The Drive Is in the Drawings

The machine has thirteen positions. Along a narrow strip of paper, a red wheel changes its angle, black connecting rods rise and fall, and the blades above them open and close. Each little machine occupies the same sort of frame. Its next movement is already waiting a few centimetres away.

The strip belongs to a zoetrope now in Auckland Museum. This nineteenth-century optical toy has a black drum pierced by narrow vertical slots, mounted on an ornamental stand. The museum records that a family used it for entertainment on a farm in Dannevirke, on New Zealand’s North Island. The work carried out by the printed machine needed no engine: someone had to place the paper inside the drum, turn it and look through the slots.

There was a choice of actions. Strips surviving with the apparatus include people, animals and mechanical subjects. One shows a green figure bending into a barrel and emerging from it. Others set wheels, limbs and impossible comic events into repeated motion. Changing the entertainment meant lifting out one strip and curling another around the drum’s inner wall.

The machinery sequence makes the draughtsman’s task particularly clear. The wheel, rods and shears had to change together in a readable order. The red framework supplies a steady reference while the black parts take up successive positions. When the last drawing meets the first around the inside of the cylinder, the action must be ready to continue.

Drawing the next movement

William E. Lincoln explained this work in his American patent of 23 April 1867. The inventor from Providence, Rhode Island, assigned his rights to Milton Bradley & Co., the games manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts. The document calls the invention a toy and describes how a series of figures could imitate life.

Lincoln’s example was a dancer. In one drawing the left leg came a little farther down and the left arm a little higher; the next drawing carried the change farther. The other limbs had to change correspondingly. Small differences between neighbouring figures would become the movement when the strip was viewed in the rotating apparatus.

His patent also made room for an extensive publishing business. Any number of picture strips could be fitted to the same instrument. Subjects were limited by the size of the cylinder and the requirements of the effect, leaving the designs open to different tastes and fancies. Buying the apparatus did not exhaust its possibilities.

The Auckland machinery offers a more demanding task than changing one isolated arm. Several parts appear to work together. Looking along the stationary strip makes their positions available for comparison: the shears approach their closed position as the associated rods and wheel move through their own sequence. The relationships have been drawn in advance, rather than produced by a working linkage behind the paper.

A naturally repeating action suits this format. A rotating wheel can keep turning, and a figure can keep stepping. A story with an irreversible ending presents a different problem: the strip comes round again. The barrel performer survives in damaged paper, with part of the sequence detached. The remaining poses still let us see the artist working between a standing body, a bent back and legs raised above the barrel.

Each glimpse through a slot

The drum gave those drawings a particular way of reaching the eye. Lincoln placed the strip below the lower ends of the slots, around the inside circumference. A central pivot turned in a socket on the stand. The viewer looked through the near side of the revolving cylinder towards the pictures on its opposite inner wall.

The slots make brief views of the pictures possible.

Between one opening and the next, the solid wall conceals the moving paper. The next slot reveals another pose at approximately the position occupied by its predecessor. With suitable spacing and speed, the separate presentations can be perceived as a changing figure.

Looking down over the rim gives a different view: the paper sweeps round continuously. Through the slots, each drawing is available only briefly. Narrow openings reduce the distance it travels while visible, helping to limit blur, but they also reduce the light reaching the eye. The open top lets illumination fall on the paper inside. Speed, light and where the viewer places an eye all affect the result.

The museum’s view into the Auckland drum catches several strips loosely nested inside it. That is a way of keeping the material together, rather than the working arrangement Lincoln describes. For viewing, the chosen pictures need to sit along the wall where they can be seen through the opposite slots.

The number of pictures matters as well as their poses. Lincoln said that the figures generally corresponded in number to the slots. Contemporary experimenters also explored what happened when they did not. William Benjamin Carpenter distinguished a figure’s changing attitude from its apparent progress around the drum: changing the relationship between the number of figures and openings could make the image appear to travel while its limbs performed their separate action.

Carpenter was a physician and physiologist who treated the zoetrope as a subject for investigation. In 1868 he also questioned a familiar explanation of such effects. An impression left by staring at something bright was one matter; the perception produced by extremely brief successive views was another. He preferred language which did not assume that the whole result was simply an image lingering on the retina.

The distinction remains useful. Showing a succession of drawings and perceiving continuous action are different parts of the event. The apparatus controls the glimpses; the visual system makes movement from appropriately related samples. A longer-lasting smear by itself would not explain a leg taking a step or a wheel turning.

A drum among people

The commercial zoetrope arrived after decades of work on intermittent pictures. William George Horner had published his cylindrical Dædaleum in 1834, following the early experiments with rotating picture discs. Lincoln’s later patent described a practical replaceable-strip instrument and emphasised the advantage of setting it in the centre of a room: several people could watch at once.

That arrangement left the pictures accessible. A viewer could examine a strip while it was still, place it in the drum and compare the moving result. The machine on paper could be taken apart visually without dismantling its imaginary mechanism.

Recording the result introduces another instrument into the arrangement. Film historian Peter Domankiewicz demonstrates a different surviving British zoetrope in his own collection, distinguishing modern animation of its individual drawings from footage taken through the moving slots. His camera’s sampling can introduce dark bands and distorted openings. The recording is useful evidence of the operation, with limits of its own.

A closer look · 10:38 · English · automatic captions

Looking through the moving drum

Play film

Lincoln had already given the owner a simpler option for changing the view. His patent allowed a patterned disc on the floor of the cylinder as well as the strip around its wall. The drum could animate pictures in two planes. After the dancer, the owner could replace the paper, spin the same pivot and start a different action.