Numerical Simulation, An Art of Prediction, Volume 2

5Energies

Cinema was born at the end of the 19th Century; it was innovations in optics, mechanics and chemistry that made possible the development of photosensitive supports and mechanisms that, because of retinal persistence, synthesize movement. Some of the research preceding its invention had an essentially scientific purpose. At that time, the English photographer Eadweard James Muybridge, like the French native Etienne-Jules Marey, was interested in movement. Marey’s pictures show that during a gallop, for example, the horse does not have all four legs in the air! In 1878, Muybridge arranged a series of cameras along a racecourse. Triggered by the horse’s passage, the shots separated the movement (Figure 1.29 in the first volume) then allow an animated sequence to be obtained.

His experience preceded the invention of the American engineer Thomas Edison (1847–1931): in 1891, the kinetograph was the first camera to be used. In France, inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière (1862–1954 and 1864–1948) filed the cinematographer’s patent in 1895 – both a camera and an image projection camera, it was invented before them by Léon Bouly (1872–1932). The Lumière brothers shot a series of films with their camera and offered private screenings. The story of the first showing of the Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat [LUM 85] recounts that the animated image of the train seeming to burst through the screen towards the audience sent them screaming and rushing to the back of the room.

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