Which came first; the egg or the chicken? In the same sense the question applies here as well. Which came first animation or the movie? Before there were films or movies there were photographs. Not the kind that you and I know today. These photographs were grainy and black and white, some even sepia or red and cream colored. This is caused by the Persistence of Vision. Your eyes use their ability to blend images as one causing the brain to perceive it as smooth movements.
It all started with an idea and moved on to something grand, an invention, several actually. Over hundreds of years there have been many inventors from all over who have contributed to the creation of motion picture films. Philip James de Loutherbourg was a French painter born in Germany.
In , Loutherbourg invented the Eidophusikon which was a mini theater that used mirrors and pulleys and contained animated panoramas created by presenting several paintings in accordance to the principle of Camera Obscura.
Now a Camera Obscura is both a form of projector and a principle following a law of optics ruled into one. Light travels in a straight line; when some of the rays reflected from a bright subject pass through a pinhole in thin material on one wall into a darkened room, they cross and reform as an inverted image on a flat surface of the wall parallel to the hole.
At first Camera Obscuras were dark rooms that later became a portable box device that was used as a drawing table. Convex Lenses were added to improve quality and shortly after a mirror was added to reflect the image. Thus Camera Obscuras became the first photographic cameras using a sheet of light sensitive material. The viewer would hold both strings between their fingers and quickly twirl the device causing the two pictures to appear as one image due to the Persistence of Vision. In a Belgian man by the name of Joseph Plateau invented an early animation device under the principle of Persistence of Vision.
