Persistance of vision

Persistence of vision makes moving objects and puppets appear to be move on it's own. In animation, what we perceive as a moving image is actually an illusion. What we are really seeing is a succession of still images displayed in rapid sequence. Persistence of vision was not created by anyone, instead it was discovered by very early optical illusional toys which showed the theory was correct and accurate.

Eadweard Muybridge was the man who famously proved a horse can fly. Adapting the very latest technology to his ends, he proved his theory by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras. This experiment proved indisputably for the first time what no eye had previously seen – that a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in the action of running. Seeking a means of sharing his groundbreaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.