Excerpt:
"Geared and  Belt  Heads"
Professional motion picture camera support
Written by Ryan Patrick O’Hara

At the dawn of cinema, (roughly 1895), the motion picture camera was appropriately established on the photography tripod system. It would not be long until filmmakers discovered and desired the ability to move a camera during the shot. From the earliest tripods with the ability to pan, (shortly thereafter pan and tilt), geared heads have been in use.  

The book “A History of Early Film” is a collection of reprints from the mid 1890’s to about 1914. The articles on early filmmaking serve as a glimpse into the technical side of early film history. Within this collection is a reprint of “Handbook of Kinematography”, of which, within chapter III, discusses the main difference between the photography tripod and the new motion picture tripods. The text states,

“…the tripod leads on insensibly to consideration of this absolutely indispensable part of the motion picture man’s equipment. Tripods for motion picture work differ from those used in still view photography chiefly on two points, one being their weight… and the other the presence of mechanical turning movements in the tripod head.”

These mechanical devices were handles or cranks connected to a series of gears which moved the platform between the camera and tripod in desired directions. The article further explains that the simpler version of the motion picture tripod, the ‘panoram’, can only turn side to side, while the more complicated motion picture tripod possessed a second tilting device known as a ‘maxim’ movement. Both directions are controlled by different levers, cranks, or handles. This is evident proof that beginnings of the motion picture camera head, (although much different than our modern geared heads), started out with the use of two separate handles and gear systems to control the pan and tilt.  

As time passed, tripod heads using gear mechanisms would continue to improve, and be used in the developing film industry along with friction heads. In 1949, Chadwell O’Connor, an amateur locomotive filmmaker, invented the world’s first counterbalanced fluid drag camera head, which enabled his pictures to be smooth. This is important because from this point on the large majority of camera support heads would branch out into two directions, the modern geared head and the fluid head.  

Three years later, in 1952, a man by the name of George Worrall invented the Worrall geared head. This milestone is considered by many to be the birth of the modern geared head. So much so, that in 1996 the Society of Operating Cameramen (SOC) awarded Worrall with the Technical Achievement award for the “Invention, introduction, and the development of the Worrall Geared Head in 1952, the first stable, smooth and balanced triple-mode geared head.”