Going to the movies or watching Saturday morning cartoons has become a fixture of contemporary American life, but have you ever stopped to contemplate how those "moving" images on film are conveyed to our eyes and brain? The movement that we see on film is actually a series of still images, every image separated from the next by brief spaces of darkness. When still images and dark spaces are shown in rapid succession, the eye ignores the dark spaces, fills in the action between the stills, and tricks us into seeing movement. This illusion of pictures that seem to move occurs because the human brain remembers images slightly longer than the eye sees them. The principle is known as persistence of vision. Identification of persistence of vision can be traced to experiments by Newton and later to nineteenth-century Belgian scientist, Joseph Plateau. Scientific toys based upon the principle were developed in the early 1800s, but public fascination did not begin until the Victorian era. In this article, the author discusses the history of the principle called persistence of vision, providing many examples.