#4 Henry Heyl

Cinema – 1870

Despite Thomas Edison claiming that no one invented the cinema. There are series of innovations in the motion pictures from any before they took the form of cinema, and Henry Heyl deserves special mention here.

 In 1873, Muybridge photographed the racehorse Occident in a sequence of photographs. By 1879 he was exhibiting his sequences of animals in motion through a device he called the zoopraxiscope. Muybridge had to distort the images so they’d appear on the screen naturally. For that reason he couldn’t project photographs—and this was the problem others tried to overcome during the next ten years.

Go back three years before Muybridge photographs Occident, and on the night of February 5, 1870, Henry Heyl puts on an exhibition for an estimated 1600 people at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The show is brief—a sequence of photographs of a couple dancing for just a few seconds is projected repeatedly on a screen—but it is enough to enthrall journalists throughout the U.S., and is reported in several newspapers. Heyl called his device the Phasmatrope. It appears that he only exhibited it once, and then disappeared.

However is quite well-known as inventor of stapler.

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