The optical toys shown here…

The optical toys shown here originated in the Enlightenment era and were commercialized in the nineteenth century. Marketed as both edifying and entertaining, these devices relied on the capacity of human vision to synthesize individual images into an apparently smooth sequence of motion. Preceding cinema as such, optical toys served to organize sensory input and focus attention, fostering an understanding of spectatorship as a skill that could be honed and deployed for pleasure.