The Time-Lapse Movie

At Chicago's Abbott Laboratories last week, researchers sat in fascination watching the first action film of a microorganism being killed by one of the new antibiotic wonder drugs. The drug, fumagillin, killed the amoeba which causes the dread amoebic dysentery (see MEDICINE) by making it explode.

The film was' the latest of many by which its maker, gangling (6 ft. 4), shy John Nash Ott Jr., 43, has developed a valuable new research tool for U.S. industry. Its name: "time-lapse" photography, i.e., film sequences taken at regular intervals to catch the actual growth of plants, flowers, fungus, etc. Ott first caught the public eye two years ago with the growth sequences he made for Walt Disney's Academy Award-winning Nature's Half Acre. Last week he had 20 cameras at work on a new sequence for Disney's followup, Secrets of Life--plus a contract for regular showings of his flower-growth films on Dave Garroway's NBC-TV feature Today. But Ott's biggest work is in special jobs for U.S. industry.

Lucky Hobby. Ott started time-lapse photography as a hobby at 18. With a secondhand 16-mm. movie camera, he photographed budding apple blossoms every hour for four days. The film made each blossom open like an explosion. To take shots oftener, Ott rigged up an electric clock which every five minutes started a motor that pulled down the window shade, switched on floodlights, and tripped his shutter. His movie showed the blossom slowly opening, flowering, then wilting--all in two minutes. He kept up the work as a hobby, while clerking in Chicago's First National Bank (once run by his grandfather, Chicago's late, famed Banker James Forgan), landed his first commercial job in 1940.

The O. M. Scott Co. (grass seed) paid him $7,500 for a color movie showing weeds curling up and dying under a chemical weed killer. After a World War II Navy hitch, Ott spent three years making a two-minute movie which showed primroses "dancing" to the rhythm of a Strauss waltz. He did this after discovering that he could make the primroses droop or rise by controlling their moisture and temperature. The movie was such a success that Ott quit his bank job, built big new greenhouses, installed cameras and elaborate timing mechanisms to work them. In four years his gross has risen from $60,000 to $112,000, his net to $20,000.

Curse of Drinks. For Northwestern University, Ott harnessed his cameras to a new-type microscope, took movies every six seconds of cancer cells multiplying as they fed on a saline-plasma solution. For the National Apple Institute, promoting apples for refreshment, he mounted a human tooth in plastic, kept two cameras on it for a year, taking shots every 2 1/2^ hours as the tooth was bathed in a popular soft drink. Result: a movie of progressive tooth decay.

His work is also enlarging botanical knowledge. For example, he discovered that plant roots do not alter the direction of their growth to reach moisture or fertilizer, but that roots which do reach them grow faster and larger. But Ott does not take contracts from everyone. He turned down a movie to promote a popular soil conditioner. Reason: his films showed that plants grew better and faster without the conditioner than with it.

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