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A Movie From Before Movies Were Invented
Alien54 writes "Two astronomers at the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton near San Jose have discovered a set of 147 plates taken of the transit of Venus in 1882. They've assembled them into a Quicktime movie! Think about it. This is a movie from before movies were invented. As a point of comparison, Edison didn't get his films going until the 1890s. This is just around the time when Muybridge was doing his work on the motion of horses and people."
I'm pretty sure there's plates of porn somewhere from the 17'th century. They're always the first ones to use new technology.
Looks like the USPTO need to look at any patents on quicktime again!
Yet more prior art discovered.
A sysadmin for Sky and Telescope just sat down for Easter dinner, and then his beeper goes ....
If, when they took these plates, it occurred to them that sooner or later someone would do this. There were already animation techniques involving revolving stills (the Zoetrope, for instance).
Its a series of photographs assembled into a movie 116 years later. They didn't make a movie of it at the time. Still cool, though.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
640 x 480 pixels (4.0 megabytes)
320 x 240 pixels (1.2 megabytes)
This is just around the time when Muybridge was doing his work on the motion of horses and people.
For those who don't know this reference, it is to Eadweard Muybridge, an American immigrant from Britain who created created the first prototypical movie in the 1870, well before Edison or the Lumiere brothers, by having multiple cameras expose in sequence. He was asked to settle a bet on whether all four of a galloping horse's feet are ever all off the ground at the same time.
Sky&Tele: Hey, uh Mike
SysAdmin: Ya?
Sky&Tele: See, we have this little problem....
SysAdmin: How bad could it possibl...well, damn.
Its a Quicktime clip made 109 years before Quicktime 1.0 was released! Or at least thats as true as it being a movie made prior to movies being invented.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
How about Galielo's Sunspots from 1612. Really, any 2D, time series data can be considered a "movie".
Reanimating the 1882 Transit of Venus
By Anthony Misch
In late 1882, Massachusetts astronomer David Peck Todd traveled to California to photograph the transit of Venus from the summit of Mount Hamilton, where a solar photographic telescope made by the renowned optical firm Alvan Clark & Sons waited among the stacks of bricks and timbers from which Lick Observatory was rising. As the transit unfolded on December 6th, Todd obtained a superb series of plates under perfect skies. His 147 glass negatives were carefully stored in the mountain vault, but as astronomers turned to other techniques for determining the scale of the solar system (see "The Transit of Venus: Tales from the 19th Century," by William Sheehan, Sky & Telescope: May 2004, page 32), the plates lay untouched and were eventually forgotten.
Fast-forward 120 years. Spurred by a reference in one of Todd's letters in Lick's Mary Lea Shane Archives, Bill Sheehan and I found all 147 negatives, still in good condition, at the observatory. To our knowledge, this collection of photos constitutes the most complete surviving record of a historical transit of Venus.
As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography -- the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit of Venus.
Digital imaging technology made reanimating Todd's transit images a comparatively simple undertaking. The result, which premiered at the International Astronomical Union's general assembly in Sydney in July 2003, shows Venus's silhouette flickering strangely as it marches across the Sun's face. It's the shadow-show of an astronomical event that occurred when Queen Victoria sat on the throne of Great Britain and Chester Arthur was president of the United States -- a moving record of an event seen by no one now living, and a preview of what millions will see for the first time on June 8, 2004.
Figures:
http://skyandtelescope.com/mm_images/6469.jpg
Amherst College astronomer David Peck Todd (1855-1939). Courtesy the Mary Lea Shane Archives of Lick Observatory / University of California, Santa Cruz.
http://skyandtelescope.com/mm_images/6465.jpg
The December 6, 1882, transit of Venus was already under way when the Sun rose over Lick Observatory in California and David Peck Todd began photographing the planet's march across the solar disk. Todd's 147 surviving photos, of which these are numbered 11, 88, and 151 (left to right), have been turned into a movie. You can download QuickTime versions in two sizes: 640 x 480 pixels (4.0 megabytes) or 320 x 240 pixels (1.2 megabytes). © 2003 University of California Observatories / Lick Observatory.
Movies:
640x480 (4.0MB)
320x240 (1.2MB)
Not quite prior art, but I remember doodling sequential drawings on the page edges of my textbooks... Does it count as parallel development?
Depends on whether you were doing it in the 19th century.
Eadweard Muybridge had 'films' of walking nude women and trotting horses sorted in 1878 - in fact, he was the guy that helped Leland Stanford win a bet proving that a horse momentarily has all its hooves off the ground when it runs. I vaguely remember an interactive CD-ROM from the early 90's with this stuff on.
Edisons Kinetoscope was demonstrated in 1891 - a good 13 years later. That said, at the time there was a lot of parallel development going on. It's also hard to quantify what exactly cinema was defined as back then. People were coming at it from all sorts of angles - photography, illustration, zoetropes, etc etc.
Actually, for something truly amazing (but slightly offtopic), have a look at Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's photos of Russia at the trun of the 19th century. This guy was a bit before his time. He took 3 still images of his subject using black and white film and red, green and blue filters. Then he'd project all three images onto a screen to show people... colour photographs! The site has some absolutely stunning images. Worth a look.
[Muybridge] was asked to settle a bet on whether all four of a galloping horse's feet are ever all off the ground at the same time.
He did settle the bet.
Yes, all four of a galloping horse's feet are off the ground at the same time -- at the moment when all four hooves are underneath the horse, in their most-inward position.
For more info, see my page of Muybridge trivia and links.
-kgj
-kgj
Here.
here it is..
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320 1.2 meg movie
640 4 meg movie
Enjoy
If you ever visit the Lick Observatory, they have pictures that show how the tiny town of San Jose that existed when the Observatory was built has grown so large. Of course, this causes problems with light pollution. Part of their solution was an agreement with the city in 1980 to use low-pressure sodium lights that the observatory can more easily filter out.
p eration2.html
http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/public/lighting/Coo
Everyone who visits me notices that the lights in San Jose are "different" and "weird;" it took visiting the Observatory to find out why.
By the way, if you want to visit the Lick and look through the telescopes, they have summer tours that I recommend. Not only do you get to look through the telescopes and learn a lot about astronomy and the history of the Observatory, there are amazing (and even romantic) night-time views of the Bay Area. (They normally discourage night-time visits because the car headlights interfere with the telescopes.) There's a lottery for it because it is so popular:
http://www.ucolick.org/public/sumvispro.html
Joey
The stuff really ought to be cataloged and put on display. Some of it is priceless.
Aside from James Licks' body being buried under the base of the 36" telescope, back in the archive storage that have a lot of interesting things from history. Like some of the equipment used for the experiment which established that the speed of light was a constant in a vacuum. The actual seismic records from the San Francisco Earthquake. I've forgotten what else; but those things stand out. It's a huge storage area up there.
Plus they have a copy of UC Berkeley's student records. It's used as a safe place in case of disaster. Also, James Licks' deathbed is there too. And the safe they have is straight from the 1800's.
In case any two-bit crackers are thinking about breaking in and exploring it, forget about it. Security is excellent up there. I busted a clueless group once myself. And the cops they have are real aggressive hard-asses.