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Joseph Plateau (Born: 14 Oct 1801 in Brussels, Belgium Died: 15 Sept 1883 in Ghent, Belgium) developed the 'Magic Disk' or Phenakistiscope in 1836.

An early stroboscopic device, the 'Phenakistiscope' used a disk with radial slits that he turned while viewing a rotating wheel; when the rotational speed of the disk and the wheel matched exactly, the wheel appeared motionless.

Other pioneers employed rotating or vibrating mirrors to produce light pulses. Plateau was also facinated by the effect of the persistance of vision. His interest however cost him dearly. His experiments (gazing directly into the sun) caused him to go partially blind at 28 and totally blind in 1841.

In 1853 Baron Franz von Uchatius was the first person to project visible moving images on a screen by improving on Plateau's Phenakistiscope. The use of stroboscopic photographs to produce the illusion of motion also led to the development of motion pictures

Sources: Cambridge Biographical Dictionary

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Plateau.html

In 1831, Joseph Plateau and Simon Stampfer constructed a machine called a phenakistiscope which produced an illusion of movement by allowing a viewer to gaze at a rotating disk containing small windows behind which was another disk containing a sequence of images.

When the disks were rotated at the correct speed, the synchronization of the windows with the images created an animated effect.

Source: John Vince, 3D Computer Animation

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