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Edison – (1847-1931)

Inventor Thomas Edison created such great innovations as the practical incandescent electric light bulb and the phonograph. A savvy businessman, he held more than 1,000 patents for his inventions.

Who Was Thomas Edison?

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 to October 18, 1931) was an American inventor who is considered one of America’s leading businessmen. Edison rose from humble beginnings to work as an inventor of major technology, including the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb. He is credited today for helping to build America’s economy during the nation’s vulnerable early years.

What Did Thomas Edison Invent?

Thomas Edison’s inventions included the telegraph, the universal stock ticker, the phonograph, the first commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb, alkaline storage batteries and the Kinetograph (a camera for motion pictures).

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Tesla

Nikola Tesla, (born July 9/10, 1856, Smiljan, Austrian Empire [now in Croatia]—died January 7, 1943, New York, New York, U.S.), Serbian American inventor and engineer who discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He also developed the three-phase system of electric power transmission. He immigrated to the United States in 1884 and sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse. In 1891 he invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil widely used in radio technology.

Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. His father was an Orthodox priest; his mother was unschooled but highly intelligent. As he matured, he displayed remarkable imagination and creativity as well as a poetic touch.

 


Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge’s photography of moving animals captured movement in a way that had never been done before. His work was used by both scientists and artists.
 

Synopsis

Hollywood couldn’t have devised a more titillating scenario. Eadweard Muybridge, an eccentric inventor, was on the verge of a truly revolutionary discovery when his young wife had an affair. Muybridge killed the suitor in cold blood and was later acquitted on a verdict of “justifiable homicide.” He resumed his work and developed a miraculous process for capturing movement on film, laying the groundwork for the motion picture industry.

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Persistence of Vision

Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina.

The myth of persistence of vision is the belief that human perception of motion (brain centered) is the result of persistence of vision (eye centred). The myth was debunked in 1912 by Wertheimer but persists in many citations in many classic and modern film-theory texts. A more plausible theory to explain motion perception (at least on a descriptive level) are two distinct perceptual illusions: phi phenomenon and beta movement.

A visual form of memory known as iconic memory has been described as the cause of this phenomenon. Although psychologists and physiologists have rejected the relevance of this theory to film viewership, film academics and theorists generally have not. Some scientists nowadays consider the entire theory a myth.

In contrasting persistence of vision theory with phi phenomena, a critical part of understanding that emerges with these visual perception phenomena is that the eye is not a camera. In other words vision is not as simple as light registering on a medium, since the brain has to make sense of the visual data the eye provides and construct a coherent picture of reality. Joseph Anderson and Barbara Fisher argue that the phi phenomena privileges a more constructionist approach to the cinema (David BordwellNoël Carroll, Kirsten Thompson), whereas the persistence of vision privileges a realist approach (André BazinChristian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry).

The discovery of persistence of vision is attributed to the Roman poet Lucretius, although he only mentions it in connection with images seen in a dream. In the modern era, some stroboscopic experiments performed by Peter Mark Roget in 1824 were also cited as the basis for the theory.

 


 

 

 


Motion Pictures

History of the motion picturehistory of cinema from the 19th century to the present.

Early Years, 1830–1910

Origins

The illusion of motion pictures is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. The first of these causes the brain to retain images cast upon the retina of the eye for a fraction of a second beyond their disappearance from the field of sight, while the latter creates apparent movement between images when they succeed one another rapidly. Together these phenomena permit the succession of still frames on a motion-picture film strip to represent continuous movement when projected at the proper speed (traditionally 16 frames per second for silent films and 24 frames per second for sound films). Before the invention of photography, a variety of optical toys exploited this effect by mounting successive phase drawings of things in motion on the face of a twirling disk (the phenakistoscopec. 1832) or inside a rotating drum (the zoetrope, c. 1834). Then, in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter, perfected the positive photographic process known as daguerreotypy, and that same year the English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot successfully demonstrated a negativephotographic process that theoretically allowed unlimited positive prints to be produced from each negative. As photography was innovated and refined over the next few decades, it became possible to replace the phase drawings in the early optical toys and devices with individually posed phase photographs, a practice that was widely and popularly carried out.

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Farnsworth

Philo Farnsworthin full Philo Taylor Farnsworth II (born August 19, 1906, Beaver, Utah, U.S.—died March 11, 1971, Salt Lake City, Utah), American inventor who developed the first all-electronic televisionsystem.

Farnsworth was a technical prodigy from an early age. An avid reader of science magazines as a teenager, he became interested in the problem of television and was convinced that mechanical systems that used, for example, a spinning disc would be too slow to scan and assemble images many times a second. Only an electronic system could scan and assemble an image fast enough, and by 1922 he had worked out the basic outlines of electronic television.

In 1923, while still in high school, Farnsworth also entered Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, as a special student. However, his father’s death in January 1924 meant that he had to leave Brigham Youngand work to support his family while finishing high school.

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Baroque Period – 16th to 18th Century

Baroque art and architecture, the visual arts and building design and construction produced during the era in the history of Western art that roughly coincides with the 17th century. The earliest manifestations, which occurred in Italy, date from the latter decades of the 16th century, while in some regions, notably Germany and colonial South America, certain culminating achievements of Baroque did not occur until the 18th century. The work that distinguishes the Baroque period is stylistically complex, even contradictory. In general, however, the desire to evoke emotional states by appealing to the senses, often in dramatic ways, underlies its manifestations. Some of the qualities most frequently associated with the Baroque are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, vitality, movement, tension, emotional exuberance, and a tendency to blur distinctions between the various arts.

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Early Designers and Movements

Arts and Crafts Movement – 19th to 20th Century

The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed. The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style, but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to the division of labor and advanced the designer as craftsman.

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William Morris

Elegant swirls of vines, flowers, and leaves in perfect symmetry, William Morris’ iconic patterns are instantly recognizable. Designed during the 1800s, Morris’ woodblock-printed wallpaper designs were revolutionary for their time, and can still be found all over the world, printed for furniture upholstery, curtains, ceramics, and even fashion accessories. But do you know the history of how they came to be?

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (7 June 1868 – 10 December 1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. His artistic approach had much in common with European Symbolism. His work, alongside that of his wife Margaret Macdonald, was influential on European design movements such as Art Nouveau and Secessionism and praised by great modernists such as Josef Hoffmann. Mackintosh was born in Glasgow and died in London.

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Peter Behrens Facts

Peter Behrens (1868-1940) was Germany’s foremost architect in the early 20th century, as well as a painter and designer. His buildings greatly influenced the architecture of the next generation in Europe.

Peter Behrens was born in Hamburg on April 14, 1868. He studied painting at the School of Art in Karlsruhe (1886-1889). He spent the 1890s in Munich as a painter and designer in the current Jugendstil, or German Art Nouveau style, and cofounded the Sezession group of artists, architects, and designers in 1893. In 1899 he joined the artists’ colony on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, where, under the influence of J. M. Olbrich, he turned to architecture. Behrens’s house at Darmstadt (1900-1901) was a characteristic Art Nouveau work.

During his tenure as director of the School of Applied Arts in Düsseldorf (1903-1907), Behrens designed a series of buildings, including the exhibition hall for the Northwestern German Art Exhibition at Oldenburg (1905). In this design, simple rectilinear geometry, plane surfaces, and incised linear decoration replaced the curvilinear forms of his residence.

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Bauhaus – 20th Century and on…

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969). Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of art and design in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

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100 Year Celebration – 


Designers

  • The process of graphic designing is far more complex than using mere designing tools to develop computer-generated images.
  • The creation of innovative and unprecedented work which provides solution for visual communication.
  • A new field that emerged as an independent subject in the mid-twentieth century.
  • Its development dates back to late 19th century
  • The term ‘Graphic Design’ was coined after the publication of Raffe’s book Graphic Design (1927).
  • Other works include renowned typographer Jan Tschichold’s book New Typography.
  • Typography is an art of organizing and setting the type in such a manner that it not only attracts reader’s attention but also appeals to their aesthetic sense.
  • Besides Tschichold, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Herbert Bayer are some of the famous graphic designers and typographers who played an influential role in shaping modern graphic designing.
  • In its early years graphic designing was merely concerned with communicating the ideas and thoughts in a more aesthetic fashion.
  • During first and second world war, several of graphic artists protested against the cruelty of war by designing posters depicting their anguish.
  • Over the decades, graphic designers were being commissioned either by government or big corporations to design posters or create an artwork that would propagate certain ideology. For instance, a noted graphic designer, Erik Nitsche was hired by General Dynamics, a weapon developing corporation, to design posters that would redeem their image in public’s eye.
  • It exemplifies how graphic designing soon became a powerful instrument for communicating ideologies. Thus the graphic art became more commercial and industrial.
  • This led to the emergence of professional graphic design industry.
  • There are multifarious types of graphic design based on the requirement of the project, such as image-based, type-based, symbols, logos and logotypes based designs.
  • As there are several forms of designing, similarly there are many sorts of graphic designers possessing expertise in varying domains of design. Some design logos, typefaces, pictograms, while others create book jackets, magazines, comics, thought-provoking posters, record covers, film’s campaign artworks, corporate identity solutions and more.
  • Milton Glaser is one of the celebrated graphic artists, known for designing the ‘I love New York’ logo.
  • Massimo Vignelli’s name is associated with corporate identity creation of leading corporations; American Airlines, IBM and Bloomingdale’s.
  • German designer, Erik Spiekermann is recognized for creating numerous fonts and launched FontShop International.
  • A highly controversial artist Stefan Sagmeister has made a reputation by designing record sleeves for Lou Reed and poster for AIGA.
  • Pioneering book designers, Muriel Cooper and Chip Kidd are credited for designing books jackets.
  • The American cinema would seem tasteless without John Alvin’s inspiring input to the film’s art campaigns such as E.T, Jurassic Park, Star Wars andBatman Returns.
  • Art director of Harpar’s Bazaar Alexey Brodovitch is another one of the seminal designer.

 

http://www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/

 

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