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What did people do before there were cinemas? Well, there was (and still is) theater. But artificial moving images? Believe it or not, there was a compelling option, and it helped lead the way to the moving picture. It was called the magic lantern.

The magic lantern goes back hundreds of years. It probably originated in shadow puppetry or any method where light was used to project something on a flat surface for an audience. One can imagine that such devices existed in many cultures throughout history. Even cavemen would have had a natural theater to create a show with a fire and a dark projection wall! But the origins of what we call magic lantern projectors go back to the 16th century.

An Italian describes it in a book translated into English by the 17th century. A Dutch scientist, Joseph Huygens is also said to have invented a similar device around this time. A small tin device, lit by an oil lamp, was used to project the image from transparent glass slides. Wandering minstrels strapped the devices to their backs and traveled throughout the European countryside offering shows to eager viewers. Sometimes a long slide might be slowly pulled through the projector while the minstrel told a story; the slide above from the 1860s tells of a tiger hunt in India. Over time, improvement in optics and lanterns led to larger devices. Inventors also found ways to make slide images move, with little mechanical contraptions that the showman could manipulate to show a boy kicking someone for example. Slides were often illuminated by something called “limelight,” where a combination of hydrogen and oxygen was lit on limestone to offer a very bright light. The sophistication of the shows also increased, with more elaborate and fantastic images and story lines to weave them together.

Lantern shows usually had rich soundtracks: live music and one or more narrators, the crowd gasping and hooting at images they had never seen before. An apparently popular sequence showed rats climbing into a sleeping man’s bed and jumping into his mouth! Lantern shows were performances in every sense of the word, with audiences playing a lively role.

The novelty, in an age before electricity, of seeing visual apparitions on a screen was magical. The “magic” in magic lantern shows also came from the fantastic imagery that showman liked to offer their audiences. The slide above is by Joseph Boggs Beale (1841-1926), America’s leading magic lantern artist, who hand-crafted thousands of exquisite lantern slides (courtesy American Magic Lantern Theater). The slide shows death appearing before the main character in Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story The Raven.

Electricity made the deployment of projectors much easier at the turn of the century. Projectors like the one shown below were easily electrified. Once photography became prevalent, slides could combine black and white images with hand-coloring to come up with realistic renditions of buildings and places. The fine art of someone like Joseph Boggs Beale slowly died out. By the 1960’s 35mm slides had replaced magic lantern projectors as less expensive and more convenient devices to show still images on a large screen.

By then the movies were everywhere. When they first became popular in the early 1900s, the magic of lantern shows was transferred to the cinema hall. Even more people flocked to see images that really moved.