Before the advent of 60+ FPS video cameras and instant replays, how did races make sure they got the photo at the moment the runner/car/horse crossed the finish line in case of a photo finish?
In: Engineering
In the 1930s the strip-film camera was introduced for photo finishes. A piece of film was pulled past a thin-slit-aperture in the opposite direction to the competitor’s movement, effectively photographing just the finish line continuously over time. The first piece of the racing object (nose, chest, toe, hoof) would appear at the finish line first and everything else would trail behind it across the photo.. So the horizontal axis of the photo image is _time_.
This gave weird distortions for slow moving parts of the racers, but the first part of the winner to cross the finish line would always be the “left-most” (or “right-most” depending on which side the image was taken from) thing in the photo.
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