Joseph Plateau experimenting with spinning discs since the mid-1820s, mainly in attempts to measure the duration of impressions of different colours. Along the way he had discovered a type of abstract animation discs by counter-rotating lines or slits in discs in 1828 (in 1829 he further developed aspects of this principle into a first prototype of what would become the anorthoscope). In 1830, Michael Faraday had published a paper about several illusions that occur in rotating cogwheels and toothed discs, coincidentally repeating some of Plateau's findings. A note added to the paper discussed a disc that in addition to the teeth in the circumference had a different amount of holes regularly spaced across a circular zone closer to the center of the disc. When looking into a mirror through the spaces in between the teeth, the holes appeared to be moving across the disc (or vice versa if looking through the holes). By November or December 1832, Plateau had experimentally managed to further develop the same principle into a new optical illusion that could represent any conceivable action depicted on the sections of a spinning disc (viewed in a mirror through slits in the disc). In January 1833, Plateau published an article that introduced the principle of stroboscopic animation with a device that became known as the phenakistiscope. Several months later, Simon Stampfer patented a very similar "Stroboscope Disc" in Austria. Stampfer mentioned several possible variations, including a cylinder (similar to the later "zoetrope") as well as a long, looped strip of paper or canvas stretched around two parallel rollers (somewhat similar to film) and a theater-like frame (much like the later praxinoscope theatre).