A Timeless History
A parlour toy that led to the cinema. In April 1825 a London stationer, W. Phillips, sold boxes of 'thaumatrope' discs — 'wonder-turners' — devised by Dr John Ayrton Paris. In 1832–33 Joseph Plateau in Brussels cut slots into a spinning disc and made drawings move: the phenakistiscope. In Vienna, Simon Stampfer had the same idea that winter and called his discs stroboscopes. Every film and GIF descends from them.
SourceJ. A. Paris, Philosophy in Sport made Science in Earnest, vol. III, 1827 · Plateau, Correspondance mathématique et physique, 20 Jan 1833 · Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 1948-124-2 · Image: Stampfer stroboscope disc no. XVIII, Vienna, 1833 (CC0)
Science In Action
Fusion — flashes above about 50 a second look like steady light; the eye stops seeing the gaps • Motion — show two still pictures close together in time and place and the brain sees one thing moving • Moiré — lay one pattern over another and a third appears that neither contains; turn them and it sweeps far faster than the wheels • Benham — a black-and-white pattern turned at 3–5 turns a second shows faint colours no camera can record
SourceAnderson & Anderson, 'The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited', Journal of Film and Video 45 (1993) · Wertheimer, 1912 · E. Chudler, University of Washington, Benham's disk · Image: phenakistiscope disc, lithograph — Wellcome Collection (PDM)
Arts
The galloping horse, drawn frame by frame. Eadweard Muybridge photographed a running horse in 1878 and proved all four hooves leave the ground at once. To show it moving he painted his sequences onto glass discs for a projector he called the zoopraxiscope, and in 1893 printed them on card for the home — The Zoopraxiscope, Horse Galloping, twelve horses round a rim, one running horse when spun.
SourceLibrary of Congress, Prints & Photographs, LOT 10440 no. 3 (LC-DIG-ppmsca-05947) · Image: Muybridge, Horse Galloping, disc no. 42, 1893 — Library of Congress (no known restrictions)
Applications Today
Cinema — a film is 24 still frames a second, each flashed two or three times so the screen does not flicker • Screens — a phone shows 60 to 120 pictures a second; the motion you see is the brain's, not the screen's • Eye tests — Benham's colours are studied as a check on the optic nerve, 130 years after the toy went on sale
SourceAnderson & Anderson 1993 · Pilz & Marre, Ophthalmologe 90 (1993) · Wikipedia, Fechner colour effect · Image: Benham's disc, our diagram after Nature 51 (1894)
The name phénakisticope was coined in Paris in June 1833, from the Greek for 'to deceive' and 'eye'.
Phenakistoscope Disc with Distorted Man — 'Prof. Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheibe No. XVIII' (Trentsensky & Vieweg), hand-coloured lithograph on paperboard, 25 cm diameter, 10 viewing slots — Simon von Stampfer (Austrian, 1792–1864), designer — 1833 — Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York — Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. John Innes Kane; Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design Department — 1948-124-2 (record chndm_1948-124-2)
