JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This is actually part of the Tech Quiz series on this blog, though it should probably be in a Why-is-it-Famous series (if there was one) better yet. It is a hard chair to identify byt itself, but as soon as you see it in context you'll know what it is.
And so:
Prior to the invention of photography, printed works on how humans should move in a given way and for a given task are uncommon and, generally, somewhat complex. The image I have in my head is the epochal work of the somewhat forgotten Etienne Marey who in the 1870's created what was essentially the world's first "slow motion" device. One iteration of Marey's apparatus was basically a long series of ganged cameras recording a motion for a simple task at a given time frame and presented on a continuous strip of photographic paper, sort of like a motion picture with the camera speed set at three frames per second. The resulting images were phenomenal and showed people for the first time the exactness of all manners of simple motions--motions that no longer looked so "simple" once all of its aspects could be studied from captured photographic evidence. Even the act of hopping over a small chair or bending to pick up a bucket of water were enormously revealing in a way like Robert Hooke's Micrographia displayed the great detail and complexity of the seemingly simple fly. Perhaps the most famous of Marey's series of images was that of a galloping horse, which also for the first time revealed what exactly the horse's legs were doing and proving that almost every painter in the history of art represented the galloping horse incorrectly. But Marey doesn't actually fit the mold of directing the motions of people for a particular instructional purposes, though he does of course photographically reveal hundreds of actions that led to a revolutionary understanding of the body-in-motion.
Perhaps one of the most famous series of photographs was of the man jumping over a chair, and action so seemingly common that people wouldn't pay too much attention to it. But when there are 15 connected photographs of a 1.5 second event, there are entirely new worlds of motion revealed. And the chair, that white chair, was at the heart of it, and may be one of the most iconoclastic props in Marey's full cabinet. Anyway in my mind it is a famous chair.
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