Born Today March 9: Leland Stanford

1824-1893

Amasa Leland Stanford was born on the day in Watervliet, New York (the town is now known as Colonie); he was one of eight children.  His father was a well off farmer and several of his brothers went on to become successful, even famous, in their own rights.  He would go on in life to be a general renaissance man: an industrialist, railroad executive, politician, winery owner, and co-founder of Stanford University.  He was also the founder of the Pacific Life insurance company.  He got his start, when he migrated out to California during the Gold Rush there; but instead of getting directly into mining, he set up shop as a merchant and grew his business into a wholesale company.  He served a term as California governor and eventually became the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and later Central Pacific railroad.  He is considered today to have been a robber baron.  As railroad president, he was wont to throw his weight around in the region, and not always to the good of anyone but Stanford and his family.  The reason for his inclusion here is his unique place in the history of earliest cinema.  He owned a huge horse ranch in Santa Clara County in California.  He had interest in horse movement and hired photographer Eadweard Muybridge to set up a series of cameras at the track that he had built at his Palo Alto Stock Farm.  All of his horses were trained to race as trotters, and he was interested in whether it could be proven that horses, at full gallop ever had all four legs off the ground at once.  Muybridge set up a series of cameras inside the track and every few feet, trip wires would set off a different camera.  What resulted was what is known as "series photography."  Using a simple "flip method"--as with animation--the photographs could show movement of the animal and rider.  The result was a film called Sallie Gardner At A Gallop (the horse's name being in the title).  This dates from the year 1878, and was previously (and erroneously) listed as being the very first motion picture. Because it was Stanford's scheme, and he hired Muybridge, he is given a producer credit on the film.  Standford had long suffered from Locomotor Ataxia, which caused him to rely heavily on a cane to walk.  The condition probably, over time, affected his heart muscle and he died of heart failure at the age of 63 on the 21st of June 1893 in Palo Alto; he is buried in the family mausoleum on the Stanford campus.

The exterior of the mausoleum

Interior showing Stanford's tomb

For More:

Wikipedia

PBS

The Birth Of Stanford University

IMDb

Leave Virtual Flowers @ Find A Grave

Born Today February 22: P. J. C. Janssen

1824-1907

French astronomer and motion picture pioneer P. J. C. Janssen was born in Paris on this day in 1824.  His birth name was Pierre Jules César; he was variously known as Pierre Janssen or Jules Janssen during his lifetime.  Due to a childhood accident, he walked with a severe limp.  As a young man he went to work as a bank clerk; but science was his passion, so he enrolled in university to study physics and math, eventually graduating and becoming a professor of physics at an architectural university in Paris.  During his lifetime he discovered and invented a great number of important milestones in physics, astronomy and chemistry--and, inadvertently, moving pictures.  Though the British scientist Lockyer was independently on to many of the same observations at the same time, Janssen is credited with figuring out how to observe "Solar prominences" with a spectroscope without the aide of an eclipse.  Through being an enthusiastic observer of eclipses, he also was the first to observe a gaseous vapor that later proved to be a new element:  helium.  And he invented a device called a "photographic revolver;" the device allowed for 180 photographs to run for one frame per second.  This is technically the first moving picture devise (precursor of the projector).  He used this device to run photography of the transition of Venus in 1874 taken in Japan--this is basically the very first movie.  This makes Janssen the very first film director and cinematographer.  The documentary short is listed in film catalog as Passage de Venus (1874).  Janssen would also appear in two documentary shorts from the 1890's by The Lumiere Brothers.  The Photographical Congress Arrives At Lyon (1895), is one of the early shorts that remains quite well known to this day.  Additionally, Janssen appeared in Discussion de Monsieur Janssen et Monsieur Lagrange (1895).  In 1903 Janssen published the famous work Atlas de photographies solaries, which contained more than 6,000 photographs of the sun.  Janssen died on 23 December 1907 at the age of 83 in Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine, France.  He is buried in the historical Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.  His grave is simply marked "J. Janssen."

For More:

Britannica

Film showing the Photographic Revolver

Wikipedia

IMDb

A Short Bit About Muybridge And The Horse Photography

The very earliest "movies" can be seen in the rise of something of a in-between technological advance in photography and true motion picture cameras:  it's called series photography and it's inventor was one Eadweard Muybridge (who was actually born in UK [Kingston-upon-Thames, England] as Edward Muggeridge.) 

Muybridge after the invention of series photography.

The first, and most famous of these, is the series of horse photographs dating from 1877 (see plate above).  Though photography had been around since the 1820's, the amount of exposure time needed to produce these images was rather encumbering in terms of portability (actually an understatement).  As the the 19th century advanced, so did technologies within the photographic world.  The reduction of exposure time from a full 15 minutes to 1/100 of a second by the 1870's, made photography a more portable and out door affair; however, it was really the change in photographic plates that made what Muybridge would conceive of as possible.  The introduction of gelatin dry plates made outdoor photography a much portable and cheaper affair (the plates before these had been wet silver plates, which didn't travel nearly as well and were much more expensive).  The new advances also improved the quality of outdoor photography especially.  

Another plate showing a series of horse photographs by Muybridge is states of motion, and one stationary photo, with measurements.

Still it took Muybridge some 5 years to work out how to achieve this (not that he was devoting his time during this period to just this venture--he traveled as a hired a photographer, amongst other things during the stretch).  It all started when he was hired in 1872 as a well known photographer by one Leland Stanford (tycoon and, yes, the namesake of the university) to prove that at some point in the stride, or gallop, of a horse, all four hoofs were off the ground at once.  It took until the summer of 1877 to pull this off.  He did so by setting up a string of electrically powered cameras at a racetrack in Sacramento California, pulling wires across the track at each camera so that when the animal ran through the string, the shutter would be tripped.  What he captured more than proved that horses do indeed have all four legs off the ground at times in full gallop; but it also sparked an idea.  By finding a way to arrange the photographs in an electrically controlled flip type machine (a perfection that he would later call a zoopraxiscope), he could actually show the animal and rider in motion.  Well hey presto, the motion picture industry was born.  Inventors like Edison, the Lumiére Brothers and others got their cogs turning independently from each other.  Taking photography to the next level of creating a moving picture which could be viewed without the use of a visible mechanism was the next stop.  Here come the movies.  Below is an embed that shows some of this horse photography in animated action.