A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DPeter Mark Roget : 1779 - 1869
Peter Mark Roget, an Englishman, theorized in 1824 that the retina of the eye retains an image for a fraction of a second after the image is removed or changed. This persistence of vision can be used to fool the eye into believing a succession of separate and slightly different images to be actually one moving image. Toys to exploit "persistence of vision" by animating drawings were then "invented" by men like John Ayrton Paris (English), 1824, Joseph Plateau (Belgian) and Simon von Stampfer (German), 1832. In 1852, Franz von Uchatius, another German, put an animated strip of drawing (done on glass) into a magic lantern and projected the resulting moving image onto a screen.
Seeing movement from still pictures is possible because of persistence of vision. A Czech inventor, J. E. Purkyne, first discussed persistence of vision in 1818 but it was Peter Mark Roget's paper to the British Royal Society on persistence of vision presented in 1824 brought it to attention. Persistence of vision is according to Roget was...
"the disposition of any image to remain momentarily on the eye's retina after it is no longer seen."In his paper, Roget (who didn't use these exact terms) noted that the illusion required a shutter and an aperture.
c. 1820: Peter Mark Roget, along with Joseph Plateau, and Michael Faraday develops the theory of 'persistance of vision'. Roget was however most famous for his Thesaurus. The British cleric John Wilkins had brought out a "conceptual dictionary," with tables, as early as 1668. The first successful Thesaurus, however, was devised by Roget, a British physician who produced his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852. The work was immediately popular and had gone through 28 editions by Roget's death. Subsequent revised editions were overseen first by his son and grandson and, after 1886, by the New York firm of Thomas Y. Crowell, which has published the work ever since.
Peter Mark Roget (b. Jan. 18, 1779, London, Eng.--d. Sept. 12, 1869, West Malvern, Worcestershire), English physician and philologist remembered for his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), a comprehensive classification of synonyms or verbal equivalents that is still popular in modern editions. Roget studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and later helped found the medical school at Manchester. In 1814 he invented a "log-log" slide rule for calculating the roots and powers of numbers. From 1808 to 1840 he practiced in London. The first edition of the Thesaurus, which was begun in his 61st year and finished in his 73rd, was a product of his retirement from active medical practice, although it was based on a system of verbal classification he had begun in 1805. Roget was a fellow (from 1815) and secretary (from 1827) of the Royal Society.
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