Invented by Robert W Paul's (1869-1943) cameraman, Henry W Short, this was a small hand-held flip-book device, using a lever to flip over separate pictures to give the illusion of movement. Each filoscope contained a hundred or so frames reproduced from a profesional film, many of them by Paul. They were marketed from 1897 onwards by the Anglo-French Filoscope Syndicate. This one contains the earliest film of a conjuror, David Durant.
© National Museum of Science & Media / Science & Society Picture Library