Pioneers and early inventions:

Joseph Plateau was born in 1801 and was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image.

To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakitoscope.

Phenakitoscope:

The phenakistoscope (also spelled phenakistiscope or phenakitiscope) was an early animation device that used the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion.