Joseph Plateau’s experiments with the persistence of vision – despite the fact that he blinded himself by staring at the sun for periods of up to 25 seconds – led to his “Phenakisticope” (from the Greek for “deceitful view”), the first cinematic device.
In the “Monde Littéraire,” 17 April 1853, Charles Baudelaire published a text entitled “La Morale du joujou,” in which he described the Phenakisticope and its “twenty identical dancing figures performing the same movements with fantastic precision.”
