It is
not surprising that these pictures of Muybridge interested the French
painters when he came to Paris, but fascinated still more the great
student of animal movements, the physiologist Marey. He had contributed
to science many an intricate apparatus for the registration of movement
processes. "Marey's tambour" is still the most useful instrument in
every physiological and psychological laboratory, whenever slight
delicate movements are to be recorded. The movement of a bird's wings
interested him especially, and at his suggestion Muybridge turned to the
study of the flight of birds. Flying pigeons were photographed in
different positions, each picture taken in a five-hundredth part of a
second.
But Marey himself improved the method. He made use of an idea which the
astronomer Jannsen had applied to the photographing of astronomical
processes. Jannsen photographed, for instance, the transit of the planet
Venus across the sun in December, 1874, on a circular sensitized plate
which revolved in the camera. The plate moved forward a few degrees
every minute. There was room in this way to have eighteen pictures of
different phases of the transit on the marginal part of the one plate.
Marey constructed the apparatus for the revolving disk so that the
intervals instead of a full minute became only one-twelfth of a second.
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