Machines · Study 078
Phenakistoscope
A phenakistoscope disc from the 1830s, rebuilt: twelve frames around a wheel come alive as a bouncing ball when the disc is strobed.
What you're looking at
Twelve drawings sit around the disc, each one a slightly later moment of a bouncing ball and a pulsing dot. The disc jumps round by exactly one frame, twelve times a second. Because every drawing lands where its neighbour just was, your eye fuses them into one moving figure. Thirteen small dots on the inner ring appear to creep, since they are one out of step.
The idea behind it
Joseph Plateau in Belgium and Simon Stampfer in Austria invented the device independently in 1832. The original was viewed in a mirror through slits cut in the rim, which provided the strobe. It was the first widely sold toy to create a convincing illusion of motion from drawings, six decades before cinema.
Try this
Press and hold to stop the strobe and see the disc spin smoothly as a plain object.
