Introduction

Victorian magic lantern shows

The show would start with a series of "Welcome" slides.

The better class of shows would involve two or three lanterns, using a technique for fading one slide on top of another.

Slides

The slides were either 3.25 square glass slides displayed using a carrier, or made from glass built permanently into a wooden frame. The image on the glass would be protected by a second sheet of glass. Some slides are completely hand painted; others are photographically reproduced and then possibly hand-tinted.

		Suez Canal This shows the Suez canal at Port Said, a photograph taken in 1890 to 1910, hand tinted (there are rarely clouds like that at Port Said!).
Tahrir Square, Cairo Cairo around 1910.
		Paris 1900 We have a whole set of the Paris exhibition of 1900.

Fading between slides

We have several examples of such slides on the site.

Moving slides

The larger wood frame mounted slides include many with more than one piece of glass, controlled by levers, so that moving images can be obtained. Sometimes one piece slides relative to another, sometimes one rotates. Some have three separate pieces of glass. Ideas on how to reproduce these on the web would be appreciated.

Lastly I have some complex mechanical dynamic slides representing the start of the cinema, in which repeated slowly changing images are projected.