Anschütz Electrical Schnellseher(1887–1891)

When Ottomar Anschütz began to develop his Schnellseher viewing device for his series chronophotographs in 1886, he was already internationally prominent as an “instantaneous” photographer through his images of animals, military manoeuvres, and, especially, storks flying in and out of their nests. The son of a regional decorative painter in Lissa, East Prussia (now Leszno, Poland), who took up photography late in his career, Ottomar Anschütz was apprenticed to photographers in Munich and Warsaw before beginning his own career in photography. His growing reputation resulted from the technological advances he made, in designing cameras and accessories, particularly his design of the first practical focal-plane shutter, which he kept a secret from early 1883 until April 1889. What could be overlooked during this period, dominated by still photography, was his obsession with using his camera to follow a complete cycle of motion, such that the beginning and the end of the cycle of motion was recorded in as few as two, and as many as 26 or more, consecutive individual images. In 1885, Anschütz began to take chronophotographs with 12 phases using a new camera he designed with a neighbouring organ builder named Schneider, who had also worked with him on his focal-plane shutter. By autumn 1886, the two men had constructed a prototype Schnellseher for the display of movement recorded by series chronophotographs. 

The Anschütz chronophotographic camera is often considered similar to the one developed by Eadweard Muybridge at Palo Alto, California, where 24 individual cameras were lined up in a shed. But although the first Anschütz chronophotographic camera – in use for under a year, from July 1885 – had similarities with Muybridge’s device, the second Anschütz chronophotographic camera was an entirely different beast. And, a beast of a camera it was: some 2.5m (8.20 ft) long, with six fully adjustable units, each holding four lenses, built on a solid iron foundation and enclosed in a walk-in light-tight box, so that an operator inside could change plates and fine-tune its operation between series exposures. Anschütz was a leading figure in the development of camera technology during his generation, and his chronophotographic camera stood as the crowning achievement of his work in camera design. From the beginning, the intention was to produce series photographs that could be reconstituted into the record of a complete movement, where the first and last images matched, providing an unbroken cycle of movement to the viewer. Anschütz was not primarily interested in the photographic analysis of movement, but in its synthesis. 

The second chronophotographic camera was in use from autumn 1886, through to the end of 1891. Primarily located at the Anschütz studio in Lissa, the camera was portable enough to travel to Hannover and photograph over 100 series at the Military Riding School, in 1886, and to photograph the daily activities of the German postal service in Berlin, in 1890. The majority of its series seem to have been made in Lissa, however, including many series of dancers, along with more traditional chronophotographic subjects, such as animal locomotion and athletes displaying their skills. Altogether the camera made around 350 to 400 chronophotographic series with a varying number of phases, only a few of which survive. In order to view these series, Anschütz devised his Schnellseher. 

The original model Schnellseher – a word invented by Anschütz, which translates as “speed-viewer” or “quick-viewer”, and that Anschütz also applied to three subsequent models of his moving picture apparatus, as well as all four models of his zoetropes – debuted in Berlin on March 19, 20 and 21, 1887, on the mezzanine of the Culture Ministry, where it was presented daily, from noon to 3 pm, to an invited audience of scientists, photographers, government officials and other leading Berlin figures (Photographisches Wochenblatt, 1887). The Schnellseher with its 120 cm (47.24 in) ring of images, heavy iron stand, batteries, Rühmkorff coil and operator, was positioned behind a false wall on the mezzanine so that only the viewing port could be observed by the guests. Moving picture discs consisting of 18, 20 or 24 consecutive images (each known as a phase), were shown to groups of four to seven persons at a time. 

By early June 1887, the Schnellseher was installed in a railroad arch across the street from the Berlin Exhibition Park where four rings entertained paying audiences at the outset, supplemented by an additional five rings in early August before the exhibition ceased at the end of the month. (Allgemeine Norddeutsche Zeitung, 1887) The Schnellseher next appeared in Wiesbaden in September, demonstrated by Anschütz himself for a convention of natural scientists (Die Vedette, 1887), then at the photographic association in Frankfurt am Main in October (Photographische Correspondenz, 1887), followed by an exhibition at the Arts and Crafts Hall in Dresden for the full month of November (Dresdener Journal, 1887), with a public installation on Augustusplatz in Leipzig from the end of December until January 15, 1888 (Weiske, 1887). 

Anschütz had made modest changes to his Schnellseher during this period, with an improved iron stand providing greater stability for the disc, and other modifications that made the apparatus more portable, as it moved around the country. The Schnellseher was still run by an operator turning a crank, who also changed the rings on the machine – electricity was only used to provide the intermittent illumination for the series photographs. 

In February 1888, the Schnellseher was permanently installed in a new building on the corner of Mohrenstrasse and Charlottenstrasse in Berlin, for which there were 23 display advertisements in the Allgemeine Norddeutsche Zeitung between August 1888 and April 1896, plus a further 186 notices in the newspaper’s “Daily Calendar”, between January 1889 and May 1891. A long exhibition of the Schnellseher between May and October 1888, at a photographic exhibition in Brussels (Bulletin de l’Association Belge de Photographie, 1888), where Anschütz received an Honourable Mention medal from the jury, precipitated the making of at least the third copy of the apparatus, with the Schnellseher reaching New York City on November 15, 1889  at the premises of C. B. Richards and Company, 3 East 14th Street (Scientific American, 1889), quickly moving to the United States Photographic Supply Company at the same address, from where it was exhibited at trade shows in both Philadelphia and Boston. The New York Times reported from a press demonstration of several chronophotographs that the apparatus would be shown “to those interested” at US Photographic Supply (April 16, 1890). 

Back in Europe, the original model of the Schnellseher was demonstrated privately for the Kaiser and the Kaiserin at the New Palace in Berlin on December 18,1889, where new chronophotographs of “Speaking Portraits” were shown (the Schnellseher was combined with a phonograph). Another private show for the Kaiser and his family on April 10, 1890, introduced both new moving images and a new, smaller model of the apparatus for schools and “general use” sometimes later called the “home model” Schnellseher, still hand cranked. In these public and private exhibitions the Schnellseher was regularly praised for the sharpness and clarity of the movements presented: “…we see the movements of the feet and the hands of the rider, the flutter of the mane and the tail of the horse, the sand flying up from under the hooves…” (Allgemeine Norddeutsche Zeitung, 1887); or, images that were “surprisingly true to nature” (Photographisches Archiv [Düsseldorf], 1887), as Anschütz “handed down to us works that are as laborious in the making as they are downright astonishing” (Berliner Tageblatt, 1889). The original model continued to tour both photographic societies and public venues during 1890 and 1891, as it was exhibited in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Graz, Pest, Warsaw, and had a long run at Earl’s Court in London; but, Anschütz was now beginning to develop his system as a commercial enterprise that would exhibit photographic moving pictures as a public entertainment, and the original Schnellseher was about to be briefly replaced by the Drum Schnellseher, and then more permanently by the Automat Schnellseher. No examples of the original model Schnellseher are known to survive.

[This essay is followed by Anschütz Drum Schnellseher.]