A History of Animation

1659 – 1899 · 14 events

Before 1900

Animation existed before cinema did. For most of the nineteenth century, moving pictures were a parlor amusement and a laboratory instrument long before they were an art form.

What changed in this period

The story begins with light and a lens. Seventeenth-century magic lanterns projected painted glass slides onto walls, and by the end of the eighteenth century showmen had turned that projection into theater — rear-projected ghosts drifting toward audiences in candlelit halls. Nothing moved in the modern sense, but the ambition was already there: to make a drawing behave like a living thing.

The 1820s and 1830s supplied the missing piece. Working independently across Europe, scientists studying how the eye handles rapid change built spinning discs and slotted drums that turned sequences of drawings into short, endlessly repeating actions. These were sold as toys, and that commercial framing matters: an entire generation grew up physically handling the principle that a series of still images, shown quickly enough, reads as motion.

Photography then hardened the idea into measurement. Sequential cameras aimed at running horses and walking men produced the first true motion studies, and those studies gave artists an accurate vocabulary of weight, balance and timing that hand-drawn animation still depends on.

The decisive moment came in 1892, when a French inventor projected long, hand-painted picture bands to a paying audience in Paris. It was public, it was narrative, and it happened three years before the first commercial film screening. Animation, in other words, did not descend from cinema. It arrived alongside it.

The record

Every documented event, 1659 – 1899

Listed in order, with context, technique, sources and related events shown in full.

  • 1659

    Christiaan Huygens sketches a projected animation

    A Dutch scientist drew a series of glass-slide designs showing a skeleton removing its own skull, intended to be projected in sequence by lamplight — one of the earliest known plans for a projected moving image.

    Netherlands Optical device Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    Christiaan Huygens
    Country or region
    Netherlands

    Historical context

    Huygens was working on lenses for telescopes and clocks when he applied the same optics to projection. The magic lantern spread quickly through seventeenth-century Europe as a scientific curiosity and a showman's instrument.

    Why it mattered

    It establishes that the ambition to project a changing image predates cinema by more than two centuries, and that the earliest surviving plan for such an image was a piece of drawn animation rather than a photograph.

    What followed

    Lantern projection became the dominant form of screen entertainment for two hundred years and supplied cinema with its architecture: a darkened room, a bright rectangle, an audience facing forward.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1798

    Robertson's phantasmagoria turns projection into theater

    A Belgian-born showman staged projected ghost performances in Paris using a wheeled lantern that moved toward a translucent screen, making painted figures appear to swell and rush at the audience.

    France Optical device Public exhibition
    Artist or studio
    Étienne-Gaspard Robert (Robertson)
    Country or region
    France

    Historical context

    Post-revolutionary Paris had an appetite for the macabre and the scientific at once. Robertson advertised his shows as rational demonstrations while staging them in an abandoned convent.

    Why it mattered

    It introduced controlled change over time as an expressive tool — scale, focus, dissolves and superimposition — and proved that audiences would pay for the experience of a projected illusion.

    What followed

    The dissolve, the approaching camera and the layered image all entered the vocabulary of screen entertainment here, and were inherited directly by early filmmakers.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1824 December 9, 1824

    Roget presents his paper on apparent motion

    Roget described the illusion produced when a moving wheel is viewed through a series of vertical slits, and presented his analysis to the Royal Society in London.

    United Kingdom Optical device Technique and tools
    Artist or studio
    Peter Mark Roget, Royal Society
    Country or region
    United Kingdom

    Historical context

    Nineteenth-century science was preoccupied with the limits of perception. Roget, better known for his thesaurus, was one of several researchers investigating why the eye fails to resolve rapid change.

    Why it mattered

    The paper gave a scientific framing to intermittent viewing and directly influenced the inventors who built the first animation devices within the following decade.

    What followed

    The explanation Roget offered — later popularized as persistence of vision — was incomplete, and modern perceptual science attributes apparent motion largely to the brain rather than the retina. The devices it inspired worked regardless.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1825

    The thaumatrope reaches the London toy market

    A card printed with a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other, spun on twisted strings, merges into a single image — the simplest commercial demonstration that vision combines successive pictures.

    United Kingdom Optical device Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    John Ayrton Paris
    Country or region
    United Kingdom

    Historical context

    The device was sold as an educational amusement by a physician with an interest in optics, and became a fashionable drawing-room object across Britain.

    Why it mattered

    It put the fundamental principle of animation into the hands of the general public as an object of play rather than a laboratory result.

    What followed

    Its commercial success created a market for optical toys, which funded the more sophisticated sequential devices that followed within seven years.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1832

    Plateau and Stampfer independently build the first animation discs

    A slotted disc printed with a cycle of drawings, spun in front of a mirror, produced the first genuinely animated sequences — repeating actions of ten or sixteen phases viewed through the passing slits.

    Belgium Optical device Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    Joseph Plateau and Simon Stampfer
    Country or region
    Belgium

    Historical context

    Plateau in Ghent and Stampfer in Vienna arrived at nearly identical devices within months of each other, both building on published work about intermittent perception.

    Why it mattered

    This is the first device to display a designed sequence of drawings as continuous motion, and therefore the first true animation apparatus. The cyclical structure it imposed — a loop of evenly spaced phases — remains the basis of animation timing.

    What followed

    Printed discs were mass-produced across Europe for decades, and the walk cycle, the gallop and the repeating gag were all first designed for this format.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1834

    Horner devises the zoetrope drum

    A slotted cylinder holding a replaceable paper strip allowed several people to watch the same animated cycle at once, without a mirror and without holding the device to the face.

    United Kingdom Optical device Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    William George Horner
    Country or region
    United Kingdom

    Historical context

    Horner, a mathematician in Bath, called his invention the daedalum. It attracted little commercial interest for three decades.

    Why it mattered

    The drum made animation social and modular: the mechanism was permanent and the artwork was a cheap interchangeable strip, which is how animation has been distributed ever since.

    What followed

    When it was independently patented in the United States in 1867 and manufactured as the zoetrope, it became the standard optical toy of the later nineteenth century and the direct ancestor of the film loop.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1867 April 23, 1867

    The zoetrope is patented and manufactured in the United States

    An American patent for the slotted viewing drum led to industrial production of the zoetrope as a household toy, sold with printed strips of gymnasts, animals and running figures.

    United States Optical device Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    William E. Lincoln, manufactured by Milton Bradley and Company
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    The American toy industry was consolidating after the Civil War, and educational novelties sold well to a growing urban middle class.

    Why it mattered

    Mass manufacture made animated sequences a common domestic experience in the United States, seeding an audience decades before the first animated films were exhibited.

    What followed

    Several pioneers of American animation, including newspaper cartoonists who later worked in film, described encountering sequential drawing first through these toys.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1868

    The flip book is patented as the kineograph

    A bound stack of pages, each carrying a slightly altered drawing, produces animation when riffled with the thumb — no mechanism, no mirror and no fixed loop length.

    United Kingdom Hand-drawn on paper Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    John Barnes Linnett
    Country or region
    United Kingdom

    Historical context

    Linnett, a printer in Birmingham, registered the idea as the kineograph. Cheap printing made the format instantly viable.

    Why it mattered

    The flip book freed animation from the closed cycle. A sequence could now be any length and could develop rather than repeat, which is the structural precondition for narrative animation.

    What followed

    It became the standard sketching tool for animators testing timing by hand, and remains in use as a pencil test format and a teaching exercise.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1877

    Reynaud patents the praxinoscope

    Replacing the zoetrope's slits with a central ring of mirrors produced a brighter, steadier and undistorted image, and made the animated picture pleasant to look at for the first time.

    France Optical device Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    Émile Reynaud
    Country or region
    France

    Historical context

    Reynaud was a science lecturer and instrument maker in Paris who built and sold his devices himself, later adding a projection version and a theatrical cabinet.

    Why it mattered

    The mirror drum solved the flicker and dimness that had limited every previous device, and demonstrated that image quality, not just the illusion itself, determined whether audiences would watch.

    What followed

    Reynaud spent the next fifteen years scaling the principle up, arriving at projected picture bands long enough to tell a story — the direct line from parlor toy to public animated performance.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1878 June 1878

    Muybridge photographs a horse in motion

    A battery of cameras triggered in sequence beside a track at Palo Alto captured the phases of a galloping horse, settling a long-running argument about whether all four hooves leave the ground.

    United States Chronophotography Technique and tools
    Artist or studio
    Eadweard Muybridge, commissioned by Leland Stanford
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    Muybridge had been working on the problem since 1872 with funding from a railroad magnate and racehorse owner. The 1878 results were published widely and demonstrated publicly.

    Why it mattered

    For the first time artists had accurate, verifiable data on how bodies actually move, replacing centuries of conventional depiction with observation.

    What followed

    Muybridge's later volumes of human and animal locomotion became standard studio reference and are still consulted by animators studying weight, contact and gait.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1882

    Marey builds the chronophotographic gun

    A rifle-shaped camera recorded twelve exposures per second onto a single rotating plate, allowing a moving subject such as a bird in flight to be analyzed from one instrument.

    France Chronophotography Device and invention
    Artist or studio
    Étienne-Jules Marey
    Country or region
    France

    Historical context

    Marey was a physiologist studying locomotion rather than an image maker. His laboratory at the Parc des Princes was built specifically for motion research.

    Why it mattered

    It compressed sequential photography into a single portable device and introduced a fixed frame rate, the concept on which all film and animation timing depends.

    What followed

    Marey's work influenced both the mechanics of the film camera and the visual language of motion analysis, and his multiple-exposure images shaped modernist painting as well as animation.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1892 October 28, 1892 Full record

    Reynaud projects Pantomimes Lumineuses at the Musée Grévin

    Reynaud projected long hand-painted picture bands to a paying Paris audience, presenting short comic stories with music and live sound effects — the first public exhibition of projected animation.

    France Hand-drawn on paper Public exhibition
    Artist or studio
    Émile Reynaud, Musée Grévin
    Country or region
    France

    Historical context

    The programs ran for years and were seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors. Reynaud painted every frame himself onto transparent strips joined with metal grommets.

    Why it mattered

    It preceded the first commercial film screening by three years and demonstrated that drawn moving images could sustain a narrative performance for a general audience.

    What followed

    Photographic cinema quickly overtook the Théâtre Optique commercially, and Reynaud destroyed most of his bands in despair. Two survive, and the event is now recognized as the beginning of animation as public entertainment.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1895 December 28, 1895

    The Lumière brothers hold the first commercial film screening

    A paid program of short actuality films at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris established photographic cinema as a commercial medium.

    France Chronophotography Public exhibition
    Artist or studio
    Auguste and Louis Lumière
    Country or region
    France

    Historical context

    Several inventors had projected film in 1895; the Lumière screening is conventionally cited because it was ticketed, publicized and commercially continuous.

    Why it mattered

    It supplied animation with its distribution system. Everything drawn afterward would be photographed onto the same stock, shown in the same theaters and sold on the same terms as live-action film.

    What followed

    Animation became a segment of the film industry rather than an independent tradition, which determined its economics, its running times and its audience for the next fifty years.

    Sources consulted

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  • 1899 1899 (dating disputed)

    Matches: An Appeal and the problem of first dates

    A short film in which matchstick figures assemble a message appealing for matches for troops has been dated by some historians to the Boer War of 1899 and by others to the First World War.

    United Kingdom Stop motion Short film
    Artist or studio
    Arthur Melbourne-Cooper
    Country or region
    United Kingdom

    Historical context

    Melbourne-Cooper claimed the earlier date in later life. Archival researchers have questioned the surviving print's stock, subject and distribution history.

    Why it mattered

    If the earlier date is correct it is among the first object-animation films made anywhere. It is included here as an example of how animation history is actually established, and where it remains unsettled.

    What followed

    The dispute is a standing caution against citing single dates as settled fact, and this project reports the disagreement rather than choosing a side.

    Sources consulted

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