Early animation devices
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[edit] "The Persistence of Vision"
In 1824, Peter Mark Roget rediscovered the vital principle, "The Persistence of Vision." This principle rests on the fact that human eyes temporarily retain the image of anything they're just seen. If this principle wasn't true, we would never get the illusion of an unbroken connection in a series of images, making movies and animation moot. Movies are really just a series of single images chained together with sound on top, so movies don't really actually move.
Thanks to Roget's rediscovered principle, various optical contraptions were soon invented...
[edit] The Thaumatrope
The Thaumatrope is a cardboard disk either mounted on a top or held between two pieces of string. It was a popular toy in Victorian times. A famous example of the Thaumatrope would be the "Bird and the Cage" Illusion. A drawing of a bird would be on one side of the disk, and a cage would be on the other. When the top is spun, or when the strings are pulled, the disk spins, and the bird appears to be in it's cage.
The name roughly means "magic disk" in modern Greek.
[edit] The Phenakistoscope
The Phenakistoscope is made of two discs mountted on a shaft. The front disc has slits around the edge, and the rear disc has on it a sequence of drawings. When spun, if one looks through the slits while the Phenakistoscope revolves, the images seem to have the illusion of motion.
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[edit] The Zoetroupe
Also known as the "Wheel of Life." It was a cylinder with slits in it, one would place strips of paper with a sequence of drawings in the cylinder, and spin the Zoetrope. Like the Phenakistoscope, one would look through the slits while the Zoetrope was in motion to see the sequence of drawings move. The slits prevented you from seeing more than one drawing at a time, giving the illusion of motion, instead of just a bunch of pictures spinning around. This invention appeared in the United States in 1867 and was marketed as a toy.
[edit] The Praxinoscope
[edit] The Flipbook
The Flipbook is a generally small book that has a single frame of an animation on every page. The book can be bent and released, page by page, to show each page and corresponding frame in quick succession, allowing for persistence of vision to take effect.
