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monplace, the novelty of the large projected photo-
graphic image in pre-cinema days was considerable, and
the popularity of such displays grew exponentially.
While travel themes were probably the most popu-
lar—educating an audience about the treasures of places
they would never visit—the magic lantern show covered
a wide range of subjects. Themes and ideas which had
previously been projected using painted slides were
given added realism when photographic imagery was
used. Thus biblical lantern shows proliferated—the
photographic “evidence” of places mentioned in the
Bible being used to add authenticity to the stories thus
delivered.
Many of the leading travel, architectural and land-
scape photographers of the second half of the nineteenth
century offered their images in lantern slide format as
well as traditional paper prints and stereographs. Thus
the Langenheim brothers published series of views of
their adopted home, Philadelphia, and, wider afi eld in
America.
Edweard Muybridge, a consummate showman, lec-
tured widely throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s
using lantern slides of his landscape and architectural
views to delight audiences. When lecturing about his
ground-breaking photographic experiments in animal
locomotion, in addition to using hyalograph discs in
his zoopraxiscope to recreate motion, he illustrated his
lectures with selections from several thousand lantern
slides of single images. A vast collection of these lantern
slides is preserved in Kingston Museum, England.
Aberdeen photographer George Washington Wilson’s
series on Windsor Castle and the River Thames could be
purchased in slide format, as could his delightful 1880s
series of view of life on the remote Scottish island of
St. Kilda.
The photographs taken by Charles Piazzi Smyth for
his Three Cities in Russia (1862), best known in two-
volume book form, were also available as a series of
warm-toned and tinted lantern slides, and lantern slide
sets exist of his views of the pyramids of Giza.
The negatives for many subject photographed for
the stereoscope could be reprinted as lantern slides and,
trimmed down, as cartes-de-visite as well, considerably
increasing the sales potential of a single negative.
Several manufacturers of magic lanterns offered
extensive catalogues of photographic slides to their cus-
tomers. Amongst these, York and Company of London,
and McAllister & Brother in Philadelphia were major
players. By the late 1850s, McAllisters had a large pho-
tographic department marketing slides of photographs
by numerous photographers. As the majority of lanterns
they sold by the 1880s were imported from Europe,
especially Britain, it can be assumed that their image
catalogue contained both the European and American
sizes of slides.
The growth of the photographic lantern slide as an
education tool has been credited with revolutionising a
number of academic disciplines, most notably the sci-
ences and the history of art. Universities throughout the
world had, by the end of the century, extensive libraries
of lantern slides, and continued to use them until the
lantern slide was replaced by the fi lm transparency after
the Second World War.
Lantern slides as entertainment developed as a
separate but equally important entity, with companies
creating elaborate tableaux exploring moral and social
issues such as the evils of drink, and producing narrative
sets of slides to illustrate their themes—just as they had
with stereocards in the 1860s and 1870s.
One such company, Bamforth & Company of Hol-
mfi rth, Yorkshire, picked up the “story-telling” idea
which had been so successfully exploited in the 1860s
and 1870s by the London Stereoscopic Company, and
marketed series with resonant titles such as “The Curse
of Drink,” “The Drink Fiend,” “The Road to Heaven,”
“Strike While the Iron is Hot,” and “Deep in the Mine.”
It was a logical step for Bamforths to progress from the
still picture sequence to the moving image, and become,
for a view years, pioneers in early cinema.
John HannavySee also: Langenheim, Friedrich and Wilhelm;
Niépce de Saint-Victor, Claude Félix Abel; Wilson,
George Washington; Piazzi Smyth, Charles; and
Muybridge, Eadweard James.Further Reading
Robinson, David; Herbert, Stephen; and Crangle, Richard, En-
cyclopedia of the Magic Lantern. London: Magic Lantern
Society, 2001.
Crangle, Richard; Heard, Mervyn; Dooren, Ine van, Realms of
Light. London: Magic Lantern Society, 2005.
Humphries, Steve, and Lear, Doug, Victorian Britain Through the
Magic Lantern. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989.LAROCHE, MARTIN (WILLIAM HENRY
SILVESTER) (1814–1886)
A jeweller turned photographer, Martin Laroche is pri-
marily remembered for the important court case Talbot
v Laroche in 1854, in which Talbot attempted to claim
that the ‘new process’ of collodion was covered by his
1841 British Patent No.8842.
Talbot had relinquished his patent rights over amateur
photographers in 1852, the year after collodion was in-
troduced, but had sought to retain control over the use of
negative materials from which positive prints were made
for professional portraiture. A situation existed whereby
professionals had to pay a licence fee to Talbot to use a
process given freely to them by Frederick Scott Archer.