Chronophotographic gun

The chronophotographic gun captured time in slices thin enough to analyze. Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist obsessed with movement, designed the device in 1882 to answer a scientific question: how exactly do birds fly? His rifle-shaped camera took twelve consecutive photographs per second on a rotating glass disc, freezing motions too fast for the eye to perceive.

The adjacent possible had assembled from astronomy and physiology. Jules Janssen's photographic revolver of 1874 had captured the transit of Venus as a sequence of images—demonstrating that astronomical cameras could record time. Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photographs of galloping horses (1878) had proven that photography could analyze motion. And Marey's own research on blood circulation and locomotion demanded tools to see the invisible phases of movement.

Marey's innovation was integration. Where Muybridge used multiple cameras triggered by trip wires, Marey placed camera, shutter, and film rotation mechanism in a single handheld device. The operator could track a moving subject—a flying gull, a running man—aiming like a hunter and capturing twelve frozen moments from a single action.

The photographic gun revealed what eyes could not see. Marey discovered that birds don't simply flap their wings up and down; the wing tips trace complex figure-eight patterns. Horses in gallop do have all four feet off the ground simultaneously. Human gait involves subtle rotations invisible in real time.

The device positioned photography at the intersection of art and science. Marey saw it as a research instrument; others recognized its entertainment potential. The transition from analyzing motion to reproducing motion—from chronophotography to cinematography—required only the recognition that what analysis had separated, projection could reunite.

Marey lived to see the cinematograph but considered it a corruption of his scientific purpose. He had built a tool for dissecting time. Others would reassemble it into movies.