Zoetropes

William Horner is the original inventor of the zoetrope in 1834 however he called it a daedalum. This was then forgotten about for over 30 years until it was patented by M. Bradley in England and William Lincoln in America. It was Lincoln who renamed it to zoetrope.

Zoetropes are optical toys that use persistance of vision to create the illusion of motion from a set of still images. It consists of an open topped drum and was supported on a central axis. Slots of equal distances and size would be in the upper side of the drum. A sequence of images that progressed slowly would then be placed on the lower inside of the drum; underneath the slots. The drum is then spun and the illusion will appear through the slots. The faster the drum is spun the smoother the motion will be and the viewers can look into the drum from any position.

The most famous case of a Zoetrope was from Eadweard Muybridge. In 1878 Leland Stanford gave Muybridge the challenge of proving that a horse will have all four of its hooves off the ground at one point of it's running motion. They set up a whitewash shed with 12 bulky camera lenses pointing out of the side. A white backdrop was placed infront of the cameras in order to increase the contrast of the horse. A Prize horse was then sent down the track with a two wheeled carriage. When the horse came to the cameras; the carriages metal wheels completed an electrical circuit with the 12 wires that were placed across the track and triggered the shutter to each camera. At the time each camera was state of the art and created all 12 images in half a second. It took him 20 minutes to develop the pictures and then he displayed them for all the viewers at the event to see the results. This proved Stanford was right and it started the worlds investigation into how animals actually moved which showed posture errors in sculptures and paintings of the art world.

The images that he created could be placed in a Zoetrope and give the illusion of a running horse.