1801-1883
Belgian physicist, mathematician and that country's earliest animator Joseph Plateau was born Joseph Antione Ferdinand Plateau on this day in Brussels when the country was part of the French Republic. The son of an artist, Plateau grew up around "natural paintings"--his father being famous for realistic flower depictions. The younger Plateau was considered a child prodigy and could read fluently by the age of six. He also became interested in physics at school at a very early age; he was particularly interested in the experimental physics of the age. He came from a family of extremely accomplished people who were all, to all degree or another, influential on him as a thinker and scientist. He eventually became interest in "persistence of memory" as it was termed, what is more properly described as the persistence of images on the retina after being exposed to certain conditions, such as bright flashes of light. This interest would lead to his experiments characterized as "animations" and the reason for his inclusion here. This interest was spurred in him though by tragedy--the lose of his parents at the young age of just fourteen. The interest was deep and may have been connected to his thinking on the problem around the time he suffered such a deep lose. It was the one mystery that he was determined in life to understand and one that lead to a number of other paths of later scientific inquiry. Carrying this fascination over into his academic career and submitted a doctoral thesis on optics in 1829, which led directly to his development in 1832 to a device that he later termed a Phenakistiscope (popularized as a "phenakistoscope"), though he had no personal name for it when it was first introduced it in published concept for (it was apparently named shortly after introduction by a company in France, and Plateau reportedly adopted the term). After the devices became a popular form of entertainment, they was called "phantasmascopes" in the UK. A nearly identical device was invented at the same time--in the early 1830's--in Austria. Plateau, though, backed up his research with math and his "invention" was more a side-effect of his research than it was it's goal; a sort of experiment and conclusion rolled into one. This invention paved the way for extremely important--and entertaining--advances in optics and animations. It also provided essential ideas that lead directly to the invention of motion pictures.
He also has a LARGE body of mathematical works, problems, proofs and laws. There is no point in trying to encapsulate them here, but if you are a math buff like me, follow the Wikipedia link below for other links to individual works (fascinating stuff!!). One of the most important of these, I will mention, is his work on soap films. We who are blessed with sight have all witnessed soap film phenomena and it can be absolutely captivating (the same can be seen, and much more persistently and unfortunately, in oil slicks). Plateau's work in this arena also contributed to the development of films for innovations in photography. So important guy--with NO film credits to his name. Please check out links, he deserves more recognition. I have also included more of his Phenakistiscope work below, some of it animated by computer gif technology. These days Plateau has been called "the father of the gif."
Plateau, having experimented on himself, was also one of the first scientists to warn about extended staring directly at the sun--he attributed his lose of vision later in life to this, though it may have been due to a genetic malady or auto-immune instead. Plateau died at the age of 81 in Ghent on 15th of September a month from turning 82 and only a couple years shy of the actual invention of projected motion pictures. For someone so nationally important to the country of Belgium, there is no information on his burial--strange and a bit sad.
Here are a few animations for the spooky season, I believe these are modern, but they are based on Plateau's technology and are oh so cool.
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