Early motion picture discovery: Photographic discs from the 1890s (Part 3)

Sword Fight, detail. Disc L 15 (photo, Eli Nesmith). I don’t yet know the nature or purpose of what appears to be a circular hole, top right of the complete frame shown here.

The discovery

In 2020, a box of discs and plates relating to an early motion picture system was discovered in the USA. The owner Eli Nesmith, who inherited the material from his aunt and uncle, has been generous enough to allow details, images, and animations to be released on The Optilogue. The first part of this short blog series illustrated ten discs from the series, Part 2 showed another nine discs. In this post we further examine the nature of the find, and speculate on the possible origins and details of the missing associated machine(s).

If you’d like an email notification of every new Optilogue post, why not Subscribe here?

The box, with discs, discovered in 2020.

Box, top and sides.

Box, side with hole (photos, Eli Nesmith).

The box

‘It is a curious contraption, with hinges along most sides and a 1.25-inch hole in one side that seems to have once served some purpose.’[1] Perhaps the hole was to allow for the insertion of a crank handle, if the machine was intended to be used while it was inside the box (assuming the hinged panels would allow for the lens side to be open, with suitable illumination).

The newspaper

The discs ‘were originally wrapped in newspaper from 1898 … the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’.[2]

The glass discs and plates

8-inch glass discs

These are eight inches in diameter with a central hole and a smaller off-centre hole presumably to receive a location pin. They carry either 24 or 40 negative photographs set slightly in from their outer edge, still and animated images from which are shown in Parts 1 and 2 of this series of posts.

Sample 8-inch glass disc, 24 pictures.

Sample 8-inch glass disc, 40 pictures (photos, Eli Nesmith).

3.25-inch glass plates

At least one of these shows a variant of the subjects recorded on the larger discs. This features two Black men performing a shoe shuffle while one plays the harmonica – the images are not exactly the same as the similar subject shown on the 8-inch disc. In this small plate shown here, one of the performers is on his knee, and they have swapped roles, with the other dancer playing the harmonica. It has not yet been determined whether any other 3.25-inch plates have variants of the subjects recorded on the larger discs.

The purpose of the plates is not known. It should be noted that 3.25 inches is one of the standard sizes for lantern slides of the period, especially in Britain, though some use of that size was made elsewhere.

Sample 3.25-inch glass plate, negative as found.

Black dancers, 3.25-inch plate, variant of the subject of large disc L 04. This image has been digitally inverted (converted from negative to positive).

Black dancers, 3.25-inch plate, variant of the subject of large disc L 04 (detail).

Celluloid sheet

There is a single item made of celluloid, 8 inches square, with a positive version of an image sequence showing two boys fighting while a small crowd looks on.

Celluloid sheet, boys fighting (detail)

Celluloid sheet, boys fighting (all photos Eli Nesmith).

The unknown camera / viewer / projector(s)

We know nothing about the camera(s) on which these discs were taken, or the machine(s) with which they were intended to be viewed or projected. It might have been a hybrid camera/viewer-projector. First, let’s take a look at some systems proposed by The Optilogue’s readers in the Comments on the first parts of this post series, and then some other possibilities. I have limited this review to the examples closest to the technical features and likely date range of the ‘Nesmith’ discs, and only those systems intended to be used as a camera as well as either a viewer or projector – viewing/projection-only devices have been excluded.

Cinéphote

Perhaps the closest that we have to a machine for taking and projecting/direct viewing this type of disc is the French Cinéphote of Huet, promoted in 1909. The Cinéphote was advertised as being designed for portrait work, rather than any other type of motion picture.

Drawing from a British version of the Huet patent. This used a ‘star-cross’ mechanism (in the same family as the famous Maltese Cross used in film machines) – the centre disc shown here – for intermittent movement. The coil at bottom left is a clockwork spring drive. From H.L. Huet, British Patent 9,370 of 21 April 1906. Equivalent French patents were FR 415,144 of 5 July 1909, Mécanisme d’entraînement pour appareils cinématographiques à disques and FR 430,674 of 18 August 1910, Appareil photographique pour la prise de vues animées.

Cinéphote camera, displayed with a finished disc inside (illustrations c.1910).

The central hole looks relatively smaller than those on the ‘Nesmith’ discs, and there is no second ‘pin location’ hole to ensure that the disc doesn’t slip. However, there is a photo of the camera/projector machine with a disc inside, and we can see that towards the outer edge of the ‘label’ there is a ring of holes for registration, one for each frame. These holes are not very evident in the published illustrations of the discs (you can buy a nice high-definition scan of this photograph from Getty Images for just £375). There’s another version of the image, plus more information and pictures, at the wonderful Media History Project.

Cinéphote viewer-projector, La Nature 26 February 1910.

In the Cinéphote viewer-projector (above left) the photo-frame would have contained a conventional photographic print, indicating the subject of the disc to be viewed through the lens, when this version of the device was used as a peepshow viewer rather than a projector. The Cinéphote disc (above right) is shown with 24 pictures arranged circumferentially. The 24 pictures are rectangular, portrait format, with black ‘V’ shaped areas to maintain their rectangular shape. With the ‘Nesmith’ discs, the pictures are wedge-shaped, so no black ‘V’ areas are needed. I have seen a reference to the size of the Cinéphote discs as 150mm, so smaller than the 8 inches (203mm) of the ‘Nesmith’ discs.

The pictures are a small distance from the edge of the disc, as with the ‘Nesmith’ discs. The decorated central area on the Cinéphote discs would not be necessary if users created their own blank discs. There were several models of the Cinéphote camera: one used 24 images in a ring (as do many of the ‘Nesmith’ 8-inch discs), while another used 75 pictures arranged in a spiral. The viewer-projector was a separate machine. I have not established the size of the Cinéphote discs, but I believe they were made on a celluloid base.

Despite the similarities, I don’t think the ‘Nesmith’ discs were taken with a converted (enlarged) Cinéphote machine, as there are too many differences. Also, I think the c.1909 date for the Cinéphote’s introduction, and the post-1903 dates for its patents, is too late. The ‘Nesmith’ discs are more likely to date from the 1890s.

Kinokam

This device was promoted in an article in the Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal in February 1906. It was 6 inches square, with the discs being approx 4.72 inches (12cm), much smaller than the ‘Nesmith’ discs, and the images were in portrait format. However, as with the ‘Nesmith’ discs, there were 24 pictures. The Kinokam negative discs appear to have been made of celluloid, and it seems that the prints made from them were paper, though celluloid positives might also have been made. The camera could be configured as a viewer, but probably not as a projector. There is an example (from the Will Day Collection) in the Cinémathèque française.[3]

The Kinokam. I have not established the nature of the mechanism used in this device (Stephen Herbert Collection).

Kinokam disc. Both illustrations from the Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal, February 1906 (Stephen Herbert Collection).

The Kinokam seems to have disappeared very quickly, without details of its price being given. I once had the opportunity of briefly examining one of these but I don’t remember how the images were illuminated for viewing – perhaps there was an aperture in the back of the device. In 1989 the British Journal of Photography reported a forthcoming sale item: ‘Kinokam combined camera and viewer still in the maker’s box – an example of which has never before been sold at auction.’[4]

Neither the Kinokam nor the Cinéphote seem to have been made in any quantity and both are now extremely rare. The Kinokam was very probably never actually marketed.

24 Pictures

Both the Cinéphote (one version) and Kinokam used discs with 24 pictures arranged in an annular configuration, as did the machine that took the ‘Nesmith’ discs. However, some of the latter have 40 pictures, so an intermittent wheel or some other part(s) of the mechanism must have been capable of being changed, unless there was more than one camera/viewer.

An adapted design?

One possible origin of the missing ‘Nesmith’ machine was the ‘detective cameras’ for taking individual snapshots on discs, some of which had suitable mechanisms for adapting to sequence pictures. One of the first of these was the Thompson revolver camera.

Museum Curator Colin Harding discusses Thompson’s 1862 Revolver Camera on YouTube. Some accounts state that Thompson (first name not known) was English, but the camera was made in France.

Thompson / Gray / Thompson-Gray / Stirn cameras

Thompson’s detective revolver camera was made by the Parisian instrument maker A. Briois, and introduced in 1862. Four negatives were exposed on a 3-inch circular glass plate. Fewer than ten examples of this camera remain. Other disc cameras of the period included one made by Sands and Hunter, the Magazine Detective Camera, which was rifle-shaped and took 18 pictures on a disc. See the Science and Media Museum blog for more details of ‘camera guns’.

R.D. Gray’s camera. ‘This version was manufactured by Western Electric, but did not sell well. The patent was purchased by Carl P. Stirn of the New York firm Stirn & Lyons along with his brother Rudolph in Germany. Afterwards it had great success, selling in the thousands by 1890’ (Worthpoint). The co-founder of Western Electric was the prolific inventor Elias Gray, possibly a relative?[5]

Robert Dempsey Gray, an experimenter in Boston, designed and arranged for manufacture a disc camera that eliminated the pistol/revolver/rifle aspect – not all subjects would have appreciated having a gun pointed at them – and became a slim disc-shaped camera that could be hidden beneath a jacket or waistcoat while photos were being taken through a buttonhole, so making the snapshotter much less conspicuous, more like a real ‘detective’.[6]

A later development of this camera was devised by Dr William Gilman Thompson – not the same person who invented the 1862 revolver camera previously mentioned – in cooperation with Robert Dempsey Gray, and known as the Thompson-Gray Camera. This was fitted with an f2 Petzval design lens, which permitted instantaneous exposures in good light. Changing the six-notch disc for one of 24 (or 40) notches, and some gear changes, might have been the method by which the ‘Nesmith’ device operated. A description appeared in the Scientific American Supplement in October 1886:

‘Thus every complete revolution of the central wheel in the floor of the box carries with it the dry plate, stops it, and moves it on again six times. The velocity of revolution of the plate is only limited by the rapidity with which one can turn the crank.’[7]

Dr Thompson wrote: ‘The apparatus was devised by Mr R.D. Gray (the inventor of the ingenious “vest camera” and other photographic improvements) and by myself. I described what was required and suggested various modifications and improvements, but the mechanical details were worked out exclusively by him.’ The Thompson-Gray development was a chronophotographic camera, with six exposures being taken in one second. One sequence that survives as drawings shows the phases of a frog’s beating heart. Gray went on to develop, in 1895, a 35mm film camera for motion pictures.[8]

Stirn camera. The smaller model took plates 5.5 inches in diameter.

The original R.D. Gray design was apparently purchased by C.P. Stirn, a German manufacturer, and sold by them in Berlin. C.P. Stirn’s ‘concealed vest camera’ was marketed in America by Stirn and Lyon, sole agents for the USA and Canada. It was introduced in 1886, and available until around 1892. There were two models, one 6 inches in diameter, the other 7 inches, the glass discs being somewhat smaller in each case. There were six pictures on each disc, but these were individual pictures, not intended for motion studies. The larger model took pictures 2.5 inches in diameter, which were suitable for making into individual-image positive plates by contact printing, for use in magic lantern projection. Advertisements claim that 18,000 cameras were sold in four years.

Some possibilities

In an interview in 1891, Thomas Edison mentioned Mr Hemment, ‘the man who photographs running horses in a thousandth part of a second’, but was limited to ‘half a dozen photographs at a time’. The maximum of six photographs suggests that John C. Hemment, a British immigrant based in New York, could perhaps have been using a Gray, or Thompson-Gray, camera, an indication that one of these disc cameras might have been used by someone other than Dr Thompson in an attempt to capture movement. This is speculation, but an interesting possibility.[9]

It is possible that the ‘Nesmith’ machine was based on an adapted, Stirn-manufactured Gray camera, or a Thompson-Gray chronophotographic camera, or perhaps designed around the associated patents, or the Demenÿ patents.[10] The Thompson-Gray mechanism design would have operated well at the 2 fps or so that was indicated by the limited action capture of the ‘Nesmith’ device. Of course this is conjecture, and the machine or machines might have been totally different and designed from scratch by someone completely unknown to historians. As with the commercial designs that are known to us, the ‘Nesmith’ camera must have had a mechanism that allowed just the required number of exposures before blocking the disc movement or the lens, otherwise the first ring of images taken would have been obscured by subsequent exposures.

We are appealing to historians and researchers to send their suggestions and thoughts concerning the disc subjects (first, see the Comments section for Parts 1 and 2). Those received in time will be incorporated into the final post in this blog series.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen the disc animations, watch them now on YouTube:

Part One

Part Two

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Deac Rossell for his information concerning the inventors of the Thompson/Gray cameras, and for alerting me to the interesting work of John C. Hemment. Eli Nesmith has kindly allowed the information and illustrations concerning the ‘mystery’ discs to appear first on The Optilogue.

Next time: Your suggestions concerning the locations of the disc subjects, and conclusions.

Stephen Herbert, September 2021

If you find The Optilogue useful, and haven’t already done so, why not Subscribe here to get email notification of every new post?

Notes and references

1. Eli Nesmith, email to Stephen Herbert, 2021. [return to text]
2. Ibid. [return to text]
3. Laurent Mannoni, Le mouvement continué: Catalogue illustré de la collection des appareils de la Cinémathèque française, item 1054, p. 322. [return to text]
4. BJP Vol. 36 p. 25, 1989. [return to text]
5. For details of the story of the development of the many models of the Gray camera, and many other concealed cameras and gun cameras, see Brian Coe, Cameras: From Daguerreotypes to Instant Pictures (Marshall Cavendish, 1978) pp. 53-64. [return to text]
6. ‘Another example [of the gun cameras] was Skaife’s “Pistolgraph”. He once aimed this at Queen Victoria, and was immediately surrounded by the police, and he was forced to open the pistol to satisfy the police that this was not an assassination attempt.’ See Robert Leggat’s A History of Photography. [return to text]
7. Dr William Gilman Thompson, ‘A New Apparatus for the Study of Cardian Drugs,’ Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, 2 October 1886. [return to text]
8. For more on Dr W.G. Thompson and R.D. Gray, see Deac Rossell, ‘Chronophotography in the context of moving pictures’, Early Popular Visual Culture Vol. 11 No. 1 (February 2013). The whole story of the two Thompsons, Gray and Stirn has yet to be fully researched and told, and might yet reveal a family connection between ‘Mr Thompson’ of the 1862 design, and the work more than two decades later of Dr W.G. Thompson. [return to text]
9. ‘Mr Edison’s latest invention. The wonders of the kinetograph.’ The interview was given to ‘a Times correspondent yesterday’, and printed in the Pall Mall Gazette, 29 May 1891. There’s a lot more about the interesting Mr Hemment, who went on to make films, at the Historic Camera website. [return to text]
10. As well as his well-known designs for large disc machines which he made and demonstrated (but with very few being produced), Georges Demenÿ also patented and made a miniature viewing machine for celluloid discs, which made use of a star-cross intermittent. Luke McKernan has pointed out that Walter Isaacs, in New York, used a Demenÿ type design in the Bioscope film projector (a beater mechanism), and Isaacs might have experimented with other Demenÿ designs more suitable for disc machines. [return to text]

Advertisement