Very Early Projection of "Moving Pictures" (1883)

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I've written a number of times on this blog about the move from the static to the dynamic image and the early history of cinema. And so it came to me today by accident that I found this article in Nature reporting on the optical work of Gaston Tissandier who many people will remember more for his early aviation exploits than for his work in optics. Nature shares a post made in La Nature about his projecting praxinoscope (defined below¹ from the Oxford English Dictionary)--and as it turns out, the Tissandier paper is a very early published use of "praxinoscope" with this very article referenced in the OED.  The baseline here: the demonstration image is just very neat. 

The text of the article from Nature, (November 16, 1882), a short work on the earliest stages of cinema and "moving pictures":

"THE PROJECTION PRAXINOSCOPE"

"M. GASTON TISSANDIER describes in La Nature an ingenious adaptation of the praxinoscope under the above name by means of which the images are projected on a screen and are visible to a large assembly. Our engraving will give an idea of the arrangement and the effect produced. By a modification of the lampp scope M Reynaud the inventor obtains by means of the ordinary lamp at once the projection of the scene or background by the object glass which is seen at the side of the lantern and of the subject by another object lass which is shown in front of and a little above the same lantern. For this the positions or phases which form a subject are drawn and coloured on glass and are connected in a continuous band by means of any suitable material. One of these flexible bands is placed in the wide crown of the praxinoscope which is pierced with openings corresponding to the phases of the subject."

"To understand the course of the luminous rays which go to form the image it is necessary to bear in mind the condensing lens which placed near the flame of the lamp is not visible in the figure then a plane mirror 45 degrees which reflects the rays and causes them to the figures filling the openings of the crown. These rays reflected once more by the facets of the prism of mirror finally enter tie object glass which transforms the vertical central image into a real image magnified on screen. In making the two parts of the apparatus converge slightly the animated subject is brought into the middle of the background where it then appears to gambol. A hand lever on the foot of the instrument allows a moderate and regular rotation to be communicated. This apparatus with an ordinary moderator lamp supplies well lighted pictures and curious effects It enables us to obtain with the greatest ease animated projections without requiring any special source of light by simply utilising the lamp in daily use."

Notes:

1. From the OED:

"Praxinoscope: A toy resembling a zoetrope, in which a series of figures representing successive positions of a moving object are arranged on the inner surface of a broad, shallow, cylindrical or polygonal drum which is open at the top and has in the middle a corresponding series of mirrors in which the figures are reflected, so that when the drum is rapidly rotated, the persistence of the successive visual images produces the impression of actual motion.

• 1878   C. E. Reynaud Brit. Patent 4244/1877 1   An Improved Apparatus for the Production of Optical Illusions called the ‘Praxinoscope’... The object of this Invention is to produce the illusion of motion by means of Drawings representing the successive phases of an action.
• 1882   Nature 16 Nov. 60/2   M. Gaston Tissandier describes in La Nature an ingenious adaptation of the praxinoscope,..by means of which the images are projected on a screen, and are visible to a large assembly.