If we combine the scientific and the artistic efforts of the new and the old world, we may tell the history of the moving pictures by the following dates and achievements.  In the year 1825 a Doctor Roget described in the “Philosophical Transactions” an interesting optical illusion of movement, resulting, for instance, when a wheel is moving along behind a fence of upright bars.  The discussion was carried much further when it was taken up a few years later by a master of the craft, by Faraday.  In the Journal of the Royal Institute of Great Britain he writes in 1831 “on a peculiar class of optical deceptions.”  He describes there a large number of subtle experiments in which cogwheels of different forms and sizes were revolving with different degrees of rapidity and in different directions.  The eye saw the cogs of the moving rear wheel through the passing cogs of the front wheel.  The result is the appearance of movement effects which do not correspond to an objective motion.  The impression of backward movement can arise from forward motions, quick movement from slow, complete rest from combinations of movements.  For the first time the impression of movement was synthetically produced from different elements.  For those who fancy that the “new psychology” with its experimental analysis of psychological experiences began only in the second half of the nineteenth century or perhaps even with the foundation of the psychological laboratories, it might be enlightening to study those discussions of the early thirties.

The next step leads us much further.  In the fall of 1832 Stampfer in Germany and Plateau in France, independent of each other, at the same time designed a device by which pictures of objects in various phases of movement give the impression of continued motion.  Both secured the effect by cutting fine slits in a black disk in the direction of the radius.  When the disk is revolved around its center, these slits pass the eye of the observer.  If he holds it before a mirror and on the rear side of the disk pictures are drawn corresponding to the various slits, the eye will see one picture after another in rapid succession at the same place.  If these little pictures give us the various stages of a movement, for instance a wheel with its spokes in different positions, the whole series of impressions will be combined into the perception of a revolving wheel.  Stampfer called them the stroboscopic disks, Plateau the phenakistoscope.  The smaller the slits, the sharper the pictures.  Uchatius in Vienna constructed an apparatus as early as 1853 to throw these pictures of the stroboscopic disks on the wall.  Horner followed with the daedaleum, in which the disk was replaced by a hollow cylinder which had the pictures on the inside and holes to watch them from without while the cylinder was in rotation.  From this was developed the popular toy which as the zooetrope or bioscope became familiar everywhere.  It was a revolving black cylinder with vertical slits,