The history of the magic lantern

Video transcript

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Hello, I'm Kristen Gallerneaux. I'm the curator of communications and information technology at The Henry Ford, and I want to share this device with you.

It's called a magic lantern, and it allowed people to experience movie-like entertainment, hundreds of years before the cinema or even photography existed.

In the 1650s, a Dutch astronomer, mathematician and physicist named Christiaan Huygens projected images using an optical lens and candlelight. The effect must have seemed like magic.

Although Huygens didn't come up with the term magic lantern he's usually credited with its invention. By the 18th century, magic lanterns were hugely popular in the entertainment world and lanternists used slides like these to narrate their stories.

At first, the images were static, like a single frame of film. There are hand-painted images from classic stories, exotic landscapes, and supernatural creatures that appeared in magic shows called phantasmagorias.

Projectionists began to use special effects that we take for granted in movies today, like dissolving views. The slides also became animated. These mechanical slides have multiple layers of rotating glass discs and lever mechanisms that created motion in a single slide.

This creature appears to be tormenting a human and these ocean waves move. This special slide, called a chromatrope, creates beautiful abstract patterns like a kaleidoscope.

While the magic lantern may seem very low-tech to us today, it actually contains many layers of creative and material innovation.

New illumination sources like limelight, and eventually electricity, meant that projections became brighter and larger. Audiences grew too, filling large theatres where lanternists used stage technology to make their shows even more dramatic, even projecting onto smoke.

Despite their popularity, the magic lantern eventually ended up shrinking down in audience size, but this time into the home. Magic lantern sets like this could be purchased from catalogues and sometimes they were even given to children as Christmas gifts.

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But eventually the lantern could no longer compete with the wonders of the cinema.

 The author Charles Dickens experienced the magic lantern and he was very excited by the way it seemed to mimic the human imagination – those sorts of mental images that we get and the fuzzy edges of human memory.

One of the most popular slide sets ever created for the magic lantern, was of Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol'.

We're excited to present a magic lantern interpretation at Holiday Nights.

We hope you'll join us.

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