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Talking Pictures
"Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects."
Roget had caught in his mind a concept of the next step beyond Kircher's Magia Catoptrica. He pointed a way whereby the single picture consecutively presented by Kircher, or anyone else, could be made to seem to move. His theory, and it is the scientific basis of the billion-dollar film industry of today, is that if pictures of persons or objects are passed before the eyes in separate consecutive stages of movement, the eye tends to remember the last picture as it passes on to the next. But Roget merely expressed this theory in words.
It was Sir John Herschel who noted that when a shilling was spun on a table the face and the obverse were blended. Hearing of this incident, Dr. William Henry Fitton — a geologist, chemist, and physician — prepared a demonstrating device. It was a little disk of cardboard with strings attached to twirl it. On one side was a drawing of a bird, on the other a cage. Revolve the disk, and the bird appeared to be in the cage.
Dr. Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau, of the University of Ghent, Belgium; Dr. Simon Ritter von Stampfer, Vienna; the great Michael Faraday; Lt. Baron Franz von Uchatius, Vienna; William George Horner, Bristol, England — these, and other scientists, developed still further the possibility of showing objects and persons in motion through the Law of the Persistence of Vision.
At the same time Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and Joseph Nicephore Niepce were carrying forward, separately, the invention of single picture photography.
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