ABSTRACT
Before television was even a twinkle in John Logie Baird’s and Philo T. Farnsworth’s eyes, let alone the viewer’s living room, other great inventors were grappling with a closely related problem – how to make pictures move. Like television, there isn’t one person who can truly be called the inventor of moving pictures, but there are a number of contributors who each brought the state of the art a little bit closer to perfection. Most people now know the basics of how film cameras and projectors work, but back in the days when nobody had the remotest idea that it might be possible to record moving images it took real genius to work out how to do it. Since the whole process relies on certain characteristics of the human eye, and television and video do too, I shall spend a little time on film before moving on to the electronic alternative.
