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 Wikipedia gallery.

Even­tu­al­ly, accord­ing to the Pub­lic Domain Review, the phenakistis­cope was “sup­plant­ed in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion: first­ly by the sim­i­lar Zoetrope, and then — via Ead­weard Muy­bridge’s Zooprax­is­cope (which pro­ject­ed the ani­ma­tion) — by film itself.” Muy­bridge, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, did pio­neer­ing motion-pho­tog­ra­phy work in the eigh­teen-sev­en­ties that’s now con­sid­ered a pre­cur­sor to cin­e­ma. Under­stand­ing what he was up to is an impor­tant part of under­stand­ing the emer­gence of movies as we know them. But the most instruc­tive expe­ri­ence to start with is mak­ing a phenakistis­cope of your own, instruc­tions for which are avail­able from the George East­man Muse­um and artist Megan Scott on YouTube. The fin­ished prod­uct may not hold any­one’s atten­tion long here in the age of Net­flix, but then, the age of Net­flix would nev­er have arrived had the phenakistis­cope not come first.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ead­weard Muybridge’s Motion Pho­tog­ra­phy Exper­i­ments from the 1870s Pre­sent­ed in 93 Ani­mat­ed Gifs

How Ani­mat­ed Car­toons Are Made: A Vin­tage Primer Filmed Way Back in 1919

The Trick That Made Ani­ma­tion Real­is­tic: Watch a Short His­to­ry of Roto­scop­ing

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.