Projection praxinoscope

Manufacturer	Émile Reynaud
Name	Le Praxinoscope à projection
Place	Paris (France)
Date	ca. 1882
Register	8026

An optical toy invented by Émile Reynaud in 1880, the projection praxinoscope allows moving characters and scenery to be projected onto a screen. Still, however, it offers the viewer only the vision of a cyclical movement. The projection is obtained by a slightly modified magic lantern, since it uses a single light source for two optical systems. The first projects the lithographed set on paper and the second projects the animated characters onto this backdrop. The characters are lithographed in transparency on twelve slides joined together by pieces of cloth. This strip with the images was placed at an angle of forty-five degrees on the perimeter of a kind of rotating plate, in the centre of which there were twelve mirrors. Each of the mirrors reflects the image of a drawing of the strip. This plate is mounted on a wooden foot with a handle that turns it, so we can observe in the mirrors how the movement depicted in the drawings of the slides is reconstructed. It is a luxury device, beautifully presented, which began to be manufactured and marketed from 1882. It was sold for between sixty and seventy-five francs with five strips with images and five decorations. Very few were sold, so it is now considered an extremely rare device.

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