At about the same time Plateau invented his Phénakisticope or Fantascope independently, the same device was invented by Simon Ritter von Stampfer, an Austrian geometrician and geologist. Stampfer was born October 28, 1792, in the Tyrol. As a young boy he stared at the sun for a long period but recovered his normal sight after the image of the sun persisted for 24 days. When a professor of practical geometry at the Polytechnical Institute at Vienna, Stampfer published his account of the Stroboscope, as he called it, in 1834. Stampfer in his article mentioned Dr. Paris’ Thaumatrope, Dr. Roget’s paper on the persistence of vision in regard to wheel spokes and the paper of Faraday--all mentioned above. Stampfer’s treatment of the disks to create the illusion of motion was a mathematical one. He explained many complicated mathematical formulae and unlike the Plateau papers his were not accompanied by a drawing. Stampfer, though not having Plateau’s artistic talent, was a more practical man. On May 7, 1833, he took out an Imperial patent on his invention. Stampfer died on November 10, 1864, in Vienna. Plateau himself is the best authority for the respective claims of himself and Stampfer, though as always he may have been much more modest and generous than the facts warranted for basically his disk had much greater influence than Stampfer’s and his research was started first. While describing an improved form of his original Anorthoscope, or machine used to create distorted images developed first in 1828 and 1829, Plateau wrote on the invention of the Phénakisticope, Fantascope or Stroboscope, in 1836 in the _Bulletin_ of the Royal Academy of Belgium: I would like to take this occasion to say here a few words on the question of my priority to the invention of another instrument, the Fantascope or Phénakisticope, priority which is shared equally with Mr. Stampfer, professor at Vienna, who has published a similar instrument under the name of Stroboscopic Disks. In the notice which accompanies the second edition of these Stroboscopic Disks printed in July of 1833, Mr. Stampfer stated that he had commenced in December of the preceding year to repeat the experiments of Mr. Faraday on certain illusions of optics and that these experiments had resulted in the invention of the instrument which he had published. Also the editors affirmed in a foreword that in the month of February of the following year Mr. Stampfer had assembled a collection of these disks and had shown them successively to his friends, including prominent persons. They brought it about that on May 7 of that year he was given an exclusive Imperial patent to the rights to his invention.