Making Motion Pictures

Thanks to Gotham City's caped crusader, Hollywood got its biggest blockbuster weekend of the summer, raking in more than $250 million for all movies. The bulk of that--around $155 million--came in ticket sales for the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight. Another $28 million went to Mamma Mia, a movie remake of a musical that centers on '70s pop music.

But while ordinary audiences were thrilling and chilling their way through Gotham City's dark nights, or basking among the tanned and toned bodies of Mamma Mia, we were thinking back to the early days of moviemaking. We don't mean recent history. We mean the days when the technology of movies was just a gleam in Aristotle's eye. We mean how "motion pictures" came to be.

4th century BC - The Greek philosopher Aristotle, standing beneath a tree during an eclipse, notices that an image of the sun has been projected onto the ground through a hole in the leaves. He experiments and finds that the smaller the hole, the sharper the image. From this, he figures that light moves in a straight line and that when it meets a surface with a small hole in it, the rays cross to form an inverted image on the other side. This principle, which is at the basis of the camera, goes unexploited for nearly 2,000 years.

16th century - Giambattista della Porta builds on Aristotle's idea by constructing a large room with a small hole in one wall--a camera obscura. He then has actors perform outside the room so that their images are projected inside for spectators. Viewers flee in panic at the sight, and della Porta is brought up on charges of sorcery.

1802 - Thomas Wedgwood reports success in capturing images using light-sensitive materials. But since there is no way to fix the image, his results are short-lived (unlike your high-school yearbook photos, which are eternal).

1826 - Frenchman Joseph Niépce captures the first true photograph, calling it a heliograph. But his method requires an 8-hour exposure. Happily, he takes on a partner named Louis Daguerre, who reduces the exposure time to 30 minutes with daguerreotypes, which are introduced to the world in 1839.

1839 - In a banner year for shutterbugs, English scientist William Fox Talbot unveils the calotype process, which makes negatives. This allows for an unlimited number of prints. Daguerreotypes, by contrast, are one-of-a-kind affairs.

mid-19th century - New optical toys (such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and zoetrope) exploit the way human brains process a quick succession of images. The toys put a series of still images on a disk or in a drum. Spin the disk or drum rapidly and, voilà, you see moving pictures!

1878 - British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge settles once and for all the question of whether a galloping horse's legs all leave the ground at the same time. By 1878, exposure time had been reduced to less than 1/100th of a second, so Muybridge set up a series of cameras triggered by tripwires and had a horse gallop by. Viewed in sequence, the images proved that a horse's legs do all leave the ground. The sensation they caused paved the way for movies.

1887 - The idea of recording photographs on celluloid roll film is implemented by Hannibal Goodwin, then taken up and mass-produced by George Eastman the following year. The innovation makes it possible to put thousands of sequential images onto one roll of film.

1888 - Thomas Edison, looking for a sequel to his phonograph, orders an assistant in his lab, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to invent a movie camera. Dickson produces the Kinetograph to record the film and the Kinetoscope to play it back. Viewers looked through an eyepiece, so only one person could watch at a time.

1895 - Inspired by a Kinetoscope display in Paris, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière perfect a commercially viable film projector and screen movies in front of ticket-buying crowds. Their multi-purpose machine--camera, printer, and projector all in one--was called the cinématographe and is the source of the modern term "cinema."

1915 - The first 3D films debut before a paying audience. The spectators wear red and green glasses that create a single image from two images photographed slightly apart. 3D never conquers the movie business, but it never dies either.

1919 - Lee De Forest develops a method called Phonofilm for recording sound onto motion picture film. He tries to market it to studio executives, but they wonder why in the world people would want to hear movies talk.

1925 - Warner Brothers, a small studio struggling to expand, buys a competing sound technology called Vitaphone to market as a short-term novelty. Popular response is so strong for WB's sound-enabled pictures, including The Jazz Singer (1927), that the silent film era effectively ends. The change kills the careers of several silent movie stars, whose voices prove to be considerably less appealing than their looks.

1929 - The first Academy Awards are presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize achievement in the film industry. The award for best picture goes to Wings, a WWI dogfighting drama with spectacular aerial footage. Producers of other action flicks immediately take heart that they too might someday win "best picture."

1932 - Herbert Kalmus perfects the Technicolor process, using light-splitting optics to simultaneously record the reds, greens, and blues of life on three separate, specially treated black-and-white negatives. Each negative was dyed to bring out the color and then superimposed on one emulsion to create a color-accurate print.

1952 - 3D not only refuses to die, it achieves its greatest success: Bwana Devil, a thriller about two man-eating lions in Kenya. The film's popularity triggers a boom in 3D filmmaking, with nearly fifty 3D movies released in three years.

1967 - At the Montreal International Exposition, several pavilions display short films that, through the use of multiple projectors, stretch across several screens to fill viewers' field of vision. Afterward, three Canadian filmmakers agree to develop a process to achieve the same effect with a single projector. Their efforts ultimately result in the creation of the IMAX format, which debuts in 1970.

1993 - The Neil Simon comedy Lost in Yonkers becomes the first movie to be edited digitally. This technological step--invisible to most moviegoers--paves the way for a Lucasian time when movies will involve no film at all, just sound and images captured and manipulated electronically. Skeptics shake their heads and yearn for simpler days.