Precursors of Film - Early Technological Developments and Developments in Psychology

Early Technological Developments and Developments in Psychology

Shadow shows are known from the earliest recorded times, and the principle that an image is visually retained for a short time after observation has ceased was observed in ancient times.

• c. 3200 BC – An earthen bowl found in Shahr-i Sokhta, Iran, has five images of a goat painted along the sides. This is believed to be an example of early animation.
• c. 500 BC – Mo-Ti, a Chinese philosopher, ponders the phenomenology of inverted light from the outside world beaming through a small hole in the opposite wall in a darkened room.
• c. 360 BC – Plato's allegory of the cave describes a cinema-like experience of an audience watching silhouetted images in a dark space.
• c. 350 BC – Aristotle of Greece tells of watching an image of an eclipse beamed onto the ground through a sieve.
• c. 200 BC – Shadow plays first appear during the Han Dynasty and later gain popularity across Asia.
• c. 180 AD – Ting Huan (丁緩) creates elementary zoetrope in China.
• 6th century- Anthemius of Tralles, a Byzantine mathematician and architect (most famous for his work in the Hagia Sophia) carried out experiments in optics, and used a type of camera obscura.
• 1021 – Alhazen, an Iraqi scientist describes experiments with a camera obscura in his Book of Optics.
• 1515 – Leonardo da Vinci describes a structure that would produce this effect.
• 1544 – Reinerus Gemma-Frisius, a Dutch scientist, illustrates large rooms built for the purpose of viewing eclipses by this means.
• 1588 – Giovanni Battista Della Porta describes a similar technique.
• c. 1610 – Johannes Kepler refers to a construction that utilises this phenomenon as a camera obscura.
• c. 1610 – Della Porta perfected the camera obscura using a convex lens.
• 1671 – Athanasius Kircher projects images painted on glass plates with an oil lamp and a lens, his 'Magic Lantern'.
• 1724 – Johann Heinrich Schulze discovers that certain silver salts, most notably silver chloride and silver nitrate, darken in the presence of light. This discovery was instrumental in the of development of photographs.
• 1740 and 1748, David Hume published Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, arguing for the associations and causes of ideas with and by visual images, forerunners to developments in the language of film.
• 1798 – Étienne-Gaspard Robert begins his revolutionary phantasmagoria shows and develops the "Fantoscope", a magic lantern on wheels.
• 1803 – Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy obtain photographic images but are unable to fix them.
• 1824 – Thaumatrope induction. Peter Mark Roget presents the persistence of vision to the world in his paper Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures. The article is often incorrectly cited as Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects, or On the Persistence of Vision with Regard to Human Motion, and given an incorrect date.
• 1824/1827 – Nicéphore Niépce produces a permanent image on a bitumen-coated pewter plate exposed for eight hours.
• 1826 – John Ayrton Paris markets the Thaumatrope, a card which, when spun, gives the illusion of movement.
• 1831 – Faraday's Law of electromagnetic. Faraday experiments with the visual illusions created by a revolving wheel.
• 1832 – Joseph Plateau: Anorthoscope and Phenakistiscope give the illusion of motion to repeated pictures with small differences on revolving disks. Also Spindle viewers and Flip books.
• 1833 – Simon Stampler develops the Stroboscope, similar to the Phenakistiscope.
• 1834 – William George Horner develops the Zoetrope, a.k.a., the Daedalum, a revolving cylinder which gives the illusion of motion to the pictures inside. In the same year, William Fox Talbot begins experimenting on fixing positive images onto sensitized paper.
• 1839 – Henry Langdon Childe further develops the magic lantern by introducing dissolving views. In the same year, Louis Daguerre demonstrates the Daguerrotype which fixes an image onto a sensitized copper plate. John William Herschel calls his similar fixed images 'photographs'.
• 1841 – Talbot develops the Calotype, which fixes an image with only a brief camera exposure.
• 1846 – The invention of intermittent mechanisms, such as used in sewing machines.
• 1853 – Franz von Uchatius develops the Kinetiscope which projects moving drawings.
• 1855 – Alexander Parkes Develops Parkesine, later developed into celluloid which gets marketed in 1869 by John and Isaiah Hyatt.