Persistence of vision is an early version of animation were many still images that are slightly different to each other are placed in sequence which trick the brain into thinking it is a moving image. 

One of the early uses of persistence of vision is a "Zoetrope".

This image shows how you use the Zeotrope followed by an image of what the image would look like to you.

Zeotrope

What an image would look like inside the
 Zeotrope when moving

Kinetoscope 

The user would look into the devise and it would run a strip of still images to create the persistence of vision. The strip of images are what today would look like stop motion animation taken by cameras and put onto computers.

Strip that is found inside.

This is one of the first examples of a kinetoscope 

Mutoscope

Here is how a Mutoscope would of looked like to the user.