The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era

By Lenny Lipton

The first of its kind, this book traces the evolution of motion picture technology in its entirety. Beginning with Huygens' magic lantern and ending in the current electronic era, it explains cinema’s scientific foundations and the development of parallel enabling technologies alongside the lives of the innovators. Product development issues, business and marketplace factors, the interaction of aesthetic and technological demands, and the patent system all play key roles in the tale.

The topics are covered sequentially, with detailed discussion of the transition from the magic lantern to Edison’s invention of the 35mm camera, the development of the celluloid cinema, and the transition from celluloid to digital. Unique and essential reading from a lifetime innovator in the field of cinema technology, this engaging and well-illustrated book will appeal to anyone interested in the history and science of cinema, from movie buffs to academics and members of the motion picture industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Apr 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781071609514

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021

L. LiptonThe Cinema in Fluxhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_1

1. Huygens and the Magic Lantern

Lenny Lipton¹  

(1)

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Projection was invented by nature – witness the eye with its lens that projects an image of the world on the retina. Projection in this book (usually) signifies an optical process in which a two-dimensional transparency is illuminated so that the light passing through it is focused by a refracting lens (dioptric lens, in the literature of the seventeenth century) to throw an image on a screen.¹ Aristotle (384–322 BCE) noted that a beam of light, when it passed through a small opening no matter its shape, formed a circular image (Mannoni 2000, p. 4). This phenomenon is the basis for the camera obscura, which projects an image of the daylight world through a pinhole aperture into a dark room onto a white wall or screen, as described below and in chapter 7 . In addition to a pinhole or a lens, projection with a mirror (catoptric projection) is possible and it may well be that projection technology was first attained in China more than 4600 years ago based on a truly uncommon phenomenon.

The first mention of projection using mirrors or reflection may be attributable to Wang Fu, an art historian who wrote, in the twelfth century CE, that the invention, which is often called the Chinese magic mirror, was made by the Emperor Huang-ti, who lived sometime between 2704 and 2595 BCE (Hirth 1907). Although this provenance is probably apocryphal, the mirror is of ancient origin. However, a proper explanation of its optics has been given only relatively recently by physicist Michael Berry (2005). The usually circular mirror is made of cast bronze, a few inches or so across, relatively thin but not flexible, with a cast or engraved decorative figure, like a representation of the Chinese zodiac on one side, but it is the other side, the smooth and highly polished side without any visible mark, that is the image-forming surface. The effect is astonishing – a novelty that doesn’t lose its luster with repeated viewings that is both easily demonstrated and mystifying: sunlight (or a small light) reflected by the featureless smooth and shiny metallic surface produces a reflected image on a diffusing surface, like the palm of the hand, which remains in focus at any distance.

James Prinsep (1799–1840) , who worked in the Calcutta Mint, may have provided what was more or less the basis of the explanation of the Chinese magic mirror that was accepted for nearly two centuries. Writing in 1832 in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, he offers the following: …the deception is produced entirely by irregularities in the surface, which are rendered the less perceptible to the eye, because the surface is convex instead of being plane… (Hecht 1993, entry 140A). That this explanation is flawed is pointed out by Berry who writes that although the reflected image phenomenon can be approximated by geometrical optics, Prinsep’s explanation based on an image-forming reflecting concave surfaces does not apply because the surface would have to be concave rather than slightly convex as Prinsep asserts and the image remains in focus at any distance, which is uncharacteristic of an image-forming mirror (or refractive optics for that matter).²

Berry speculates that the casting process that produces the design is responsible for the mirror surface’s invisible pattern of 400 nanometer (a billionth of a meter) high lines whose relief is generated while the mirror is cooling, by unequal contraction of the thick and thin parts of the pattern, but there may be other explanations since the design may also be produced by engraving. Berry ’s analysis makes use of Laplacian optics to explain how the exquisitely small declivities, impossible to see with the naked eye, are reflected by incoming rays of light by the polished surface to produce rays that add together to form the image. Almost certainly the mirror’s image-forming property was discovered and was not an intended attribute. I have no evidence that the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Europeans we are about to discuss were influenced by the Chinese mirror, but its reflected image is suggestive of that of Della Porta, Schwenter , and Kircher’s catoptrics, the precursors of the magic lantern. Whatever the case, the magic mirror may well be mankind’s first projected image and therefore deserves to be brought to the attention of the reader.

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Fig. 1.1

A Chinese magic mirror, showing its cast image side.

Athanasius Kircher (1601 or 1602–1680), an extremely well-educated Jesuit priest, born in Geisa, Buchonia, now Germany, has been described as the last of the true Renaissance polymaths (Rossell 2008, p. 24). He studied Hebrew, Egyptian hieroglyphics, mathematics, and geology; he was also a musical encyclopedist, inventor of a system of logic, museum founder, and a theologian who attempted to create a system of universal knowledge encompassing all disciplines. His interests and inclinations, especially his theological bent, were decidedly pre-Enlightenment, but his effort to find a unifying principal of knowledge, despite the fact that it attempted to codify magic, alchemy, and astrology, had as its goal one that is not unlike that of modern theoretical physicists seeking a unifying theory of everything. He was highly regarded by some, but not by the rationalists of the time, like Christiaan Huygens. Kircher was an expert on the use of the catoptric projection techniques that he employed for his lecture-performances. He wrote about them in one of his books, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, which was published in Rome in 1646. The second edition published in 1671, discusses optics and the new optical instruments like the telescope and projection devices. Kircher and his pupil Jesuit priest and astronomer Christopher Scheiner traveled to Syracuse to the site where Archimedes was said to have used burning mirrors, a solar reflecting weapon, to incinerate the invading Roman fleet. The scientist Sir David Brewster (2005) wrote about Kircher and Scheiner’s visit: (They went to) examine the position of a hostile fleet; and they were both satisfied that the fleet of Marcellus could not have been more than thirty paces distance from Archimedes. However, it’s unlikely that Archimedes’ mirrors, if indeed he built them, could set a ship ablaze.

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Fig. 1.2

Athanasius Kircher

The Jesuit Kircher ’s avowed goal was to use projection for a church-sanctioned message, to engender the fear of God in superstitious nonbelievers by vividly depicting the godless world of spirits and ghosts. The depiction of demons and spirits to frighten and entertain was to become the subject of magic lantern performances and persists as a major cinema genre to this day. Kircher ’s practice was in keeping with the Jesuits’ approach to explain the church-sanctioned natural magic of the universe created by their God, by pressing into service man-made artificial magic, in this instance Kircher ’s catoptric projections of spooks and numerological lore (Guynn 2011); the priest was a showman who set out to astonish and convert the heathen. Kircher ’s method of mirror projection was an improvement over the technique invented by the German Daniel Schwenter (1585–1636) as given in his book Deliciae physico-mathematicae (Scientific and Mathematical Delights), published in Nuremberg in 1636. Hecht (1993, entry 15F), in his annotated bibliography, translates a heading in Schwenter ’s book as follows: How to project and display lettering by means of a mirror in sunshine, onto a wall which is in shadow. Schwenter painted or engraved an image on a concave mirror’s surface in order to reflect its silhouette image onto a wall or a screen, using the sun as a source of light that was reflected by the mirror’s surface. Hecht points out that Schwenter knew little about the actual workings of the thing he describes, but you don’t have to know how to make a plow to plant a field. Catoptric projection was improved when Kircher added a refractive image-forming lens between the mirror and the screen to produce sharper images, as described in his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae of 1646 (Mannoni 2000, pp. 25, 26).

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Fig. 1.3

Kircher’s catoptrics. The sun was used as the illumination source and lenses enhanced the imaging properties of images painted on the mirrors, N, V, and R. (Cinémathèque Française)

Hecht notes the connection between magic, the occult, and early attempts at projection, which was furthered by the advent of magic lantern technology and its superior imaging ability, so much so that in its early days, it was also known as the lantern of fear (la lanterne de peur) (Liesegang 1986, p. 11). The catoptric method, which projects a silhouette, is different from that of the magic lantern’s dioptric or refractive method, which projects light passing through a transparency rather than one that is reflected from the surface of a mirror. It is the refractive-lens transparency-slide method that became the predominant projection method during the next three and a half centuries, until the advent of the Digital Era. Invention is usually a process of iteration, and Schwenter and Kircher ’s efforts have antecedents, in particular the work of the Italian polymath Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1535–1615), a learned man whose understanding of optics was superior to that of Schwenter or Kircher , who described his experiments with catoptrics and the camera obscura in his Magia Naturalis, published in 1558 in Naples (Mannoni 2000, p. 8). Della Porta was accused of sorcery by Pope Paul V, as Mannoni puts it, due to his inclination for the marvelous. His projections were the precursor of future catoptric and magic lantern shows, as presented in the 1589 edition of Magia Naturalis, in which he describes the projection of images of a fantastical nature, featuring performers in the daylight, thrown on the inner wall of a camera obscura.

Six decades later Kircher painted images on concave mirrors and illuminated them with sunlight or candlelight passing through a spherical water-filled glass globe condenser to concentrate the light. The light reflected by the mirror next passed through a biconvex lens to help form an image on a screen in a darkened room, but only writing or silhouettes of objects could be displayed by this method. Kircher described a portable version, the barrel-shaped lucerna artificiosa or artificial light, a projecting lantern topped with a chimney, whose candlelight was reflected by a concave mirror through a biconvex lens. The description in the lucerna artificiosa deceived some scholars into thinking that Kircher invented the magic lantern. Kircher made claims about the inventorship of the magic lantern that gained strength due to Huygens ’ virtual disavowal of inventorship. The lucerna artificiosa and the magic lantern have parts in common, but the lucerna artificiosa is an example of catoptrics that like early magic lanterns used a candle for illumination but the optics are different. Kircher ’s handheld projector resembles a lighthouse light with an image painted on its reflector rather than a slide projector. However, his use of a focusing lens to sharpen the catoptric image was a significant improvement, and the magic lantern uses a similar arrangement but for light that has passed through a transparency. Since catoptrics predates Huygens ’ invention of the magic lantern, there is the possibility that he was influenced by Kircher ’s optical arrangement, but as Huhtamo pointed out to me by email: as a scientist Huygens despised Kircher whom he considered a charlatan, so it is unlikely. But it’s possible to be influenced by the idea of somebody you don’t respect.

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Fig. 1.4

Kircher’s plan for an elaborate projection temple, using his Metamorphosis machine. (Cinémathèque Française)

Catoptric projection is the precursor of an important modern technology in which the image is made up of an array of a great number of tiny mirrors, the DMD image engine, one of the underpinnings of the digital cinema. However, catoptric projection lay fallow for three and half centuries because of the magic lantern’s vastly more flexible transparency projection method, giving sharper, brighter, and colorful images, an invention that scholars now attribute to Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695). Rossell (2008) makes a compelling case, both circumstantial and using direct evidence, that Huygens is indeed the inventor of the magic lantern, some of which is presented here. Huygens (1888–1950) describes a projection lantern in Vol. XXII of his Oeuvres Complètes (Supplément à la correspondence), where he uses the term la lanterne magique , and he reproduces drawings he made in 1659 of animated skeleton figures used for lantern slides (Mannoni 2000, p. 39). Christiaan Huygens was one of the most famous men in Europe in 1659, the year he invented the magic lantern. He was a brilliant mathematician and physicist and an astronomer who, with his brother Ludwick, built telescopes with which he discovered the rings of Saturn and its moon Titan. The magic lantern is a slide or transparency projector and the direct precursor of the twentieth century’s ubiquitous celluloid cinema motion picture projector. A motion picture projector can be thought of as magic lantern that advances slides rapidly enough to create the illusion of apparent motion.

Laurent Mannoni (2000, pp. 38, 39) believes that at the very conception of his invention, Huygens projected moving images using slides that were based on Hans Holbein’s painting Dance of Death, poses of dancing stick figure skeletons. (Skeleton images would continue to figure in magic lantern content for centuries.) Mannoni speculates that Huygens superimposed two slides, a moving and rotating one with only a skull and a right arm plus a fixed slide of the rest of the body, to create real motion animation. It’s not hard to see Huygens might have come up with such an idea because the very act of transporting a slide through the projector’s gate produces on-screen motion. Huygens ’ skeleton poses in his Oeuvres Complètes are shown on page 197 as ten figures in nine groups, four of which are circled and can be used to construct an animated sequence, which Huhtamo has arranged into an endless loop suitable for projection that can be viewed on YouTube. Over the course of the next three centuries, lanternists would devise new approaches for real motion movement, a specific solution for each motion problem, often using two-dimensional puppetry to create many effects including spinning globes, flying birds, blinking eyes, moving panoramas, and so on. Hecht (1993, entry 50) writes that the origin of this kind of mechanically moved slide was the year 1697 and attributes the invention to Jena physicist Erhard Weigel (1625–1699). The antecedent of Weigel’s technique was Kircher ’s articulated cut-out jumping-jack moved by means of thin threads, as described in his Ars Magna of 1646, which Hecht (1993, entry 17) describes as a primitive prototype. Elaborate moving slides, titled working mill and lady with a curtsey, which were animated with mechanical puppet appliances, are to be found in the Musschenbroek catalog of circa 1730. Christian Gottlieb Hertel (1683–1743) cut slits in the lens tube for allowing the introduction of another slide to produce the effect of motion relative to the one in the gate, or for the use of a black slide for occlusion while a new slide replaced the previous one (Rossell 2008, p. 52).

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Fig. 1.5

Sketches by Huygens of his skeleton slides, perhaps the first projected moving images, reproduced from his Oeuvres Complètes, a portion of page 197. (Cinémathèque Française)

In this book I use a definition for cinema technology that consists of two elements: projection and motion. The projection of motion can use either of the two techniques: one that is not an illusion, but is exactly what it sounds like, real motion, and the other an illusion, called apparent motion. The first corresponds to what we experience in the everyday world and can be most simply replicated in the magic lantern by moving a slide in the projector’s gate whereupon the image on the screen will be observed to also move. Apparent motion wasn’t discovered or demonstrated until the early 1830s and is the basis for the modern cinema and television. It’s an illusion created by properly presenting incrementally different frames. For centuries the cinema of the magic lantern used real motion involving the movement of the slide itself, for example, with pans accomplished by moving a long slide through the projector’s gate and by means of mechanical appliances on the slide.

The camera obscura is an early projector that was first described in a printed work in Cesariano’s translation and commentary on Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s late first-century-BC Treatise on Architecture. It has similarities with the magic lantern in that it uses an illuminated subject, projection optics in the form of a pinhole rather than a lens, and a screen, which was plausibly of influence with regard to the design of the magic lantern, according to Hecht (1993, entry 3). In its original form, it consisted of a dark room having an aperture (pinhole) facing the outside world, the aperture casting an image on the facing wall, which is an arrangement identical that used for a pinhole photographic camera. The great advancement in its design, well-known by the time of Huygens , was made in 1568 by Daniello Barbaro (1514–1570), architect and professor at the University of Padua (Newhall 2012, p. 9). He substituted a biconvex lens (magnifying glass) for the pinhole aperture to greatly increase the projected image brightness of objects illuminated by sunlight. In the case of the magic lantern, the painted slides were illuminated by a lamp or a candle that transmitted light through them; for both the camera obscura and the magic lantern, light passes through a lens to form an image that is thrown onto a screen.

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Fig. 1.6

A camera obscura being used by an artist to paint a scene.

van Nooten (1972), in his article Contributions of Dutchmen in the Beginnings of Film Technology, has written that inventor and glass blower, the Dutchman Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633), has been cited in the literature as the inventor of the magic lantern. His name became associated with its invention as he demonstrated it in his travels throughout Western Europe, for the most part to London and Prague, where he was able to obtain financial support from royalty based on his reputation as an inventor and popularizer. Although he built projecting lanterns, they were shadow lanterns, a simple handheld lensless lantern that used a light source, a candle, or lamp burning animal or vegetable oil, to shine through the cutouts in its wall, like a jack o’lantern. It could be used to cast images of objects or animals, like a bat with outstretched wings, a reverse silhouette, whose spooky fuzzy image was thrown on a wall, as demonstrated for me by UCLA Professor Erkki Huhtamo, using a lantern from his collection. The image it cast, like that of a bat, could be animated by moving the lantern to create an illusion of flight, the perfect diversion for a cat. Huygens may have known about the shadow lantern, and his magic lantern may have been influenced by it, since it would have been turned into an even better shadow lantern with the addition of a lens in front of its cutouts.

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Fig. 1.7

A shadow lantern from the collection of Erkki Huhtamo. (Photo by the author.)

Huygens ’ invention of projection, or more exactly projection by the subtraction of light by a transparency, set the pattern for projection technology for centuries. The magic lantern is a simple optical instrument, so simple that I built one similar to it, a postcard projector, at the age of 11 after seeing one at a science fair. Early magic lanterns consisted of a light-proof housing or cabinet of wood or metal containing a source of illumination, often an oil lamp; a chimney to ventilate the heat and gasses produced by the lamp’s combustion; a concave mirror (usually a polished reflective metal like copper) placed behind the lamp to concentrate the light rays; a convex condensing lens that further concentrated light onto the slide; a holder or gate for positioning the glass slide held within a carrier for keeping it in place and transporting it; and an image-forming lens. These parts must be properly aligned to throw the image onto a screen, which was as often as not a surface like a wall or a bed sheet, the final element of the projection optical system, if one discounts the human eye. Huygens ’ was the basic projector design used from the seventeenth century into the Glass and Celluloid Cinema Eras until the advent of the Digital Cinema Era and the DMD image engine. The magic lantern was often finely made and Japanned or lacquered with an enamel-layered paint finish that Europeans used to emulate Japanese lacquerware.

Although it is highly probable that Huygens constructed his first magic lantern in 1659, his letter to his brother Ludwick, concerning a request for one by his father, is unequivocal proof that he was doing so by 1662 (Rossell 2008, p. 19). It was Italian Jesuit mathematician Francesco Eschinardi (1623–1703) who in 1668 first attached the word magic to the lantern, as in Laterna Magica, but scientists and serious scholars disliked the terminology, seeking to distinguish themselves from its charlatan practitioners by calling it the megalographic or thaumaturgic lantern and by the mid-nineteenth century, the preferred usage for the erudite user was optical lantern. Huygens traveled to London in 1661 to demonstrate his improved telescope to scientists and instrument makers, amongst them optician and telescope maker Richard Reeve. The magic lantern was available for sale at Reeve’s shop by May 1663 when Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) bought one. Scientist Robert Hooke (1605–1703), the discoverer of the biological cell in 1665, which he so named, wrote a paper that appeared in the Royal Society’s widely read Philosophical Transactions in 1668, agreeing with Huygens that the lantern was a frivolous instrument misguidedly used to frighten the gullible and superstitious. Hooke was also expert in optics and succeeded in increasing the brightness and field of view of the microscope based on the plano-convex two-element eyepiece designed by Huygens for his telescope.

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Fig. 1.8

This basic magic lantern is illustrated here with a reflector behind the candle, a slide of an upside down cross, and a two element projection lens. More advanced designs used condenser optics between the illumination source and the slide. Zahn’s design of 1686.

In his day Christiaan Huygens would have been called a natural philosopher but that job classification has gone out of style having been made redundant by the specialist, who, as the cliché goes, is a person who knows more and more about less and less. Yet, the awareness of the growth of specialization came late, for it wasn’t until 1833 that the word scientist was introduced by the philosopher William Whewell, himself a polymath and natural philosopher, to create the distinction between science and philosophy (Sehgal 2018). Today we classify Huygens as a polymath who made contributions as an astronomer, as an inventor, and as one of our great physicists working in optics and mechanics. Huygens was dismissive of his creation of the magic lantern for two reasons: he thought it was trivial compared with his other accomplishments, and he deplored its application as frivolous popular entertainment, to wit, la lanterne de la peur. Due to his ambivalence about his magic lantern, he is partly to blame for the obscuration of his contribution. He was a Protestant but not a religious man and may have resented what he considered to be the misuse of his invention as an instrument bent to the purpose of proselytizing by invoking superstitious fears in an attempt to turn the ignorant into Christians, or, even worse, Catholics.

As was the case for many an inventor, the uses of his invention were beyond his control, and an early use of the magic lantern was as the lantern of fear, a means to frighten the wicked and humble the foolish with visions from the netherworld. A letter written to Huygens in 1662 by the Parisian Pierre Petit contains what Liesegang (1986, p. 11) asserts is the first mention of the lantern of fear, in which Petit informs Huygens of the activities of the Dane Thomas Walgenstein. This probably contributed to Huygens turning his back on his invention to the extent that he indefinitely put off building the one he had promised his father Constantijn, eventually using the preposterous excuses that he had mislaid the parts and had forgotten how to build one. On August 12, 1662, in a letter to his brother Ludwick, Huygens wrote: Perhaps father will have forgotten the whole thing. If not give him the above reasons and tell him that I am willing to build him a telescope and a microscope and anything else he would like, but not the lantern; he will just have to add this invention to the list of lost arts (Hecht 1993, entry 328). Like other inventors of the time, Huygens had a business on the side selling instruments, which could be profitable, and in 1666 he was corresponding with French engineer Pierre Petit who requested advice about magic lantern optics. It seems that while Huygens had disassociated himself from the magic lantern, he didn’t mind if it was used in somebody else’s neighborhood. The magic lantern was not fated to become added to the list of lost arts, and it soon became a popular novelty as well as a visual aid for the scientific community.

Huygens was born on September 4, 1596, in The Hague, into a family of considerable accomplishment. His father Constantijn was a poet, a scholar, and a diplomat who wanted Christiaan and one of his brothers, Maurice, to also become diplomats. While Maurice had a more literary and artistic bent, Christiaan was a prodigy who was encouraged by a family friend, René Descartes (1596–1650), to continue with his mathematical studies. Descartes is one of the inventors of analytical geometry which bears his name, and he occupies an interesting place in the history of science as a man poised between the system of Aristotle and the concept of modern physics originated by Isaac Newton (1642–1727). For much of his career, Huygens was a dyed-in-the-wool Cartesian who was consumed by a passion for math and science. With the help of Ludwick, he built increasingly large refracting telescopes improving their optics, which allowed him to discover the rings of Saturn and its moon Titan. He made advances in quantifying gravitational forces that led him to correctly understand the nature of centrifugal force and how it altered the shape of the Earth. Huygens invented the first accurate mechanical clock, a pendulum clock, which became an instrument crucial to the furtherance of physics and astronomy. In his book Horologium Oscillatorium, published in 1673, he described the physics of his clockwork escapement, a mechanism not unlike that of the intermittent movement used in celluloid cinema motion picture cameras and projectors, as noted by Mannoni (in conversation).

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Fig. 1.9

Christiaan Huygens

Huygens developed the concepts of energy and work, which had also been of interest to Newton, and explained the nature of the collisions of elastic bodies which informed his construct of physical optics, of which he is the founder. His mechanically based wavefront model (based on touching elastic spheres) provided explanations for various phenomena such as the nature of double refraction or birefringence, first discovered in the crystal Iceland spar. The modern explanation, based on the electromagnetic nature of light, stipulates that a ray of light entering the crystal emerges as two polarized rays because the speed of light in the crystal is different in different directions (anisotropy), unlike glass, water, or air, in which the speed of light is the same in any direction (isotropy). Although his model is entirely different from today’s, Huygens was the first to explain polarization based on the wave nature of light, which would become the most widespread and I think most effective way for viewing plano-stereoscopic movies. His approach to physics was to mathematically solve specific problems rather than to arrive at general laws or theories, and it is for this reason that his reputation is eclipsed by that of Newton , who created the philosophical basis for modern physics in which it became a pursuit that at its most sublime is the quest to develop all-encompassing general theories to explain the laws of nature.

Newton ’s invention of calculus provides far more elegant and powerful methods for solving problems in mechanics than the geometrical techniques used by Huygens . However, to make arguments that would be persuasive to a readership that was unfamiliar with calculus, Newton derived the laws of mechanics using conventional math, in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which was published in Latin in three volumes in 1687. Both Huygens and Newton were inventors in the field of optics: Huygens invented the transparency projector and Newton the reflecting telescope, the basic astronomical instrument widely in use today. Newton ’s conception of the laws of mechanics, from which Kepler’s laws of planetary motion may be derived, was the basis for the Enlightenment’s belief in the predictable clockwork nature of the universe, but fittingly it was Huygens who invented mankind’s first accurate mechanical clock. On a trip in England, Huygens shared a coach with Newton , but there is no record of what they said to each other. Alas, whatever Huygens may have accomplished, his work in physics is overshadowed by that of Isaac Newton.

The biography of Huygens by A. E. Bell (1947) is, for the most part, a recitation of his professional activities and accomplishments rather than that of a personal life. Huygens was unmarried but was rumored to have had assignations with several women including his cousins. He was resolute in the face of adversity and carried on with his research despite prolonged bouts of depression with his work declining only in his last years. Some of his countrymen considered him to be unpatriotic since the Netherlands and France were continually at war but rather he was apolitical, spending much of his time in France in order to be in contact with its active scientific community. He returned to The Hague in August 1681, as a result of the hard line that was taken by the Netherlands’ new governor William III of Orange. Although he grew up in a Calvinist society, Huygens rejected the comforts offered by a Calvinist pastor; as he lay dying, true to himself to the very end, he remained skeptical of the Reformed Church’s doctrine of personal immortality.

Whereas Huygens may have invented real motion projection, the German scholar and lanternist Johannes Zahn (1641–1707) may well be the originator of the concept of the illusion of projected apparent motion. Zhan was not a hands-on experimenter but rather served as a compiler of published information about optical devices, including variations on the design of the magic lantern (Rossell 2008, pp. 39, 40). Zahn used long slides with adjacent figures in different poses, but his major gift to posterity is a circular ensemble of six slides with poses arranged along the circle’s periphery. Zahn ’s hand-drawn poses published in 1686 were designed to be rotated into place in the magic lantern’s gate. Zahn ’s circular format became widely used during the transition between the magic lantern and the celluloid cinema; the radial image array was applied in the nineteenth century to the phenakistoscope and its adaptations to the magic lantern, and the disk also foreshadows the gramophone record and the various disk formats and magnetic drives that we now take for granted. Zahn ’s seems to have made the original suggestion for creating the illusion of motion from a series of still images, the phases of motion, which served as the means for producing an endless loop of projected motion in the hands of Muybridge , Anschütz , and others (Hecht 1993, entries 36, 46). Zahn also extended the application of the lantern by using it as a microscope, circa 1685 (Hecht 1993, entries 36, 361). And he was an advocate of the lantern as an educational tool and projected images of live animals such as snakes, worms, and insects, trapped between the double glass walls of a slide.

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Fig. 1.10

Zahn’s projector with a disk (1686) demonstrates his understanding of the phases of motion.

The earliest mention of a magic lantern projection clock was made in 1668 by Giuseppe Campani, according to Liesegang (1986, p. 11). In 1685 Bavarian mathematician Johann Christoph Sturm, who had invented a popular portable camera obscura in 1676, published plans for a lantern clock that used a circular slide painted with the image of a clock face, on top of which was placed another transparent slide with a clock hand that remained fixed. The circular disk had geared teeth that were driven by a clockwork mechanism at the base of Sturm ’s bright portable lantern. Zahn , in 1685, came up the same clock application and also used a magic lantern to project a wind direction indicator mechanically linked to a weather vane. A magic lantern projection clock, built before 1700, is on display at the Orangerie, Kassel, Hesse, Germany, according to Huhtamo.

While Zahn promoted the use of the magic lantern as a pedagogical tool, which he built and improved, Huygens , as we have seen, considered the magic lantern to have been a misplaced effort from which he sought to distance himself. The scientist Huygens considered the magic lantern to be an inconsequential invention compared to his work in mechanics and optics, and yet projection is one of the most important of Huygens ’ contributions. He was prescient when it came to his trepidations about how projection was to be applied, and within a few decades, its popularity was based on its use for staging phantasmagoria performances designed to terrify the superstitious and delight skeptics (Hecht 1986, entry 334B, and numerous others). When his contemporaries learned of the magic lantern, they were motivated to copy the device and create their own slides and shows with the result that the magic lantern rapidly spread through Western Continental Europe and across the channel.

Huygens provided the projector and Zahn suggested how to achieve frame by frame animation, two of the most useful inventions in human history, which go unsung: there is no Christiaan Huygens Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Academy or AMPAS hereafter), and there is no Johannes Zahn Theater at the Disney animation studio. Huygens is far from forgotten, and NASA named the spaceship that landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, after its discoverer. His projector and the remarkable work of Zahn are the beginnings of cinema’s motion technology. Theirs were the crucial and tangible steps in mankind’s quest to use science and artistry to project moving images of reality and fantasy, an endeavor that continues to this day.

One of the most influential proselytizers of the new medium was the Dane Thomas Rasmussen Walgenstein (1627–1681), who was a mathematician, astronomer, teacher, and a glass grinding optician (Hankins 1995). Walgenstein traveled throughout Europe in the 1660s performing magic lantern shows, his first at a lecture in Lyon in 1665 and most prestigiously in 1670 for King Frederik III of Denmark (Rossell 2008, p. 22). His lantern peregrinations presaged those of the itinerant lanternists, and it was probably Walgenstein who demonstrated the magic lantern to Kircher . He may have been in contact with Huygens earlier when both of them lived in Paris at the same time, and they corresponded about Walgenstein ’s experiences with the lantern in Venice in 1667. Walgenstein deserves credit for spreading the word about the new medium in the latter part of the seventeenth century, while Kircher has an outsized reputation based on his assertion that the magic lantern was his invention, and it is easy to see how scholars like Musser (1995) were moved to agree because of his impressive writings, a cataloguing of seventeenth-century wisdom. It was a bit more than a decade after Huygens ’ invention that Kircher published a description of what he claimed to have achieved with the magic lantern, in the second edition of his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, in 1671. In an illustration of the magic lantern, which he called the magic or thaumaturgic (wonder evoking) lamp, he makes an error that is well-known in the field by placing the projection lens between the light source and the slide, but for a projector to work, the slide must be placed between the light source and the lens. Several authors have pointed out that the mistake may have been made by the engraver.

Kircher may have been frustrated to have been one upped by his contemporary Huygens and Hecht tells us that: Kircher convinced himself, and succeeded in convincing his associates Kestler and de Sepi, that he was the inventor of the lantern and that others, particularly Walgenstein , had only improved on his invention. The following from a letter dated March 1, 1660, to Huygens from a physician, Pierre Guisony, sheds some light on the state of Kircher ’s knowledge and what he was up to: The good Kircher continuously shows a thousand magic tricks in the Gallery of the Collegium Romanum…If he knew about the invention of the lantern, he would thoroughly frighten the cardinals with ghosts (Hecht 1993, entry 328). Yet, just as he had convinced those close to him, Kestler and de Sepi, there are modern sources that credit Kircher as the inventor or co-inventor of magic lantern projection. Kircher ’s reputation as the magic lantern’s inventor springs from self-promotion, his recognition as a scholar, and to a large extent from Huygens ’ desire to hide his light under a bushel. In the history of technology and cinema in particular, Kircher is not a unique actor, and there have been other men like him who are passionate enthusiasts of a technology, whose love for it befuddles them into believing that they have created another man’s work, as if wishing could make it so.

An art form was born, and a new profession came into being, that of the lanternist, an itinerant artist-performer traveling throughout Europe, the Savoyard, with his magic lantern strapped to his back, sometimes accompanied by his family on his peregrinations. Cinema is the art that combines projection and motion, and it was invented from whole cloth in the seventeenth century, and so it is an art of relatively recent origin giving us an opportunity to observe how, from inception, an artistic medium is created and becomes employed and developed by both technologists and artist-practitioners, but if you ask just about anyone you know who invented projection, they won’t know the answer. Our culture has not given the same weight to the importance of the invention of projection even though it is one of the most powerful communication tools mankind has devised, arriving later but as important as Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century invention of the printing press and moveable type. Projection is so pervasive a boon that, hidden in plain sight, it is paradoxically visible and invisible, what with people now spending more time looking at it descendant, the display screen than any other waking activity.

It is widely acknowledged that the invention of printing began the spread of literacy and its consequential enhancement and democratization of human knowledge. So triumphant is the printed word, so ascendant is the bias favoring verbal literacy that there is, for the most part, a disregard for the comparable revolution of visual literacy brought about by projection. Projection of motion and the display of information have revolutionized human communications and our ability to better comprehend the world we live in and to create worlds of imagination and fantasy. The image cast on a wall or a screen has been with us for more than three centuries and has become even more ubiquitous of late given its incarnation as the electronic display. It seems absurd to go on like this, making a case for the virtues of projection, since it has become so ingrained, but its importance is concealed by its ubiquity, and its significance is denied by the bias that the printed word is a more legitimate and authentic way to communicate.

Bibliographies

Books

Bell, A.E. Christiaan Huygens and the Development of Science in the Seventeenth Century. London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1947; (reprinted 1950).zbMATH

Guynn, William. The Routledge companion to film history. London: Routledge, 2011. Erkki Huhtamo, Natural magic: A short cultural history of moving images.

Hirth, Friedrich, Chinese metallic mirrors: With notes on some ancient specimens of the Musée Guimet, Paris/New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1907.

Liesegang, Franz Paul. Dates and Sources: A Contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography. Translated and edited by Hermann Hecht. London: The Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain, 1986.

Musser, Charles. Thomas A. Edison and His Kinetographic Motion Pictures. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. 5th ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012.

Rossell, Deac. Laterna Magica – Magic Lantern. Stuttgart: Füsslin Verlag, 2008.

Articles

Berry, M. V. Oriental Magic Mirrors and the Laplacian Image. European Journal of Physics 27, no. 1 (November 24, 2005).

Sehgal, Parul. Solving the Infinite and the Infinitesimal. The New York Times 168, no. 58,328 (May 15, 2018).

Van Nooten, S. I. Contributions of Dutchmen in the Beginnings of Film Technology. Journal of the SMPTE 81, no. 2 (February 1972).

Footnotes

1

Projectionists use the word throw in two ways, as it was just used, as a synonym for the verb project and as a noun to signify the distance from the projector to the screen.

2

As we shall see in chapter 71, the magic mirror was the inspiration for the work of English television inventors John Perry and W. E. Ayrton in 1879.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2021

L. LiptonThe Cinema in Fluxhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_2

2. The Magic Lanternists

Lenny Lipton¹  

(1)

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Conditions in Europe immediately after Christiaan Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern contributed to its becoming a compelling diversion. London experienced a great outbreak of bubonic plague during 1665 and 1666, which was one of a series of outbreaks that had in the recent past killed tens of millions of Europeans. At the time of the introduction of the magic lantern, smallpox was killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans annually. In addition to plague and smallpox, famine was a commonplace killer. Most families lived in crowded vermin-infested dwellings and worked from dawn to dusk to barely sustain themselves, yet they often went hungry. There was a notable lack of painkillers, and a bad tooth could kill you or make you wish you were dead. Child mortality rates are estimated to have been between 30% and 40% (Scheper-Hughes 1987). The wealthy, including the royalty, lived without good sanitation or sewage, and even Versailles did not have indoor toilets.

The well-off were afraid to take baths because they believed it would open their pores to disease and infection, so they doused themselves with perfume. In recent memory the Church had burnt heretics at the stake, and belief in the supernatural, witches, demons, and possession remained widespread. The Enlightenment, grounded in evidence-based science and rational thought challenged irrational beliefs, and while it was the creation of science the magic lantern was taken up by both the superstitious and the enlightened. In this time of religious upheaval, the magic lantern became the lantern of fear, with performances that were designed to prey on the superstitious, but the same shows served as an amusement for the more sophisticated. In much of Western and Northern Europe, the power of the Catholic Church had been displaced by the Protestant sects, the Lutherans, and the Calvinists, and across the channel by the Church of England; it seemed as if Catholicism was being swept aside. Magic lantern performances became an entertaining diversion from daily cares and a medium of lasting influence as it became a window on the world for people who may have never been more than a few miles from home, and for many this new medium was brought to them by the wandering lanternist who toured Western Europe.

Although the magic lantern was also viewed as a kind of scientific instrument, according to Rossell (2008, p. 17), it was of second- or third-tier importance because it was not considered to be a mathematical instrument, since it was not designed for making measurements. However, at the close of the seventeenth century, the magic lantern was making a deep impression on the leading minds of Europe, like the instrument maker Johann Franz Griendel (1631–1687), who was known for his excellent slide shows and his microscope improvements, who is also mistakenly credited as one of the inventors of the magic lantern, which he named. Although it was useful for their presentations, savants were not hesitant to put it down because of the way it was used by itinerant showmen, like the Savoyards and the more sophisticated practitioners in the cities, who by the end of the seventeenth century were mounting elaborate phantasmagorias that appealed to an urban audience. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, optical and illumination technology advanced, as described in chapter 3, and the magic lantern’s uses expanded to education, thereby enhancing its status with the scientific community, which now preferred to call it the optical lantern .

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who at the same time as Newton independently invented calculus, was so enthusiastic about the lantern’s prospects that he included it in his proposal for a conclave of scholars to scrutinize the latest scientific instruments. In 1675 he wrote: The Representations could begin, for example, with the magic lantern; that is, with projections of attempts at flight, artistic, meteors, optical effects, representations of the sky with the stars and comets, and a model of the Earth…fireworks, water fountains, and ships in rare forms; then mandrakes and other rare plants and exotic animals (Rossell 2008, p. 43). By no later than 1720, the leading European scientific instrument makers featured the magic lantern, but by the middle of the century, it may have lost its appeal to these specialists since it worked well enough with middling-quality lenses and it was becoming a commodity. If the specialist continued to offer the magic lantern, they may have functioned only as resellers. The magic lantern entered service in Italy’s first physics lecture hall at the University of Padua in 1755 with an instrument made by Domenico Selva of Venice, where there was a thriving glassmaking industry where eyeglasses may have originated in the second half of the thirteenth century. Selva’s lantern was an elegant machine made of dark wood with a distinctive octagonal lamphouse (Rossell 2008, pp. 76, 77). By the end of the seventeenth century, the magic lantern was well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous tool capable of creating visions of the world for those who attended a performance and it remained in use even after the establishment of the celluloid cinema in the early twentieth century when slide projection remained an important instrument of education, religion, and government.

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Fig. 2.1

A magic lantern with provision for slide storage. Made by Ernst Plank of Nuremberg, circa 1900. (Cinémathèque Française)

A magic lantern slide show required the creation of a story, depicted in drawings, which were painted on slides, and of course a performance. The lanternist and his troupe of helpers experienced the anticipation of setting up and awaiting the arrival of the audience, performing the music and narration, making the sound effects, and creating motion by manipulating the slides. It was show business in which taking a bow at the end of the show was the kind of compensation not to be had if you were a baker or a farmer. If you had the talent and the personality for it, it was better than subsistence farming. The lanternists who roamed Western Europe with portable gear strapped on their backs more than likely bought them, sometimes as a package with the lantern. Rossell (2008, pp. 46, 47) posits that at the end of the seventeenth century, and into the next, the manufacture of projectors was the domain of optical specialists, whereas the creation of slides was more likely to be in other hands, like those of painters, engravers, and artisans. By the early eighteenth century, modest-scale manufacturing of magic lanterns and slides had begun in the south of Germany. Quite obviously, making a magic lantern, with its requirements for precision optics and specialized illumination systems was a challenge, whereas the creation of the slides, while not without their own demands, was more likely to be within the sphere of expertise of craftspersons and artisans. The evidence pointing to this is that there are a large number of tracts providing methods and recipes for creating the transparent colored paints required for the slides, along with advice on protecting them by firing or coating.

Roaming storytellers, peddlers, and performers from Savoy, Piedmont, and Auvergne became magic lantern showmen known as the Savoyards. They came from a territory contiguous to France, Switzerland, and Italy (Mannoni 2000; Rossell 2008). The people of this region were like other put upon minorities with a national identity whose land is impinged by larger and more powerful countries. This French-speaking territory was the subject of considerable conflict, even though it had been established as a political entity in the eleventh century and ruled thereafter by the powerful House of Savoy. It was annexed by France and then returned to the House of Savoy and was involved in several armed conflicts from the early sixteenth century through 1815. The vagaries of fortune affected the lives of the people in this land of political turmoil and impoverishment, which may have led its people to seek an alternative means of survival as roaming salesmen and entertainers. They held sway as the preeminent lanternists for both the common folk and the middle class from the later part of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century when they began to fade out, their journey having run its course. Mannoni (2000, p. 103) writes that: …the true travelling showmen, those who moved along the roads on foot with their poor lanterns on their backs, seem to have almost completely disappeared around the 1870s. As lantern technology improved it progressed from the humble oil lamp for illumination, as used by the Savoyards, to more powerful ones, allowing the magic lantern to enter a different level of theatricality staged by a different class of urban showmen. While the Savoyards’ practice of the magic lantern began soon after its invention, how the calling originated is unknown.

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Fig. 2.2

A Savoyard with a lantern on his back. Shown in an engraving by Giovanni Volpato (1738–1803), after a painting by Francesco Maggiotto, circa 1770. (Cinémathèque Française)

The peepshow, it might be supposed, was a stepping stone to Savoyard lantern practice. The peepshow was often an individual viewing experience, but boxes were built with multiple peepholes, and its presenters undoubtedly provided commentary and possibly music just as was done for lantern shows, but were the Savoyards peepshowists? While Rossell (2008) and Balzer (1998) believe that the Savoyards were, it struck me that the proof for this assertion was wanting, so I asked two experts, Laurent Mannoni and Erkki Huhtamo (by email, the end of June 2019) if this was so, and if so might it be seen as a bridge to the use of the magic lantern. I discovered there was a gap in the scholarship – they could not confirm that the Savoyards were peepshow practitioners. Hecht (1993, entry 540/8) notes that: "In spite of the widespread popularity of the peepshow, no expert work on the instrument had been published during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; only in belles-lettres of the period were there frequent illusion to the instrument.... The fact that the peepshow wasn’t properly documented at the peak of its popularity has contributed to this gap in our knowledge. It’s reasonable to suppose that the Savoyards were first traveling peepshow practitioners before their adoption of the magic lantern given that the devices were used for similar ends. But is it true? Oddly enough, the magic lantern was available as a compact device that was more easily carried from place to place than a bulkier peepshow cabinet. As far as I can tell, the Savoyards traveled on foot and are not depicted as having used a horse or wagon, so size and weight of the apparatus was an important consideration for them. As to the invention of the peepshow, Balzer (1998, pp. 10, 18, 20) tells us: By the close of the sixteenth century all the elements of the peepshow were there…." Balzer also relates that two students of Rembrandt, Huygens’ fellow Dutchmen, Carel Fabritius (1622–1678) and Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678), are credited with the invention of the peepshow, but in 1473 the Italian architect, Leon Battista Alberti, created a box with a small hole in it for viewing perspective images with a depth effect.

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Fig. 2.3

A peepshow performance. Anonymous, circa 1780. From the collection of François Binetruy, Versailles. (Cinémathèque Française)

There were many kinds of devices that might reasonably qualify as a peepshow, with many different kinds of viewing arrangements. Some designs are open, without an enclosure, and the boxes themselves were made in different shapes and sizes. Various techniques were used to heighten perspective and to create the illusion of depth, with or without mirrors and refractive optics. Included amongst these methods is the precocious precursor of the infinity optical system, which is used in multimillion dollar simulators. In such peepshows a simple lens, a magnifying or close focusing lens, was used so the eye muscles accommodated to produce the physiological effect that the observed drawing was both magnified and apparently at some great distance. Huygens and others at the time were undoubtedly aware of them, but the best connection between the peepshow and the magic lantern is that they explored similar themes and subjects, not that one led to the invention of the other. They do have optics in common since there were peepshows that used refractive lenses, not for projection, but rather for eye accommodation for direct viewing. However the refractive eyepiece version of the peepshow is of great interest with regard to early apparent motion displays having the same viewing arrangement, the foremost examples of which are Anschütz’s Electrotachyscope and Edison and Dickson’s Kinetoscope.

The Savoyards, today anonymous, had been performing functions that required their particular attention and expertise in the towns and cities of the nations of Europe, such as selling eyeglasses bought from Altare near Genoa and regions to the south, where glassmaking knowhow had escaped the secrecy imposed by the Venetian glass industry. The Savoyards were also chimney sweepers, jugglers, hand magicians, gossipers and tellers of scandals, organ grinders, hosts of the cabinet of curiosities, and possibly traveling peepshow practitioners, the latter a conceivable bridge to the magic lantern performances for which they became renowned. The Savoyards were considered to be dashing and romantic figures for the wanderer is associated with danger and adventure, and those who remained with the fields and the farms or streets of the city admired the courage of these entertaining rogues who lived a life of uncertainty, danger, and instability, so different from their own. On the streets of the cities and town, or on country roads, and at fairs, they were valued performers because they were fun, singing and telling jokes as they cranked their street organ, and showed off their exotic trained marmosets and trove of curiosities. The Savoyard children livened up the performances with percussion instruments, dancing and acrobatics. They were the great proselytizers of the magic lantern, who celebrated the scope of its visualization and storytelling capabilities and in the process made it a part of European culture. While the magic lantern was in the process of establishing itself in Europe, in the United States, the first magic lantern show took place in Salem, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1743, which was billed as an Entrainment for the Curious. By 1895 there were tens of thousands of lanternists in the United States giving upward of 150,000 performances a year (WS: magiclanternsociety).

Early attitudes toward the magic lantern were diverse: Huygens so totally disassociated himself from it that he refused to make one for his father, but the scientists of Europe were finding it to be useful for lectures and demonstrations, for example for the projections of tadpoles or other living animals. The Savoyards, on the other hand, embraced it to tell stories that appealed to the people, often satirical commentaries about the lives of the nobility or events of the day. By 1730 a tradition had been established in which solo performers or family groups of Savoyards, equipped with a wooden cabinet magic lantern with its crinkle-top chimney, had become the itinerant lanternists of the continent and its primary exponents. Around 1740, or shortly before that, the Savoyards began to buy both lanterns and slides from vendors like lens manufacturer Berkenstein, of southern Germany, who commissioned hand-painted slides from artists in Nurnberg or Augsburg. A contemporary source reported that (Berkenstein) also puts together magic lanterns, camera obscuras and peepshows which he sells to the Savoyards (Rossell 2008, p. 110). One format was the long slide with multiple pictures in a row, which Berkenstein and others sold in the late seventeenth century. A typical sample was about 3 inches wide by 14 inches long, with up to six hand-painted scenes or episodes to be slid through the projector’s gate to create a sequence, in effect through a series of wipes.

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Fig. 2.4

Long glass slides, panoramic or with multiple images. (Cinémathèque Française)

One portable lantern that was made in between 1780 and 1800, which has come down to us, was carried in a wooden case about 22 inches high, 10 inches deep, and 17 inches wide. The projector itself was 5.7 inches square and 16 inches high including chimney; it shared one of its sides with a wall of the carrying case. Compartments in the case were provided for the lens, slides, and the oil supply. The design encouraged rapid setup and placed everything required for operating the projector at hand (Rossell 2008, p. 133). On occasion, Savoyards were invited into the homes of the middle class to entertain the children with a show; they were the movies, television, and the Internet of the age. The Savoyard lanternists and their activities were memorialized in European history by numerous drawings, paintings, decorations on cups and flatware, tea sets, bronzed statuettes and