What's a magic lantern?
Before cell phones, computers, or TV screens, one of the most popular ways to look at pictures was through magic lanterns. A magic lantern is a projector that uses light to project images. Like our projectors today, magic lanterns took small pictures and blew them up so that they could be projected onto a screen, wall, sheet, or any other surface that would show images well.
Magic lanterns were first invented in the mid-1600s by Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. In the beginning, they were mostly used to project scary images, like Death or skeletons. Huygens' first sketches of pictures that could be projected using magic lanterns were even a series of pictures of Death taking off its head. These scary pictures eventually became the core of horror shows called " Phantasmagoria," which were very popular throughout the 19th century.
As magic lanterns became more available, people started using them for other things like traveling shows and university lectures. At first, only universities, museums, and professional storytellers could afford to buy magic lanterns, but by the 1820s, technology had advanced enough that magic lanterns and their slides could be mass produced. Now, middle class and even some working class families could afford to buy and use lanterns in their homes. By the 1900s, toy-sized magic lanterns had become cheap enough for most families to afford, and they were very popular with children of all ages.
Very early on, people realized that you could use magic lanterns to project moving images. The easiest way to achieve that is to project two slides at once, one background slide that stays still and one foreground slide that is moved across the background to project movement. Over the 150 years that magic lanterns were popular, increasingly complicated mechanisms were invented to make the pictures move in more realistic ways. They could even do a fancy dissolve transition between two images by lining two slides up and slowly turning down the light on one slide and turning it up on the other one simultaneously!
