Choreurtoscope

 

I heard about this device – the choreutoscope - some years ago, with some disbelief.  I did manage to establish that, yes; it had been invented in Greenwich by John Taylor Beale. 

Now I had been interested for many years in Joshua Taylor Beale who was an interesting and innovative engineer of the early 19^th century. He had begun in Whitechapel, moving to Greenwich where he had a foundry on part of the Enderby site. There he developed numerous interesting devices. Among the things he manufactured were steam road vehicles which he demonstrated around the Greenwich area – like the other inventors he went up Shooters Hill to prove the vehicles could tackle steep slopes.   He also invented an important rotary steam engine.  He used this in small boats and demonstrated it to George Stephenson himself – but Stephenson had to pay to be rescued when the engine he had come to see failed when they were out at sea.   Beale’s most important invention was a device called the ‘exhauster’ which he patented and which was used in every gas works.  It was ridiculously successful later when it was manufactured by the Bryan Donkin Company of Bermondsey and, later, of Chesterfield. 

Joshua died in 1866 and his foundry was inherited, and soon closed, by his son John Taylor Beale. There is a huge story about all this and whether Joshua had ever married Hannah, his children’s mother. There was a long drawn out court case as to whether John could inherit the foundry and the patents, but regardless, he was clearly a wealthy man.  The family had lived on the bottom of Vanburgh Hill where the Plaza, once the Granada Cinema, stands. John lived there in Conduit House and later moved up the hill Westcombe Park and eventually to a big house in Westcombe Park Road.

In retirement he invented an important bicycle called the ‘Facile’. This was in the days when bicycles were still what we would call ’penny farthings’; but there were various inventions aimed at making t them a lot more easy to use by everyday people and his adaption of the design was extremely successful. The Facile was one of the first ‘safety’ ordinaries- much like a modern day bicycle, with two similar sized wheels.  It is in every bicycle museum and there are lots and lots of pictures of his bicycle on the net and even somewhere you can buy a replica should you want to.

 

John also turned his mind to this device – the choreutoscope. This was a means of showing ‘moving pictures’ in the form of  dancing figures - a  skeleton was the most famous one but there were also clowns and sailors and other things. It was also possible to manipulate them to some extent. To us this would be very simple but it is one of the steps leading to ‘moving pictures’; finding out how the very basic things work so you can build on them.

There were many other devices all of which demonstrated what could be done.  John Beale was not the only person in Greenwich doing this either. I hope soon to write about the Noakesoscope – which was also invented locally and was another and more complex device.

A couple of months ago a neighbour contacted me at Greenwich Industrial History Society and asked if we had any information about the Noakesoscope. Now I knew a bit about that because we had a speaker about it a few years ago and I was also aware that the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society had had a visit in the late 1970s to see one. We talked about this a bit and also mentioned also that Noakes was not the only local inventor with an interest in these devices.

I told her about the research I had done on John Taylor Beale but more importantly – for me - on his father. She told me how some friends of hers in the Magic Lantern Society had written a book about the choreutoscope  and that they too had researched  John Taylor Beale and the book  contained a great deal of information about him.

She got me a copy of the book and – thank you for that- and I was soon in touch with the authors, another local resident. So, I thought that I should share with you something about this interesting device and some of its background - although I must admit I have been struggling to understand it and how it relates to other devices.

The people who wrote the book and also published it are part of the Magic Lantern Society.  Now I understand what magic lanterns are - when I was a child someone had an old one. It was just like the slide projectors we had in the 70s and 80s where you put a transparency in front of a light source and looked at it on a screen. Other and different devices were developed to demonstrate what was then understood as ‘persistence of vision’ and were in effect ‘optical toys’. They tended to have really strange names - for instance ‘phenakistiscope’, ‘zoetrope’ and ‘praxinoscope’.

The idea is that you have a series of figures – maybe a skeleton, a sailor.. A dancing lady -  and each one is slightly different.  Put into a mechanical device they are quickly moved in such a way that the figures appear to gyrate or dance in some way.  Beale’s choreutoscope made rapid substitutions on a screen in real time, and it had an ingenious shutter mechanism to obscure the transitions between the images.   In 1870 his ‘Automatic Picture’ is described which showed a woman’s face making various grimaces in random order.

The authors of the book comment that Beale seems to have originally developed these apparently recreational devices on an altruistic basis around the time of his father’s death in 1866. He seems at first to have seen it as a hobby and did not patent anything. He appears to have developed nothing more after 1877.  However he later registered Chromatic Pattern Charmer under the 1843 Utility Act. This was a handheld device produce various random patterns.

By 1875 Beale  was involved with a Charles Baker,  who had an opticians’ business in  Holborn which sold a large selection of optical and scientific equipment.  He was also an early manufacture of photographic equipment - and he also manufactured the choreutoscope. Beale  registered his dancing skeleton in a ‘Magic Lantern Picture’ apparatus as a precautionary measure when the device began to be sold commercially.  This version allowed the operator to change the sequence of images and vary the rate of change thus, hopefully,  introducing playfulness and unpredictability.   Four of these devices are known to exist in collections and in museums in Paris and elsewhere.  He also began a relationship with the Royal Polytechnic Institution  to develop and publicise his work

John Beale also developed a very clever lantern slide called ‘The Rinker’  which is a humorous skating figure with a novel form of movement  was designed so as to  add a sense of unpredictability.

The book  continues by describing how his ideas were picked up and the work done on similar devices at the Royal Polytechnic Institution and how they were received. There are also extracts from reviews and descriptions of the device taken from a number of contemporary books. It is quite clear that a lot of the comment recognises that this is not just an entertainment form but embodies some serious thought and carries the possibility of use outside the world of entertainment.

Successive devices have variations which embody new ideas about the way that moving pictures could be achieved through projection. There is a serious background based on our perception of moving images. In the future cinema we would appear to see natural movement despite the fact we are in fact looking at a series of pictures each with a slight variation.  The book warns us that we should not look at these devices as something to look back at from the cinema. It stresses that the relationship of these devices to future cinematography and related devices is complex and open to interpretation.  It says we should see the choreutoscope as a device of ‘ingenuity and wonder’.

This has been a very quick run through a complex but interesting subject. As far as relevance to Greenwich is concerned we need – as I have said before - to look at a culture of innovation and invention – and also having a means of contacting relevant organisations which might take an interest.  I might also note a tradition of local research in a wide range of subjects, and indeed to the local scientific instrument trade and of course the Royal Observatory.  There was been continual research on many subjects in the Arsenal and elsewhere as well as some distinguished scientists in Woolwich education. As far as Beale himself surely his interesting father set an example by his lifetime inventing many different devices.

The book is 'The magic lantern dancer .the choreutoscope and its place in the history of the moving image;  Ed. Jeremy Brooker, Richard Crangle and Martin Gilbert, published by the Magic Lantern Society.  Please look at their web site https://www.magiclantern.org.uk/sales/publication.php?id=20