W2501

Pioneers of Communication

Eadweard Muybridge & Ottmar Mergenthaler

Collins Cover Announcement 

PIONERS OF COMMUNICATION

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AND OTTMAR MERGENTHALER

Eadweard Muybridge was born in England in 1830 and moved to the United States in 1850. After becoming a skilled photographer, he was hired to prove that at some point of a horse's stride, all four feet were off the ground at the same time. He found, however, that the photographic process and lenses used at that time were unable to stop fast motion.

From that point on, Muybridge worked toward creating stop-motion photographs. Using rows of 12 to 24 cameras with rapid shutters, he was the first to capture a moving person or animal as a series of still photos. In 1880 he invented the zoopraxiscope which projected photographs printed on a rotating glass disk onto a screen in rapid, sequential order, creating the illusion of moving images. One of his famous early sequences showed a cat in motion and this is what I show projected on this hand-painted First Day Cover along with his zoopraxiscope.

Also featured on this COLLINS Cover is communications pioneer Ottmar Mergenthaler. Born in Germany in 1854, he emigrated to the United States in 1872. In the printing industry, many attempts to mechanically set type by hand had been unsuccessful. These futile attempts stimulated Mergenthaler to develop a mechanical typesetter. He did invent such a machine and when Whitelaw Reid of the "New York Tribune" saw a line of images produced from the new machine he exclaimed "It's a line of type!". Without realizing it, Reid had named Mergenthaler's invention for when Ottmar patented it in 1884 he called it the linotype. By dramatically reducing the cost of setting pages of type for printing, the linotype led to a drop in prices for newspapers, magazines, and books. It spurred expansion in all areas of publishing. Books and set type are components of my cachet that represent Mergenthaler's contributions.

I'm very pleased with the technical composition of this COLLINS Cover and the one coming soon for pioneers Ives and Dickson. And, the hand painting style is the perfect complement to the unusual color scheme of the stamps. A very nice two-stamp item for your collection paying tribute to communication inventors Eadweard Muybridge and Ottmar Mergenthaler. Item #W2501. $12.00