Toy cinema projector

On 25 April 1931, Josep M. and Tomàs Nicolau Griñó, two brothers from Barcelona, filed a patent for a new device for projecting animated images and created a new company: Proyector NIC S.A (NIC were the first three letters of the surname Nicolau). The first cartoon projector designed to be used by children was born. In this way, the Nicolau brothers, heirs of a family of paper industrialists, abandoned this activity to embark on the toy industry. The Cine NIC, which is what this device was called, consisted of a simple projector of images that had a movement of only two strokes. The images were drawn horizontally on a strip of transparent or translucent paper in two lines, the one above corresponded to one part of the movement and the bottom to the second part. A moving shutter alternated the top and bottom image over the same plane of the screen. A handle rotated the shutter at the same time and dragged the strip horizontally and slowly with the images. A weak bulb between 25W and 40W, to prevent overheating, illuminated the images that were projected at a distance of approximately one metre from the screen. It was a very simple mechanism, the result of observations of pre-cinematographic image projection systems, such as the magic lantern and the zoetrope, and the first film projectors.