Pioneers

"Like Newton, Plateau experimented on himself and at the age of twenty-eight went blind from staring at the sun. After several agonizing months he partially recovered his sight, only to lapse permanently into blindness at the age of forty. Yet aided by his wife, Plateau continued to work on the problem of after-images until his death at the age of eighty-two. He invented the phenakistoscope, another model which dissembled movement (...) Ironically, Edison was deaf when he invented the phonograph and Plateau blind when he created a rudimentary form of cinema."

in A History of the Cinema: from its origins to 1970 by Eric Rhode; London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1976.