The Universal Tech Tree

What do firearms and cameras have in common? One answer is shared vocabulary: load, aim, shoot. The etymological origins of this relatedness are murky. People likely borrowed language about firearms — which are over 500 years older than photography — to talk about cameras, which are operated in a similar manner. But in the case of the movie camera, the connection is concrete. The first movie camera is generally considered to be the kinetograph, invented in 1891 by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at the Edison lab. Two years earlier, Edison had travelled to Paris to the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a world’s fair, to showcase his company’s phonograph. There, he met with Étienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist who had begun his career studying blood circulation, and who had developed an interest in chronophotography partly out of his work on physiology. Chronophotography consists of taking multiple photographs in quick succession to capture movement. A famous ea ... Read full article.