The History of Animation

Animation Timeline to the 1900's

The first known type of projected animation was the Magic Lantern in 1650. It consisted of a translucent oil painting, a simple lens and a candle or oil lamp. In a darkened room, the image would appear projected onto an adjacent flat surface. Some of these slides contained moving parts and was often used to project demonic, frightening images in order to convince people that they were witnessing the supernatural.

The victorians in 1824 had a toy named The Thaumatrope. This was simply a disk spun on thread that merged two images on either side to make a single new picture. A typical example of this is a bird on one side of the disc and a bird cage on the other side which combined creates a bird in its cage.

Then came the Phenakistoscope an early animation devise constructed in 1831 by the Belgian Scientist Dr Joeseph Antoine Plateau and Austrian Dr Simon Ritter. It consists of a disk with a series of drawn on images evenly spread out around the edge. When spun you would only be able to see on section of the spinner so as it spun it would form a moving image.

In 1834 a more improved device was sugested and from the 1860’s the Zeotrope was marketed. The zoetrope had several advantages over the basic phenakistoscope. It didn't require the use of a mirror to view the illusion, and because of its cylindrical shape it could be viewed by several people at once.

The Flipbook was produced in 1868 originally known as the Kineograph. This was a series of images changing slightly on each page near the edge of the book. When the pages are bent back and rapidly released a moving image forms. It operates on the same principle as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope what with the rapid replacement of images with others, but they create the illusion without anything serving as a flickering shutter as the slits had in the previous devices.

In 1887 Thomas Edison started his research work into motion pictures and by 1889 he announced his creation of the kinetoscope which projected a 50ft length of film in approximately 13 seconds.

The first public animation projection was in 1892 when Charles-Émile Reynaud, who was a French science teacher who had previously produced the Praxinoscope in 1877 and used it in his projection. The device was similar to the zeotrope it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered. He improved this version to make it capable of projecting images on a screen from a longer roll of pictures. He used the improved version in1892 when he exhibited his hand-drawn animated cartoons that were drawn directly onto the transparent slip to a larger audience. In 1900, more than 500,000 people had attended these screenings.

Progressing from the first public projection 1895 Louis and Augustine Lumiere issued a patent for a device called a cinematograph capable of projecting moving pictures. Then in 1896 Thomas Armat designed the vitascope which projected the films of Thomas Edison that were created in 1889. This machine had a major influence on all sub-sequent projectors.

Here is a Video of a Timeline of Animation Trends. It recaps what I've explained above from the 1650's to the 1900's then progresses to modern day animation including 3d and 4d.