Arthur Clarence Pillsbury

Arthur Clarence Pillsbury (1870–1946) was a United States photographer, inventor, and filmmaker, known through his innovations which extended human vision at a critical time in our history. Although many make the mistake of focusing on his sensational landscapes of Yosemite National Park, photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and time-lapse photography of flowers, he had seen the potential of film for rapidly increasing our understanding in every part of science.

The son of physicians, Pillsbury was born in Medford, Massachusetts His family relocated to Auburn, California in 1883, and he became a student at Stanford University. In 1895, he rode to Yosemite by bicycle with his cousin Bernard Lane and another friend from Stanford.

His first major use of his panorama camera were the many panoramas taken documenting the Yukon gold rush. In 1899, on his second trip to the Yukon, the first having taken place the year before, 1898, Pillsbury made a solo journey from the headwaters of the Yukon River to the Pacific Ocean of 1,981 miles, Skagway to Nome, Alaska. He also used the panorama for vertical photos of nature, many of these created as d'orotones. Over his career he invented multiple still format and motion picture cameras, 21 have been documented to date. These included the first lapse-time camera, used to record the life cycle of plants from the time they emerged from the ground through blossoming, germination and death. Work on this camera began in 1910. CineMicroscopy, flower dramatics, were popular in theaters and schools from primary to university for decades.

1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire

He used panorama and conventional cameras to capture the panorama images that went around the world in the immediate aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner as a photojournalist from 1903 to March 1906, but left to establish the Pillbury Picture Company, based in Oakland, just a month before the earthquake.

Pillsbury later recalled that he still had his Examiner press pass when the earthquake hit the following month, and he knew many of the policemen, so was able to gain access to good locations to photograph panoramas of the burning city. He took photos using several cameras. One of these was the swinging lens circuit servomechanism panoramic camera which he invented as his senior project in mechanical engineering at Stanford University in 1897. There is a link to the Library of Congress, and multiple other sources for these on the Foundation website ACPillsburyFoundation.com.

More innovations In 1925, Pillsbury first showed the film from his invention of the microscopic motion picture camera, a tandem inline, high magnification unprecedented scientific achievement. These were followed by his invention in 1929 of the first X-Ray motion picture camera which revolutionized pre-operative surgery; he put such inventions into what he called Knowledge Commons to ensure these would not be slowed down in application by attempts to profit from this advance in human understanding of the life beyond human sight. In 1930, he invented the first undersea motion picture camera and became the first filmmaker to use it. This historic filming took place in Pago-Pago Bay, American Samoa. Pillsbury used a color matching index with Pathecolor and at this time Technicolor, learned from his earlier work with flowers. This was also the first lapse-time movie recording the almost imperceptible movements of sea life, such as making star fish appear to dance. A short tribute movie on the ACPillsburyFoundation.com including this footage and other cinematic techniques such as aerial Cinematography applied to water falls in Yosemite, overcoming the early jerkiness of movie cameras and their flicker. The Foundation's website includes menus taking you to cited sources about his over 70 motion pictures, panoramas in the Library of Congress and other sources, with articles extracted from 3 Million pages of scanned magazines and catalogues from 1898 - the 1940s, citing his "how to" techniques pioneering the early history of film that are useful today.

For smaller formats he preferred 5 X 7 Graflex images. developed them at his new home based business in Oakland, and sent them to many major newspapers around the world on the photo-wire facsimile machines he innovated for Hearst Newspapers 1903 - 1906. .

His granddaughter Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, wrote a biography of Pillsbury.