826
by 1861, styling themselves the American Stereoscopic
Company, they were producing lantern slides and stereo
diapositives in huge numbers.
The brothers remained active in marketing pho-
tographs until William’s death in 1874, after which
Frederick retired and the company was sold.
John Hannavy
See also: von Voigtländer, Baron Peter Wilhelm
Friedrich; Daguerreotype; Calotype and Talbotype;
Talbot, William Henry Fox; and Petzval, Josef
Maximilian.
Further Reading
Hunt, Robert, A Manual of Photography, London: Richard
Griffi n, 1857.
Johnson, William S., Nineteenth Century Photography: An An-
notated Bibliography 1839–1879, London: Mansell, 1990.
Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene New York:
Dover, 1964.
Welling, William, Photography in America: The Formative Years
1839–1900, New York: Thomas Crowell, 1978.
Philadelphia Photographer, Langenheim obituaries, vol. 11,
p.185 (1874) and vol.16, p. 95, (1879).
LANGLOIS, JEAN-CHARLES (1789–1870)
French war photographer
The Crimean War photographs taken by Colonel Jean-
Charles Langlois either on his own or with Léon-Eugene
Méhédin and Friedrich Martens offer a much more
chilling image of the war than Roger Fenton’s more
celebrated productions.
He was born in Beaumont-sur-Auge, Calvados,
in 1879, the year of the French Revolution, and later
joined the French army. He served in campaigns up
until 1815, when he embarked on a study of painting
before returning to his military career, but as an artist
not as a soldier.
He developed an interest in panorama painting before
1830, later translated into an interest in panoramic pho-
tography. Posted to Algeria in 1833, he made numerous
sketches which resulted in his remarkable Panorama
of Algiers painted three years later. In 1839 another
panorama painting, this time of the burning of Moscow
in 1812, was opened in a specially constructed building
on the Champs-Elysée in Paris.
In 1855 and 1856 Langlois made two journeys to the
Crimea to record the scenes there. Working with both
Méhédin and Martens, he produced a fi ne series of pho-
tographs, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, sketches
for a huge panorama of the siege of Sevastopol painted
from inside the Malakoff Fort. The resulting painting
was his fi rst to be based on photographic sketches. It
was exhibited in Paris in 1860.
John Hannavy
LANTERN SLIDES
The magic lantern, the projector which delivered
thousands of Victorian slide shows, and which enjoyed
renewed popularity with the introduction of the photo-
graphic lantern slide, can trace its lineage back, at least,
to the middle of the seventeenth century. Some historians
place the genesis of the lantern much earlier.
Before 1850, the magic lantern was used to project
hand drawn and hand-painted slides as public entertain-
ment, with narrative sequence being created by artists,
and some movement being introduced by elaborate
optical-mechanical features.
The introduction of the hyalotype, or photographic
lantern slide, by Frederick and William Langenheim
after 1850, revolutionized magic lantern shows, and
creating a huge new market for photographers and
photographic publishers.
The lantern slide, as introduced by the Langenheims,
gave a new lease of life to the slow but very fi ne grain
albumen-on-glass process which had been introduced
a few years earlier, and not very successfully, by Felix
Abel Niepce de St Victor. While its low sensitivity made
it impractical as a negative medium for all but still life
work, or landscape and architecture on the stillest of
days, as a printing medium it proved ideal.
Using a camera obscura in reverse, large negative
images could be reduced and printed on to the small
glass plate for projection in the lantern. The fi ne grain
structure of albumen-on-glass was ideal for this purpose,
retaining the fi nest of detail—essential when the image
was subsequently projected on to a large screen.
While it is clear that the Langenheims initially
saw the lantern slide as an extension of the entertain-
ment business—they charged admission to their slide
shows—it proved to be of much great importance in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
With series of slides covering travel, architecture,
landscape, exploration, history, biblical themes, and
many other subjects, the magic lantern swiftly moved
from being an entertainment to being a powerful edu-
cational and instructional tool.
Lantern slides, before the advent of photography,
came in a variety of sizes. “French Pattern” slides were
3.25" × 4", while “English Pattern” used a square 3.5"
× 3.5" format. The European standard size was slightly
smaller at 3.25" × 3.25", and it was this format which
became the standard for photographic images, although
the 3.5" × 4" format endured in France, America, and
Japan.
Color, introduced by hand-painting over the photo-
graph, was used for some images, but toning was more
usual as, in addition to offering a variety in coloration, it
also helped protect the image against premature fading
under the intensity of the lantern’s illumination.
While today the idea of the projected image is com-