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Etienne Jules Marey
Étienne-Jules Marey was born on March 5, 1830 at Beaune, in the wine-producing district of France. On the advice of his father, a wine merchant, Marey went to Paris to study medicine. He combined a knowledge of medicine with a love of mechanics. This combination proved fruitful, for he invented, a number of scientific devices for recording, physiological movements in animals and human beings otherwise invisible to the eye.
Movement in Light : Aviation
During the 1860s Marey threw himself into the study of flight, first of insects and then birds. His aim was to understand how a wing interacted with the air to cause the animal to move.
He also devised some ingenious apparatus based on his graphical method, such as a corset which allowed a bird to fly around a circular track while recording the movements of its thorax and wings.
Étienne-Jules Marey, c.1880
Marey discovered that the insect's wing described a double ellipse (a 'figure 8') in the space of one revolution. Some years later, chronophotography confirmed that the same was true of the wing of a bird.
In his lectures at the Collège de France, where he taught from 1867 onwards, Marey presented drawings and graphics to illustrate his theories, and demonstrated machines reproducing the flight of the insect and the trajectory of its wings. Any aeronauts in the audience must have been fascinated to see these machines in operation, no doubt feeling that they were now very close to their goal.
At this period, French aviation was in a state of continuous development, with numerous flying machines being constructed and perfected. These included dirigible airships, machines with flapping wings, helicopters, and balloons with wings.
Victor Tatin, Ornithopter, 1875
Yet aviation as we know it was still in a state of limbo, since advocates of the heavier-than-air aeroplane were seen as cranks. However Alphonse Pénaud, a member of the Société de Navigation Aérienne ("Aerial Navigation Society") presided over by Hureau de Villeneuve, remained convinced that human flight would only be possible by means of the aeroplane.
He had identified the problems which had to be solved in order to build the machine of his dreams: the resistance of the air, that of the materials used, and above all the essential need for a lightweight engine. He had foreseen everything that would make the flight of aeroplanes possible, but failed in the application of his theories and finally committed suicide.
Victor Tatin compressed air powered Aeroplane of 1879
Marey was no stranger to the first faltering steps of aviation. He was aware of all the work, followed Pénaud's research, wrote articles for Hureau de Villeneuve's journal L'Aéronaute, and even became vice-president of the Société de Navigation Aérienne in 1874.
Aware that "the most perfect examples of locomotion which man has achieved are in general obtained by methods quite different from those of nature," Marey supported the work of his friend Victor Tatin, whose aim was to construct, not a balloon or a machine imitating the flight of an insect or bird, but a true aeroplane.
He placed the laboratories and grounds of the Station Physiologique at the aeronaut's disposal, and in 1879 Tatin achieved his goal. Through Marey's advice and his own lengthy research and talents as a craftsman, the device which he designed, one of the very earliest aeroplanes, completed a flight around the track of the Station at a speed of eight metres per second.
Victor Tatin aeroplane flying around the track at Chalais-Meudon
Aéroplanes, "Navigation aérienne, appareils plus lourds que l'air", La Nature, 25 October, 1884
After this first success Marey continued to support the pioneers of aviation. He published Le Vol des Oiseaux (The Flight of Birds) in 1890, and presented the work of Clément Ader, a famous aviation pioneer, at the Académie des Sciences in 1898. Finally he turned his attention to aerodynamics. His research in this area included the construction of a smoke machine which helped him to understand "how the air behaves as it provides support to the wing".
Marey therefore made a considerable contribution to one of the great discoveries of his time. But he died too soon to see true aviation, or to see that another of his inventions, medical in its nature, would find use in aircraft (where it is still used today). This was his "investigative drum", whose principle was to be used in the design of manometric pressure-measuring capsules.
Étienne-Jules Marey's 'machine for imitating insect flight'
Early in 1869 Marey constructed a very delicate machine to demonstrate the flight of an insect and the figure-8 shape it produced during its movement. His artificial insect, with a body formed by a drum containing compressed air, could move up, down, and even diagonally.
Étienne-Jules Marey's "insect flight machine"
Watercolour by E Valton, 1869
http://www.expo-marey.com
"A mechanism actuated by an air pump produces alternate raising and lowering of a pair of wings constructed to the same design as those of the insects, formed, that is to say, with a rigid framework to the front and a flexible surface behind, made of rubber supported by thin steel shafts ... the small model which I present to the Académie [des Sciences, on 15 March 1869] develops a tractive force which may be measured by the dynamometer and which represents the raising of a weight of eight to ten grams. ... If the tip of one of the wings of this artificial insect is gilded, we see that all the movements and changes of shape in the flight of the real insect are reproduced in the mechanical apparatus."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Articles from Harper's New Monthly and Scientific American 1869 - 1871 relating to Marey's experiments
The Velocity of Insects' Wings during Flight
Scientific American, New Series
Volume 20, Issue 16, Apr. 17, 1869, pp. 241-256
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu
Flight of Winged Animals
Editor's Scientific Record, Harper's New Monthly magazine
Volume 41, Issue 245, Oct., 1870
Flight of Birds and Insects
Editor's Scientific Record, Harper's New Monthly magazine
Volume 41, Issue 246, Nov., 1870
Velocity of Insects' Wings during Flight
Manufacturer and builder
Volume 3, Issue 1, January 1871
Marey's Apparatus for Recording the Flight of Birds
Editor's Scientific Record, Harper's New Monthly magazine
Volume 43, Issue 255, Aug., 1871
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Étienne-Jules Marey's 'bird in the ring'
The bird on its circular measuring track was fitted with a small corset and carried a small piece of wood on its back, to which was attached an instrument later known as the "air pantographe". This consisted of two rubber capsules mounted on a universal joint, connected to a long rod touching the bird's wing joints.
Étienne-Jules Marey's "air pantographe"
Marey, Étienne-Jules, La Méthode Graphique, 1878
The capsule in contact with the rod transmitted its movements to the second capsule, which in turn transmitted them pneumatically to a recording instrument. Marey's equipment allowed aeronauts to carry out some fundamental experiments:
"The programme of these experiments is easy to grasp. It consists of fastening to the apparatus, in turn, a real bird and a mechanical bird; gathering from each of them the trace of the movements of its wings, the oscillations of its body, and every other phenomenon; comparing the two traces obtained; and finally correcting the schematic apparatus until it precisely imitates the movements of a real bird. Only then shall we be able to supply the imitation bird with its own flight,"
said Marey in 1872. To carry out this plan, Marey placed his equipment at the disposal of Victor Tatin, a trainee engineer and aeronautic enthusiast. After various modifications, Tatin recorded a graph of the wing motion of a flying pigeon, then that of a machine operated by a rubber spring. By the late 1870s, after many experiments, Tatin had perfected a model aircraft powered by compressed air.
Étienne-Jules Marey's 'Aerodynamic studies'
Aesthetically, the climax of Marey's work came between 1899 and 1902. His last great work was the observation and photography of smoke trails, a fascinating spectacle which seemed to give him great visual pleasure. A huge number of glass plate photos were taken in the course of these experiments. The Cinémathèque alone preserves 36 magnificent original glass negatives: shown here are a selection of modern prints, and also some original prints from these.
Marey presented his first photographic results to the Académie des Sciences on 16 July 1900, but his work had begun in 1899 and involved a return to his 1860s studies on the flight of birds. The photographs he showed at the Académie allowed a better understanding of the action of the bird's wing on the air:
"It was important to carry out experiments to show the direction which the small air currents take when they meet the surface of a wing at greater or lesser inclination and presenting a variable curvature ... Produce in a closed space with transparent walls a regular current of air; introduce into this flow parallel and equidistant threads of smoke; place in the path of these threads surfaces of different configuration, over which they will deviate in different ways; brightly illuminate the smoke trails and make instantaneous photographs of the appearance; that was the plan."
The two ingenious designs of smoke machine which Marey created in 1899 and 1901 have unfortunately been lost, but an original photograph showing the more advanced second version survives at the Cinémathèque.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Machine No.2 1901
In 1901, financial support from the United States allowed the construction of a machine with 58 smoke trails, compared with only 20 in the 1899 machine. An electrical oscillating device forming a chronograph was also added to the second design. A camera was placed in front of a box closed by a transparent glass sheet, through which the smoke trails passed in front of a black velvet background. A magnesium flash at the right-hand side of the box provided illumination while instantaneous images were taken of the smoke trails, which Marey noted became very clear in the light of the magnesium flame.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Machine No.2 1901
La Nature, Sept. 7, 1901
The smoke was produced by a burner fuelled with wood shavings and cotton waste, and passed through a series of small lead emission tubes spaced equally across the top of the transparent box. An electric fan at the base of the box drew the smoke trails down vertically from the top of the box, very thin and parallel,
"like the strings of a lyre". "When the fan is switched on, one sees all the threads of smoke fall through the casing to create a white sheet with longitudinal stripes; these threads then assume the appearance of stretched strings like those of a piano."
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Trail
The smoke trails remained distinct for a distance of 20-30cm, then gradually began to merge with the surrounding air. A series of tubes, with cloth filters, removed the smoke and the cloud of powdered magnesium released by the flash. Once the arrangement of fine smoke trails had been achieved, an obstacle could be placed in the middle of them - a thin sheet of mica of infinitely variable shape and dimensions, or a body with a rounded end. The speed of flow could be increased or decreased using a control attached to the fan.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Machine Trails
The room where this strange machine was set up, either at the Station Physiologique or the Institut Marey, was plunged into semi-darkness. As the magnesium flash exploded, a camera set up in front of the glass would capture the smoke trails in "the capricious wanderings which they describe in the places where eddies form." "An important question for aviation is to know how the currents of air behave against three neighbouring and parallel planes, inclined at a given angle." One of Marey's photographs allowed an effective answer to that question.
"The problem is an important one. At a time when aerial locomotion is occupying so many researchers, there is a clear need to understand the behaviour of the air through which are passed bodies of various shapes: balloons, aeroplanes, etc. Even the flight of a bird, if the nature of the wing movements is shown by chronophotography, requires, in order to be understood, that one knows the behaviour of the air which gives the wing its support."
Having studied the movement of humans, animals, and inanimate objects, including the infinitely small, clouds, wind and water, where might Marey turn his keen observation next? But it was now 1902 and, exhausted by illness, Marey was writing less. "Now I want to watch the others work," he observed. He died in 1904.
Further Reading
Les mouvements de l'air étudiés par la chronophotographie
la Nature 7/9/1901
write for a compressed set of the 3 pages [752 kb]
Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904): Inventor of first movie camera
Étienne-Jules Marey was born on March 5, 1830 at Beaune, in the wine-producing district of France. On the advice of his father, a wine merchant, Marey went to Paris to study medicine. He combined a knowledge of medicine with a love of mechanics. This combination proved fruitful, for he invented, a number of scientific devices for recording, physiological movements in animals and human beings otherwise invisible to the eye.
Étienne-Jules Marey, 1850
His first measuring machine named the 'Sphygmograph' counted human pulse beats and recorded them on a revolving smoked glass disc. He thus showed that attention to mechanical detail could produce accurate physiological measurements like pulse beats. The next instrument 'Kymograph' that he developed was for the transmission of animal movements from their site of origin. He devised a small capsule covered with a rubber membrane, from which a small rubber pipe transmitted variations in air measure to the moving needle on the paper recorder of the kymograph.
With this ingenious machine, he measured the wing movements of bees and pigeons, and the leg movements of horses and men. Marey heard of the work of Eadweard Muybridge an English professional photographer: so he invited the latter in 1881 to give a demonstration to the scientists at Paris. Marey immediately saw, from Muybridge's results, the ideal, inertialess transmission and recording technique in photography. Using a rotating photographic glass plate, he introduced his 'photographic gun' which took twelve consecutive pictures per second.
The images, the size of a postage stamp, were arranged round the edge of a revolving circular photographic plate, which was a development of the technique used a decade earlier by the astronomer Pierre-César Jules Janssen to capture the movement of stars. Janssen's apparatus made only 48 images in 72 seconds or 1.5 sec for each image and could hardly produce the illusion of movement. It was the advent of the dry photographic plate in 1880 which made possible Marey's shorter exposures.
Étienne-Jules Marey : Movement in Light : Aviation
During the 1860s Marey threw himself into the study of flight, first of insects and then birds. His aim was to understand how a wing interacted with the air to cause the animal to move.
He also devised some ingenious apparatus based on his graphical method, such as a corset which allowed a bird to fly around a circular track while recording the movements of its thorax and wings.
Étienne-Jules Marey, c.1880
Marey discovered that the insect's wing described a double ellipse (a 'figure 8') in the space of one revolution. Some years later, chronophotography confirmed that the same was true of the wing of a bird.
In his lectures at the Collège de France, where he taught from 1867 onwards, Marey presented drawings and graphics to illustrate his theories, and demonstrated machines reproducing the flight of the insect and the trajectory of its wings. Any aeronauts in the audience must have been fascinated to see these machines in operation, no doubt feeling that they were now very close to their goal.
At this period, French aviation was in a state of continuous development, with numerous flying machines being constructed and perfected. These included dirigible airships, machines with flapping wings, helicopters, and balloons with wings.
Victor Tatin, Ornithopter, 1875
Yet aviation as we know it was still in a state of limbo, since advocates of the heavier-than-air aeroplane were seen as cranks. However Alphonse Pénaud, a member of the Société de Navigation Aérienne ("Aerial Navigation Society") presided over by Hureau de Villeneuve, remained convinced that human flight would only be possible by means of the aeroplane.
He had identified the problems which had to be solved in order to build the machine of his dreams: the resistance of the air, that of the materials used, and above all the essential need for a lightweight engine. He had foreseen everything that would make the flight of aeroplanes possible, but failed in the application of his theories and finally committed suicide.
Victor Tatin compressed air powered Aeroplane of 1879
Marey was no stranger to the first faltering steps of aviation. He was aware of all the work, followed Pénaud's research, wrote articles for Hureau de Villeneuve's journal L'Aéronaute, and even became vice-president of the Société de Navigation Aérienne in 1874.
Aware that "the most perfect examples of locomotion which man has achieved are in general obtained by methods quite different from those of nature," Marey supported the work of his friend Victor Tatin, whose aim was to construct, not a balloon or a machine imitating the flight of an insect or bird, but a true aeroplane.
He placed the laboratories and grounds of the Station Physiologique at the aeronaut's disposal, and in 1879 Tatin achieved his goal. Through Marey's advice and his own lengthy research and talents as a craftsman, the device which he designed, one of the very earliest aeroplanes, completed a flight around the track of the Station at a speed of eight metres per second.
Victor Tatin aeroplane flying around the track at Chalais-Meudon
Aéroplanes, "Navigation aérienne, appareils plus lourds que l'air", La Nature, 25 October, 1884
After this first success Marey continued to support the pioneers of aviation. He published Le Vol des Oiseaux (The Flight of Birds) in 1890, and presented the work of Clément Ader, a famous aviation pioneer, at the Académie des Sciences in 1898. Finally he turned his attention to aerodynamics. His research in this area included the construction of a smoke machine which helped him to understand "how the air behaves as it provides support to the wing".
Marey therefore made a considerable contribution to one of the great discoveries of his time. But he died too soon to see true aviation, or to see that another of his inventions, medical in its nature, would find use in aircraft (where it is still used today). This was his "investigative drum", whose principle was to be used in the design of manometric pressure-measuring capsules.
Further Reading
Étienne-Jules Marey. Physiologie du Movement. Le Vol des Oiseaux. Paris: G. Masson, 1890. 8vo., xvi, 394 pp., 1 photographic plate and 164 illustrations in the text.
Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. 4to., xx, 450 pp., 184 b&w plates from photographs, drawings, etc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Étienne-Jules Marey's 'machine for imitating insect flight'
http://www.expo-marey.com
Early in 1869 Marey constructed a very delicate machine to demonstrate the flight of an insect and the figure-8 shape it produced during its movement. His artificial insect, with a body formed by a drum containing compressed air, could move up, down, and even diagonally.
Étienne-Jules Marey's "insect flight machine"
Watercolour by E Valton, 1869
"A mechanism actuated by an air pump produces alternate raising and lowering of a pair of wings constructed to the same design as those of the insects, formed, that is to say, with a rigid framework to the front and a flexible surface behind, made of rubber supported by thin steel shafts ... the small model which I present to the Académie [des Sciences, on 15 March 1869] develops a tractive force which may be measured by the dynamometer and which represents the raising of a weight of eight to ten grams. ... If the tip of one of the wings of this artificial insect is gilded, we see that all the movements and changes of shape in the flight of the real insect are reproduced in the mechanical apparatus."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Articles from Harper's New Monthly and Scientific American 1869 - 1871 relating to Marey's experiments
Sourced from the Making of America Project at Cornell University
The Velocity of Insects' Wings during Flight
Scientific American, New Series
Volume 20, Issue 16, Apr. 17, 1869, pp. 241-256
Flight of Winged Animals
Editor's Scientific Record, Harper's New Monthly magazine
Volume 41, Issue 245, Oct., 1870
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu
Flight of Birds and Insects
Editor's Scientific Record, Harper's New Monthly magazine
Volume 41, Issue 246, Nov., 1870
Velocity of Insects' Wings during Flight
Manufacturer and builder
Volume 3, Issue 1, January 1871
Marey's Apparatus for Recording the Flight of Birds
Editor's Scientific Record, Harper's New Monthly magazine
Volume 43, Issue 255, Aug., 1871
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Étienne-Jules Marey's 'bird in the ring'
The bird on its circular measuring track was fitted with a small corset and carried a small piece of wood on its back, to which was attached an instrument later known as the "air pantographe". This consisted of two rubber capsules mounted on a universal joint, connected to a long rod touching the bird's wing joints.
Étienne-Jules Marey's "air pantographe"
Marey, Étienne-Jules, La Méthode Graphique, 1878
http://www.expo-marey.com
The capsule in contact with the rod transmitted its movements to the second capsule, which in turn transmitted them pneumatically to a recording instrument. Marey's equipment allowed aeronauts to carry out some fundamental experiments:
"The programme of these experiments is easy to grasp. It consists of fastening to the apparatus, in turn, a real bird and a mechanical bird; gathering from each of them the trace of the movements of its wings, the oscillations of its body, and every other phenomenon; comparing the two traces obtained; and finally correcting the schematic apparatus until it precisely imitates the movements of a real bird. Only then shall we be able to supply the imitation bird with its own flight,"
said Marey in 1872. To carry out this plan, Marey placed his equipment at the disposal of Victor Tatin, a trainee engineer and aeronautic enthusiast. After various modifications, Tatin recorded a graph of the wing motion of a flying pigeon, then that of a machine operated by a rubber spring. By the late 1870s, after many experiments, Tatin had perfected a model aircraft powered by compressed air.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Étienne-Jules Marey's 'Aerodynamic studies'
http://www.expo-marey.com
Aesthetically, the climax of Marey's work came between 1899 and 1902. His last great work was the observation and photography of smoke trails, a fascinating spectacle which seemed to give him great visual pleasure. A huge number of glass plate photos were taken in the course of these experiments. The Cinémathèque alone preserves 36 magnificent original glass negatives: shown here are a selection of modern prints, and also some original prints from these.
Marey presented his first photographic results to the Académie des Sciences on 16 July 1900, but his work had begun in 1899 and involved a return to his 1860s studies on the flight of birds. The photographs he showed at the Académie allowed a better understanding of the action of the bird's wing on the air:
"It was important to carry out experiments to show the direction which the small air currents take when they meet the surface of a wing at greater or lesser inclination and presenting a variable curvature ... Produce in a closed space with transparent walls a regular current of air; introduce into this flow parallel and equidistant threads of smoke; place in the path of these threads surfaces of different configuration, over which they will deviate in different ways; brightly illuminate the smoke trails and make instantaneous photographs of the appearance; that was the plan."
The two ingenious designs of smoke machine which Marey created in 1899 and 1901 have unfortunately been lost, but an original photograph showing the more advanced second version survives at the Cinémathèque.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Machine No.2 1901
http://www.expo-marey.com
In 1901, financial support from the United States allowed the construction of a machine with 58 smoke trails, compared with only 20 in the 1899 machine. An electrical oscillating device forming a chronograph was also added to the second design. A camera was placed in front of a box closed by a transparent glass sheet, through which the smoke trails passed in front of a black velvet background. A magnesium flash at the right-hand side of the box provided illumination while instantaneous images were taken of the smoke trails, which Marey noted became very clear in the light of the magnesium flame.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Machine No.2 1901
La Nature, Sept. 7, 1901
The smoke was produced by a burner fuelled with wood shavings and cotton waste, and passed through a series of small lead emission tubes spaced equally across the top of the transparent box. An electric fan at the base of the box drew the smoke trails down vertically from the top of the box, very thin and parallel,
"like the strings of a lyre". "When the fan is switched on, one sees all the threads of smoke fall through the casing to create a white sheet with longitudinal stripes; these threads then assume the appearance of stretched strings like those of a piano."
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Trail
The smoke trails remained distinct for a distance of 20-30cm, then gradually began to merge with the surrounding air. A series of tubes, with cloth filters, removed the smoke and the cloud of powdered magnesium released by the flash. Once the arrangement of fine smoke trails had been achieved, an obstacle could be placed in the middle of them - a thin sheet of mica of infinitely variable shape and dimensions, or a body with a rounded end. The speed of flow could be increased or decreased using a control attached to the fan.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Smoke Machine Trails
The room where this strange machine was set up, either at the Station Physiologique or the Institut Marey, was plunged into semi-darkness. As the magnesium flash exploded, a camera set up in front of the glass would capture the smoke trails in "the capricious wanderings which they describe in the places where eddies form." "An important question for aviation is to know how the currents of air behave against three neighbouring and parallel planes, inclined at a given angle." One of Marey's photographs allowed an effective answer to that question.
"The problem is an important one. At a time when aerial locomotion is occupying so many researchers, there is a clear need to understand the behaviour of the air through which are passed bodies of various shapes: balloons, aeroplanes, etc. Even the flight of a bird, if the nature of the wing movements is shown by chronophotography, requires, in order to be understood, that one knows the behaviour of the air which gives the wing its support."
Having studied the movement of humans, animals, and inanimate objects, including the infinitely small, clouds, wind and water, where might Marey turn his keen observation next? But it was now 1902 and, exhausted by illness, Marey was writing less. "Now I want to watch the others work," he observed. He died in 1904.
Further Reading
Les mouvements de l'air étudiés par la chronophotographie
la Nature 7/9/1901
Étienne-Jules Marey, 1850
His first measuring machine named the 'Sphygmograph' counted human pulse beats and recorded them on a revolving smoked glass disc. He thus showed that attention to mechanical detail could produce accurate physiological measurements like pulse beats. The next instrument 'Kymograph' that he developed was for the transmission of animal movements from their site of origin. He devised a small capsule covered with a rubber membrane, from which a small rubber pipe transmitted variations in air measure to the moving needle on the paper recorder of the kymograph.
With this ingenious machine, he measured the wing movements of bees and pigeons, and the leg movements of horses and men. Marey heard of the work of Eadweard Muybridge an English professional photographer: so he invited the latter in 1881 to give a demonstration to the scientists at Paris. Marey immediately saw, from Muybridge's results, the ideal, inertialess transmission and recording technique in photography. Using a rotating photographic glass plate, he introduced his 'photographic gun' which took twelve consecutive pictures per second.
The images, the size of a postage stamp, were arranged round the edge of a revolving circular photographic plate, which was a development of the technique used a decade earlier by the astronomer Pierre-César Jules Janssen to capture the movement of stars. Janssen's apparatus made only 48 images in 72 seconds or 1.5 sec for each image and could hardly produce the illusion of movement. It was the advent of the dry photographic plate in 1880 which made possible Marey's shorter exposures.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Rotating Disk Camera, 1883
The above camera consists of a rotating disk shutter and a circular plate that turns uniformly. The construction of this camera is suggested by the astronomer Pierre-César Jules Janssen. Only one image remains and is of Janssen with his head wrapped in a turban, smoking a cigarette on January 1, 1884.
Even with the short exposure time given by the rotating disk, the images lacked clarity. According to Marey only pictures taken at long intervals would be successful with this camera.
The next innovation which enabled accurate scientific study of movement was his final solution and led to the first modern movie camera. It employed a silver bromide emulsion on a paper ribbon, which was brought intermittently to rest behind a lens and obscured by a rotating shutter while moving forward for the next exposure.With the gelatin-based film that George Eastman introduced in 1885, Marey obtained 60 images per second each 9 cm x 9 cm. These were truly the first modern cinematography films.
With the above camera, Marey not only recorded a wide variety of animal and human movements but laid the foundations for all subsequent cinematography. He used high speed technique to slow down rapid movements and invented the reverse-technique, time- lapse, to speed up slow movements. Marey acknowledged that his innovations were the practical extension of the inventions of Janssen (1824-1907) and Muybridge (1830-1904) to meet the split-second accuracy which they sought.
Marey, Étienne-Jules, La Méthode Graphique, 1878
The capsule in contact with the rod transmitted its movements to the second capsule, which in turn transmitted them pneumatically to a recording instrument. Marey's equipment allowed aeronauts to carry out some fundamental experiments:
"The programme of these experiments is easy to grasp. It consists of fastening to the apparatus, in turn, a real bird and a mechanical bird; gathering from each of them the trace of the movements of its wings, the oscillations of its body, and every other phenomenon; comparing the two traces obtained; and finally correcting the schematic apparatus until it precisely imitates the movements of a real bird. Only then shall we be able to supply the imitation bird with its own flight,"
said Marey in 1872. To carry out this plan, Marey placed his equipment at the disposal of Victor Tatin, a trainee engineer and aeronautic enthusiast. After various modifications, Tatin recorded a graph of the wing motion of a flying pigeon, then that of a machine operated by a rubber spring. By the late 1870s, after many experiments, Tatin had perfected a model aircraft powered by compressed air.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Étienne-Jules Marey's 'Aerodynamic studies'
Aesthetically, the climax of Marey's work came between 1899 and 1902. His last great work was the observation and photography of smoke trails, a fascinating spectacle which seemed to give him great visual pleasure. A huge number of glass plate photos were taken in the course of these experiments. The Cinémathèque alone preserves 36 magnificent original glass negatives: shown here are a selection of modern prints, and also some original prints from these.
Marey presented his first photographic results to the Académie des Sciences on 16 July 1900, but his work had begun in 1899 and involved a return to his 1860s studies on the flight of birds. The photographs he showed at the Académie allowed a better understanding of the action of the bird's wing on the air:
"It was important to carry out experiments to show the direction which the small air currents take when they meet the surface of a wing at greater or lesser inclination and presenting a variable curvature ... Produce in a closed space with transparent walls a regular current of air; introduce into this flow parallel and equidistant threads of smoke; place in the path of these threads surfaces of different configuration, over which they will deviate in different ways; brightly illuminate the smoke trails and make instantaneous photographs of the appearance; that was the plan."
The two ingenious designs of smoke machine which Marey created in 1899 and 1901 have unfortunately been lost, but an original photograph showing the more advanced second version survives at the Cinémathèque.
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