The "universal tech tree"
- sciart0
- Jun 2
- 2 min read
(an interactive graphic spanning time, simply click your year(s) of interest)
Excerpt: "What do firearms and cameras have in common? One answer is shared vocabulary: load, aim, shoot.
The etymological origins of this relatedness are murky. People likely borrowed language about firearms — which are over 500 years older than photography — to talk about cameras, which are operated in a similar manner. But in the case of the movie camera, the connection is concrete.
The first movie camera is generally considered to be the kinetograph, invented in 1891 by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at the Edison lab. Two years earlier, Edison had travelled to Paris to the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a world’s fair, to showcase his company’s phonograph. There, he met with Étienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist who had begun his career studying blood circulation, and who had developed an interest in chronophotography partly out of his work on physiology. Chronophotography consists of taking multiple photographs in quick succession to capture movement.
A famous early achievement of the technique is The Horse in Motion, a series of photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 that proved something Marey had asserted years earlier: For a brief moment in gallop, a horse has all four hooves off the ground. Encouraged by Muybridge, Marey developed an improved device to take chronophotographs. The resulting design, the “photographic gun,” featured a long barrel derived from existing firearms. We don’t know what transpired between Marey and Edison, but it seems likely that Marey’s design inspired the kinetograph. Coincidentally (or not), the Online Etymology Dictionary’s entry for “shoot” claims “the meaning ‘to photograph’ (especially a movie) is from 1890” — around the time of the kinetograph’s invention.
Marey himself had been inspired by the invention of another Frenchman, the astronomer Pierre Janssen. In 1874, hoping to capture images of the transit of Venus, Janssen created a device he called the “photographic revolver.” It looked like a large telescope. Inside, it hosted a complex camera that used a revolving apparatus to take several images in quick succession. The resulting eight seconds of the black dot of Venus moving across the sun disk are often recognized as the first motion picture in history.
Prior to Jansenn’s invention, revolving components had not been used in photography or astronomy. They came from the Colt Paterson revolver, a handgun popular in the U.S. since its mid-19th century creation by Samuel Colt. Thus, we can reconstruct a genealogical succession of ideas: Colt inspired Janssen, who inspired Marey, who likely inspired Edison (who then inspired the Lumière brothers and further developments in filmmaking)."