Maker

CLASSIC TALE: The Ratcatcher, the most popular of all mechanical slides, portrays a sleeping man in bed, with a rat coming from under the covers to see the source of snoring, then crawling into the mouth. One

piece of glass levers the mouth open and closed, and the crank rotates a piece of glass to move the rat up and into the mouth. Note the round brass rack and pinion operated by the crank.

DD: Let’s talk about the slides. The slides are made of glass inside a wooden frame. JJ: Exactly. A lot of them in the early days were simply freehand paintings on glass. They’re miniature paintings, but, of course, made to blow up to incredible sizes at times. Some of them would be 3 inches in diameter, some of them even smaller. It was the earliest AV.

DD: That lanternist was the AV man. JJ: He was it!

DD: Then the slides begin to change because of photography. JJ: In the late 1830s to 1840, we got photography but no one was thinking of projection. They were making pictures on metal or paper. Fortunately, a pair of brothers from Germany, William and Frederick Langenheim, figured this out. William fought in the Texas Revolution, and Frederick started a photography business in Philadelphia. They are credited with inventing the first black and white photographic lantern slide. They didn’t have color photography.

DD: You showed me examples. The process was to paint a larger picture and take a photograph of it, and then do this transfer process to create a slide, which was then handpainted to add color. JJ: To handpaint all the details required incredible skill and eyesight, and a lot of technique. They would take characters out of, say, Tennyson’s poems, or Les Misérables, and show the characters in great

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detail, because they went with published stories that were well known. They could then bring a story to light.

DD: A lot of the language of film editing originates with the magic lantern.

JJ: The first motion of any kind, or any effect, that we now take for granted — whether it’s electronic, or on motion picture film, or digital — was done when they learned that you can move one piece of glass past another piece of glass, and cause things to darken out, or to change. It gives the simulation of motion.

They also learned that they could dissolve — a word we use today — from one image to another by raising the firelight in one lantern, and lowering it in the other one using a very-nearly identical slide. A house might be shown in daylight, and dissolve into an image of the house at night.

DD: Did it require dual projectors? JJ: You would, generally, have at least two sets of lenses. That way you could dissolve smoothly without interruption of the viewing.

DD: What’s your favorite projection? JJ: The Ratcatcher slide is legendary. Basically, it was the hit of the show and I use it still. There’s a man recumbent in a big old bed in the 1800s, and he’s got a candle burning on his nightstand, and he’s under the covers. He’s got a long black beard and wears a nightcap. One of the levers on the side of the magic lantern moves a piece of glass up and

Photograph by John Jackson