Kinesiscope

Abstract

This is an 1864 Czech encyclopedia entry that details its author’s contribution to proto-cinematographic developments through devices named the Kinesiscope and the Forolyt. Following in the wake of Stampfer and Plateau (see previous two articles in this issue), Purkyně signposts the potential role the moving image can play in scientific demonstration. Like Stampfer, he also imagines its future advancement in the direction of dramatic narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Jan Evangelista Purkyně
• optical illusions
• proto-cinematography
• Kinesiscope/Forolyt
• animation
• animated photography

Notes

1. Nicholas J. Wade, Josef Brožek, and Jiří Hoskovec, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 1.

2. Discussed in his doctoral thesis, published initially as Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Sehens in subjectiver Hinsicht (Prague: Vetterl, 1819); translated into English as “Observations and Experiments on the Physiology of the Senses. Contributions to the Knowledge of Vision in its Subjective Aspect,” in Wade et al., Purkinje’s Vision, 61–102.

3. See Jindřich Brichta, “Purkyně's Contribution to Cinematography” in Henry J. John, Jan Evangelista Purkyně: Czech Scientist and Patriot, 1787-1869 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1959), 80-2. Originally published in Czech in Yesmir (1953), 250-253; and Giusy Pisano-Basile, “Jan Evangelista Purkyne: La stroboscopie au service de l’enseignement,” in Maurice Dorikens (ed.), Joseph Plateau 1801–1883: Living Between Art and Science (Flanders: Provincis Oost, 2001), 249–52.

4. See: Brichta, “Purkyně's Contribution to Cinematography”; and illustrations and captions in Dominique Willoughby, Le Cinéma graphique (Paris: Textuel, 2009), 38–41.

5. For example, Purkyně makes no appearance in Laurent Mannoni’s voluminous and valuable The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).

6. See also: Petr Szczepanik and Jaroslav Anděl (eds.) Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908-1939 (Prague: NFA, 2008.)

7. Henry Hopwood, Living Pictures: Their History, Photo-Production and Practical Working (London: Optician and Photographic Trades Review, 1899), 15. On connections between Purkyně, Wheatstone and other proto-cinematographic pioneers (but with no answer to the question concerning the aperture-less approach), see: Nicholas Wade, “Wheatstone and the origins of moving stereoscopic images,” Perception 41 (2012): 901–24.

8. See Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 238–47.

1. Purkyně miscredits Sir Charles Wheatstone with the invention of the Thaumatrope. Credit is widely given to John Ayrton Paris (known as Dr Paris), author of Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Ernest (1827), who successfully marketed the device after 1825. Charles Babbage records an alternative account of the Thaumatrope’s invention in which he played intermediary between Sir John Herschel’s initial musings and William Henry Fitton’s subsequent fabrication of such a device, some time prior to Paris. According to Babbage, he, Fitton and perhaps Herschel or indeed others (Babbage simply says “we”) created a good many examples and showed them to friends, before forgetting about the device and moving on to other pastimes, only to be surprised “some months after” by Paris’s commercial exploitation of what was now called a Thaumatrope. See: Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 205–7. The origin of Purkyně’s misattribution of the invention to Wheatstone might lie with David Brewster’s report of the Thaumatrope in The Edinburgh Journal of Science 4, no. 7 (1826): 87–8, Wheatstone and Brewster both being key players in the development of stereoscopy in the nineteenth century. It may also be connected in some way to Wheatsone’s précis of Purkyně’s work, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, No. 1,” The Journal of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 1 (1830): 101–17.

2. Note Purkyně makes no reference to Plateau here.

3. Here, Purkyně seems to be indicating neuronal functions he had studied closely, most notably those named (after him) Purkinje cells that reside in the cerebellum. In 1960, E.G.T. Liddell stated: “To Purkinje […] goes credit for the first clear account of nerve cells and the processes of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord” (cited in Wade et al., Purkinje’s Vision, 24).