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Space Science

A Movie From Before Movies Were Invented 161

Posted by CmdrTaco from the break-out-the-huey-lewis dept.
Alien54 writes "Two astronomers at the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton near San Jose have discovered a set of 147 plates taken of the transit of Venus in 1882. They've assembled them into a Quicktime movie! Think about it. This is a movie from before movies were invented. As a point of comparison, Edison didn't get his films going until the 1890s. This is just around the time when Muybridge was doing his work on the motion of horses and people."
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A Movie From Before Movies Were Invented More

A Movie From Before Movies Were Invented

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  • Yeah, but (Score:5, Funny)

    by jabbadabbadoo ( 599681 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:09AM (#8830055)
    I'm pretty sure there's plates of porn somewhere from the 17'th century. They're always the first ones to use new technology.

    • Re:Yeah, but (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AdamInParadise ( 257888 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:41AM (#8830195) Homepage
      Porn was found in the remains of Pompei. I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a sample of Egyptian porn (being 2000BC).

      Now does anyone have an example of Neoholitic porn? Goddess of fertility doesn't count.
      • There are statuettes from the bronze age that experts are sure were porn.

        • Re:Yeah, but (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Heh. There are irish statues from the neolithic (stone age farming period) that experts _say_ their usual "must have been of religious significance" - but are pretty blatantly stone age porn...
      • I'm sure there was some porn cave paintings.

      • Re:Yeah, but (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Psykosys ( 667390 )
        There are many different theories about the Venus statues - they are not necessarily all portrayals of the "fertility goddess", and it has often been suggested that some of the statues, with their exagerrated breasts + genitals, were indeed used in the same way that porn is today.
      • I don't know that neolithic porn was neccessary because equal rights weren't a terribly contemporary idea back then.

        I figure the guy could just demand the gal strip, and if she refused he just cracked her over the head with something heavy and did it for her.
        • and if she refused he just cracked her over the head

          Before there were all the social taboos brought about by organized religion, women were often happy to have sex. Check out the history of the Tahitians, for example. Biologically speaking, boys and girls like to get naked together and fool around. It's only church opression that makes us think of it as something men need to beg for and women should avoid (or be labled a whore).

          Cheers.
          • Not that I completely object to the idea of wanton sex... mmmm.... what? Oh yeah. Anyway, microbes are very easily transferred as a result of sex, so the church's stance -- like those of not eating pork, things that were "unclean", etc. -- actually had societal benefits.

            In modern times, you need look no further than the rampant AIDS epedimic in Africa to see where promiscuity can lead a society.
            • Fair enough -- though I don't think that was even understood in the old days, so the church wasn't doing it for our health.

              On the flip side, I think that a more open attitude towards sex (and sexual discussion) would benefit our society as far as disease and unwanted pregnancy is concerned. Fact is we _are_ promiscuous (an estimated 80% infidelity rate in marriage [2-in-2-1.co.uk], for example) but we just lie about it.

              Personally, I would say that the problem in Africa is poverty and lack of education, not promiscuity.

              C
              • > Personally, I would say that the problem in Africa is poverty and lack of education, not promiscuity.

                Before you can solve a problem you have to know where the problem is. "Lack of $$$ & lack of knowledge" != "gotta fuck like goddamned rabbits."

                The problem is that they are constantly screwing multiple people, and that is the ONLY problem. The only reason to blame it on something else is because you are uncomfortable discussing the real cause.

                If they weren't promiscuous, AIDS would not be spread
                • People everyone fuck like rabbits. I know it's hard to believe for us slashdot folks, but it's true ;)

                  As I replied to an other post: promiscuity in America has gone up in the past two decades, but HIV transmission has gone down. Look up some numbers on that. You will never stop people from fucking because it is probably the most base human urge after hunger. It's amazing the risks people will take to have sex. But if you educate them and offer them condoms, you can get most of them to use them.

                  So I s
      • "Now does anyone have an example of Neoholitic porn?"

        Here ya go! [goddess-gallery.com]
      • Compare:

        ancient artifact [ksu.edu]
        modern smut [dacahard.com]

        Coincidence?

  • prior art! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neophytus ( 642863 ) * on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:11AM (#8830060)
    Looks like the USPTO need to look at any patents on quicktime again!

  • Another blow for Edisons patent portfolio (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:11AM (#8830066)
    Yet more prior art discovered.

  • Somewhere... (Score:5, Funny)

    by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:13AM (#8830073)
    A sysadmin for Sky and Telescope just sat down for Easter dinner, and then his beeper goes ....
    • Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80004005'
      Timeout expired
      /banmanpro/banmanfunc.asp, line 1467

  • Makes me wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kalidasa ( 577403 ) * on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:13AM (#8830074) Journal
    If, when they took these plates, it occurred to them that sooner or later someone would do this. There were already animation techniques involving revolving stills (the Zoetrope, for instance).
    • What about flipbooks? You know, a 'pad' of pictures where you flip through it, controlling the flipping speed with your thumb. You get about a 2 second movie this way. I remember having some Disney ones when I was little.

      In the Broadway Play 'Ragtime', they talk about an immigrant that invented such flipbooks (eventually making his fortune), but I don't know the year or how true to history the play was.

  • It isn't really a movie (Score:5, Informative)

    by christurkel ( 520220 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:13AM (#8830075) Homepage Journal
    Its a series of photographs assembled into a movie 116 years later. They didn't make a movie of it at the time. Still cool, though.

    • Re:It isn't really a movie (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A movie IS a series of photographs... the difference is that it becomes a movie if you show them in a certain fashion.

      • Re:It isn't really a movie (Score:5, Insightful)

        by azzy ( 86427 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:45AM (#8830206) Journal
        I think the grand-parent has a valid point. You can't call a set of still images a movie just because they can be put together and made into a movie. Intention of creation plays an important role. Otherwise you could call any series of static pictures that show some change or story a movie. And such things date back much further.. from the top of my head I am thinking of the Bayeux Tapestry.. indeed any tapestries depicting stories, even prehistoric cave art; man with spear, man throws spear, dead animal.

        • I think the grand-parent has a valid point. You can't call a set of still images a movie just because they can be put together and made into a movie. Intention of creation plays an important role

          It's an interesting point - is it the person who originally had te idea, or the person who first successfully made it work. For instance, John Logie Baird actually made the very first video recordings [tvdawn.com], decades before anyone else managed it. But he wasn't able to play them back because he didn't have a way to sync

        • If you RTFA, you find that the pictures may in fact have been taken with that intention:

          As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography -- the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit o

          • No need to get offensive.. do remmeber what the F stands for.

            > A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself

            However, it's entirely possible that the thought didn't occur to Todd.

            It's possible a caveman once got high on magic mushrooms and envisioned someone converting his cave paintings into a film.. or it's possibl;e he just used whatever artistic means were available to him at the time and had to make do.

            Now.. it doesn't matter /when/ Todd made these images, the movie itself was made rather r

  • direct links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:14AM (#8830078)
    640 x 480 pixels (4.0 megabytes) [skyandtelescope.com]
    320 x 240 pixels (1.2 megabytes) [skyandtelescope.com]
    • Does anybody setup torrents anymore, or is that just a thing of the past? I noticed that peer guardian went nuts blocking hosts when I used bittorrent last time.
    • Jeezus FRIK'N christ! Even the damn direct .MOV link's don't work unless you accept cookies.

      Sometimes I'd really like a chance to bop website designers over the head.

      At this site they claim they want the cookies so that you don't have to re-enter latitude/longitude information for certain features. Yeah, right, whatever. But there's no damn reason the rest of the site shouldn't work. Hell, the entire website should work. If I try to use a feature that uses latitude and longitude, and I don't have cookies

  • Muybridge (Score:5, Informative)

    by PollGuy ( 707987 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:15AM (#8830084)
    This is just around the time when Muybridge was doing his work on the motion of horses and people.

    For those who don't know this reference, it is to Eadweard Muybridge, an American immigrant from Britain who created created the first prototypical movie [nl.net] in the 1870, well before Edison or the Lumiere brothers, by having multiple cameras expose in sequence. He was asked to settle a bet on whether all four of a galloping horse's feet are ever all off the ground at the same time.

    • Re:Muybridge (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:37AM (#8830176)
      "by having multiple cameras expose in sequence"

      So like bullet time then? So the Matrix is sort of Muybridge Reloaded?
      • Actually, yes. IIRC, he used tripwires strung across the track to trigger the cameras. The horse ran by, hit the string, and the camera took a picture.
      • So like bullet time then? So the Matrix is sort of Muybridge Reloaded?

        Exactly.

        Now all we need is a time machine that can go back to Muybridge's era, so we can kill Keanu Reeves' great-grandfather.

        No, wait -- wrong time-slip, I'm thinking of the Terminator -- okay, we go back in time and kill Schwartzenegger's grandfather.

        -kgj
      • Very much so. To the point that when I first started studying Muybridge recently, I began to wonder what new innovations might be in the Virtual Camera patents [virtualcamera.com]. I'm really not seeing them...

      • Kind of ironic that the latest in special effects was invented before motion picture cameras...

    • The Bet Muybridge Settled (Score:5, Informative)

      by handy_vandal ( 606174 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:53AM (#8830230) Homepage Journal
      [Muybridge] was asked to settle a bet on whether all four of a galloping horse's feet are ever all off the ground at the same time.

      He did settle the bet.

      Yes, all four of a galloping horse's feet are off the ground at the same time -- at the moment when all four hooves are underneath the horse, in their most-inward position.

      For more info, see my page of Muybridge trivia and links [karljones.com].

      -kgj

  • wow (Score:1)

    by kalpol ( 714519 )
    Venus hasn't aged a bit!

  • Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)

    by kantai ( 719870 ) <kantai@gmail.com> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:15AM (#8830090)
    Sky&Tele: Hey, uh Mike
    SysAdmin: Ya?
    Sky&Tele: See, we have this little problem....
    SysAdmin: How bad could it possibl...well, damn.

  • Better still.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:16AM (#8830093)
    Its a Quicktime clip made 109 years before Quicktime 1.0 was released! Or at least thats as true as it being a movie made prior to movies being invented.

  • Galileo's sunspots (Score:5, Interesting)

    by apothoray ( 198529 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:23AM (#8830124)
    How about Galielo's Sunspots [rice.edu] from 1612. Really, any 2D, time series data can be considered a "movie".

  • /.ed (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:24AM (#8830129)
    Reanimating the 1882 Transit of Venus
    By Anthony Misch


    In late 1882, Massachusetts astronomer David Peck Todd traveled to California to photograph the transit of Venus from the summit of Mount Hamilton, where a solar photographic telescope made by the renowned optical firm Alvan Clark & Sons waited among the stacks of bricks and timbers from which Lick Observatory was rising. As the transit unfolded on December 6th, Todd obtained a superb series of plates under perfect skies. His 147 glass negatives were carefully stored in the mountain vault, but as astronomers turned to other techniques for determining the scale of the solar system (see "The Transit of Venus: Tales from the 19th Century," by William Sheehan, Sky & Telescope: May 2004, page 32), the plates lay untouched and were eventually forgotten.

    Fast-forward 120 years. Spurred by a reference in one of Todd's letters in Lick's Mary Lea Shane Archives, Bill Sheehan and I found all 147 negatives, still in good condition, at the observatory. To our knowledge, this collection of photos constitutes the most complete surviving record of a historical transit of Venus.

    As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography -- the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit of Venus.

    Digital imaging technology made reanimating Todd's transit images a comparatively simple undertaking. The result, which premiered at the International Astronomical Union's general assembly in Sydney in July 2003, shows Venus's silhouette flickering strangely as it marches across the Sun's face. It's the shadow-show of an astronomical event that occurred when Queen Victoria sat on the throne of Great Britain and Chester Arthur was president of the United States -- a moving record of an event seen by no one now living, and a preview of what millions will see for the first time on June 8, 2004.

    Figures:
    http://skyandtelescope.com/mm_images/6469.jpg [skyandtelescope.com]
    Amherst College astronomer David Peck Todd (1855-1939). Courtesy the Mary Lea Shane Archives of Lick Observatory / University of California, Santa Cruz.

    http://skyandtelescope.com/mm_images/6465.jpg [skyandtelescope.com]
    The December 6, 1882, transit of Venus was already under way when the Sun rose over Lick Observatory in California and David Peck Todd began photographing the planet's march across the solar disk. Todd's 147 surviving photos, of which these are numbered 11, 88, and 151 (left to right), have been turned into a movie. You can download QuickTime versions in two sizes: 640 x 480 pixels (4.0 megabytes) or 320 x 240 pixels (1.2 megabytes). © 2003 University of California Observatories / Lick Observatory.


    Movies:
    640x480 (4.0MB) [skyandtelescope.com]
    320x240 (1.2MB) [skyandtelescope.com]
    • Thanks!

      © 2003 University of California Observatories / Lick Observatory.

      I was just wondering...: Can they copyright this stuff (that is, the movie), so long after the actual photos were taken...?

      • > Can they copyright this stuff (that is, the movie), so long after the actual photos were taken...?

        I think that they can copyright that exact movie they made, but since the original plates are (I'm assuming) Public Domain, you could make your own movie from the originals.

  • Edisson did not invent the film camera (Score:3, Informative)

    by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:32AM (#8830153) Homepage Journal
    Well, maybe he did (or somebody under his employment did), but he wasn't the first.

    Behold the brothers Lumière [holonet.khm.de]!
    • Edison himself didn't invent anything.
      He was more a businessman and a mediatic man than anything else.
      Real guys under his employment like Tesla actually discovered amazing things, but Edison made his best to hide the facts.

      • Executing Elephants and Edison vs. Tesla (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Cordath ( 581672 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @05:23PM (#8832638)
        Tesla originally worked for Edison, but they had a bit of a falling out. Eventually they were both competing in the power market, with Tesla selling AC current and Edison selling DC. AC has a lot of advantages for power transmision, but that didn't stop Edison from embarking on a campaign to discredit AC power. He electrocuted dogs and cats with AC current in public demonstrations intended to show how dangerous AC power was.

        During the construction of Luna Park on Coney island, an elephant used as a beast of burden killed a couple of people. Topsy, as she was called, was condemned to death. However, there was a wee bit of a problem. Elephants aren't the easiest critters to kill. Edison, being the generous person he was, gladly volunteered to execute the elephant with AC current, and filmed the whole thing. He showed that film "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903) publically on many occasions and I am sure more than a few stray cats and dogs escaped a crispy fate thanks to that film. It is still possible to track down copies of "Electrocuting an Elephant" today. Please be warned that it's a rather gruesome little piece of history, and is not for the faint of heart, or SPCA members.

  • Edison first? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aphrika ( 756248 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:34AM (#8830167)
    Eadweard Muybridge had 'films' of walking nude women and trotting horses sorted in 1878 - in fact, he was the guy that helped Leland Stanford win a bet proving that a horse momentarily has all its hooves off the ground when it runs. I vaguely remember an interactive CD-ROM from the early 90's with this stuff on.

    Edisons Kinetoscope was demonstrated in 1891 - a good 13 years later. That said, at the time there was a lot of parallel development going on. It's also hard to quantify what exactly cinema was defined as back then. People were coming at it from all sorts of angles - photography, illustration, zoetropes, etc etc.

    Actually, for something truly amazing (but slightly offtopic), have a look at Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's [loc.gov] photos of Russia at the trun of the 19th century. This guy was a bit before his time. He took 3 still images of his subject using black and white film and red, green and blue filters. Then he'd project all three images onto a screen to show people... colour photographs! The site has some absolutely stunning images. Worth a look.
    • "turn of the 19th century" would typically mean "when the 19th century began" -- i.e. 1800 -- whereas the photos you linked are from the early 1900's. Neat anyway.
    • Okay this Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii guy is freakin cool. What an awesome trick to come up with back then.

      True Genius!
      • I have to assume that it didn't work very well back then though, since no one else adopted it. In fact, if you look at their page on how these were recreated, you can see that before computers did contrast and color adjustment, the image is pretty muddy. We certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for making these images, but it seems likely that his contemporaries were not impressed.

        (As an aside, anyone else feel like they're looking at some sort of a reenactment, like Disneyland's Frontiertown or somethin

    • Who helped teach 2 award academy award winning DOPs, & he reckons the French were the 1st to develop practical movie picture technology.
    • > have a look at Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's photos

      WOW. Simply amazing. I've never been much for photography as art, but some of those images are stunning. In some of them, the colors almost seem "more real" than color photos from today. I especially like the close-up images with water, as the time between snaps on moving water creates an awesome unintentional rainbow effect in the river. It makes the photos sorta mysterious looking. Thank you VERY much for the awesome link.

  • BitTorrent ? ? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Swanktastic ( 109747 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:02AM (#8830268)
    It would be nice if someone would put up a BitTorrent link... These guys may not have the bandwidth to distribute this thing...

  • I've set up a Torrent (Score:5, Informative)

    by gspr ( 602968 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:15AM (#8830321)
    Here [dyndns.org].
  • Reanimating the 1882 Transit of Venus

    Reanimating the 2004 Slashdotting of www.scyandtelescone.com

    How about letting their poor sysadmin reanimate the webserver? Kiss of life!

  • /. ed soo.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:25AM (#8830352)
    here it is..
    (scroll & blink rapidly..)

    ( ) sun/venus
    (. ) sun/venus
    ( . ) sun/venus
    ( . ) sun/venus
    ( . ) sun/venus
    ( . ) sun/venus
    ( .) sun/venus
    ( ) sun/venus

  • Color photos before color film (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jonhuang ( 598538 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:34AM (#8830398) Homepage
    Reminds me of this guy: Russian color photos before color film [loc.gov]
    • Thanks for the link. It's interesting how the past can seem so distant when viewed through black & white, but so near and real when viewed through color. Some of the images on that site were taken before WW1, but look like they were taken yesterday. This reminds me of a photographer (I don't remember his name) who traveled the US in the early twentieth century capturing images using a primitive form of color photography. I believe he intended to use the images for postcards, but the venture failed a

  • Movie mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by markclong ( 575822 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:37AM (#8830411)
    320 1.2 meg movie [slushdot.org]
    640 4 meg movie [slushdot.org]

    Enjoy

  • Lick Observatory and Mount Hamilton (Score:5, Informative)

    by bug506 ( 584796 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @12:13PM (#8830603) Homepage
    If you ever visit the Lick Observatory, they have pictures that show how the tiny town of San Jose that existed when the Observatory was built has grown so large. Of course, this causes problems with light pollution. Part of their solution was an agreement with the city in 1980 to use low-pressure sodium lights that the observatory can more easily filter out.

    http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/public/lighting/Coop eration2.html [ucolick.org]

    Everyone who visits me notices that the lights in San Jose are "different" and "weird;" it took visiting the Observatory to find out why.

    By the way, if you want to visit the Lick and look through the telescopes, they have summer tours that I recommend. Not only do you get to look through the telescopes and learn a lot about astronomy and the history of the Observatory, there are amazing (and even romantic) night-time views of the Bay Area. (They normally discourage night-time visits because the car headlights interfere with the telescopes.) There's a lottery for it because it is so popular:

    http://www.ucolick.org/public/sumvispro.html [ucolick.org]

    Joey

  • Wow. That is simply amazing.

    The Slashdot effect has become so powerful, it can not travel back in time and knock things off the net before they are invented!

  • More information on transits of Venus (Score:4, Informative)

    by StupendousMan ( 69768 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @12:35PM (#8830734) Homepage

    Transits of Venus -- in which the planet crosses the face of the Sun as seen from Earth -- are rare events. They occur in pairs, eight years apart, with gaps of roughly 120 years between pairs. The last pair was 1874 and 1882, so this movie shows the most recent transit.

    However, the next transit is in just a few months, on June 8, 2004. It will be visible from Europe, but only the tail end can be seen from North America. If you miss this one, the next is in June of 2012.

    Transits were very important to astronomers in the past because they offered an opportunity to measure the distance between the Earth and the Sun; that, in turn, yielded the distance between Earth and every planet in the solar system. I've written a document explaining how transits of Venus could be used to determine the size of the solar system. It includes a little history, too. Look at

    http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys235/venus_t/venus _t.html [rit.edu]

  • Disney (Score:4, Funny)

    by PsiPsiStar ( 95676 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:15PM (#8831033)
    Can you find one of Mickey Mouse before he was invented? I really want to piss off Disney for extending the copyright to keep their damn rodent.
    • Can you find one of Mickey Mouse before he was invented? I really want to piss off Disney for extending the copyright to keep their damn rodent.

      An Anonymous coward posted this link, but since it did not make it above the noise, here is the link to the news story:

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2481749. s tm [bbc.co.uk]

      Friday, 15 November, 2002 - A 700-year-old fresco bearing an uncanny resemblance to Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse has been discovered in Austria. The mouse figure was unearthed by an art his

  • Galileo's Sunspots - Even Earlier (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bangzilla ( 534214 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:47PM (#8831282) Journal
    I attended an Edward Tufte lecture last year where he had assembled static pictures from drawings made by Galileo of the motion of Sun spots into a movie -- Galileo was the "cameraman", Tufte the "editor". Nice teamwork.

    Lots of links here http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EdwardTufte

    I also recall someone recreating audio from the thousands of years ago from the grooves cut by a potter in the pot he/she was throwing on a wheel. Essentially the pot and it's grooves acted as a recording device in the same way that the groves in vinyl do (did!).

  • See also Russian color photographer (Score:4, Informative)

    by Murphy(c) ( 41125 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:54PM (#8831342)
    In the same vein as making movies before actual movies, see also the great photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.

    He took pictures using color filters on 3 different cameras, and then used 3 candlelight projectors to recombine the the image in one color picture.

    Pretty neat stuff, here [ummagurau.com] is the link.

    Bare in mind that all those color pictures are pre-1900, which I personally find absolutely incredible, because to me black-white means old, and suddenly seeing landscapes and people in color, somehow makes them more real.

    Murphy(c)

  • Lick Observatory is a treasure trove (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11, 2004 @02:50PM (#8831685)
    I used to work up at Lick Observatory when I was in College. They have a real treasure trove up there, so I'm not surprised that someone has stumbled across this stuff.

    The stuff really ought to be cataloged and put on display. Some of it is priceless.

    Aside from James Licks' body being buried under the base of the 36" telescope, back in the archive storage that have a lot of interesting things from history. Like some of the equipment used for the experiment which established that the speed of light was a constant in a vacuum. The actual seismic records from the San Francisco Earthquake. I've forgotten what else; but those things stand out. It's a huge storage area up there.

    Plus they have a copy of UC Berkeley's student records. It's used as a safe place in case of disaster. Also, James Licks' deathbed is there too. And the safe they have is straight from the 1800's.

    In case any two-bit crackers are thinking about breaking in and exploring it, forget about it. Security is excellent up there. I busted a clueless group once myself. And the cops they have are real aggressive hard-asses.

  • The Zoetrope [techtarget.com] predates this example of moving pictures by quite a bit. It is an animation device invented in 1834 by William George Horner. Maybe you've seen one before: a cylinder with pictures inside and slits that you look through as you spin it.
  • Cellular animation has been a round for centuries. People painted little animations on lamp shades and spun them. You can buy such in novelty stores today.

    A popular 19th century lecture circuit entertainment was the scroll-movie narration. A scrolling of up to a mile long was unwound behind a narrator. Frequently these were travelogues of exotic places like the western US.

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