Chapter 4 : A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION

3/20/92

A Chronology Of Animation History Computer Animation Technology prepared by Judson Rosebush C 1989-1990
This is document CHRON4.DOC
360,000,000 BC - first known tetrapods (4 legged terrestrial vertebrates) appear. 1,500,000 BC - Kindling wood employed in building fire. 1,000,000 BC - Humans migrate out of Africa and use stone tools in Jordan. 350,000 BC - Alternate date for Homo erectus uses fire. [decide which you want Judson.] 250,000 BC - Brain capacity of neanderthal man exceeds 1000 cubic centimeters. 120,000 BC - Man builds shelters with roof supported by wooden beams. 50,000 BC - Body paint employed as decoration and camaflage. 43,000 BC - Homo sapiens matures; brain capacity exceeds 1500 cc's and spoken language is developed. 32,000 BC - Neanderthal hunters employ superimposed positions to depict the action of a running boar. First recorded drawings with temporal component. [but isn't the date too early?] 25,000 BC - Clothing begins to be tailored. Czechoslovaks make kiln fired clay figures of people and animals. 15,000 BC - Cave painters at Lascaux, France superimpose stars over the sketch of a bull creating the oldest record of a star constellation. Because most modern (Arabic) star names describe the part of the constellation where the star is located it is theorized that constellations were named before the individual stars. 8600 BC - Brick houses are built in Jerico, Palestine. 8450 BC - Accounting and counting systems : Persians use clay tokens as bills of lading for shipments. 8350 BC - Jerico is incorporated as first town. bureaucracy. First
Chapter 4: A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION
8000 BC - Widespread domestication of plants and animats. 6500 BC - Seals are used to make impressions in clay. 6500 BC - Weaving of cloth perfected. 6000 BC - In Ishango, Zaire bone is cut with notches, mediatizing the grouping and counting activity. 3600 BC - Mesopotamians employ clay envelopes for tokens. 3500 BC - Mesopotamians invent pictographic writing in clay. 3500 BC - Widespread urbanization. During the next 500 years copper and bronze metal technologies are perfected. 3000 BC - Abacus sliding stone number register, counting, and procedures for adding and subtracting numbers. 3000 BC - Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing. 2700 BC - Egyptians perfect basic surveying instruments and techniques, including the plumb bob, the square (and right angle), measuring rods (the ruler), the level, and the chalk line. Evidence of angular measurement slim. 2700 BC - Approximate date for origin of oldest known living thing on Earth, a bristle cone pine tree named Methuselah. 2500 BC - I Ching developed as model of universe. 2500 BC - Babylonians invent the zodiac, a band of 12 major constellations, or signs, through which the planets migrate and which encircles Earth. Each sign corresponds to 1/12th of the circle and is loosely correlated to the length of time for the moon to progress thru a full cycle of phases. 2150 BC - Babylonians use scale rules and scribes to draw plan ziggurat. of a 1800 BC - Phonetic alphabet evolved by Semitic tribes.
1700 BC - Babylonians employ precomputed multiplication tables. 1650 BC - Egyptian Ahmes compiles the Rhind Papyrus, a textbook of arithmatic problems and their solutions. 1500 BC - Babylonians create a baked clay tablet map of the town of Go-Sur that includes the river that flows through it and the nearby mountains. 1303 BC - Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II initiates a systemic land survey of Egypt. 600 BC - Metal coins employed by Greeks. 585 BC - Thales of Miletus (Greece) developes five theorms about circles and triangles, explains how to find North using the pole star, and predicts an eclipse of the Sun, on May 28, that stops the battle between the Lydian Alyattes and the Median Cyaxares. 550 BC - Etruscans assign names to 8 principle winds, and these names become 8 equally spaced angles of the wind rose, a circular chart resemblina a compass. 550 BC - Pythagoreans discover that the length of a string dictates the pitch of a note, and thus observe that numerical ratios underlying musical intervals, and formalize the musical scale. 532 BC - Pythagoras formalizes geometry as a study of axioms, definitions and theorems. He identifies four of the five regular polyhedra. [subset of this in chap 6 chron] 500 BC - Greeks convert from writing right to left to writing left to right. The Romans will make similar conversion 200 years later. 470 BC - The Greek Hippasus discovers the dodecahedron, the fifth and last of the regular polyhedra to be identified. He is drowned by the other Pythagoreans after bragging about his discovery. 425 BC - Zeno of Elea proposes four paradoxes on motion.

425 BC - Theatrical proscenium introduced by Greeks to demarcate the stage space and frame it for viewing. Great. 400 BC - Menaechmus explains conic sections to Alexander the
400 BC - Murals in Pompei anticipate the formulation of perspective. 375 BC - Archytas of Tarentum, in Greece, constructs a one of the earliest known automata, a mechanical bird. 370 BC - Greek Eudoxus proposes a model of the heavens as a series of concentric spheres. The retrograde motion of the plants is described as a hippopade curve, which resembles a figure 8 and is produced by two homocentric spheres turning with equal but opposite velocities around axes which are slightly inclined to each other. 350 BC - Aristotle consolidates six arguments to prove that the Earth is a sphere. He asserts the obliquity of the Earth's axis and establishes the concept of the equator, the poles, and the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. 300 BC - Euclid's Elements includes discussions of plane and solid geometry, including points, lines, planes, and the construction of right angles, half angles, circles and arcs. 270 - Aristarch of Samos proposes the idea that the Sun is the center of the solar system, but the idea doesn't catch on. 250 BC - Oldest known astrolab, an instrument for measuring angular distance, particularly the sun, moon, or a star above the horizon. After 900 astrolabs began to be augmented with a rotating(?) ring called a spider or rete and inscribed with the zodac so that the astrolab can be used to tell the time of day. See below. 240 - Chinese astronomers make first recorded passage of Halley's comet. 236 BC - Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the chief of the library at Alexandria, employs a trigometric method and measures the circumfrence of Earth with an accuracy of 15%. One hundred years
later the experiment is repeated by Posidonius, whose result is 25% too small. Regretably during the next 1600 years, nobody bothers to recheck his result until after Columbus, sailing west in 1492, mistakes America for Asis and names the natives Indians. 200 BC - Archimedes of Syracuse advances computational geometry and publishes formulas and algorithms incluing the area of a parabolic segment, volumes of curved shapes, the law of the lever, and the principle of boyancy. He calculates the number of grains of sand [on Earth? in the universe?] to be equal to 10E54. 200 BC - Erathosthenes of Cyrene uses the solstitial armilla, a type of armillary sphere to determine angular obliquity of the ecliptic. An armillary sphere is an astronomical measuring instrument that models the great circle movement of the heavens using concentric rings. Erathosthenes' instrument consisted of one fixed ring and a rotating inner ring. One is aligned to the plane of earth's rotation and the other to the plane at which the heavens rotated around the earth on an annual basis. See 140 AD below. 200 BC - Oldest known celestial globe shows stars and constellations. This is called the Farnese globe because. 150 BC - Nicomedes in Greece describes a procedure to draw a conchoid. 150 BC - The Greek Crates builds a globe of the Earth. The globe has not survived but it is the first globe of which there is a record. 126 BC - Hipparchus applies trigonometric procedures in astronomical calculations. Hipparchus also describes the precession of the vernal equinox. 100 BC - Musical notation is developed in China. 49 BC - Romans, in Egypt, perfect the water level and plane table. The plane table is a drawing board mounted on a tripod. When used with an alidade, a pair of sights connected to a straightegde, it is possible to aim at objects and then recorded (drawn) a line on the plane table which corresponds to a vector from the plane table to the objects being sighted. The astrolab predates the plane table in measuring angles, but the plane table may be the first instrument to

Chapter 4 : A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION record them, making it a topographical instrument. starting point to prepare accurate maps.

3/20/92 This is a

???? - Romans adopt the compass, divider, and measuring caliper from the Greeks. 100 - Greek astronomer Menelaus, living in Rome, writes the Menelai Sphaericorum, the oldest known book on spherical trigonometry. 105 - China Cai Lun invents paper; eventually it will replace silk and wood as a writing mterial. 129 - Claudius Ptolemy, working in Alexandria, prepares the first general atlas of the world. It contains a world map and 26 detailed maps. [date this before or after the fire?] 140 - Alexandrians build the Meteoroskopion, an armillary sphere with 9 rings, including the horizon, the meridian, the equator, the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn, the Artic and Antartic Circles, and the ecliptic. It is probably scaled with degrees. 249 Chinese Pei Hsiu describes the use of rectilinear divisions to make cartographic maps which contain accurate indications of distance and orientation. -250 - Conflaguation of library at Alexandria in Egypt at the hands of the Romans destroys the largest collection of classical literature extant on the planet. This is the first metaphorical head crash of the human race. 500 - Abacus improved by addition of sliding wires. 500 AD - Byzantines at Gaza, Syria construct a waterclock with a Hercules android that strikes hours with a club. 624 - Arabs conquer Egypt; beginning of Arab technical and scientif prowess. 680 - Positional notation system with zero perfected in India. 700 - Printing on paper is perfected in China
800 - Charlemagne's court, in what is now Germany, introduces lower case letters into the Roman alphabet. 825 - Arab AI-Khowarizmi writes Aljabr (AI-gebra). 900 - The astrolab is augmented with a rotating ring inscibed with the zodiac and called a rete. The enhancement makes it possible to tell the time of day throughout the whole year. This is done by first sighting on the sun and measuring its asmuth angle, rotating the zodiac to allign with the angle, and determing what time an arrow points to. This modern astrolab is sort of like a circular slide rule, only it calculates time of day from sun angle and season (time of year), not arithmetic operations on numbers. 910 - Paper money is introduced in China. 1000 - Arab Alhazen (Ibn al-Haitham) [see chap 3]. 1000 - Norsemen sail to the new world. 1040 - Chinese invent moveable type. 1100 - Ancient knowledge from Greece and Rome begins to trickle into Europe via Arabia, North Africa, and Spain. 1100 - Chinese discover the principle of the magnetic compass. 1200 - Use of Arabic numberals spreads into Europe. The effect to simplify (or make possible) mathematical manipulations which are impractical using Roman numerals. 1202 - Fibonacci introduces Hindo-Arabic numerals, including 0, into Europe. But the concept is slow to catch on. In his writing he also recognizes debt as a negative asset. 1204 - The sack of Constantinople by ?? destroys most early Byzantine and Greek literature. 1240 - Albertus Magnus constructs an iron man android. 1256 - Roger Bacon builds a talking head android.

1296 - An Italian company publishes La Compassos da Navigare, a detailed harbour finding manual for the entire Mediterranean Sea, with bearings express in "half points," that is, halves of tghe angles defined by the 32 point compass, a compass with 32 basic directions. 1300's - Mechanical clocks in public places become popular. Often they are equipped with human-looking automatons called jaquemarts, or jacks, which strike bells with hammers and replacing live watchmen and bell ringers. 1382 - Nicolas Oresme uses coordinates to express mathematical functions. 1405 - Ptolemy is rediscovered in Europe and his Geographia is translated into Latin. During the next 300 years most of its cartographic errors are corrected. 1407 - King of France incorporates a College of Arms ; and blazon--formal written descriptions of heraldic shields is practiced by the college. 1436 - Leon Alberti codifies a theory of perspective in Della pittura, bringing to the visual arts a long sought mathematical foundation comparable to that of music. 1450 - Coiled spring steel becomes widely available as a source of portable kinetic energy. It is uses especially in clocks. 1455 - Johann Gutenberg prints the Mazarin bible and perfects the concept of a printing press with moveable type. The influence of printing and engraving is widespread, and includes the printing of music, maps, and drawings as well as the written word. 1456 - The German astronomer Johann Miller constructs a mechanical flying iron eagle and an insect fly. signs. 1489 - Johann Widman standardizes the plus (+) and minus (-)
1492 - Martin Behain of Nuremberg builds a 20" diameter globe of the world which is the oldest terrestrial glove in existance. It contains no Americas.
1515 - The Planisphere, a stereographic projection, is perfected which produces an accurate flat representation of the celestial hemisphere inside a circle. 1557 - Robert Recorde introduces the equals sign (=). 1560 - Leonardo da Vinci uses coordinates for analyzing quantitative data for experiments on gravity. 1569 - Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator publishes a world map using a projection where longitude is represented by equally spaced vertical lines and latitude is represented by horizontal lines. 1579 - Grancois Vieta in France advances algebria notation, advancing the concept of variable names for unknowns. 1593 - Vena calculates n to 17 decimal places. 1614 - John Napier, in Scotland, discovers logorithms, setting the stage for the slide rule (1620). 1620 - First publication of logarithmic tables. 1620 - Englishman William Oughtred perfects the slide rule, and device which multiplies numbers by analogically displacing (sliding) the physical scales. The trick is that the scales are logorithmic, and that the displacement actually adds the logorithms. This is high magic (good stuff). 1620 - The theodolite is introduced, it is a portable instrument for measuring both horizontal and vertical angles using a sight and protractor like scales. The theodolite marks a significant advance over the Roman plane table and alidade, and during the next 100 years a series of emerging technologies are incorporated into this topographic instrument, including the telescope, the vernier scale, stadia hairs, and the new, miniturized spirit levels. 1620 - Englishman Edmund Gunter develops a surveying chain and system of measures that remains in use for over 400 years. Each link of the chain is 7.92 inches long. There are 25 links in the

Chapter 4 : A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION length of the surveyor's rod, 100 links in the chain. equal one acre and there are 80 chains in a mile.

10 square chains

1631 - Oughtred introudces the multiplication sign (x). 1631 - Thomas Harriot introduces symbols for greater than (>) and less than (<). 1631 - Frenchman Pierre Vernier invents a technique of juxtoposing two sliding scales and increasing measuring accuracy approximately 10 fold. The two vernier scales have one unit of difference for each major unit--for example the second vernier scale has 11 divisions to an inch whereas the main scale has ten ; whereever the two scales come into phase is the extra digit of precision. 1636 - John Hume introduces the idea of superscripts for power notation (A"), but it is not until Newton that exponents are understood to be positive, negative, integer or fractions (1676). 1637 - Rene Descartes in France invents Analytic Geometry, dividing the plane with two perpendicular and quantitative axes. The benefit is a way to display functions of two variables, especially the conics, and the beginning of using graphics as an analytical method. [subset of this in chron6] 1637 - English navigator Richard Norwood invents a system for measuring speed on ships which utilizes a sandglass and a knotted rope ; this is the origin of the term "knots" for measuring speed. 1639 - Cross hatching patterns employed by Marcus Vulson de la Colombiere are standardized for specific colors in depicting heraldic shields. 1642 - Frenchman Blaise Pascal invents digital adding machine which uses gears. Cogs automate carries. Values are input with rotary motion using the hand and a stylis. The machine can add and subtract ; multiplication is accomplished with repeated additions and ofsets. 1655 - John Wallis devises symbols for greater than or equal to (>_), less than or equal to (<), and infinity (xx).
1659 - Johann Rahn creates the modern divide symbol (=). 1666 - Isaac Newton discovers the binomial theorm. 1669 - Telescopic sights are incorporated into theodolites. 1673 - Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz formulate calculus. 1673 - Leibnitz enhances Pascaline by adding a shifting bar so as to faciliate multiplication and divisions. Further mechanization of this concept occured in 1820 with the addition of the crank, and in 1850 with the addition of the keyboard. 1770 Charles Messier compiles a Catalogue of 103 nonstellar, deep-sky objects. 1700 - Irregular curve templates manufactured in Paris aquire name French curves. 1706 - William Jones introduces the modern symbol for pi (n). 1738 - Frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson builds an android flute player capable of playing a dozen songs. 1750's - Tableaux mecaniques -painted landscapes with moving figures, windmills, and objects driven by hidden clockworkbecome popular. 1752 - An extravagant mechanical theater is completed in the Gardens of Hellbrunn at Salzburg. It consists of 113 hydraulically operated figures and takes 4 years to build. 1753 - Oldest mechanism capable of writing and drawing, currently in Vienna. 1756 - J. I. Brietkopf invents a mosiac system for typsetting music. A font matrix consists of separate note heads and stems so that simultanious notes (chords) could be typset on a single staff. 1955 - Leonard Euler introduces a symbol for summation (E). 1770 - Self contained spirit level introduced. triangulated surveying begins in France. Modern

1897 - First use of permits and customs to control motion picture production and distribution is waged by the Americans against agents of the French Lumiere company. 1897 - In England Cecil Hepworth pubishes The ABC of Cinematography. 1898 - Melies advances naval battle stagecraft further, blowing up the Battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, and then shooting divers through a fishtank as they recover bodies. 1898 - In America, J. Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith stage The Battle of Santiago Bay, another naval epic using models, and discover the ARRET, used in Humpty Dumpty Circus, thought by some to be the first stop motion film in America. 1898 - Albert Michelson and Samuel Stratton build a HARMONIC SYNTHESIZER that uses cranked eccentrics and levers to move a drawing pen ; the resulting drawings are called HARMONIGRAMS. (You can buy one today in a toy store ; with trade names like the Mechanico, the Magic Designer, and the Spirogram. The harmonic synthesizer is similar to the pendulum harmonigraph except it does not loose energy as the swinging pendulum does. It is a complementary output device to the HARMONIC ANALYIZER. 1899 - Arthur Cooper makes first STOP MOTION commercial, for Bryant and May Matchsticks called Matches Appeal. 1899 - Paul builds a movie studio equipped for special effects and with a moviable camera. 1900 - J. Stuart Blackton, at Edison Black Maria studio in New Jersey, combines stop frame animation of drawings and live action in The Enchanted Drawing, a chalk talk elaborated with some camera trickery. 1901 - Lumieres advocate the PHOTOROMA, a 360 surround film experience. During this period they also experiment with 70mm (1900), and 3D using glasses (19xx). 1902 - Melies combines live action documenary photography with staged live action in The Corination of King Edward, which was rushed into the theaters.
1902 - George Melies makes Voyage to the Moon, and uses elabolate theater stage flats carefully drawn and painted, moving and mechanical props, pyrotechnics, and actors. One of this trick devices is a sophsicated use of the DISSOLVE. In The Man with the Double Head Melies plays two roles on the screen at the same time, probably a first; it is accomplished with a DOUBLE EXPOSURE. By the following year, in Melomanic, Melies shoots MULTIPLE EXPOSURES of five and more passes. His trickfilm tools now include the arret, cuts, fades, dissolves, double and multiple exposures, and hand coloring, but it is uncertain that he ever uses stop motion. 1902 - American George ?? Sheffield proves that all arithmatic and logical functions reduce to NOTAND. 1903 - Edwin S.Porter directs Life of a Fireman and The Great Train Robbery, sometimes called the first PHOTOPLAY, because it fuses cinematography and storytelling. Both make extensive use of trick photography, including the STATIC MATTE, used in The Great Train Robbery to capture a moving exterior. 1903 - Zecca, directing for Pathe, makes use of REVERSE ACTION in Le Plongeur fantastique. 1903 - The Wright brothers demonstrate that a controllable airplane requires controls for three degrees of freedom : YAW, PITCH, and ROLL. 1904 - Offset lithography perfected. the office mimeograph machine. One derivative product is

1905 - Spaniard Segundo de Chomon in Paris makes a trick motion film, El Hotel Electrico, using STOP MOTION photography. 1905 - Melies installs mercury lights into his movie studio. 1905 - Edison's studio employs animated title cards in How Jones Lost His Roll. 1906 - Porter, in adapting Windor McCay's comic strip The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, begins experimentation with model animation and has animated shoe walking.
1906 - Electrical signal amplification, a kind of analog computing, becomes realistic with invention of tiode, by Lee deForrest. 1906 - Another ARRET beheading, this time by Melies in Paris. France bans the execution shot in 1911, an early censorship. 1906 - Walter R. Booth, in England, incorporates stop-action filmmaking. 1907 - Blackboard chalk SCRATCHONS are single frame photographed onto a film in J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Face. This film is often sited as the first drawn 2D ANIMATION. 1907 - Blackton and Smith fuse single frame 3D MODEL ANIMATION and live action in order to depict a bottle pouring its own wine, a hand slicing bread and other antics in The Haunted Hotel. Vaudville audiences and the experts were dumbfounded. This is the first stop-motion film of 3D objects to achieve commercial success. 1907 - Porter's The Eagles Nest employs mechanical props. 1907 - D. W. Griffith creates the CLOSE UP. [better check this line out.] 1907 - Norman Dawn introduces the PAINTED GLASS MATTE PROCESS to Hollywood, in which part of the image to be photographed is painted on glass and hung in front of the scene. 1908 - G. W. Bitzer introduces CLAY ANIMATION in The Sculptor's Nightmare. 1908 - French newspaper cartoonist Emile Cohl develops an 2D ANIMATION technique of drawing with India ink on rice paper and then photographing the successive individual drawings. He makes numerious short films, including Fantasmagorie , his first film and the first CARTOON, and Drame chez les Fantoches, which uses 2D SHAPE

METAMORPHOSIS.

1909 - Cohl innovates on the use of DOUBLE EXPOSURE printing to combine animation and live action in Clair de Lune Espagnol (The Man in the Moon). Cohl's method may have been to film the live first, process the film, count the frames, and plan the animation before
shooting it on a second negative, which was then double printed with the live action. 1909 - Cohl adopts the ELECTRICALLY DRIVEN CAMERA SHUTTER to get even exposures. 1909 - Multi-reel movies become popular. 1909 - American Rear Admiral Peary is the first person to visit to the North Pole of planet Earth. 1909 - Whitehead and Russell employ a special symbol for logical or (v). 1910 - Emile Cohl develops the silhouette method using 2D ARTICULATED CUTOUTS of a human figure made with linkages and joints for his film Peintre neo-impressionniste. C. Armstrong in England develops a similar method. 1910 - Edison makes first EDUCATIONAL FILM, The Man Who Learned, about the dangers of unpasteurized milk, and launches an industrial/training production unit that employed animation. 1910 - Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead publish Principia Mathematica. 1911 - New York newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay animates his Little Nemo character ; this is the first animated cartoon to feature a newspaper comic strip character. The 3 minute hand drawn short is drawn on paper and photographed, and the prints are COLOR-TINTED by hand painting. The film makes the first use of CYCLES. It is a theatrical sensation. 1911 - Puppet animation advances when Polish-Russian Ladislas Starewicz uses stop motion to photograph 3D jointed mechanical insects in Lucanus Cervus The following year he makes The Cameraman's Revenge, which includes a special effect of film burning in the projector. 1911 - John Terry and Hugh Shields, in San Francisco, combine animation and live action by shooting onto a single emulsion using split reel technique.

1922 - Western Electric makes animated sound film tests. In 1924, Lee De Forrest makes animated talking cartoon at the Max Fleischer studio. 1922 - Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North begins the era of the film documentary. 1923 - Hunchback of Notre Dame employs miniature sets. 1923 - Eugene Schufftan patents a mirror process to combine paintings, models, or photographs with live action. 1924 - German Hans Richter and Swedish Viking Eggeling collaborate in making abstract animation called Diagonal Symphony. 1924 - Bell Laboratories is founded to consolidate the various research activities within AT&T. 1925 - Dodge Dunning invents in-camera travelling matte process using completary colors that works for black and white but not color. 1926 - Disney and others incorporate the key frame technique (defining the action line as extreme positions plus in-betweens, exposure sheets, the Moviola, and the ink and paint assembly line into animation process. 1926 - Lotte Reiniger completes the all-animated feature Adventures of Prince Achmed using jointed 2D silhouette marionettes. Two years later she makes The Adventures of Dr.

Doolittle.

1926 - Fleischer makes the bouncing ball process to add music to the silent film. 1926 - Russian Sergei Eisenstein introduces a theory of montage into the vocabulary of film ; Potemkin released. 1927 - The film Metropolis simulates a television by using a rear projection screen. 1927 - Alan Crosland directs The Jazz Singer, the first theatrical release with synchronized speech.
1928 - Felix the Cat is the first cartoon star to appear on television, on NBC in New York. 1928 - Paul Terry makes Dinner Time, the first cartoon with sound, voices, and music. 1928 - American Walt Disney makes the first animated synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, premered at the Colony Theater in New York, which launches the character of Mickey Mouse. Disney will now assume leadership for cel-style animation innovation. Pluto, Donald Duck are born within a decade. Musical tempo now paramount. 1928 - Dodge Dunning syncronizes rear projection and live action photography. This is how most scenes in an automobile are filmed. 1929 - Americans Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising make first lip synchronized dialogue cartoon, Bosko The Talking Kid. It is with this film they approach Leon Schlessinger at Warners (below). 1930 - German Oskar Fischinger choreographes abstract animation to classical music. 1930 - 24 fps is standarized as sound film speed. 1930 - Birth of Betty Boop, from the Fleicher studio. 1930 - Walter Lantz (later the creator of Woody Woodpecker) utilizes photomechanical coloring in the opening of King of Jazz. 1930 - Widespread use of IBM cards for bookkeeping. 1930 - The ninth planet, Pluto, is discovered using photo comparitive techniques. 1931 - New Zealander Len Lye draws directly onto film. Box, in 1935 is made in England. Color

1936 - Englishman Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" defines the domain of computing. Turing's machine conceptualizes serial input messages that are interpreted by hardware processing logic which manipulates the input stream backward or forward and overwrites symbols onto it. 1936 - Konrad Zuse in Germany builds electromechanical calculator using relays and binary numbers. 1936 - John Wilbur builds a mechanical computer for solving linear equasions. 1936 - Soviet Union establishes the Soyuzmult film studio to produce animation. 1937 - August Arnold and Erich Koestner perfect a reflex viewing system for motion picture cameras which is manufactured by Arriflex in Germany. Its main advantage is that the camera operator can look directly and continuously at the subject being filmed. 1937 - Disney uses multiplane photographic camera in The Old 1937 - Walt Disney releases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, their first feature film, which included lip synchronized characters, sound and color. 1937 - MGM forms animation unit that employs William Hanna and Joe Barbera, the future Hanna-Barbera Productions. Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner become major characeters. 1937 - Mechanical and electrical isograph analog computers are independently perfected to solve polynomial equasions with real coefficients. Thornton Fry and R. L. Dietzold build the mechanical isograph, which traces one or more sine and cosine waves and draws the result. The electric machine is constructed by H. C. Hart and Irven Travis. [check facts : is an isograph a polynomial solver?] 1937 - George Stibitz at Bell Labs builds an electric relay circuit that perferms boolean logic functions: binary input signals are converted to binary output signals. Using his "boolean gates" Stibitz construct a machine which adds two binary numbers.
1938 - Starevitch uses facial masks for different expressions. 1938 - Claude Shannon, in Boston, relates binary numbers, boolean algebra dnd electric circuitry. 1938 - Bell System introduces the mechanical crossbar switch into the phone system. It is used to switch calls at telephone exchanges. 1938 - George Philbrick, at the Foxboro Company, completes the Polyphemus, the first all electronic analog computer, and displays the results on an oscilloscope. 1938 - Chester Carlson invents xerography. 1939 - John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry build a prototype of a binary calculating machine. The machine as ?? registers, or memories, each 25 bits long, and one logic circuit, which can ??. The machine is similar to Stibitz's, but uses tubes (not relays), for the logic circuit. The memories are built from capacitors. 1939 - H. C. Montgomery build a photo-electric harmonic analyizer. 1939 - Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz both verify the success of the Hollywood color feature. 1939 - Bell and Howell 71-Q Eyemo spring powered hand held 35mm newsreel camera becomes the most widely distributed professional motion picture camera of its era. 1940 - John Grierson founds The National Film Board of Canada. Norman Mclaren is one of its first stars of the abstract method. 1940 - Douglas Rockwell pioneers wax block method. 1940 - John and James Whitney employ a pendulum harmonium to make Twenty-Four Variations on an Original Theme, one of the first American abstract animation films.

1947 - Grace Hopper documents the first computer bug, a dead moth found inside the Mark ll, by pasting it in her notebook along with a description of the incident. 1948 - Claude Shannon, now at Bell, defines information theory and proposes a method of define and measure information (quanity of bits). In his spare time he constructs a chess playing machine. 1948?- Ralph Shaw and Engineering Research Associates prototypes The Rapid Selector, a mechanized filing and searching system. 1948 - IBM begins work on its first electronic computer, the Model 604 Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator. 1949 - Olin Dupy at MGM builds motion control aparatus for camera control that will record pan and tilt movements onto a phonograph record and play them back. Early analog motion control unit. 1949 - First experiments with front projection. 1949 - Jiri Trnka, in Chechoslowakia, opens puppet studio. Others there include Hermina Tyrlova and Karel Zeman. 1949 - Maurice Wilkes at Cambridge, England builds the first stored program computer, the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator). It is a fully binary vacuum tube machine (??) with ?? words of ?? bit memory. 1949 - MIT's Jay Forrester invents magnetic core memory. 1949 - Phototypesetting introduced. 1950(?) - United Productions of America (UPA) introduces Gerald McBoing Boing, and a new flat graphic style, often called LIMITED ACTION where design and caricature assume precedence over action. 1951 - "Totalized Animation" is introduced in which 3D models are in motion during shot.
1951 - Mauchly and Eckert, at Remington Rand, complete UNIVAC, the UNIVersal Automatic Computer, an electronic stored program machine for commercial use. Seriel number one is sold the US Bureau of the Census. Its cycle time is 2000 operations per second, or.002 MIPS. One of its input/output devices is magnetic tape. 1951 - Ken Olsen and Jay Forrester at MIT build the Whirlwind /computer. It has 1024 words of 16 bit memory and performs 20,000 operations per second. It is equipted with a CRT display and movie camera and some of the very first computer animation is produced on this machine. 1951 - Otto Schade of RCA defines the optical transfer function, which applies information theory to the behavior of lenses. 1952 - Electronic Associates Inc in New Jersey manufacture the 16-231R, an analog computer. Over 500 are sold, making it the largest selling analog computer. Among other things it is used to design the nuclear reactor for the Nautilus and perform flight simulation for the X15. 1952 - Ben Laposky begins making Oscillons, analog computer art pictures displayed on a CRT oscilloscope and controlled with dials, and shot onto black and white film or onto color film using filters. 1952 - IBM introduces its first stored program computer, the 701, a tube machine which uses binary representations. 1952 - Werner von Braun proposes an earth orbiting space station. 1953 - Crick and Watson discover the genetic code. uses a programming language. 1953 - IBM(?) perfects the light pen. 1953 - IBM introduces their first magnetic tape digital recorder, the Model 726. It has a density of 100 bytes per inch and a transfer rate of 75 inches, or approximately 60,000 bits, per second. Magnetic drum storage is also perfected this year. Nature

1953 - McLaren explores stop motion pixillation technique in film Neighbors. 1953 - The Tonight Show York. Its original host is Steve included Jack Paar (19??), and longest running TV program in goes on the air at WNBC-TV, New Allen, and subsequent hosts have Johnny Carson (1962). It is the American history.
1954 - IBM introduces 650 computer. It is a small business computer that reents for $4000 a month and during the next 15 years 1500 units are sold. 1954 - Reynold Johnson invents the rotating magnetic disk at IBM's San Jose research lab. 1954 - First compiler: John Bakus at IBM develops Fortran (FORmula TRANslator), a programming language which supports matrix as well as scalar variables, simple arithmatic, assignments, conditionals, branch and subroutine calls, and machine independent I/O. Subordinate to a standarized machine independent syntax are concepts such as language portability, subroutine libraries, device portability, and other concepts essencial to computer animation. 1954 - John Halas and Joy Batchelor animate a feature length serious work, Animal Farm. 1954 - Bute and Dr. Ralph Potter collabolate to produce Abstronic which uses an oscilloscope. 1955 - Motorized animation stand introduced by John Oxberry includes double columns, automatic follow focus and rotating table. 1956 - IBM announces the 704, a commercial vacuum tube computer. By the end of 1957 it has 87 machines of the 700 series in operation worldwide. Customers could purchase a point addressable CRT as an output option, a first, and although the 704 included an "advance film frame" instruction, the tube had no vector or character mode and was intended for microfilm recording, not interactive display. 1956 - George Price, writing in Fortune, theorizes The Design Machine, an interactive CG CAD/CAM system complete with an "IBM 704 computer, a Hughes Aircraft Memotron memory-type picture
tube, and an automated machine tool." The system employs virtual models, a function key pad menue, and a rotator ball, dial and joystick to effect primitive transformations. 1957 - IBM begins shipping the first disc drive, the IBM 350. 1957 - The Air Forces operationalizes SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment), a computer mediated system for graphic display of aircraft and air defense. It employs an IBM AN/FSQ-7 computer that weighs 175 tons and which combines tube and rotating drum memory, and displays radar blips on a CRT with a light pen. 1957 - Russel Kirsch and others at National Bureau of Standards employ a rotating scanning drum with a photoelectric cell to digitize picture and store it in a computer. 1957 - Ken Olsen leaves MIT and founds Digital Equiptment Corporation. 1957 - Two Chinese-American physicists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang receive the Nobel prize for a theory that elementary particles are asymmetric ; their antiparticles are identical but have opposite charge. This is an analogy at the atomic level to stereoisomers at the chemical level. 1958 - John and James Whitney employ mechanical CAM equipment to manipulates templates. Products of this analog motion control computer include Lapis (1962-1966). 1958 - Seymour Cray builds the first fully transistorized supercomputer, the Control Data Corp 1604. 1958 - The LISP language is invented by John McCarthy, who coined the term "artifical intelligence." Lisp provides a programming approach whereby formal rules may be structured for tasks like theorm proving and artifical intelligence. 1958 - The Recording Method method of writing characters printed first computerized system for banking, Electronic of Accounting (ERMA) is introduced. It includes a numbers on checks with machine readable using magnetic ink.

picture driven activities, freehand and constrained drawing, and object editing and positioning. 1963 - The Stromberg Carlson Corporation introduces the Stromberg Datagraphic 4020, or SD-4020, an offline film recorder that may be used to record motion pictures. The basic model comes with a capstan driven camera but Sherril Martin, then living in Concord, Massachusetts, adapts a pin registered 35mm camera to the SD-4020 at Lincoln Labs at MIT, so that precision filming can be done. 1963 - Ed Zajac at Bell makes Two-Gyro Gravity Gradient Attitude Control System using a Fortran subroutine package (similar to the Calcomp interface) plus a Fortran program. This is very likely the first computer animated film as well as a genuine scientific visualization. 1963 - Larry Roberts at MIT writes a computer program to remove the hidden lines in a three dimensional perspective drawing. 1963 - William Fetter coins the term "computer graphics." 1963 - Touch Tone dialing introduced into the Bell System. 1964 - Rand Corp. makes first data tablet. 1964 - IBM System 360 computer fuses decimal and binary representations into a single architecture and implements it as a series of machines with a gradient of price-performance. The 360 machine language is incompatable with the previous machines but emulates them. The initial 360s employes low density integrated circuits ; in the 1970s the architecture is expanded to produce the 370 line, which includes additional paging instruction and is constructed with higher density integrated circuits ; in the eighties, it is expanded further to produce the 30xx machines (eg, the 3080, 3090) with extended addressing and vector instructions. During this entire period the instruction set of the basic machine remains consistant and upwardly compatable with the newer designs. 1964 - BASIC and APL interpreters are developed; instead of being compiled and executed, code is executed interactive a line at a time. BASIC, created by Tom Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth, resembles FORTRAN. APL, developed by Ken Iverson at Harvard in
1957, operates on entire matrices and incorporates a program stack so it can execute recursively. 1964 - Ken Knowlton's BEFLIX language at Bell Labs defines primitives to manipulate a 252 x 184 pixel grid. Knowlton's primitives include pixel read-write, area copy, area scale, and area permutation by rule. Stan VanDerBeek, Lillian Schwartz, Leon Harmon, Lou Katz and Joe Scala are early colabolators. 1965 - Robert Langridge makes first films of real time interactive computer graphic 3D molecular models and protein structures at Project Mac at MIT. The project involves minimizations of molecule energies. 1965 - Bell System introduces electronic 1st telephone switching system that uses stored program memory. 1965? - IBM introduces the 2250 interactive CRT display for the System 360, including a lightpen and handlers. Early applications include CAD/CAM, command and control, and weaving. 1965 - Tony Conrad makes The Flicker, a film made entirely of black or white frames in varying rhythms. Conrad may not have know he was making an entirely binary movie. 1965 - Korean Nam June Paik purchases Sony Portapack and declares video art. video. 1965 - Digiset introduces electronic character generation to

1965 - Computer Graphics Exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York features the work of two Bell Labs researchersMichael Noll and Bela Julesz. 1966 - Dal Molin in the United States develops a computerized system to write music. Input is via a typewriter keyuboard and output is via a phototypsetting machine. 1966 - Control Data Corp and Bell Labs make point digitized image. The Bell work is spearheaded by M. Sch., Leon Harmon, and Ken Knowlton.
1966 - MAGI Synthavision is first animation system to include command language and three dimensional solid geometry. 1966 - First rendevous and docking of vehicles in Earth orbit, between American Neil Armstrong and David Scott in Gemini VIII and an unmanned target vehicle launched ahead of them in orbit. 1967 - General Electric in Syracuse builds a real time interactive computer graphics system with shaded color solid objects with hidden surfaces removed. 1967 - Tokyo Computer Group demonstrate computerized inbetween, "Running Cola is Africa". 1967 - Michael Noll at Bell Labs makes first computer animated stereo movie. 1967 - Michael Noll at Bell Labs makes first films of computer animated stereo 4-D objects : Four Dimensional Hyperobjects and 4-D Hypermovie. 1967 - John Whitney at IBM computes Permutations. 1967 - Brooklyn Polytechnic establishes computer animation department. 1967 - Users of Automatic Information Display Equiptment (UAIDE) create a Computer Animation Committee. The purposes of the committee include the exchange of technical information, recommendation of hardware and software, and the establishment of standards. Computer animation is defined as including, but not necessarily limited to "the production of motion pictures on film, video or other visual communications media using active or passive graphic output devices driven by computer-generated commands." 1967 - First time code videotape editing system is demonstrated by CBS. Ampex demonstrated an electronic edit on videotape. Prior to this, all editing on videotape was done by physically cutting the medium and splicing it back together again. 1967 - Ampex introduces analog disc video recorder, the HS100, that can record 30 seconds of video and play back single frames, slow motion, or backward action.
1964 o r 1968 - Douglas Englebart at Stanford Research Institute invents mouse and windowing system. 1968 - Apollo 8 astronauts orbit the moon and are the first humans to the view the world as a whole and witness an Earthrise. 1968 - Doug Trumbull employs slit screen method and front projection in 2001. The movie stars a thinking computer named HAL, who murders the crew. 1968 - Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition organized by Jasia Reichardt provides documentation of widespread use of computers in music, poetry, art, and animation. 1968 - Sherwood Anderson and Donald Weiner at Syracuse University create CALD and CAMP languages for the production of 2 and 3D graphics and movies. 1968 - Harvard introduces the SYMAP package of cartographic algorithms. 1968 - Bela Julesz and Carol Bosche make random dot computer animated stereo movies demonstrating cyclopian perception. 1968 - Hewlett-Packard introduces the 9100A, a $4900 desktop calculator that could perform basic arithmetic, transcendental functions, log functions and trig functions. 1968 - Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce found Intel Corp. 1968 - Ivan Sutherland builds a head mounted display with individual monitors for each eye and a position tracker that enables a computer to update the views based upon where the subject is working. This is one of the first virtual reality systems. 1968 - Doublas Englebart demonstrates collaborative work on a hypertext document between two individuals 500 miles apart. 1969 - McLaren uses strobes in Pas de Deux.