Ottomar Anschutz was born on May 16, 1846 in the little town of Lissa (Leszno), in the Prussian province of Posen, Poland.

In 1882 Anschutz began experimenting with instantaneous photographs of animals in motion and machines to display moving pictures from a series of instantaneous photographs. To help in his endeavor he invented a focal-plane shutter camera for this class of work. The high speed camera was constructed by the Goerz optical company and became known as the Goerz/Anschutz camera. The camera was capable of taking extremely rapid exposures from 1/1000th of a second, which enabled Anschutz to do educational work in motion. He would take photos of animals in motion at a Zoo in Poland.

In 1883 Anschutz's experiments with moving pictures.

In1884 he became famous through out the world for his still photographs of birds in flight.

In 1886 he began developing moving picture machines. The first was a wooden disk in which 12 direct positive plates were arranged on a wheel like seen at a circus. When the wheel spun the images viewed through the viewer would move. It was called an Electrotachyscope. Click here for a You Tube video of the moving pictures.

In 1888 Anschutz captured pictures of cannon balls in flight. He has established the fact that a projectile moving four hundred meters about 1,300 feet a second can be photographed and that the exposure of the plate was only about the ten thousandth part of a second

In 1892 He was the inventor also of a special form of cinematograph in which full-size lantern plates were used called the Electirical Schnellseher. It was a coin operated viewing machine with images on celluloid arranged around a disc. This was one of the commercial operated movie machine available in German arcades.

By 1894 Anshutz improved his Electrotachyscope by creating a Projecting Electrotachyscope. The machine consisted of two large picture discs, each with twelve images. A plate image on each wheel was projected alternately and illuminated by a geissler tube, as the light source, when the image passed the viewing aperture. This machine projected life sized moving sequences of animals and human figures, very brief but of fine quality, onto large screens in Germany. this was the world's first publicly projected, naturally photographed motion pictures. Later models were coin operated. The machines were known as the Electrical Wonder, in Europe and America.

On May 30th 1907 Ottomar Anschutz died.

Ref:
1888 Anthony's photographic bulletin, Volume 19
1907 British journal of photography

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