gap. There will be as it were a living representation of
nature and . . . the same scene will be reproduced upon the screen with
the same degree of animation.... By means of my apparatus I am enabled
especially to reproduce the passing of a procession, a review of
military manoeuvres, the movements of a battle, a public fete, a
theatrical scene, the evolution or the dances of one or of several
persons, the changing expression of countenance, or, if one desires,
the grimaces of a human face; a marine view, the motion of waves,
the passage of clouds in a stormy sky, particularly in a mountainous
country, the eruption of a volcano," etc.

Other dreamers, contemporaries of Ducos, made similar suggestions; they
recognized the scientific possibility of the problem, but they were
irretrievably handicapped by the shortcomings of photography. Even when
substantially instantaneous photographs were evolved at a somewhat
later date they were limited to the use of wet plates, which have to be
prepared by the photographer and used immediately, and were therefore
quite out of the question for any practical commercial scheme. Besides
this, the use of plates would have been impracticable, because the
limitations of their weight and size would have prevented the taking
of a large number of pictures at a high rate of speed, even if the
sensitized surface had been sufficiently rapid.

Nothing ever came of Ducos' suggestions and those of the early dreamers
in this essentially practical and commercial art, and their ideas
have made no greater impress upon the final result than Jules Verne's
Nautilus of our boyhood days has developed the modern submarine. From
time to time further suggestions were made, some in patents, and others
in photographic and scientific publications, all dealing with the
fascinating thought of preserving and representing actual scenes and
events. The first serious attempt to secure an illusion of motion by
photography was made in 1878 by Edward Muybridge as a result of a
wager with the late Senator Leland Stanford, the California pioneer
and horse-lover, who had asserted, contrary to the usual belief, that
a trotting-horse at one point in its gait left the ground entirely. At
this time wet plates of very great rapidity were known, and by arranging
a series of cameras along the line of a track and causing the horse
in trotting past them, by striking wires or strings attached to the
shutters, to actuate the cameras at