Thaumatrope

What is a Thaumatrope?

The Thaumatrope (also known as “wonder turner”) is a mechanical optical illusion created by London based Physicist John Ayrton Paris (1785 – 1856). It first appeared in the nineteenth century sometime in the 1820’s.

How the Thaumatrope works - The simple toy is made from a disk with a picture on each side, with strings attached to the disk. When you twirl the strings quickly between your fingers the pictures will then appear to blend into one, this causes an optical illusion due to a phenomenon called persistence of vision.

 

Advantages - The advantages of the Thaumatrope would be it is a simple design and also cheap to make.

Disadvantages - The disadvantage of the Thaumatrope is that you need a fair amount of artistic ability to draw the images on each side of the disk.

Here is an example of how the Thaumatrope works.

Here is a video that shows how to make a Thaumatrope.