Magical Spectacles: Optical Entertainment of the Precinema Era See all the exhibitions.

Animation and horror shows began in the eighteenth century; photography and the electric light in the nineteenth. Precinema devices introduced lasting technologies, such as sequential images and projection. Various optical devices that appeared prior to the birth of cinema brought the viewers of the period much excitement through attempts to create an illusion of depth in binocular vision using the stereoscope, praxinoscope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and magic lantern.