Magic Lantern Castle Museum
I interviewed Jack for Make:16 and I took the photo of him, below, in his workshop where he repairs magic lanterns and keeps them working. My excerpt below contains some parts of the conversation that didn't make it into the article.
DD: There's a wonderful collection here, and it's a beautiful thing. You started in 1986 after you retired. What was the first thing that you bought?
JJ: I worked for a large, international organization. I was visiting our London office, and I asked the the manager of the office, "What's to do here in London?" I hadn't been there before. He said, "Well, go to a street market. We have them all the time here." I went to one. I bought what was purported to be a magic lantern, and I brought it back -- when airlines would let you bring things back in your luggage. After doing a lot of research, I found out what I bought was not a magic lantern but a lantern enlarger. That was my first comeuppance.
DD: The museum has a collection of magic lanterns made as toys (above).
JJ: There was a huge industry. Everything that Daddy has, the kid gets too. While it’s never quite as much as Daddy's, still it's pretty cool. Most toys were made in Nuremburg, Germany. There were at least five makers that we know of there, and they made hundreds-of-thousands of various sizes and shapes.
DD: Mostly running off small oil lamps?
JJ: Yes. They didn't really project very well, but the kid in his little room could set one up, and project three of four feet onto a wall, and see what was not a very good image from a decal that had been stuck onto a piece of glass. They were lithograph-printed images. They were a little fuzzy, probably.
DD: From being a toy or a plaything, the magic lantern comes up to be part of the early film industry starting in the late 1800s. Then we see Edison’s home kinetoscope.
JJ: You had the home kinetoscope, and, of course, then the projecting kinetoscope, which was the one that was used by more professional people. You could project films but you could not buy them; you had to rent them. Netflix of the day, I guess you might say. There's nothing new.
DD: Right.
JJ: You could buy, for 50 cents apiece, the slides that had little, tiny images that you could project -- pictures in France, or England, or the holy land.
DD: Those early films, though, were not very long were they?
JJ: No, they were very, very short. The earliest ones were 50 feet, which is basically the length of the table that George Eastman could lay out the film -- it was liquid -- and let it solidify, and then roll-cut strips that were 35 millimeter long, and so at 16-frames per second, it doesn't last very long. At some point, I recall in an autobiography where this old man talked to Edison about how to show these films, and he said, "Well, just run them through three times so that they get their money's worth." There was no story. They had no message -- no nothing. They were just images of people moving, and, in fact, they were not moving. They were really sequential stills.
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Actually, Magic Lanterns aren't the first form of projection technology... Gamalan shaddow puppetry has it beat by, in all likelihood, centuries.
Did someone check if he had a green one?
This article reminded me of the Green Lantern Oath:
In the brightest day
In the blackest night
No evil shall escape my sight
For those who worship evil's might
Beware my power
The Green Lantern's light!
Okay, so I may've gotten some of the words wrong...Has anyone finally discovered who ACTUALLY wrote the oath? As I recall SFWA Grand Master Alfred Bester denied that he composed the oath.
Someone have an answer for me?
Apparently there were a large number of itinerant magic lantern operators in the 19th century; they'd wander from town to town and put on shows in village halls, churches, private homes, etc.
I recently heard a radio programme where someone* described seeing one of the last of these shows; the (rather sinister-sounding) operator was going from door to door, and would project images onto a bedsheet for a shilling.
*I wish I could remember who it was- a writer, I think.
@2: Sorry. We weren't all reading comic books during English class. I was reminded of T.S. Eliot and his "ironic mask" J. Alfred Prufrock:
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
As much as I love Make magazine, why so much repeat on BB today? I can read the dead tree version, the online version at makezine.com and now I can practically read most of it at BB.
I want to do a steampunk rave; with Babbage engines running as sequencers to play steam-operated instruments and magic lanterns for visuals.
I believe that the term "smoke and mirrors" also comes from the era of the Magic Lantern, as both were used in older forms to obscure enough detail as to make people believe they were seeing a lost relative, etc...
If there are any Harry Smith fans out there, he used several magic lanterns projecting together when he did live performances of his animated films, such as Heaven and Earth Magic. My friend M. Henry Jones of Snakemonkey Studios in the East Village was a protege of Harry's in the early 70s, and inherited many of his magic lanterns, which he occasionally hauls out for a show, such as when Anthology did a Harry Smith retrospective a few years back.
"Actually, Magic Lanterns aren't the first form of projection technology... Gamalan shaddow puppetry has it beat by, in all likelihood, centuries"
*bangs head on desk*
with electricity perhaps??
actually I hear that scientists from the future travelled back in time and invented the whole Gamalan thing anyway..