6 The Graphic Method

Reframing Photography as a Time-Tracing Technology

If in Frederick Douglass’s hopeful perspective (see chapter 5), photography’s “tracings of time” indexed Black and global emancipation, for Étienne-Jules Marey they represented a new “universal” tool for science and Western positivism. In the French-accented story of how cinema was implemented, Marey’s graphic method functions as the hinge paradigm.1 Graphic method is his proprietary term for analog apparatuses recording time or motion in visual and measurable traces from the mid-1860s. At the dawn of the Darwinian era, Marey promoted his method as a revolutionary innovation for physiological research on inner and outer body functions, from pulse to locomotion and animal flight. For scholars of modernity, it crystallized the rise of time-picturing culture and a decisive break with centuries of static representation. Its application to photography directly ushered in cinema.2

As the story goes, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s multiple-camera sequences of animal locomotion from 1877, Marey opted for a single-camera with multiple exposures on a single plate. He initially called this adaptation of the graphic method “photochronography”—I’ll return to this crucial term—before adopting chronophotography in 1886.3 In 1888, he replaced the single plate with a light-sensitive paper strip on which each exposure was separate, producing the first bona fide pictures of motion. Meeting Marey at the International Exposition of 1889 in Paris, Thomas Edison was shown his flexible-strip camera and soon jettisoned the cylindrical chronophotographic setup he had been working on in favor of celluloid (Braun, Picturing Time, 151–53). The Muybridge–Marey–Edison axis of chronophotography forms the core of the accepted history of precinema.

This chapter and the next argue that this story gives short shrift to longer technical developments and truncates crucial historical contexts through which sequential photographic recording was introduced and adopted. I focus in this chapter on the genealogy of self-recording instrumentation, its applications for atmospheric research and astrophotography, and its intersections with the study of temporality in human vision. All these strands were deployed prior to Marey as part of the competitive imperialist ambitions of nineteenth-century Western state science and technology that informed Marey’s physiological research as well.

Self-Tracing Instruments from the Seventeenth Century to Marey

The earliest time-tracing apparatuses appear to have been contemporaneous with the arrival of the telescope. Anselmus de Boodt, a naturalist and draftsman from Bruges, Belgium, is credited with an odometer-and-compass apparatus with punch-hole registration on a paper strip around 1610. It was likely devised within the new logic of engineering compendia known as the “theater of machines,” in which simple devices were experimentally combined, often for aspirational applications.4 Yet until the well-publicized construction of a pendulum clock by Christiaan Huygens in 1657, time-tracing technology stalled. In the 1660s, Christopher Wren designed a weather clock with paper-and-pencil registration on both cylinder and disk: Robert Hooke is said to have built a prototype after this design in 1678–1679 with a punch-hole recording system.5 Another similar apparatus was constructed by Louis Léon Pajot d’Ons-en-Bray, who gathered one of the finest collections of scientific instruments and “devices of wonder” in the eighteenth century, including a scrolling panorama box.6 In 1734, d’Ons-en-Bray published an illustrated article on a clock-driven anemometer that traced wind speed on a gridded paper cylinder and wind direction on a soot-covered cylinder. This is the first self-tracing instrument reliably known to have been built and used.7 Tremor-recording devices were constructed following the 1755 earthquake that devastated Lisbon and the deadly 1783 Calabria earthquakes, with both sand-tracing and ink-brush pendulum setups.8 Nonetheless, it is fair to say that from the 1600s to the late 1700s, self-recording machines remained marginal and fell short of real-world applications.

In 1795, one of the founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Alexander Keith, built a weather station with a recording cylinder thermometer. His description contains a novel insight:

And as the pencil rises or falls by heat and cold, it will mark the degrees on the scale of the cylinder; and the cylinder being constantly revolving, the division for each day will successively be marked by the pencil, which will leave a trace, describing an undulated line. . . . These papers, when taken off and bound together, will make a complete register of the temperature for the year; or, if they are pasted to one another . . . the variations of heat and cold, during the year, may all be seen and compared by one glance of the eye.9

This passage exhibits the same imperative of visualizing and quantifying duration that informed Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg’s 1756 chronographic machine. It too favored the cylinder over disks, plates, pendulums, and hole-punching systems.10 Thomas Young certainly knew Keith’s weather recorder (he was at Edinburgh University in 1795) and provided the first general account of self-tracing technology in an 1807 lecture given at the Royal Institution. He describes a “chronometer . . . for measuring small portions of time” consisting of a weight-activated, revolving and descending cylinder on which a fixed needle traced the vibrations of an object or tuning fork. The cylinder’s “surface, being smooth, may be covered either with paper or with wax, and a pencil or a point of metal may be pressed against it by a fine spring, so as to describe always a spiral on the barrel.” Young expressly calls it a “chronometer” that can graph “the motion of any other body.”11 Importantly, this apparatus aimed either at tracing continuous durations or registering quantifiable variations. This double function split into two types of graphic recording setups by the mid-nineteenth century, which Marey’s graphic method straddled. Young’s chronometer applied to the recording of sound inspired the prototypes of Charles Cros’s and Edison’s cylinder phonograph designs, with reversible recording and playing functions, both in 1877. However, Camille Flammarion’s cinema apparatus of 1867, the telechronoscope, had preceded these audio applications. Flammarion replaced the wax in Young’s chronometer with miniature photographs arrayed in a helix around the cylinder. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Edison adopted the same design for their 1888 kinetoscope (see chapter 7).

Young’s chronometer bespeaks a new valence of time-tracing technicity at the start of the nineteenth century. Durations became both longer in theory and smaller in practice. The age of Earth was pushed back to several millions, then tens of millions of years by the 1830s, while at the opposite end the second was broken down. Swiss clockmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet, who worked in the Île de la Cité in Paris from the 1770s through the Revolution and Empire, was the chief horological and aesthetic innovator. His self-winding perpetual motion clock of 1780, his 1801 tourbillon mechanism anachronistically named after René Descartes’s vortex theory, and the addition of “moon-tip” hands and sun-and-moon dials in thinned-out pocket watches all invoked astronomical durations to vouchsafe portable timekeepers’ precision. Breguet came from the same upwardly mobile class of petit bourgeois technician-scientists as his close friend Jean-Paul Marat, whose sister Anne-Marie worked with Breguet. Both émigrés and anglophiles from Neuchâtel, Switzerland, they saved each other’s lives during the Revolution despite their diverging political allegiances.12 Breguet’s craftsmanship made him among the instrument-makers most prized by the Paris Observatory. In September 1813, François Arago named him official timekeeper of that institution; meeting notes from 1819 indicate that Breguet had “brought a useful amelioration to the mechanism he has imagined for splitting a second into ten equal parts.”13 Among Breguet’s apprentices was Louis Moinet, his right-hand assistant after 1811. An amateur astronomer, in 1816 Moinet built a chronometer (compteur de tierces) with a precision of one-sixtieth of a second, which he adapted to telescope eyepieces to improve the recording of celestial coordinates.14

In propounding his graphic method, Marey is rather succinct about this long tradition of self-recording instruments. A footnote from an 1867 lecture indicates that he learned that history from the grandson of Breguet, Louis-François-Clément Breguet, the engineer who built Marey’s first sphygmograph in 1859. L.-F.-C. Breguet knew the history of self-tracing instruments from d’Ons-en-Bray to Young, and Marey points in particular to the up-and-down motion of Young’s cylinder, thanks to which “the graph . . . inscribes itself in the form of a helix, which can be very long.”15 The construction and use of self-recording cylindrical apparatuses took off in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with an early model built in 1808 in Germany by Johann Albert Eytelwein, followed by French military engineers endeavoring to quantify the speed, friction, and forces of propelled gun shells, illustrating the continued closeness of photocinema prototechnologies with military and colonial power.16 Working for the War Ministry in the late 1820s, engineer Arthur Jules Morin developed a vertical cylinder machine tracing the parabolic curves of falling bodies that he too called “a chronometer.”17 Marey provides an illustration for it in an 1866 article, while stating in another essay that it was “the first among recording machines”—a nationalist exaggeration.18

Electrification made cylinder self-recording devices among the most polyvalent new instruments for research and industrial applications in the second half of the nineteenth century. British polymath Charles Wheatstone designed and built the first electrical cylinder recording machines in the early 1840s. Growing up in his father’s musical instrument business, Wheatstone, like Young, worked across acoustics, optics, horology, and electricity—waveform industrial arts. In 1834, he devised an ingenious setup to time the speed of electricity in a copper wire and was recognized as among the best experimental scientists of England. He expressly cites Young’s cylinder tracing chronometer as his inspiration.19 Wheatstone is on record as having explained the principle of his “chronoscope” to astronomer Adolphe Quetelet in 1840, which later helped invalidate L.-F.-C. Breguet’s 1845 nationalistic claim of priority for its invention.

There were two main types of cylinder recording machines based on the same setup: an electrical circuit turning on and off an electromagnet connected both to a clock and the rotating cylinder equipped with a graphing stylus.20 The interval chronoscope served to record a precise duration for applications in mechanics, ballistics, nerve signal research, and synchronization. The other type, a tracing chronograph, aimed at imaging a continuous variable phenomenon as a graphic curve, with applications for navigation, meteorology, physiology, and power engines. The three terms—chronometer, chronograph, and chronoscope—remained interchangeable in practice. Graphic electro-chronometers of both kinds were especially tied to geophysical and astronomical research because of the new electromagnetic paradigm. Multiple innovations around electricity from the 1810s to the 1830s (batteries, electromagnets, conduction, production, relays, etc.) led to a boom in electrical technologies such as the telegraph, which came into use after 1837, with a patent by Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke. Telegraphic electrification and natural disturbances in telegraphic transmission soon evinced the idea that the Earth was a giant electrical object: the “theory of the Earth circuit.”21 The dream that communication could take place directly through Earth’s electromagnetic field, resulting in a single panhuman “body electric” (to echo Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem), was reinforced by the laying of submarine cables in the 1850s, before a powerful solar magnetic storm destroyed many telegraph lines in 1859. Quetelet commented in 1840 that electricity in telegraphic wires could transmit “signals with the speed of thought, since in the span of one second they could go around the globe six or seven times.”22 Admiring Wheatstone’s self-recording telegraphic weather stations mounted on balloons or lowered down mining shafts, the popularizer François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno exclaimed in 1849: “Here the imagination is truly awed. The depths of space and the abyss are now accessible. You put an inert instrument there, and space and the abyss take it upon themselves to send you instantaneously the indications of atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity you wanted, which arrive as if by magic in your laboratory. . . . Yesteryear it was light that became for us an astounding drawing artist, today it is the whole of nature that paints itself before our eyes.”23 Self-tracing instruments were thus central for the mid-nineteenth-century technocratic project of making all aspects of the natural world visible. But Moigno suggested also that chronographic recording technology was a conceptual expansion of photography—that is, in retrospect, an intermediary step from photography to cinema. That is the reason why Marey coined the word photochronography first—a photographic application of chronography—before shifting to chronophotography, the picturing of time.

Already in 1840, John Herschel had pointed out the capabilities of photography for recording dynamic phenomena in the very essay in which he coined the word photography. He describes “a self-registering meteorological photometer or actinograph,” a cylindrical clock-driven continuous photographic recorder that registered variations of daylight over a twelve-hour period on a sensitive paper strip or paper disk. These strips were the first to render visible a durational phenomenon as a photographic image—true chronophotographs. In follow-up experiments, Herschel used thermosensitive and photosensitive paper strips to record the heat and light spectra of atmospheric illumination, so they could be “rendered sensible to the eye.”24 Such efforts were consonant with Herschel’s broader attempt to devise new means of visualizing natural phenomena. In 1833, he published a paper on a new method for drawing the orbits of double stars. He considered this “process . . . essentially graphical,” and it consisted in plotting the positions of binary stars over time on graph paper to enable the freehand tracing of “a curve . . . of large and graceful sinuosity,” which represented their respective elliptical orbits. In 1849, he refined what he then called his “graphical process,” which was quickly adopted by European astronomers.25

Wheatstone was involved in optical research with William Henry Fox Talbot and Michael Faraday in the 1830s while working on the spectroscopic analyses of metals, and in 1838 he invented the stereoscope, a sensational device fusing two images to produce three-dimensional visual perception. He knew John Herschel’s 1840 clock-driven drum actinograph and followed developments in photography with great interest, commissioning stereoscopic daguerreotypes from French physicist Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau in 1842.26 Wheatstone built his first paper-recording cylinder chronograph in 1842–1843 for “a meteorological record with ‘self-registering instruments on a new construction,’” which was installed at the new Kew station located in the decommissioned astronomical observatory.27 Just thirteen years after Nicéphore Niépce came to Kew, “self-registering instruments” were deployed there to image graphically the variations of atmospheric temperature, pressure, electricity, humidity, and wind speed.

By the mid-1850s, electrically driven cylinder-recordings were used in dozens of applications and described and illustrated in scientific and popular publications.28 They acquired a particular urgency in the United States. To become a full partner with Europe in world affairs, the country needed key data for its global linkage: synchronized time and exact transatlantic distance. Calculating the longitude of American locations compared to the Greenwich and Paris meridians became an urgent priority for the US Coast Survey. A Boston clockmaker and amateur astronomer tackled that issue while working unpaid at Harvard: William Cranch Bond. In September 1848, with his son George Phillips Bond, he discovered a new satellite of Saturn—the first major discovery in the solar system since William Herschel found Saturn’s Mimas in 1797. The new Saturnian moon, which he named Hyperion, was simultaneously discovered in England by William Lassell, yet the two sets of coordinates could not be compared for lack of longitude reconciliation, depreciating Bond’s discovery. With other American astronomers, Bond worked to remedy the situation throughout the 1840s by shipping chronometers back and forth to the Greenwich Observatory—116 in thirty-four crossings in 1848 alone—to compute longitude.29 In 1849, drum chronographs were used to register the transit of a star at the meridian of several telegraphically linked observatories in New York, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Philadelphia, comparing their recordings to solar and sidereal clocks to establish respective longitudes (Holden, Memorial, 239–42). Synchronization remained problematic because the rotary motion of the chronographs was irregular due to the clocks’ escapement mechanisms, occasioning asynchronies. The problem was solved by Bond, helped by his two clock-making sons George and Richard, with a “spring-governor” chronograph that achieved near-perfect rotary continuity in 1850 (243–46). The Bonds’ so-called American method of electromagnetic paper-drum chronography, linking astronomical observatories by telegraph, became the most reliable means of coordinating the longitude and time of distant locales.30

From this quick survey of self-tracing cylinder instrumentation, we can draw three conclusions. First, astronomer John Herschel’s 1840 actinograph attests that photography was entangled with the recording of duration from its very beginning. By 1860, Herschel envisioned “the stereoscopic representation of scenes in action” using photographic shots taken at intervals of “a tenth of a second”—a prototype of 3D cinema.31 Second, the development of the self-registering electromagnetic chronoscope/chronograph cylinder by Wheatstone in 1842 was directly influenced by Young’s chronometer and Herschel’s actinograph. Third, two innovations in astronomy—Herschel’s development of a “graphical process” between 1833 and 1849, and the Bonds’ American method correcting the uneven rotation of electro-chronographic cylinders by 1851—prepared Marey’s vaunted graphic method, the first theoretically and the second technically. The initial apparatus Marey perfected in 1859, the sphygmograph, was a portable clock-driven device tracing human pulse on a soot-covered “small plate of glass or metal.”32 Better informed about chronographic technologies, in the early 1860s he adopted the cylinder chronograph as his main operational setup.

Visual Duration and Ocular Hieroglyphs

An important factor behind the emergence of time-tracing technologies in the 1840–1850s was the development of temporal research in vision studies. It is significant for understanding late developments of photocinema for three reasons. First, it further complicates the simplistic paradigm that Marey’s chronophotography just added time to photography across a conceptual and technological void of forty years. Second, vision research showed that human eyes are neither instantaneous nor passive optical receptors; they are coproducers of inherently dynamic visual images, and instrumentation was devised to simulate such dynamic imaging. And third, the class of images produced by human vision and its simulators had a distinct family resemblance with the earlier class of hieroglyphic imprints (see chapter 4).

Robert Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were all fascinated by afterimages and other ocular spectra between the 1780s and the 1810s because their ambiguous status—partly phenomenal and partly subjective—fueled the quest for metaphysical bonds between humans and the physical world (see chapter 4). In 1819, Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkinje published his dissertation about experiments on “vision in its subjective aspects,” meaning visual phenomena endemic to the eyes. Purkinje produced and analyzed instances of afterimages, pressure images, galvanic images, entoptic images (of blood vessels), peripheral vision, double vision, unfocalized sight, floaters, and visual deformations due to motions of the eyes or the body. He collected them into a new category of visual patterns that disclosed hidden physiological functions of the human visual apparatus.33 Purkinje showed that human eyes produced streams of automatic images that were kinemorphic and nonmimetic.

In 1828, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau wrote his PhD dissertation “On Some Properties of the Impressions Produced by Light on the Organ of Sight,” investigating photosensitive processes within the human eye. His director was astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, who corresponded with both John Herschel and Arago and played an outsized role in the adoption of graphs as visualization tools.34 In 1824, Quetelet read an article by Peter Mark Roget puzzling over the distortion of carriage wheel spokes in rotation, suggesting that topic for Plateau’s thesis. Like Purkinje, Plateau transformed the eye from a passive photographic-like organ into a complex psychophysiological medium endowed with its own peculiar temporality: “The sensations produced in us by light have a certain duration,” Plateau concluded.35 He describes the process as starting with a quick increase of stimulation, followed by a short stage of full perception, then a sharp decline of visual information. He associated this overall curve with other known dynamic physical processes like the cooling cycle or sonic resonance. He also compared it to the path of “igneous meteors leaving behind them a long luminous trail,” injecting, as it were, astronomical trajectories within vision (Plateau, Dissertation, 17–18).

It is in a complementary theory of afterimage phenomena from 1834 that Plateau coined the expression “persistence of impressions” in the retina.36 Synthesizing prior research, he shows that natural vision and afterimages form colors in opposite ways and formulates the following law: “In all cases when natural colors produce WHITE by their combination, afterimage colors of the same hues produce the opposite of white, BLACK” (Plateau, Essai d’une Théorie générale, 49). He then redefines afterimage vision as “negative vision” by contrast with positive natural vision (58–59), and it is likely from this essay that John Herschel developed his own ideas of positive and negative images (see chapter 5). When natural vision is exposed to the motion of a lit object, Plateau affirms that a complex “oscillation” of positive and negative impressions occurs (60). On this basis, he offers a concluding definition: “The interval elapsing between the instant when the retina is removed from the action of a colored object, and that when the impression starts taking a negative state constitute what we mean by PERSISTENCE OF IMPRESSIONS ON THE RETINA; and the negative phases of the impression constitute the phenomenon of accidental colors [afterimages]” (64). Plateau does not posit, interestingly, that the perception of visual motion devolves from positive impressions melding with one another; quite the contrary, he documents visual experiments where positive and negative impressions mutate into each other with sequential oscillations (61).

The research of Purkinje and Plateau weakened the camera obscura model of vision. While Jonathan Crary famously argues in a Foucauldian vein that this took place in the 1820s when “the physiology and temporality of the human body” came to the fore, Crary leaves unexamined the role of motion and duration in vision.37 Yet, accounting for these new dimensions of sight led vision researchers in the wake of Purkinje and Plateau to investigate visual and ophthalmic temporal subprocesses not just by generating ophthalmic imaging but by constructing devices able to produce, simulate, and test such images. The stroboscopic disks and the rotating phenakistoscope drum devised quasi-simultaneously by Plateau and Simon von Stampfer (who also worked in astronomy) in the early 1830s were no mere philosophical toys; they were kinemorphic imaging simulators. Plateau’s most intriguing device was the anorthoscope, two spinning disks with cutout portions spinning in opposite directions that generated a stable pattern. Plateau commented that “in the mist of the sort of gauze produced by the motion of both lines,” a paradoxically static image appeared that he called “the flying heart” (Dissertation, 20). While Niépce and Louis Daguerre were wrestling with parasitical motion in long-exposure photography, a new species of image emerged that was neither static nor in motion, blurring the lines between the two traditionally antagonistic categories of imaging.

For vision researchers, the new duration of simulated imaging became a key to understanding human vision.38 In 1825, John Herschel’s musings on the topic led to the invention of the thaumatrope, a small device fusing recto-verso afterimages by quickly flipping between them.39 The question of visual motion synthesis, as observed in afterimage trails generated by a whirled branch with a burning tip—a perennial source of puzzlement since antiquity—came to the fore.40 In December 1830, electrophysicist Michael Faraday published an article about experiments with spinning wheels that created both static and moving stroboscopic images. His conclusions indicated that visual motion was still difficult to conceptualize and, indeed, visualize: “The eye has the power, as is well known, of retaining visual impressions for a sensible period of time; and in this way, recurring actions, made sufficiently near to each other, are perceptibly connected, and made to appear as a continued impression.”41 The preconception of retinal persistence is partly overcome here through the “connection” between discrete “impressions.” But the resulting “continued impression” is qualified by the expression “made to appear,” which still suggests an illusion or artifice. Faraday’s description of visual motion, in other words, cannot quite bridge static and moving images; it remains stroboscopic.

A year later in the same journal, Wheatstone provided a detailed account of Purkinje’s work while synthesizing new research on the “physiology of vision” on the Continent by “Müller, Plateau, etc.,” still “entirely unnoticed in this country.”42 In his account on vision research at the inaugural 1833 Cambridge British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, Quetelet reported on an experiment by Wheatstone conducted in front of John Herschel, David Brewster, and others. While a spinning disk with alternate black and white sectors looked gray, a sudden electrical spark caused the visual apparatus to perceive the disk as immobile with its black and white sectors separated.43 This amusing experiment showed the opposite of the traditional view: Visual motion was native to human sight, and static vision merely its interruption. As Chitra Ramalingam shows, Wheatstone was central in developing new instrumentation for such investigations, working closely with both Faraday and Talbot in 1833–1834. Ramalingam summarizes Wheatstone’s main research hypothesis on durational phenomena in various mediums (sound, vision, timekeeping, etc.) this way: “A dynamic event was made to leave behind a fixed trace on a sensitive surface, through its action in time.”44 This polyvalent formula represents a keen encapsulation of the development of photocinema in the 1830s and 1840s, combining the tail end of the hieroglyphic imprint tradition, the implementation of photography, experiments with static-moving imaging simulators, and the rise of time-tracing electro-chronographs.

Moving-Plate Chronophotography in the 1840s

After the Kew Observatory was repurposed as a meteorological station and electrical instrument testing site in 1842, Wheatstone installed a bank of “self-registering instruments” there. Although he directed the effort, the station was run by an instrument-maker and polymath who has not received his due: Francis Ronalds. Ronalds was a liberal thinker whose sister Emily befriended Robert Owen, with whom she worked toward the abolition of slavery. Ronalds was fascinated with electricity, inventing battery-operated clocks in 1815 before building a thirteen-kilometer-long working electric telegraph in the family garden in 1816—a conspicuous network of wires that drew many spectators, including Wheatstone and Cooke.45 Only in 1868 was Ronalds recognized as the precursor of the telegraph (Ronalds, Sir Francis Ronalds, 141–49, 162). He developed telescope mounts and perspective-tracing machines, publishing detailed accounts and precise drawings of his new instruments (101–9). Among these were clock-driven self-tracing devices recording atmospheric electricity, designed as early as 1815. These machines traced a spiral groove on a horizontal disk covered with a layer of resin softened at the contact of a thin electrified spindle, making Ronalds a key innovator in self-recording instrumentation (133). He had a lifelong interest in imaging and used a camera lucida for drawing, and he constructed tracing instruments for perspective, elevation, geometrical curves, etc. An excerpt from his “ideas book” dated 1814–1829 describes a “chemical camera”: “Place any substance or infusion upon the paper or other surface receiving the image which by the action of light would stain the paper . . . illuminate the object as strongly as possible by means of lenses in any number or any size. . . . If this were practicable we should obtain far better mechanical painters than human ones of light & shade” (214). Although he did not follow through at the time, as early as 1841 he came up with the idea of putting photographic plates in motion to trace the continuous variations of indices of instruments.46 By 1845, he collaborated with Henry Collen on a prototype. Collen was a London portrait painter and art teacher to future Queen Victoria who worked with Talbot on calotype photography in 1841. In 1842, with his connection at Westminster, Collen was asked to photograph the Treaty of Nanjing ending the Opium Wars—the first political document and international treatise reproduced by photography.47 Although Collen sought to take credit for the invention of moving-plate self-recording, Ronalds was the inceptor. He describes his project in an article of 1847 as: “self-registering, photographically, the variations of the declination magnet and the thermometer which were made previously to the use of good achromatic lenses, for projecting, upon photographic paper, a sharp image, magnified to any required degree, of that part of the instrument whose motions are to be registered.”48 In such devices, an Argand light illuminates the instrument’s indicator (a needle or mercury column) to imprint its image on a vertical photographic plate driven by clockwork and gravity, creating a twelve-hour chronographic record of the continuous variation of current, magnetism, or pressure.

In the same 1847 issue of the Philosophical Transactions where Ronalds published his essay on self-registering instruments, Charles Brooke published a description of a similar process he had developed for the Greenwich Observatory “On the Automatic Registration of Magnetometers, and Other Meteorological Instruments, by Photography,” with the difference that it used photographic paper on a cylinder and a different caching system.49 The simultaneous appearance of both papers suggests that the Royal Society regarded their inventions as independent.50 Because of the faintness and fugitivity of photographic traces on paper, Brooke resorted to retracing them with ink. Ronalds initially used paper calotypes between glass plates, but in 1849 at the urging of John Herschel, he turned to daguerreotypes with a better resolution. In the words of Beverley F. Ronalds: “Ronalds was the first to develop and document a successful ‘movie camera,’ complete with optical system, to capture the continuous modulation of natural phenomena using photography. His initial model was built in 1845 and original photographic curves from that year survive” (Sir Francis Ronalds, 496). Although short of recording visual motion proper, Ronalds’s moving-plate setups and Brooke’s rotating cylinder devices were certainly chronophotographic prototypes—the latter certainly derived from John Herschel’s 1840 actinograph.

Marey, we should emphasize, was well informed of these developments. He stated as much when his research took its first turn toward chronophotography in July 1876, admitting that “for many years, the variations of a thermometer have been photographed in this way at Greenwich.” Using a thin mercury column to gauge cardiac pressure at small intervals, Marey decided to forgo the photonegative approach and instead light the mercury column against a black background, as “the luminous image travels the entire length of the photographic plate.” He concluded his contribution cryptically: “We cannot enter into any detail of the signification of these curves that open up a new domain for the graphic method.”51 His famous monograph on the graphic method was published two years later in 1878, but only in 1884 did he publish an addendum about the use of photography.52 The continuous capture of indices in 1876, however, was not the first time he pondered photography; what opened the way to graphic applications in 1874 was astrophotography.

Astronomy and Positivist Hegemony in the Nineteenth Century

While in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries astronomers had often been at the forefront of antiracism, from Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet and Benjamin Banneker to Arago, in the second half of the nineteenth century physical scientists largely subscribed to positivist views on civilizational development and nonwhite racial degeneracy. In 1866, when three French navy steamboats reached the walls of Seoul, a Korean official asked why the French had come. “He was told the only purpose was the observation of a lunar eclipse which, in fact, was to occur within a few days. He did not seem satisfied with that answer.”53 The Korean official’s suspicions were well founded. Astronomy had become an integral cog in the colonial apparatus of Western powers. Observation campaigns in the nineteenth century were routinely used as alibis for colonial penetration. As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang shows in the case of India, military support for astronomical expeditions to control visual disturbances in the surroundings of observation sites turned into blatant displays of colonial might.54 Astronomical instrumentation and observation in colonized lands served as tools of imperial consolidation as well as displays of civilizational superiority aimed at colonized peoples.55 This global, transnational, and colonial framework, which accompanied the birth of astrophotography as a central technology for modern astrophysics, shadows the emergence of the graphic method.

The politicization of astronomy as a component of global control heightened during the Napoleonic Wars. Henri de Saint-Simon is emblematic in this regard. After fighting with colonists in the American Revolutionary War, he trained as an engineer back in France, soon turning to land speculation and entrepreneurship. He then became the new voice of science leveraged for globalization in a prophetic, autocratic, and colonial perspective. In 1803, he proposed a “Newton” prize to be awarded by the Royal Society through a vote by international men and women of science in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, physiology, literature, painting, and music: “The committee of the twenty-one elected by humanity will be known as the Newton Council; it will represent me on Earth; it will split humanity in four divisions to be called British, French, German and Italian. . . . Every person, wherever they live on the globe, will be bound to one of these divisions.”56 This globalist European hegemony piggybacked on Naturphilosophie holism by invoking the bonds between human and cosmic history: “The mechanism of man and the mechanism of the universe are the same with the following differences: The universe is a mechanism endowed with perpetual motion as motor. The mechanism of man being moved by a derived motion is of limited duration.”57 His 1808 work closes off with the famous diagram “Figurative System of All Human Knowledge,” prefiguring the fad of textual-visual nomenclatures of knowledge by the likes of Jeremy Bentham and André-Marie Ampère in the wake of the 1815 Vienna Congress. In an 1810 text, he exhorted his readers: “Bring yourself, in thought, back to the epoch of the formation of the globe, then descend along centuries by observing the progress of the human spirit, and you will clearly see the means to be employed for accelerating its perfection” (Enfantin, Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, 16:89). Diagrammatic thought and the kinemorphic visualization of cosmic history combine to shore up the new historicity. By 1813, he addressed himself directly to Napoleon Bonaparte in Work on Universal Gravitation, Means of Forcing the British to Recognize the Independence of Flags. This composite pamphlet proposes a “European parliament” that, following Napoleon ending his occupation of European countries, would promote political equality for all Europeans, including women.58 In exchange, England would rescind its 1807 law enabling the British Navy to board any ship suspected of engaging in the slave trade—a policy the French planter lobby and Saint-Simon himself berated as a violation of national sovereignty (Saint-Simon, Oeuvres choisies, 2:167–74). The first part of the title illustrates Saint-Simon’s driving idea that gravitation should become the universal principle of secular knowledge binding science, politics, and peace: “The idea of universal gravitation must serve as basis to the new philosophical theory, and the new political system of Europe must be a consequence of the new philosophy.” This is what he called “the positive system,” an expression that originated the notion and term of positivism made famous by his disciple Auguste Comte (2:174, 210).

By the 1840s, European historiography, anthropology, political theory, and astronomy concurred in making whiteness the civilizational vector of global destiny. One of the bestsellers of scientific vulgarization in England and the United States was Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)—an amphibological title asserting all at once the power of the deity and the autonomy of nature. Under the guise of astronomy’s view from on high on all matters scientific, the book recycles polygenism and crude anti-Blackness. “The Negro alone is here unaccounted for; and of that race it may fairly be said, that it is the one most likely to have had an independent origin, seeing that it is a type so peculiar in an inveterate black colour, and so mean in development,” Chambers proponed, adding that, “in the Caucasian or Indo-European family alone has the primitive organization been improved upon. The Mongolian, Malay, American, and Negro, comprehending five-sixths of mankind, are degenerate.”59 Such gratuitous claims of degeneracy—found in many astronomy books at mid-century—justified colonial conquest as deliverance through regeneration.60

For astronomer, physiologist, and early photoimagist John William Draper as well, the natural history of the cosmos directly informed Western hegemony (see chapter 5). In 1856, he published Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical, tackling physiology on the model of “Astronomy and Chemistry” to make it a “Positive Science.”61 His treatise recasts human evolution as a natural play of physical and chemical forces between human bodies and air, water, matter, and light—a pre-Darwinian mechanical framework. It was during the questions and answers following Draper’s 1860 lecture at Oxford on Europe’s epistemic development—reinterpreted through social Darwinism—that William Wilberforce (apocryphally) quipped that Thomas Henry Huxley proponed human descent from monkeys.62

In his Human Physiology, Draper sought a middle position between the proslavery polygenism of Louis Agassiz and Josiah Clark Nott and the traditional monogenism of James Cowles Prichard.63 “The human race,” Draper asserts, must not be seen as made up of “varieties, much less of distinct species, but rather as offering numberless representations of the different forms which an ideal type can be made to assume under exposure to different conditions.” This malleable type materializes into races through a “plastic power,” defined as “the capability of metamorphosis or transmutation from form to form” over “several centuries” (Draper, Human Physiology, 565–66). He contrasts this plastic power arranging living matter with a “totally distinct agency, the sunlight,” which contributes to organic matter (459). The point is that, lacking Charles Darwin’s trove of biological observations, he relies purely on visualization through explicitly kinemorphic and photoimaging insights to simulate the unseen diversification of races. Human metamorphosis for him rests primarily on “complexion” as a factor of sunlight and “the form of the skull” dictated by the “condition of development of the brain” judged optimal in the “Indo-European race” (573–74). His compromise formation presents white supremacy as Indo-European intelligence morphing the braincase from the inside out. He conjectures flippantly that Blackness results from “degenerating haematin” in the liver, overloading the skin with a high “percentage of iron” that causes the “misshaping” of Black peoples’ heads—an echo of Jean-Baptiste Demanet’s metal-toxification theory of Blackness (592). His monogenism is thus just as racist and antiscientific as the polygenism of Johann Kaspar Lavater or Chambers. “What a contrast between the astronomer, of whom the human race may justly be proud,” he exclaims referring to Isaac Newton, “and the Australian savage portrait Dr. Prichard has furnished,” whose “features” cannot “acquit him of the charge of cannibalism” (564–65). His central claim, simply put, is that “universal history is only a chapter in physiology” (611). On that basis, Draper redefines white people as optimal plastic incarnations of the ideal human type.

This equation of history and physiology rests on little reliable scientific data: It is wholly informed by optics. It is, in fact, as a photochemist, spectroscopist, and astronomer that Draper theorizes phenotypical variations of skin and skull shape. A striking passage from another book written at the end of the Civil War illustrates the point, with clear relevance for media prehistory:

If the life of a man could be prolonged through many centuries, and he were to occupy it in making a journey over the earth from the Arctic to the Antarctic Circle, though he might have been perfectly white at first, his complexion would in succession pass through every degree of darkness, and by the time he had reached the equator, towards the middle of his life, he would be perfectly black. Continuing his journey, his color would lighten as he proceeded, and on his reaching the Antarctic he would become pale again, all these changes occurring without any loss of his personal identity. Moreover, in this progress, supposing that his mode of life, as regards food and comfort, was such as natural conditions suggest, even his skull would vary, and with it his intellectual powers. . . . If, in his career, children were born to him, they would be of every shade of color and of every form of skull.64

This visualization scenario of racial morphing synthesizes his two-prong theory of race: skin photosensitivity and skull kinemorphism—that is, photography and protocinema. Let us notice that while he formerly asserted that white intelligence increased the braincase volume (a fiction of craniometry, as Stephen Jay Gould shows), here he advances the opposite thesis: that position on the globe alone shapes skulls.65 Either way, within his astronomical purview, species of static and dynamic vision are necessary and sufficient rationales for explaining racial variations of the human species.66

Although Darwin’s framework was meant to dispel such gratuitous conjectures, the issue of visualization shows up in Darwin’s perplexity regarding the vector responsible for speciation and variation—what the often-elided full title of On the Origin of Species formulates as The Preservation of Favoured Races. This vector for Darwin is “the mystery of mysteries—as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.”67 That philosopher is John Herschel, who, together with Alexander von Humboldt, inspired Darwin’s scientific avocation.68 John Herschel wrote this quip to Charles Lyell in a letter from February 1836, a few months before Darwin, on his way to South America, visited him in Cape Town. Darwin discovered John Herschel’s letter in 1839, jotting in a notebook: “Herschel calls the appearance of species, the mystery of mysteries. & has grand passage upon problem! Hurrah.–‘intermediate causes’” (Eldridge, Eternal Ephemera, 30). The challenge of Darwin’s theory is how to properly visualize an extraordinary number of interactions and generations over time and space from tiny windows on extant and fossil species in order to reconstruct their overall sequential developments. Darwin posits that “an interminable number of intermediate forms must have existed, linking together all the species in each group by gradations as fine as our present varieties” (On the Origin of Species, 462). That focus on intermediate states reprises John Herschel’s highlighting of gradual processes of causation formulated in his 1830 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, an influential work propounding the visualization of changes within temporal processes that cannot be directly observed—or whose sequence is so “instantaneous that the interval cannot be perceived.”69 For John Herschel, intermediate forms were placeholders for unseen gaps and unseeable mutations in kinemorphic continua. Interestingly, in the same book he mentions Thomas Young’s 1807 cylinder-chronometer design that might “permit us to appreciate intervals to the nicety of the hundredth, or even the thousandth part of a single second” (John Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, 355). John Herschel’s intermediate moments, we can then surmise, triangulated a new temporal model of visualization through his father’s kinemorphic cosmology, the long duration development of living species, and self-tracing instrumentation—all part of his new graphical process in approaching duration.

This leads us back to Marey. With an MD in human physiology, Marey pioneered the same new “dynamic physiology” as that espoused by Draper, and he too contrasted the old “static” physiology with its innovative “dynamic” improvement.70 In 1867, Marey replaced his mentor, the anti-Darwinian and creationist anatomist Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens, as the Chair of Natural History of Organized Bodies at the Collège de France. In his inaugural lecture, Marey emplaced his graphic method within contemporary science and the overall history of scientific knowledge.71 “Allow me to retrace in a quick overview [retracer dans un rapide coup d’oeil] the principal phases of the evolution of science,” he declared, adding that he could not “unfold for your eyes this entire historical picture” but only suggest the overall vector of its unseeable movement (Marey, “Évolution historique des sciences,” 257). He begins with how eighteenth-century taxonomy divided humans and animals into “families,” “tribes,” and “species,” carefully eschewing the term race (257).72 Then he moves on to anatomy, embryogenesis, physiology, and, ultimately, studies of physiological functions. To anchor this epistemic evolution, Marey, like Draper, turned for analogy to “the science which dominates and contains all others, that of the universe” (260). Taxonomy, he infers, corresponds to the classification of cosmic bodies into stars and planets, descriptive anatomy is akin to planetary geography, structural anatomy to geophysics, embryogenesis to cosmology, and physiology corresponding to meteorology and oceanography—the life-sustaining motions of water, air, and heat. Together with marquee names like Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon, Georges Cuvier, and Johannes Müller, Marey mentions lesser-known lights, including Jean Senebier and Purkinje, locating his own expertise as a synthesis of physical and biological sciences. Echoing Condorcet’s historical vector, he insists that “the course of Progress accelerates ceaselessly” toward “new conquests,” especially now that science can rely on the graphic method as a new universal language (260). He concluded that the road into the future “is nonetheless traced visibly,” a final wink at his graphic method (261).

While Marey said little about race, the idea of Western science developing a “universal language” through graphs has strong racial implications for Draper. The latter concluded his 1856 overview of world historical “social mechanics” by stating that white Europeans succeeded as a “race” because their physiological transformation yielded “an analytical mental character,” endowed with “a capability of indefinitely modifying our state” (Draper, Human Physiology, 635). This capability relied on a single technic: “A high psychical condition demands as its essential, both in the individual and in the race, a mechanism of registry” (637). While this ostensibly refers to alphabetic writing—as superior to ideographic or syllabic systems—Draper had certainly in mind self-graphing instruments representing the apex of science technology. In other words, the graphic method of Marey and the “mechanism of registry” of Draper partake of the same positivist vector of human evolution in which whiteness is the favored race because it alone is universal.

Solar Photography in Colonial Context

Given the premium bestowed on the macrocosm in confirming positivist visualizations of human history, it is no surprise that astronomy was among the privileged fields of application for photography—once Daguerre and Draper demonstrated the feasibility of photographing the Moon. The leading British astronomer George Biddell Airy declared in 1857 that “in due time we may make astronomy self-tracing,” a signal confirmation that photography was already thought of as just one among other “self-tracing” technics.73 The proximal motivation for astrophotography, however, was the nature of the Sun. On September 25, 1841, a large solar magnetic burst was detected at astronomical/meteorological observatories. Drum-recording electro-chronographs were subsequently installed at meteorological stations to monitor such magnetic outbursts, which threatened burgeoning telegraphic networks and electromagnetic machines.74 In 1843, an amateur astronomer named Samuel Heinrich Schwabe published the results of twenty years of sunspot observations he had conducted in the hope of demonstrating that one of these spots was a new planet. What he found instead is that sunspots follow an eleven-year cycle, reviving curiosity about the source of solar energy and its relation to light, heat, and magnetism. On July 16, 1850, John Adams Whipple and George Phillips Bond succeeded in obtaining the “first-ever daguerreotype of a star other than the Sun,” Vega.75 In the article announcing this achievement, Bond pointed out two remarkable facts: Light had taken twenty years to arrive from Vega, and it acted the same way on the photosensitive plate as the light of the Sun. This was the first concrete evidence that the Sun was a star and, conversely, that stars must have roughly the same chemical composition as the Sun. Investigations of solar physics brought attention back to a phenomenon that, for its awe-inspiring grandeur, had remained but an oddity: total solar eclipses. At the moment of totality when the Moon blocks out the Sun’s disk, the outer solar layers called the corona can be observed directly. But totality is viewable only for a few minutes, and only in thin swaths across the globe, making access to such global locations an absolute requisite.

The main precursor of astrophotography was British astronomer Warren De la Rue. For my purpose, I will focus on a lesser-known French actor, Aimé Laussedat, because his work directly prepared that of Jules Janssen and his 1874 photographic revolver. Trained in astronomy and geodesy at École Polytechnique—whose uniformed students were army officers—Laussedat embraced photography early on as a polyvalent tool of visualization. While conducting a topographical survey in the Pyrenees in 1846, he noted that with his theodolite “each of my stations was a point of view so that what I projected on my horizontal paper were visual rays.”76 This pioneered the use of photography for three-dimensional mapping. Assisted by Paul Gustave Froment (at the suggestion of Arago), Laussedat subsequently built a device using a camera lucida for directly transducing drawings into relief measurements (Laussedat, “Les applications de la perspective au lever des plans,” 8fn2). After military cartographers colonizing Abyssinia complained of unreliable mapping technics, Laussedat came up with new ways of triangulating photography for cartography. In the 1850s, he participated in an expedition to the Maghreb to extend the measurement of the meridian begun by Jean-Baptiste Biot and Arago. The expedition was part of the strategic agenda by the War Ministry to link Algeria and Morocco to the metropole astronomically in order to make them tighter possessions of France.77 Laussedat also helped develop military photographic surveillance, experimenting with “instant photography” from trains, balloons, and even kites as part of what he called “the art of reconnoitering.”78 One of his photographic setups combined a camera lucida and a field telescope to reshoot a small portion of a larger photograph in a zoom effect.79 His work in photographic instrumentation and astronomy was integral to France’s colonial conquests in the last third of the nineteenth century.

The three-points-of-view photographic method for cartography that he finalized in 1851 was called “metrophotography” and “topophotography.”80 It was not adopted in France, but Prussian military scientists quickly learned of and improved on it, explaining in part why their maps of France during the Franco–German War of 1870–1871 proved finer than those of the French high command. Laussedat subsequently taught astronomy at École Polytechnique and in 1857 built a teaching observatory for the school. It was around that time that he began applying photography to astronomical observation, particularly eclipses (Notice sur les travaux, 6).

The total solar eclipse across the Mediterranean in 1860 was the first great test for astrophotography. England mounted a large expedition to Spain led by De la Rue, with major astronomers such as Otto Wilhelm von Struve and Airy and other scientists interested in photography such as Francis Galton. Vatican astronomer Pietro Angelo Secchi planned to travel to a different observation site in Spain. At the last minute, the French Ministry of the Navy assented to dispatch Laussedat in an expedition to Batna in Algeria so France would not be left behind. The common aim was investigating the nature of solar protuberances, as well as the mysterious red spots detected during 1842’s totality by Francis Baily—the so-called Baily’s beads. It was unclear whether either phenomenon was an optical aberration or a physical event—or the latter deformed by the former. Laussedat used wet and dry collodion plates to photograph the eclipse but missed totality because of a technical failure. De la Rue made thirty-five wet collodion plates and Secchi fourteen dry collodion photographs during totality. Some astronomers saw the beads and others did not, but the results regarding protuberances were conclusive: Since they were impressed on plates just before the Moon disk entirely covered the Sun, they belonged to the latter; and since the same protuberance patterns were seen on plates from different stations, they were real physical phenomena.81

De la Rue used a huge clock-driven solar telescope from Kew called a photo-heliograph—a final irony considering Niépce’s unsuccessful 1827 trip to Kew with his heliographic plates. As for Laussedat and his colleague Aimé Girard, they only brought a small reflector telescope that was not clock-driven. Laussedat, however, by then a professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, had procured the signal instrument of French optical physics since Senebier: a heliostat.82 While De la Rue’s machine tracked the Sun directly, Laussedat affixed the camera to the eyepiece of the fixed horizontal telescope aimed at the heliostat that itself tracked the Sun.83 Even though his photographs during totality failed, Laussedat documented the aspect he prized most, the serial kinematics of the phenomenon: “Juxtaposed in the order in which they had been obtained, [the twelve plates] reproduced in the most striking fashion the gradual path of the moon’s disk in front of that of the sun,” he wrote, formulating an early definition of chronophotography (Laussedat, Lunette, 7). De la Rue used an efficient chute system of plate replacement to obtain successive shots, but he was not interested in sequencing the eclipse. An admirer of Wheatstone, what he most sought to obtain were slightly spaced shots producing stereophotographs. Curiously, both Secchi and De la Rue obtained similarly “defective” plates: They show three different phases of a protuberance impressed on the same plate at a few seconds’ intervals because of a shock given to the telescope. Accidental quasi-chronophotographs.

In his official report of the Batna eclipse expedition to the Académie des Sciences, Laussedat described local Maghrebi spectators within the purview of colonial control. They are first mentioned in relation to a spectacular phenomenon occurring only during total eclipses: interference fringes projected as shimmers from obstacles such as leaves. “The gatherings of Arabs rendered the appearance of [fringes] all the more striking that these dark lines coursed upon their white garment,” he recounted (Laussedat et al., “Rapport,” 996). Dark-skinned colonized peoples with their white djellabas were turned into observational screens. Addressing the impact of the eclipse on “animated beings,” Laussedat described the reaction of animals in the same breath as that of the locals. “We could not neglect the effect produced on races so different from ours,” he commented, pointing out that the apparent calm men displayed was “obviously a matter of not showing themselves inferiors.” This acknowledgment of resistance to power differentials within a colonial setting is countered by his next indication that in Constantine a “renowned marabout hostile to France” was pummeled with stones by local women for having predicted that there would be no eclipse. Women figure here as reliable allies to the conquerors, with Laussedat explaining that after banging pots to ward off evil, they ululated when the sun reappeared, in the same manner that “Maronite women salute French soldiers at every halt of our glorious flag” (Laussedat et al., “Rapport,” 998–99). Left out of histories of astrophotography, such comments bespeak the active reinforcement of white supremacy by European scientists imagining and imaging the cosmos.84

This chapter has shown that chronophotography was the end development of a long-held concern with tracing not just time or animal bodies in motion but the physical forces shaping celestial bodies, including all levels of our world—from the microcosm of the human eye to global earthquakes, planetary atmospheric data, magnetic solar storms, and the protuberances of our closest star. On April 7, 1876, astronomer Jules Janssen presented his revolving camera attached to a horizontal telescope to the French Photographic Society, suggesting that sequential shots could be used to study “physiological mechanics related to walking, flight and other animal movements.”85 Marey scholars take this well-known astronomical provenance of chronophotography as a neutral technical adaptation. Yet tracing technology devised to account for the macrocosm was never part of a disinterested enterprise. As Marey’s and Draper’s work in dynamic physiology shows, that framework easily segued with post-Darwinian racist universalism aiming at ruling the nonwhite world. It is that racial animus behind photographic chronography that filmmaker Jordan Peele foregrounds in Nope (2022) while recovering the figure of the African American jockey concealed in one of Muybridge’s chronophotographic sequences and long elided by the history of media.