French scientist Pierre-Jules-César Janssen (1824-1907), a keen observer of eclipses (and now most famous as the discoverer of Helium), decided to try and capture the motion of Venus crossing the sun through sequence photography, which was a milestone in the development of cinema itself. But at this point we are still in the realm of the individual photograph.
Janssen's mission was to capture the point of contact between planet and sun during an eclipse, since this could help determine solar distance more precisely. Since the exact moment that this would occur could not be determined, he did not want to depend upon a single photograph that might miss the event entirely. Instead he decided to take a rapid sequence of photographs. He achieved this by constructing his cinematic revolver. The revolver was somewhat similar to a Colt revolver. It was driven by a clockwork-driven Maltese Cross-like mechanism capable of taking 48 exposures on a Daguerreotype plate over a period of 72 seconds.
Daguerreotypes were becoming an antiquated technology by this time, but, as Stephen Herbert explains -" the metal plate ensured an absence of flare that could have been a problem if a glass plate had been used - and a wet plate would in any case have been inconvenient to use in such a camera. With the sun as the source there was no shortage of light, so the 'slow' daguerreotype process was ideal."
Jannsen traveled to Japan to take his photos, and they were presented the following year as individual images. It would be several years before they could be presented as an animated sequence. Yet here they are, the first chronological entry on imdb.