History of optical toys

Over at Collector's Weekly, Ben Marks traces the history of optical toys from the 19th century, from Thaumatropes to Phenakistoscopes (discs seen above) to Zoetropes. All of these devices played on the persistence of vision, the phenomenon in which a series of still images appears to be one continuous moving image.

Thaumatropes from the early 1800s are perhaps the first optical toys to suggest how tantalizing moving pictures could be. In 1825, a London physician named John Ayston Paris produced a set of six paper cards, which were packed in a round container and sold as a “Thaumatropical Amusement.” The label on the container made the toy’s educational and scientific purpose explicit: “To illustrate the seeming paradox of seeing an object which is out of sight and to demonstrate the faculty of the retina of the eye to retain the impression of an object after its disappearance.”

"Dawn of the Flick: The Doctors, Physicists, and Mathematicians Who Made the Movies"

• [rtresco]

  Early, manual GIFs.

• [Gimlet_eye]

  There’s evidence that people in the Paleolithic were making use of these techniques: http://news.discovery.com/history/prehistoric-movies-120608.html

• [Gimlet_eye]

  This 1:35 video includes one of the bone-disk Thaumatropes mentioned above (about 45 seconds in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=axQSc9P0DsI#!

• [egriff5514]

  There is an excellent collection of these and other early visual devices in the museum in the Library of the University of Exeter (Devon, UK).

  http://www.exeter.ac.uk/bdc/

• [Luke Temple Walsh]

  Thanks for the information in this post and in the comments as this is an area that interests me, as do Mutoscopes. It’s no surprise that the Devil turns up in one of the images as they were called Diablos in their early history, perhaps because the etymology relates to turning or repeated cycles?

• [Gabriel]

  If you want to mention the persistence of vision at least say it is a myth. It’s annoying that the notion won’t die even though it has been shown to be false so long ago. The article actually got it right.