Abstract
PROF. E. J. MAREY has lately published in the pages of our contemporary, La Nature, an article on a “photographic gun,” the illustrations to which, with a somewhat shortened account of the process, we are enabled, through the courtesy of the editor of La Nature, to present to our readers. M. Marey's researches on animal locomotion are well known; his experiments carried on by the graphic method were productive of most valuable results, and they corrected and explained many debated points in animal mechanics; but having seen some of the results obtained by Mr. Muybridge, at San Francisco, with photographic pictures taken during an exposure of the 1–500th of a second, he was very desirous to have the same process adapted, so as to admit of its being applied to the taking of birds flying. In September, 1881, on a visit of Mr. Muybridge to Paris, he brought with him some photographs of birds taken on the wing, but these unlike the invaluable series taken by the same gentleman of horses and men, were not the representation of a series of continuous attitudes, but rather represented the bird in the position it happened to be in at a moment of time; whereas, to explain the fall and rise of the wings and the positions of the body, it was, above all things, important to have a series of rapid photographs taken of the same bird over a period during which the whole mechanism was in action, so as to allow of the movements to be afterwards studied at leisure. After deliberating over this subject during the last winter, at last the idea of a photographic gun occurred to him; but the immense quickness with which the movements should succeed one another, in order to bring a series of sensitive surfaces across the lens, at first presented great difficulties in the constructing of the machine. It was necessary to have images taken successively ten or twelve times in one second, in order to succeed in obtaining the various positions of the wings of a bird at each revolution. As the result of a good deal of thought and labour, an apparatus was constructed about the size of a sporting-piece (Fig 1), which would take twelve images, in one second, of an object on which the piece was continuously sighted. The time of exposure of each image was about 1–720th of a second.
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Instantaneous Photography of Birds in Flight . Nature 26, 84–86 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/026084a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/026084a0
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