The Belgian mathematician and physicist Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was born in Brussels on October 14, 1801.
(October 14, 1801 – September 15, 1883)
Retouched daguerreotype by Albert Callisto
His invention, the ‘phenakistiscope’ was one of the first devices ever to create the illusion of a continuously moving image. He used a spinning disc.
The following example of such a disc was created by Eadweard Muybridge in 1893.
Animation has come a long way since then, but this still looks pretty good!
novellaandbanannabelle.wordpress.com 
Love that spinning disc and to think it was from 1893, wow!