JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This is a very quiet image of a major device in the history of the animated/moving picture: Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope, a device which was based on the persistence of vision principle that would allow th emind to believe it was witnessing a continuous (though segregated) motion.
Oddly enough, this device brings to mind this ulatra-stable depiction of motion:
Which is a detail from this lovely illustration [Source: found by Eric Edelman, collage artist, in Funk & Wagnall's Dicitonary, 1920]:
Notes:
1. "On 10 December 1830, Michael Faraday(1791-1867) gives a lecture at the Royal Institution. The publication appears in February 1831: "On a peculiar Class of Optical Illusions". Continuing on what Peter Mark Roget (1779 - 1869) had published in the Philosophical Transactions, he describes two parallel discs, revolving on the same axis, in opposite directions, each having 16 cogs. When viewed in a mirror a stationary image is seen. He does not refer to Plateau's work, done before 1831 and which had been published in the Correspondance mathémathique et physique. Later Faraday writes that the honour is due to Plateau."--source, here. s in --February 1831: "On a peculiar Class of Optical Illusions". Faraday writes that the honour is due to Plateau.
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