Richard Balzer collects optical treasures of the past. He recently started a Tumblr blog to display Phenakistoscope images as gifs, so that we can see the animation as people in the 19th century saw them -without having to find the antique device to play them on.
The Phenakistoscope is a device invented by Joseph Plateau in 1841 to take advantage of the persistence of vision to give the viewer a moving picture. Spinning discs were viewed through a series of radiating slits to animate the pictures.
See the collection of images at the The Richard Balzer Collection, with new gifs added every week. -via Buzzfeed