Lucien Bull was a pioneer in chronophotography. Chronophotography is defined as "a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion."
Early life
Born in Dublin, Ireland to British father, Cornelius Bull, and French mother, Gabrielle Joune, Bull lived his younger years in Dublin where he attended school and lived at home with his parents. Later in 1894, Bull moved to France to visit his aunts. After several months, Bull eventually settled in the area and became an assistant to Étienne-Jules Marey in 1895. Marey was a physiologist interested in capturing human movement for later study. At the time, Marey was working on the cinematographic, which was a camera that was shaped like a rifle and took pictures of moving objects from a rotating plate. This eventually became known as the “gun camera”, a predecessor to the movie picture camera, which Bull later devised a faster moving version. This camera was designed to investigate the study of motion. Basically, this “gun camera” was designed to take an object in motion and snap still shots. By taking these still shots, each movement made by the object was captured and then studied to analyze movement patterns that were unable to be studied before. The first successful film was taken in 1904 when Bull was able to film the flight of a fly at 1,200 frames per second. Bull also created a “spark drum Camera” that replicated the continuous motion of 35-mm film. Using an electromagnetic shutter, two side-by-side films were exposed and wound around drums inside the camera built from wooden frames.
Successes
Marey died in May 1904. As a result of his death, Bull became head of the , which formed part of the Collège de France. While remaining with the Marey Institute, Bull was naturalized as a French citizen in 1931. After a few years, Bull eventually introduced a few papers on a wide variety of subjects ranging from spark illuminations, high-speed motion-picture photography, original studies of insect and bird flight, and electrocardiography and muscle and heart functions. His work was eventually listed by Dr. W. Hinsch in Research Film for December 1953.
Roles
Bull began his career as an assistant to Etienne Jules Marey in 1895. His roles would include developing and printing the chronophographic negatives. After Marey's death in 1904, Bull became the Director of l'Institut in Paris. In 1933, he was put in charge of research at the National Office of Research and Invention in France. When the First World War broke out, Lucian joined the war effort developing systems for the high-speed photographic analyses of ballistics and for locating enemy gun batteries via a sound ranging device. These were highly effective and enhanced his already significant reputation, and governmental appointments followed. Honours included the CBE, and the legion of honour. He was awarded gold medals for his roles in developing the field of chronophotography by the National Office of Research and Invention.
In 1948 Bull became the president of the Institution of Scientific Cinematography in Paris. His work was eventually listed by Dr. W. Hinsch in Research Film for December 1953. He continued his research well in to the 1950s, still publishing papers on high-speed cinematography and had a profound influence on many branches of engineering and science. Although Bull was from Ireland, he settled in France which is where he spent the majority of his later life. However, he did visit Ireland several times throughout this period. As Bull never married, he had many friends who admired him and was still receiving visitors to tea in his Paris flat in 1971. Described by a close friend Bull was this ‘tiny, bird-like, lovable figure, with an irrepressible sense of humour, and an ability to bring pleasure to those around him’. Bull received several honours for his significant work. Among the honours he received were the Legion of honours, the Order of Merit, an Academy of Sciences Laureate, several gold medals for scientific research from French institutions and an OBE from the British Government. Lucien Bull died in his Paris flat at the age of 95 on 25 August 1972.
Bull died in Paris in 1972 as a bachelor, leaving behind no children. He outlived his brother, British cartoonist René Bull, by almost 30 years. Bull's work spanned fields beyond high speed photography, with his bibliography of published papers ranging from military applications of sound in the form of sound ranging and medical papers to recording of video. Much of this was continued research from his work with Étienne-Jules Marey. Bull's work as an assistant with Marey, particularly in regards to developing Marey's camera gun into the higher speed spark-drum camera, was instrumental in the development of the technique of chronophotography, and was key to his appointment as head of the Marey Institute. Chronophotography itself acted as a stepping stone to the development of cinematography and silent film. The lasting effects of the technique are observable to this day, as it provided a foundation for modern cinema. Some of Bull's work has been preserved to this day. A copy of his stereoscopic spark drum camera is held in the National Science and Media Museum of Bradford, England. His research on the heart was later used in the development of the electro-cardiograph. Bull was memorialized in an article for the Irish Engineer's Journal, written by Kenneth Mitchell and published on 17 April 2018, giving an overview of Bull's life and accomplishments.
