Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau - Phenakistoscope

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau 

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgian physicist. He was one of the first persons 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 Phenakistiscope.

Joseph Plateau's father was an artistic man with a great talent for painting flowers. He wanted Joseph to follow an artistic career and his schooling was arranged with this aim. After excelling at primary school, Joseph was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts. However Joseph became an orphan at the age of fourteen when his father died, his mother having died one year earlier. A brother of Joseph's mother who was a lawyer, A.M Thirion, took over bringing up Joseph and his two sisters. Joseph had a serious illness around this time and for a while could not attend the Academy. However, once he had recovered he resumed his course.

Although the training at the Academy was mainly in the arts, Plateau's interests were in science. He was enthusiastic about physics and carried out experiments in the evenings with apparatus which he had constructed himself. These were not simply for his own amusement, for the young Plateau was putting on a show to entertain an audience. In this he combined showmanship with a display of dexterity and excellent understanding. Plateau entered the Athenaeum in Brussels in 1817 to complete his secondary education. There he was fortunate to be taught by Adolphe Quetelet who was appointed to the chair of elementary mathematics at the Athenaeum in 1819. A fellow pupil at the Athenaeum, Pierre Verhulst, provided someone with whom Plateau could spend many hours in deep scientific discussions, while both were strongly encouraged by their teacher Quetelet who became their friend. It was Quetelet who arranged for Plateau and his friends to frequently visit the National Observatory which encouraged his interest in astronomy.

In 1822 Plateau graduated from the Athenaeum having achieved outstanding success. His tutor advised him to study literature and philosophy at the University of Liège with the aim of going on to study law. Of course his guardian was a lawyer so law was in some ways a natural choice. However, although Plateau had shown great ability in these subjects, they were not the ones which interested him. He felt he had no choice but to follow the advice and indeed obtained a bachelor's degree in literature and philosophy and then a bachelor's degree in law. He had already decided that he would complete this course but then register to study the subjects which he really loved. He did just that, studying courses in mathematics and physics at the University of Liège.

Plateau now was responsible for providing for his sisters and he took this responsibility seriously. Rather than concentrate on working for a doctorate in mathematics and physics, he took a job as a secondary school teacher of mathematics at the Athenaeum of Liège; he also acted as a tutor for his sister Joséphine. Despite having all these duties, Plateau was still able to write an outstanding doctoral dissertation in a period of two years and he was awarded a doctorate on 3 June 1829.