Camera gun - GIF

[PJs]

Like the guy says, if someone pointed it at you, you'd probably run a mile. The craftsmanship is beautiful and the mechanism pretty ingenious to rotate 4 plates for successive shots. Most in those days were Daquerreotype, single plates and laborious to setup and operate...then you had to develop to the plates quickly. I can see the point of multiple shots but only made for the rich and infamous, for sure. I am curious what kind of plate and development process this used.

I found this article with some Poor pics of the inside and plate sizes.

Here is a website in French that has some better pics but a great pic of an early camera rifle gun with a circular magazine...that looks like a "Veiw Master" slide...again multiple shots.

Google Translated some of it.

"The late nineteenth century is marked by the double figure of almost exactly contemporary inventors of genius, the Burgundy bourguignon Etienne-Jules Marey (March 5, 1830 - May 21, 1904) and the English-born American Eadweard J. Muybridge (April 9 1830 - May 8, 1904), both passionate about chronophotography. You surely know their superb series of photographs which break down the march of the man, the paces of the horse, the movement of the fencers or the flight of the seagull. The principle of their inventions will subsequently be very accurately taken up and developed by the Lumière brothers. They are therefore for many historians the real fathers of the cinematograph. A downside however: if they were very passionate about the recording of moving object they used for their research, they were not interested at all in the problem of the subsequent projection of these images.

Picture goes here.

Marey, the first, modifies a shotgun and invents the famous photographic rifle that includes a roll of flexible film to quickly take several pictures in succession, and thus break down the movements. The rifle is built at the end of 1881 and used in the early months of 1882:

"I have a photographic rifle that is not deadly, and that takes the image of a flying bird, or a running animal, in a less than 1/500 of a second. if you can imagine this speed, but it's something surprising. " (EJ Marey - letter to his mother of February 3, 1882 [2])

Michel Frizot, a CNRS researcher and professor of the history of photography is a great specialist in the work of Étienne-Jules Marey. He devoted several books and articles to him. In "New History of Photography", an exciting and monumental work (4.7 kg, a monster in every sense of the word), he adds:

"Designed as a real shotgun with aiming on the shoulder, the camera has a lens in the barrel, and a cylinder head in which a sensitive plate rotates, when pressed on the trigger." The rotating plate gelatin-bromide of silver, stops twelve times behind the lens, while the shutter lets the light through for 1/720 of a second "[3]

Less discreet and less manageable but the quality of the images undoubtedly superior, note also the wonderful Kilburn gun camera (circa 1882-1886): a large-format 4x5 inch mahogany mounted on a cherry base that could be fixed on a rifle butt."

Thanks Jon! Great rabbit hole dive.

PJ