Ottomar Anschütz

Ottomar Anschütz (1846–1907) was a German photographer and inventor whose rapid-shutter camera captured brief motion and whose Electrotachyscope displayed moving images.

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Electrotachyscope: A late-19th-century device that displayed a sequence of photographs as apparent motion using a rotating slotted disk. Anschütz’s best-known moving-image invention used this principle to animate photographic sequences.
High-speed photography: Photography using very short exposures to record rapidly moving subjects or brief events. Anschütz’s camera made it possible to capture motion too fast for ordinary shutters.
Eadweard Muybridge: A photographer known for sequential images of animals and people in motion. Muybridge’s motion studies formed a prominent parallel to Anschütz’s photographic experiments.
Kinetoscope: A coin-operated motion-picture viewer developed by the Edison Manufacturing Company in the 1890s. It offered individual viewing of moving images after Anschütz had demonstrated related peep-show technology.
Focal-plane shutter: A camera shutter positioned near the image plane that exposes the image by moving a slit across it. Anschütz’s rapid camera used a traveling shutter curtain to make very brief exposures.
Pigeon photography: Aerial photography made using cameras carried by trained pigeons. Anschütz developed lightweight cameras for obtaining photographs from pigeons in flight.
Étienne-Jules Marey: A French physiologist and inventor who developed photographic methods for analyzing movement. Marey’s chronophotographic instruments pursued the same scientific problem of recording motion.
Edison Manufacturing Company: The company that produced early motion-picture equipment and films associated with Thomas Edison. Its commercial viewers followed the technological path opened by earlier image-sequence devices.
Chronophotography: The photographic recording of successive phases of movement, often at short intervals. His work belongs to the effort to analyze motion through rapid photographic sequences.
Military reconnaissance: The gathering of information about an opposing force or territory for military purposes. His pigeon cameras were tested as tools for aerial observation.