What are magic lantern slides?

Why does the word still resonate today, the year that what the successor to magic lantern slides, 35mm film Kodachrome film, was discontinued?

Magic lantern slides go back to late 1600s in Europe,
probably earlier in parts of the world where its history is not well documented. A little area in Germany became known for its magic lantern devices. An image was projected from a kerosene lamp housed in a metallic container through a glass slide on a wall or piece of cloth. The effect of these images would was magical centuries before electricity.

The sizes of these slides varied, but a thin panoramic view like the one below seems to have been common in the first half of the 19th century in Europe. The tiger hunt was something a slide artist could easily illustrate without having gone to India and captivating material for a good story.

In the late 19th century, with the development of electricity and photography, lantern slide sizes became standardized around 3.25 by 4 inches. Once paintings and illustrations, slides were now more often based on black and white photographs. The best ones and the real art came in hand-coloring each slide. While many were mass-produced, other lantern slides are one of a kind.

Japan was a center of innovation and craftsmanship, which made sense given their experience with colorizing photographs. Recent research has also revealed that lantern shows had a vibrant existence among the Russian aristocracy.

In India one might expect that it was a Maharajah's toy as well a common many's delight. On the right is anonymous image from the 1890s. These hawkers of images, with their mysterious contraptions stalked the bazaars of Lahore not too long ago.

Occasional details have emerged about lantern slide history in the subcontinent. For example, Kurt Meyer relates in In the Shadow of the Himalayas: Tibet - Bhutan - Nepal - Sikkim A Photographic Record by John Claude White 1883-1908 how the photographer John Claude White nearly blew himself up with a number of others during a magic lantern show in Bhutan in 1907. White used lantern shows to engage local audiences with his images.1 Holmes of Peshawar was another of many firms that produced lantern slides at one time or another.

There was clearly demand in India. In the early 1900s, one could find ads from a major UK manufacturer advertising their lantern projectors in Thacker's Indian Directory. 2 Bombay newspapers suggest shows around agricultural and other topics took place regularly.

Magic lantern shows were multimedia shows, with a narrator weaving the slides together into a dramatic experience. Mechanical devices were used to move objects and create illusions. Modern day recreations have lantern presenters like Terry Borton dressed up in Victorian garb, setting up dissolves between grand mahogany projectors to the accompaniment of live period music. These shows can still be enchanting.

One of the more interesting photographers to have his work turned into lantern slides was the American frontier photographer, William Henry Jackson. He went to India in 1894-95, and took a series of photographs that he presented in traveling show he took across the US in the years that followed.

While photographic collections sometimes include lantern slides, they are usually much less accessible to visitors and researchers. Few institutions still have working projectors. Although later slides were made of celluloid, early glass ones often broke. Unlike photographs, slides are heavy and likely to be disposed of when people moved.

Only a few institutions, like the Magic Lantern Society in the US or the pioneering Magic Lantern Society of the UK are keeping alive the study and presentation of lantern shows. There are also private collectors; the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, for example, recently installed a collection of early mainly European lantern slide devices at his Rubicon Winery in Napa Valley, California.

Future studies of the medium in India are likely to be very rewarding.

The links below are to Jackson's 1895 India lantern slides, and a more complete history of magic lantern slides.

1. 1. Kurt Meyer and Pamela Deuel Meyer, In The Shadow of the Himalayas, p. 30-31.
2. 2. See for example, the 1906 and 1910 editions of Thacker's listings of major European and Indian firms in each city by year.