On this day… March 18th, 1868
This year at the Electric Palace in Harwich we’re marking the significant anniversaries that relate to the invention and development of cinema. This is because we’ve got our own important anniversary coming up later this year: we’re going to be 110 years old!
Today we are looking back at the same day in 1868 when John Barnes Linnett, a printer from Birmingham, UK, patented the flip book, or the flick book.
The flip book is a very basic way to create the illusion of movement. A series of pictures is drawn onto thick paper or thin card, each one a little bit different from the previous one. When you hold the pictures in one hand and flip through them using the thumb of your other hand the pictures create an animated sequence. In Germany the flip book is called Daumenkino which means “thumb cinema”.
In 1868 John Barnes Linnett had given his new patent the title Improvements in the Means of Producing Optical Illusions however this illustration from the patent documents shows that he intended his invention to be commonly known as “The Kineograph”.
John Barnes Linnett produced Kineographs with different themes, from windmills to dancing skeletons. However, the existence of UK patent № 925 does not mean that John Barnes Linnet was the first person to make a flip book.
In fact it is well known that they already existed in France, where they were known as folioscopes or cinéma de poche, which means “pocket cinema”.
Pierre-Hubert Desvignes had made folioscopes from around 1860 and yet the term did not apprear in a patent until in 1898, when a man called Léon Beaulieu patented a device for browsing the folioscope and named it “Petit Biograph Parisien”.
By this time, flip books were widely available and photographic flip books were now being made using images from motion picture films. Often flip books were manufactured to promote the viewing of the films themselves, for example those made by Léon Beaulieu. His flip books reproduced scenes from films made by the Gaumont company, Thomas Edison and by French director Georges Méliès, a prolific film maker at the end of the 19th century whose films were mostly lost.
During the early 20th century the Walt Disney Animation Studios found that producing flip book animations of their famous charaters was very popular with fans.
Disney flip books are still frequently found on auction sites and you may even see rare flip books with pictures of pop stars such as The Beatles.
In the 1970s British artist duo Gilbert & George made 900 numbered editions of their black and white photographic flip book ‘Lost Day’ and the flip book format continued to be a source of inspiration for artists like Julian Opie, Sol LeWitt and Keith Haring.
In 2014 New York artist Juan Fontanive created wall mounted mechanical flip book viewers for his ‘Ornithology’ series of flip books. He used 18th and 19th Century natural history illustrations to create beautiful kaleidoscopic animated sequencs of birds in flight.
It may seem incredible, but recently some of the long lost films from the Victorian period have been remade thanks to stills that were discovered preserved within these miniature booklets. French scholar Thierry Lecointe together with Robert Byrne, a film restrorer who is currently the Board President of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, were able to create new film prints using a private collection of early flip books.
They discovered that French historian Pascal Fouché had a vast collection of flip books, including twenty-four rare examples manufactured in the 1890s by Léon Beaulieu. Although they were extremely fragile due to their age, they were carefully photographed by Onno Petersen, a cameraman and post-production specialist from the Netherlands, and the resulting films were first shown at the 2019 San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
Robert Bynre said it was as if they had completed a circle:
“The images started as film, were recast into miniature booklets, and 100 years later we have reversed the transformation and returned the long-lost images to the screen.”
And finally, we’d like to celebrate the universal appeal of the flip book with this wonderful video from Germany, which proves that language is no barrier when it comes to the moving image.
