7 Flammarion’s Telechronoscope

Camille Flammarion

Born on a small farm in Northern Burgundy, France, Flammarion credited his Catholic mother with encouraging his early passion for astronomy. In his memoir, he links this passion with a primal horror of death, which manifested in a fascination for fossils as a form of afterlife but also in his abhorrence of militarism and wars.4 He was eleven when François Arago died in 1853, and he was struck by the eulogy given in church by his local priest praising Arago as an astronomer, a republican, and a believer—perspectives Flammarion had thought incompatible. In 1856, Flammarion’s father lost his farm and was hired as a menial worker at the Adrien Tournachon Jeune & Cie photographic factory in Paris run by Nadar. Flammarion’s training in astronomy thus grew in parallel with photography’s profound transformation of visual culture and the beginnings of astrophotography. Working as an apprentice silverware engraver to complement the meager income of his parents, he took night classes. With other penniless students seeking knowledge capital, he organized a free academy where he gave lectures in the sciences, compiling them at fifteen under the lofty title Universal Cosmogony.5 With the help of the doctor treating him for exhaustion (!) in 1858, he secured a position of calculator at the Paris Observatory. After Arago’s death, the observatory was headed by Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, a staunch supporter of the Second Empire who had canceled Arago’s public lecturing and lorded it over the staff (Flammarion, Mémoires, 132–35).

In 1862, Flammarion’s first published book, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, updating seventeenth-century conjectures about extraterrestrials, became an instant bestseller translated into a dozen languages. Le Verrier took it as an affront against real science and promptly fired him (Flammarion, Mémoires, 153–55). Mixing rigorous cosmology and spiritism, the book was panned by both the positivist and the Catholic press, while the more liberal cultural wing saw it as a manifesto of freethinking. Victor Hugo dispatched: “Your studies are my studies. Yes, let us dig into infinity” (quoted in Flammarion, Mémoires, 213–17). Like Hugo, Flammarion believed in the transmigration of souls and subscribed to the thought of Allan Kardec and later Helena Blavatsky.6 By the early 1870s, Flammarion stood among the leading cultural figures of the Third Republic. He incarnated the synthesis of innovative vulgarization with advanced science and spiritual aspirations and presented with literary panache for the edification of freethinking masses.7

Lumen and the Inception of Cinema

According to Flammarion, the idea of Lumen came to him in 1865 while mulling over the time it takes distant starlight to reach Earth, a topic he’d just written about. As mentioned in chapter 6, estimations of the size of the universe increased exponentially over the nineteenth century, which meant that images received by telescopes showed stars and galaxies as they had been dozens of million years ago. That uncanny simultaneity between the present of observation and the past of observed objects boggled the minds of the likes of Hugo, who wrote: “The sky we see is not present; it is past. The today of the sky is unknown to us; all we have in front of our eyes is Yesterday, a Yesterday which, for some stars, goes back thousands of years. . . . The stars which a three-meter telescope catches now no longer existed perhaps by the time of Charlemagne, and the stars observed in a six-meter telescope right now had perhaps vanished already by the time of the Trojan Wars.”8 There are two components to such realizations. One was the curious tangibility of the deep past of history received as light in the present within astronomers’ eyes and on photographic plates. The other was more unsettling. The current state of the cosmos was strictly unseeable and unknowable; humans lived in cosmic epistemological darkness. This anxiety resonated with the thermodynamics of Rudolf Clausius, especially his 1865 concept of entropy, stipulating that the universe trends toward disorder and energy loss, with perfect stillness at absolute zero temperature as an end scenario. This tragic horizon of cosmogony redoubled anxieties about the “heat death” of the Sun, not to mention the death of God.9 Until the arrival of the Big Bang theory in the 1920s, the nebular hypothesis explained the local formation of planetary systems and galaxies but not the overall structure or fate of the universe (see chapter 3). It is within that cosmological hiatus that Flammarion wrote Lumen.

Flammarion’s goal was to offer a salve, at once fictive and scientifically sound, to entropic fears. Lumen follows the Dantean genre of travel to the beyond modernized by Humphry Davy’s 1830 Consolations in Travel (a book Flammarion translated into French). It is structured as a conversation between a dead man named Lumen (Light) and his living friend Quaerens (the Seeker), whom he instructs on matters of the afterlife. It is like awakening from a dream, Lumen declares, as “called by the future and the past, the spirit seeks all at once to regain possession of itself and seize the fugitive impressions of the vanished dream—with their procession of tableaus and events, still passing before it” (Flammarion, Récits de l’infini, 5). The afterlife is immediately photocinematic. It enables ubiquitous macrocosmic visualizations, as a further passage indicates:

Instead of seeing the stars in the sky as you are seeing them from Earth, I could clearly distinguish the worlds gravitating around them; and, oddly, when I no longer wanted to see the star so as to examine these worlds unconstrained, it would disappear from my vision. . . . Moreover, when my vision focused on a particular world, I could distinguish details of its surface, its continents and seas, clouds and rivers, and while it did not seem to get visibly larger to my eyes as when we use a telescope, I succeeded through a particular intensity of concentration of sight in my soul to see the object on which it concentrated, such as a town or the countryside . . . as distinctly as if I had been in a balloon. (18–19)

There are direct echoes of Johannes Kepler, Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, Thomas Wright, Immanuel Kant, and the Great Moon Hoax—sources Flammarion commented on in The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds. The manipulable field of vision Lumen describes—with close-ups and fast-moving tracking shots—is that of the Oculus, which it likely inspired. Lumen asks Quaerens to “imagine refracting telescopes which, through a succession of lenses and an arrangement of diaphragms can make worlds successively closer and isolate from view the illuminating source” or else “a multitude of eyes” like “those of insects” (21). Flammarion defamiliarizes readers from known apparatuses and regimes of vision to acculturate them to transcalar visualization across space-time. Lumen then recounts being transported after death to an airborne purview over Paris. Thinking time had gone by since his death, he believed he was seeing the Paris of the future until he began witnessing the events of the French Revolution in real time. What was going on? That is the heuristic puzzle driving the novella.

Deducing that he is currently located in the Capella star system, seventy-two light-years away from Earth (the estimate of the time), Lumen suddenly understands that he is seeing earthly events occurring in 1793, since their light-images have just now reached the Capella system. He explains: “A light ray would be a sort of mail bringing us rather than written news the photography or even more rigorously, the very aspect of the country from which it came. . . . Hence there is a surprising transformation of the past into the present . . . [as] each aspect is followed by another, and so on successively; and it is like a series of undulations bearing the past of the worlds and made present for observers” (Flammarion, Récits de l’infini, 43, 45). Lumen can move to, and view at will, any part and time of the universe. As he tries explaining to Quaerens that this ubiquity follows “the laws of perspective,” the latter cuts in to say, “You mean, of politics?” To which Lumen retorts, “No, of perspective (although both are very much alike), since, seeing great men from the sky, I judge them otherwise than they appear to the common men” (92–93). Flammarion’s Oculus view on history is thus inherently critical, Lumen stating, for instance, that “Napoleon has willfully caused, to satisfy his personal ambition, the death of five million men,” a bold revisionist assessment in Second Empire France (138). As he moves farther away, Lumen views the continuous history of Earth in reverse, from the Battle of Waterloo back to the nebular formation of the solar system (97–98). This reversal of time’s arrow back to historical then cosmological depths was the brainchild of Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne’s 1802 novelistic saga, one of Flammarion’s key inspirations.10

As Quaerens cannot quite wrap his head around where Lumen is or when his “present” is occurring, Lumen expands the simile of photography, explaining that he can “find again the light rays gone in earlier years and bearing with them the photography of these years” (Flammarion, Récits de l’infini, 106). He analogizes light with “a series of terrestrial photographs staggered on the same line at intervals” so that “in a light ray, or better, in a jet of light composed of a series of distinct and juxtaposed images we have the fluidic inscription of the history of the Earth” (107, 108). The indication of “distinct and juxtaposed” photographs demonstrates that Flammarion carefully thought out the technical conditions of possibilities for the visual synthesis of motion. To Quaerens’s objection that clouds and night would curtail access to a total view of history, Lumen responds that nonvisible rays like infrared traverse such obstacles (125–30). After this long didactic preamble, Flammarion reaches his technical goal: the detailed description of a photographic apparatus for projecting motion imaging.

The image of a celestial body traversing dark abysses is in an analogous condition to the image of a person or object a photographer brought into his camera obscura. It is not impossible that these images meet in such vast spaces a dark celestial body (celestial mechanics has noted the existence of several), of a particular condition, whose surface (perhaps made of iodine, if we believe spectral analysis) would be sensitized [sensibilisée] and capable of fixing on itself the image of a faraway world. Hence terrestrial events would come to paint themselves on a dark globe. And if this globe turns on itself like other celestial bodies, it will present successively its different zones to the terrestrial image and will thus take the continuous photograph [photographie continue] of successive events. Moreover, descending or ascending according to a line perpendicular to its equator, the line on which the images are reproduced would describe not a circle but a spiral, and, after the first rotation concluded, the new images would not coincide with the older ones and not superimpose on them but would follow above or underneath. Imagination could now suppose that this world is not spherical but cylindrical, thus seeing in space the indestructible column around which the great events of terrestrial history would engrave and roll themselves. (135–37)

Astronomical verisimilitude clearly breaks down in favor of describing a working cinema apparatus. Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace theorized the existence of dark stars (akin to black holes), but no serious astronomer ever proposed cylindrical or photosensitive celestial bodies.11 Flammarion does not specify a shutter mechanism for splitting light rays into “distinct and juxtaposed images” or a process for their spontaneous arrangement into a spiral. But technical feasibility, as we will see, was entirely within his reach.

The original design Edison proposed for his kinetograph fifteen years later was exactly the same: microphotographs arranged in a spiral around a cylinder. Flammarion’s level of technicity sets Lumen apart from earlier tales of cosmic visualization, like Felix Eberty’s 1846 The Stars and the Earth, which deploys a similar premise of light allowing a voyage through the past via a “microscope of time.”12 Perhaps Flammarion knew of Eberty’s book when he states: “This process cannot rigorously be called a microscope, but rather a chronoscope, or chrono-tele-scope (to see time from afar)” (Flammarion, Récits de l’infini, 228). I want to emphasize the importance of the chronoscope as an intuition pump for cinema. While Eberty rekindles the Christian myth of an all-seeing divinity, Lumen dispenses with a godhead, turning instead to other intelligent beings and the transmigration of souls with a concomitant antipositivist decentering of “Man.”

Flammarion as Technical Inceptor of Cinema

Flammarion’s conjectural cinema apparatus has a clearly different valence than prior technical speculations like Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche’s 1760 photochemical canvas or the Great Moon Hoax’s filmlike telescope. That is because, through his own readings and practice, as well as contacts with key technicians of precinema, he possessed the technological knowledge to envision a workable motion picture setup. By 1867, he had befriended established personalities like Hugo and Nadar but also up-and-coming writers and scientists including Jules Verne, Cros, Janssen, and Marey. All of them attended Flammarion’s famous Wednesday evening salon, an ideal venue for cross-pollinating debates and precinema speculations.

Benoît Turquety analyzes precinema in the 1860s through the notion of distinctive problem. Invoking Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, he shows that individual practitioners worked from specific technical problems that were never quite the same, though they may seem so a posteriori.13 Eadweard Muybridge sought to establish a physical fact to win a bet; Marey aimed to represent physiological functions as quantifiable continua; Edison transduced the cylinder phonograph into the kinetograph for profit, and so on. Turquety closely scrutinizes the patents of two early technicians of motion-imaging apparatuses—Louis Ducos du Hauron (1861) and Charles Cros (1867)—to reframe their genesis. While Ducos du Hauron deployed a technically unrealistic design—hundreds of cameras in a grid whose plates are woven into a large canvas strip that is scanned in zigzags—Cros was content to explain the “general” principles of motion (and color) photography combining rotating microphotographs in the phenakistoscope (Turquety, Inventing Cinema, 131, 141–46). Hence, while both claimed the feasibility of recording and projecting a “moving scene [scène mouvementée]” (Ducos du Hauron) and “moving scenes [scènes mouvementées]” (Cros), their projects entailed significant conceptual and technical differences.

Ducos du Hauron and Cros nonetheless presumed that visual motion perception was due to retinal persistence and took place within “the eyes” of observers (Turquety, Inventing Cinema, 119). For both, visual motion was only approximated by serial photographs. Flammarion’s astronomical model radically contrasts with this eighteenth-century preconception: It presupposes instead that visual motion perception and its technological re-presentation are coextensive. There is not, on the one side, streaming light with an infinite blur of overlapping images and, on the other side, machines mimicking human vision’s intermittent sampling. For Flammarion, light is a kinemorphic imaging flow to begin with. It follows that his telechronoscope does not take the reproduction of visual motion as its distinct problem, since it is no problem at all. What Flammarion tackles instead is how to render visible the imaging flows born by light rays. This (astro)physical realism of Flammarion’s approach to moving images sets him apart from all other precursors. Although the fictional telechronoscope is couched as a mind experiment rather than as an engineering proposal, its setup rests on advanced optical and mechanical know-how that Flammarion had secured by 1867 in five particular areas I examine in turn.

The first is magic lantern projection. In spring 1866, following Arago’s example, he started giving free astronomy conferences at the Association Polytechnique. To make these lectures more vivid to working-class audiences, he collaborated with Alfred Molteni, the scion of a well-known optical instrument-maker, to produce a set of thirty astronomical magic lantern slides.14 Flammarion claims that this collaboration with Molteni was single-handedly responsible for the fad of scientific slide projections over the following decades (Mémoires, 345–46). Whatever the case, serial and especially mechanical astronomical slides for nineteenth-century educational magic lantern shows were a central contribution to animation technology.

The second component is spectroscopy, the study of the light spectrum decomposed by a prism, which was revolutionized by photography in the 1850s and 1860s. In January 1866, Flammarion began contributing to Le Siècle, the semiofficial newspaper of the liberal anticlerical opposition. His first article was titled and addressed “The Chemical Composition of Celestial Bodies Revealed by the Analysis of Their Light.”15 He explains how Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen solved the mysterious bands discovered by William Hyde Wollaston and Joseph von Fraunhofer by determining that each represents the visual signature of a chemical element present in or traversed by the light source. During the 1860s and 1870s, photographic spectrographs became the main tool of burgeoning astrophysics. Let us note that spectral lines are unseeable by human vision without a prism, just like moving-image streams without a camera obscura.

The third component informing the telechronoscope is Flammarion’s personal experience as a balloonist with mobile airborne points of view. Balloonists were the first to witness the smooth, kinemorphic, and truly cinematic unfolding of our three-dimensional visual continuum. In 1867, mischievously picking the day of the Ascension, Flammarion took his first balloon ride, writing enthusiastically: “You rise up slowly, majestically into space. This is already a first, unique, wholly new and very singular sensation. The motion taking us up is completely unnoticeable; for us the balloon seems immobile, it is Earth that lowers itself” (Mémoires, 375). The lack of kinesthetic motion cues for the observer creates the illusion of a spontaneous transformation of the visual field, reinforcing the sensorial import of kinemorphosis.

The fourth technical component is Flammarion’s deep knowledge of both theoretical and instrumental optics. In 1867, he published (under the rebus-like pseudonym of Fulgence Marion) a popular treatise on optics describing human vision, the behavior of light, the history of vision science, optical instrumentation, and all the main devices producing visual motion effects, from Robertson’s phantasmagoria to Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau’s phenakistoscope.16 Hence, while drafting Lumen, Flammarion had the entire field of optics and visual instrumentation at his immediate recall.

The fifth and determinant component of his cinema setup is the application of the cylinder to photography. In 1849, Plateau and Charles Wheatstone recommended the use of stereoscopic photographs with the phenakistoscope, and several technicians like Jules Duboscq with his 1852 Bioscope followed their suggestion.17 Yet all technicians, down to Muybridge and his 1880 Zoopraxiscope, placed photographs either on a disk or on the inner surface of a drum with slits or mirrors. Flammarion’s use of the cylinder’s outer surface with photographs arrayed in a tight spiral enabled a much longer sequence to be recorded and played. That design originated with John Herschel’s 1840 actinograph combined with the helicoidal trace of electro-chronoscopes—hence the name telechronoscope. While drafting Lumen, Flammarion was working on a photographic cylinder recording device he called a “photometer,” which he asked a clockmaker for the French Navy, Louis-Joseph Lecoq, to build in 1867 for use in a balloon.18 It is described in Flammarion’s 1872 book The Atmosphere: “Nitrated paper can be used as an impressionable substance. A clockwork mechanism activates, in a copper casing, a cylinder around which is rolled a band of sensitized paper. The case is placed on a table; on its upper part is a small window, an aperture through which light passes and whose width is calculated based on the diameter of the cylinder. The latter turns around a central axis, either in one hour for delicate and quick observations, or in twelve hours. Passing underneath the window, the prepared paper is impressed proportionally to the light intensity acting upon it” (Flammarion, L’Atmosphère, 280). In 1870, Flammarion presented that photometer to the Académie des Sciences and showed a long photographic strip taken during a solar eclipse.19 He reproduced part of that strip in The Atmosphere together with other photograms.20 These strips accentuate the resemblance between his “photometer” and John Herschel’s “actinograph” (see chapter 6).21

All five components taken together—projection, spectro-photography, surround aerial vision, optical and photographic technology, and rotating cylinder photography—justify the assessment that Flammarion’s telechronoscope is no mere figment but a bona fide prototype of a working model for a cylinder cinema projection apparatus. In his 1867 book L’Optique, Flammarion spends considerable attention on shutter mechanisms, confirming he was aware of the need to synchronize the rotation and intermittent immobilization of each microphotograph to enable the fluid projection of visual motion.

The Precinema Club: Nadar, Cros, Janssen, and Marey

Around 1870, already famous, Flammarion stood at the center of a close nexus of precinema technicians and thinkers that included photographer Nadar, poet and inventor Charles Cros, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Jules Janssen. Knowledge transfers likely worked multidirectionally across this group. Ballooning and photography were notorious twin passions of Nadar, who patented aerial photography in 1858. He and Flammarion became close friends and ballooning advocates, staging well-publicized simultaneous balloon rides in the spring of 1867.22 In 1865, Nadar shot a famous series of self-portraits from twelve different angles forming a complete 360-degree sequence that could be animated in a phenakistoscope. The Czech researcher Jan Evangelista Purkinje did the same that year, placing twelve photographic frames on a disk in his “kinesiscope.”23 In 1870, Nadar took a sequence of photographs of Flammarion shaving his beard and mustache, ending with a smooth face—a remarkable time-lapse experiment that could be animated as well. It was likely a direct homage to Flammarion’s interest in animated photography (La Cotardière, Camille Flammarion, 130–31). One of the closest friends of Nada’s was Désiré van Monckhoven, a Belgian chemist who became an authority in photographic optics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was an amateur astronomer, and, in 1892, Nadar referred to him as “among the [likes of] Janssen . . . and that incredible Marey” for his inventiveness, in particular “his enlargement apparatuses with heliostats,” a process van Monckhoven initially published in 1867 (Nadar, When I Was a Photographer, 122, 127).24

In 1900, Janssen wrote to Flammarion on a private matter that “the telescopes of friendship often produce anamorphs,” attesting to the optics-centric complicity they shared.25 The two met in 1873 around preparations for the 1874 Venus transit, about which Flammarion wrote several articles. Janssen was trained as a colonial astronomer who made his mark in expeditions to Peru and India in the 1860s. In 1868 in Madras, he observed a new spectroscopic line in the Sun’s chromosphere that did not correspond to any known chemical element. Joseph Norman Lockyer observed the same line a few months later, and in 1871 he confirmed the discovery of the first extraterrestrial chemical element: helium.26

Janssen plays a key role in the history of cinema thanks to his design for a photographic revolver with a heliostat. It was the first automated serial-photograph apparatus according to Françoise Launay and Peter D. Hingley, and it directly inspired Marey’s application of chronophotography to physiological research.27 On February 17, 1873, Janssen presented his revolving photographic disk design to the French Commission of the Transit of Venus, admitting he had paid little heed to photography until then. According to an October 1873 quip by British astronomer George Biddell Airy—who appropriated Janssen’s original device for his own expedition—Janssen had “not the least idea of mechanics” (Launay and Hingley, “Jules Janssen’s ‘Revolver Photographique,’” 64). The burning question is then where Janssen derived his breakthrough components: a disk plate exposed at one-second intervals and rotated by a clockwork drive equipped with an intermittent electrical shutter.

To obviate the black-drop effect of the previous Venus transits, as well as variable reaction times by observers, astronomer Hervé Faye began campaigning in 1870 for photography for the upcoming transits of 1874 and 1882.28 In a presentation to the Académie des Sciences, Faye championed the heliostat setup Laussedat had experimented with during the 1860 total solar eclipse (see chapter 6). He argued it was superior to clock-driven equatorial telescopes and allowed “to multiply almost indefinitely these plates and measurements,” to which Flammarion publicly acquiesced.29 Faye cites a letter from Laussedat that refers to articles by Warren De la Rue, Major Tennant, and Richard A. Proctor on transit observation sites. The mention of Proctor is significant because he was about to publish Other Worlds than Ours, a book reprising the multiple-world hypothesis together with Flammarion’s conceit of a cosmic observer witnessing the photographic archive of Earth’s history.30 Proctor envisioned an observer with a total telescopic vision of the universe, endowing him with “powers of locomotion commensurate with his wonderful powers of vision,” another instance of the Oculus. He expands on Flammarion’s framework by noting that because Earth moves through space, “millions of eyes” would be needed for recording a total archive: “The whole history of the earth, so far as light could render it, would have been in a moment of time presented before the myriad-eyed sphere.” Proctor aligns with Eberty’s divine omniscient gaze and mentions the Battle of Waterloo in reverse motion, lifting the episode from Lumen’s 1867 publication (Proctor, Other Worlds, 319–29; Flammarion, “Lumen, les paradoxes de la science” [May 1867]). Proctor’s emulation of Lumen is a critical piece of evidence demonstrating that international organizers of the 1874 Venus transit, well aware that it was a crucial test for astrophotography requiring both “a large number of pictures” and “the comparison of successive pictures,” were keenly aware of Flammarion’s fictional cinema apparatus (Proctor, “On the Application of Photography,” 64).

The first optical manufacturer Janssen approached in 1873 was Eugène Deschiens, among the most respected astronomical and electrical instrument-makers of Paris at the time.31 In 1866, Deschiens had collaborated on the construction of the “photobioscope” of Henry Cook and Gaetano Bonelli. It was a compound phenakistoscope with “two series of pictures placed on a glass disk” that “enable[d] viewing stereoscopic photographs in motion” and might reproduce “all imaginable movements shot on the fly [pris au vol].”32 It makes sense that Janssen chose Deschiens (likely on Flammarion’s advice), although their relationship quickly soured. Janssen turned to his previous collaborator Antoine Rédier for the final design of the photographic revolver in 1874.33

The last member of the precinema group was Charles Cros, a remarkable media inventor and respected writer and poet who devised numerous self-recording devices, worked on electrical cylinder telegraphic systems in 1866–1867, and drafted projects for motion and color photographic systems.34 Among Cros’s recurring obsessions was a means of communication with other planets, a topic on which Flammarion invited him to lecture in 1869. Cros presented his light-coding device for exchanging signals with the planet Venus during the transit, and Cros and Flammarion would undoubtedly have discussed their respective fascination for animated photography and kinemorphosis. In a treatise on perception simulation, Cros explicitly considered the human biosensorial apparatus to be kinemorphic: “The perception of motion results from a succession of morphic [morphiques] impressions,” he writes.35 In 1872, he published “An Interastral Drama,” in the same journal where Flammarion’s Lumen appeared five years earlier.36 That short story tells of a male Earthling and a female Venusian, both children of astronomer fathers, who fall in love through telescopes and communicate in secret:

They sought to vanquish the distance separating them by exchanging the most complete traces of their beings. They sent each other their photographic likenesses in sufficient series for the reproduction of relief and motion.

When no observation was possible, Glaux [the Earthling] would shut himself in a room to reproduce on smoke or floating dust the moving image of his beloved—an impalpable image solely made of light. He also made of it a still likeness with plastic substances.

Then they imagined sending each other the sound of their voice, their speech, their songs. All of these were recorded in curves and reproduced within an electrical apparatus using a diapason. (Cros, “Un Drame interastral,” 240)

After three years of multisensory sexting, the virtual lovers take their own lives, while “all of Glaux’s photographs, photosculptures, and phonographs [phonographies]” are placed in a secret archive (241). Incidentally, this is the first mention of the word phonograph(y) to denote the automatic recording of sound, rather than its prior usage of phonetic transcription of words. As is well established, in 1877 Cros published the description for a cylinder phonograph apparatus, a few months before Edison.37

In sum, it is fair to say that, prior to Muybridge’s and Marey’s turn to chronophotography in the late 1870s, Flammarion, Nadar, Cros, and Janssen worked intensely and collaboratively on precinematic animated photography for astronomical and aerial applications in a way that qualifies this foursome as collective innovators of cinema. It was Flammarion, moreover, who penned the authoritative description of Janssen’s photographic revolver for the periodical La Nature in 1875, and he seemed better suited to explain how it functioned than Janssen himself.38 Flammarion writes of Janssen’s instrument that it aims “to catch on the spot and record, at the very moment they are occurring, the successive and useful phases of the phenomenon” (Flammarion, “Le Passage de Vénus,” 357). This is exactly what his telechronoscope ambitioned: “It will take in this way the continuous photograph of successive events” (Flammarion, Récits de l’infini, 136). We must conclude that Flammarion’s astronomical cylinder motion-recorder photographic prototype design was key to Janssen’s sudden application of rapid-sequence photography to the observation of the 1874 Venus transit.

Flammarion and Edison

Within current media history, the emergence of cinema apparatuses is envisioned as an application of sequential photography for the analysis of human and animal motion. The subsequent crucial step ostensibly taken in 1887–1888 by Edison and his chief kinetograph engineer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, followed by Marey and Georges Demenÿ in 1889–1890, was to reverse the process to project the synthesis of photographed motion.39 Flammarion’s telechronoscope inverts this narrative. It takes the synthesis of serial photographic imaging as aboriginal to the cosmos, placing synthesis as phenomenologically prior to its analysis in discrete chronophotographs. As mentioned earlier, together with John Herschel’s 1840 actinograph and his own photometer, both using nonintermittent photosensitive strips, Flammarion’s telechronoscope has the particularity of being the only cylinder method proposed for photographically recording and projecting motion prior to Edison’s kinetograph/kinetoscope.

The question might then be raised whether influence or transfer occurred from Flammarion to Edison. Here is how the latter describes his new machine in a caveat for the US Patent Office on October 15, 1888:

My invention relates to an instrument which is intended to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, that is to record and reproduce views of things and objects in motion, and the instrument is designed to be in such form as to be cheap, practical, and convenient. I call the apparatus a Kinetoscope. When the instrument is used in recording motions it may be called a kinetograph, but when used for subsequent reproduction, which will be its most common use to the public, it is properly called a kinetoscope. The principal feature of the invention consists in continuously photographing a series of pictures at slight intervals, not less than eight per second. These pictures are photographed in a continuous spiral line on a cylinder or plate in the same way that sound is recorded on the phonograph. The cylinder is provided with an escapement which keeps it at rest at the instant the chemical action of photographing takes place on it and between the operations of photographing it is advanced in rotation a single step at a time, this motion taking place while the light is cut off by a rapidly vibrating shutter. . . . For reproducing the photographic record, I substitute for the photographing instrument a microscope, and when the instrument is revolved the continuous series of photographs passes above the eye with such rapidity as to produce on the eye the impression of a continuous scene in motion which occurs in the same manner as those originally recorded.40

The kinetoscope uses “a collodion or soft film,” and the exchangeable photographic apparatus or microscope (M in Figure 7.8) is mounted on an arm synchronized with the axle of the cylinder, while the shutter is vibrated between two magnets (F and G in Figure 7.8). Flammarion’s telechronoscope and the kinetograph/kinetoscope share three key operative features: sequential microphotographs on the outer surface of a cylinder, the helicoid arrangement of microphotographs, and the lateral reading of the helix of microphotographs. Edison’s light-focusing photographic/microscope mechanism is a fourth feature not so much absent in the cosmic chronoscope as implicit, given Flammarion’s knowledge of optical apparatuses. Edison adds another feature not found in Flammarion: “By using very large transparent shells the pictures may be projected on a screen as is done in the enlargement of micro-photographs. . . . The source of light will be placed inside the cylinder” (Edison, “Patent Caveat,” 353). Edison thus envisioned a glass cylinder rotating and sliding across a lamp whose light beam traverses the successive microphotographs magnified by a lens to project them on a screen.

There are so many channels potentially linking Edison to Flammarion’s Lumen that the question seems less whether Edison learned of the telechronoscope than when and how. These channels include the following: Dickson and his sister Antonia were raised in France in the 1860s, and Antonia was a scientific writer and translator from French while Dickson was the main engineer for the kinetoscope; self-recording cylinder telegraphy, specifically Edison’s knowledge of the model developed by Charles Cros in 1867; Edison’s lasting interest in astronomy (see his invention of the tasimeter for measuring stellar heat); Theosophy (both Flammarion and Edison were in the orbit of Helena Blavatsky); Edison and Charles Batchelor’s fascination for unknown cosmic forces such as the etheric force;41 the name and subsequent productive misunderstanding by caricaturist George du Maurier in 1877 regarding Edison’s sound-amplifying machine, “the chronophonoscope”; Cros’s 1877 cylinder phonograph, of which Edison was clearly aware; international expos (Edison’s representatives are said to have hired Flammarion for the 1881 Paris International Exposition of Electricity); and, of course, a most likely direct encounter by Edison of Flammarion’s book or reviews of it, either in English or in French.42 I have found no smoking gun in Edison’s archives (now coming online), but this should come as no surprise. Edison was wary of patent claims and infringement laws and did not hesitate to alter or suppress documents when it suited him. Though absence of proof is proof of nothing, we are left with two equally striking alternatives: either Edison discovered the cylinder setup idea in Lumen, in which case cinema as we know it comes from Flammarion, or Edison did not know Lumen, in which case the protoapparatus for working cinema—prior to celluloid strip technology after 1888—was invented twice, twenty years apart.

In either alternative, let us insist that the phonograph should no longer be considered the paradigmatic setup for time-based audiovisual media. Cros made electrical cylindrical apparatuses a standard for media design prior to the phonograph, notably for a self-tracing cylinder music machine (1866) and telegraph (1867).43 In the case of Edison, historians have followed his vaunted explanatory schema for the 1888 kinetoscope as trying “to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear,” as indicated in his patent text. Yet in that chain of media, it was the telescope that came first. In 1878—ten years before that consecrated formula—Edison described a microphone capturing and amplifying sound at a distance: “TELEPHONOSCOPE This little instrument is to the ear what the telescope is to the eye. As the eye receives and transmits the vibrations of the ether or, in other words, the light, so the ear receives and transmits the vibrations of the air, set in motion by some disturbance. . . . Mr. Edison proposes to invent something which can be concealed and connected to the ear.”44 Modern audiovisual media designs did not originate from sound only to migrate to vision in some telic evolution paralleling the immemorial switch from orality to writing. The telescope was the paradigm. Indeed, Edison’s coinage of telephonoscope may well have copied and remediated for sound Flammarion’s telechronoscope.

Flammarion as Cinema Thinker and Animation Pioneer

No sooner had Edison and Dickson implemented the cylinder cinema than Flammarion devised a second-generation cinema apparatus in his novel Uranie (1889).45 It reprises the space travel genre of Lumen but with a female guide, in a more transparent retracing of Flammarion’s own intellectual trajectory. The plot follows a young astronomer under the thumb of a ruthless Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, who falls into a daydream triggered by his fascination for the female figure of Urania atop a mantle clock at the Paris Observatory. Coming alive, Urania takes him across deep space to a planet populated by tiny androgynous dragonfly-like beings. “Their eyes are superior to your best telescopes,” the celestial muse quips, adding, “For printed matter they have the direct photography of events and the phonetic fixation of speech itself” (Flammarion, Uranie, 18–19). Urania explains that astronomy and the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence will achieve world peace, and to illustrate the point she reaches back into the past as though merely “changing microtelescopic eyepieces [objectifs micro-télescopiques]” (46). The second part of the novel jumps forward to 1867 with the narrator’s friend George Spero and his fiancée, just after the Paris “Universal Exposition” where cylinder chronographs and photographic technology intersected (57). Spero is a second doppelgänger of Flammarion, an astronomer obsessed with death and the transmigration of souls. He shares this passion with his Norwegian fiancée, but as they go ballooning to watch an aurora borealis, they crash and die. Soon after, the narrator communicates with their souls through a hypnotist who tells him they now live on Mars where they “exchanged sexes” (136). Long developments on psychic communication with the dead follow, citing the fashionable work of the moment: Edmund Gurney and Frederic W. H. Myers, Phantasms of the Living (1886). The narrator is ultimately transported to Mars, inhabited by talking plants and fantastical creatures—but everything dissolves as in a dream, and he is back on Earth. Spero then reappears, passing as male though “really” female, but he is only a 3D filmic hologram: “They [Martians] have invented, among other things, a kind of telephotographic apparatus [appareil téléphotographique] in which a spool of fabric constantly receives, by unfolding, the image of our world and fixes it durably. An immense museum dedicated to the planets of the solar system preserves in a chronological order all these photographic images forever fixed. The whole history of the Earth is found there” (214).

In 1894, Flammarion devised a third cinema apparatus in his dystopic The End of the World.46 A docufiction, the book is premised on a comet whose orbit, discovered by a woman mathematician, will cross Earth’s path. Martians warn Earth by sending a “photophonic message” to an astronomical observatory in India—which is now postcolonial and independent from Great Britain. Martians also send a live-cast communication via a “telephonoscope”—that is, a “projection apparatus” showing “hieroglyphs” all at once on a “plate,” a “mirror,” and a “curtain” (Flammarion, La Fin du monde, 131–32).

Given his decades-long interest for cinema technology, it is not surprising that after the Lumière Cinématographe was unveiled in December 1895, Flammarion quickly adapted the new media for astronomy. In December 1897, he presented to the Société Astronomique de France the following project: “Through the cinématographe, however, a terrestrial globe may be photographed revolving on itself, seemingly isolated in space against the dark background of a starry sky, tilted on its axis and seen from all points of the equator as well as the pole. We can thereby behold an image of the Earth as we would see it from the Moon, for instance, and see our planet slowly and majestically rotating in a uniform and calm motion.”47 At last, the enduring visualization of rotating Earth seen from a lunar point of view would be materialized.

With the help of an artist painting the globe (Hippolyte Berteaux), an engineer designing a rotating machine with an invisible cam (M. Chateau), and a camera operator filming the rotating globe (Eugène Pirou), Flammarion directed this simulation movie. A piece of the actual filmstrip was reproduced in an issue of Cosmos of May 1898.48 Danielle Chaperon states that the film was never shown, but this is not quite correct.49 A correspondent from the Los Angeles Herald in Paris witnessed one of the shows on February 15, 1898, and gave a detailed account. There were at least two films. One, lasting two minutes, is described as “a picture of the earth as seen by the inhabitants of the moon, if there be any,” and was thus likely the animation picture I examined. The correspondent describes a second live-action film condensing an entire night of astronomical observation into two minutes by way of stop-action astrophotography:

In order to make the consecutive pictures that would enable him to portray the scenes of the heavens at various stages of the night, [Flammarion] took thousands of proofs on the same film, and made a number of proofs on different nights, and in this way made a series of photographs showing the gradual going down of the sun, the coming out of the stars, the rising of the moon, its motions during the night, and the entire movements of the ever-changing astronomical bodies from darkness to dawn.

The flying stars that shot mysteriously across the firmament during the night were all faithfully portrayed, and the whole scene of the star-lit heavens transferred to the film, ending with the breaking of day and the chasing away of the stars by the rising sun in the morning.50

Chaperon provides the scenario of a third film, which is more like an entire program with a travel journey shown in various episodes—from a seaside at night to the Andromeda galaxy and back (Chaperon, “Le Cinématographe astronomique,” 58). Through much of 1898, Flammarion worked on a complex show of astronomical films meant to be projected at the Cosmorama building planned for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Nothing came of it, but the grandiose space journey program Chaperon describes fits that millennial occasion.

When Lumen was republished in English in 1897 in the era of cinema, Flammarion added the following paragraph:

Already your terrestrial scientific knowledge enables you to take instantaneous photographs of the successive aspects of rapid phenomena, such as lightning, a meteor, the waves of the sea, a volcanic eruption, the fall of a building, and to make them pass before you graduated in accordance with their effect on the retina. Similarly, you can, on the contrary, photograph the pollen of a flower, through each stage of expansion to its completion in the fruit, or the development of a child from its birth to maturity, and project these phases upon a screen, depicting in a few seconds the life of a man, or a tree.51

Such a comment is prescient of the way high-speed cinematography and accelerated stop-action began altering human perception and knowledge of space-time. These new techniques were in fact at the very heart of the cinema of attraction and, subsequently, the experimentalists of the first French avant-garde of cinema in the 1920s.52

Popular Science and Race in Flammarion’s Pancosmic History

Flammarion exemplifies the new professional class of late nineteenth-century best-selling astronomer-popularizers, together with Agnes Mary Clerke in the United States and Proctor in England. Unlike them, early on he developed a passion for the occult shared by intellectuals and mass culture alike, as a reaction against Weberian rationalization and modernization.53 Flammarion was a radical vitalist who rejected empirical approaches making mind and soul epiphenomena of the brain. He favored instead a pancosmic panpsychism—the belief that the human soul is but one facet of a fluidic energy animating the entire cosmos, leading to metempsychosis after death. William James—who knew Flammarion through the Society for Psychical Research—Alfred North Whitehead, William Crookes, and Henri Bergson, among many others, shared such convictions. Importantly, Flammarion’s panpsychism was interpreted by Black diasporic thinkers as inherently emancipatory. Haitian intellectual and politician Louis-Joseph Janvier wrote in 1882 that “for us, mulattoes of Haiti, the preponderant authority in philosophy as in astronomy is Flammarion” (quoted in Flammarion, Mémoires, 296fn).54 By presenting the soul as independent from the body and capable of migrating to other envelopes beyond the human phenotypical spectrum, panpsychism de-essentialized race. In his magisterial retort to Arthur de Gobineau’s anti-Black Aryan theory, Haitian philosopher Anténor Firmin also paid homage to Flammarion’s spiritualism as an alternative to the psychological materialism of white scientific racism.55 Among nineteenth-century African American thinkers as well, panpsychism was invoked as an area of scientific inquiry circumventing biological racism.56

Flammarion’s own views on race cover a wide spectrum in his published writings. In Imaginary Worlds and Real Worlds (1865) he reviewed what I call “astro-ethnography,” the makeup of conjectural inhabitants of other planets. He mentioned Georges Cuvier’s description of putative Venusians as “midway between the Orang Utang and the Kaffir [Black African]” and Martians “resembling our negroes” while pointing to earlier commentators envisioning Venusians as “akin to the Black peoples of our Africa.”57 Without unilaterally condemning their anti-Blackness, Flammarion argued that such analogies were nonsensical given the vastly different physical conditions (gravity, atmosphere, light) on other planets. He calls for a Copernican revolution in thinking about extraterrestrials. Rather than projecting human races on space aliens, he posits that all intelligent life-forms constitute a continuum within which there is no justification to privilege humanity: “Amid such a variety [of possible life-forms on other planets], how can we maintain the idea of a universality of type, how can we maintain the universality of an organism whose first character is to mold itself after a requisite form, to place itself in unison with the ambient harmony, to be eminently plastic, in order to be out of place nowhere, in no system?” (Flammarion, Mondes imaginaires, 121). Flammarion’s racial thinking is fundamentally qualified by his relativizing humanoid centrality through the plasticity and diversity of macrocosmic sentient life-forms. In Lumen, when asked by Quaerens, “What people are you taking as typical of the degree of intelligence on Earth?” Lumen answers unexpectedly: “The Arab people. They are capable of producing Keplers, Newtons, Galileos, Archimedes, Euclids and d’Alemberts” (Flammarion, Récits de l’infini, 159).58 In “The Story of a Comet,” added to Lumen in 1873, civilizational developments are seen through the eyes of a comet orbiting Earth at long intervals and gendered as a female gaze (since une comète is feminine in French). It flies by our planet at three-thousand-year intervals to take stock of humanity’s progress, like a camera-equipped probe sent by a more advanced civilization. As the comet passes over ancient Egypt, the female voice indicates that “the celestial observer had not yet, in truth, glanced upon the white race among humans though she noted nonetheless great progress in the ways things appeared” (309). In a later orbit, the comet notes that “the ancestors of the Toltecs” built an advanced culture in the city-state of “Tenochtitlan,” while “the Celts” remained steeped in “natural primitive life.” In other words, non-Europeans developed urban cultures while white peoples were still “savages” (315–17). Such comments show Flammarion’s reliance on archaeological research to debunk Gobineau-like white supremacy. As for phrenology and craniometry, Flammarion dismisses them in another work in terms reminiscent of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “The Caucasian brain is oval, the Mongol brain round and the negro brain elongated—but in what way is the human spirit associated to granulated or cylindric fibers? What have notions of justice and injustice to do with carbonic acid?”59 Such arguments secured respect from Black diasporic intellectuals, despite racist barbs and anti-Black clichés unfortunately popping up in his prose.60

Flammarion’s worldview is composite in a way that challenges ours. On the one hand, he was trained by and beholden to positivist science, from whence his relative antiracism sprang. Firmin subtitled his masterpiece Positive Anthropology within the same purview of true science as critique. On the other hand, Flammarion’s writings as a popularizer occasionally traffic in Eurocentric, colonialist, and racist clichés of a kind that his friend Jules Verne’s novels reflect more starkly and shamelessly. Yet what ultimately commits Flammarion’s thought to a horizon of gender and racial equality is his view of history in which material and civilizational progress synonymous with white suprematist purviews are de-emphasized via a forward-and-backward model of macrocosmic temporality. For Flammarion, metempsychosis links past and future through the same soul energy, merely shedding material envelopes. And for him, the past is never dead, primitive, or to be overcome; it remains present and animated, albeit optically distant.

The telechronoscope thus opens perspectives for rethinking Western historicity. While the arc of photocinema followed a protracted history of poisonous racism as part of progress, Flammarion’s telechronoscope displays, technically and conceptually, a tenuous but tangible potion: a nontelic horizon of justice committed to a sense that history is ever alive—always right here, with us, and always in the future too.