The first practical application of high-speed photography was
Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 investigation into whether horses' feet were actually all off the ground at once during a
gallop. The first photograph of a supersonic flying bullet was taken by the Austrian physicist Peter Salcher in
Rijeka in 1886, a technique that was later used by
Ernst Mach in his studies of supersonic motion.
[1] German weapons scientists applied the techniques in 1916,
[2] and The Japanese Institute of Aeronautical Research manufactured a camera capable of recording 60,000 frames per second in 1931.
[3]
Bell Telephone Laboratories was one of the first customers for a camera developed by
Eastman Kodak in the early 1930s.
[4] Bell used the system, which ran 16 mm
film at 1000 frame/s and had a 100-foot (30 m) load capacity, to study
relay bounce. When Kodak declined to develop a higher-speed version, Bell Labs developed it themselves, calling it the Fastax. The Fastax was capable of 5,000 frame/s. Bell eventually sold the camera design to
Western Electric, who in turn sold it to the
Wollensak Optical Company. Wollensak further improved the design to achieve 10,000 frame/s. Redlake Laboratories introduced another 16 mm rotating prism camera, the Hycam, in the early 1960s.
[5] Photo-Sonics developed several models of rotating prism camera capable of running 35 mm and 70 mm film in the 1960s. Visible Solutions introduced the Photec IV 16 mm camera in the 1980s.
In 1940, a patent was filed by Cearcy D. Miller for the rotating mirror camera, theoretically capable of one million frames per second. The first practical application of this idea was during the
Manhattan Project, when Berlin Brixner, the photographic technician on the project, built the first known fully functional rotating mirror camera. This camera was used to photograph early prototypes of the first nuclear bomb, and resolved a key technical issue about the shape and speed of the implosion,[
which?] that had been the source of an active dispute between the explosives engineers and the physics theoreticians.
The D. B. Milliken company developed an intermittent, pin-registered, 16 mm camera for speeds of 400 frame/s in 1957.
[5] Mitchell, Redlake Laboratories, and Photo-Sonics eventually followed in the 1960s with a variety of 16, 35, and 70 mm intermittent cameras.
