Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau
(October 14, 1801 – September 15, 1883) 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Antoine_Ferdinand_Plateau
Charles-Émile Reynaud
Charles-Émile Reynaud was a French science teacher, responsible for the first projected animated cartoon films. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877 and the Théâtre Optique in December 1888, and on 28 October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public,
Pauvr Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris. This film is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used.
Eadweard Muybridge
In 1872, former Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether all four of a horse's hooves are off the ground at the same time during a gallop. Stanford sided with this assertion, called "unsupported transit", and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.
William George Horner
William George Horner (1786 – 22 September 1837) was a British mathematician and schoolmaster. The invention of the zoetrope, in 1834 and under a different name (Daedaleum), has been attributed to him. The son of the Rev. William Horner, a Wesleyan minister, was born in Bristol. He was educated at Kingswood School, near Bristol, and at the age of sixteen became an assistant master there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_George_Horner
Edison
(Kinetoscope) This camera was called the kinetograph. It used rolls of film about 35mm wide, and these film strips carried rows of holes down the sides to allow the film to be pulled through the camera at an even rate. These rows of holes still appear on both ciné-film and films for use in ordinary cameras.
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/bdc/young_bdc/movingpics/movingpics9.htm
The Lumières
The Lumières held their first private screening of projected motion pictures in 1895. Their first public screening of films at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film,
Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumi%C3%A8re
George Pal
George Pal (February 1, 1908 – May 2, 1980), born
György Pál Marczincsak, 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 (1942–1948) and received an honorary award in 1944. This makes him the second most nominated Hungarian exile (together with William S. Darling and Ernest Laszlo) after Miklós Rózsa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pal