From Pre-Cinema to STEM Education: Optical Toys and their Pedagogical Contexts

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference / Chicago / March 2017

Nineteenth-century optical toys such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and zoetrope have long figured into the history of cinema. Capable of demonstrating the perceptual phenomenon then known as persistence of vision—which would undergird the illusion of motion in cinema—these pre-cinematic toys displayed some of the earliest moving pictures and ushered in a new conception of human vision as subject to deception and in need of training and guidance.

Despite their prominence in prior scholarship as technological precursors to the cinema and as intellectual property, these playthings’ pedagogical roles have been under examined. Since the nineteenth century, optical toys have circulated as educational playthings, sold as ready made objects, do-it-yourself kits, and in books of parlor games and home science experiments to teach the fundamentals of optics. Today these same optical devices enjoy continued prominence as children's playthings, appearing in museum contexts and sold as kits for young tinkerers and budding practitioners in STEM fields. This paper compares the educational discourses surrounding optical toys during their initial circulation and their recent resurgence, arguing that these toys’ historical endurance might be attributed to their pedagogical malleability.

Initially framed by the imperatives to entertain and edify middling nineteenth-century children, optical toys contributed to a broader discourse that positioned vision as subject to manipulation, which could result in either rational entertainment or deception. In this way, these toys helped articulate the parameters within which children’s media spectatorship would be framed for the next two centuries, with children cast as either active participants or unwitting victims. Contemporary optical toys marketed within the context of STEM education are likewise positioned as socially-engaged playthings, capable of fueling the curiosities of the next generation of inventors and creators, yet the emphasis has shifted from asserting middle-class subjectivity through play to hailing members of underrepresented groups under the rubric of STEM education.

Drawing upon archival research, my paper considers the rhetoric framing these devices nearly two hundred years apart and examine the toys’ formal attributes to trace how they have endured as both “new” and historical media, observing their capacity for reappropriation and adaptation in order to address perceived social, cultural, and pedagogical needs at two historical junctures.