Lebensräder /“Life Wheel” or Phenakistoscope

Stations-ID: D051

Instructions:

Take one of the wheels out of its slot and hold it in front of your face, so that you are looking at its black back. Now look at the mirror through the uppermost slot with one eye. Spin the wheel – slowly at first, then faster. First to the right, then to the left.

• What do you see on the disc?
• What do you see in the mirror when you look through the slots in the disc while it is rotating?
• What happens when the rotation is very slow?
• What do you see when looking directly onto the rotating disc?

The Belgian physicist Joseph Antoine Plateau (1801-1883) and the Austrian mathematician and geodesist Simon Ritter von Stampfer (1792- 1864) independently described the principle of perforated rotating discs for the representation of motion sequences.

Mehr dazu in unserem Stationenpark-Handbuch
Find out more in our Handbook