Magic lantern

• 1. Introduction

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  The magic lantern cast its first flickering images onto walls and screens more than three centuries before cinema existed. In 1659, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens sketched ten small figures of a skeleton removing its own skull, scrawling above them a note about representations made with convex glasses and a lamp. That single page, found among documents from that year, marks the oldest known record of this device. Huygens almost immediately regretted what he had made. He called it a bagatelle, worried it would embarrass his family, and even tried to have his own lantern sabotaged before it reached the court of King Louis XIV. Yet the device he wished he had never invented would go on to fill theaters, terrify churchgoers, educate students in botany and astronomy, and lay the mechanical groundwork for the motion picture projector. How did a tool its own creator tried to suppress become the dominant visual medium of the 18th and 19th centuries? And what made it capable of moving images decades before anyone invented film?

• 2. How the Machine Works

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  A concave mirror sits behind the light source at the heart of the apparatus, directing as much light as possible forward through a small rectangular glass slide. That slide bears the image, and a lens at the front of the lantern focuses the slide's plane onto whatever surface serves as a screen. Because a single lens inverts whatever passes through it, just as a camera obscura does, operators insert each slide upside down so the projected image lands the right way up. Early lanterns used candles or oil lamps, which produced dim results. The Argand lamp, invented in the 1790s, brought a noticeable improvement in brightness. Limelight, developed in the 1820s, pushed output to roughly 6,000-8,000 lumens. The electric arc lamp arrived in the 1860s and removed the need for combustible gases or hazardous chemicals, and later incandescent bulbs added safety and convenience without matching the raw brightness of the arc. Slides themselves went through a parallel evolution. Figures were first rendered in black paint on glass, then transparent colors were added. Oiled paper was sometimes used instead of glass. Most handmade slides were mounted in wood frames, and a layer of transparent lacquer often sealed the painted surface. After 1820, manufacturers began printing outlines onto glass using copper plate processes and coloring them by hand. The first photographic lantern slides, called hyalotypes, were invented in Philadelphia in 1848 by the German-born brothers Ernst Wilhelm Langenheim and Friedrich Langenheim, and patented two years later. By the mid-19th century, much of the mass production of smaller, cheaper lanterns had shifted to Germany.

• 3. Disputed Beginnings

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  Thomas Walgensten, a mathematician from Gotland who studied at the University of Leiden in 1657-58, may have encountered Huygens there and learned the lantern's secrets from him. From 1664 to 1670 Walgensten demonstrated the device across Paris, Lyon, Rome, and Copenhagen. In Rome, Athanasius Kircher reported in 1671 that Walgensten had sold so many lanterns to Italian princes that they had become nearly everyday items in the city. Walgensten is credited with coining the term Laterna Magica, apparently communicating that name to Claude Dechales, who published a description of seeing the machine of the "erudite Dane" in Lyon in 1665. Then in 1670 Walgensten projected an image of Death before the court of King Frederick III of Denmark. The projected specter frightened courtiers, but the king dismissed their reaction and asked to see the figure three more times. Frederick III died a few days later. A separate tradition may have developed independently in southern Germany, centered on lanterns with horizontal cylindrical bodies rather than the vertical bodies associated with Huygens and Walgensten. Instrument maker Johann Wiesel of Augsburg built a ship's lantern around 1640 that shared key features with later magic lanterns: a horizontal cylindrical body, a concave mirror behind a lamp fixture, and a biconvex lens at the front. Huygens is known to have studied Wiesel's lens samples since 1653, but no direct evidence ties Wiesel to a finished magic lantern. After his death in 1662, his successor continued producing the same designs, and in 1677 a publication named Johann Franz Griendel, who had arrived in Nürnberg in 1671, as the inventor of the lantern.

• 4. From Fear to Education

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  Pierre Petit, a Parisian engineer, called the device a "lanterne de peur" in a 1664 letter to Huygens, and the earliest surviving slide subjects bear that name out. Projected images of demons, skeletons holding hourglasses, and souls in purgatory were the medium's first vocabulary. According to legend, Kircher secretly projected images of Death onto the windows of apostates at night to frighten them back into church. He also suggested in his 1671 book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae that audiences would be more astonished if the lantern was hidden in a separate room, keeping them ignorant of the cause of the apparitions. By 1671, though, when Griendel described the lantern to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the possibilities had expanded well beyond horror. Griendel described it as presenting figures, paintings, portraits, faces, hunts, and even a full comedy with all its living colors. Leibniz himself imagined a kind of world exhibition in 1675 featuring projections of flight attempts, artificial meteors, sky maps with stars and comets, fireworks, water fountains, rare plants, and exotic animals. Johannes Zahn made the educational case explicitly in 1685-86: detailed anatomical illustrations were nearly impossible to draw on a chalkboard but could be easily copied onto glass or mica and projected. Scottish lecturer Henry Moyes's tour of America in 1785-86 brought the magic lantern into college laboratories. French writer Stephanie Felicite, comtesse de Genlis, used projected images of plants to teach botany in the late 18th century. In 1821, Philip Carpenter's London company introduced a lightweight, transportable lantern with an Argand-style lamp suitable for classrooms. His first educational slide set, The Elements of Zoology, appeared in 1823 with over 200 images in 56 frames, organized according to the classification system of the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus.

• 5. Animated Projections

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  Huygens's 1659 sketches suggest that his skeleton was designed to remove its own head and replace it, which means the very first demonstrations may already have incorporated moving images. Robert Hooke wrote in 1668 that spectators not versed in optics, seeing the apparitions and disappearances and actions the lantern could represent, would readily believe them supernatural. The simplest motion effects used two glass slides together: one holding the static background and one carrying a figure that could be moved by hand or mechanism. Slipping slides allowed a moveable glass plate to slide across a fixed one, making eyes shift in their sockets, waves roll across a sea surface, or a procession of figures pass through the frame. Lever slides produced more natural movements, such as a woodcutter raising and lowering an axe, and pulley slides could turn the sails of a windmill. Rackwork mechanisms drove more complex motion, including revolving planets and satellites orbiting the Sun. A device offered by one M. Dicas in 1795, called the Lucernal or Portable Eidouranian, showed exactly that. Fantoccini slides used jointed figures set in motion by levers, rods, or cams, named after the Italian term for animated puppets. Two British patents for slides with moving jointed figures were granted in 1891. In 1709, a German optician named Themme built slides including a carriage with rotating wheels, a cupid with a spinning wheel, a shooting gun, and falling bombs. Glass wheels were cut with a diamond and driven by a thread spun around small brass wheels. Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited Themme's shop, found the mechanisms simple but bought seven moving slides and twelve more with four painted pictures each. The Choreutoscope, purportedly invented around 1866 by Greenwich engineer John Beale, projected six pictures with a hand-cranked mechanism for intermittent movement and synchronized shutter action; it was later used at the first professional public demonstration of the Kinetoscope to explain how that device worked.

• 6. Phantasmagoria and Showmanship

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  Phantasmagoria turned the lantern's capacity for fear into a commercial art form, using rear projection, mobile projectors, and a battery of effects to stage what audiences experienced as genuine encounters with the dead. The magician Phylidor created what appears to have been the first true phantasmagoria show in Vienna from 1790 to 1792, using mobile magic lanterns with Argand lamps. He framed his show as an expose of charlatans, claiming it revealed the tricks that operators like Johann Georg Schropfer and Cagliostro had used to deceive their audiences. As Paul de Philipsthal, he brought the Phantasmagoria to Britain starting in 1801 with great success. Etienne-Gaspard Robert became perhaps the most celebrated of the showmen who followed Phylidor. His Fantasmagorie ran in Paris from 1798 to 1803, and he patented a mobile Fantascope lantern in 1798. He performed throughout Europe and returned for a comeback in Paris in 1814. The Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, which opened in 1838, became a major showcase for all these techniques. Its main theater held 500 seats, and lanternists there worked with six large lanterns running on tracked tables to project detailed images onto a screen of 648 square feet. In Japan, a distinct tradition called Utsushi-e developed in the 19th century. The Dutch are thought to have introduced the lantern in Japan before the 1760s. Kameya Toraku I first performed in 1803 in Edo in the new style, using lightweight handheld wooden projectors called furo that allowed several performers to move projections of different colored figures across the screen simultaneously, combining Western mechanical techniques with the skills of traditional Karakuri puppetry.

• 7. Dissolving Views and Later Craft

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  Paul de Philipsthal reportedly invented the dissolving view effect in Ireland in 1803 or 1804 while working out how to make the spirit of Samuel appear from a mist in a staging of the Witch of Endor. The method involved two lanterns projecting matching images: the first was slowly dimmed while the second brightened, producing a seamless transition from one scene to the other. A newspaper account of his 1812 London performance described a series of landscapes in imitation of moonlight changing insensibly to produce a very magical effect. Henry Langdon Childe, who may have once worked for De Philipsthal, is said to have invented the same effect independently in 1807 and to have refined it by 1818. The oldest known use of the phrase "dissolving views" appears on playbills for Childe's shows at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1837. Biunial lanterns with two projecting optical sets were built specifically to make dissolving views easier to produce. The first known horizontal biunial, called the Biscenascope, was made by an optician named Mr. Clarke and presented at the Royal Adelaide Gallery in London on the 5th of December 1840. Triple lanterns later enabled additional overlay effects, such as snow falling as a summer scene dissolved into a winter one. Several of the special-effect slides developed during this period became celebrated devices in their own right. The Chromatrope, possibly invented around 1844 by Henry Langdon Childe, produced dazzling geometrical color patterns by rotating two painted glass discs in opposite directions. The Eidotrope, invented by English scientist Charles Wheatstone in 1866, used counter-rotating discs of perforated metal or card to generate swirling Moire patterns of bright white dots. Of all the original lanterns from the first 150 years after the invention, only 28 are known to have survived as of 2009.