Our new blog comes from PhD student and early film historian Peter Domankiewicz. Peter worked with us in the summer as part of his studies and researched some of our nineteenth century optical media collections. Here he writes about the history of the Zoetrope, perhaps the most enduring animated toy of the era.
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Sometimes a great notion comes to an individual…. And then absolutely nothing happens. That’s how it was with the Zoetrope.
In 1833, the ‘Phenakistiscope’ had gone on sale in Britain, derived from the investigations of Joseph Plateau, then a mathematics teacher in Belgium. Indeed one of these was the very first pre-cinema item collected, purchased by Peter Jewell in Buxton as a present for Bill Douglas, and now on show. It consists of a disc covered in a sequence of images, which are viewed through slits in the edge of the disc via a mirror. Often sold as the ‘Magic Disk’ they were very popular. But they could only be seen by one person at a time.
At that moment, another mathematics teacher from Bristol named William Horner was running a ‘Classical Seminary’ in Bath. But W. G. Horner was also a well-respected mathematician, whose ideas were frequently published in philosophical and scientific journals. It had occurred to him that there was a relatively simple way to take the phenakistiscope idea and spin it into something many people could see at the same time. He explained this in a paper entitled “On the Properties of the Daedaleum, a new instrument of Optical Illusion”.[1] He proposed using a hollow cylinder with regular “apertures”, and a series of images placed between them, to be glimpsed as it turned.
One of Horner’s explanatory diagrams
Most of the paper is a mind-bending (to the layperson) mathematical analysis in which he correctly identifies and explains various strange aspects of the device. One is that the result of the pictures moving in the opposite direction to the slits will be to make images appear laterally squashed, so they should be drawn extra wide. He is dead right about this, but later zoetrope artists paid no heed, resulting in round balls appearing oval. There is also the rather baffling effect of all the drawings being visible at the same time as it rotates, despite that seeming impossible (check it out for yourself). He mentions conveying all the details to a respected Bristol optician, John King jr. and it certainly sounds as if a prototype was built, whilst his ideas were reprinted in France and Germany. Yet nothing came of it, and after 1834 there is no sign of a single device of this nature being constructed.
Nothing similar appeared until 1860, when Peter Hubert Desvignes in Lewisham, a trained medic with an inventive frame of mind[2], patented “apparatuses for exhibiting photographic, stereoscopic and other pictures, models, figures and designs”.[3] The patent contained a host of variations on devices using a series of slits to animate a sequence of movement. Amongst these was the same concept as in the Daedaleum, but with options including: a system that increased the clarity and focussed the viewer on a single changing image, rather than seeing lots of them at once (which almost looks like a primitive VR headset); employing solid models rather than just flat images; ways to view stereoscopic (3D) sequences; using vertical rather than horizontal cylinders; creating an ‘endless band’ that wound between drums; employing a rotating shutter; and dispensing with slits altogether by using strobe lights to freeze the action.
Some of Desvigne’s many designs, taken from his 1860 patent
Sooner or later, pretty much all of these ideas would be used. For instance, in 1886 Marey built three dimensional models of a bird in flight, taken from his analytical ‘chronophotographs’, and put them in a giant slitted drum. A replica can be seen in the Musée Méliès of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, while the National Science And Media Museum has another (not currently displayed). In Germany, the skilled action photographer Ottomar Anschütz would create a vertically (or horizontally) rotating ‘Tachyscope’ drum for home viewing of his action sequences. Rotating shutters would go on to become a standard part of film cameras and projectors, and in modern times there are three-dimensional zoetropes which are illuminated by strobe light to become animated, such as the impressive one at ACMI in Melbourne.
Synthesis of movements of flight using models in a zoetrope – Etienne-Jules Marey 1886 (Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville - public domain)
The detail of the description of construction in the patent indicates Desvignes made several of these variations, which is confirmed by his displaying what he christened the ‘Mimoscope’ at the London International Exhibition of 1862, where it was described as “an instructive philosophical toy, affording endless variety and amusement.” The official verdict was “the drawings are well executed, and the illusion is very perfect,” leading to an Honourable Mention “for ingenuity of construction”. Given that positive response and the many ingenious ideas he had come up with, Desvigne’s Mimoscope must have been a great success. Except that it wasn’t. It was never commercially manufactured and disappeared without a trace.
The basic concept resurfaced on the other side of the Atlantic from a rather unlikely source. William Lincoln was an 18 year-old sophomore student at Brown University in Rhode Island, studying the classics – an unsurprising choice given that his father was a Classics professor at said institution – when he constructed something remarkably like what Horner had proposed. The owner of a local bookshop in Providence (appropriately enough) advised him to show this to Milton Bradley & Co. of Springfield, Massachusetts who were a relatively new and highly successful manufacturer of board games and other home entertainments.[4] It appears they went for it immediately, as when Lincoln applied for a patent in July 1866, the rights had been assigned to Milton Bradley.[5] In the patent it was already titled the Zoëtrope from the Ancient Greek for ‘life’ (zoe) and ‘turn’ (tropos) – or, as it also became widely known, the ‘Wheel of Life’.[6] The company did not even wait the nine months for the granting of the patent, but began mass production, commissioned an artist to create action strips for it, and launched it as THE Christmas gift of 1866. It was a huge success.
People of all ages enjoying the Zoetrope, from the Milton Bradley Annual of 1872
The company took the precaution of also securing patents in France and Britain in other people’s names and made a deal with the London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company, granting them exclusive rights for a period of time in exchange for royalties.[7] The Milton Bradley original had a pasteboard drum, whilst the London Stereoscopic version had a metal one, making it more robust and upmarket, and it sold for one guinea (£1, 1s). They too had a major hit on their hands in the Christmas of 1867, declaring “the demand in London is so great that two or three days’ delay in executing orders must be excused.” That was not all, however. Over the holiday season, the company also constructed a “Great Zoetrope” in the Great Concert Hall (where else?) of the pleasure grounds of Crystal Palace. It measured sixteen feet across and was turned by the latest thing in power: a Hugon gas engine. There was a gallery that accommodated 400 spectators, an explanatory lecture and music to accompany the experience. I would love to know what it looked like, what the picture sequences were and how on earth they were changed, but sadly no images – artistic or photographic – have come to light. It sounds like something fun to recreate. Although, as one jaded commentator wrote, “the effect is very striking for a time ; but after one or two changes of scene the eye begins to miss the strangeness of magnitude ; and it is but fair to say that the instrument, in its original and domestically convenient size, answers all the purposes of amusement.”[8]
For the following Christmas, they issued a new version with a rust-red drum and an ornate metal base. The example on display in the museum seems to be one of these (item 69010), which you can see at the beginning of this blog. After that they appear to have given up on legal fights with those making pirate versions and renounced their exclusivity, at which point a mass of cheaply-made examples poured into the market.
The first series of 12 strips sold with each Zoetrope were based on the designs from Milton Bradley, but as the London Stereoscopic Co. issued five more series over the following year, these were mainly new designs – by whom, we do not know. Each strip consisted of 13 images and over the years this number was typical (11-13 images being the norm). One interesting phenomenon, which the artists creating strips exploited, was that by having only 12 of one element of the image, evenly spaced, you could make that object appear to move forwards, whilst by adding 14 they would appear to move backwards. Sometimes both effects were combined. There were also discs that could be put on the floor of the drum to add more layers of animation. Some were similar to subjects produced for the phenakistiscope, while many were beautiful, moving geometric patterns. The museum has a few examples of these (items #69353/4). Notably, many of these early sequences, both the strips and discs, are incredibly strange and/or grotesque, featuring imaginary creatures, giant heads, detached heads, demons and other weirdness.
Sections of strips for the c.1900 Sala zoetrope – on display (item 69110)
After over thirty years of false dawns, the impact of the success and ubiquity of the commercial zoetrope cannot be overstated. It became the principal way that people could view moving pictures – be they scientists or laypeople, adults or children - and understand the concept that a series of pictures that varied slightly one from another, if presented rapidly to the eye, created a convincing illusion of movement. It also influenced most of the people associated with the early development of moving pictures. Eadweard Muybridge (the subject of a display in the museum) used a zoetrope to view some of his first movement sequences, captured on glass plates, before he developed a projection device, and later some of these were commercially produced as strips, sold by the Scovill Manufacturing Co. from 1882. Étienne-Jules Marey created a camera at the end of the 1880s that used a very short strip of film to capture and analyse brief bursts of action. He used the zoetrope as a way of ‘playing back’ sections of these at variable speeds – and created the version with models already mentioned. Birt Acres, the first person to shoot films commercially in Britain, spoke of how he had drawn his own strips for the zoetrope when young and later attempted to do the same with series of photographs.
‘The attitudes of animals in motion, by Muybridge, arranged for the zoetrope, photographed from the life in 1878-79’ (Library of Congress – public domain)
But here’s a funny thing: with all the ways of capturing moving images we have at our fingertips today, with easy access to view a plethora of online videos, you, in front of your phone or computer screen, cannot experience a zoetrope. Sure, someone can point a camera at a spinning zoetrope and press Record, but what will result does not and cannot replicate what your eyes see. Our brain and eyes, working in tandem, accept the blur of the surface of the drum spinning past and focus on the changing images. Our camera is more literal and freezes a moment, and may thus capture nothing more than a section of drum and perhaps a fragment of a drawing. This is why any film or video of a zoetrope has dark bands across it. Even the most carefully filmed sequence suffers from this. And most modern digital cameras, including those in our phones, produce strange, slanting effects.
Such was my curiosity about zoetropes, stimulated by work cataloguing those in the museum this summer, that I eventually bought an original London Stereoscopic zoetrope at an auction in order to be able to play with it and experience what people saw in the 1860s. I made this short video about my discoveries and the reasons for my failure at accurately recording it.
I’m happy to say that there is a simple, nay foolproof, method to experience a zoetrope the way they were designed to be, and it doesn’t involve a bidding process. Just pay a free visit to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum any day of the week and you will find a number of them that you can play with, alongside other optical toys, and the older examples kept in cabinets. You won’t regret it. Even to the visually-saturated modern eye, they still seem magical.
Peter Domankiewicz
[1] Published in the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science v.4 No. 19, January 1834 pp. 36-41. For some reason, the name ‘Daedaleum’ has been persistently misunderstood as meaning “Wheel of the Devil”, whereas Horner stated that this name related to it “imitating the practice which the celebrated artist of antiquity [Daedalus] was fabled to have invented, of creating figures of men and animals endued with motion.”
[2] The confusing thing about this family is that it contains many individuals, spread across generations, with the name of Peter Hubert Desvignes. In the past, credit for the patent has been attributed to the father of the one discussed here, who was a retired architect. I think it is more likely to be his son, who trained in medicine, but does not seem to have practiced it, and was the proprietor of the Islington Bazaar. I could be wrong.
[3] No. 537. Provisional specification left 27 February 1860. Complete specification left 25 August 1860.
[4] They exist to this day, as a subsidiary of Hasbro, and still have a base in Springfield.
[5] No. 64, 117, ‘Toy’, 23 April 1867.
[6] A more accurate translation could be “way of life”.
[7] ‘Nottage v Jewitt’, Morning Post, 20 December 1867, p. 6.
[8] ‘Crystal Palace’, Sun (London), 6 January 1868, p. 3.