Étienne-Jules Marey

He was also a pioneer in establishing a variety of graphical techniques for the display and interpretation of quantitative data from physiological measurement.

The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is physiology, medicine and photography. Employment is recorded with Collège de France. Positions recorded include president of the French Academy of Sciences and president. Work by Étienne-Jules Marey is recorded in the collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Modern Art, Photography Collection and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Commander of the Legion of Honour.

• Illustration — Flying pelican captured by Marey around 1882. He created a method of recording several phases of movement superimposed into one photograph • Illustration — A galloping horse Marey started by studying blood circulation in the human body. He then shifted to analyzing heart beats, respiration, muscles (myography), and movement of the body. To aid his studies, he developed many instruments for precise measurements. For example, in 1859, in collaboration with the physiologist Auguste Chauveau and the watch manufacturer Breguet, he developed a wearable Sphygmograph to measure the pulse. This sphygmograph was an improvement on an earlier and more cumbersome design by the German physiologist Karl von Vierordt. In 1869, Marey constructed a very delicate artificial insect to show how an insect flies and to demonstrate the figure-8 shape it produced during movement of its wings. He fixed a gold foil to an insect wing and shone light on it to study the flapping of the wing. He also used a soot covered glass-fibre introduced along the path of the insect wing to determine if it crossed with the wing in the upper stroke or lower stroke by examining the side on which the soot was cleared. Then, he became fascinated by movements of air and started to study bigger flying animals, like birds. He adopted and further developed animated photography into a separate field of chronophotography in the 1880s. His revolutionary idea was to record several phases of movement on one photographic surface. In 1890, he published a substantial volume entitled Le Vol des Oiseaux (The Flight of Birds), which was illustrated with photographs, drawings, and diagrams. He also created precise sculptures of various flying birds. Marey studied other animals too. He published La Machine animale in 1873 (translated as "Animal Mechanism"). The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge carried out his "Photographic Investigation" in Palo Alto, California, to prove that Marey was right when he wrote that a galloping horse for a brief moment had all four hooves off the ground. Muybridge published his photos in 1879 and received some public attention. Marey hoped to merge anatomy and physiology. To better understand his chronophotographic images, he compared them with images of the anatomy, skeleton, joints, and muscles of the same species. Marey produced a series of drawings showing a horse trotting and galloping, first in the flesh and then as a skeleton. The presence and activity of Marey in Naples is well documented, in particular thanks to the documentation preserved in the historical archive of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn. Marey began to travel to Naples presumably because of his relation with madame Vilbort, wife of Joseph Vilbort, the director of the French journal Le Globe. Madame Vilbort moved to Naples to cure her illness, thanks to the warm climate, and Marey followed her. Marey and madame Vilbort bought villa Maria in Posillipo in 1880. Marey accomplished in Naples part of his studies aimed at the realization of his pre-cinematographic tools and in the Dohrn zoological station studied the movement of fishes hosted in the aquarium's tanks. In a letter dated 1 November 1876, Marey requested the Stazione Zoologica to provide live ray fishes for his studies. Among the documentation that notes the collaboration of Marey with Anton Dohrn is the archive at the zoological station which preserves photos where the two appear together during an excursion and show Marey on board Dohrn's boat. The usage of the chronophotographic gun, which Marey used to aim at birds, but without shooting, appeared unusual to local people who referred to Marey sometimes as the "silly from Posillipo" ("lo scemo di Posillipo"). He proposed "Marey's Law", a law that stated that an increase in blood pressure caused a lowering of the heart rate and vice versa. He also invented "Marey's tambour" for physiological experiments.