Mankind’s first projector was the Chinese Magic Mirror, attributed to the Emperor Huang-ti, who lived sometime between 2704 and 2595 BC.E. Made of cast bronze with a design on one side, the design’s image could be catoptrically projected by the flat side.

The first zooms were made with the Fantascope projector, which could hold focus, patented in France in 1799 by Étienne-Gaspard Robert (also known as Robertson). It also anticipates cell animation’s foreground character superimposition over a background by means of dual projection.

Magic lantern dissolves were demonstrated on March 31, 1830, by Englishman Henry Langdon Childe, in London. Note the fading comb shutter mounted in front of the lenses.

The pneumatically powered 35mm movie camera, the Aeroscope, was designed in 1910 by Polish inventor Kasimir Proszynski. A bicycle pump was used to compress the air in its cylinders.

Dialogue balloons for silent films were inflated by the actors to simulate speech. The technique was described in a US Patent filed in 1917 by Charles Felton Pidgin of Massachusetts.

35mm film as a phonograph recording by using a heated wire to cut its celluloid edges. The Projectophone was described by Katherina Von Madaler, a Hungarian living in England, in a US Patent filed in 1911.

The earliest commercial optical sound system used 42mm (35mm plus 7mm for the track). It was deployed by the German Tri-Ergon organization in 1924.

Technicolor ruled for two decades, using a camera that exposed red, green, and blue sensitive negatives simultaneously. Shown here is the camera’s beamsplitter, which was used for the last time in 1954.

Vertical CinemaScope was described by Henri Chrétien in his US Patent filed in 1929.

The first video disk, the Phonoscope, which used gramophone technology, was built by Englishman William Logie Baird in 1927.

Motion capture was invented in 1883 by French physiologist Étienne Jules Marey. Today motion or performance capture is a widely used visual effects technique.