New Delhi, December 8 (IANS). Science and Cinema – the story of connecting two different worlds with a single thread, was written on 9 December 1874. This story is very interesting. This was the day when the world was first taking steps towards recording something called a “moving image”, and no one had any idea that this effort would later become the basis of the entire world of films, camera technology and entertainment.
At the time, photographic technology was in its infancy and capturing a transit of Venus was considered almost impossible, but scientists did so using a “photographic revolver” created by French astronomer Pierre Janssen.
This revolver was similar in appearance to the weapon, but instead of bullets, it used photographic plates, which could be exposed one after the other in rapid succession. As Venus passed the Sun on December 9, the instrument captured several consecutive frames—a “frame-by-frame recording” in today’s parlance. What is interesting is that at the time people could not have imagined that these continuously taken images had inadvertently taken the first revolutionary step towards the “motion picture”.
Today experts in film history believe that this incident was not just a scientific achievement, but the roots of cinema were also hidden somewhere here. Had this revolver never been made, the camera’s shutter mechanism, the idea of frame rate, and the storytelling technique of continuous images might have gone in a different direction. It was this early experiment that convinced the world that multiple photographs, taken in rapid succession, could make an event truly “live” in motion—a fundamental principle of cinema.
The thrill of this incident is also that a scientific mission unknowingly sowed the seed of the most influential art form in human history – film. On one hand, scientists were trying to understand how accurate the movements of the planets are, and on the other hand, through this recording technology, stories, emotions, dreams and imaginations were to come alive on the big screen.
–IANS
kr/
