The zoetrope (pronounced ZOH-uh-trohp), invented in 1834 by William George Horner, was an early form of motion picture projector that consisted of a drum containing a set of still images, that was turned in a circular fashion in order to create the illusion of motion. Horner originally called it the Daedatelum, but Pierre Desvignes, a French inventor, renamed his version of it the zoetrope from the Greek Greek words “zoe,” meaning life, and “tropos,” meaning turning. The word zoetrope therefore can be taken to mean “wheel of life” or “living wheel.”

The traditional zoetrope is easy to build, consisting of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in its sides and a series of sequenced images on its inner surface. As the cylinder is spun, the viewer looks through the slits to the opposite side of the interior. When viewed in this way, the images are seen by the eye in such rapid succession that they produce the illusion of motion. It can be turned at a variable rate to create slow-motion or speeded-up effects. Like other motion simulation devices, the zoetrope depends on the fact that the human retina retains an image for about a tenth-of-a-second so that if a new image appears in that time, the sequence was seem to be uninterrupted and continuous. It also depends on what is referred to as the Phi phenomenon, which observes that we try to make sense out of any sequence of impressions, continuously relating them to each other.

The visual effect created by a zoetrope is still used today to create animated GIFs and video display technologies such as streaming video, which essentially allows cinematographers to create an effect of motion by presenting discrete but closely-related images one after the other.

In 1876 the Frenchman Émile Reynaud adapted the principle into a form that could be projected before a theatrical audience. Reynaud became not only animation’s first entrepreneur but, with his gorgeously hand-painted ribbons of celluloid conveyed by a system of mirrors to a theatre screen, the first artist to give personality and warmth to his animated characters.

In 1878. Railroad tycoon and former California governor Leland Stanford commissioned photographer Eadweard Muybridge to provide proof that all four of a horse's hooves left the ground when galloping. Muybridge developed a way to take photos with an exposure lasting a fraction of a second and, with reporters as witnesses, arranged 12 cameras along a track on Stanford’s estate.As a horse sped by, it tripped wires connected to the cameras, which took 12 photos in rapid succession. Muybridge developed the images on site and, in the frames, revealed that a horse is completely aloft with its hooves tucked underneath it for a brief moment during a stride. The revelation, imperceptible to the naked eye but apparent through photography, marked a new purpose for the medium. It could capture truth through technology. Muybridge’s stop-motion technique was an early form of animation that helped pave the way for the motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.In 1879, he created his own device for displaying motion pictures – the zoopraxiscope. He borrowed the animated illusion of movement from the zoetrope, and combining it with the capacity for projection embodied in the magic lantern. The device employed glass discs on which pictures derived from his chrono-photographic plates were painted.