The 1830s Device That Created the First Animations: The Phenakistiscope

"The image just above is an ani­mat­ed GIF, a for­mat by now old­er than most peo­ple on the inter­net. Those of us who were surf­ing the World Wide Web in its ear­li­est years will remem­ber all those lit­tle dig­ging, jack­ham­mer­ing road­work­ers who flanked the per­ma­nent announce­ments that var­i­ous sites - includ­ing, quite pos­si­bly, our own - were "under con­struc­tion." Charm­ing though they could be at the time, they now look impos­si­bly prim­i­tive com­pared to what we can see on today's inter­net, where high-res­o­lu­tion fea­ture films stream instan­ta­neous­ly. But tech­no­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing, we can trace it all back to what this par­tic­u­lar ani­mat­ed GIF depicts: the phenakistis­cope."

"Invent­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and inde­pen­dent­ly in late 1832 by Bel­gian physi­cist Joseph Plateau and Aus­tri­an geom­e­try pro­fes­sor Simon Stampfer, the phenakistis­cope was a sim­ple wheel-shaped device that could, for the first time in the his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy, cre­ate the illu­sion of a smooth­ly mov­ing pic­ture when spun and viewed in a mir­ror: hence the deriva­tion of its name from the Greek phenakisti­cos, "to deceive," and ops, "eye.""

"When it caught on as a com­mer­cial nov­el­ty, it was also mar­ket­ed under names like Phan­tas­mas­cope and Fan­tas­cope, which promised buy­ers a glimpse of horse-rid­ers, twirling dancers, bow­ing aris­to­crats, hop­ping frogs, fly­ing ghouls, and even pro­to-psy­che­del­ic abstract pat­terns, many of which you can see re-ani­mat­ed as GIFs in this"

The phenakistiscope originated in late 1832 as simultaneous independent inventions by Joseph Plateau and Simon Stampfer. The device used a wheel of sequential images viewed in a mirror to create the illusion of continuous motion. Its name derives from Greek roots meaning "to deceive" and "eye." The device was marketed under various names such as Phantasmascope and Fantascope and displayed subjects from dancers and horse-riders to abstract patterns. Early web animated GIFs echo the simple looping motion of the phenakistiscope, revealing a clear technological lineage from optical toys to modern digital animation.

Read at Open Culture