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54 THE WHEEL OF THE DEVIL
had a series of fourteen pictures of a man painted on it. The man's arms and legs were in varying positions. The two discs rotated freely, and when they hit on a certain relativity of speed, the man, glimpsed through the slots as they passed before the eye, split up the man's movements into separate shots so that he actually appeared to be running.
The secret of the contrivance, if it can be called a secret, lay in the fact that the eye was deceived into seeing, not fourteen drawings of a man, but one man and, because each picture of him had been endowed with arms and legs in varying positions, this one man seemed to be moving his limbs.
That was in 1830. Three years later an elaborated version of the device appeared and was, for a couple of decades at least, a very popular toy, starting as one of those instructive drawing-room novelties, such as stereoscopic views, of which the early Victorians were so fond, and ending as a child's toy to be bought in almost every toy-shop.
It was devised by an Englishman, William George Horner, who called it the Daedalum, or Wheel of the Devil, its first animated pictures being of the Devil waving his trident and enticing the beholder to join him in the flames. It consisted of a shallow round tin about a foot in diameter which was freely mounted on a central stand. Vertical slots were cut in the edge of the shallow tin near its top. Fitting snugly inside the lower half of the tin, below the slots, was a fourteen-inch band of paper bearing innumerable pictures of the Devil in various postures. By rotating the whole contrivance on its stand and by glancing down through the slots at the paper band on the inside of the low, open-topped tin, one got the impression, as in the Phenakistoscope, of one Devil, a Devil who appeared to leap and gesticulate.
The Victorians did not much care for the name of the contrivance ; they soon changed it to The Wheel of Life. Pictures of galloping horses, boxers, dancers and jugglers took the place of the Devil. A refinement was a candle mounted above the central pivot to illumine the figure seen on the paper band. In its last phase, the Wheel of Life became known as the Zoetrope.
There was still no attempt at a picture on a screen, and the Zoetrope pictures were drawn by artists ; no photographic picture had been attempted for the simple reason that instantaneous photography had still to be perfected.