Two hundred years before my 2-year-old daughter figured out how to use Netflix on an iPhone, people were fascinated with moving pictures. The first moving pictures were produced on devices known as Phenakistoscopes, Praxinoscopes, Tachyscopes, Thaumatropes and Zoetropes. I assume only the very wealthy had the money and leisure time to sit and watch what amounted to short animated gifs, replaying a millisecond of action over and over again. How long would people sit in front of these? What was the attention span of the 1830s compared to today? It’s fascinating to think how advanced and amazing these devices were to people, and how these simple wheels inspired people to innovate new and longer methods for watching moving pictures, all the way up to the portable TVs we call smartphones today. The following gifs were created by Richard Balzer from his vast collection of moving picture devices. They are a cool and sometimes creepy look into the images that captured the human mind in the 1830s.
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