A spinning Victorian parlour disc made drawings look like they moved, the ancestor of cinema

science & techThe Public Domain Review1833 · Brussels and Berlin

A spinning Victorian parlour disc made drawings look like they moved, the ancestor of cinema

the gist

The phenakistoscope was a spinning cardboard disc with a series of drawings around its edge, viewed through a set of slits. Spun in front of a mirror, the slits flick each picture past the eye in turn, and the brain blends the rapid sequence into motion, so dancers twirl and animals leap. Joseph Plateau in Brussels and Simon von Stampfer in Berlin invented it almost simultaneously in 1832. It was mass-produced as a children's parlour toy and later eclipsed by the zoetrope and then by projected film.

how it works

Each picture is seen only briefly through a slit, and the eye keeps a faint afterimage of it. Because the next slightly different picture appears before that afterimage fades, the brain fills the gaps and reads the sequence as continuous movement.

so what

The toy demonstrated persistence of vision, the trick the brain uses to turn still frames into movement. That same principle underlies every film, cartoon and GIF.

fun fact

Plateau's experiments on how the eye sees moving light left him blind later in life.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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