Motion Pictures

              Motion pictures: The process of viewing a rapid succession of still images depicting a moving subject step by step, in such a way that the eye is tricked into seeing actual movement.

             Atleast two men can claim to have been the first to invent the visual trick that is a "motion picture." In 1832, Australian inventor Simon von Stampfer (1792-1864) read how British physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) had experimented with rapidly rotating objects to create the illusion of movement. Impressed, he deviced some experiments himself and these led him to develop his version of a moving picture. The Stampfer Disk, presented to the public in December 1832, actually consisted of two disks, one with slits around its edge and the other with pictures showing stages of movement. When the slit disk turned in front of the picture disk, the pictures seemed to merge and join into the now-familiar sensation of seamless motion.

            However, Stampfer was not alone. In Belgium, in the same year, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (1801-83) also inspired by Faraday, revealed an almost identical mechanism that he termed a Phenakistoscope. Plateau's fascination with "persistence of vision" theory, the idea that the after image on retina persists for a short time, led him to experiment with staring at the sun. A decade later, Plateu was completely blind. Meanwhile back in 1833, Stampfer was getting ready to receive imperial privilege for his discoveries.

           More than sixty years passed before their motion pictures devices were progressed into what we now call cinema. Connecting together single photographic frames, the French Lumiere brothers, Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948) were first, in 1895, to project moving, photographic pictures to a paying audience of more than one. U.S inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1941) produced the first commercially successfull projector in 1896. Their invensions radically changed how we see the world, because now our ideas are almost totally subject to the way the world is presented to us.