Living pictures; their history, photoproduction and practical working. With a digest of British patents and annotated bibliography (1899)

40 LIVING PICTURES. Fig. 45. shown in Fig. 45. The cards, tangentially mounted, are held back by a guard, and when released fly into an upright position for inspection, their vertical situation being maintained by a wall against which they rest until covered by the next picture. Watilliaux' Folio- scope is also made in rotary form. One early application of the Phenakistoscope and Zoetrope must be referred to, but the idea never brought forth any very practical results, though many minds attempted a solu- tion of the problem. A glance at the Digest of British Patents, and the Bibliography given at the end of this work, will show that in early years great attention was devoted to methods of attaining the simultaneous perception of solidity and motion. Six patents were applied for between 1853 and i860, all having this object in view, and other methods than those therein described were suggested in various periodicals. With but one excep- tion no new principle was involved, the only suggestions being either that the edges of two discs should be viewed through ordinary stereoscopic eyepieces (the vision being interrupted by passing slots on an independent disc) or else that the two views should be mounted side by side inside a horizontally revolving cylinder slotted in the usual way, an arrangement merely equivalent to a Zoetrope working on its side, as was shown in Fig. 20. The exception referred to is the principle of allowing only one eye to perceive one view at one time, a slightly different design being presented to the other eye just previously to the first being cut ofT. Claudet, in making this suggestion in 1853, was