ABSTRACT
Janssen, Muybridge and Marey do not belong either to the popular show traditions or to the traditions of the scientific amateur. On the contrary, they were professional scientists of one kind or another, interested in developing photographic methods for research purposes. But this also distinguishes them from the earlier scientists whose discoveries belong to the ancestry of cinema. In the case of the generation of Faraday and Plateau, optical phenomena were themselves the subjects under investigation, and the devices they invented which relate to the prehistory of cinematography were first thrown up as experimental demonstrations of their observations, and then given a popular form by the process of commercial exploitation. For Janssen, Muybridge and Marey, on the other hand, the subjects they were investigating were not optical phenomena, although their method was photographic scrutiny, and it is another historical irony that they are nowadays remembered much more in connection with cinematography than with anything else. (This is not entirely true in Janssen’s case. He has several first-time observations to his credit and, according to one biographical dictionary, achieved ‘immortality’ in 1868 when he observed a strange spectral line during a total eclipse of the sun: he sent the data to the English astronomer Lockyer, who attributed it to a new element which he called helium.)
The relationship between these two generations of scientists is the relationship between different stages in the historical development of modern science-stages in a protracted revolution in scientific thought and method, beginning in the fields of astronomy and physics in the seventeenth century, which altered the relations between different types of
Of the twenty-eight of whom precise details are given among the successful ‘men of invention and industry’ immortalized by Samuel Smiles, fourteen came from small property-owners or yeomen farmers, master-weavers, shoemakers, schoolmasters and the like, six came from quite prosperous middle-class circumstances, and only eight seem to have had any trace of working class origin. Of the eight out of the twenty-eight who became capitalists of any importance, only one…was of working class origin…. The other seven were men who belonged to the lower middle or middle class.
