Consider it, as you will, to be the original GIF (graphic interchange format). However, like a GIF animation, it can only show a short continuous loop.
Like most Google Doodles, it’s to celebrate the birthday of Belgian physicist and mathematician Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau. He had moved the world forward, and who’s often credited with inventing the aforementioned device.
But it wasn't exactly his invention alone...
Born in Brussels, Belgium on this day in 1801, Plateau was the son of an accomplished artist who specialized in painting flowers.
Years later, after studying law, young Plateau became one of the best-known Belgian scientists of the nineteenth century, remembered for his study of physiological optics, particularly the effect of light and color on the human retina.
Plateau was also one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other.
His research on visual perception inspired him to invent a device he called the phénakistiscope, which led to the birth of cinema by creating the illusion of a moving image.
Inspired by the mesmerizing animated discs, the animated Google Doodle art was made to reflect Plateau’s style, with different imagery and themes in them on different device platforms.
Plateau’s doctoral dissertation detailed how images form on the retina, noting their exact duration, color, and intensity.
Based on these conclusions, he was able to create a stroboscopic device in 1832, fitted with two discs that rotated in opposite directions.
One disc was filled with small windows, evenly spaced in a circle, while the other had a series of pictures of a dancer. When both discs turned at exactly the right speed, the images seemed to merge, creating the illusion of a dancer in motion.
But strangely enough, Google’s own description fails to mention that Plateau isn’t the only one who invented the phenakistiscope (better known as phenakistiscope or the later misspelling phenakistoscope). It’s one of history’s most famous cases of simultaneous invention.
Austrian professor Simon Stampfer was simultaneously studying the same optical illusion. Both he and Plateau may have studied descriptions of that illusion from British scholar Peter Mark Roget.
This also included a specific mechanical example of that illusion published by the famed British scientist Michael Faraday. (Roget may have built some phenakistiscopes in private as well.)
Though Plateau lost his vision later in life, he continued to have a productive career in science even after becoming blind, working as a professor of experimental physics at Ghent University with the help of some colleagues.
These included his son Felix Plateau as well as his son-in-law, Belgian biographer Gustaaf Van der Mensbrugghe.
American computer scientist Steve Wilhite once worked at CompuServe and was the primary creator of the GIF file format.
It later went on to become the de facto standard for 8-bit color images on the Internet until PNG became a viable alternative. He had developed the GIF in 1987.
There’s a heck of a Wikipedia article about the GIF that points back to some of their original writings, as well as a fourteen-page article at JSTOR.
You can read about these articles by visiting the links below:
However, Google’s animations also don’t necessarily do justice to the intricacy of the original Victorian-era illusions — some of which are still a sight to behold!
All that aside, Google says it’s doing something unique to celebrate Plateau: the company says it’s the first Google Doodle with different artwork across desktop, mobile, and its dedicated search app.
Happy 219th Birthday, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau!
@GoogleDoodles
@wikipedia
@JSTOR.org
@PublicDomainReview
@nichecinema
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