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Peter Mark Roget Peter Mark Roget (b. Jan. 18, 1779, London, Eng.-d. Sept. 12, 1869, West Malvern, Worcestershire), English physician, philologist, and scientist.
Submitted by riechman76 on August 20, 2006
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Peter Mark Roget (b. Jan. 18, 1779, London, Eng.--d. Sept. 12, 1869, West Malvern, Worcestershire), English physician, philologist, and scientist.
Widely remembered for his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), a comprehensive classification of synonyms or verbal equivalents that is still popular in modern editions. Roget theorized in 1824 that the retina of the eye retains an image for a fraction of a second until the image changes. This persistence of vision theory is to fool the eye into believing a succession of separate and slightly different images to be actually one moving image. In 1852, Roget's persistence of vision theory had inspired others to exploited inventions that animated pictures. Franz von Uchatius, a German, put an animated strip of a drawing (done on glass) into a lantern and projected the resulting moving images onto a movie screen. Germans called this animation process, "The magic lantern."
By the age of fourteen Roget was studying medicine at Edinburgh University, graduating five years later to tutor the children of a wealthy merchant from Manchester. Roget concentrated on medicine from 1808-1840. Roget primary medical research was in the field of human senses. In 1814, he also invented what he called a "log-log." Roget's invention is what as known to today as a slide rule to calculate the roots and powers of numbers. This formed the basis of slide rules that were common in schools and universities, until the calculator age over 150 years later. In 1815, the Royal Society elected Roget as an official fellow.
In 1824, he wrote a paper describing an optical illusion he had noticed while watching the wheels of a horse drawn carriage through the blinds of a window. The illusion persistence of Vision allows us to see a succession of still images as a continuous moving picture. This makes cinema and television work. Roget studied the phenomenon with a simple device he built himself. When he set it...
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