Capturing Life Onscreen: the Invention of Motion Pictures
Overview
Motion pictures combined three earlier technologies. Early nineteenth-century experimenters knew how to make drawings appear to move, by passing them rapidly before the eye. Magic lanterns and shadow puppets were ways to project silhouettes onto a wall or screen. Photography allowed the capture of realistic images of people, animals, and their surroundings. Motion picture pioneers competed to find a way to make photographs seem to come alive, and project them for display to an audience.
Background
The perceptual phenomenon called persistence of vision was known to the ancient Egyptians, but was first described by Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) in 1824. You can demonstrate it yourself by looking briefly at a light, and then closing your eyes. The image of the light remains on your retinas for 1/20 to 1/5 of a second before itfades away. Early in the twentieth century, psychologists showed that the brain also has a perceptual threshold, in which images that flash by quickly will seem to be continuous. Together these phenomena make it possible to produce the illusion of motion using a series of closely spaced images that change by degrees.
The first motion picture devices were mechanical, and the images were simple drawings.
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