1876-1972
To call Lucien Bull a photographic genius would be an understatement! The man not only helped pioneer Chronophotography, he single-handedly perfected it. Though born in Dublin, Ireland to a British father and a French mother, he is most closely associated with his mother's country than any other (despite that he was also awarded an OBE). Bull, however, grew up in Dublin, but made frequent trips to France to stay with relatives there thoughout his childhood. In 1895 he moved to Paris permanently and secured a position with the French scientist/doctor/inventor Étienne-Jules Marey. After Marey's death in 1904, Bull took over as head of the Marey Institute, founded and named for his inventor boss. He also perfected a number of Marey's camera inventions; this included a further development of Marey's famous "gun camera." From this invention, Bull invented his own "spark drum camera" that was a strange type of "motion" picture contraption.
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| The Spark Drum Camera. One can see Bull in action with the camera in the opening photo of this post--what he is filming there is his famous bullet/soap bubble experiment. |
His greatest contribution to the field of film and photography was his perfection of ultra high-speed photographic images for sequence motion. He is famous for his chronophotograph high speed ultra short motion picture Bullet Piercing A Soap Bubble (Balle traversant une bulle de savon) dating from 1904. Though Marey did contribute to the experiment before his sudden death that same year, 85% of the project was Bull's alone. His considerable contribution to the world of motion pictures is a behind-the-scenes kind of affair. If you look, for example, at his page listing on IMDb, he has just the one title linked above (he should have more credits to his name there, as he actually served a "cinematographer" on several of Marey's works dating from the 1890's). Still, recognizing his cinema contributions is important, after all there is no way a minor figure would ever had been made president of France's Institution of Scientific Cinematography, as Bull was in 1948. Some of his important photographic contributions include government work during the first World War that included work in high speed photography, in addition to using an innovative "sound ranging device" to locate gun batteries. His older brother was famed British illustrator René Bull, whose work was no doubt an influence on Monty Python's cartoonist (turned filmmaker) Terry Gilliam.
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| Still of bullet peircing, but not bursting a soap bubble. |
Bull lived a very long life after his retirement. Though he was a life long bachelor with no companion(s) or children, he a had a large circle of friends who describe him right up to the time of his death as a man who loved to have friends for tea, always a man of lively conversation about science and subjects dealing the telescopes that were in development. Lucien Bull died on the 25th of August in 1972--he was 95 years of age. He died in France, but I can find no burial information in any location there, the United Kingdom or Ireland for him.
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| [Source: National Library of Medicine] |
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