The Magic Lantern

FLIP all the pages of this book at the top and you will see an acrobat move. Why? Because on each right hand page, in the upper right hand corner, there is a picture of an acrobat that is just a little different from the one on the page before and after. When your eye looks at something, it retains the image of what it sees for a second or so after the object has moved or changed. When a group of pictures are moved in the proper sequence and speed, their persistence of vision makes one picture flow into the next. Which is the basis of all motion pictures.

But flipping the pages of a book does not make the kind of motion pictures you think of as the movies. These are created by a long series of pictures that are different from each other in the same way the acrobat pictures differ from each other, but there are many more of them - long reels of them - that are projected by a machine onto a screen.

Movies are made from projected photographs. But before the first movies came into being, there were shows that used movement of pictures and objects in various ways like the acrobat or like shadows created on the wall by moving puppets before a light. And there was a long and gradual development of the art of photography. How pictures that moved and photographs that didn't both developed and then how the two were combined to make movies is told here in an interesting and involving account.