PreCinema

The precursor of motion pictures, the magic lantern was invented in the 1650s with numerous people developing working models.

Thomas Walgensten is reputed to be the first to use the term Laterna Magica. He traveled around Europe demonstrating and selling projectors to royalty.

It soon became a traveling showman's instrument and for the next 200 years lanternists were putting on programs at inns, castles, fairs and eventually theatres.

One of the first to exploit the screen's possibilities was the Belgian Etienne Gaspard Robert who called himself "Robertson". He noted the French public's taste for the macabre during the waning years of the Revolution and by 1799 was staging elaborate ghost shows at the Pavilon d'Echiquier in Paris .

Skeleton from the Magic Lantern Society, Click for their site.

Three years later, Robertson moved his "Fantasmagorie" to a former Capuchin convent. Spectators were led down dark passagways to the old chapel where they sat facing a screen behind which were concealed several magic lanterns and six assistants. As thunder roared and lightening flashed ghosts, goblins, and demons came hurlting at the audience.

This would help lead to a whole genre of macabre magic-lantern shows which became part of the standard repertoire of 19th century showman.

Sweep from the Magic Lantern Society

With the advancement of science and technology came improvements in lanterns and their accessories: better lamps were made, reflectors and condenser lenses added, projection became brighter and sharper, and photographic slides replaced the old hand-painted pictures.

Capable of limited animation and certain special effects, slides changed every 30 seconds or so as a live showman presented illustrated songs and stories to musical accompaniment. The audience cheering, clapping, and booing much as they did while viewing a popular melodrama of the day.

These shows would fade in popularity with the rise of the motion picture and were soon regated to illustrating songs between reels at nickelodeons.

Another form of entertainment to emerge in the 1850s were the panoramas in which vast paintings were wound across the stage of the theatre, accompanied by lighting and sound effects.

Thidon's Theatre of Art depicted noted battles with sheet brass soldiers, horses and ships moving along a revolving belt in front of the scenery. The guns and cannons were so fixed that the operators behind the scenes could puff smoke through them with the boom coming from a bass drum.

Thaumatrope from Optical Toys . Click for their site

By now most well-to-do Americans and Europeans were familiar with moving pictures, thanks to parlor toys such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, stroboscope and smaller versions of magic lanterns.

Perhaps the most popular was the Zoetrope, a slotted revolving drum. Peering through the slits, hand-drawn clowns, acrobats, and animals seemed to leap through their paces on the strips of paper fitted inside the drum.

Muybridge set in motion. The California Museum of Photography. Click photo for their site.

The series photos of Eadweard Muybridge would provide the essential link between still photography and motion pictures. This British eccentric begun a series of studies of animal locomotion in 1872 under the sponsorship of Governor Leland Stanford of California.