How it began
Kazimierz Prószyński was born in Warsaw and took up photography as a teenager, joining the Warsaw Photographic Society. An exhibition of Ottomar Anschütz's pictures showing phases of movement turned his interest to moving images. He began studies at the Polytechnic Institute of Liège in Belgium, where he resolved to build his own cinematographic machine, then left the university and returned to Warsaw. There, in 1894, he invented the pleograph.
How it works
The pleograph could record movement and also project it on a screen. Culture.pl reports that Prószyński's technology could register up to 50 frames per second, which partly removed the flicker viewers perceived. In 1898 he followed it with the biopleograph, which used two lenses and recorded on two rolls of film. In projection the two lenses lit the screen alternately, reducing flicker further.
Who pushed back
The invention attracted little attention. A year later the Lumière brothers presented their cinematograph and became known as the fathers of cinematography, while the pleograph remained unknown. Prószyński's Pleograph Company, founded in 1901, went bankrupt in 1903, which stopped work on other devices he had planned.
What changed first
The Pleograph Company was the first Polish film production company. It made several short films, including Ice Rink in Łazienki and The Cabby's Adventure, and the first screenings took place at the Summer Theatre in the Saski Garden in spring 1902. In 1903 a pleograph projected moving images during a performance of Wagner's The Valkyrie at the Wielki Theatre in Warsaw.
What lasted
Prószyński kept working on the flicker problem and in 1909 patented a three-blade shutter that interrupted the light 40 times per second, which the French company Gaumont adopted on a large scale. He also built the aeroscope, a hand-held camera driven by compressed air that went into mass production in Great Britain in 1911. He died in the Mauthausen concentration camp on March 13, 1945.
