Talk:Magic lantern

"Lanterna Magica" [sic]
The opening sentence begins: "The magic lantern or Lanterna Magica..." What is this second term, and in what language? The Hebrew Wikipedia page gives an alternative (?) name "Laterna Magica" [sic] indicating it as Latin. This would seem to require verification. -- Deborahjay (talk) 19:39, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Lack of references
This page seems to have a complete lack of references. There is a lot of information here that requires references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.215.166.184 (talk) 06:36, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

1558
According to Wikipedia, the microscope was invented 1595 and the telescope in 1608. I find it difficult to understand why there is such a long gap between those two (the principles being nearly identical), but the magic lantern being 37 years before the microscope and 50 years before the telescope just doesn't make sense to me.  Randall Bart    Talk   00:13, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Fantasmograph
The article Fantasmagorie (1908 film) mentions the word "fantasmograph" as being a type of magic lantern. Wondering if this would be a proper redirect here and why it's not mentioned. -- &oelig; &trade; 18:06, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Manufacture of Lantern Slides

 * memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/landscape/lanternhistory.html

"The first lantern slide producers made their slides using albumen-coated plates and, after a short period, switched to wet-collodion plates.(5. Spindler) The introduction of dry plate processes, as well as mass-produced lantern slide kits, made the slides easier for amateur photographers to produce and also made them more accessible to schools and universities. (6. Spindler)

"Besides the photographic medium itself, the process for creating lantern slides remained primarily the same throughout their one hundred year history. There were two ways of printing the images: the contact method and the camera method. The first dictated placing the negative directly on the light-sensitive glass. This required that the negative was the correct size to produce the 3.5x4 inch slide. For larger negatives, the camera method was necessary. Using a camera with a long bed and bellows, the negative and glass were both placed in the camera and printed by exposing the glass to daylight or artificial light. After exposure in both cases, the latent image was developed out with chemicals. After the plate was dried, the image could be hand-colored using special tints. The slide was finished with a mat and a glass cover and was taped to seal the enclosure.(7. Elmendorf)

"The finished product was placed within a lantern slide projector to be viewed on a wall or screen. The first projectors used oil lamps for light. By 1870, limelight, produced by burning oxygen and hydrogen on a pellet of lime, offered a better, although more dangerous, form of illumination. In the 1890s, the invention of the carbon arc lamp, followed by electric light, provided a safe method for displaying the lantern slide image. (8. Spindler)"

Where is the article about Lantern Slides? -96.233.19.113 (talk) 21:32, 3 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Good question, especially in light of the redirect from Lantern slide to this article which I find is now in place. There is a bare-bones explanation in the "Operation" section of this article and a brief summary in the "History" section of the Slide show article, but WP certainly has room enough for a more detailed history with some illustrations of the various types. The above material from the NMAH is limited to photographic lantern slides and completely ignores two centuries of entirely hand-painted ones, along with some less common processes (e.g. Woodburytypes and Autochromes), but the first two paragraphs look good to me and would provide a sound foundation for the photographic era. Unfortunately, the third paragraph demonstrates the exasperating reality that even seemingly authoritative and reliable sources almost always manage to get something wrong or use wording open to easy misinterpretation: the carbon arc lamp was already seeing some use for street lighting in the late 1870s (see the Arc lamp and Yablochkov candle articles), and if by "electric light" (which actually covers a wide range of devices and was commonly applied to electric arc lights in the 19th century) the incandescent electric light is meant, the Edison-type light bulb made its debut around 1880. Perhaps the author meant to say that they began to be used in magic lanterns in the 1890s, but that's not quite what comes across from a casual reading. AVarchaeologist (talk) 06:47, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

The Decline of Lantern Slides

 * memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/landscape/lanternhistory.html

"Use of lantern slides lasted throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and until the 1950s when their popularity began to decline with the introduction of the smaller 2x2 transparencies.(9. Spindler) Finally, the discovery of the Kodachrome three-color process made 35mm slides less expensive to produce than lantern slides.(10. Freeman, p.336) Although their production ended over 40 years ago, many academic slide collections still house and use glass slides. In some cases, the views that they represent are either drastically changed or no longer exist and thus they are invaluable images of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." -96.233.19.113 (talk) 21:36, 3 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Two thoughts:
 * 1. In grade school I was taught that a person discovers something that already existed and invents something that did not exist before. Modern dictionaries concur with that limitation on the meaning of "invent" but seem to condone the indiscriminate application of "discover" to both phenomena. Perhaps that nice teacher lady was behind the times or just out to lunch and led me astray, but the distinction still seems a very useful one. Can we please say that the Kodachrome process was "invented" and not "discovered" as if it was stumbled upon fully formed in some forgotten notebook?
 * 2. 35mm slides are lantern slides as that term was understood in olden times. The lantern part got dropped in mid-20th century as too quaint and old-fashioned for advertising the modern marvel of 2x2 inch Kodachrome slides and the sleek new projectors designed for them, but years earlier there were several odd lantern slide formats, including quite small ones for toy magic lanterns, and regardless of format they were all known as "lantern slides" and projected with "[magic] lanterns".
 * Nit-picking aside, still more basic information for a new "Lantern slide" article. Who will create that article? The subject is not a specialty of mine and I have other more familiar fish to fry, but if nobody attends to the task in the next decade or so maybe I'll take a stab at it. AVarchaeologist (talk) 07:42, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Comprehensive site
is a good source for expansion. -- Beland (talk) 12:02, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

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