From Cave Paintings to the Flip Book

Animation is not something newly discovered, in fact the oldest form of animation is 5,200 years old.  So here I will give a short description and maybe a picture or two, of some of the most ancient- excuse me- the earliest, types of animation.

Cave Paintings: An extremely early example of animation that tries to capture motion in a still drawing on a wall.  Paintings are drawn with many legs in positions that show the attempt to perceive motion.


The Thaumatrope: Invented in 1824, the thaumatrope was atoy used in the victorian era. This particular toy was disk/card that had two different pictures on either side and was attached to two pieces of string. If you twirled the strings very quickly between your fingers the two pictures seemed to combine to make one. The creator of this invention was either John Ayrton Paris or Charles Babbage. 

The Zoetrope: The zoetrope was created in 1834 and is a somewhat complex device that creates the image of motion. It is a cylinder with verticle slits around the sides and opposite the slits there was a series of pictures. When you spun the cylider, you looked through the slits and would see an illusion of motion. 

Praxinoscope: The praxinoscope was invented in 1877 by Charles-Emile Reynaud and was a more enhanced type of the zoetrope. The zoetrope was viewed through slits, however, the praxinoscope was viewed in a series of mirrors around the inside of the cylinder. This provided a clearer image than the zoetrope did. 

The All-Famous Flip Book: Created in 1868 by John Barns Linnet. The flip book, just as the zoetrope did, created the illusion of motion. It is a set of sequential pictures viewed at high speed which creates the illusion. An example of this is the mutoscope. This is basically a flip book with a crank handle that flips the pages.