I recently obtained a copy of Joscelyn Godwin’s book Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World (Inner Traditions, 2009).  I mention it here so that I can plug it: it’s a wonderful overview of the 17th century savant, studded with 400 examples of his charts, maps, inventions, and other illustrations.  There’s been somewhat of a Kircher revival recently; this trove will fuel it.

Here, for example, is Kircher’s Parastatic Microscope: a glass disc, painted with small images, mounted in a wooden case.  The disc rotates; the images are viewed through a lens.  As Godwin points out, it’s much like a modern slide viewer.  And it comes close to providing a moving picture: all it needs is a shutter (like a film projector), or slits broken up with blackness (like a zoetrope or phenakistascope) to separate sequential pictures and trigger the persistence of vision.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)