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Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era

The possibility of a Victorian cinema extends beyond the first decade of cinema’s innovation at the end of Victoria’s reign if we include the flourishing of optical devices know as “philosophical toys” in the nineteenth century. This essay focuses on the device known as the thaumatrope, invented by John Ayrton Paris in the 1820s. The “wonder-turner” used rapid revolutions of a disk imprinted with matching partial images (such as a bird on one side and a cage on the other) to create a perceptual image that fused both sides into a single appearance. I call such optical toys “technological images” because they manipulate human perception through a mechanical device. Although the thaumatrope fuses an image rather than animating one, its novelty as an optical device inaugurates an era of ever more complex technological images.