Page 31 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Simon von Stampfer: Stroboscope (aka Stampfer Disc, Zoetrope etc) c1832
Here it is - the first device ever to show moving images! You peered through the top-most slit (see diagram below) as you cranked the stroboscopic discs around and round, creating an illusion of movement as the images on the disc animated through the Stroboscope. In this era of ‘generalism’, when Salonière’s encouraged a broad range of scientific and artistic/literary knowledge from their guests, Stampfer qualified perfectly - he was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer, and his experience of telescope lenses led on to a study of optical illusions, and thus to the stroboscopic disc or Zoetrope. There was a proliferation of optical toys of this kind throughout the 19th century (including David Brewster’s Kaleidoscope, John Ayrton Paris’ Thaumatrope (1824), Plateau’s Phenakistiscope 1832, the Chromatrope (1830), Moving Panoramas (1855), Beales’ Choreutoscope (1866), Duboscq’s Grimatiscope (1870), and on to Emile Reynaud’s Theatre Optique (1887), and the experiments of Muybridge, Le Prince, Lumiere and Edison in the fin de siecle. The idea of moving- picture-based home entertainments was created by these optical-toy pioneers...
Simon von Stampfer + Joseph Plateau: Phenakistoscope (aka Stroboscope, Wheel of Life etc). Invented simultaneously but independently by Stampfer and Plateau - this was the best-selling mechanical optical-toy or mechanical lantern-slide.