4 ms·

Louis Le Prince

61 points by samwillis 4y ago

Animats 4y ago
That belongs to the family of pre-moving-picture camera devices, along with the zoetrope, praxinoscope, Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, and the Theater Optique. None of these had anything like a usable film transport mechanism. Edison made the first film transport mechanism with intermittent motion, a synchronized shutter, and continuous film with sprocket holes.[1] Almost all later movie cameras and projectors work that way. (Yes, there's an approach with a rotating prism and continually moving film. Some of the pre-Edison cameras worked that way. That's sometimes used for very high frame rate cameras, in the thousands of FPS range.) [1] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/0589168 https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
- contravariant 4y ago
  You seem to be confusing cameras with projectors. What's described here is a single lens device that could successfully capture images in quick succession, if that doesn't count as a video camera i don't know what does.
psychphysic 4y ago
Very interesting person and story. I suspect he just ditched his life tired of trying to make the world see his device as worthwhile. I first encountered it with a BuzzFeed Unsolved video of all things[0]. I think that shows stopped and Shane and Ryan have their own unrelated channel but it was an excellent series. They had that Saturday morning presenter chemistry down pat but with adult content. [0] https://youtu.be/ill2cgCyTUc https://youtu.be/ill2cgCyTUc
comice 4y ago
As terrible as youtube can be (I currently hear it autoplaying some unwanted next video on some other tab I can't find) I love how we've gone from Le Prince recording a video on a roll of paper in 1888 to being able to watch that same video almost anywhere in the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAiYFEHI9o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAiYFEHI9o8
- vhcr 4y ago
  You can turn off autoplay in your browser.
  - gumby 4y ago
    I doesn't seem sticky for me although perhaps it's because I don't have an account.
  - comice 4y ago
    I have autoplay of videos turned off. but I played a video, changed tab, the video ended and youtube went on to play another unrequested video, carefully selected to make me watch more ads.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  makes me wonder if we have early radio transmissions too
  - wizardforhire 4y ago
    We might… I can imagine scenario where we find historic broadcasts being reflected back to us via astronomical bodies, but given the already faint signal its a long shot at best.
    - sbaiddn 4y ago
      Radio signals attenuate eith r^2 and eventually drop bellow of the background cosmic noise.
  - Bayart 4y ago
    By now it's probably just cosmic background noise.
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      I meant some old experimentation records. Like Bose making radiowave blips through his devices and someone capturing it on wax disc.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> He has been credited as the "Father of Cinematography" but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing at least in part to the great secrecy surrounding it. Maybe someone with more historical knowledge can correct me but I was a little surprised to read how little influence Robert Goddard had on modern rocketry — at least from reading Wiley Ley's "Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel" (1957). Of course Ley can be accused of bias since he was (from Wikipedia) "one of the first members of Germany's amateur rocket group, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt". At the same time, growing up in the U.S., I would not be surprised if a patriotic bias would also lead to over-representing our own Robert Goddard in our history books. I can't deny the contrast between the secrecy of Goddard's work in the U.S. when compared to the openness and sharing of the amateur rocket group in Germany. Goddard seemed unable to develop a reliable means to supply the fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber while the German rocket group brought all their shared ideas and abilities to bear on creating, at last, the reaction-powered centrifugal pump that made all the difference in the world. It always struck me as a kind of loose analogy to closed vs. open source. At the same time, the analogy falls down with regard to cinematography as Edison was not known as an open collaborator and yet he "won". Also, perhaps Goddard was cursed as well to have been born just a bit too early (he died the day after the bomb was dropped on Nakasaki, just as WWII was ending, too soon to see the fruits of what the Allies would bring back from Peenemünde).
- mandevil 4y ago
  Goddard was obsessed with secrecy: he was convinced that everyone on the planet was trying to steal his ideas. That meant that he only worked with a few workmen (most of whom were related to his wife) who he trusted, he gave them the plans for one part at a time, they would build that one part and then return plan and part to him. He did all the designs himself and did all the final assembly himself- only he knew how the parts fit together. This meant that, even given that he was a brilliant dude (in addition to rockets he did some key research in the area of vacuum tubes- so he was working on computers and rockets!), he ran into two problems he simply wasn't able to solve: building a guidance system capable of controlling the rocket as winds etc. pushed on it, and building an engine that was strong and light enough to do what he wanted. That was why his best rocket got only about 9 miles high, rather than the 50 he was trying to reach. von Braun (and his VfR team) ran into exactly the same two problems- they were damn hard problems- but because WvB was a gifted team leader he went out and got others to solve the problems for him. He got expert metallurgists to design an engine, and electronics engineers to solve those problems for him. He understood how to build teams- for example, he built the most powerful supersonic wind tunnel in the world, even though the V2 was already designed before the wind tunnel was complete. But he knew that offering the chance to work with the best wind tunnel in the world would ensure that the best aerodynamics engineers would want to work with him, and they would solve his design for him, even before the actual tunnel was complete. That was why WvB built rockets that worked, while Goddard didn't, and why WvB had such a larger influence on others than Goddard. [1] Of course, team work can have downsides- sometimes you are on a team with nasty evil people. That's why Werner von Braun ended up a Sturmmbanfuehrer in the SS, because he was working for the Nazi's, and used concentration camp slave labor that was being worked to death to build his rockets. (It is estimated that more people died in Camp Dora being forced to build the V2- roughly 10,000- than from the rockets falling on them- roughly 7,000.) [1]: At one point some debris from a crashed V2 were shown to Goddard, and he jumped to the conclusion that fit his priors about everyone trying to steal from him: the German rocket used control vanes like he did, therefore they must have stolen it from him. The best English language expert on von Braun and Goddard, Michael Neufeld, does not believe that any such thing happened- the German team documented their work enough that it's pretty clear where their ideas came from, and it seems unlikely that Goddard allowed enough information to leak out. But that was where Goddard's mind naturally went- any sophisticated rocket idea must have been stolen from him.

61 points by samwillis 4y ago

That belongs to the family of pre-moving-picture camera devices, along with the zoetrope, praxinoscope, Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, and the Theater Optique. None of these had anything like a usable film transport mechanism. Edison made the first film transport mechanism with intermittent motion, a synchronized shutter, and continuous film with sprocket holes.[1] Almost all later movie cameras and projectors work that way. (Yes, there's an approach with a rotating prism and continually moving film. Some of the pre-Edison cameras worked that way. That's sometimes used for very high frame rate cameras, in the thousands of FPS range.) [1] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/0589168 https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

contravariant 4y ago
You seem to be confusing cameras with projectors. What's described here is a single lens device that could successfully capture images in quick succession, if that doesn't count as a video camera i don't know what does.

psychphysic 4y ago

Very interesting person and story. I suspect he just ditched his life tired of trying to make the world see his device as worthwhile. I first encountered it with a BuzzFeed Unsolved video of all things[0]. I think that shows stopped and Shane and Ryan have their own unrelated channel but it was an excellent series. They had that Saturday morning presenter chemistry down pat but with adult content. [0] https://youtu.be/ill2cgCyTUc https://youtu.be/ill2cgCyTUc

comice 4y ago

As terrible as youtube can be (I currently hear it autoplaying some unwanted next video on some other tab I can't find) I love how we've gone from Le Prince recording a video on a roll of paper in 1888 to being able to watch that same video almost anywhere in the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAiYFEHI9o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAiYFEHI9o8

vhcr 4y ago
You can turn off autoplay in your browser.
- gumby 4y ago
  I doesn't seem sticky for me although perhaps it's because I don't have an account.
- comice 4y ago
  I have autoplay of videos turned off. but I played a video, changed tab, the video ended and youtube went on to play another unrequested video, carefully selected to make me watch more ads.
agumonkey 4y ago
makes me wonder if we have early radio transmissions too
- wizardforhire 4y ago
  We might… I can imagine scenario where we find historic broadcasts being reflected back to us via astronomical bodies, but given the already faint signal its a long shot at best.
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    Radio signals attenuate eith r^2 and eventually drop bellow of the background cosmic noise.
- Bayart 4y ago
  By now it's probably just cosmic background noise.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    I meant some old experimentation records. Like Bose making radiowave blips through his devices and someone capturing it on wax disc.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

> He has been credited as the "Father of Cinematography" but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing at least in part to the great secrecy surrounding it. Maybe someone with more historical knowledge can correct me but I was a little surprised to read how little influence Robert Goddard had on modern rocketry — at least from reading Wiley Ley's "Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel" (1957). Of course Ley can be accused of bias since he was (from Wikipedia) "one of the first members of Germany's amateur rocket group, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt". At the same time, growing up in the U.S., I would not be surprised if a patriotic bias would also lead to over-representing our own Robert Goddard in our history books. I can't deny the contrast between the secrecy of Goddard's work in the U.S. when compared to the openness and sharing of the amateur rocket group in Germany. Goddard seemed unable to develop a reliable means to supply the fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber while the German rocket group brought all their shared ideas and abilities to bear on creating, at last, the reaction-powered centrifugal pump that made all the difference in the world. It always struck me as a kind of loose analogy to closed vs. open source. At the same time, the analogy falls down with regard to cinematography as Edison was not known as an open collaborator and yet he "won". Also, perhaps Goddard was cursed as well to have been born just a bit too early (he died the day after the bomb was dropped on Nakasaki, just as WWII was ending, too soon to see the fruits of what the Allies would bring back from Peenemünde).

mandevil 4y ago
Goddard was obsessed with secrecy: he was convinced that everyone on the planet was trying to steal his ideas. That meant that he only worked with a few workmen (most of whom were related to his wife) who he trusted, he gave them the plans for one part at a time, they would build that one part and then return plan and part to him. He did all the designs himself and did all the final assembly himself- only he knew how the parts fit together. This meant that, even given that he was a brilliant dude (in addition to rockets he did some key research in the area of vacuum tubes- so he was working on computers and rockets!), he ran into two problems he simply wasn't able to solve: building a guidance system capable of controlling the rocket as winds etc. pushed on it, and building an engine that was strong and light enough to do what he wanted. That was why his best rocket got only about 9 miles high, rather than the 50 he was trying to reach. von Braun (and his VfR team) ran into exactly the same two problems- they were damn hard problems- but because WvB was a gifted team leader he went out and got others to solve the problems for him. He got expert metallurgists to design an engine, and electronics engineers to solve those problems for him. He understood how to build teams- for example, he built the most powerful supersonic wind tunnel in the world, even though the V2 was already designed before the wind tunnel was complete. But he knew that offering the chance to work with the best wind tunnel in the world would ensure that the best aerodynamics engineers would want to work with him, and they would solve his design for him, even before the actual tunnel was complete. That was why WvB built rockets that worked, while Goddard didn't, and why WvB had such a larger influence on others than Goddard. [1] Of course, team work can have downsides- sometimes you are on a team with nasty evil people. That's why Werner von Braun ended up a Sturmmbanfuehrer in the SS, because he was working for the Nazi's, and used concentration camp slave labor that was being worked to death to build his rockets. (It is estimated that more people died in Camp Dora being forced to build the V2- roughly 10,000- than from the rockets falling on them- roughly 7,000.) [1]: At one point some debris from a crashed V2 were shown to Goddard, and he jumped to the conclusion that fit his priors about everyone trying to steal from him: the German rocket used control vanes like he did, therefore they must have stolen it from him. The best English language expert on von Braun and Goddard, Michael Neufeld, does not believe that any such thing happened- the German team documented their work enough that it's pretty clear where their ideas came from, and it seems unlikely that Goddard allowed enough information to leak out. But that was where Goddard's mind naturally went- any sophisticated rocket idea must have been stolen from him.