15 Facts About Magic lantern

Magic lantern, known by its Latin name, is an early type of image projector that used pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates, one or more lenses, and a light source.

Magic lantern used a concave mirror behind a light source to direct the light through a small rectangular sheet of glass—a "lantern slide" that bore the image—and onward into a lens at the front of the apparatus.

Magic lantern can be seen as a further development of camera obscura.

Oldest known document concerning the magic lantern is a page on which Christiaan Huygens made ten small sketches of a skeleton taking off its skull, above which he wrote "for representations by means of convex glasses with the lamp" .

Magic lantern"sold such lanterns to different Italian princes in such an amount that they now are almost everyday items in Rome", according to Athanasius Kircher in 1671.

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Kircher did suggest in his book that an audience would be more astonished by the sudden appearance of images if the Magic lantern would be hidden in a separate room, so the audience would be ignorant of the cause of their appearance.

Magic lantern was not only a direct ancestor of the motion picture projector as a means for visual storytelling, but it could itself be used to project moving images.

Some suggestion of movement could be achieved by alternating between pictures of different phases of a motion, but most magic lantern "animations" used two glass slides projected together — one with the stationary part of the picture and the other with the part that could be set in motion by hand or by a simple mechanism.

The subject and the effect of magic lantern dissolving views is similar to the popular Diorama theatre paintings that originated in Paris in 1822.

Possibly the first horizontal biunial Magic lantern, dubbed the "Biscenascope" was made by the optician Mr Clarke and presented at the Royal Adelaide Gallery in London on 5 December 1840.

Versions of the magic lantern were used to project transparent variations of the phenakisticope.

The magic lantern was used to illustrate lectures, concerts, pantomimes and other forms of theatre.

Utushi-e is a type of magic lantern show that became popular in Japan in the 19th century.

Some enthusiasts claim that the brilliant quality of color in Magic lantern slides is unsurpassed by successive projection media.

The magic lantern and lantern slides are still popular with collectors and can be found in many museums.