A few sentences about cinema for each era, worked show, node, station and venue. A row's card shows its one-line history and folds this under “More”.
104 of 104 are placeholders with no source yet. Each is a line inbible/excerpts.ts.
Shadow play is older than writing about it. Puppets of leather and paper were shown behind lit screens in China, India, Java and the Ottoman lands, and the same three things always made the show: a flame, a sheet and a figure between them.
| About | Excerpt | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The heron | The oldest shadow plays were short: an animal, a trick, a laugh. A few figures and a sense of timing held a crowd of children, as they still do. | placeholder |
| Clay bank | Fired clay lamps are among the oldest made objects that give light. A pinched bowl, a wick and oil lit rooms for thousands of years before glass or metal lamps. | placeholder |
| Flax shallows | Flax is retted in water until the fibres come loose from the stalk, then beaten and combed. Linen woven from it was the cloth of ancient Egypt, and a stretched linen sheet was the first screen. | placeholder |
| Sesame patch | Sesame is one of the oldest oil crops. Its oil burns with little smoke, which matters in a closed room where a show lasts an evening. | placeholder |
| Charcoal burn | Charcoal is wood burned slowly under earth, with little air. It draws a line and, ground into a binder, makes a black that stops light. | placeholder |
| Goat pen | Javanese wayang kulit and Turkish karagöz puppets are cut from hide, scraped until thin enough to be stiff but light. Some traditions scrape it until it lets coloured light through. | placeholder |
| Potter's pit | Early pottery was fired in a pit, the pots packed with fuel and covered. A lamp bowl needed only a lip for the wick and a hollow for the oil. | placeholder |
| Oil press | Seed oil was pressed with stones, beams or wedges. The steady flame of a good oil lamp decided how long a shadow show could run. | placeholder |
| Loom | A warp-weighted loom wove linen wide enough to hang between two poles. The screen of a shadow play was often the same cloth a household slept under. | placeholder |
| Puppet bench | A shadow puppet is cut with knives and punched with small chisels, so light shows through the holes as pattern. Its limbs are joined so a rod can move them. | placeholder |
| Dye pot | An opaque figure throws a hard-edged shadow; a thin one throws a grey blur. Blackening the hide made the outline read from the back of the crowd. | placeholder |
| Plate firing | A pinhole needs a thin, opaque wall with one clean hole in it. Early obscura rooms used a shutter or a plate with a small bore; the smaller the hole, the sharper and dimmer the picture. | placeholder |
| Camera obscura hut | Mozi in China and Aristotle in Greece described light through a small hole making an upside-down image. Ibn al-Haytham studied it closely around 1020, and every camera since is a camera obscura with something to catch the image. | placeholder |
| Shadow stage | A lamp behind, a sheet in front and a puppeteer between them: the audience watches light on a screen in the dark. The arrangement did not change when the puppet became film. | placeholder |
Glass turned the shadow into a picture. Lens grinders, painters and lantern makers of the seventeenth century put a painted slide in front of a lamp and a lens, and the magic lantern threw a coloured image on a wall across a dark room.
| About | Excerpt | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The drowned crew | The phantasmagoria of the 1790s used lanterns on wheels to make ghosts grow and shrink in the dark. Audiences in Paris were told to expect the dead, and some fled the room. | placeholder |
| Sand spit | Glass is mostly silica sand. Sand low in iron makes clear glass; iron turns it green. | placeholder |
| Kelp line | Burned seaweed gives an ash rich in soda, a flux that lets sand melt at a lower heat. Coastal glassworks burned kelp for it for centuries. | placeholder |
| Copper scree | Copper alloyed with zinc makes brass, the metal of lantern bodies, lens tubes and scientific instruments. | placeholder |
| Limestone cut | Lime steadies glass so it does not dissolve in damp air. Burned lime also gave limelight, the bright stage light of the nineteenth century. | placeholder |
| Ash kiln | Kelp or plant ash was burned down and leached to make the flux glassmakers called soda or potash. | placeholder |
| Glass furnace | Murano's glassmakers made the clear cristallo glass of the fifteenth century, clear enough for good lenses. | placeholder |
| Lens grinder | Lenses were ground by hand against curved tools with finer and finer grit. Spectacle makers' lenses went into telescopes, microscopes and, later, lanterns. | placeholder |
| Slide cutter | Early lantern slides were long glass strips in a wooden frame, pushed through the lantern one picture at a time. | placeholder |
| Brass foundry | Brass is cast and then hammered or turned. It does not rust, so lantern makers used it for everything the heat would reach. | placeholder |
| Lime kiln | Limestone burned in a kiln gives quicklime. Heated in a flame, a block of lime glows white: limelight. | placeholder |
| Colour grinder | Painters ground their colours by hand on a stone slab and mixed them into oil or varnish. Verdigris, scraped from copper, gave the clear green of many lantern slides. | placeholder |
| Painter's studio | Lantern slides were painted by hand in transparent colours, small enough to fit the lens and fine enough to be enlarged on a wall. | placeholder |
| Lantern workshop | The magic lantern is usually credited to Christiaan Huygens around 1659: a lamp, a mirror, a slide and a lens in a box with a chimney. | placeholder |
| Gauze weaving | Robertson threw his ghosts onto a gauze or a sheet of waxed muslin, so thin that the audience in the dark could not see the screen at all. | placeholder |
| Wheeled lantern | The fantascope was a lantern on a wheeled table with a lens that refocused as it moved, so the picture stayed sharp as it grew. | placeholder |
| Tent raising | Fairground lantern shows were set up in a booth or tent for a few days and packed onto a cart for the next town. | placeholder |
| Room fitting | Robertson showed his phantasmagoria in the crypt of a disused convent in Paris, lit by one lamp that was put out before the ghosts came. | placeholder |
| Lantern tent | Travelling lanternists carried the lantern on their backs from town to town and showed it in inns and tents for a coin. | placeholder |
| Phantasmagoria room | Étienne-Gaspard Robert's phantasmagoria in Paris hid the lantern behind the screen and rolled it back and forth, so ghosts seemed to rush at the audience. | placeholder |
In the nineteenth century toys taught the eye to see motion. The thaumatrope, the phenakistiscope, the zoetrope and the praxinoscope showed a run of drawings in quick order, and the viewer saw one figure moving.
| About | Excerpt | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The hammer | A zoetrope strip loops: the last drawing must lead back into the first. A blacksmith striking an anvil was a favourite subject because the motion repeats by itself. | placeholder |
| Rag heap | Paper was made from linen and cotton rags until wood pulp took over in the late nineteenth century. | placeholder |
| Iron seam | Iron gave the nineteenth century its machines, and the gears and springs that moving-picture devices ran on. | placeholder |
| Coal drift | Coal fed the forges, the steam engines and, later, the dynamos that lit arc lamps. | placeholder |
| Smithy | A smith turned iron into bars, rods and plate, the stock every later workshop cut from. | placeholder |
| Gear cutter | Clockmakers' gear-cutting engines made the regular, repeated motion that a projector's movement needs. | placeholder |
| Spring winder | A wound spring stores motion. Clockwork drove toys and some early cameras before electric motors. | placeholder |
| Paper mill | Rags were beaten to pulp, lifted on a wire mould and pressed into sheets. | placeholder |
| Print shop | Optical toys were sold as printed discs and strips, so one drawing could be copied for thousands of buyers. | placeholder |
| Drawing desk | Each frame of a zoetrope strip was drawn one small change from the last. The skill is the same one animators still use. | placeholder |
| Mirror bench | Émile Reynaud's praxinoscope of 1877 replaced the zoetrope's slits with a ring of mirrors, giving a brighter, steadier picture. | placeholder |
| Toy workshop | The phenakistiscope, zoetrope and praxinoscope were sold as parlour toys. Motion pictures began in the nursery. | placeholder |
| Praxinoscope fitting | Reynaud patented the praxinoscope in 1877. Its mirrors sat halfway between the drum's centre and its strip, so each picture seemed to stand still in the middle while the drum turned. | placeholder |
| Limelight fitting | Limelight burned a stick of lime in an oxygen and hydrogen flame. Theatres lit their stars with it from the 1830s, which is where "in the limelight" comes from. | placeholder |
| Theatre raising | Reynaud's Théâtre Optique combined a praxinoscope, a lantern and mirrors to throw a long strip of painted frames onto a screen behind which he worked it by hand. | placeholder |
| Belt yard | Belts and pulleys carried motion from one shaft to many, the way a single engine drove a whole workshop. | placeholder |
| Praxinoscope theatre | Reynaud's Théâtre Optique projected long painted strips at the Musée Grévin from 1892, three years before the Lumières. | placeholder |
Chemistry fixed the image the camera obscura had shown for centuries. Niépce, Daguerre and Talbot made pictures that stayed, and within fifty years plates were fast enough to stop a galloping horse mid-stride.
| About | Excerpt | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The horse, taken from life | In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge set a row of cameras along a track in California, each fired by a thread the horse broke. The plates settled an argument: a galloping horse does have all four hooves off the ground at once. | placeholder |
| Silver seam | Silver salts darken in light. Every photograph until digital cameras was made from them. | placeholder |
| Salt pans | Common salt fixed Talbot's early prints, and sodium thiosulphate, called hypo, fixed nearly everything after. | placeholder |
| Bone yard | Gelatin boiled from bone and hide held silver in the dry plate from the 1870s, and on film after it. | placeholder |
| Silver refinery | Refined silver was dissolved in nitric acid to make silver nitrate, the start of every emulsion. | placeholder |
| Chemist's bench | Photography was a chemist's art. Its pioneers were often apothecaries and amateur scientists. | placeholder |
| Iodine retort | Iodine, found in seaweed ash in 1811, made the daguerreotype's silver plate sensitive to light. | placeholder |
| Gelatin works | Richard Leach Maddox's gelatin dry plate of 1871 could be made ahead and was fast enough to hold a moving subject. | placeholder |
| Plate works | Glass plates coated at a factory freed photographers from coating their own on the spot. | placeholder |
| Camera workshop | A camera is a camera obscura made small: a dark box, a lens, and a plate where the picture falls. | placeholder |
| Exposure | An exposure on a wet or dry plate took from a fraction of a second to many seconds, and the plate showed nothing until it was developed. | placeholder |
| Darkroom | A developer brings out the image that light left hidden in the silver, in a room lit only by red or amber light. | placeholder |
| Fixer bench | Fixing washes away the silver the light did not touch, so the picture no longer darkens when it is looked at. | placeholder |
| Dark tent sewing | Wet-plate photographers took a light-tight tent into the field, with a window of orange glass, to coat and develop each plate within minutes. | placeholder |
| Wire drawing | Wire is made by pulling a rod through smaller and smaller holes in a hard die until it is as thin as it needs to be. | placeholder |
| Trip-wire rig | Muybridge's cameras were fired by threads across the track, so the horse took its own pictures. | placeholder |
| Disc printing | The zoopraxiscope discs were painted on glass from Muybridge's photographs, the figures drawn a little stretched so they looked right when spun. | placeholder |
| Zoopraxiscope fitting | Muybridge built the zoopraxiscope in 1879: a lantern, a turning glass disc and a counter-turning slotted disc as a shutter. | placeholder |
| Studio raising | Early studios were built on rooftops with glass walls and ceilings, since daylight was the only light strong enough for a portrait. | placeholder |
| Gallery raising | Muybridge lectured in halls across America and Europe, his horse running on a screen above the stage. | placeholder |
| Portrait studio | Portrait studios opened in every city within a few years of 1839. For many families a photograph was the first picture of themselves they owned. | placeholder |
| Zoopraxiscope gallery | Muybridge's zoopraxiscope projected his sequences, painted onto glass discs, to lecture audiences from 1880. | placeholder |
Flexible celluloid film put thousands of photographs on one strip. Edison's kinetoscope showed it to one viewer at a time; the Lumières' cinématographe in 1895 projected it to a room, and cinema as a public show began.
| About | Excerpt | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The ferry | Early films were single shots of ordinary life: workers leaving a factory, a train arriving, a boat leaving a harbour. People paid to see places they already knew, moving on a screen. | placeholder |
| Cotton field | Cotton is nearly pure cellulose, the raw stuff of celluloid. | placeholder |
| Sulphur pit | Sulphur makes sulphuric acid, which film factories used by the tonne. | placeholder |
| Saltpetre cave | Saltpetre gives nitric acid. Treated with nitric and sulphuric acid, cotton becomes nitrocellulose. | placeholder |
| Harbour dock | Camphor, shipped from Taiwan and Japan, softens nitrocellulose into celluloid. | placeholder |
| Acid works | Mixed acids were made in lead-lined works, one of the dangerous trades behind the film business. | placeholder |
| Nitration plant | Nitrocellulose is also guncotton. Nitrate film burned fiercely, and its fires shaped the building rules of cinemas. | placeholder |
| Celluloid rollers | Celluloid was rolled and cast into thin clear sheets. Eastman sold flexible roll film from 1889. | placeholder |
| Emulsion coater | Film base was coated with a gelatin-silver emulsion in long lengths, in the dark. | placeholder |
| Perforator | Edison's workshop settled on 35 mm film with four holes per frame on each side, a format still in use. | placeholder |
| Film vault | Nitrate film had to be stored cold and apart. Most films made before 1930 are lost, many to fire and decay. | placeholder |
| Dynamo house | Electric light came to cinemas from their own generators before towns had a mains supply. | placeholder |
| Arc lamp works | An arc between two carbon rods gives a light bright enough to throw a picture across a hall. Projectors used it for most of a century. | placeholder |
| Movement bench | An intermittent movement holds each frame still in the gate, then pulls the next one down while a shutter closes. | placeholder |
| Cine camera workshop | The Lumières' cinématographe was camera, printer and projector in one wooden box, light enough to carry into the street. | placeholder |
| Projector workshop | Projectors grew from the magic lantern: the same lamp and lens, with a film movement between them. | placeholder |
| Glass-roof studio | Early studios had glass roofs or turned on a pivot to follow the sun. Edison's Black Maria of 1893 was the first built for films. | placeholder |
| Developing lab | Exposed film was wound on racks and dipped through tanks of developer, stop and fixer. | placeholder |
| Cutting table | Joining shots made films longer than one take and let a story cut from one place to another. | placeholder |
| Printing lab | A printer copied the edited negative onto positive film, so one film could play in many towns at once. | placeholder |
| Kinetoscope parlour | The first kinetoscope parlour opened on Broadway in 1894. Customers bent over cabinets to watch a short loop one at a time. | placeholder |
| Nickelodeon | From 1905 small storefront cinemas in the United States charged a nickel for a programme of short films. Thousands opened in a few years. | placeholder |
| The picture palace | By the 1910s cinemas were built as palaces, with orchestras, balconies and thousands of seats. | placeholder |