Movie History
Part 2
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Magic Lantern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern
The magic lantern or Laterna Magica is an early type of image projector employing pictures on sheets of glass. It was developed in the 17th century and commonly used for educational and entertainment purposes.
1646
Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit priest, published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, in which he improved on della Porta’s work, including arrangements to project using sunlight or candle light, using a convex lens as an objective to focus the images.
Kircher is one of the most famous names in the history of the lantern and is often mistakenly credited with its invention. A later edition of his Ars Magna... from 1671 includes illustrations of magic lanterns projecting pictures.
1671:
A Mystery
Kircher may not have been responsible for these pictures because they show the fairly obvious fault of having no projection lens to focus the images. So in many ways they are very similar optically to Giovanni de Fontana’s lamp or lantern of 1420, even to the extent that the images on the slides are upright as is the image on the screen. This is correct for this kind of lens-less projection, so whoever drew the illustrations probably knew a bit about basic optics, even though the lens is missing.
Willem Wagenaar has suggested (NMLJ Vol. 1 No.3) that the illustrations show point-source projectors. Hermann Hecht (NMLJ Vol. 6 No.1) suggested that when Kircher published the 1671 edition of his book, he had somehow to claim that he thought of the lantern first, and that his lantern was not only much better but much bigger as well. But Kircher did not publish details until 12 years after Christiaan Huygens had a lantern and six years after Samuel Pepys had bought one.
1650 onwards
All over Europe, people such as Dutch astronomer, mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) and the Danish mathematician Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten started to develop working models of Lantern Projectors.Huygens had a lantern at least as early as November 1659. His father kept pestering him to send him a lantern so he could “frighten his friends with it”. Christiaan Huygens
Huygens was born in The Hague into a wealthy and comfortable home. His father, a distinguished poet and well-known diplomat, was a friend of many respected European scholars. Rene Descartes was a frequent visitor, and through his influence Huygens developed a firm belief that science could in principle explain all natural phenomena. He constructed the first high-resolution telescope, by perfecting a method of grinding lenses, he designed a special kind of pendulum and used it to produce the first accurate clock, and most famously of all he developed the mathematics to describe the wave nature of light and its propagation through space. Many researchers are coming to the conclusion that if there was one inventor of the Magic Lantern in a usable form then it was most probably Christiaan Huygens.
Thomas Walgensten was the first person to use the term Laterna Magica. Walgensten not only realised the technical and artistic possibilities of the Magic Lantern, but also its economic potential, travelling round Europe demonstrating and selling them. Walgensten's Laterna Magica
Walgensten’s Laterna Magica, drawn by Dechales in 1665.
In 1663 the London optician John Reeves started to make lanterns for sale. A Frenchman, Balthasar de Monconys, recorded how he visited Reeves on 17 May 1663:
“After we had eate, we went to Long Acre to see Mr. Reeves who makes telescopes. But he had none ready and deferred us to another time and also to show us how a bull’s-eye lantern works.”
De Monconys then described the lantern.
The diarist Samuel Pepys was an early customer. He bought a lantern from Reeves on 19 August 1666, a fortnight before the Fire of London. In his diary he wrote “Comes by agreement Mr Reeves, bringing me a lanthorn, with pictures on glass, to make strange things appear on a wall, very pretty.” A later entry tells how he purchased the lantern.
Christiaan Huygens // Walgensten’s Laterna Magica, drawn by Dechales in 1665.
Magic lantern has a cool long history.so...
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