# Pre-industrial animation? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 9, 2008, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796 "2008-09-09T16:22:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/1 "2008-09-09T16:22:36Z")
Flip-books are a pretty simple technology. The ancient Egyptians probably could have cobbled one together with papyrus thousands of years ago. Is there any evidence that anyone prior to the 19th Century thought of flipping through a series of drawings to make them move? ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/2 "2008-09-09T18:09:20Z")
[Oldest Animation Discovered In Iran](http://www.animationmagazine.net/article/8045) > [@](#): > > Long considered a modern invention, animation has apparently been lying about its age. A 5,200-year-old bowl found in Iran’s Burnt City in the 1970s features a series of five images that researchers have only recently identified as being sequential, much like those in a zoetrope. Giving the bowl a spin, one would see a goat leaping to snatch leaves from a tree, as seen in the video clip below. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/3 "2008-09-09T19:18:47Z")
Hmmmm … calling this bowl “animation” isn’t accurate. Here’s a link to [photos](http://www.chnphotoagency.ir/gallery.php?lang=en&gallery_uid=84)of the actual artifact. There’s no shutter mechanism so if you spun it all you would see is a blur. And the bowl doesn’t look like it would spin very easily anyway. It may be a good example of early sequential art, but its not animation. The ancient Persians \*had \*the technology to make a zoetrope, but this bowl isn’t one. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/4 "2008-09-09T19:35:32Z")
I agree about the Persian bowl – I’ve seen it before, and it also struck me that you’d just se a blur. It’s possible that things like the “Bird in Cage” illusion existed before the 19th century, but even that’s a stretch to call "animation > **[Bird in Cage Optical Illusion](http://loukregel.blogspot.com/2007/10/bird-in-cage-optical-illusion.html)** > > Here's a little video of the parlor trick. It's only a few seconds long. The work on modern motion pictures is held to start in the 19th century with Roget’s 1824 paper “The Persistence of Vision”, [http://www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?articleId=216967](http://www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?articleId=216967) and the Phenakistoscope of Plateau and von Stampfer (and von Stampfer’s Storoboscope) > **[Phenakistiscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenakistiscope)** > > The phenakistiscope (also known by the spellings phénakisticope or phenakistoscope) was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. Dubbed Fantascope and Stroboscopische Scheiben ('stroboscopic discs') by its inventors, it has been known under many other names until the French product name Phénakisticope became common (with alternative spellings). The phenakistiscope is regarded as one of the first forms of moving media entertainment that paved the way for the ... It was the work of an artillery officer, Franz von Uchatius, that gave us the first projected “animated” images: > **[Franz von Uchatius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_von_Uchatius)** > > Franz von Uchatius (1811–1881) was an Austrian artillery general and inventor. His inventions included both military applications and pioneer work in cinematography. > He invented a motion picture projector in 1853,\[citation needed\] developing it over the years from 1845 from the device then called stroboscope (Simon von Stampfer) and phenakistiscope (Joseph Plateau). This was the first example of projected animation, demonstrated in 1853; it is also described as the combination of the zoetrope ... Before this, I’m not aware of any sort of toy or device that tried to store and recreate motion that wasn’t simply mechanically duplicated. By the way, you can make the argument that cartoons preceded “motion pictures”. Virtually all of these were _drawn_ images – Plateau’s and von Stampfer’s and Von Uchatius. In the later 19th century people used “moving” magic lantern slides, with jointed and independently moving arms and appendages, all of them hand-drawn. ---
**Author:** ![Finagle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b19c9b/32.png) [@Finagle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Finagle)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/5 "2008-09-09T21:06:39Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I agree about the Persian bowl – I’ve seen it before, and it also struck me that you’d just se a blur. Unless you blinked at the right frequency. And, if the pot was turned on a wheel – well, they’d have the right mechanism to make the finished bowl spin. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/6 "2008-09-09T21:15:59Z")
> [@](#): > > Unless you blinked at the right frequency. And, if the pot was turned on a wheel – well, they’d have the right mechanism to make the finished bowl spin. Or you built yourself a hand-turned stroboscope\*. Or were lucky enough to be watching it when lightning flashed at the right rate. \*I built one as a kid, from instructions in a science book. Just a cardboard disc rotating about its center with slots cut around the periphery to look through. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/7 "2008-09-09T21:48:25Z")
The easiest way to make such a thing woud be to put vertical slits in the side of the bowl, and then watch through the slits. This is like **CalMeacham** ’s strobe wheel, but automatically synched. But it doesn’t look like that bowl has slits in it. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2008, 9:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/8 "2008-09-11T09:16:23Z")
Books are not trivial technology. Before the nineteenth century one wouldn’t have casually wasted paper on something like flip books when one didn’t yet fully understand the principle of persistence of vision. For that matter, I don’t think that paper airplanes existed before the nineteenth century. Only at the point that the persistence of vision phenomenon was discovered did anyone begin to think about the fact that flip books might use this to make moving pictures, and by that point they were beginning to think about using photographic technology to make movies. Casual uses of paper to make speculative things like flip books or paper airplanes didn’t exist until the principles were understood in other ways (such as movies and as real airplanes) because paper was actually somewhat expensive compared to today. Paper is so cheap today that this is hard to remember, but it was once expensive enough that it wasn’t wasted on children’s toys. ---
**Author:** ![lynxie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e99b99/32.png) [@lynxie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lynxie)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2008, 9:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/9 "2008-09-11T09:43:41Z")
Try this page on the history of cinematography. A fascinating read. > **[The History of The Discovery of Cinematography --- An Illustrated...](http://www.precinemahistory.net/index.html)** > > The History of the Discovery of Cinematography ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2008, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/10 "2008-09-11T10:05:35Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > For that matter, I don’t think that paper airplanes existed before the nineteenth century. Wikipedia on the history of paper planes > **[Paper plane | History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_plane#History)** > > Paper airplanes are known to have been made as far back as the mid 19th century, based on an American children's book describing their construction from 1864. > The construction of a paper airplane, by Ludwig Prandtl at the 1924 banquet of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, was dismissed as an artless exercise by Theodore von Kármán: ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2008, 10:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pre-industrial-animation/462796/11 "2008-09-11T10:35:07Z")
O.K., it appears that paper airplanes existed in China 2,000 years ago, but they were adult items. They were treated rather as they treated kites at the time - a little too expensive to be common children’s toys. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that making paper airplanes became common.