Lucien Bull with His Stereoscopic Spark Drum Camera, 1904. Lucien Bull (January 5, 1876 - August 25, 1972) was an Irish inventor and pioneer in chronophotography. In 1894, he moved to Paris in order to work as an assistant for Étienne-Jules Marey, a pione


Lucien Bull with His Stereoscopic Spark Drum Camera, 1904. Lucien Bull (January 5, 1876 - August 25, 1972) was an Irish inventor and pioneer in chronophotography. In 1894, he moved to Paris in order to work as an assistant for Étienne-Jules Marey, a pioneer in the world of cinematography. Marey was a physiologist, studying how the human body worked and he felt that if he could capture human movement on film, he would be able to expand scientific understanding in this field. Marey's camera was the forerunner of the motion picture camera. In 1903 Bull devised a high-speed version of this camera and built his stereoscopic spark drum camera. The camera took 54 pairs of pictures at up to 2000 frames per second and was the first to analyze the wing beats of insects. Marey died in 1904 and Bull became head of the Marey Institute. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1931. In 1933, he is put in charge of research, National Office of Research and Invention in France and began publishing papers on a wide variety of subjects ranging from spark illuminations, high-speed motion-picture photography, original studies of insect and bird flight, and electrocardiography and muscle and heart functions. In 1948 he became President of the Institute of Scientific Cinematography. Among his other achievements was research on optical illusions and acoustic phenomena, and photographic techniques of shock waves. He died in 1972 at the age of 76. Chronophotography is an antique photographic technique from the Victorian era which captures movement in several frames of print. These prints can be subsequently arranged either like animation cels or layered in a single frame.


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