A Gun That Didn’t Shoot Bullets
In 1882, on the cliffs of Posillipo, Italy, locals watched in confusion as a Frenchman aimed a strange device at birds and pulled the trigger. But no feathers flew.
Étienne-Jules Marey wasn’t a hunter—he was a scientist, and his “gun” captured movement, not prey. This was the chronophotographic gun, and it would help Marey unravel the mechanics of flight, locomotion, and even the flip of a cat landing on its feet.
Breaking Motion into Moments
Marey’s work as a physiologist had already led him to invent a wearable sphygmograph in 1859, but in the 1880s, his focus turned fully to movement. With the chronophotographic gun, he could record 12 frames per second on a single photographic plate, creating overlapping images of successive motion phases.
Marey applied it to study everything from galloping horses to swimming fish. He filmed birds in flight, donkeys trotting, and microscopic creatures swimming—all with the goal of dissecting movement into analyzable stages.
An Animated Zoo on Film
His studies became so broad that they were later described as an “animated zoo.” He analyzed human walking and running, the acrobatics of cats, and even how dogs turned midair. He captured the movement of a chicken dropped upside down and studied how smoke dispersed to better understand air currents.
Marey wasn’t alone in this field—Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of a galloping horse were published in 1879. Yet Marey’s method, layering the phases of motion onto a single image, offered a unique visual insight that no one else had achieved.
From Pelicans to Particles
Marey’s research extended beyond the animal world. In his final years, he studied abstract motion: the fall of a ball, the path of smoke, and the aerodynamics of air currents. In 1901, with funding from the Smithsonian’s Samuel Pierpont Langley, Marey built one of the world’s first aerodynamic wind tunnels.
Using a smoke machine with 58 channels, he visualized airflow and contributed data useful to early aviation. His ideas also sparked developments in motion pictures. After meeting Marey in 1889, Thomas Edison and W.L. Dickson incorporated a sprocket-driven film advance into the Kinetoscope, solving playback problems Marey had encountered.
Étienne-Jules Marey died in 1904 in Paris. His photographic gun is still on display at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, bearing witness to a device that didn’t fire projectiles—but changed how we see the world in motion.
In 1882, a man stood on a cliff in Naples aiming a gun at birds.
But it didn’t fire bullets—it captured movement.Étienne-Jules Marey’s invention, the chronophotographic gun, froze time into frames and helped unravel how animals, humans, and even smoke move through the world. pic.twitter.com/sMJME2laen
— Detective Tiger's Stories (@TigerDetective) June 15, 2025