Joseph Plateau (Phenakistoscope)

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist. He 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 phenakistoscope.
William Horner (Zoetrope)
The Zoetrope was invented in 1834 in England by William Horner. He called it
the daedalum (the wheel of the devil). The Zoetrope wasnt popular until
the 1860s.
Emile Reynaud (Praxiniscope)
The Praxiniscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It
was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Emile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope
it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning
cylinder. The Praxinoscope improved on the Zoetrope by replacing its narrow
viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors placed so that the reflections of
the pictures appeared more or less motionless in position as the wheel
turned. Looking through the mirrors when the wheel is spun you would see a
fast sequence of images producing the illusion of motion with a brighter and
less distorted picture the Zoetrope offered.
Edward Muybridge
Edward Muybridge was 18th century photographer. In 1872 Muybridge
photography skills were put to the test to prove if a galloping horse lifts all
four hooves off the ground at one point in the sequence of motion.
Muybridge refined the available methods of instantaneous photography
introducing specially designed equipment that worked as faster speeds. By
1878he was photographing horses in motion using batteries if cameras, their
shutters triggered by the horses movement over the trip wires. The results
were a technical and conceptual breakthrough.
Thomas Edison (kinetoscope)
The Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by one individual at a
time through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. The
Kinetoscope was not a movie projector but introduced the basic approach
that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the
advent of video, by creating the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of
perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-
speed shutter. First described in conceptual terms by U.S. inventor Thomas
Edison in 1888.
The Lumiere Brothers
Auguste and Louis Lumiere came from Lyon in France, where they worked in
their fathers photographic factory. In 1894 they saw Edisons Kinescope in
Paris that inspired them, so they design a camera of their own. By February of
the next year (1895) they had produced a working model of their Cine
camera, which they called a cinematographer.
The films produced by the Lumieres camera were usually about 50 seconds
long. They were taken in one shot with the camera kept fixed on a tripod
looking the same way all the time. The first film which was ever shown to an
audience was a moving image of workers leaving a factory in Lyons. This film
was also the first time that an audience had seen moving pictures projected
on a screen. The first public screening of one of the Lumieres films was
given on the 28th December in 1895 in Pairs.

George Pal
George Pal was a Hungarian-born American animator and film producer,
principally associated with the science fiction genre. He became an American
citizen after emigrating from Europe. He was nominated for Academy Awards
(in the category Best short subjects, Cartoon) no less than seven consecutive
years. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKhnlhFnIM4