The visual series has always played an important role in human perception. We can remember the rock paintings of our ancestors to say with certainty that as soon as a man became a man, as he tried to fix and portray his actions.
And, the primitive person fixed the actions in the accurate chronological order - here our ancestors go on hunting, here in a mammoth fly spears, and here already the happy community feasts.
However, millennia passed before mankind invented cinema.
Experiments with optical devices were set in the IV century BC. In their treatises, the followers of the Chinese philosopher Mo Di described the first obscurus camera - a simple optical device, a dark box or a dark room with a hole in one of the walls that allows to get an inverted image of objects on the screen or on the opposite wall. Aristotle also described the obscura chamber, and the 10th-century Arab scientist Abu Ali Haisam (Alhazen), based on the study of the obscura chamber, put forward a hypothesis about the linearity of light propagation.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, scientists returned to the study of image acquisition through the obscura camera. The resurgence of secular science has also borne fruit in optics. Many scientific treatises of that time describe different types of camera obscura. Talented inventors - scientists and artists Giovanno di Fontana and Leonardo da Vinci - have taken serious steps to use optics for entertainment. Now we would say that they did a good job in the entertainment industry, but in the 15th-16th centuries, when the church continued to persecute witches and sorcerers, when the Inquisition was raging, such inventions could have brought terrible reprisals to scientists. Nevertheless, Giovanni di Fontana tried to focus the light through the lens from a regular lantern, and Leonardo da Vinci found much in common between the obscura camera and the structure of the human eye. Apparently, he was the first to use the obscura camera to sketch from life and describe it in detail in his Treatise on Painting.
In 1686, Johannes Tsang designed a portable camera obscura, equipped with a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, which allowed to project the image on a matte horizontal plate and made it easier for artists to transfer the landscape on paper.
Often, instead of a simple opening, a lens was used to significantly increase the brightness and sharpness of the image. The smaller the hole through which the objects were projected, the sharper and clearer the image of objects in the camera was. In terms of depth of field and sharpness, this optical design could compete with modern photographic lenses. A significant disadvantage of this design was the low aperture ratio, as all the light enters the camera through a small hole, and the brightness decreases from the center to the edges of the image. At the edges of the image, optical distortion also increases and the sharpness decreases.
And nowadays some photographers use so-called "walls" - cameras with a small opening instead of a lens. Images obtained with these cameras are characterized by a kind of soft pattern, an ideal linear perspective and a great depth of field.
Inventors did not leave attempts to make the camera obscura more perfect. In the 17th century, a "magic lantern" appeared. One of its first inventors was the Jesuit monk Atanasius Kirher. In his device the image, put on a mirror, was projected on a special screen. And the escperiments on the "continuity of vision", that is, the rapid change of drawings one by one described in 1765 chevalier d'Arcy.
Two centuries ago, the artists wandered around Europe with a hurdle and "magic lantern", which scrolled through the entire paper tape with different landscapes and household scenes. The change of images in the "magic lantern" is already reminiscent of modern cinematography, or rather, children's diaphragms. A little more, and the image will come to life, will begin to move...
But it's a little bit - not a little bit, not a little, not a whole hundred and fifty years. It was only in the 19th century that optical illusion devices, taumatropes and strobes appeared. The device of a strobe was based on two rotating disks. On one disk there were slots, on the other - consecutive images of movement. It was the simplest fixation of movement - dogs danced, beer was drunk by frequenters of pubs, but the movement was - though brief, but already continuous.
In 1839, daguerreotype (the first method of photographing) appeared. Man learned to fix a real moment with the help of science. Not yet a movement, no, but before the invention of the camera was already a handful of miles away.
In 1856, Alexander Parks was granted a patent for the invention of parquezine (celluloid), and it was also a huge step forward.
In 1878, the photographer Edward Maybridge for the first time used twelve cameras at the same time, working at regular, well-calculated intervals. This allowed Maybridge to shoot the horse's sequential step. His shots didn't shock the average horse.