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Established 15,000 B.C. |
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Volume , January 1671.
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all the rage!! |
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| To the modern eye a magic lantern most resembles a kerosene-fired slide projector. This preconception overlooks the slides themselves, however. Lantern slides were large, bulky, complex objects of glass, paint, wood and metal. Many had built-in mechanical features. So the lantern's projected images were not necessarily static, but could be graced with limited animation. Some slides could even create complex, constantly moving screen displays. Lantern slides came in several physical formats. Peck and Snyder's proprietary slides were 4 1/2 by 7 inches. The "usual English pattern" was 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 and the "French pattern" was 3 1/4 by 4 inches. (Brian Coe describes the standard European size as 3 1/4 by 3 1/4 inches.) But specialised slides could be over a foot long, containing gears, cranks, cogs, or even belts and pulleys. Slides were attached in front of the condensing lenses, outside the body of the lantern itself. They slid into place horizontally through metal runners at top and bottom. The following describes some of the mechanical variants of the lantern slide. Lever Action Slides. A lever protruded from one corner of the slide, attached to a second, overlapping pane of painted glass. When the lever was depressed or lifted the second glass rotated through a brief arc, resulting in a single animated movement on the lantern's screen. The Peck and Snyder catalogue enthuses: "The moving effects produced on the screen are very life-like. (...) The horse is put in motion by the lever, and appears to be cantering. (...) The children go up and down as natural as can be, and the audience can hardly believe that they are not alive. The No. 2 Electro Radiant Magic Lantern reproduces these pictures 8 to 12 feet in diameter. We consider the Lever one of the very best mechanical effects." Peck and Snyder sold lever-action slides for between $1.75 and $2.25. Brian Coe's History of Movie Photography describes double and even triple lever-action slides, but the truly elaborate ones were apparently rare. Peck and Snyder does not offer any doubles or triples. Slip slides. Slip slides had two panes of glass, with a thumb-and-finger notch cut into one corner of the wooden frame. The moving pane of glass was gripped and pulled by hand, a very simple operation. Slip slides often used black patches to obscure and reveal details of the background slide. Coe describes sub-varieties of "slipping slides" that were pulled with tabs. Peck and Snyder: "Part of the picture is painted on one glass and the other on part on another glass. The two are arranged in a frame so that one glass slips over the other, and very comical effects are produced. It is a great mystery to the uninitiated, and they cannot understand how the transformations are made." Peck and Snyder retailed these for a thrifty seventy-five cents each. Mechanical Slides: Rackwork and Pulley Slides. Early rotary slides sometimes used a belt-and-pulley drive, with two brass disks turned in contrary directions by belt drives and a little hand-crank. This technique was rivalled and eventually replaced by the neater and more accurate rack-and-pinion system. A single round disk of glass with a toothed brass rim could be cranked and rotated indefinitely. This caused repeated rotary animation on the screen. Rackwork slides cost $4.25 to $5.00 in Peck and Snyder's catalogue. The catalogue offers no pulley slides circa 1886. Chromatropes. Says Peck and Snyder: "These are handsomely painted geometrical or other figures on two glasses, which, by an ingenious arrangement of crank pinion and gear wheels, are made to revolve in opposite directions, producing an endless variety of changes, almost equal to a grand display of fire-works." Chromatrope cranks could produce single rackwork rotation against a fixed background, or double counter-rotation of both disks of glass. Peck and Snyder's chromatropes could project various brightly colored psychedelic moire' patterns up to twelve feet across. Professional chromatrope displays in large urban theatres must have been quite mind- boggling. The Eidotrope was a chromotrope variant using counter-rotating disks of perforated metal, showing a swirling pattern of brilliant white dots on the screen. "Tinters" or colored translucent sheets could be added to tint the display. Coe describes Eidotropes, but Peck and Snyder does not offer any Eidotropes for sale circa 1886. C. W. Ceram's ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE CINEMA states that Eidotropes were powered by pulleys and "superseded" by Chromatropes. The Cycloidotrope (see Coe p.19) was a truly remarkable variant, a kind of lantern spirograph. A black disk of smoked glass rotated within the slide frame, and a stylus on a pivoted arm traced a pattern in the soot against the moving glass. This appeared on the screen as a brilliant white line tracing a regular geometric design, an increasingly complex animated display. The stylus could be re-set as the cycloidotrope rotated, producing interlocking rosettes and similar mechanical geometries. Peck and Snyder do not sell or mention this impressive but labor-intensive graphic device. Images very similar to those generated by the Eidotrope and Cycloidotrope are now quite popular in computer screen-savers. Dioramic Slides. These very elongated slides were twice as wide as normal slides, 4 1/2 by 12 or 14 inches. Peck and Snyder: "These slides are exceedingly beautiful. The painting is artistic and elaborate, and the wonder is they can be sold so cheaply. A scene is painted on fixed glass, and over this is made to pass a long procession of figures -- soldiers, vessels, trains of cars, caravans, as the case may be -- with the most pleasing and wonderful effects." The colored background image was small and square, but the pane with little figures was over a foot long. The figures slid along in front of the painted background. Peck and Snyder sold dioramic slides for $3 each. Panorama slides. These landscape-style slides were over a foot long and could be gently drawn past the condensing lenses, "panning" across the picture. Like diorama slides, they often had a procession of moving figures as well. They cost $3.35 to $4.50 from Peck and Snyder. Coe states that a London optician named J. Darker succeeded in attaching a kaleidoscope to the lens of a magic lantern in the 1860s. Says Coe: "His projection Kaleidoscope produced a remarkable effect when used to fill a large screen with a colourful, constantly changing pattern." (The Kaleidoscope itself, an optical toy which is very much alive, was invented by Sir David Brewster and patented in 1817.) Ceram, C. W., Archaeology of the Cinema, Coe, Brian, The History of Movie Photography, and Peck and Snyder's Catalogue (aka "Price List of Out & Indoor Sports and Pastimes") 1886, reprinted 1971 by Pyne Press, ISBN 0-87861-094-4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ and then there was... In the 1780's a Swiss scientist, Ami Argand, devised and patented an improved lamp that provided a light source strong enough to make the Magic Lantern capable of theatrical exhibition. Limelight... In 1801 Professor Robert Hare invented the oxy-hydrogen blowlamp. A piece of calcium oxide was added by Lieutenant Thomas Drummond in his signal lamp of 1826 and by the middle of the century Drummond's limelight had become the principal source of illumination for all but the domestic lantern. This was in turn (after 1878) slowly replaced by the electric arc lamp. On a domestic level the paraffin oil lamp was the main source of light by the middle of the nineteenth century having replaced the Argand tallow oil lamp of 1780. Domestic gas then electricity came into use around the turn of the century. The simplest light source of all, the candle, was also popular in many toy lanterns sold around the turn of the century. Robinson, D., From Peep Show to Palace and Coe, B., A History of Movie Photography. also... Limelight by John H. Lienhard Sir Humphrey Davy gave a famous series of lectures on natural philosophy at the Royal Institution of London starting just after 1800. Davy was enormously influential, and he returned again and again to the theme of light. Light and seeing were scientific fixations in the first half of the 19th century. That age produced dioramas, magic lanterns, photography, the first electric lighting (long before Edison), and public gas lighting. Michael Faraday followed Davy in those lectures, and, in the early 1820s, a young member of the Royal Engineers, Lt. Thomas Drummond, watched him do a demonstration. When Faraday turned an oxygen-hydrogen flame on a lump of quicklime, the heated lump emitted a brilliant light. Drummond saw a new use for that flukey behavior. Setting distant markers for surveyors could radically improve the accuracy of geographic surveys. In 1825, Drummond set a limelight marker on a mountaintop near Belfast. It was so bright it could be seen in Donegal county, sixty-six miles away. By now Drummond's limelight has become our metaphor for the glow of public approbation, for being seen. That metaphor took shape in 1837, when limelight systems became sufficiently streamlined that they could be moved into the theater. Just before Davy's first lectures, the English had begun obtaining domestic gas from coal and leaving behind clean-burning coke. By 1837, all major theaters were being lit by coal gas. After thousands of years with little change, gas lighting was now flooding stages with light, far cheaper than the old candelabras and lanterns. And that created a craving for still more light. Limelight finished the transformation of the theater. It cast the light of high noon on stages. Lenses and filters gave limelight the warmth it lacked. It lasted until the new electric lighting systems arrived in the late 1800s. But limelight found other uses as well. The military used it to illuminate enemies at night. During the siege of Charleston, the Union Navy focused limelight on Fort Sumter while they pounded it into rubble. Ships found one another by night. During the 1870s and '80s, workmen under the East River dug the caissons for the Brooklyn Bridge by limelight. By 1952, when Charlie Chaplin made the movie Limelight, the word itself lingered only as a metaphor. "Find your light," an old actor tells the narrator in the play, Fantastiks. That means seek the center of the light that'll show you to the world. It means, "Find that same limelight beam which first cut through the night, all the way from Belfast to Donegal." References Penzel, F., Theatre Lighting Before Electricity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. Rees, T., Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1978. Beal, D., The Limelight - American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Fall, 1997, pp. 38-41. |
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