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The Collaborative International Dictionary
zoopraxiscope

Cinematograph \Cin`e*mat"o*graph\, n. [Gr. ?, ?, motion + -graph.]

  1. an older name for a movie projector, a machine, combining magic lantern and kinetoscope features, for projecting on a screen a series of pictures, moved rapidly (25 to 50 frames per second) and intermittently before an objective lens, and producing by persistence of vision the illusion of continuous motion; a moving-picture projector; also, any of several other machines or devices producing moving pictorial effects. Other older names for the movie projector are animatograph, biograph, bioscope, electrograph, electroscope, kinematograph, kinetoscope, veriscope, vitagraph, vitascope, zo["o]gyroscope, zo["o]praxiscope, etc.

    The cinematograph, invented by Edison in 1894, is the result of the introduction of the flexible film into photography in place of glass.
    --Encyc. Brit.

  2. A camera for taking chronophotographs for exhibition by the instrument described above.

Wiktionary
zoopraxiscope

alt. (context photography historical English) An instrument developed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard%20Muybridge in the 1870's, similar to the phenakistoscope. The instrument involves a disc that includes serial pictures being rotated in front of a light source, projecting them upon a screen, to exhibit the natural movements of animals and the like. n. (context photography historical English) An instrument developed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard%20Muybridge in the 1870's, similar to the phenakistoscope. The instrument involves a disc that includes serial pictures being rotated in front of a light source, projecting them upon a screen, to exhibit the natural movements of animals and the like.

Wikipedia
Zoopraxiscope

The zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures. Created by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879, it may be considered the first movie projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892–1894, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand. Some of the animated images are highly complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement.

The device appears to have been one of the primary inspirations for Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson's Kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system. Images from all of the known seventy-one surviving zoopraxiscope discs have been reproduced in the book Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest (The Projection Box, 2004).

Usage examples of "zoopraxiscope".

But, although he was passionately devoted to this hobby and spent most of his spare hours closeted in his study with his Praxinoscope, his Phasmatrope and his Zoopraxiscope, projecting on to a white screen photographs of plants and animals that often seemed to move, these studies remained no more than peripheral to his business, which consisted of fleecing the living by arranging interviews with their departed.