Fantasmagorie - The very first animated movies in history

"Fantasmagorie" is a French animation movie made by Émile Cohl in 1908, which's considered the first animated cartoon ever.

Émil Cohl was a French graphic artist and he's also the first cartoon filmmaker in Europe. In the year of 1908, he joined the Gaumont film company as a writer, then moved to making animated films. He actually made a lot of films (more than 250 products), using drawings, puppets, cut-outs, and more.

Cohl's film of "Fantasmagorie“ (or also known as Phantasmagoria in English) is likely the very first animated film in the history. 

Fantasmagorie defined as "a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imaged“. Émil Cohl worked on this film for around 5 months. He had drawn each frame on paper which he shot onto negative film. For this film, each frame on paper takes him about 80 seconds to complete, and he had to draw totally about 700 pictures which he photographed later. The colors in the negatives weren’t inverted on the film; therefore, it looks like chalk on a blackboard though it was originally drawn with a black pen on white paper.

The film has no real story or structure. You can see different scenes that are morphing into other different images. In the 1st scene, a hand is drawing a little clown which doubles as a chubby guy who falls into a chair in a theater. 

(Source of information: http://www.lomography.com/)

History of pencil

The modern pencil was first invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, who's a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

The magic material that was so appropriate for the purpose was the form of pure carbon that we call graphite. It this material was first discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the start of the 15th century. despite the fact that the Aztecs had used it as a marker several hundred years earlier. It was initially believed to be a form of lead and was called ‘plumbago’ or black lead (so the ‘plumbers’ who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil ‘leads’. 

This stuff was called graphite only in 1789, using the Greek word of ‘graphein’ meaning ‘to write’. Well, the pencil is an older word, derived from the Latin language ‘pencillus’, meaning ‘little tail’, to describe the small ink brushes  that were used for writing in the Middle Ages.

The First Paper Money in the world

Paper bills were first used by Chinese people, who started carrying folding money during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) - mostly just in form of privately issued bills of credit or exchange notes - and used it for over 500 years before the practice began to catch on in Europe in the 17th century. While it took about one or even two centuries for paper money to spread out to the rest of the world, China was already going through a kind of fairly advanced financial crisis: the production of paper notes had grown until their value plummeted that prompted inflation to soar. Due to that, China entirely eliminated paper money in 1455 and would not adopt it again for several hundred years after that. 

It's Just For Fun!!!

The world around us is so big. Knowledge is like an endless sea and what we know is really, really tiny!!! With the hope of introducing you some great facts about the world, which are so simple and interesting but we might somehow get remiss. Well, in this blog, I'm going to just focus on the facts like who made the first instant noodle, when the first PC was made, or something like these. But don't take them so seriously, keep in mind that it's just for fun. Haha!!!