May 2: On May 2, 1861, while working near Paris, Henri Désiré du Mont filed French patent 49,520 for "a photographic device for reproduction of the successive phases of movement". It would transport 10 or 12 photographic plates, one by one, from a slotted frame, past the camera lens, into a lower receptacle area. A moving shutter was synchronized to ensure the plates were only exposed when they were in the right place.[1][2][3]
Specific date unknown:
In 1861, the American engineer Coleman Sellers II received US patent No. 35,317 for the kinematoscope, a device that exhibited "stereoscopic pictures as to make them represent objects in motion". In his application he stated: "This has frequently been done with plane pictures but has never been, with stereoscopic pictures". He used three sets of stereoscopic photographs in a sequence with some duplicates to regulate the flow of a simple repetitive motion, but also described a system for very large series of pictures of complicated motion.[4][5]
In 1861, Samuel Goodale patented a hand-turned stereoscope device which rapidly moved stereo images past a viewer, in a fashion similar to the later mutoscope.[8]
In 1861, the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell produced the first colour photograph, displayed by using three magic lantern projectors with different colour filters.[9]
^S. Stevenson, A. Morrison-Low, A. Simpson, J. Lawson, R. Mackenzie, R. Gillanders and J. Lawson, Light from the Dark Room: A Celebration of Scottish Photography (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1995), ISBN 0903598582, pp. 20–1.
Carroll, Noël (1996), Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Rosen, Miriam (1987), "Méliès, Georges", in Wakeman, John (ed.), World Film Directors: Volume I, 1890–1945, New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, pp. 747–65