down, so that his jaw opens and closes as if he was snoring.

Then you have a crank on the other side and as you turn it, coming up from under the bed and up over the covers comes a rat to investigate the man snoring. It gets closer and closer to the man’s mouth. Finally, he swallows the rat. The audience goes nuts.

“Man has been fascinated by projected imagery ever since there were shadows dancing on the walls of a cave.”

DD: In your museum are handbills used to promote magic lantern shows. The programs were not just stories, but also lectures — travels in England, for example.

JJ: Yes, and there are many on the evils of drinking. That was a big movement in England, called the Band of Hope, and their motto was, “Water is best.” A very popular thing was catastrophes — the Youngstown flood, and the Galveston hurricane, and the terrible fire somewhere, not to mention the San Francisco earthquake. As one fellow wrote in his autobiography, people seemed to love to go see horrible stories.

You could buy slides for 50 cents apiece. You could not buy films; you had to rent them. Netflix of the day, I guess you might say. There’s nothing new.

DD: A magic lantern show is a group of people sitting in a room, watching “horrible” images on a wall. JJ: They also did science lectures. Some of the shows were humorous. Some of them were educational. They used magic lanterns in churches to project hymns.

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 where George Eastman could lay out the film — a liquid — and let it solidify, and then roll-cut strips that were 35 millimeters [wide], and so at 16 frames per second, it doesn’t last very long.

At some point, I recall the story 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. Films for the Edison home kinetoscope were printed in three tracks on one film width so the film could be run forward, then played again reversing the reel, and then again forward. It was a very unusual thing.

DD: One focus of your collection is how the secret societies used the magic lantern for initiation ceremonies and to reveal secrets that only the members knew. JJ: Masons, for instance. They came up with a marvelous device known as the hoodwink. Those to DD: These are hand-cranked machines. be initiated were fitted with what looked like a set of JJ: They’re all hand-cranked. It’s a wonderful, click-goggles attached to a leather hood. The goggles had ing, mechanical sound that we don’t hear anymore. a lever on either side where you could flip open the eyepieces to see, or close them to keep the initiate in the dark. They strapped it around the initiate’s head, and led him into the inner chambers, where he was shown a light-show presentation that told the secret story of the lodge. That device gave rise to the term “being hoodwinked.”

DD: The magic lantern comes to be part of the early film industry starting in the late 1800s. The Edison kinetoscope could project from slides and film. JJ: You had Edison’s home kinetoscope, and, of course, then the projecting kinetoscope, which was the one that was used by more professional people.

DD: You have a beautiful collection here. JJ: Nowhere else in the world can you go and see the complete variations on how magic lanterns were made and what they were used for. It really was AV in every sense of the word, and it developed into motion pictures. Man has been fascinated by projected imagery ever since there were shadows dancing on the walls of a cave.

The Magic Lantern Castle Museum follows the use of magic lanterns up until the first generation of film projectors. Judson decided to stop collecting there, at the advent of cinema.

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