O Say Can You See?

Of avatars and inventors

James Cameron’s Avatar was the box office smash to beat over the holiday season. The director of the Alien and Terminator franchises, Cameron has made CGI (computer-generated imagery) and other cutting-edge special effects his cinematic bread and butter. But, despite his reputation as today’s special effects master par excellence, I was not surprised to see this headline in a recent issue of Newsweek: “It’s The Story, Stupid: Directors James Cameron and Peter Jackson are the kings of new film technology. But they insist they aren’t slaves to it.”

The 1979 movie Alien is a landmark in the tradition of science fiction motion pictures. This plaster of Paris egg is a central prop in the Alien narrative.

Well, of course. But despite the obligatory bow to filmic art, I confess that the overdose of F/X these days, especially the raucous variety, has me running to Netflix in search of the European art films of my youthful memory, shoestring productions blessedly free of most special effects (except for that magical opening scene in 8 1/2 where Marcello Mastroianni floats through the roof of his traffic-jammed car—it’s a personal favorite of mine). I sometimes find myself regretting altogether the arrival of the computer to the film scene.

At the same time, I tell myself to get real about the movies. Whatever our illusions about cinema, whether heavy on storyline and character, or suffused with CGI, it is important to recognize that all films are just that—illusions, and technological ones at that. There is a technological continuum from the Lumière brothers, through Thomas Edison and George Lucas, that eventually leads to Cameron’s Avatar. In fact, some of the cutting-edge effects of today are not all that revolutionary, at least in concept. For instance, much has been made of Avatar’s use of performance capture, a computer-generated animation technique to recreate the organic motion of humans and animals. Seventy years ago, Disney studios used rotoscoping based on the same principle, but employing, instead of computer technicians, an army of animators who manually traced the filmed motions of live actors.

Martin Kline’s love of science fiction led him into designing motion picture special effects. He spoke at the Lemelson Center in 2000 about his work, and showed props and images from Stuart Little (1999), including this shot of the boat race set. Photo courtesy Martin A. Kline.

Over the years, the Lemelson Center has hosted many inventors and inventions from Hollywood. The late Stan Winston, Cameron’s frequent collaborator, told us what got him excited about the computer effects business and what it was like to work with Schwarzenegger and Cameron on the Terminator series. Marty Kline, the CGI genius behind such productions as Star Trek: The Movie, the 1970s TV series Battlestar Galactica, and Stuart Little, brought with him some of the physical models that were the platforms for his digital magic.

The movies are only one genre of artistic invention coming out of the Los Angeles area; musical instruments like electric guitars are another of the area’s surprising innovative products. So, what is it about Hollywood that has made it such fertile ground for innovation?

Art Molella is Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the National Museum of American History’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

Why are food stamps in the National Numismatic Collection?

My first experience with Food Stamps was as a kid, growing up in Peekskill, NY. In the grocery store, my mother would give my sister and me “the glance” which meant not to stare at the people in front of us, who were ripping coupons from booklets to pay for their food. I remember feeling like we were expected to help them keep a secret—that some people couldn’t pay cash for their food. This raft of memories unexpectedly floated up a few days ago when I helped the Smithsonian bring a collection of Food Stamps into the National Numismatic Collection.

 

This time, rather than helping to protect a secret, the National Museum of American History is celebrating these ingenious slips of paper and the system of emergency currency they represent. Numismatically-speaking Food Stamps are remarkable. They tell us a story about the most ambitious system of food aid ever created by any government, anywhere.

They were money: printed by the Bureau of Printing and Engraving and backed by the Federal Government. But unlike the green dollars some of us still prefer to use instead of a debit card, Food Stamps were intended to be a single-use medium of exchange. After they did their job enabling a hungry person to go home with food, the store had to send them back to the government, where they would be counted and cancelled. Grocery store merchants got reimbursed in “real” dollars for each food stamp dollar they turned in.

But the story didn’t end there. Food Stamp purchases could not be accurately completed without a mechanism for making small change. Think about it. I use a $5 coupon to make a $4.50 purchase. The cashier can’t, by government order, give me back 50 cents. Some genius (or perhaps an avid Monopoly game fan?) invents change chits. Individual grocery stores were responsible for creating their own change and we’ve collected quite an informative array of them—tokens, printed pieces of colored construction paper, and other printed items which not only served as change but reminded the user where they came from. Change from Mike’s Meat Market could not be used at the Safeway grocery store. This gives new meaning to the concept of a “change jar,” and users of Food Stamps were expected to keep a multitude of change chits organized for future use.

In addition to this array of Food Stamps and change chits, we also collected some of the technology used for printing the coupons (including unadopted designs) and Electronic Benefit Transfer cards that let people pay without fumbling through coupon books.

Karen Lee directs projects from the National Numismatic Collection at the National Museum of American History. She most-recently helped to create the exhibition Stories on Money. Currently, she is the working on a new traveling exhibition with the United States Mint.

Step by step to freedom and justice

Editor’s note: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the student sit-ins at the Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter. To commemorate this event, the Museum is exploring “Stories of Freedom and Justice” throughout 2010. This post from Director Brent D. Glass is the first in a series that will investigate the history of liberty, equality, and justice in America.

Director Brent D. Glass (center).

Earlier this week—January 18—while Americans observed the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I stood in the Oval Office as President Obama proudly displayed a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln. The President spoke to a small group of civil rights veterans and their families and reminded us that Lincoln did not abolish slavery in 1863 but he did declare all slaves in rebellious states would be free. The Emancipation Proclamation, the President said, was a significant step but not the final step toward freedom. For this group of mostly elderly citizens who changed America in the 1950s and 1960s, the President’s message was clear—social progress does not happen with the stroke of a pen.

Xavier Carnegie, the actor who plays the fictional civil rights activist Samuel P. Leonard in the "Join the Student Sit-ins" program.

My thoughts at that moment turned to the programs underway at the National Museum of American History where we have launched a new initiative called “Stories of Freedom and Justice.” Last weekend an inspiring Martin Luther King, Jr. family festival included musical performances and a symposium featuring two members of the Little Rock Nine, who provided a gripping personal account of their courageous journey to integrate their high school in 1957.The festival also included our popular theatrical performance, “Join the Student Sit-ins” in which we offer visitors the experience of non-violent protest. More than 40,000 people visited the Museum during the MLK weekend and the melody of “We Shall Overcome” echoed throughout the building.

Next month, we will honor the legacy of the Greensboro Four, the college freshmen who staged the sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960 and became part of a national protest movement that that eventually led to the desegregation of public facilities throughout the South. On February 3 Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough will present these civil rights pioneers with the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal. We will also host a town hall meeting with high school students to discuss the meaning and significance of the Greensboro sit-in. These programs will continue through the end of July when we will mark the moment that the Woolworth’s sit-in finally ended with an agreement to serve blacks and whites at the lunch counter.

 

 

The lunch counter on display as one of the Museum’s landmark objects has always held a special meaning for me for two reasons. First, it represents the determination of a generation of Americans—black and white, young and old—who understood that racial segregation was wrong and that they needed to do something to end it.  Step by step, as President Obama pointed out in the Oval Office this week, ordinary people accomplished extraordinary deeds. Second, the lunch counter display in the Museum represents our commitment to tell the story of what it means to be an American, a story that involves overcoming barriers to achieve the American Dream of freedom and opportunity.

Brent D. Glass is Director of the National Museum of American History.

You asked, we answer: What is the oldest known color photo?

When it comes to objects—and sometimes humans—people are always curious to know what’s the first, biggest, oldest, or best.  The problem with superlatives is that they can be difficult to establish definitively.  The answer to a question we received via Twitter last week—possibly in response to our recent blog post "The 1906 San Francisco quake, in color"—illustrates the problem: "What is the oldest known color photo?"

Here’s what curator Michelle Delaney had to say: "Much research continues on early experiments in color photography. The museum holds a rare and unique set of Hillotypes from the 1850s by early American photographer, Reverend Levi L. Hill. He achieved some successes with color images on daguerreotype plates. But other heliochrome experiments with color photography were also being done in France at the same time by Niepce de St. Victor."

For more on the origins of color photography, check out these other Smithsonian resources:

• Are they really color photographs or were they hand-colored with pigments? See Michelle’s "Unlocking a photography mystery" blog post about a research project on the Hillotypes collection.
• Michelle investigates some controversial examples of early color photography in her contribution to the Smithsonian’s Click! Web site: "Photography changes the historical research curators do."
• On “The Bigger Picture” blog, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative’s Merry Foresta discusses how color has been one of the biggest problems in photography and introduces us to the luminous color of the autochrome. See "Photography’s Colorful Past."

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of "You asked, we answer" blog posts. If you have a burning question you'd like to see answered, please submit it using the comment form below or send an email with the subject "Questions answered." 

Dana Allen-Greil is new media project manager at the National Museum of American History.

The 1906 San Francisco quake, in color

Many people have seen black and white photographs of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But the earthquake photographs shown below are in color. How is this possible?

 
Left: Half of a Krőmgram by Frederick Eugene Ives. A view towards downtown San Francisco, October 1906. Right: Half of a Krőmgram by Frederick Eugene Ives. A view from near city hall, San Francisco, October 1906.

We tend to think of the photographic world up to the middle of the 20th century as a black and white world. The majority of snapshots, movies, magazines and book illustrations until the 1950’s are in black and white even though color photography has been available in some form since the late 19th century.

Among the photographers who experimented with color photography in the late 19th century was Frederick Eugene Ives. He is best known for his invention of halftone printing in the 1880s. However, Ives spent much of his life attempting to develop a number of commercially viable methods of color photography, with little success.

The first color process Ives attempted to market was the Photochromoscope system. He employed subtractive color theory to record scenes with a one- shot stereoscopic camera. Ives’ camera system of mirrors and filters behind each lens split and filtered the light to create one pair of slides for each primary color of light (red, green, blue). The slides were bound together in a special order with cloth tapes into a package known as a Krőmgram. The Krőmscőp was the apparatus used to rebuild the image allowing the viewer to see in three-dimensional color.

The Ives Photochromoscope system was on sale for several years but was commercially un-successful. The Krőmscőp viewers were expensive ($50 in 1907 or about $1000 today adjusting for inflation), required strong sunlight or arc light for viewing, and were technically complex to use, despite Ives’ assertions to the contrary. Precise alignment of the Krőmgram in the Krőmscőp and careful adjustment of the lighting was required to obtain a satisfactory color image. Also the Photochromoscope apparatus was solely sold by the Scientific Shop of Chicago whose main clientele was not the general public but rather colleges, universities, and observatories.

Ives’ work has left a legacy of several hundred early Krőmgram color photographs dating from the 1890s to the 1910s which are preserved in the museum’s Photographic History Collection. Ives traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe often taking the only existing color photographs of his subjects that date from this time period.

Today the advent of digital imaging makes it easy to combine Ives’ color separation images into a single color image using Photoshop by scanning each of the three primary color slides and layering them together. The photographs shown here are from two of several Krőmgrams taken by Ives on a trip to San Francisco in October 1906, six months after the great earthquake on April 18th. Most of the other photographs taken by Ives on this trip were from the Majestic hotel roof and show little beyond the rooftops of nearby buildings, but the two shown here were taken near or at street level. The first image shows what is probably a temporary wooden building on the left with an area of rubble on the right and the city in the background. Under magnification it is possible to read the billboards center right, one of which advertises a pair of shoes for 25 cents. The second image shows a field of rubble near San Francisco’s city hall.

By 1907 the Lumière brothers in France had introduced the color Autochrome plate. Autochromes were a simpler color process and became the first commercially successful color process. An example from 1908 can be found on HistoryWired. The success of Autochromes brought an end to Ives’ marketing attempts with his Photochromoscope process. Ives continued to experiment with other color processes, but none of his later experiments made a significant impact on the commercial development of color photography. The end result has been to make Ives relatively unknown in the history of early color photography.

Anthony Brooks is a volunteer in the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History.