 Japanese Broadcasting Corporation, 687 Jannard, Jim, 696 Janssen, Pierre Jules César (1824–1907), 62, 75, 93, 122, 123, 143, 164 Jaubert, G.F., 232 Jaws 3-D, 615 J. B. Colt & Company, 26, 140, 159 Jeapes, W.C., 239 Jefferson, Thomas, 173, 174, 288 Jeffery, Louis, 592 Jeffree, John Henry, 716 Jeffree ultrasound diffraction cell, 716 Jelly, Paul W., 453 Jenkins-Armat Phantoscope-Vitascope 35mm projector, 222 Jenkins, Charles Francis (1867–1934), 47, 102, 142, 151–160, 165, 168, 186, 346, 578, 592, 622, 625, 631–636, 638, 640–642, 645, 665, 679, 701 Jenkins Laboratory, 632, 635 Jenkins Television Corporation, 635 Jensen, Axel G., 624 Jerome, William Travers (Judge), 423–424 Jewett, Frank, 247 Jim the Penman, 278, 595 Joan the Woman, 351, 352 Jobs, Steve, 695 John M. Wall, Inc., 306, 427 Johnson, Paul V., 380, 729 Joly-Normandin Cinematograph, 168 Johnston, William A., 294 Jolson, Al, 298, 316 Joly, Henri, 141, 321 Jones, Ada, 346, 347, 379 Jones, Bernard E., 227 Jones, George W., 259 Jones Lost His Roll, 225 Jones, Loyd A., 479 Jones, R. Clark, 611 Jones, W.C., 327 Jordan, Larry, 479 Jorke, Helmut, 729 Jos-Pe, 363 Joy, Henry William, 77, 379, 384, 470 Joy, John, 265, 287 J. P. Morgan, 316 J. P. Morgan Chase, 724 Julia and Julia, 693 Jumeaux, Benjamin, Dr., 373, 375, 377, 382, 469 Junior, 465 Jurassic Park, 340, 699, 733

775 Jurgens, John, 478 Justice Warrington, 383 Juvenile Jungle, 557 JVC (Victor Company of Japan, Ltd.), 722 K Kaiser, J., 254 Kaleidophone, 318 Kalem, 174 Kalmus, Comstock & Wescott (KC&W), 423, 424, 426–428, 430 Kalmus, Herbert Thomas (1881–1963), 405, 421, 423, 424, 426, 428, 429, 575 Kalmus, Natalie (1882–1965), 439, 577 Kamm, Leo U., 77, 469 Kammatograph, 77, 373, 377, 469 Karolus, August (1893–1972), 266 Karolus light valve, 714 Käsemann, 602 Kästner, Erich, 479 Katachromie, 446 Kathodophone, 263 Kaufman Astoria Studios, 478 Kaye, Michael C., 732 Kayser, Charles Hugo, 117, 130, 138, 155 KDKA, 655 Keaton, Buster, 306 Keighley, David, 584 Keith-Albee-Orpheum (K-A-O), 317 Keith-Orpheum, 241 Keith-Orpheum’s Palace, 241 Keith’s Colonial Theater, 241 Kelkres, 154 Keller, Arthur, 335 Keller-Dorian, Anthon (some sources give Albert), 392, 393, 445, 476, 483 Keller-Dorian process, 393 Kelley Color, 352, 371, 418 Kelley Color Company, 401 Kelley Color Films, Inc., 410 Kelley, William Van Doren (1876–1934), 351–353, 371, 384, 398, 399, 402, 405–407, 409, 410, 414, 418, 419, 424, 432, 483, 596–598, 612, 615 Kell Factor, 714 Kellogg, Edward W. (1883–1960), 238, 242, 264, 312, 477 Kell, Ray, 714 Kellum, Orlando, 239 Kelmar Systems, 319 Kenig, Dave, 120, 203, 573 Kennedy, Clarence, 604 Kennedy, Joseph P., 318 Kennel, Glenn, 710, 711 Kennett, Richard, 68 Kerr cell, 261, 266, 267, 274, 624, 626, 713, 714, 728 Kerr, John, 266 Kerr, Robert, 579 Kesdacolor, 407 Kestler, 12 Keystone, 489 KFWB, 294, 295 Khartoum, 574 Kīlauea, 408 Kilburn, Tom (1921–2001), 703 Kilby, Jack, 702 Kikuchi, Makoto, 705 Kinak Motion Picture Company, 466

776 Kinarri 35, 199 Kinegraphone, 312 Kinekrom, 384 Kinemacolor, 81, 300, 350, 351, 365, 371–394, 398, 399, 401, 405–407, 410, 418, 423–425, 469, 470, 606, 673 Kinemacolor America, 398 Kinemacolor and other Magic, 380 Kinemacolor Company of Allentown, 381 Kinemacolor Company of America (KCA), 381, 384, 398 Kinematograph, 148, 161, 164, 168, 217, 238, 373, 377, 385, 409, 470, 548 Kinematophone, 224 Kinematoscope, 78, 142 Kineograph, 144 Kineopticon, 169 Kinescope, 656, 657, 659, 664, 683–685 Kinescope cathode ray tube, 655, 679, 687, 704 Kinescope film recording, 551, 683–685, 687, 688, 692 Kinescope recorder, 692 Kinesigraph, 78, 89 Kineto, 109–111, 113–115, 117, 121, 124, 125, 140 Kinetograph, 51, 55, 70, 81, 105, 111, 114, 117–125, 128, 130, 131, 134, 140, 145, 146, 157, 164, 171, 189, 195, 239, 470, 503, 655 Kinetograph camera, 114, 117, 118, 120, 127, 130, 145, 151, 161, 172, 384, 657 Kinetograph Department, 178 Kinetographe, 164 Kineton, 188 Kinetophone, 115, 130, 133, 221, 222, 228, 230, 231, 238–242, 244, 297, 467 Kinetophone P.K., 467 Kineto Project, 105–116, 131, 133, 138, 139, 156, 172, 503 Kinetoscope, 17, 34, 50, 55, 72, 89, 91, 105–107, 109, 111, 117, 118, 120, 124, 125, 127, 130, 137–140, 142, 144, 145, 148, 151–153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 164, 168, 169, 171, 172, 177–179, 186, 187, 189, 221, 222, 225, 228, 230, 232, 239, 278, 302, 346, 372, 438, 463, 467, 503, 504, 527, 578, 584, 592, 593, 649, 658 Super Kinetoscope, 157 Kinetoscope Casing, 183 Kinetoscope Company, 132, 152 Kinetoscope Department, 171 Kinetoscope Exhibition Company, 139 Kinetoscope tube, 717 King Kong, 511, 694, 731 Kingslake, Rudolf, 31, 208, 209, 211 King Solomon’s Mines, 441 Kinley, David, 262 Kinopanorama, 538 Kinoptic, 215 Kinora, 144, 373, 465 Kircher, Athanasius (1601/1602–1680), 4–7, 12, 22, 720 Kirsch, Russell A., 703 Kismet, 517, 553 Kisner, 457 Kiss Me Kate, 450, 613, 616 Kitsee, Isidor, 238 Klangfilm Company (Soundfilm Company), 266, 325 Klangfilm Karolus cell, 266 Kleine, George, 174 Kling Photo Supply Corporation, 204 K. M. C. D. Syndicate/Association, 144 Knoll, John, 660, 733 Knowlton, William R., 551 Knudsen, Vern, 328 Köche, Hans, 91

Index Kodachrome, 29, 195, 361, 363, 370, 371, 384, 386, 390, 394, 396, 397, 399, 400, 402, 404, 440–442, 445, 449, 451, 453, 469, 477, 478, 483–487, 489, 531, 532, 604, 674 25, 486 64, 486 200, 486 Commercial Safety Color Film, Type 5268, 486 Duplicating Safety Color Film Type 5265, 485 II, 486, 493, 497 Kodachrome process, 286, 399, 400, 485, 486, 531 K-11, 486 K-12, 486 Kodachrome reversal process, 483 Kodachrome subtractive reversal color film, 483 Kodacolor, 393, 453, 454, 476, 483, 687 Kodacolor Aero Reversal Film, 453 Kodak, 29, 38, 69, 70, 72, 74, 99, 117, 121, 140, 171, 181, 195, 209, 211, 215, 218, 262, 286, 291, 324, 329, 340, 346, 347, 353, 357, 363, 365, 366, 386, 393, 396, 399, 400, 412, 413, 416, 421, 439–443, 445, 448–454, 457, 459, 463, 464, 466–468, 471, 473–476, 479, 483–485, 487, 489, 491–496, 499, 504, 506, 515, 522, 531, 550, 562, 576, 581, 584, 604–607, 685, 687, 705, 706, 710 Anistigmat, 474 Brownie, 473, 492 Cineon, 710, 711 Ciné-Special, 192, 476, 531 D-76, 413, 436 Ektagraphic 35 mm projector, 579 Ektar lens, 476, 479, 537 lightning II film recorder, 711 museum, 79 No. 1 camera, 95, 97, 98, 113, 114, 117, 122, 177, 503 No. 2 camera, 70, 99, 113, 619 orthochromatic negative, 190 panchromatic negative, 365 panchromatic stock, 190 Park, 72, 451, 453, 457, 484, 486, 697 projection lens, 210 Research and Development Laboratory, 74, 118, 399, 411, 473, 487, 492 Vision, 458 Vision3 500T Color Negative 5219, 457 XL camera, 494 Kodalith film, 698 Kodascope 8, 489 Kodascope Library, 475 Kodascope projector, 393, 475, 476 Kodavision, 499 Koenig, Rudolph, 249, 252, 257 Köhler, August, 362 Kollmorgen BX-265, 575 Kollmorgen, F., 211 Kollmorgen lens, 217, 575 Koopman, Elias Bernard, 142–146 Korn, Arthur, 622, 683 Kosmograph, 236 Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, 222 Kotavachrome Professional Prints, 453 Kracauer, Siegfried, 447 Kressman, Paul, 716 Kroitor, Roman, 579 Kromogram, 367 Kromskop, 368, 405, 640 Kromskop additive color slide viewer, 364, 366, 367, 673 Kromskop camera, 366

Index Kromskop Lantern, 367 Kromskop projector, 366 Kromskop three-color system, 366 Kubrick, Stanley (1928–1999), 188, 340, 506 Kuchar, George, 479 Kuchar, Mike, 479 Kudelski, Stefan (1929–2013), 339 Kuhn, Edmond, 249 Kuhn, Loeb & Company, 484 Kuleshov effect, 28 Kunz, Jakob, 262 Kurosawa, Akira, 559 L Laboratoire des Établissements Édouard Belin, 654 La Cava, Gregory, 319 La Cucaracha, 440 Lady Fingers, 518 Laemmle, Carl (1867–1939), 175, 238 La Follette, Senator Robert (Fighting Bob) Marion, Sr., 278 Lake, H.H., 234 Lambda Company, 137–148, 158, 168, 259, 303, 506 Lancaster, 367 Lanchester, F.W., 392 Land, Edwin Herbert (1909–1991), 388, 394, 497, 498, 602–606 Land effect, 388 Land-Wheelwright Laboratories, 602 Lane, George, 597 Langenheim, Ernst William (1809–1874), 68 Langevin, Paul, 653 Lang, Fritz, 280 Langmuir, Irving, 271 Lantern of fear (lanterne de la peur), 6, 7, 9, 15, 19, 22 Lantern wheel of life, 50 Lanthanum crown glass, 38 La Petite, 463, 464 LaPierre, August, 34 Lapiposcope, 168 Large plate camera, 97 L’Arrivee du Train, 596 Larry Ceballos Review, 517 LaserDisc, 706 Lasergraphics Director, 710 L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (The Assignation of the Duke of Guise), 225 Last Frontier Uprising, 414 Last of the Redmen, 414 Laterna Magica, 9 Latham brothers, 137–142, 144, 152, 259, 506, 507 Latham Loop, 141, 142, 154, 259, 321, 466 Latham, Otway, 138, 139 Latham, Woodville (1837–1911), 137–142, 154 Latour, M., 667 Laube, Grover, 196, 612 Laudet, Georges, 234–236 Laurence, W.L., 530, 532 Lauste, Eugène Augustin (1857–1935), 110, 114, 139–142, 153, 168, 186, 248, 253, 259–262, 321, 506, 578 Law, Harold B., 669, 676 Lawrence of Arabia, 574 Leacock, Richard, 479 Leblanc, Maurice (1857–1923), 623, 624, 713 Le Blon, Jacob Christopher, 363 Lechner, Bernard J. (1932–2014), 704, 719 Lee, Ang, 52, 733

777 Lee, Frederick Marshall, 373–377, 435 Lee, Horace William, 213, 214 Lee Opic, 214 Lee, Rowland V., 384, 418 Lefferts, Marshall C., 72, 74 Legend Films, 353 Legend3D, 731 Lehman Bros, 316 Lehmann, Johannes, 362 Leiber, F., 405 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716), 15, 702 Leibold, Peter, 681 Leica camera, 166, 213, 214, 216, 495, 563, 606 Leica frame format, 483 Leicester Square Odeon, 577 Leicina, 495 Leitz, 166, 214, 218 Leitz, Ernst, 166, 563 Leitz Mechau, 683 Leitz Summilux-C prime lens, 218 Lélut, L. (possibly Louis Francisque), 364 Lenard, Philipp E., 627 Leningrad Institute Telemechanics, 662 Lenox Lyceum, 127 Lens-Adjuster, 183 Lenticular additive color, 392, 447, 483 Lenticular camera film, 393 Lenticular process, 392, 393, 445, 685 Lenticular stereoscope, 56, 589, 590, 593 Leo, Jack, 287, 400 Leonard, John E., 195, 196, 324 Leone, Sergio, 557 Le Prince, Adolphe, 83, 84 Le Prince, Louis Aimé Augustin (1842–1890?), 47, 70, 75, 80–84, 99, 113, 123, 124, 137, 165, 166 Lerner, Joseph, 339 LeRoy, Jean Acme (1854–1932), 169 Lespiault, Maurice, 70 Leutmann, Johann George, 36 Leventhal, Jacob Frank (?–1953), 167, 366, 418, 596–598 Levinson, Nathan, 294, 332, 335 Lewis, Jerry (1926–2017), 691 Lewy, E., 395 Leyland, Thomas, 68 LG, 729 L. Gaumont & Cie, 102, 168, 379, 380, 396, 399, 465, 506 Liberty, 414 Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, 516, 581 Lichtman, Al, 545 Liesegang, Franz Paul, 34, 52 Liesegang, R.E., 76, 392 Light engine, 719–721 “Lighthouse” manufacturing technique, 676 Light modulator, 248, 623, 727 Lightograph, 272 Light sensitive photographic emulsion, 252, 345, 446, 503 Lights of New York, 298 Light valve, 245, 254, 255, 259, 261, 275, 308, 313, 314, 317, 319, 330, 331, 333, 337, 622, 624, 632, 633, 716 modulator, 313 projector, 714 recording transducer, 259, 307 Lightworks, 709 Lilienfeld, Julius Edgar, 702 Lilliputian or Praxinoscope Théâtre, 56 Lilliputian Praxinoscope, 58

778 Limbacher, James L., 361, 428, 518 Limelight, 26, 32–34, 39, 47, 527 Limelight projector, 34 Limiter, 332 Lincoln, William E., 55 Lindbergh, Charles, 304, 305 Line screen, 389, 390, 407 Linear Phonogram Carrier, 264 Linear scanning projection receiver, 624 Linnett, John Barnes, 144 Linwood Dunn Theater, 241, 262, 295, 328, 403, 428, 565 Lions Gate, 724 Lioret, Henri, 232 Lioretographe, 232 Lippmann emulsion, 362 Lippmann, Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel (1845–1921), 86, 362, 363, 392 Lippmann process, 362 Lip synchronized sound, 222, 225, 230, 232, 235, 238, 243, 244, 280, 294, 297, 298, 304, 307, 328, 330, 467, 512, 714 lip sync film, 231, 235 lip sync recording, 297, 299 Lipton, 727 Liquid crystal, 364, 681, 704, 719, 728 Liquid crystal display (LCD), 53, 359, 605, 623, 704, 719, 723, 727 Liquid crystal light valve, 722 Liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS), 719, 723, 728 Liquid crystal shutter, 359, 582, 719, 723, 729 Lissajous figures, 626 Lissajous, Jules Antoine, 626 Little Three, 294 Live action flying-spot disk scanner transmitter, 673 Live mechanical scanning, 664 Living Book of Knowledge, 470 Lloyd, Gareth A., 704 Locke, C.W., 527 Loew, Arthur, 573 Loew, Marcus, 134, 322 Loew’s Rochester Theater, 393 Loew’s State Theater, 524, 611 Loew’s Theaters, 322 Loew’s, Inc., 315, 322, 323 Loew’s/MGM, 175, 243, 296, 315, 322, 323 Lombard, Thomas B., 130, 131 Londe, Alfred, 93 London Cinematograph Company, 259 London Coliseum, 715 London Exhibition, 55 London Television Service, 663 London Television Station, 665 Looking for John Smith, 225 Lookup table (LUT), 218, 360, 698 Loucks, 606, 725 Loudspeaker, 234, 235, 246–248, 252, 257, 259, 263, 265, 274, 281, 282, 297, 301, 312, 313, 316, 318, 319, 321, 329, 332, 335–337, 340, 341, 515, 524, 537, 552, 564, 568 Loughlin, Bernard D., 676 Louisiana Story, 199 Lovejoy, Frank W., 72 Løvstrøm, Richard Edgar (1889–1968), 28 Lowell, Percival, 273, 633 Lowes Radio Company, 651 Low velocity scanning, 650, 651 LTO (linear tape open) digitally encoded format, 688, 707 Lubin, Sigmund, 175 Lubitsch, Ernst, 293 Lubszynsky, Hans Gerhard, 661

Index Lucasfilm, 709, 722 Lucas, George, 116, 340, 565, 578, 624, 694, 695, 709, 725 Lucerna artificiosa, 6 Lucite, 38 Lumax, 213 Lumet, Sidney, 695 Lumia, 28, 29 Lumière, Auguste Marie Nicolas (1862–1954), 161 Lumière Brothers, 33, 132, 142, 144, 161, 189, 190, 197, 222, 231–233, 244, 303, 362, 363, 373, 528, 578, 598, 619 Lumière, Carl Antoine (1849–1911), 161, 232 Lumière, Louis Jean (1864–1948), 60, 88, 99, 100, 102, 120, 125, 128, 133, 137, 141, 142, 155, 161–169, 364, 367, 372, 389, 465, 474, 507, 508, 594, 596, 597 Lunch Hour at the Lumière Factory, 303 Lund, Otto, 97, 99 Lust for Life, 450 Lye, Len (Leonard Charles Huia Lye, 1901–1980), 353, 402 Lyles, A.C., 558 M M2, 494 M20 “lipstick” mike, 327 M30 cardioid mike, 327 MacAdam, David Lewis, 451, 607 MacGillivray, Greg, 581 Mackenstein, H., 82 MacKenzie, Donald, 314 MacKenzie, Douglas, 247, 254 Mack Sennett Studios, 401 Madam Butterfly, 428 Maddox, Richard Leach (1816–1902), 68, 69 Madison Square Garden, 380, 381 Magi, 698 Magic Bioscope, 470 Magic Introduction Company, 142, 146 Magic Journeys, 616 Magic lantern (lanterne magique), 3–13, 15–29, 31–39, 46–51, 55–58, 62, 68, 70, 75, 76, 78–80, 85, 86, 100, 128, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 140, 141, 157–161, 163, 165, 169, 179–181, 183, 186, 209, 210, 215, 221, 222, 238, 253, 260, 293, 345, 349, 353, 356, 357, 367, 371, 373, 463, 464, 469, 513, 527, 534, 541, 578, 579, 589, 590, 594, 595, 598, 601, 602, 619, 633, 701, 713 lantern projector, 151 Magic Lantern Zoëtrope, 85 Magic Mirror, 4, 622 Magi high frame rate stereoscopic cinema technology, 188 Magi system, 729 Magna, 559, 568 Magna Pictures Corporation, 567 Magnachrome, 387, 512 Magnacolor, 414–416, 418 Magnafilm, 511–513, 517 Magnascope, 188, 238, 313, 509, 511–514, 562 Magnetic audio recorder, 687 Magnetic audio recording, 685 Magnetic film, 338, 339, 479, 537, 552, 580 Magnetic focus coils, 648 Magnetic recorder, 328, 479 Magnetic recording, 255, 256, 337–340, 537, 549, 551, 631, 687 Magnetic sound, 255, 332, 333, 335, 336, 339, 340, 477, 523, 537, 552, 568, 578 on-film, 336, 552 system, 568 track, 522, 550, 552

Index Magnetic tape, 338, 479, 499, 537, 552, 687, 704, 707 Magnetic tape recorder, 255, 337, 495 Magnetic tape recording, 337 Magnetic track, 339, 559, 616 Magnetic video recording, 687 Magneto-optical effect, 631 Magnifilm, 517 Magniscope projector, 238 Maguire & Baucus Ltd., 156, 177, 372, 373 Maguire, Franz Z., 132 Mahler, Joseph, 605 Maihak, 337 Majestic, 414 Majestic Theatre, 238 Making of the Panama Canal, 379 Malick, Terrence, 29 Malkames, D. Karl, 145, 146 Maltby, Frank D., 171, 172 Mamoulian, Ruben, 440 Man from Rainbow Valley, 414 Manners, John Hartley, 640 Mannes, Leopold Damrosch (1899–1964), 384, 445, 483–485 Mannix, E. (Eddie) J., 573 Mann, Michael, 138, 695, 696 Mannoni, Laurent, 17, 22, 81, 151 Mann, Riborg, 138 Manometric flame, 249, 252, 260, 272, 274, 277 Marage, Dr., 249 Marconi-EMI Telegraph Co. Ltd., 636, 642, 661, 663–666, 679 Marconi, Guglielmo, 260, 269, 270, 276, 311 Marconi-Stille recorder, 255 Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, 245, 255, 271, 311, 653, 660, 661 Marcy, Lorenzo James (1819–1896), 34 Marey, Étienne-Jules (1830–1904), 55, 60, 75, 79, 80, 82, 84–86, 93, 95, 113, 114, 117, 143, 145, 158, 162, 164, 165, 173, 231, 257, 541, 699 Mark 1V, 688 Markgraf, William, 181 Markle, Wilson, 353 Marks, Alvin M., 597, 615 Marks, Mortimer, 597, 615 Marks Polarized Corporation, 615 Married in Hollywood, 418 Marshall, Albert E., 448 Marshall’s Photo Oil Colors, 346 Martin and Lewis, 613 Martinelli, Giovanni, 298 Martinez, Michele P.L., 404 Marvin and Casler Company, 142 Marvin, Henry (Harry) N., 142–145, 172 Mascot Pictures, 414 Maskelyne, 168 Mason, Joseph, 405 Massolle, Joseph (1889–1957), 263, 308, 512 Mastercraft Corporation, 476 Matsushita, 671 Matte technique, 331 Matthews, Glenn E., 473 Mauer, John, 478 Max Fleischer Studio, 280, 401, 440 Maxwell, 28, 76, 247, 357–359, 361, 363, 365–367, 371, 384, 388, 620, 626 Maxwellian analysis, 705 Maxwell, James Clerk, 45, 247, 357 Maxwell, Joseph P., 246

779 Mayer, Al, Jr., 204 Mayer, Albert, Sr., 202, 204, 696 Mayer, Emil, 267 Mayer, Louis B., 204, 323, 543 Mayer, Max, 405, 406 Maysles, Albert, 479 Maysles, David, 479 Mazda, 329 Mazda Tests, 329, 712 McAllister, Ray, 80 McCann-Erickson advertising agency, 535 McCarthy, J.J., 512 McCormick, A.L., 255, 419 McCullough, Russell H., 543 McDonough, James W., 405 McDonough, Michael, 207 McGee, James Dwyer (1903–1987), 660, 661 McKay, Herbert C., 227 McKernan, Luke, 372, 380 McLaren, Norman, 78 McLean, Donald H., 637, 638 Mechanical and electronic television, 642 Mechanical disk scanning, 642, 713 Mechanical film scanner, 683–684 Mechanical scanning, 384, 624–626, 629, 631, 634, 640, 642, 643, 648, 657, 661, 666, 679, 684, 713, 714 device, 634 pickup, 645 system, 626, 640, 641, 663 television, 634, 636, 651, 714 television system, 152 Mechanical shutter, 582, 598, 624, 726, 729 Mechanical slide, 24 Mechanical sound amplifier, 240 Mechanical television, 624, 631, 640–642, 645, 649, 655, 663, 714, 716 Mechau, Emil (1882–1945), 166, 186 Mechau Model 3 Projector, 166, 167 Mechau projector, 53, 166–168, 683, 685 Mees, Charles Edward Kenneth (usually C. E.) (1882–1960), 74, 365, 410, 473, 474, 483, 484, 604 Megalographic/thaumaturgic lantern, 9 Megascope (an opaque or postcard) projector, 19, 22 Meister, Otto, 91 Meithe, Adolph, 215 Mekas, Jonas, 479 Méliès, Georges (1861–1938), 28, 60, 157, 174, 179, 181, 188, 232, 239, 349, 353 Mellotone, 318 Memorex, 709 Ménard, Louis-Nicholas (1822–1901), 72 Mendoza, David, 297 Menjou, Adolphe, 322 Menzies, William Cameron, 439 Merritt, Russell, 134 Merté, Willy, 210 Méry, Jean, 350 Mesguich, Félix, 231, 232 Messter, Oskar Eduard (1886–1943), 166, 186, 236–238, 242, 243, 263, 300, 463 Metalstorm, 615 Methyl methacrylate, 38 Metrocolor, 442, 450 Metro Film Company, 428 Metro Pictures, 322 Metropole Cinema, 715

780 Metropolitan Vickers Ltd., 663 Metroscopix, 597 Metrotone News, 304 Meyer, Hugo, 213 MGM, 105, 199, 202, 203, 214, 226, 289, 293, 294, 297, 298, 304, 308, 315, 317, 322–324, 328, 329, 331, 332, 336, 337, 347, 368, 404, 419, 420, 428, 430, 432, 440, 441, 450, 511–516, 518, 522, 529, 538, 544, 545, 552–554, 556, 561, 563, 564, 573, 574, 597, 709, 723 MGM Camera 65, 202, 522, 538, 545, 573, 574 Michigan Electric Company, 372 Microdispersion method, 392 Microelecticalmechanical systems (MEMS), 719 Micromirror, 720, 721, 729 Micromosaic color motion picture process, 364, 371, 385, 388, 389, 476 Micromosaic screen, 364 Microphone, 229, 231, 232, 235, 246–248, 254, 259, 263, 265, 266, 274, 281, 282, 301, 311, 313, 317, 318, 327, 328, 335, 337, 477, 664 Microscope, 36 Microspectral system, 392 Midas, 468 Middleton, H., 623 Mike boom, 328 Miller, A.J., 416 Miller, Charles, 196 Miller, James A., 256 Milton Bradley & Co., 55 Mingalone, Albert, 306 Minolta, 490 Minor, Charles C., 213 Miracle Mirror Screen, 552, 554 Miramax, 723 Mirograph, 465 Mirographe, 465 Mirror, 216, 217, 306, 720–722 Mirror coated prism, 217 Mirror drum, 628, 692 Mirror galvanometer, 236, 244, 251, 252, 259, 261, 274, 311, 333, 683 Mirror stereoscope, 589 Mir Theater, 538 Miss Sadie Thompson, 613, 616 MIT, 681 Mitchell 65mm FC/BFC, 197 Mitchell BNC studio camera, 191, 196, 202–204 Mitchell camera, 196, 204, 306, 515, 558, 609, 685, 696 Mitchell Camera Corporation, 196, 197, 324, 514, 515, 563, 696, 709 Mitchell CNC camera, 543 Mitchell FC camera, 196, 515, 517, 518, 567, 573 Mitchell, George Alfred, 191, 195, 202–204, 324, 435, 478, 479, 514, 515, 563, 567, 575, 685, 691 Mitchell NC camera, 203, 608 Mitchell rackover, 191, 195–197, 324 Mitchell Reflex camera, 692 Mitchell S35R with reflex video assist, 197, 202, 685 Mitchell Standard camera, 195, 196 Mitchell System 35, 202, 685, 691 Mitchell, William D., 194–197, 323, 324, 418, 514, 515 Miyagishima, Takuo (Tak) (1928–2011), 203, 555, 573 MkII, 202 Mobisson, Ferdinand, 83 Moby Dick, 438 Mocha tools, 732 Model 200A, 338 Model A301, 339

Index Model II, 199 Model L, 191 Moëssard, 527 Moingo, Abbé, 56 Moisson, Charles (1864–1943), 163, 164 Molteni, Alfred, 163, 594 Money from Home, 613 Monogram Pictures, 414, 420, 450 Montage, 24, 28, 243, 709 Monte Carlo Holiday (also known as Montecarol), 577 Monteleoni, Giulio, 557 Montpelier Electric Theater, 383 Montreux Symposium, 705 Moore, Alex T., 181 Moore, Richard, 199 Mordanting process, 430 Morely, G.W., 38 Morrissey, Paul, 615 Mosaic system, 363, 364, 389, 543, 622–624, 629, 630, 658, 659, 661, 705 Moscow Theater, 600 Mosque Theater, 518 Motiograph projectors, 157, 187, 280 Motion or performance capture, 699 Motion picture camera, 10, 117, 120–124, 128, 132, 173, 176, 199, 211, 213, 215, 218, 261, 324, 368, 395, 411, 441, 466, 470, 490, 514, 522, 567, 622, 683, 685 Motion Picture Company, 238 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), 124, 148, 155, 168, 174, 175, 235, 285, 380, 381 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 227, 267, 298, 519 Motion picture projector, 152, 175, 230, 238, 321, 466, 579, 619 Motograph, 464 Moto-Photoscope, 168 Moto-Pictoroscope, 168 Motorgraph, 463 Motor Rhythm, 606 Motorola, 727 Movee Co., 466 Movette, 466 Movette Inc., 466 Moviecam F. G., 201 Moviedeck projector, 496 Movie-Phone, 318 Movie-Sound-8 projector, 491 Movietone, 227, 235, 243, 244, 248, 249, 253, 260, 265, 274, 280, 281, 286–290, 297, 299, 300, 303–309, 311, 315–317, 319, 322–324, 515, 553 Movietone City, 285, 306, 307 Movietone News, 304, 306 Movietone newsreel, 303, 304, 306 Moving coil microphone, 313, 327, 664 Moving panorama, 62 Moving Talking Picture Apparatus, 337 Moviola, 709 Moy and Bastie, 191, 379 Müller, Franz, 627 Mullin, John (Jack) T. (Major) (1913–1999), 338, 687 Multichannel digitally encoded optical track, 333 Multichannel directional sound, 335 Multichannel magnetic sound, 333, 522, 525 Multichannel optical sound process, 552 Multichannel recording, 537 Multichannel sound, 313, 330, 335, 336, 340, 578 Multichannel technique, 335, 337, 341, 521

Index Multicolor, 401, 417–419 Multicolor Film Corporation, 418 Multi-pack concept, 370 Multipactor, 651 Multiphone, 106 Multiple Sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding (MUSE) compression system, 680, 681 Multiplexed Analog Components (MAC), 681 Multiple lens condenser, 35 Multiscreen, 579 Multi-track sound, 515 Murch, Walter, 28, 116 Murdock, John J., 241, 242, 381 Murnau, F.W., 285, 303 Murray, Albert, 649 Murray, John, 43–45 Musée Grévin, 59 Music Corporation of America, 706 Musschenbroek, 7, 31 Musser, Charles, 114, 130, 135, 137–139 Mussolini, Benito, 304 Mutagraph, 168 Muth, Jack, 548 Mutiny on the Bounty, 574 Mutograph, 145, 148, 506 Mutopticon, 145 Mutoscope, 78, 137–148, 151, 172, 405, 592 Mutoscope and Biograph Co., see American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Muybridge, Eadweard (1830–1904), 11, 50, 60, 82, 85, 93, 95–97, 99, 100, 108–111, 114, 117, 137, 186, 547, 619 My Man Godfrey, 319 Myographe, 95 N Nadar, Félix, 99 Nagra, 339, 702 Nagra quarter-inch reel-to-reel recorder, 479 Nagra SN recorder, 480 Napfel, Hans F., 491, 495 Napoléon, 509, 529 NASA, 12 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), 681, 688 National Aniline & Chemical Co., 346 National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, 241, 380 National Bureau of Standards, 211, 703 National Cameraphone Company, 237, 240 National Film Board, 78 National Film Preservation Foundation, 262, 295 National Geographic, 390 National Media Museum, 373, 376, 380 National Motion Picture Camera Corporation, 195 National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, 82 National Photocolor One-shot camera, 368 National Screen Services Corporation, 188 National Television Standards Committee (NTSC), 668, 669, 674–677, 679–681, 687, 688, 695, 706, 727, 731 Super NTSC technology, 681 Native 3-D, 733 Natural Color, 353, 361, 365, 373, 375, 384, 385, 400, 420, 514, 523 Natural color cinematography, 359, 361, 382 Natural Color Kinematograph Company Ltd., 379, 384 Natural color photography, 357, 363, 366 Natural color process, 351, 361, 364, 371, 379, 452, 527 Natural Vision 3-D, 525, 549, 554

781 Natural Vision Corporation, 609, 611 Natural Vision large format system, 238, 518, 524, 525, 608, 609, 612, 613 Natural Vision stereoscopic camera, 545 Natural Vision stereoscopic system, 522 Naturama, 557 Nature Color, 399 Naumann, Helmut (1903–1985), 215 Naval Experimental Station, 273 Naval Research and Sound Laboratory, 337 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 289, 393, 666, 667, 670, 685, 687 Naylor, T.W., 46, 47, 57 NBC radio network, 294, 338, 655 Negative-positive photographic process, 61, 208, 345, 362, 392, 445, 448–450, 453, 454, 456, 458, 463, 473, 483, 503, 504, 522, 564, 701 Negroponte, Nicholas, 681 Neil, Ian, 218 Nelson, Bob, 479 Nelson, Nikolay, 469 Neuhauss, R., 402 Newcastle upon Tyne Chemical Society, 106 Newcomer, Harry Sidney, 217, 519, 548, 555 New Company (NewCo), 712 New Dimensions, 606 New Line, 723 Newman, Alfred, 554 Newman, Arthur Samuel, 163, 192 Newman-Sinclair (sometimes written as Newman & Sinclair), 192 Newman-Sinclair camera, 192 Newsreel camera, 260, 305, 306, 330, 470 Newton, A.J., 366 Newton, Isaac (1642–1727), 10, 11, 15, 36, 37, 207, 208, 355–359, 365, 601, 702, 717 Newvicon, 671 New Yorker Theatre, 717 New York Museum of Science and Industry, 605 New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 295, 297 New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Center, 256 New York World’s Fair, 530, 532, 579, 607, 616, 658, 717, 725 Nicastro, L.J., 404 Nicholas, E.A., 651 Nicklaus, John M., 347 Nicol, William, 601, 631 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore (1765–1833), 62, 64, 68, 208, 361 Nipkow, Paul Julius Gottlieb (1860–1940), 624–626, 632, 663, 668, 679, 701, 713, 716 Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), 671, 679, 680, 687 Niagara Falls, 518, 595 Nicol prism, 601, 603, 728 Night Passage, 577 NIKFI, 506, 615 Nikon optics, 573 Nikon reflex camera, 204 Nipkow disk, 625, 626, 632, 634–636, 639, 641, 642, 646, 656, 664, 673, 684, 714, 715, 728 Nipkow scanning, 645 Nipkow scanning system, 634 Nippon Sheet Glass Co., Ltd., 38 Nizo, 490 Noaillon, Edmund Henri Victor, 600 Noakescope, 527 Noakes, D.W., 79, 527 Noiseograph, 224 Nolan, Christopher, 459, 506, 583

782 Nollet, Jean-Antoine (1700–1770), 23 Nonlinear or random access editing system, 709, 710 Nord, 613 Norelco, 569 Norling camera, 595 Norling, John A., 597, 606, 607, 612, 613, 725 North American Phonograph Company, 130, 132, 137 Norton, Eugene Earl, 237, 238 NTSC television, 384, 680 NV Optische Industrie De Oude Delft (Old Delft Optical Company), 576 Nykvist, Sven, 200 Nyquist Sampling Theorem, 706 O Oakley, Inc., 696 Object-based sound, 234, 340, 341 O’Brien, Brian (1898–1992), 567–569, 571, 575 O’Brien, Ethel and Brian, 575 O’Brien, Ethel D., 569 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 711 Ocular harpsicord, 28 Odeon Cinemas, 716 Ogloblinsky, Gregory N., 648, 649, 657 Oklahoma!, 518, 520, 567–571 Oko, 470 Old Delft Optical Company, 217 Old Glory, 380 Old Ironsides, 511 Old San Francisco, 298 Oliver!, 691 Olson, Harry Ferdinand (1901–1982), 327, 687 OMNIMAX, 580, 581, 584 Once Upon a Time in Mexico, 695 One-Eyed Jacks, 565 One from the Heart, 691 One-shot camera, 367, 368, 399 On with the Show!, 432 Opaque projector, 23 Open standard, 667, 681, 701 Optical activity, 626, 704 Optical lantern, 9, 15 Optical Radiation Corporation, 340 Optical reader, 336 Optical recording, 236, 250, 253, 257, 261, 265, 271, 276, 333, 728 Optical recording and playback transducers, 274, 288 Optical sound, 244, 248, 255, 257, 262, 265, 266, 269, 271, 273, 274, 277–279, 281, 286, 287, 307, 309, 312, 313, 317, 319, 327–333, 336, 337, 339, 417, 432, 477, 491, 552, 664 optical sound format, 277, 477, 562 optical sound system, 259, 269, 277, 286, 307, 311, 504, 564, 666 optical sound technology, 244, 260, 277, 329 optical sound track, 217, 247, 248, 252–254, 257, 259, 262, 266, 273, 274, 282, 283, 299, 313, 321, 327, 330, 332, 335–340, 401, 412, 415, 432, 435, 442, 477, 485, 504, 505, 512, 515, 548, 549, 551–553, 556, 562, 563, 622, 687 optical system, 277, 470 Optical sound camera-recorder, 279, 288, 291, 311, 313, 328, 338, 339 Optical sound head, 321 Optical sound-on-film, 227, 243, 244, 248, 252, 257, 259, 260, 263, 265, 270, 272, 274, 282, 300–303, 312, 315–317, 324, 325, 347, 469, 477, 504, 549

Index Optical sound pickup attachment, 282 Optical sound printer, 274 Optical sound reader, 318, 319, 321, 340, 347, 552–553, 569, 709 Optical transfer function (OTF), 217, 218 Opticolor, 393, 447 Optigraph, 157 Optis Effligior, 214 Order of Napoleon, 379 Organic light emitting diode (OLED), 359, 443, 681 Orthicon, 669 Orthicon camera, 685 Orthiconoscope, 669 Orthicon pickup camera, 685 Ortho, 345, 366 Orthochromatic emulsion, 345, 397, 413, 446 Orthochromatic film, 365, 413, 414, 474 Orthochromatic glass plate, 365 Orthochromatic negative, 329, 366, 411, 435, 475 Orthochromatic record, 414 Orthochromatic reversal stock, 468 Orthochromatic stock, 366, 397, 476 Orthophonic phonograph, 244, 247 ORWOcolor, 448 Oscillating valve, 245 Oscillite, 648, 649 Oscillite tube, 649, 679 Oscillograph (oscilloscope), 627, 654, 659 Ott, Charles, 111, 132 Otterson, John, 267, 289, 290, 296, 317, 319, 323 Ott, Frederick P. (Fred), 110, 117 Ott, John, 121, 130, 132 Our Navy, 407, 483 Out California Way, 415 Owens, Freeman Harrison (Harry) (1890–1979), 279, 281, 288 Oxy-hydrogen blowlamp, 32 Ozobrome, 363 P Pace, Vince, 597, 733 Pacific Telephone Company, 639, 648 Pacific Theaters, 340, 544 Pagan Love Song, 450 Page, 631 Paillard, 490 Paillard-Bolex Talkie, 468 Paillard lens, 479 Palace, 225, 379 Palace Cinema, 557 Palace Theatre, 379 Paléophone, 250 Paley, William C. “Daddy”, 177 Paley, William S. (1901–1990), 177, 178, 674 Pal, George, 402 Pallophotophone, 311 Palmer-McGovern fight, 507 Panacam, 204, 693 Panacolor, 403, 404 Panacolor, Inc., 403, 404 Panaflex camera, 204 Panaflex Gold II, 204 Panaflex Lightweight, 204 Pan-American Telegraph Company, 311 Panasonic, 679 Panaspeed crystal sync motor, 203

Index Panastar, 204 Panavision, 199, 201–205, 217, 479, 522, 544, 548, 550, 555, 556, 564, 567, 573, 575, 577, 578, 584, 693, 695, 697 Super Panavision, 538, 573, 574 Ultra Panavision, 202, 538, 573, 574 Panavision camera, 217 Panavision Genesis, 204, 696, 697 Panavision Millennium, 204, 696 Millennium DXL, 205 Millennium XL, 204 Panavision Silent Reflex (PSR), 203, 204, 691 Pancake, 192 Panchromatic, 329, 345, 377, 401, 405, 413 Panchromatic emulsion, 364, 365, 389, 391, 392, 397, 435, 446 Panchromatic film, 329, 345, 365, 390, 402, 413, 414, 457, 697 Panchromatic glass plate, 365 Panchromatic negative film, 329, 366, 414, 440 Super Sensitive Panchromatic Negative 1201, 190 Panchromatic reversal, 468 Panchromatic sensitization, 364–366, 596, 597 Panchromatic stock, 329, 366, 388, 449, 450 Panchromatization, 365, 381 Panchromotion, 405–407 Panchro, 214 Pan Cinor, 216 Panon, 508 Panoptikon, 140 Panorama, 62, 523, 527, 538, 546 Panoramica, 508 Panoramico, 508 Panoramico camera, 508 Pantages Theater, 335 Pantograph, 350, 352, 631 Parabolon Oil Light Lantern, 26 Parallax stereogram, 366, 599 Paramount Color, 352 Paramount Famous Players, 297, 308, 315, 317 Paramount Pictorials, 419 Paramount Pictures, 175, 224, 238, 243, 267, 280, 289, 293, 294, 296, 298, 301, 306, 307, 313, 315, 317, 323, 328, 336–338, 351, 352, 400, 403, 414, 418–420, 428, 430, 442, 454, 511–514, 517, 520, 522, 524, 529, 530, 545, 548, 552, 555, 557, 559, 561–565, 568, 573, 575, 576, 595, 609, 613, 615, 691, 712, 716, 717, 723 Paramount Theater, 717 Parasite, 615 Paravision, 562 Paris Exposition Universelle, 98, 113, 114, 127, 232, 234, 393, 447, 507, 508, 528 Paris Hippodrome, 235 Paris, John Ayrton (1785–1856), 52 Paris Peace Treaty, 267 Parkes, Alexander (1813–1890), 72 Parkesine, 72 Parlor Kinetoscope, 463 Parsons, Charles Algernon Sir (1854–1931), 235, 236, 249, 629 Parsons Optical Company, 38 Parsons, William, 195 Parvo, 190, 191 Pasadena Pageant of Roses, 388 Pastor, Tony, 155 Pathé-Baby, 468 Pathé camera, 164, 189 Pathé, Charles Morand, 189, 350, 471 Pathéchrome, 349–352 Pathécolor, 350, 352, 371, 379, 380

783 Pathé Frères, 174, 189–194, 233, 262, 285, 303, 304, 306, 318, 349–351, 381, 412, 418, 464, 468, 469, 495, 713 Pathé Kok, 468 Pathé Pro, 164 Pathé process, 351 Pathé Professional studio camera, 189 Pathé Rural, 471 Pathéscope, 468 Pathéscope Vox, 469 Pathex, 468 Pat Powers, 188, 281, 419, 420 Patrick d’Arcy, Count (1725–1779), 43 Patton, 575 Patton, George S. (General), 337 Pätzold-Pross interrupting shutter, 130, 185, 192 Pätzold, Theodor, 164 Paul, Robert William (1869–1943), 132, 133, 155, 169, 171, 177, 185, 464, 578 Paulson, 236 Pauvre Pierrot, 57 Pedersen, Peder, 265 Peepshow, 17, 19, 25, 43, 50, 55, 56, 62, 78, 88, 89, 91, 93, 105, 106, 109, 118, 120, 127, 128, 132–134, 137, 138, 141, 144, 146, 147, 151, 152, 158, 164, 168, 169, 172, 186, 221, 225, 231, 238, 239, 244, 364, 463, 465, 470, 503, 504, 592, 626 Peerless, 188 Peerless Magnarc lamphouse, 393 Pénaud, Alphonse, 96 Pennebaker, D.A. (Donn Alan), 479 Pennybook, 144 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703), 9 Performance capture, 731 Perisic, Zoran, 694 Perkins, William Henry, 345 Perry, John, 622–624 Perskyi, Constantin (1854–1906), 620 Personal Sound Environment (PSE), 582 Perspecta, 336, 337, 340, 341, 515, 552, 553, 564 Perspective Sound System, 336 Peterson, Axel Carl Georg, 236, 325 Petit, Pierre, 9, 10 Petzval, Joseph Max (1807–1891), 65, 207, 209 Petzval lens, 210 Petzval portrait lens, 209 Petzval projection lens, 209 Petzval sum, 209 Pfleumer, Fritz, 338 Phantasmagoria, 12, 15, 19, 21–24, 26, 46, 179, 221 Phantom ride, 528, 529, 541 Phantoscope, 79, 102, 151, 153, 168, 186 Phantoscope projector, 151, 153 Phase Alternating Line (PAL), 677, 679, 706 Phasmatrope, 78 Phenakistoscope, 11, 43–51, 55, 56, 75, 78, 79, 85, 88, 91, 100, 120, 127, 138, 142, 151, 161, 186, 365, 371, 541, 547, 589, 590, 593, 619, 701 Phenakistoscopic principle, 50 Phenakistoscopic shuttering, 111 Phenakistoscopic technology/projection, 93 Philadelphia Orchestra, 313, 335 Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, 650 Philco Corporation, 650, 662, 666–669, 675, 679 Philco Radio Corp., 650 Philidor, Paul (1785–1828), 19, 21, 22, 26, 179 Philips, 188, 256, 567, 569, 662, 680, 681, 693, 706, 711 Philips DP70, 569

784 Philips-Miller sound recording system, 249, 256 Philips photoconductive tube, 671 Phillips, Willis E., 548 Phoenocinopticon, 50 Phonactinion, 260 Phonautograph, 249, 250 Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, 232, 235 Phonofilm Company, 228, 235, 243, 244, 248, 260, 269, 274, 276, 277, 281, 288, 289, 295, 300, 312, 317, 318 Phonofilm Studio, 278 Phonofilm system, 275, 276, 279 Phonograph, 79, 105–111, 116, 125, 129, 131–134, 137, 176, 221, 222, 224, 228–244, 246–250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 260, 263, 264, 272, 273, 286, 288, 295, 299, 300, 302, 312, 317, 321, 338, 372, 469, 687 Phonographic sound, 221, 222, 227, 244, 302 Phonographic synchronized sound system, 238, 300, 386 Phonograph Works, 130, 140 Phonorama, 232 Phonoscènes system, 100, 235, 236 Phonoscope projector, 100, 161, 637 Phonovision, 687 Phonovision disk video recording, 636 Phonovision system, 687 Phono Works, 132 Phoroscope, 626 Phosphor screen, 627–628, 654, 656, 667, 674, 675, 713, 717 Photion tube, 280 Photoachygraphe, 164 Photocell vacuum tube, 264 Photochrom, 349, 350 Photochromoscope Syndicate, 366, 374 Photochronographie, 98 Photoconductive Target, 670 Photoconductivity, 249, 670 Photodetector, 704 Photo Electron Stabilized Photicon, 692 Photofilm, 308 Photogenic drawings, 67 Photographe à Verres Combinés, 209 Photographic Convention, 122 Photographic facsimile machine, 683 Photographic gun, 96, 97 Photographic Pellicle, 73 Photographic receiver, 82 Photographic revolver, 93–94, 96, 122, 123 Photographic rifle, 75, 94, 95 Photographic sound, 252–254 Photographic tablet, 252 Photographone (speaking arc light), 253, 259 Photophone, 251, 265, 267, 274, 281, 304, 307, 308, 311–313, 315–319, 666 Photophone optical sound system, 315 Photophone variable area optical sound system, 634 Photoplayer, 224 Photorama, 528 Photoret, 142 Photosensitive pickup, 321 Phototelegraphy, 622 Phototube, 254, 631, 640 Photovoltaic cell, 250 Pi-cell, 728 Pi-cell liquid crystal shutter, 729 Pickup, 642, 647–651, 653, 654, 656–658, 661, 664, 669, 670, 675, 692 Pickup tube, 639, 643, 646, 649, 654, 660, 661, 692, 704

Index Pictorial, Carl Struss, 214 Picture tube, 642, 648 Picturescope, 466 Pidgin, Charles Felton, 225 Pierce, David, 380 Pilkington, 38 Pilotone track, 339 Pinatype, 352, 363, 430 Pinson, 62 Pioneer Pictures, 440 Pittsburgh Plate Glass, 38 Pixar, 695, 699, 725 Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig (1858–1947), 254, 620, 660 Plano-stereoscopic projection, 593, 599 Plasmat, Kino, 213 Plasticon, 596 Plasticon Pictures, 596 Plastigrams, 366, 418, 596 Plateau, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand (1801–1883), 43–51, 55, 75, 541, 589, 619, 701 Plateau Problem, 43 Pleasantville, 711 Pleasure Railway, 529 Pledge, 366 Pletts, John St. Vincent, 259 Plexiglas, 38 Plimpton, Horace G., 181 Plumbicon, 671, 693 Plumbicon pickup tube, 693 PLZT (lead zirconate titanate) electro-optical shutter, 727 Polachrome, 394 Polacoat, 611 Polacolor, 403, 602 Polalite, 613 Polarization method of image selection, 547, 582, 584, 597, 602, 607 Polarizing prism, 631 Polaroid Corporation, 403, 497, 505, 524, 602, 604–606, 609, 611 Polavision, 393, 394, 497, 499 Polavision camera, 394 Poliakoff, J., 252 Pollak, 621 Pollio, Marcus Vitruvius (circa 90–20 BCE), 8, 61 Polychromide, 363, 399 Polyfolium chromodialytique, 370 Polyvision, 62, 508, 509, 529, 530, 579 Pomeroy, Roy J., 307, 315 Poniatoff, Alexander (1892–1980), 688 Porter, Edwin Stanton (1870–1941), 28, 74, 135, 157, 172, 176–181, 183–188, 225, 278, 302, 303, 507, 595 Porter, Thomas Cunningham, 598 Portrait of an Invisible Woman, 693 Portrait of Jenny, 513 Post, Charles S., 247, 295 Poulsen, Arnold, 325 Poulsen, Valdemar (1869–1942), 255, 265, 337, 631 Pour Construire un feu (To Build a Fire), 530 Poverty Row, 413, 414 Poverty Row studios, 413, 420, 557 Powell, 440 Powers, 280, 318 Powers, Nicholas, 157 Powers projector, 511 Powrie, John H., 390 Pozzi, David, 380 Praxinoscope (I look at action or action viewer), 45, 55–60, 186, 260 Praxinoscope Théâtre, 56

Index Precision Machine Company, 183, 278 Premier Projector, 466 Premiere, 710 Premium Large Format (PLF), 578–585 Premium Large Format Theaters (PLFs), 730 Pressberger, 440 Prestwich, 191, 204, 465, 507 Prestwick, 166 Pre-visualization (previs/previz), 692, 699 Prévost, Pierre (1764–1823), 62 Priestly, Jack, 200 Prime, 584 Prime Focus, 374 Prinsep, James (1794–1840), 3 Prizma, 396, 399, 405–407, 409, 414, 418, 419, 424, 483 Prizma Color, 406 Prizma Color Company, 419 Prizma Company, 408 Prizma, Inc., 406 Prism Anamorphoser, 216, 217, 555 Prismatic rings scanning device, 632 Prismatic rings scanning technology, 633 Prismatic rings, 632, 633 Prismatic scanning system, 632 Prism beam-splitter, 427, 685 Prism dispersion process, 392 Prism technology, 435 Pro-600, 478 Pro-600 Special, 478 Producers Distributing Company of America (P.D.C.), 297, 315, 317 Producers Releasing Corporation, 420 Professor Simon, 252 Project-A-Graph, 466 Projected cinema phonographic sound, 240 Projecting Electro-Tachyscope, 53, 88, 89, 91, 166, 169, 619 Projecting Kinetoscope, 154–157, 160, 183 Projecting Phenakistoscope, 140 Projecting Praxinoscope, 53, 55–58, 82, 99, 132, 157, 161, 166, 463 Projection, 130, 137–139, 142, 151–160, 377, 555, 615, 713–724, 726 Projection loop, 260 Projection mapping, 733 Projection TV, 718 Projectophone, 253 Projector, 137–142, 152, 159, 726 Projectoscope, 155–157, 164, 172 Prokesh, 47 Prolinear, 213 Pross interrupting shutter, 142, 584, 667 Pross, John A., 158, 164, 185, 667 Proszynski, Kasimir (de) (1875–1945), 192, 470 Przybylek, Stephanie, 277, 278 Publix Theaters, 511 Puppetoons, 402 Purkinje (Purkyně), Jan (1787–1869), 47, 55 Push-pull, 331, 335 Push-pull liquid crystal modulator, 728 Push-pull optical sound, 339 Push-pull recording system, 332 Push-pull technique, 331 Push-pull variable width recording, 306 Push-pull variable width track, 331, 337 Pye Radio Ltd., 692 Pyroxylin, 70, 72–74

785 Q Quadraplex, 105 Quadri-color, 352 Quad video recorder, 685 Queen Mary, 382 Queen Victoria, 589 Queen Victoria Memorial, 379 Quick loading recorder-reproducer, 328 QuickTake 100, 705 Quo Vadis, 554 R Rackett, Gerald F., 435 Radiant Manufacturing Corp., 555 Radio, 271, 633–635, 640, 645, 650, 654, 655, 660, 661, 663, 666, 668, 669, 675, 687 Radio City, 316, 393 Radio City Music Hall, 564 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 187, 246, 248, 257, 261, 264, 265, 267, 271, 277, 281–283, 286, 289, 291, 294, 297, 299, 304, 306, 308, 311–319, 321–325, 327, 331–333, 335, 337, 338, 384, 417, 513, 514, 620, 633–635, 640, 642, 643, 645, 647–651, 653–662, 673–681, 684, 687, 693, 704, 705, 713, 714, 717–719 Radio Frankfurt, 338 Radio Frequency Multipactor Amplifier, 651 Radio Keith Orpheum Corp, 318 Radio Manufacturers of America (RMA), 665, 667, 668 Radio movies, 620, 634 Radio Parade of 1935, 392 Radio Pictures Corporation, 318, 633 Radio vision, 631, 632 Radio vision facsimile devices, 633 Radiovisor kit, 635 Raff & Gammon, 132, 137, 138, 140, 152, 155, 169 Raff, Norman, 132, 155 Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), 693 Rainbow Negative, 418 Rainey, P.M., 301 Raintree County, 574 Ramsay, Allan, 241 Ramsaye, Terry, 138, 144, 228 Ramsdell, Floyd A., 613, 733 Ranger, Colonel Richard Howland (1889–1962), 337, 338 Rangertone recorder, 337 Rankine, H.O., 254, 267, 275, 313 Rank Laboratories, 575 Rank telecine, 694 Rapée, Ernö, 226 Raster barrier, 599, 600 Raster barrier method for image selection, 599 Raster scanning, 628, 630 Rateaugraph, 168 Ravenscroft, George (1632–1683), 37 Rayar, 214 Raycol, 388 Raydex, 363 Raytar lens, 402 RCA Autophone, 477 RCA Photophone, 297 RCA system, 244, 676 RCA Victor Company, 477, 653, 655, 659, 666 Real-Art, 418 RealD, 505, 584, 597, 603, 725, 728 RealD Cinema, 584

786 RealD Luxe, 584 Realife, 515, 518 Rear screen compositing technique, 694 Receiver, 230, 251, 312, 620, 621, 623–625, 627, 632–635, 641, 648, 651, 655, 667, 673–677, 683, 713, 717 Receiving set, 273 Recording mastering, 247 Rectifying diode, 270 Rector, Enoch J., 466, 506, 507 Red, 364, 369, 375, 376, 447, 458, 584, 696–698 Red Digital Camera Company, 696–697 Red Digital Cinema Cameras, 205 Redding, Jerome, 327 Rédier, Antoine, 93 Redmond, 624 RedOne, 696 Redskin, 430 Reel Thing Conference, 262, 295, 301, 328, 380, 403, 428, 443, 565 Re-emulsification, 395, 398, 403 Reeve, Richard, 9 Reeves, Hazard (Buzz) Earle (1906–1986), 339, 532, 533, 537, 543, 544, 549, 552, 568 Reeves Sound Studio, 339 Reflecting telescope, 11, 37, 717 Reflective display, 723 Reflex Technologies, 58 Regal, 584, 724 Regal Films Productions, 561 RegalScope, 561 Regeneration, 271 Regeneration amplification, 271 Regenerative circuit, 271 Rehalogenation, 395, 401, 403, 404 Reichenbach, Henry M., 72–74, 451 Reichenbach, Utzschneid, and Leibherrer, 38 Reisini, Nicholas, 544 Remaphone, 318 Rembrandt, 17 Rennahan, Ray (1896-1980), 401, 429, 436, 439, 450 Republic, 318, 417, 557 Republic Distribution Corporation, 409 Republic Laboratories, 413 Republic Pictures, 413, 414, 454, 557 Réseau, 364, 384, 385, 389–392, 497, 675 Réseau process, 364 Responder (receiver), 269, 270 Retrofocus, 215, 435 Retrofocus lens, 204, 207, 214–216 Return of the Jedi, 340 Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, 580 Reulos & Goudeau, 465 Revenge of the Creature, 613 Revere, 489 Reversal film, 445, 446, 448, 450, 453, 473, 474, 476, 494, 497 reversal print stock, 450 Reversal process, 364, 459, 473 Reversed telephoto, 215 Rex Motion Picture Company, 181 Reynaud, Charles-Émile, 51, 53, 55–60, 70, 82, 84, 99, 114, 132, 152, 157, 164, 166, 186, 188, 350, 423, 463 Rialto Theater, 280, 407, 428, 511 Rice, C.W., 312 Richter, Robert, 199 Rich, Walter J., 295, 296 Ride Vaquero, 450 Ries, Elias E., 254, 255, 277, 281

Index Riesenfeld, Hugo, 279, 280, 318 Rigg, 168 Rignoux, Georges, 632, 637, 641 Riley’s Optical Shop, 169 Rimington, Alfred Wallace, 28 Rinaudo, Joe, 224 Rin Tin Tin, 293 Ritchie, 621 Rivoli Theater, 280, 315, 319, 409, 511, 568, 570, 596 RKO Pathé Exchange, 308 RKO-Pathé News, 304 RKO Proctor’s Theater, 714 RKO Radio Pictures, 175, 267, 289, 294, 311, 316, 318, 331, 353, 402, 414, 514, 518, 555, 556, 595, 666 RKO-Scope, 556 Roach, Hal, 353 Robot Monster, 613 Robert, Étienne-Gaspard (1763–1837), 22, 23, 26, 45, 188, 513 Robinson, Jay, 554 Rockefeller, Laurence, 316, 531, 532 Rock, William T. (Pop), 381 Rocky, 200 Rodda, Sidney, 661 Rodriguez, Robert, 597, 695 Roebuck, Alvah Curtis, 120, 157, 466 Roentgen Society, 630 Roese, John A., 726 Rogers and Hammerstein, 568 Rogers, Gustavus A., 173 Rogers, Roy, 415, 417 Rogers, William Barton, 598, 726 Roget, Peter Mark (1779–1869), 43–45, 51, 547 Roll film holder adapter, 117 Roll-holder indicator, 70 Rollmann, Wilhelm (1821–1909), 593, 595 Roosevelt (President), 666, 669, 717 Rose, Albert, 669 Rosenberg Cinematograph, 168 Rosher, Charles G., 195 Rosing, Boris L’vovich (1869–1933), 624–626, 628–630, 632, 653 Ross, Andrew, 35, 209 Ross, Charles, 318 Ross, Gary, 711 Rotating disk, 44, 45, 252, 345, 377, 625, 637 Rotating mirror-drum using a manometric flame, 624 Rotating mirror stroboscope, 249 Rotating scanning disk, 701 Rotating scanning drum, 683 Rotoscoping, 350, 353, 732, 733 Rottweiler: Dogs of Hell, 615 Rouen Exposition, 164 Rough Riders of Cheyenne, 414 Rowland, Richard, 185 Roxy Theatre, 225, 285, 304, 516, 525, 542, 551 Royal Engineers, 32 Royal Photographic Society, 398, 468, 470 Royal Polytechnic Institution, 48 RPX, 584 Rtcheouloff, Boris, 687 Rubin, H., 511 Rudge, John Arthur Roebuck, 79, 80 Rudolph, Paul (1858–1935), 210, 213, 216, 218, 548 Ruhmer, Ernst Walter, 251, 253, 259, 272, 632 Rule, John T., 607 Rumsfeld, Donald, 681 Rundfunk, Reichs, 716

Index Run for the Sun, 556 Rural America, 595 Ruska, 660 Russian Wireless and Telegraph Company, 660 Russell, Lillian, 381 Rutherford, Lord, 660 Rutzen, A.C., 253 Ryan, W.H., 403, 407 Ryder, Loren L. (1900–1985), 337, 338, 545, 562, 573 S Sabine, Paul, 290 Sagan, Carl, 727 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 225, 226 Salomon, Eric, 213 Salon Indien of the Grand Café, 232 Salzburg Festival, 256 Sam Harris Theater, 303 Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 196 Sanabria, Ulises Arman (1906–1969), 625, 632, 641–643, 667, 715 Sandrew, Barry, 353 Sandvik, Otto, 562 Sandia National Laboratories, 727 Sanford Essig, 657, 658 San Francisco Opera House, 530 Sanger-Shepard, E., 374 Sansui, 340 Santee, H.B., 328 Sarnoff, David (1891–1971), 271, 289, 311, 315, 317, 318, 514, 643, 645, 648–650, 653–655, 657, 659–661, 666, 669, 675–677, 717 Sassoon Film Design, 733 Sasson, Steven J., 704 Saticon camera tube, 671, 691 Satie, Erik, 226 Savoyards, 12, 15–17, 19 Savoye, François, 600 Scala Theatre, 372, 382 Scanner, 624, 634, 664, 684, 710, 716 Scanning, 631, 641, 646–648, 664, 667, 668, 704, 713, 718 Scanning circuit, 660 Scanning disk, 625, 635, 715 Scanning disk receiver, 639 Scanning electron microscope, 656 Scanning mirror concept, 626 Scanning ring apparatus, 632 Scarlet Letter, 379 Schade, Otto H. (1903–1981), 217, 218 Schairer, Otto, 651 Schank, Lee H., 495 Scheele, Carl Wilhelm (1742–1786), 61 Scheiner, 4 Schenck, Joseph M., 428, 567, 568 Schenck, Nicholas, 243, 315, 322 Schinzel, Karl, 402, 441, 446 Schklair, Steve, 733 Schmidt, Carl, 598 Schmidt optics, 717, 718 Schmidt telescope, 717 Schneider Variogon, 216 Schneider, W., 446 Schnellseher/Quick View, 88 Schoedsack, Ernest B., 511 Schott & Associates Glass Technology Laboratory, 38 Schott, Otto (1851–1935), 38 Schroeder, Alfred C., 676

787 Schröpfer, Johann Georg (1730–1774), 19 Schultz, Paul, 186 Schulze, Johann Heinrich (1687–1744), 61 Schwendter, Daniel (1585–1636), 4, 6, 720 Scientific Development Company, 423 Sciopticon, 34 Scophony GmbH, 715 Scophony Ltd., 624, 715–718 Scotch 111, 338 Scott, Randolph, 404 Scott, Ridley, 733 Scovill, 109 Scovill Manufacturing Company, 109, 445 Screen-plate, 364, 385, 388–390, 392, 393 Scriabin, Alexander, 28 Search for Paradise, 538 Sears, Roebuck & Company, 120, 293, 466 Sébert, Hyppolite, 93 Second Chance, 613 Section and Ratio, 506 Securitas, 33 Seebeck, Thomas Johann, 361 Seeber, Guido, 238 Seeberphon, 238 Seinfeld, 458 Seiter, William A., 195 Selenophone, 174, 255, 256, 285 Selig, Polyscope, 174 Selle, Gustav, 398, 446 Sellers, Coleman, 77, 78, 93, 592 Selsdon, Lord, 664, 666 Selsted, Walter Theodor (1921–2011), 688 Selva, Domenico, 16 Selwyn Theatre, 598, 726 Selznick, David O., 439, 513 Selznick, Louis J., 408 Senlecq, Constantin, 622, 624 Sennett-Color, 401 Sennett, Mack, 318, 401, 414 Sensurround, 339 Séquentiel Couleur Avec Mémoire (SECAM), 677, 679 Serrurier, Iwan (1878–1953), 709 Seurat, Georges, 389 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 450 Seven Wonders of the World, 538, 542 Shade, Willy E., 218 Shadow lantern, 9 Shadow mask, 675, 676 Shadow mask display tube, 389, 675–677, 687 Shanebrook, Robert L., 72, 457 Shannon, Claude E. (1916–2001), 702 Shaw, George Bernard, 288, 304, 713 Shaw, William Chester, 579, 580 Shaw, William Thomas, 592 Shearer, Douglas (1899–1971), 202, 331, 332, 337, 545, 573 Sheehan, Winfield R., 306, 307, 323 Sheet polarizer, 601–605, 611, 615, 704, 728 Sheffield Scientific School, 269 Sherlock, Dan, 507, 508, 514, 515, 517, 518, 529–531, 537–539, 543, 553, 556, 567, 581 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 285 Shockley, William, 702 Shoenberg, Isaac (1880–1963), 660, 661, 664, 701 Shoot-and-Tape, 692 Short, Horace Leonard, 236 Short, Sydney George, 387

788 Shostakovich, Dimitri, 226 Showscan, 188, 584 Shurcliff, William A., 611 Siegfried & Roy: The Magic Box, 733 Siegrist, H., 446 Siemens & Halske, 252, 260, 263, 266, 393, 447, 477, 552 Siemens Artificial Eye, 622 Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), 605 Silent, Harold, 331 Silicon Graphics International (SGI) workstation, 722, 729 Silicon X-tal (liquid crystal) Reflective Display, 728 Silvera, G.R., 352 Simplex, 157, 183–188, 280, 511, 515, 516 Simplex Grandeur, 187 Simplex Kinematograph Synchronizer, 238 Simplex Photo Products Company, 466 Simplex projector, 135, 157, 181, 262, 393, 518, 547 Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, 725 Sinclair, Upton, 286, 287, 513, 516 Sinemat, 466 Single lens camera, 215, 424 Single projector flickerless frame-sequential technology, 728 Single sensor camera, 697 Single-system, 253, 287, 306, 478, 491, 496, 664 camera, 260, 261, 274, 278, 287, 290, 304, 306 newsreel camera, 288, 330 recording, 262 sound, 279, 480 sound-on-film, 262 sound-on-film camera, 277, 717 Siren amplification, 235, 236 Siren/compressed air amplifier, 236, 249 Sixteen Fathoms Deep, 450 Skip line scanning, 667 Skladanowsky, Max (1863–1939), 53, 80, 91, 113, 165, 166, 168, 192, 231, 506 Skouras, Spyros Panagiotis (1893–1971), 545, 548, 550, 552, 557, 609 Skywalker Ranch Studio, 116, 722 Sleeping Beauty, 577 Slide projection, 210, 215, 221, 579 Slide projector, 6, 29, 222, 359 Slit opening light valve (ribbon light valve), 247 Sloan Physics Laboratory, 269 Slot Unit, 278 Smakula, Alexander, 211 SM film, 496 Smith, Charles, 607 Smith, Courtland, 255, 287, 288, 290, 303, 304, 379, 383, 384, 597 Smith-Dietrich Corporation, 542 Smith, George Albert (1864–1959), 371, 373, 383, 704 Smith, George E., 376, 377, 704 Smith, Jack, 479 Smith, Jacob, 175 Smith, J.H., 446 Smith, Oberlin (1840–1926), 255, 337, 687 Smith, Pete, 249, 597 Smith, Willoughby (1828–1891), 249 SMPTE DC28 committee, 712 Smythe, Edwin H., 269 Snapshot photographic device, 633 Snickerty Nick and Buzzy the Pirate Bee, 403 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 710 Soaring, 584 Società Anonima Fabbricazione Apparecchi Radiofonicic (SAFAR), 662

Index Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 141, 163 Société des Cinéma-Plaques, 470 Société du Film en Couleurs Keller-Dorian, 392 Société Française Cinéchromatique, 392 Société Française de Photographie, 76, 95, 97, 234, 364, 385, 471 Société Pathé Frères, 189 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), 151, 185, 262, 309, 553, 573, 576, 632, 710, 718 Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), 151, 309, 329, 423, 504, 512, 514, 632 Soleil, John Baptiste François, 589, 590 Solido, 582 Solid state light sensor, 704 Solid state sensor, 705 Solomon and Sheba, 577 Solomon, Aubrey, 561 Solomon Sagall, 716 Solow, Sidney, 416, 459, 578 SOM-Berthiot (Société d'Optique et de Mécanique-Berthiot), 216 Songer, Jimmy D., Jr., 597, 691 Song o’ My Heart, 516 Sonics, Inc., 580 Sonnar, 213 Sonochrome, 347 Sonograph, 318 Sons of the Sea, 392 Sony, 204, 340, 496, 556, 584, 679, 680, 693, 695, 705, 706, 712, 723, 728, 729 Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS), 340, 580 electron-beam recorder, 693 F35, 696 HDVS analog high definition video camera, 693 HDW-F900 CineAlta video camera, 695, 709 Hi-Vision HDVS, 693 Hi-Vision system, 693 SXRD projector, 723, 728, 729 Sound amplifier, 246, 248, 271, 629 Sound and Motion Picture Reproducing System, 279 Sound camera, 291, 495, 496 Sound mixer, 328 Soundograph, 224 Sound-on-disk film, 243, 298, 300 Sound-on-disk system, 232, 234, 247, 263, 283, 287, 289, 294, 295, 297, 299, 300, 318, 517 Sound-on-disk technology, 222, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233, 242–244, 247, 248, 286, 287, 289, 290, 294, 295, 297–300, 302, 303, 308, 311, 312, 315–318, 328, 330, 340, 468 camera, 249, 276, 277, 287, 288, 478, 491 newsreel, 278 newsreel camera, 277, 306 recorder, 252, 312, 328 Sound-on-film technology, 139, 228, 231, 237, 242–256, 259, 261, 263, 265, 271, 274, 276–278, 281, 282, 286–290, 295, 297–299, 302, 303, 307–309, 311, 312, 314–319, 323, 330, 340, 478, 479, 498, 549, 553, 666, 728 Sound projector, 282, 490, 491, 505 Sound reader, 248, 257, 315, 319, 321, 331, 336, 337, 340, 432 Sound Record, 282, 332 Sound Record Blank, 256 Sound recorder, 261, 274, 333 Sound recording, 229, 238, 246, 248, 250, 252–254, 256, 261, 279, 306, 307, 316, 324, 328, 335, 337, 338, 521, 532, 687, 713 Sound recording stock, 330 Sound track, 253, 256, 261, 278, 293, 298, 303, 319, 321, 329, 340, 464, 481, 505, 534, 552, 562, 567, 580, 612 Sound track emulsion, 274

Index Sound tracks, 261 South Sea Adventure, 538, 541 Sovcolor, 448 Space Telegraphy, 270 Spacehunter, 615 SpaceVision, 607, 609, 613, 615 Spartacus, 443, 577 Spatial light modulator (SLM), 719 Speck, Robert, 363 Spectacles, 36 Spectroscope, 38 Speed Panchro, 214 Speedic lens, 213 Speer, Walter Harold, 382, 383 Spehr, Paul, 83, 109, 117–119, 122, 125, 127, 137–141 Spencer, D.A., Dr., 392 Sperry Gyroscope Company, 273 Spherical mirror Schmidt design, 718 Spicer-Dufay Ltd., 391 Spicers Ltd., 391 Spielberg, Steven, 340 Spinello, Barry, 353 Spiral Lantern, 469 Spirally scanning system, 624 Spirit DataCine scanner, 711 Spirograph, 77, 372, 470 Sponable, Earl Iru (1895–1977), 187, 248, 265, 273–279, 281–283, 287, 288, 290, 291, 300, 306–309, 312, 315–317, 324, 337, 339, 341, 514, 515, 545, 546, 548–550, 553, 554, 558, 573 Spoor-Berggren process, 513 Spoor, George Kirke (1871–1953), 238, 518 Spoor Spectaculum Theater, 518 Spoor-Thompson, 412 Sportagraph, 507 Spot color, 313, 351, 352 Spotlight, 664 Spottiswoode, Nigel L., 613 Spottiswoode, Raymond, 607, 613, 733 Spread-sound system, 336 Spy Kids 3-D, 597 Squeeze track, 331 Sound to optical transducer, 277 Stack, Robert, 609 Staats, 548 Stafford, J.W., 419 Standard Capital, 316 Stanford, Leland, 85–87, 95 Standards Automatic Electronic Computer, 703 Stanley Company of America, 281 Stanley Theater, 298 Staud, C.J., 492 Star Wars, 340, 565, 578, 695, 712 Star Wars trilogy, 694 Star Wars:Episode II–Attack of the Clones, 583, 694, 695, 709, 712 Star Wars:Episode I–The Phantom Menace, 695, 722 State Theater, 315 Static Club, 195 Station Physiologique, 96, 97, 100, 114 Steadicam, 200, 202, 204 Steam turbine, 236 Steamboat Willie, 281 Steenbeck, Wilhelm, 709 Stein, 515, 563 Steiner, Max, 226 Stellavox magnetic tape recorder, 702 StEM/Standardized Evaluation Material film, 712

789 Stencil coloring, 61, 345, 346, 350, 351, 379 Stereo and Photomicrographic Unit at Wright-Patterson Base, 607 Stereo Realist camera, 29 StereoD, 731 Stereo-Fantascope, 75 StereoGraphics Corp., 728 Stereophonic double track variable area recordings, 267 Stereophonic magnetic track, 336 Stereophonic sound, 335–337, 341, 522, 549, 551, 559, 661 Stereophoroscope, 592 Stereopsis (two-eyed solid seeing), 534, 589, 590 Stereopticon, 68, 137, 253, 527 Stereopticon Panorama Machine, 534 Stereopticon phantoscope, 152 Stereoscope, 45, 76, 78, 589, 590, 592, 615 Stereoscopic Binocular Film Company, 418 Stereoscopic camera, 590, 592, 593, 595, 612, 613, 615 Stereoscopic conversion, 353, 581, 611, 725, 731, 733 Stereoscopic Mutoscope, 592 Stereoscopic process, 417, 608 Stereoscopic projection, 388, 547, 581, 593, 594, 601, 603, 604, 607, 723, 729, 730, 734 Stereoscopic system, 387, 623, 729 Stereoscopic television, 726, 727, 729 Stereotrope, 76 Stereotrope projector, 469 StereoVision International, 615 Stevens, John Henry, 72, 74 Stevens, Robert, 196 Steward, Willard G., 463, 592 Stewart, James Henry, 48, 50, 168 Stewart, Jim, 727 Stewart, Walter, 567 Stille, Curt, 255, 337 Stillman, James A., 183 St. Louis Exhibition, 529 Stokes, 631 Stokowski, Leopold, 313, 335 Stoller, H.M., 300 Stoll Studio, 409 Stolze, Franz, 89 Stop Device, 118, 140 Stop the World I Want to Get Off, 202 Storaro, Vittorio, 200 Stowers, Allen, 318 Strauss, Lewis, 484 Stromberg-Carlson Telephone Manufacturing Corporation, 669 Strong, Henry A., 69, 187, 188 S. T. Tripack, 404 Sturm, Johann Christoph, 11 Subframe, 373, 383, 385–388, 402, 403, 557, 605, 613 format, 385 image, 388 system, 386 Subtractive bichromatic projection, 426 Subtractive color, 355, 359, 360, 363, 384, 403, 445, 452, 673 Subtractive color mixing, 351 Subtractive display, 366, 451 Subtractive duplitized print, 430 Subtractive duplitized print process, 363, 424 Subtractive hardened gelatin dye matrix process, 363 Subtractive print, 364, 371, 398, 399, 401 Subtractive printmaking, 360, 363, 366, 371, 374 Subtractive process, 402, 403, 429, 433, 484 Subtractive projection, 373 Subtractive release print process, 358, 403

790 Subtractive technology, 371, 372 Subtractive three-color image, 363 Subtractive three-color process, 395 Sugimoto, Masao, 680 Sulzer, Albert F., 466 Summar, 214 Summarit, 214 Summicron lens, 214 Sun Microsystems graphics workstation, 699 Sunny Side Up, 516 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, 293, 303, 307 Super 8, 467, 469, 489–499 Super 8 camera, 493, 494, 496, 498, 499 Super 8 film, 496 Super 8 format, 394, 464, 687 Super 8mm, 394, 495 Super 8 projector, 495 Super 16, 481 Super 35mm, 204, 556, 562, 697 Super 1200, 478 Superama, 555 Super-anaglyph, 729 Supercinecolor, 420, 421, 454 Superman films, 694 Supermatic (SM) processor, 495 Supermatic VP-1 telecine, 495 Superscope, 555, 556, 564 Superscope 235, 556 Surtees, Robert, 570 Sutton, M.H., 626 Sutton, Thomas, 76, 357, 358, 527 Swan Electric Light Company, 107 Swan, Joseph (1828–1914), 106, 107 Swanson, Gloria, 475 Sweet Chariot, 608 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 718 SX-70, 606 Symmes, Daniel, 597 Synchronized projection, 231 Synchronized sound, 222, 227, 230, 231, 236, 238–240, 243, 244, 247, 248, 253, 257, 287, 302–304, 307, 315, 318, 324, 327, 430, 432, 470, 496, 505, 527, 537 Synchronized sound motion picture phonograph system, 232, 236, 242 Synchronized sound moving images, 229, 294 Synchronized sound projector-phonograph system, 242 Synchronized speech, 243, 248 Synchronizing Apparatus, 238, 239 Synchronizing Device, 235 Synchronophone, 238 Synchroscope, 238, 239 Synthetic dye, 345, 446 Szczepanik, Jan, 624 T Tabb, H.A., 152 Taber, John, 276 Tachar, 213 Tachistoscope, 598, 726 Tainter, Charles Sumner, 251, 252, 312 Takayanagi, Kenjiro, 643, 645 Take the High Ground, 450 Talbot, Frederick A., 65, 67, 68, 72, 73, 227 Talbot, William Henry Fox (1800–1877), 61, 62, 67–74, 93, 208, 209, 345, 361, 362, 364, 400, 503, 622, 701 Talbotype, 67, 68, 361

Index Talking film, 432, 715 Talking Motion Picture Apparatus, 279 Tallent, Alexander A.K., 366 Tape recorder, 337, 338, 687, 705 Tape recording, 338, 393 Taras Bulba, 578 Tarbin, William, 370 Tarkington, Raife G., 473 Tashlin, Frank, 691 Tate, Al O., 131 Taylor, Harrold Dennis (1862–1943), 210, 211 Taylor-Hobson Company, 214, 215, 577 Taylor, Taylor, and Hobson, 210, 215, 564 T. Cooke and Sons, 210, 218 Technichrome, 401 Technicolor, 168, 217, 308, 318, 351–353, 363, 365, 370, 371, 386, 393, 395–398, 400, 401, 403–405, 410, 411, 417–421, 423–433, 435, 436, 438–443, 445, 447–451, 458, 459, 496, 522, 523, 549, 550, 556–559, 562–565, 571, 574–576, 578, 597, 605–607, 613, 687, 697, 710, 712 Inc., 423 Monopack, 485 Motion Picture Corporation, 423 Plant No. 4, 429, 433 Process Number Five, 438, 442 Process Number Four, 361, 363, 371, 430, 433, 435, 436, 439 Process Number One, 424, 426, 428 Process Number Three, 363, 429–433, 436 Process Number Two, 363, 426, 428–431, 433 SA, 443 three-color system, 347, 352, 358, 361, 395, 427, 435–443, 523 three-strip color camera, 196, 400, 401, 403, 419, 424, 450, 522, 563, 609, 613 three-strip technicolor camera, 215, 368, 395, 403, 404, 426, 435, 436, 440, 523, 733 Technirama, 216, 217, 442, 443, 522, 547, 555, 564, 573–578 Techniscope, 556–558, 576 Ted Turner, 353 Telautograph, 631, 683 Telco Color, 403 Telecine, 496, 664, 680, 683–685, 687, 710 Telecinema, 607 Telectroscope, 622 Telefilm, 318 Telefunken AG, 166, 260, 337, 642, 662 Telegraph, 114, 119, 129, 172, 244, 249, 269, 270, 311, 620–622, 627, 629, 631, 683 Telegraphone, 255, 337 Téléoscope, 713 Telephone, 224, 229, 230, 232, 235, 244, 246, 251, 253, 259, 260, 263, 282, 313, 327, 337, 386, 438, 567, 621–623, 631 Telephoto varifocal, 215 Telephotograph rotating drum system, 621 Telescope, 36 Tele-transcription, 685 Teleview, 582, 592, 598, 726, 729 Teleview stereoscopic projection system, 273, 582, 598, 726 Television, 260, 476, 620, 622, 627–642, 645, 648–651, 653–655, 657, 659–661, 663–669, 673–681, 683–685, 687, 692, 693, 695–697, 701, 706, 709, 713, 715–717, 722, 727, 728 broadcast service, 636, 664, 666 camera, 279, 685, 691 Committee, 666 display tube, 667 pickup tube, 669, 704 productions, 669

Index projection, 713 projector, 713 receiver, 665, 669, 680, 687 recording, 393, 716 set, 384, 496, 561, 605, 635, 655, 656, 663–665, 667, 668, 675, 676, 681, 685 Televisor, 641, 663 Telewriter, 621 Teloptican monitor, 714 Terminator 2, 699 Terrence Malick, 29 Tesla, Nikola, 108, 260 Tessier, Julian, 474 Texas Instruments (TI), 681, 702, 719–723, 725, 728, 729 Tex Takes a Holiday, 419 Thalberg, Irving, 329, 430 Thalberg, Irving, Jr., 323 Thaumatrope (wonder turner), 52 Thaumaturgic (wonder evoking) lamp, 12 The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, 448 The American Flag, 407 Theater Equipment Corporation, 609 Théâtre Gymnast, 235 Théâtre Mécanique, 165 Théâtre Optique, 56–60, 99, 114, 132, 161, 350 Theatriaxinoscope, 56 Theatrograph, 133, 169 The Bat Whispers, 517 The Better ‘Ole, 298 The Bible…In the beginning, 575 The Big Fisherman, 574 The Big Parade, 226 The Big Trail, 516, 554 The Birth of a Nation, 225, 298, 352, 381 The Black Cauldron, 577 The Black Pirate, 428, 429 The Black Stallion, 200 The Blue Angel, 266 The Bubble, 613 The Cameraman, 306 The Cardinal, 578 The Clansman, 225, 381 The Concert, 600 The Covered Wagon, 280 The Debut of Thomas the Cat, 398 The Door in the Wall, 506 The Edison Kinetophone, 241 The Elephants, 463 The Firefly, 347 The French Line, 613 The Glorious Adventure, 407, 409, 418 The Godfather Part II, 443 The Good Earth, 347 The Great Gabbo, 418 The Great Meadow, 518 The Great Train Robbery, 293, 529 The Gulf Between, 395, 425, 428 The Hateful Eight, 574 The Honeymooners, 685 The Hummingbird, 475 The Hunted, 200 Theisen, Earl, 140 The Jazz Singer, 243, 293, 298, 299 The Joy Girl, 428 The King and I, 558, 559 The King of Kings, 318

791 The Lash, 517 The Last Starfighter, 698 The Lights of Old Broadway, 428 The Lions of Gulu, 609 The Long, Long Trailer, 450 The Man from M.A.R.S., 598 The Man Who Wasn’t There, 615 The Matrix Reloaded, 583 The Monte Carlo Story, 577 The Party, 691 The Patriot, 200 The Perfect Song, 225 The Phantom of the Opera, 351, 428 The Polar Express, 725 The Power of Love, 417, 595 The Queen’s Messenger, 640 The Quiet Man, 417 The Rain People, 200 The Red Shoes, 440 The Return of Rin Tin Tin, 414 The Ride of the Valkyries, 225 The Right Stuff, 200 Thermionic emission, 244 Thermionic Oscillograph, 648 Thermophone (air-thermo) microphone, 291 The Robe, 520, 525, 550, 551, 554, 556 The Russian Ark, 695 The School for Scandal, 388 The Serpentine Dance, 346 The Show of Shows, 431, 432 The Singing Fool, 267, 298, 316 The Skipper of the Osprey, 388 The Song of the Volga Boatman, 298 The Sound of Music, 578 The Star Spangled Banner, 241 The Stranger Wore a Gun, 404 The Student Prince, 450 The Sword of Monte Cristo, 420 The Ten Commandments, 428 The Three Musketeers, 352 The Toll of the Sea, 428 The Tree of Life, 29 The Trust, 171–176, 181, 285, 381, 606 The Vandal Outlaws, 379 The Viking, 430 The Virgin Queen, 409 The Volga Boatman, 295 The Wayward Girl, 557 The Whoopee Party, 281 The Wild North, 450 The Wizard of Oz, 733 The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, 538, 544 Third Dimensional Murder, 597 This is Cinerama, 241, 304, 409, 520, 523, 533–535, 538, 542, 545, 567, 608 Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 172, 179 Thomascolor, 388, 518 Thomas Edison National Historical Park, 116, 120 Thomas H. Blair & Co., 169 Thomas, Lowell Jackson (1892–1981), 241, 304, 532–535, 541, 542 Thomas, Richard, 388 Thompson, Francis, 579 Thomassin, 238 Thomas-Todd Productions, 533, 542 Thompson-Houston, 477 Thomson, 245, 626, 627

792 Thomson, Joseph John (J.J.) (1856–1940), 244, 270, 423, 626, 695 Thorner, Walther Dr., 166 Three-channel optical sound, 335, 545, 549 Three-color analysis, 377 Three-color camera, 371, 443 Three-color carbon print, 364 Three-color cinema, 438 Three-color cinema system, 371, 373, 435, 440, 673, 675 Three-color cinematography, 345, 373, 438 Three-color color photography, 353 Three-color dye imbibition process, 402, 429, 430, 597 Three-color dye transfer process, 424 Three-color motion picture service, 435 Three-color photography, 359, 361, 370, 401, 427 Three-color print, 363, 366, 420, 436, 442 Three-color process, 361, 386, 419, 426, 435, 439, 440 Three-color reproduction, 359 Three-color separation negative, 370 Three-color subtractive print, 435 Three-fold interlace, 641, 715 Three-plate one-shot camera, 395 Three-strip camera, 196, 395, 411, 424, 436, 440–442, 563 Thuillier, Elizabeth, 349 Thwaites, John Hall Brock, 602 THX Ltd., 340, 722 Tiffany-Stahl Productions, 308 Tiger Child, 580 Tihanyi, Kálmán (Kolomon) (1897–1947), 658, 659 Time, Inc., 532 Tim Sassoon, 733 Tinted celluloid nitrate base film stock, 347 Tinting, 345–348, 350, 351, 361, 376, 383, 412 Titanic, 699, 733 Tixier, Pierre, 56 To Be Alive!, 579 Tobis (Ton-Bild-Syndicate or Sound-Picture-Syndicate), 266 Tobis-Klangfilm group, 266, 267 Todd-AO, 187, 197, 255, 324, 335, 336, 339, 340, 520, 522, 525, 538, 548, 559, 567–571, 573–575, 578, 579, 616 Todd, Michael, Jr., 542, 567 Todd, Mike (1909–1958), 62, 525, 533, 534, 541–544, 559, 567, 568, 570, 571 Todd Process, 567 To Fly!, 581 Toho, 336 TohoScope, 559 Toho Theater, 559 Tolman, Justin, 645 Tom Mix, 306 Ton-biograph, 238 Tondreau, A.W., 612 Tonfilm, 265 Toning, 250, 298, 345–348, 350, 361, 396, 398, 399, 412, 414, 415, 417, 419, 454 Too Hot to Handle, 306 Toot Toot Tootsie, 298 Topper, 353 Tosca, 381 Toscanini, Arturo, 256 Toshiba, 706 Toy Story, 699 Toy Story 2, 443 Trail of ’98, 512–513 Transistor, 701, 702, 704, 719 Transistorized computer, 703

Index Transitions, 581, 616 Translux, 304 Transmitter, 246, 620, 624, 625, 633, 634, 648, 657, 660, 661, 663, 665, 667, 673, 675, 683, 688 Transparency projector, 11, 541, 713 Traveling Lens, 215 Treasure of the Four Crowns, 615 Tremont Temple, 425 Trichromatic additive color television image, 639 Trichromatic analysis, 374, 377, 383, 445, 451, 685 Trichromatic film, 484 Trichromatic photography, 373, 386 Trichrome, 235 Trichrome Carbo process, 363 Trichrome process, 364 Tricolour, 403 Tri-Ergon Aktiengesellschaft, 248, 252, 255, 262, 263, 265, 274, 279, 281, 287, 308, 309, 312, 321–325, 512, 606 Trifolium film, 370 Triode tube, 245, 246, 263, 270, 271, 312, 620 Triple, 367 Triple lens condenser, 35 Triplet, 210, 211 Triunial lantern, 27 Tri-X Reversal, 494 Troland, Leonard Thompson (1889–1932), 308, 426, 429, 430, 432, 435, 440, 441 Troland Td, 426 Trolley camera, 97, 99, 699 Tron, 698 TruColor, 348, 368, 409, 411–421, 441, 442, 454 Truffaut, François, 199 Trumbull, Douglas, 52, 188, 506, 584, 729 T stop, 211 Tube pickup, 704 Tungsten filament light bulb, 254, 262, 282, 315, 321, 329, 414, 426, 440, 457, 697 Turner, Edward Raymond (1873–1903), 373–377, 383, 384 Turner Entertainment, 353 Tushinsky Brothers, 555, 556 Tushinsky, Irving, P., 556 Tushinsky, Joseph S., 556 Tuttle, Bertha Sugden (1897–1984), 430, 473, 474 Tuttle, Harris Benjamin, Sr. (1902–1988), 473–475 TV receiver kit, 635 Twentieth Century Camera, 196 Twentieth Century Pictures, 323, 545 Twisted nematic device, 704 Two-channel stereophonic sound, 337 Two-color additive cinematography, 372 Two-color additive system, 388 Two-color cinematography, 347, 368 Two-color imbibition process, 436 Two-color subtractive camera, 435–436 Two-color system, 377, 419 Twofold interlace, 667, 675 Two-speaker loudspeaker system, 332 Two-string light valve, 313 Tykociński-Tykociner, Joseph (1867–1969), 248, 259–262 Tyndall, John, 93 Type 5216, 457 Type 5234 Ortho, 414 Type 5235 Pan, 414 Type 5236 Ortho, 414 Type 5243, 457 Type 5253, 457

Index Type A, 486 Type A noise reduction process, 339–340 Type II and Type III Cine Negative Panchromatic films, 190 U Ub Iwerks, 401, 419, 420 Uhlig, 340 Ullman, Liv, 597 Ultimatte HD chroma-key travelling matte system, 694 Ultimate Screen, 584 Ultra-frequency recording lamp, 213 Ultra Prime, 213 Ultrastigmat, 213 U-Matic format, 688 Unar, 210 Un Deux Quatre!, 557 Underwriters’ Electrical Bureau, 157 Underwriters Laboratories (UL), 157 Unger, Leon, 403 United Artists, 175, 294, 308, 328, 428, 454, 517, 556, 564, 574, 577 United Artists Circuit, 571 United Fruit, 311 United States Air Force, 669 United States Navy, 274, 311, 633, 726 Universal, 175, 195, 294, 297, 304, 308, 315, 317, 319, 328, 336, 340, 351, 387, 413, 428, 442, 512, 523, 557, 561, 564, 577, 698, 699, 712, 724 Universal News, 304 Universal Pictures Corp., 175, 195, 403, 597 Universal Projecting Kinetoscope, 157 Universal Studios, 238, 339, 693 University of Illinois in Urbana, 260, 262, 295 University of Texas Dallas Center for the Study of Digital MEMS (microelectrical mechanical systems) Technology, 721 Universum-Film AG (UFA), 263, 267, 325, 447, 448 Urban, Charles (1867–1942), 239, 371–384, 405, 425, 464, 465, 470, 529 Urban-Eclipse, 174 Urban, Joseph, 400 Urban Motion Picture Industries, Inc., 470 Urbanora House, 379 V Vacuum pump, 626 Vacuum tube, 246, 248, 261, 262, 277, 319, 337, 338, 653, 656, 669, 702 Valensi, Georges, 676 Vance, Arthur, 657 Vanity Fair, 409 Van Neck, F., 192 Vanoscope Company, 423 Van Ripper, Lewis C., 423 Varamorph, 564, 577 Varda, Agnés, 199 Variable area, 257, 311, 316, 319, 327, 328, 330–332, 335, 477, 666 multiple channel track, 261 optical track, 256 recording, 248, 252, 265, 267, 314, 316, 318, 319, 332 sound-on-film system, 317 track, 250, 257, 262, 267, 318, 319, 330–333, 336, 337, 477 Variable density, 256, 257, 316, 318, 319, 327, 330–332 optical track, 255 optical video track, 687 recording, 248, 254, 259, 261, 330, 331

793 soundtrack, 253, 255, 257, 264, 314, 319, 328, 331, 515 system, 265, 318, 319, 666 Variable resistor, 411, 702 Variable scan rate system, 679 Variable slit light valve, 251 Varifocal (variable focal length) lens, 22, 215, 216 Vario-Glaukar zoom lens, 215 Varioscope, 506 Vario, 215, 506 Vario-35, 506 Vario-35A, 506 Vario-70, 506 Varioanamorphot, 506 Vario Sonnar, 480 Varley, Frederick Henry (1842?–1916), 161, 592 Vectograph, 605 Vector scanning, 630 Ventimiglia, Giovanni, 557 Vergara, 113 Verito, Wollensak, 214 Veriscope, 466, 507 Vermeer, 61 Verständig, Anton, 91 Vertigo, 443 Vetter, Richard, 575 Victor, Alexander Ferdinand, 468, 469 Victor Talking Machine Company, 236, 239, 476, 519, 548, 659, 666 Video assist, 202, 691 Video assist tap, 685, 691 Video conference, 713 Video game, 675, 698, 699 Video Home System (VHS) magnetic tape system, 688, 706, 710 Video projection, 309, 721 Video recorder, 680 Video recording technology, 687 Video tape, 688, 706 Video tape recorder (VTR), 687, 688, 694, 705, 709 Video tap tape recording system, 691 Video village, 691 Video West Camera, 597 Vidicon, 670, 671, 685, 687, 692 Vidor, King, 518 Vidtronics Division, 687 Vienna Academy of Sciences, 47 View-Master, 590 Villard, Henry, 114 Virag, 621 Visiogram, 687 Vision3 Negative Films, 250D, 200T, and 50D, 457, 499 Visite sous-marine du Maine (Divers at Work on the Wreck of the Maine), 239 Vistascope, 576 VistaVision, 217, 336, 400, 442, 443, 505, 506, 520, 522, 545, 555, 559, 561–565, 575, 577, 578, 616, 697, 698 VistaVision camera, 563, 565, 576 Vitacolor, 414 Vitacolor Company, 414 Vitagraph, 156, 172, 174, 176, 183, 285, 293, 295, 298, 409 Vita Home Cinématographe, 469 Vitak, 466 Vitaphone, 106, 111, 130, 227, 231, 235, 242–244, 267, 280–282, 286, 287, 289, 290, 293–303, 307, 308, 311, 313, 315–318, 328, 384, 517, 611 Vitaphone Corporation, 295 Vitaphone disk, 299–301, 314 Vitaphone Studio, 302

794 Vitarama, 531, 532 Vitarama Corporation, 531 Vitascope projector, 120, 132, 135, 142, 153–156, 164, 169, 171, 172, 177, 185, 222, 346, 372, 517, 631 Vitasound, 335, 336 Vittum, Edwin E., 453 Viventoscope, 507 Vivex, 363 Vlahos, Petro, 597, 692, 712 Vocafilm, 318 Vogel, Hermann Wilhelm (1834–1898), 365 Vogel, Joseph, 512 Vogt, Hans (1890–1979), 263, 264, 321, 512 Voigtländer, Peter Wilhelm Friedrich (1812–1878), 65, 209 Volfoni, 729 Volkmann, Alfred, 598, 726 Volta Graphophone Company, 229 Volta Laboratory, 229 von Ardenne, Manfred (1907–1997), 602, 630, 642, 653, 656 von Helmholtz, Hermann, 86, 356, 357, 366 Von Hübl, 366 von Madaler, Ferdinand, 233, 254 Von Madaler, Katherina, 253 von Seidel, Philipp Ludwig, 207, 209 von Siemens,Werner and William, 91, 622 von Stampfer, Simon Ritter (1790 or 1792–1864), 44, 45, 47 von Stampfer’s stroboscope, 44 von Steinhall, Carl Augustus, 165, 210 von Sternberg, Joseph, 266 von Uchatius, Franz F. (1811–1881), 47, 50, 57, 76, 82, 86, 151 von Voigtländer, Friedrich Ritter (1846–1924), 209 W W2CXR, 635 W2XAB, 679 W2XBS, 640 W2XR, 640 W3XK, 635 Wachhorst, Wyn, 105, 125 Waddell, William E., 278, 595 Wagner Festival, 267 Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 604, 717 Wales, Alvis, 580 Wales, Ken, 597 Walgenstein, Thomas Rasmussen (1627–1681), 10, 12 Walker American, 611 Walker, Joseph Bailey (1892–1985), 70, 72, 188, 215, 216 Walker, Ralph, 530, 531 Walker, William Hall, 69, 70 Wallace, William James (Judge), 172, 173 Wall camera, 306 Wall, Edward John (1860–1928), 399, 423, 427 Waller, Frederic, Jr. (1886–1954), 530–532, 534, 535, 538, 541–544, 579 Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer, 532 Wallin, Walter, 555, 573 Wall Manufacturing Company, 278, 306, 535 Walsh, Raoul, 307, 516 Walter, Bruno, 256 Walt Ordway, 712 Walworth, Vivian K., 403, 602, 604 Wanderer of the Wasteland, 428 Wandersleb, Ernst, 210 Wang Fu, 3 Wanlass, Frank M. (1933–2010), 704

Index Wardell, William, 466 Warhol, Andy, 479 Warner Bros., 175, 203, 227, 242, 244, 247, 267, 286, 289, 290, 293–302, 307, 308, 315–318, 322, 329, 332, 335–337, 400, 403, 419, 431, 432, 450, 454, 548, 550, 552, 556, 561, 564, 605, 612, 712, 718, 722–724 Warner Cinerama Theater, 523 Warner, Harry, 293, 296 Warner, Jack L., 517, 550–551, 556, 612 Warnerke, Léon, 70 Warner Pacific, 545 Warner Research Laboratory, 390 Warner, Samuel, 286, 287, 294, 295, 298 Warner Theater, 297, 298 Warnercolor, 442, 454 Warner-Pathé News, 304 Warner-Powrie, 390 Warner-Powrie plate, 390 WarnerScope, 550 WarnerSuperScope, 551 Warrington, Gilbert, 511 Warwick Bioscope, 168 Warwick Trading Co. Ltd., 239, 373, 376, 464, 465, 470 Wash-off relief process, 363 Watkins, Stanley, 300 Wavefront model, 10 Wavelength multiplex visualization system, 729 Wave-siren, 249 Way Down East, 398, 428 Wayne, John, 417, 516 Way Out West, 353 Weaver, Eastman (1894–1971), 409, 426 Webb, Richard C., 680 Weber and Fields, 281 Wedgwood, Thomas (1771–1805), 61 Weigel, Erhard (1625–1699), 7, 24 Weiller, Jean Lazare, 626 Weimer, Paul Kessler, 669, 670, 704 Weiner, Otto, 362 Welles, Orson, 196, 353 Wellman, William, 313, 511 Wells, Leon W., 557 Wente, Edward Christopher (1889–1972), 246, 247, 254, 267, 297, 307, 313, 314, 317, 335 Wente valve, 313 Wenzel, 188 Wertheimer, Max, 52 Wescott, William Burton (1883–1952), 423, 424, 429 West Coast Theaters, 285 Western Electric 394-W, 247 Western Electric Manufacturing Company, 187, 244, 246–248, 254, 255, 257, 265, 267, 269, 277, 280–283, 286–291, 294–297, 299–301, 308, 311–313, 315–317, 319, 321, 322, 327, 328, 331, 335, 511, 545, 549, 553, 654, 666, 728 Western Electric Noiseless Recording, 331 Western Electric optical sound system, 248, 308 Western Television, Inc., 641 Western Union, 246 Westinghouse Electric and Mfg. Company, 108, 246, 260, 262, 266, 267, 289, 299, 311, 312, 477, 633, 642, 645, 648, 653–656, 666, 718 Westrex, 333, 337, 338, 568 Westrex RA-1506 recorder, 537 Wet collodion negative-positive process, 345 Wet-plate collodion, 68 Wetzlar, 563

Index WGY, 311, 634 What Price Glory, 244, 303, 315 Wheatstone, Charles Sir (1802–1875), 75, 78, 153, 237, 589, 590, 592 Wheelwright III, George W., 602, 604 Whewell, William, 9 White, Abraham (Honest Abe), 269, 270 White Christmas, 564 Whitford, Annabelle, 346 White, James Henry, 160, 181 Whitley, Elizabeth, 81 Whitlock, Albert J., 694 Whitman, J.A., 238 Whitney, James, 479 Whitney, Jock, 435, 440 Whitney, John, Jr., 312, 698 Whitney, Willis R., 311, 424 Why, 697 WIBO, 642 Wide Screen (widescreen), 549, 556, 561–565, 573, 575, 576, 578, 696 Widelux, 508 Widescope, 514, 557 Wilart Instrument Company-Wilart, 466 Wilart News Camera, 466 Wilfred, Thomas, 28 Willard, 78, 476 Willat, C.A. (Doc), 395, 425 Willeman, George, 241 William P. Stein Company, 400, 563 Williams, Alan, 597 Williams, Carl, 575 Williamson, 191 Williamson 35 mm contact printer, 475 Willis Forest Dresser, 542 Wilson, E., 648 Windjammer, 542 Windows, 36, 710 Wings, 293, 307, 313, 318, 511 Winter Garden Theater, 316 Wintergarten, 506 Wireless active shuttering eyewear, 729 Wireless telegraphy, 311, 631 With Our King and Queen Through India, 372 With Prizma in Africa, 409 Wohl, J.A., 405, 406 Wohlrab, Hans-Christoph, 266, 267, 552 Wolf-Heide, 446 Wollaston Landscape lens, 208 Wollaston, William Hyde (1766–1828), 208 Wonder drum, 165 Wong, Anna May, 428 Wood, R.W., 249 World 3-D Film Expo, 613 World Exposition, 237 World Film Corporation, 408 Worthington, William, 418 Worth, Lothrop, 608, 612 Wratten & Wainwright, 74, 365, 473 Wratten filter, 359, 365 Wratten, Frederick Charles Luther, 365, 388 Wratten Series No. 2 red safelight, 413 Wray Optical Works, 403 Writing telegraph, 621 Wundertrummel (Miracle tunnel), 89

795 Wurlitzer, 224 Wurlitzer Motion Picture Orchestra (Style H), 224 Wurtzel, Sol, 324 W. Watson & Sons, 463, 519 WX9AO, 642 Wyckoff, Alvin C., 351 Wyckoff Process, 351 X Xenon arc, 186, 187, 443, 580 XL (existing light) system, 494 XL model, 187 XL ZScreen, 726–728, 734 XpandD, 729 Y Yale University, 247, 269, 280 Yates, Herbert John (1880–1966), 413, 414, 417, 557 YCM Lab, 428 Yerkes Manufacturing Company, 224 Yoder, Gordon, 478 Young and Wild, 557 Young, Owen D., 289, 311, 366, 655 Young Sherlock Holmes, 699 Young, Thomas, 207, 356, 357, 359, 363 Y-type, 213 Z Zahn, Johannes (1641–1707), 11, 12, 22, 25, 45, 47, 50, 58, 61, 86, 89, 161 Zanuck, Darryl F., 298, 546 Zeiss anamorphic lens, 556 Zeiss, Carl (1816–1888), 38, 166, 201, 204, 210, 211, 213, 214, 218, 362, 480, 491, 548, 556–558, 602, 605, 606 Zeiss Contax, 213, 606 Zeiss Herotar polarizing filter, 606 Zeiss Ikon Optical Company, 569, 602, 605, 651 Zeiss lens, 479 Zeiss Protar Anistigmat, 210 Zeiss Tessar, 210, 216, 218, 466 Zemeckis, Robert, 725 Zenith Radio Corporation, 666, 669, 681 Zenker, Wilhelm, 362 Zimbalist, Efrem, 298 Zinnemann, Fred, 570 Zoëtrope (life-turning or wheel of life), 45, 55–60, 76–79, 88, 95, 99, 108, 109, 114, 152, 165, 186, 590, 592 Zollinger, Ernesto, 216, 548 Zone, Ray, 81 Zoomar, 211, 216 Zoomar Corporation, 216 Zoom lens, 22, 202, 207, 211, 215, 216, 218, 479, 492, 493, 496, 498 Zoom lens attachment, 188 Zoöpraxiscope, 50, 85–88, 109, 186, 547, 619 Zoptic front-screen projection, 694 ZScreen modulator, 727, 729 ZScreen polarization modulator, 725, 729 Zukor, Adolph, 181, 224, 243, 267, 296, 318, 514, 522, 529, 595 Zworykin, Vladimir Kosmich (Anglicized as Kosma) (1888–1982), 167, 260, 628–630, 635, 642, 643, 645, 648–651, 653–661, 664, 666, 669, 675, 679, 701, 704, 717, 718