The Magic Lantern

In Victorian times, the magic lantern was at its peak as a popular form of entertainment.

The first magic lanterns were produced in the 1650's - so the slide projector has a history that stretches back two hundred years before the invention of photography. Before photography, slides were hand painted on glass, and the uses of the magic lantern were in education and entertainment. Samuel Pepys in his diary for 19h August 1666 reports, "Comes by agreement Mr Reeves, bringing me a lantern, with pictures in glass to make strange things appear on a wall, very pretty."

From around 1790 lanterns were used in shows called 'phantasmagoria' shows. In these the audience was shown a number of frightening images being projected by magic lanterns.

These shows were the precedents of horror films and video nasties. In many cases the images were back projected from a magic lantern behind the screen, and so the audience could not see the lanterns used to make the pictures. Even at this early stage, some of the slides showed moving images, as they were made of two or more sheets of glass, and the operator could move one sheet against the other to make the image move.

In the early years of the nineteenth century travelling showmen gave lantern shows throughout Europe. These lanternists were called Galantee' lanternists. They walked from town to town with their lanterns and slides on their back, and gave shows on any convenient whitewashed wall.

The surviving slides from this period show simple hand painted stories that could be elaborated by the showman as he gave the show.

Later in the nineteenth century there were many technical developments in the magic lantern. Dissolving views showed two views of a scene projected from two lanterns. By varying the light levels in the two lanterns, winter could turn to summer or night to day. Biunial and Triunial lanterns were developed later.

These had respectively two and three complete optical systems. simplified the projecting of dissolving views and allowed a showman to project other effects, such as projecting a scene with one lens and superimposing an angel with the other lens.

These lanterns

Hand painted slides were also produced to tell a story, and to show the sights of other countries. So the lanternist could show travelogues as well as stories and effects.

With the invention of photography, and the development of photographic methods of producing slides, many other uses of the lantern came to the fore, people could use the lantern to show their families growing up, and actual photographs of lands overseas could be projected.

Lithographic reproduction could also be used to produce slides. These were often of stories that children could project and show to one another in their drawing rooms.

One application of the story telling of the lantern was in the use of life model slides, where posed actors would tell the story. Many of the stories had a temperance theme, in line with the moral position of the times.

Illumination for magic lanterns started with candles and oil lamps, including sophisticated paraffin lamps with three or four wicks. Later lanterns used 'limelight', where an oxy-hydrogen flame plays on a block of lime, producing a white incandescent light, and electric arc lights.

In the nineteenth century many slides were produced with images that moved. Specialist toy lanterns were also produced with smaller slides, so that children could produce their own shows.

With the introduction of cinema, the magic lantern slowly faded away from its central role in entertainment and education. Study of the history of the magic lantern in the twenty-first century gives us a fascinating insight into the entertainments of the nineteenth century.