page_title: Precursors of film
section_title: Stroboscopic principle
hierarchical_section_title: Precursors of film / Motion pictures before film / Stroboscopic principle
caption_attribution_description: English: Side Nr. 10 of the reworked second series of Stampfer's stroboscopic disc published by Trentsensky &amp; Vieweg in 1833.
context_page_description: Precursors of film are concepts and devices that have much in common with the later art and techniques of cinema.
  Precursors of film are often referred to as precinema, or 'pre-cinema'. Terms like these are disliked by several historians, partly because they seem to devalue the individual qualities of these media by presenting them as a small step in the development of a later invention. For instance: the flip book, zoetrope and phenakistiscope are very tactile devices that allow study and play by manipulating the motion by hand, while the projected image in cinema is intangible. Such devices as the zoetrope were not replaced by cinema: they were still used after the breakthrough of film. Furthermore, many early media examples are also part of a tradition that not only shaped cinema, but also home video, video games, computer-generated imagery, virtual reality and much more. The study of early media devices is also part of a wider and less teleological approach called media archaeology.
  Many of the devices that can be interpreted as precursors of film are also referred to as "philosophical toys", or "optical toys".
context_section_description: Several possible examples of very early sequential images can be found in paleolithic cave paintings, on a 5,200-year old pottery bowl found in Iran, in an Egyptian mural approximately 4000 years old (found in the tomb of Khnumhotep at the Beni Hassan cemetery) and several other examples. However, it is very unlikely that these could be viewed in motion before the invention of stroboscopic animation in the 1830s.
  In 1825, the thaumatrope used a stroboscopic effect that made the brain combine incomplete pictures on either side of a twirling cardboard disc into one logical image. The effect was incorrectly attributed to the so-called "persistence of vision" in the retina. The technology of the thaumatrope can also be used to display very simple and repetitive animation when each side of the card depicts one of two phases of an action. However, this option was only recognized much later.
  Joseph Plateau experimenting with spinning discs since the mid-1820s, mainly in attempts to measure the duration of impressions of different colours. Along the way he had discovered a type of abstract animation discs by counter-rotating lines or slits in discs in 1828 (in 1829 he further developed aspects of this principle into a first prototype of what would become the anorthoscope). In 1830, Michael Faraday had published a paper about several illusions that occur in rotating cogwheels and toothed discs, coincidentally repeating some of Plateau's findings. A note added to the paper discussed a disc that in addition to the teeth in the circumference had a different amount of holes regularly spaced across a circular zone closer to the center of the disc. When looking into a mirror through the spaces in between the teeth, the holes appeared to be moving across the disc (or vice versa if looking through the holes). By November or December 1832, Plateau had experimentally managed to further develop the same principle into a new optical illusion that could represent any conceivable action depicted on the sections of a spinning disc (viewed in a mirror through slits in the disc). In January 1833, Plateau published an article that introduced the principle of stroboscopic animation with a device that became known as the phenakistiscope. Several months later, Simon Stampfer patented a very similar "Stroboscope Disc" in Austria. Stampfer mentioned several possible variations, including a cylinder (similar to the later zoetrope) as well as a long, looped strip of paper or canvas stretched around two parallel rollers (somewhat similar to film) and a theater-like frame (much like the later praxinoscope theatre).
  The stroboscopic disc was followed by other animation toys, such as the zoetrope (1866), the flip book (1868) and the praxinoscope (1877), before its basic principle became the foundation for the perceived motion in film.
caption: Animated GIF of Prof. Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheibe No. X (Trentsensky & Vieweg 1833)