Pencil To Animator

History:
In 1832, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau
and his sons introduced the
phenakistoscope ("spindle viewer").  It
was also invented independently in the
same year by Simon von Stampfer of
Vienna, Austria, who called his invention
a stroboscope. Plateau's inspiration had
come primarily from the work of Michael
Faraday and Peter Mark Roget (the
compiler of Roget's Thesaurus). Faraday
had invented a device he called "Michael
Faraday's Wheel," that consisted of two
discs that spun in opposite directions
from each other. From this, Plateau took
another step, adapting Faraday's wheel
into a toy he later named the
phenakistoscope.
How it works:
The phenakistoscope uses the persistence
of motion principle to create an illusion
of motion.  Although this principle had
been recognized by the Greek
mathematician Euclid and later in
experiments by Newton, it was not until
1829 that this principle became firmly
established by Joseph Plateau.
The phenakistoscope consisted of two
discs mounted on the same axis. The first
disc had slots around the edge, and the
second contained drawings of successive
action, drawn around the disc in
concentric circles. Unlike Faraday's
Wheel, whose pair of discs spun in
opposite directions, a phenakistoscope's
discs spin together in the same direction.
When viewed in a mirror through the
first disc's slots, the pictures on the
second disc will appear to move.
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What became of it:
After going to market, the
phenakistoscope received other names,
including Phantasmascope and Fantoscope
(and phenakistiscope in Britain and many
other countries). It was quite successful
for two years until William George Horner
invented the zoetrope, which offered two
improvements on the phenakistoscope.
First, the zoetrope did not require a
viewing mirror. The second and most
influential improvement was that more
than one person could view the moving
pictures at the same time.