 Can everyone see a man hiding behind a camel in a dust storm? Okay. This is a magic lantern. Is anyone really here who know what magic lanterns are? No? Great. Okay. This quite simply is a projector. There's a light source there. There's a condenser lens. You put the slide in this slot here. And there's another focusing lens on the end. All it does is throw pictures on walls. This is kind of an anachronistic projector. It's a Johnson's optoscope. It's from the 1910s. But the magic lantern, and these slides are a lot older. This slide that you're looking at here was painted sometime in the 1830s, probably. But the principle goes back to the 17th century. It was invented by a Dutch scientist called Christian Halkens. He's the man who invented the pendulum clock and who discovered the rings of Saturn. He also developed this principle, which is based on the old camera obscure idea that if you put an aperture in a wall light will carry through and project things on the other side. He just turned it inside out and put it in a little box. So Halkens invented this in the first reference to it in his notebooks is in 1659. And he himself hated it. He was a very serious scientist. He was interested in talking to very serious people, day car and people like that. And he thought that he had no time with something that made phantoms appear and that very disreputable people could use to fool people and make ghosts happen and all that. But lots of other people did like it very much. So it's spread out from around Houshens. There was a Danish mathematician who's called Thomas Valgenstein, which is a lovely name, who started touring around the courts of Europe with the Magic Lantern in the 1660s. It turned up in a British instrument maker shop, Richard Reeves, in London, around that time as well. There's a reference to it in Samuel Peets' notebook. He says he did also bring a lantern with features in glass to make strange things appear on a wall. Very pretty. And from there, lots of other people. Robert Hooke took an interest, Willem Jacobs-Greves and the Dutch philosopher and Voltaire, who we'll come back to later. But soon after this, people or scientists started to lose interest in it because Magic Lantern doesn't really do anything from a scientific point of view. It doesn't prove any experiments. You can't test anything with it. All it does is throw images onto a screen. So they lost interest pretty quickly. But the instrument makers, particularly instrument makers in southern Germany around Nuremberg, started to take an interest because they saw something that they could make some cash out of. So they started selling cheaper Magic Lanterns to a different sort of people. These people were itinerant Lanternists. They would travel around Europe, around France and the U.K. and Germany and Holland. And they would bang on people's doors and they would show Magic Lanterns shows. They come by many names. They're called the Savillards, the Gallanty Men. They were known as the Walloons or the Rary Showmen. And from the start of the 18th century, they start to turn up in plays and prints and there are a series of ceramic figurines featuring them made by the Messian Factory, which were very popular. This is a print from the museum here, which has one of these disreputable poor folk showing a Magic Lantern show. So this changed what the thing was somewhat. It became something for show people to show at fairs and in people's homes. Here we have one here. Notice, first of all, it's a girl. Lots of people like to think that there were not a lot of Lady Lanternists in those days, but I've seen three or four prints, which says that there was probably enough. And she's holding a hoody girdy, which is one of these here, and a Magic Lantern on the top. This is an 18th century Magic Lantern. Notice the difference between that and the one that I'm using. But the principle is exactly the same. And these people would wander around and sing and shout things in the streets. They'd say things like, Curiosity for the Asking. Show the beautiful Magic Lantern in your home. It will cost you no more than 50 sews. And they'll say, You'll see the good Lord, the Master Sun, and Madam Moon, the Stars, the King, the Queen, the Gendarm, the Hangman, the Morning, the Afternoon, the Seven Deadly Sins. It's superb. It's magnificent, ladies and gentlemen. Roll up, roll up. We're starting in a moment. The room's already full. And in all your life, you've never seen nothing so rare and curious. These are from plays of the period. They're not direct recordings of what people said, but lots of literary work start to pick up on these quite romantic figures, people thought. We know a little bit about what the Lanternists did from the surviving slides. Here's a couple from the Media Museum in Bradford. This is a strange grotesque folk devil slide. I don't really know what it is, so if anybody recognises this man, who I swear is a thing, please tell me, because he's been annoying me for two years. He's got this kind of recognisable folk monster feel about him. And there were lots of different kinds of shows that they would do. They would do grotesque things like this. Or they would do satirical slides like this one. He's called a calate dwarf. He is a kind of caricature that was developed by a French engraver called Jacques Calate. This is a monkey satire, which was very popular, that showed animals doing hilarious human things, like shaving a goat. They also did public events like coronations. They would deal with political events like wars or revolutions. They would also deal with erotic subjects, which were very filthy indeed and do survive, and some scatological scenes of enemies and things like that. So it was all very unsavory. And these became, as I say, popular enough and widespread enough so that they start to appear in the literature of the era. Voltaire himself was known to give magic lantern shows, and there's a recording in the diary of one of his audience members where he said that after supper, he gave us the magic lantern, the Voltaire. With some remarks that would make you die laughing, there was the circle of Monsieur the Duke of Richelieu, the story of the Abbey de Fontaine, and all kinds of tales always with the Savillard accent. No, there was never anything so funny. But in the course of fiddling with the reservoir of his lantern, which was filled with wine spirits, he tapped it onto his hand and caught fire. And there was a blaze, oh Lord, we had to watch since it was beautiful. I've got a series of slides which are from a little bit later, but they're in this kind of old grotesque style that will serve as a quite useful comparison. Okay, this lantern was not made for these slides, so everything doesn't fit, which is why it's going to look really amateurish. But in the spirit of it, I think. Okay, so this is a little person, and there's something going on because they're pretty upset about the whole thing. And it's, oh dear, it's a bull knocking over a mum. And she's not very happy about that at all. Pardon the focus. And there's all kinds of goings-on happening because of this, and he's running away. So you get things like that, and these words eventually pass on to become a sort of toys. Let's see a couple more. This one depicts a kind of village race with all these people riding these donkeys. And he's fallen off. He's not having a very nice time. Now, the itinerant lanternists in the Saviards would have very few actual slides because they were quite poor. There's another one, oh, he's got a pig. He's probably not going to beat the donkeys. And this guy's running backwards, and there's all kinds of trouble happening. And so they would tour around because they had such limited stock so that their stories wouldn't get really old. There's not a lot of actual evidence of what these people said in a lot of the plays and the literature of the era. People tend to make fun of them as if they were really rubbish, but there were almost certainly some very good ones out there. So we haven't got a lot of evidence to go on. I'll show you one more, which is this man. He looks very important, and he's chasing something, and this guy's fallen over, and there's all these people and they're holding a pig who's trying to get away, and he's all like, oh, my tail. So they're all very much like bats. Let's go back to the sandstorm, which is my placeholder. So anyway, the slides are mostly these kind of small sketches and things like that. There could be individual subjects like this which has almost no story going on. I don't know how you could construct anything out of that. And the likelihood is they would show a single slide in the old kind of traveling entertainer style. The magic lancen was a new technology in those days, but it was grafted onto this much older tradition of fairground entertainments. But as it becomes really famous, and probably quite popular, it also becomes quite disreputable as middle-class people and reputable people of all sorts will have nothing to do with this thing. In 1783, the Abid Nolay said it was one of those instruments which too great of fame has made ridiculous in the eyes of a good many people. Abraham Kasna said, nobody takes the Savoyards with their magic lantern for an example of an experiment or an experiment making a naturalist for their plaything is old and coarse, which is quite damning, really, isn't it? And then this kind of coincides with other things going on in Europe. At the end of the 18th century, we have the Napoleonic Wars and then a Europe-wide depression and then a wholesale industrial change that's happening to the lives of poor people all over the place. So at the start of the 19th century, the common folk get quite a bit poorer. So they can't really go around buying a lot of these things and the traders start to tail off because people are starting to think it's old and coarse and a bit rubbish. And in one of Matthew's interviews, he says, all on the lines dead but me, the gallantys show don't answer because magic lanterns are so cheap in the shops. When we started, magic lanterns wasn't so common, but we can't keep all the good things in these times, which is quite tragic. So what happened was towards the end of the 18th century, the instrument makers, like these people, this is John Bennett and this is Nathaniel Hill, and if you look very closely, there's a magic lantern there and a camera obscura and there's one over here, which shows that these 18th century instrument makers were selling it. But then something else happens at the end of the century in the start of the 19th century was the instrument trade itself starts to change. It starts to market a cheaper brand of microscope or a cheaper brand of telescope to people who are not scientists and offer a bit of fun. And then with the Industrial Revolution, this really kicks in with the next chap I'm going to talk about who is called Philip Carpenter, who was the original founder of Carpenter & Wesley in Birmingham. That says Registry, he did move, but he did live in Birmingham at first. And what he did was he utilized all of the various stuff-making apparatuses that Birmingham had. Birmingham was one of the biggest manufacturing towns in the entire world at this point. And he used it to create really cheap mass-produced instruments, not cheap so that our savoyards or our poor people could go out and afford to buy it at the same rate that middle classes could, but cheap enough so that it was no longer the preserve of the super-rich. So this here is a kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope was invented by David Brewster around 1817 and Philip Carpenter was the original manufacturer. And the thing that's interesting about the kaleidoscope is that he made it in interchangeable parts out of these little tubes with these lenses on the end that you could pop off and pop back on. He put it in a little box. He stamped Philip Carpenter Brewster's kaleidoscope. And then he sold 200,000 of them in Paris and London in a couple of years, which is really, really quite a big deal in 1817, 1818. And then Carpenter starts to put this clever exercise in this first meeting with the mass market into Magic Lanterns. Can everyone hear me, by the way? I'm going to keep turning around quite a lot. And he creates this, the Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern, not just a lantern anymore, but an Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern, which he sells with packages of slides, like this, and little books like this. And if you were someone who was interested in playing with science and stuff, then you could buy this and you could give you little shows at home and you'd have a great time. But he has to deal with the extreme disreputability of the lantern because it's used to show ghosts and charlatans stuff and to con you out of all of your cash. So he does a very clever thing and he re-markets the Magic Lantern as something educational, something to learn with. Okay, so let's look at some of the slides that he has here. So these are from the very first set of slides. These are not from the very first set of slides. They are later copies of the very first set from his Elements of Zoology sets. Okay, I'm in everyone's way. So we have an owl, which is rather nice, isn't it? And we have this condor killing a rabbit. So the Elements of Zoology sets, oh no, at first, was a series of different animals arranged according to the system of Linnaeus, which he sold in here with little explanations of each of the different animal kingdoms, animal groups, and then each of the different animals, which is really rather clever because it meant that it became an educational device that could appeal to a very sensitive middle-class audience at the time and he could sell it as this neat little consumer package. But we still have this kind of weird sense of wonderment coming back because a magic lantern is still a magic lantern. People still know what this is and we get this kind of other kind of discourse creeping in in the book. So if we look at this condor, he tells you it's a condor and tells you all about eating habits and stuff. He says, this, with the exception of the ostrich, is the largest of birds. This is directly from this book. It's amazing size and strength, the count of the roach in the Arabian tales. When full grown, it sometimes measures 16 feet when the wings are extended and it's capable of snatching and carrying boys of 10 years of age and upwards. The fullness of its plumage is such as to resist a ball fired from a gun, which is not that educational. It's mostly hilarious animal bluster. He says that a ferret will creep into a child's bedroom and drain their blood in under an hour, which is rather great. So he's got these kind of twin impulses going on because he's got to sell this as an educational thing so people are happy to buy it for their kids, but also he's got to make it fun enough so people are interested in the thing in the first place. This is something he did with his microscopes. He marketed microscopes as a way of seeing the microscopic world and all these beasties. Has anyone seen, there's a really famous engraving of a drop of Thames water with loads and loads of little animal cures and beasties in it. And there's an old lady going, that was a result of one of Philip Kapp and his microcosm shows. He would show projected microscope images in his shop and people would go along and be like, oh my God, look at that, which again allows you to think that you're a scientist, but really it's about all of the giggles. Let's try another one. This is a different slide. So this is also from Elements of Zoology. We have, pardon the painting, is over 100 years old. And he says, they cannot walk, they can merely stagger along in an awkward and unsteady manner and are very liable to fall. They are of great stupidity, suffering themselves to be approached and knocked down, which isn't very nice. But worth knowing if you're a budding young naturalist. Okay, I'll show you a couple more. I don't have commentaries for all of these, but we will just look at them because they're very nice. This is a kind of flying lizard-y thing. He's missing a lot of his paints. And we have a crocodile. And Komodo lizards, anyone, do you think? Some of them are not always recognizable animals. Like I have no idea what he is. Philip Kappenter was also guilty of reproducing an image of an animal called a socky-tero, was it turned out an incorrect drawing of a water buffalo someone did of China? Let's look at these other ones. We have a kind of very poorly drawn frog with little froglets around it. And these guys, who are some of my favorite paintings I've ever seen, because he has a kind of human face. Again, these slides were, they were printed. Sorry if anyone can't see because I'm standing in the way. They were printed with a copper plate engraving. And Kappenter was very good at blustering at saying that this reproduces them in the finest fidelity that's far superior to any painted slide. The first one that we saw was a painted slide, by the way. And then he got his artists to paint over them with this in such a way that completely covers the original engraving anyway. I mean, they're all totally different. If you compare frogs with frogs, they are not the same. And then we have these guys. This is a turtle. And this is a kind of snapping tortoise. And I've got a commentary for this one, actually. We save the tortoise. They are extremely long-lived. One kept in the gardens of Lambeth attained the age of 120 years. And they are so tenacious of life that one lived six months after its brain was taken out, walking about as before. Another lived 23 days after its head was cut off and the head opened and closed its jaws for a quarter of an hour after the separation from its body. They're extremely slow, which, again, is very useful advice. And then Carpenter... I'm wrapping up now. Then Carpenter expanded all of this and became very successful doing lots of other different kinds of slides. So we see examples here. These are all from the elements of zoology. He has a king and queen set. He has an astronomy set, something from the Bible, and then a set of general views. And he would do things like these. So this, again, is part of his educational stuff. He's selling views of distant places that you might never have seen before. But it's still a volcano. The paintwork's not very good, but it's still a very beautiful slide. This is a Bacillus erupting. And one's like this of a prairie fire and a little man on a horse running away from it. And all through his slides, you can see this kind of tension between keeping it respectable but keeping it exciting. And it worked, actually. He died with an awful lot of money. So I think that's probably where I wrap up. Thanks.