A Gun to Shoot Action

        In the late 1870s, a French professor of physioloqy and 'natural history, Etienne Jules, Marey, made the first step, toward capturinq all of an action instead of Just treezinq part of it. Long interested 'in analyzinq the ways in which animals move, he turned to' photoqraphy In the hope that he could break down their motions into sequences,each step of which could be studied individually. By 1882 Marey had designed a gun camera whose trigger set in motion a clockwork mechanism, the clockwork turned a sensitized plate on which 12 postage-stamp-size pictures were made in a second. The exposure for each was very brief 1 /720 second. In 1887, Marey invented a "chronophoto­graphic" camera "that took sequence pictures on a roll of sensitized paper; three years later he" replaced the paper, with transparent celluloid film on which he was able to record as many as 60 in­dividual exposures per second. This in­strument foreshadowed the modern motion picture camera.

          Marey's gun camera took the 12 tiny pictures at lett ot a bird in flight. The camera hada lens in its barrel and a shutter at the front of its breech. A.d.tum-shape,dmagazine, shown detached above the gun, held a load of 25 circular plates, each with a dozen picture-taking areas around its rim. To load the camera, the drum was placed on tooot the breech and a slot was openedso that the first plate tell into a chamber oirecttv behind the shutter. The user closed the slot, removed the drum magazine, then sighted on his subject end squeezed the trigger to get his 12 rapid-fires ho ts.The drum was then remounted and the gun turned upside down so thet the plate dropped into a storage compartment for later developing.

Marey's roll-film sequence camera (shown in a top view) took photographs in a horizontal strip like the one above. The film, driven by a hand crank, moved from a storage spool to the focal plane in the middle of the compartment, where it stopped for exposure, and then was wound on a take-up spool. The shutter, also operated by the crank,made individual exposures of 1/100 second, fast enough to avoid blur in pictures of a flying duck.