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Inside The Camera Intermittently: In the 1890s inventors throughout the western world were simultaneously and independently working on just such mechanisms as Herschel envisaged. The solution came with roll film, which could be driven inside the Camera intermittently from a supply reel to a takeup reel, so that fresh film could be quickly put in place for successive exposures, at the rate of sixteen or more per second. The first system to meet with public favor as a form of entertainment was Thomas Alva Edison's Kinetoscope.
But in fact the picture was not a duplicate, for the viewing lens was at another point in space than the taking lens: by the phenomenon of parallax the images, particularly of subjects close to the camera, were slightly different. This discrepancy was corrected by the introduction of the single-lens reflex camera. The Mirror was now put inside the Camera body. By an ingenious spring-loaded mechanism it flipped from its 45 ° position to the horizontal on pressing the shutter release. The American Graflex (introduced in 1903) and the British Soho Reflex of three years later became the standard hand cameras of pictorial photographers for the first two decades of the century.
The electronic flash has a further capability: it can emit flashes intermittently. Harold E. Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who invented the gas-filled tube in 1938, first made use of it to examine rapidly moving machine parts by the long-familiar strob-oscopic method: a light flashing at exactly the rate that a regularly moving object revolves or oscillates will illuminate the same phase of the motion at each flash, and the object—to the eye and Camera alike—will appear to stand still. |
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