 When Shelly asked me to do this, she said, could you talk about something that had to do with the things we put on the comments? And most of the things, if not all of them at this point, I think all of them actually are lantern slides, which is a very early projection medium. There are two pieces of glass that sandwich the image and just sort of a border where you can write captions and so forth. And I have some over there. After we're done talking, you can go take a look. I brought some up for you to see. There's a drawer so you can see how we store them archivally. And we actually were able to get a hold of a real projector, which unfortunately would have to be rewired. We can't use it, but it was very cool. It took us a long time to find one. Museum used to have lots of them, but of course they got thrown away because we stopped doing lantern slides. But I was able to get one donated, which was very nice. So when I told a friend of mine who was an archivist, I was going to do this presentation, she thought I was going to be actually projecting them with a historic projector. But no, we digitized them. So we're going to go back to Brooklyn in 1900-ish. And if you look at the map, you can see some of it looks like city, but look at all that empty space. And this is how we think of historic Brooklyn. That could be Brooklyn in 1900 or even 1980. But I'm going to segue to Fred. Fred was my dad. He was born in 1914. And he came to New York when he was seven years old, so in 1921. And dad used to tell this story. He would say, well, you know, when I was a boy, I went to a one-room schoolhouse. And we had to put coal in the stove for the teacher first thing in the morning. And we went skinny-dipping in the creek. And we used to trap muskrats in the swamp. Where do you think I grew up? And then he would say, oh, I grew up in New York City. If you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn at the turn of the century, a lot of it was country, farmland. This is our skank house. The skank house is down on the fourth floor in 1891. And another view of the skank house. You can see, you know, the farmland out in the background. Although you do see maybe some telegraph poles. So, you know, civilization is coming in. Here's the museum in 1898. So this is the West Wing out in the middle of the fields. You know, a few big buildings coming up. But, you know, Brooklyn was not... It was a city, but it wasn't a city the way we think of it. And I'm just going to... It has to be the Arkansas. I'm going to walk you through the museum. This is 1904. And here's 1907 to 8 where you've got the museum that... It's pretty much as it looks now except for the stairs are gone. And behind those stairs was a big auditorium. And that's a little bit significant for this talk. So you live in Brooklyn. It's 1900. How do you find out about things in the rest of the world? One way, of course, is to go there. And when I first started thinking about this talk, I was thinking, well, you know, people... Most people couldn't go to Europe. It took more than a week to get there on a steamship. I'm sure it cost a lot of money. But then when I was doing the research for this, I came across this article in the Brooklyn Eagle, which is this amazing online resource at the Brooklyn Public Library. Everything is digitized up to 1902, and it's fantastic. You're going to see more of it. So this is 1901 after the Paris Exposition. And the ships were crowded. It was so prosperous here. So many people were going to Europe that they were actually filling ships, overfilling ships, especially first-class cabins. So a lot of people did go. But a lot of people couldn't go either. And so they depended on the newspaper. And this is a big special supplement that the Brooklyn Eagle did on the Paris Exposition. And they gave you a lot of detail. The newspapers then were... You know, if you gave a lecture, the text of your lecture was likely to end up in the newspaper. So the other way, though, that you found out about things was lantern slideshows. And the thing that really struck me when I started thinking about lantern slideshows is you could see color images. And in some cases, you could even see motion picture because around the early decades of the 20th century, we started to get motion pictures, film. Burton Holmes was a big name. He was like the rock star of lectures, illustrated lectures. And this one was given here. That's the Institute Building in downtown Brooklyn. And the Brooklyn Museum had our own Burton Holmes. This is William Henry Goodyear, who was our first curator of fine arts. He was an architectural historian. And we sent him off to Paris to go to the Exposition. And he went with a man named Joseph Hawks, who was a Brooklyn photography expert, photographer and colorist. So they went with the express purpose of seeing the Exposition, but also taking pictures, bringing them back and presenting them to the people of Brooklyn. It was a six-week trip. So, you know, you didn't take a trip to Europe lightly. So they took off on July 14th on the Hamburg American Steamer, Pennsylvania. And this is one of his lantern slides. I'm not sure if this is at the Brooklyn, at the New York end or the Parisian, but I love this ferry. I'm assuming this is ferrying you into the city. Some people could even take their dog with them. I mean all the comforts of home. And when he came back, he gave a four-lector series on the Paris Exposition. And he basically walked you through the entire Exposition. And I have a feeling, given the articles in the Eagle, which are pretty, this is a short one, but some of them were quite detailed. I have a feeling that if we really wanted to, given the lantern slides and the annotations on them and these, we could probably figure out his lecture and almost put together his lecture again. So, why would you go to a lecture? Well, it's really easy to illustrate. Here's one of the things that you would see in the newspaper or say in Frank Leslie's illustrated news or Harper's Weekly magazine. You would see line drawings, little etchings. If you went to Mr. Goodyear's talk, this is what you'd see. This really puts you there. And when you think about it, in 1900, what did you see in color? You saw artwork in a museum or in someone's home, but we didn't have color photography. We didn't have color movies. So, to see a color image like this, I think must have really been amazing. Here's another one. This is, you know, sort of interesting-looking picture, but when you see it for real with the color, it really pops. So, I just picked a few of the images. You could see a bird's-eye view with all of the people walking down the Great Esplanades. You could see the Eiffel Tower. You could walk under the Eiffel Tower and see the fashionable people walking with you. You could go up in the Eiffel Tower in the elevator. And you could see the great buildings inside and out. And seeing photography of inside buildings is kind of unusual because you've got issues with light. And, of course, you could see Paris at night. So, I thought you might be interested also in some of the technical issues of the scanning that we did. The first pass that we did, there are about 550 slides of the Paris Exposition, I think. We did a real quick and dirty scan. We just scanned them on an Epson scanner, a good quality scanner, but we didn't do any editing. We didn't do any color matching. And we certainly didn't clean up the dust, dirt, fingerprints, and scratches. This is one of the first scans. Recently, we've been pulling ones that we think are the best images, and we've been scanning them in high resolution, bigger files, going in and cleaning up all the crud on the slides. And also color matching the digital image to the actual slide so that they're for real. Part of the reason for this is to make money for the museum because if we have a large file, that's something of value that we can license to someone and get some money back. This is, I love this one because it's got UFOs. And I thought, wow, when I first saw it, I thought, wow, I wonder what's that weird smoke over there? Well, it was scratches.