Optical toys, Pre-cinema & Cinematography

The very start of cinematography began with the discovery of “persistence of vision”, or the phenomenon of the brain still seeing a picture, even though it has been removed. This theory was explained by Roget in 1824, after Aristotle noticed he could still see the image of the sun after he looked away, Ptolemy noticed that dots became circles when potters were using a pottery wheel, and Isaac Newton observed that a wheel consisting of many different colors when spun turned just one color. This peculiar idiosyncrasy of vision is what is responsible for the appearance of fluid motion while watching a movie. The first device to exploit this phenomenon was the thaumatrope, a simple double sided card with 1/2 picture on each side, with a string attached to each side, and when the card is spun around it’s axis, the whole picture is seen. The first thaumatrope was made in 1825. Next, came the phenakistascope, a card with slits and varying pictures that when spun and looked through in a mirror, gave the illusion of movement. This was made by Alphonse Gireaux in 1833. This, in turn, led to the development of the zoetrope shortly after and then the praxinoscope in 1877. The first motion picture projector was Edison’s Kinetascope in 1891, but only enabled one person to view it at once. The 1st motion pictures projectors weren’t available commercially until the the very first “movie screening” in 1895 in France by the Lumiére brothers.

Thaumatrope, (meaning turning marvel) invented in 1825 by J.A. Paris, using the theory of persistence of vision, is basically a card with a string attached on both sides, which when twirled gives the illusion of a static image.

This is a phenokistascope,dated 1833, printed by Alphonse Gireaux, which is the first device to give the illusion of fluid motion by spinning the wheel with slits and the picture wheel together.
This zoetrope, or Wheel of Life made by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company, circa 1880, is an improvement of the phenakistascope.
This is a praxinoscope, made in France by Emile Reynaud, c. 1890, uses mirrors to creat the illusion of movement.
Shadow box theaters were used to show moving silhouettes on a screen. This one made in Vienna around 1870 was called a “Theatre des hombres chinoises animee ” or animated Chinese men’s theater.
This “Magic Mirror or Wonderful Transformations” from 1880 is known as an anamorphic picture viewer, where a distorted picture is reflected onto a cylindrical mirror to create a non-distorted picture. As the photo on the right shows, a stretched out non-sensical picture is reflected onto the mirror to create a picture of an old woman with a cane.
Here are a few magic lanterns, used to display hand painted glass slides to tell a story or show historical events. These were the immediate precursors to film projectors, and used an oil lamp as a light source. Once they determined how to process pictures onto a roll ( at 24 frames per second), they could then be used to show a “motion picture”.
Edison’s kinetoscope, c. 1893 (not in my collection, but would like to have one…)
The Lumiere brothers Cinematographe, the world’s very first projecting film machine designed for mass viewing, c. 1895. Once again, not in my collection, extremely rare.

Motiograph, 1909 model, was one of the first hand cranked 35mm silent movie projectors, made by the Enterprise Optical Manufacturing Company.
This Keystone Moviegraph hand cranked Motion picture projector was manufactured around the 1920s
This is an 8mm keystone projector from 1927.