Welcome	About	Introduction	Chapter One beginning of time – 999 AD
Chapter Two 1000 AD – 1399	Chapter Three 1400 – 1599	Chapter Four 1600 – 1649	Chapter Five 1650 – 1699
Chapter Six 1700 – 1749	Chapter Seven 1750 – 1799	Chapter Eight 1800 – 1819	Chapter Nine 1820 – 1829
Chapter Ten 1830 – 1839	Chapter Eleven 1840 – 1849	Chapter Twelve 1850 – 1859	Chapter Thirteen 1860 – 1869
Chapter Fourteen 1870 – 1879	Chapter Fifteen 1880 – 1884	Chapter Sixteen 1885 – 1889	Chapter Seventeen 1890 – 1894
Chapter Eighteen 1895 – 1896	Chapter Nineteen 1897 – 1899	Chapter Twenty 1900 + post cinema	Chapter Twenty-One Addendum 1911+
Copyright	HOTDOC Internet Archive Channel	HOTDOC X Channel	HOTDOC You Tube Channel

_{Period: 1750 to 1799}

I closed out chapter six with another maker of optical instruments, such as eyepieces, spectacles and microscopes, John Cuff, who was also well known for his interest in the Camera Obscura. More and more optical instrument makers were needed because of the tremendous interest in the camera and lantern.

Growth was as they say, leaping and bounding.

The Phantasmagoria became an extremely popular piece of entertainment during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Its popularity soared throughout Europe, particularly in Germany but never as much as in France. The Phantasmagoria could be considered the forefather of today’s horror movie. Subjects were primarily of the black magic or necromancy categories; ghosts, spirits, dead relatives and the like.

The purpose was to scare the audience to death. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson is the name synonymous with the Phantasmagoria. He would use abandoned churches, chapels and monasteries as his venues. More on Robertson and others very soon, but now lets turn our attention to some publishers of the time, and what they had to say and show regarding pre cinema.

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Costa’s engraving from 1750 shows the open-air tent Camera Obscura on location. Two people appear to be manipulating the camera in gathering a view of the river community.

Also, Costa’s book Le Delicie del Fiume Brenta.

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1750
JAMES AYSCOUGH (1720-1759)
Ayscough was a London optician who published this illustration of a room Camera Obscura in a short 27-page publication of his, this year.

Ayscough’s work called A Short Account of The Nature and Use of Spectacles. In Which Is Recommended, A Kind of Glass for Spectacles, Preferable to Any Hitherto Made Use of For That Purpose published in 1750 can be READ at Internet Archive.

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Here is John Hinton’s description of the Camera Obscura that accompanied the illustration from his work Universal Magazine of January-May 1752 starting on p214 and ending on p215.

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1750
MIRACULOUS WRITING MACHINE
FRIEDRICH VON KNAUSS (1724-1789)
Born in Aldingen, Württemberg, Friedrich von Knauss was a remarkable, though often overlooked, 18^th century inventor, clockmaker, and mechanician at the Habsburg court.

He was active primarily in Vienna and is best known for building sophisticated automata and mechanical writing machines that blended scientific precision with theatrical flair, very much part of the pre cinema lineage of animated and representational devices.

_{Knauss Automaton photograph Technisches Museum Wien, Vienna}

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He was obsessed with simulated articulation, a preoccupation that would later influence puppet theatre and audio-synced illusion devices.

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Prior to becoming court mechanician to Empress Maria Theresa, he trained as a watchmaker; and held the title Kaiserlicher Hofmechanicus. Flourishing between 1750 and 1770, von Knauss is noted for mastering:

🔧 Mechanical Writers or Schreibautomaten: These were small-scale automata capable of writing short Latin phrases, letters, or even performing simple calligraphy
🔧 A mechanical hand that dipped a quill into ink and wrote, imitating the movement of a human hand. One example is preserved in the Technisches Museum Wien or possibly the Kunsthistorisches Museum
🔧 Speaking Heads / Talking Machines, vocal automata now considered lost like a silent film: mechanical heads or busts that ‘spoke’ by simulating vocal cords and airflow.

Letters in Viennese archives hint at “sprechkünstlerische Maschinen” which translates as ‘speech-artistic machines.’ Surviving machines are found in the Austrian National Archives, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna and the Met in New York, which is the producer of this video.

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Pre cinema, in its essence, was about creating moving images and bringing static images to life. Knauss’s automata, by their very nature, were designed to mimic living beings (writing, speaking, playing music).

This pursuit of lifelike movement and the creation of figures that seemed to possess their own agency was a significant theme in the centuries leading up to cinema.

The wonder and curiosity generated by such mechanical marvels laid a conceptual groundwork for the magic of projected moving images. This manipulation of mechanical movement to create a narrative or a performance, aligns with the early efforts in pre cinema devices to present sequential images or actions. The Friedrich von Knauss writing Automaton image The Met.

Nollet received a patent for this Camera Obscura after submitting the design to the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1752. This was a collapsible camera with a pyramid frame. Posthumous portrait of Nollet below, by Pasqual Pere Moles in 1771.

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From Jean Antoine Nollet’s Leçons de Physique Expérimentale Volume five, 1765, p480, figure five showing the Camera Obscura and the comparison with the human eye as many had done (Schott, Sturm and Descartes to name just three).

Antoine Nollet Leçons de Physique Expérimentale Volume five, 1765, p580, plate 10, figures 23, 24, 22 highlighting the use of mirrors and lenses, a solar camera for magnification, and the Lanterna Magica for projecting.

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The telescopic lens-arm hanging over the balcony reflects the image through the tube and into the tent from the top. The four-legged tent on the ground shows us how the contrivance appears in its uncovered state.

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Parrat described and illustrated a portable Camera Obscura shaped like a boxed cone, in a letter he sent to the Gentleman’s Magazine editor for its April issue. He described the instrument to the editor a Mr. Sylvanus Urban, which he stated could easily be converted into a Show Box and typically used for making drawings or viewing landscapes.

Parrat had contributed an illustration of the “optick machine” as we see here with the accompanying letter. Parrat evens provides a talking legend on how it works.

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READ the letter from Mr. Simon Parrat about his Camera Obscura/Show Box in The Gentleman’s Magazine April 1753 Volume 23, Issue 4 here at Internet Archive.

1754
HALF TENT / HALF DESK CAMERA OBSCURA
The room Camera Obscura has also found itself refined into a combination tent-desk, like in this plate from the Universal Dictionary of Physics and Mathematics by Alexandre Saverien , his Paris edition in 1754. – Getty.

AB – a mirror tilted at an angle of 45 degrees to the horizon; E – a collecting lens that projects on the paper for the picture of an external object. Legend source physiclib.ru

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Beccaria was born in Mondovì, Piedmont, with some historical records differing slightly on the exact date. Our interest here is that he investigated the action of light on silver chloride around 1755, but he did not quantify it in the modern sense.

He demonstrated the phenomenon qualitatively rather than measuring it numerically. He prepared silver chloride then called horn silver or luna cornea and observed that it was initially white. After exposure to sunlight, it gradually became violet, bluish, and eventually dark.

By turning the sample around, he showed that only the side exposed to light changed colour, proving that light—not air—caused the transformation.

This was a remarkably important observation because it was the first clear demonstration that light could produce a permanent chemical change in silver chloride, one of the foundations of photography.

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Beccaria did not record exposure times versus degree of darkening, rates of reaction, light intensity, or any mathematical relationship between light and chemical change. His work was observational only, but well documented. The paper was intended to prove that light itself altered matter, not merely its appearance.

The date 1755 refers to his memoir presented to the Academy of Sciences of Bologna, translated as On the Art Which Light Possesses of Itself of Altering Not Only the Colours but Also the Structure of Bodies.

This memoir established that light could chemically modify silver chloride and historians of photography generally regard it as the earliest scientific description of the photosensitivity of silver chloride.

The first genuine attempts to quantify the effect came much later. I have spoken of Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1777 who investigated the chemistry of the darkening process and showed that chlorine was released during exposure to light, moving beyond Beccaria’s qualitative observations.

During the nineteenth century, various chemists began measuring the amount of silver reduced, weight changes, and reaction rates.

For example, M. Carey Lea measured the proportion of silver chloride altered after prolonged sunlight exposure, finding that only about 1% of the material had reacted under his test conditions.

Returning to Beccaria, he established experimentally that light caused the chemical alteration of silver chloride, but he did not measure or quantify the relationship. His work was qualitative and demonstrative rather than quantitative.

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Euler was honoured posthumously with his image placed on both postage and legal currency of Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Italian exclave of Campione d’Italia. Also pictured here is an engraved portrait of Leonard Euler by William Darton, 1760.

1758
JOHN DOLLOND (1706-1761)
Dollond was an English optician. He improved upon the Camera Obscura especially in the area of lens construction by manufacturing an Achromatic lens which corrected fringes in colour and ignoring chromatic aberrations.

Dollond, the son of Huguenot exiles, acquired the family art of silk weaving. However, he studied optics and astronomy and, in 1752 he joined his eldest son Peter, in an optical company.

He debuted his Heliometre in 1753.

John Dollond achieved Achromatic lens correction by ignoring chromatic aberrations through the use of a crown glass lens and a flint glass lens. This method was found to get around and correct chromatic aberrations.

In 1747 however, a debate erupted over Newton’s assertion that chromatic aberration in lenses could not be remedied. Dollond continued to invent his achromatic lens built of flint and crown glasses for use in telescopes, even though further research showed differently. In 1758, he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his innovation, but the preceding discovery by Chester Moor Hall of England in 1729 was later recognised.

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18^TH CENTURY LANTERN ETCHING
This beautiful 18th century print, entitled La Lanterne Magique d’Amour (The Magic Lantern of Love), was etched by Pierre Michel Alix (1762-1817), after a painting by Jean Frédéric Schall (1752-1825).

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Charles-François was a French writer and physician born in Montebourg, Cotentin, where he studied medicine at the University of Caen, becoming a physician in 1744.

Known for his visionary and anonymous novels, he blended 18^th century philosophical movements like Rationalism and Illuminism, combining scientific ideas with mystical, alchemical, and cabalistic elements.

His works, often classified as utopian, dystopian, or proto-science fiction, anticipated groundbreaking inventions such as photography, synthetic food, television, and even concepts resembling pheromones and contact lenses.

His most notable novel, Giphantie, vividly described a process akin to photography—decades before its invention—where “elementary spirits” fix images using a light-sensitive substance.

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THIS MATTER
‘Giphantie’ is a remarkable 18th-century novel that blends utopian fiction, philosophical speculation, and proto cinema. Its title is an anagram of Tiphaigne’s name, and the work is often cited for its prescient descriptions of technologies and concepts far ahead of its time, most notably photography.

Like Verne, Orwell and others, he foresaw the coming of inventions such as photography and motion pictures. One wonders which of the many examples of the past, (Statius, Villeneuve, Cardano, Porta, et al.) de la Roche may have drawn from, telling this story.

One element however is still unexplained: what “this matter” is referring to in the coating of the canvas. Excerpt here:

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Despite his foresight, Tiphaigne remained a marginal figure, partly due to his distance from influential literary circles and the destruction of Montebourg’s archives during the French Revolution and World War II, which limits biographical details.

He was not a member of the Rouen Academy, contrary to some confusion caused by a namesake, and de la Roche was a family nickname, not a noble title.

This illustration below depicts what de la Roche was referring to in Part 1, Chapter 11 of Giphantie. Its an 18th century engraving by an unknown artist from The Miraculous Mirror and resides at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

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PHOTOGRAPHIC DREAM
Giphantie is framed as a fantastical travel narrative, a popular genre in the 18th century. The story begins with the unnamed narrator, swept away by a storm to a mysterious land called Giphantia, a utopian realm governed by “elementary spirits” who possess advanced knowledge and abilities. The novel is divided into two parts:

📸 First Part (Utopian Exploration): The narrator explores Giphantia, guided by a spirit called the Prefect. This section describes the society, customs, and technologies of the land, which contrast with European norms of the time. The tone is satirical, critiquing human folly, vanity, and societal flaws through the lens of an idealized civilization.

📸 Second Part (Visionary Insights): The narrative shifts to a more philosophical and speculative tone, with the narrator receiving revelations about science, nature, and human behaviour. This includes the famous description of a process resembling photography and other futuristic concepts.

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📸 Light rays reflected from objects are collected on a specially prepared canvas
📸 A “glutinous substance” on the canvas, sensitive to light, captures and retains these rays
📸 The image forms instantly and remains fixed, creating a perfect replica of the scene

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PHOTOGRAPHIC ALIGNMENT
This description aligns strikingly with the principles of photography: a light-sensitive medium (like silver halide in early photography) captures an image formed by light. Tiphaigne attributes this to the work of elementary spirits, but his explanation is rooted in a quasi-scientific understanding of optics and chemistry, likely informed by his medical background and contemporary experiments with light and substances like silver nitrate.

This passage has cemented Giphantie’s reputation as a combined proto pre cinema and, proto science fiction work. Scholars, such as Clarke (2005), argue that Tiphaigne’s vision was not mere coincidence but a logical extrapolation of 18th-century scientific knowledge, including Newton’s optics and early chemical experiments.

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In 1760 when the de la Roche book Giphantie was written, photography had not yet become a name, coined by Antoine Hércules Romuald Florence. And, it was still a dream, a thought, a hope. The need for an emulsion was just now beginning to be realised.

Beyond photography, Giphantie contains other forward-looking ideas:

📺  Television-like Displays: The novel describes “mirrors” that project moving images of distant events, resembling live broadcasts.

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the main character being taken in a typhoon, arrives in a land where he is shown wondrous things were “pictures are made”

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These two excerpts (pp11 and 12 below) are taken from A History of Photography, Written as A Practical Guide and An Introduction to Its Latest Developments, by Jerome Harrison, Scovill, New York, 1887.

Harrison ponders the question.

Like Verne, Robida and others, Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche foresaw the coming of inventions such as photography, television and Motion Pictures.

Listen to Giphantie via LibriVox at Internet Archive here.

Ledermüller provided us with several colour illustrations. The solar microscope is shown in table twenty-one on this page. The top image (Figure 1) shows a reflex camera with 45° mirror. The bottom image (Figure 2) shows the camera without the mirror.

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Ledermüller’s interest in insects-as-subjects, came from his status as government beekeeper. Below, a coloured illustration of a dragonfly by Ledermüllers own hand seen through one of his Camera Obscuras with his solar microscope acting as the lens, in 1760.

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A close up of a fly as seen and drawn by Ledermüller in 1760, with his Camera Obscuras equipped with a solar microscope. The close up shows how detailed the Camera Obscura allowed. He published these images this same year in his book Microscopic Delights of The Mind and Eye over two hundred and sixty-three years ago.

Compare what Ledermüller saw then with what we can see, today.

Here is a common flea seen and drawn by Ledermüller in 1760 with his Camera Obscura with a solar microscope lens. What a wonderful discovery the Camera Obscura was in leading the way to tremendous imagery, bringing us closer to the Cinematography we enjoy today.

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some bugs coming to see a projection show of other bugs in a movie theatre

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A microscope lens, in an “obscure room” image representation taken from Ledermüllers Microscopic Delights of The Mind and Eye, Table II, page 25 and Table XII, page 25 and a microscope lens made by John Cuff of London showing a slide bar of plant or insect images, Table V, figure 1 and figure 2, page 25.

In table V, figures 1 and 2, notice the Aladdin’s lamp light source, and the three aperture diaphragms.

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1760s
MECHANICAL PHANTOMS AND TECHNOTHEATRE
JOHANN SAMUEL HALLE (1727-1810)
Halle is one of those semi-forgotten transitional figures in the lineage from Enlightenment science to pre cinema spectacle. He was a physicist, a natural philosopher, and a promoter of optical and mechanical phenomena, operating at the intersection of education, amusement, and illusion.

He created semi-automated tableaux using clockwork and Magic Lanterns, sometimes portraying biblical or mythological scenes in motion. All this, described in his Magie oder, die Zauberkräfte der Natur (1784), which has been mistaken for superstition but was actually early Technotheatre.

Johann Samuel Halle seen here, drawn and engraved by his son Johann Samuel Ludwig Halle in1791.

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Little biographical data survives about this man, but Halle was active during the reign of Frederick the Great and into the early reign of Frederick William II.

He moved in circles with intellectuals, craftsmen, and court engineers, but wasn’t a performer in the street-theatre sense, but rather a courtly entertainer and science popularizer. His three-volume work Magic or the Magic Powers of Nature (Magie oder, die Zauberkräfte der Natur’), often simply cited as Magie, is misleadingly titled [pictured].

It’s not about magic in the occult sense. Instead, it catalogues the magical effects of science, nature, and mechanics—a kind of compendium of natural wonders that could be staged with technology for the purpose of performances, written in a tone aimed at educated laypeople.

Volume III is the most visually rich. It includes descriptions (and in some editions, engravings) of:

📽️  Mechanical tableaux animated with clockwork
📽️  Phantasmagoric projections using early Magic Lanterns
📽️  Mirrored illusions, using concave reflectors and transparent paintings to create apparitions
📽️  Automata posed in Biblical, mythological, and moral allegories

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MECHANICAL PHANTOMS AND TECHNOTHEATRE
Halle’s signature contribution was creating semi-automated “phantoms”—essentially tableaux vivants made of clockwork figures, animated with hidden gears, and illuminated or dramatized by lantern projection.

This example pictured is a dramatised representation of the Halle ‘Apotheosis Machine’ “An apparatus, composed of a concave mirror and suspended glass plate, elevates the saint’s figure into rolling clouds, accompanied by humming string sounds.”

Imagine this angel hovering or floating in the air, it could also be;

📽️  Possibly a prototype for what later becomes the ‘glory machines’ in 19th century Dioramas
📽️  Used a concave mirror and suspended glass plate, with a figure of a saint or angel rising upward into illusionistic clouds
📽️  Sound effects added using tensioned gut strings that would vibrate to create eerie humming

Other semi-automated “phantoms”—essentially tableaux vivants, included:

DANIEL IN THE LION’S DEN
“Driven by clockwork, paper-cut lions open and close their jaws, while back-lit clouds rotate behind them and a divine hand is projected.”

📽️  A mechanized Diorama with:
📽️  Paper or wood-cut figures
📽️  A crank-driven lion that opened and shut its jaws
📽️  Backlit clouds parting via rotating discs
📽️  A divine hand projected from above (lantern effect)

DESCENT OF ORPHEUS INTO THE UNDERWORLD

📽️  Used layered slides and rotating wheels for fire and smoke
📽️  Hades was animated using a gear hidden behind the painted curtain
📽️  Musicians in the background “played” lyres, triggered by a central axle

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OPTICAL TRICKS AND ILLUSION
Halle was obsessed with optical deception as a spectacle. His devices were not toys but didactic illusions—designed to teach optics, perspective, mechanics, and theology through staged wonder.
These techniques included:

📽️  Double-sided glass slides, painted with translucent layers
📽️  Pepper’s Ghost-like illusions, using angled glass and hidden compartments
📽️  Moving shutters and blinds, to create “sudden revelation” effects

His work is sometimes called Technotheatre—a kind of proto cinematic stage where motion, light, and mechanics produced awe within an audience. K camera and L lanterne from Johann Samuel Halle’s, Fortgesetzte Magie oder, die Zauberkr fte der Natur, Volume 1, Berlin 1772, p180.

NOTICE THE USE OF THE WORD “CINE” CAMERA OBSCURA

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COURTLY SPECTACLE TABLEAU
This image shows a framed stage-like tableau, complete with figures and mechanical elements. A framed miniature stage set before a court audience—a mechanized Diorama portraying a mythological or Biblical scene.

In the foreground are figures arranged on a shallow stage, likely static wooden or card-cutouts. Picture each element in the frame moving as it would in its own way, and time.

The middle portion contained rotating discs behind the cutouts, suggesting moving clouds. In the background would be hidden gearing—rods and pulleys and concealed clockwork mechanics.

The frame edges contained sliders or shutters along the visible borders implying control of light. This aligns precisely with Halle’s description of what he calls a “phantom” tableau—a concise visual of machinery + optics in action. Below the plate, Halle typically included brief German captions. This one read as “Mechanical tableau stage equipped with clockwork and rotating discs to generate clouds and light transitions.”

This speaks directly to hidden mechanical animation plus optical spectacle. Figures seen in the foreground were likely paper or wood cutouts, arranged in a small stage set-up. Rotating discs behind the figures would cause spinning cloud patterns. The border elements would open and close to reveal illuminated features.

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LEGACY AND INFLUENCE
Halle’s work likely influenced later showmen and optical engineers such as Etienne-Gaspard Robert, Johann Georg Schopper and other Viennese who built optical cabinets.

This painting is by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin from 1738, of a boy playing with a dazzling, whirling, top.

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Here is what Martin Quigley Jr. had to say about Nollet’s “Dazzling or Whirling, Top” on page 74 of his work Magic Shadows, The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures Quigley Publishing, New York, 1960:

Nollet travelled extensively, visiting Italy, England, and Holland among other European countries. While in Holland, Pieter van Musschenbroek showed Nollet a Magic Lantern view of a wind-mill whose arms appeared to turn.

While with van Musschenbroek, Nollet was also shown:
🎞️ a lady bowing as she passed down the street
🎞️ a knight lowering his hat out of politeness

This event by Musschenbroek was one of the earliest attempts to make motion entertainment. It’s 1760.

Nollet’s “Dazzling or Whirling, Top” was a popular little toy. It aided in the education of vision persistence and led to a better acquaintance of motion within the field of entertainment & arts. Here is the excerpt from Quigley’s Magic Shadows page 74:

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and Nollet wrote to each other. Franklin referred to him as “an able experimenter.”

Regarding light, Franklin said “I must own I am much in the dark about light.”

Pictured: From Nollet’s Leçons de Physique Expérimentale, 1764.

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The son of an ordinary carpenter, Johann he was born in Leipzig. He came to Prague in 1755 and in the same year to Vienna and worked from 1757 to 1762 in the workshop of Meinicke. Having graduated from school and then university with a mathematical focus.

In 1763 he decides to open his own optical workshop. The Minister of State Prince of Kaunitz drew attention to Voigtländer’s talent, so that Empress Maria Theresa granted him a so-called “Commerzien protective decree on the production of mathematical instruments.”

In 1797, in recognition of his achievements and skill, he received the state factory’s authority with all the advantages and benefits. In the same year he died, his company was continued by his widow and his older sons Wilhelm Voigtländer (1768–1828) and Siegmund Voigtländer (1770 Vienna – 1822 Vienna).

Another son was Johann Friedrich Voigtländer whose son Peter Wilhelm Friedrich von Voigtländer established Voigtländer through the acquisition of the Petzval lens as a leading photographic company of his time. Engaged in the production of measuring instruments and optics for microscopes, he wrote several scientific papers and even received a prize, but he died in 1797 receiving it posthumously.

The company grew, increasing production and expanding its range over several generations. In future chapters I will be sharing more on both Voigtländer and Petzval.

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This camera shown below was made in 1841 by Peter Voigtländer. It was the first use of metal for a camera in the world and it introduced a breakthrough lens which allowed for faster exposure times, thus enabling portrait photography. It is a Voigtländer Daguerreotype camera.

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1764
BENJAMIN MARTIN (1704-1782)
Martin was one of London’s busiest makers of optical and philosophical instruments. He sold microscopes, spectacles, perspective machines, and devices for lectures and demonstrations including the very popular Camera Obscura.

His shop at Fleet Street (established in the 1750s) advertised a wide range of such instruments. Camera Obscuras came in many forms such as the goblet camera of Herigone. Martin provided us with a book-shaped camera measuring 24 x 18 x 5 inches in its folded state which he gave to Harvard.

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The book-shaped Camera Obscuras shown below are typical of book Camera Obscuras of the mid 18th century. The famed portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) owned these two.

They’re housed at The National Museum of Science & Industry.

In 1760s trade catalogues and advertisements, Martin lists “portable Camera Obscura Machines, in boxes, and with lenses of different powers.”

These were typically box-type models, sometimes with a mirror and lens arrangement so the image could be viewed from above on a sheet of paper (a drawing aid). He also produced larger versions for room demonstrations, akin to those sold by John Cuff and other London makers.

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Martin published The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy (volume 1 in 1762, volume 2 in 1764), where he explicitly mentions the Camera Obscura as an optical teaching device.

By that time, he was already supplying them commercially. Surviving price lists from the mid-1760s mention them alongside his microscopes and perspective machines.

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The Magic Lantern Society notes that a “portable Camera Obscura” plate in that volume (Plate L) is copied in later sources, and that the 1763 volume “would have been available around Christmas 1763 or early 1764.”

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Below is the Benjamin Martin book camera used by Joshua Reynolds shown above, now in it’s folded state and standing on end. Image Science and Society Picture Library Prints.

Portrait of Martin, an engraving , published by Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1785. Now in the Smithsonian Institution.

1764
THE CAMERA WITHIN ART
CHARLES AMÉDÉE PHILIPPE VAN LOO (1705-1795)
An adorable painting of a Camera Obscura poking its way into the frame comes to us by way of van Loo. This originally-named The Magic Lantern shows a boy looking into the lens of a camera while embracing it.

The subjects are actually the artist’s family, who are overshadowed by the instrument.

A fascinating study of perspective and dimension, the painting named, The Magic Lantern  is rather mis-named. It shows a young boy in the background looking into the lens while embracing the camera, and a little girl in the foreground with her hand on the frame with her fingers outside of what would be the natural boundaries of a posed photographic environment.

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I can hear her thinking . . . “this box we have here is going to revolutionize picture-taking“

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The camera although half in the picture, is clearly not a lantern, but appears from the left as if entering into the view. This added 3rd dimension reminds us of the natural environment the Camera Obscura provided to artists.

The wooden box and lens are not peculiar to a lantern, and there appears to be no chimney. However, the circular frame is typical of the shape of lantern slides.

It is unclear why van Loo called the painting as he did. This historian has suggested that the view we see is in fact that of a lantern slide as it would appear in painted form, thus the name, and the slight humour in blending the two discoveries in the same picture. It is not known if van Loo painted lantern slides.

The painting resides in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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The little girl has her fingers outside the natural boundaries of a painted posed environment (outside the inner edge of the frame). The frame itself being part of the painting.

And mom, has an interesting look on her face as if to say “do you see what we have here?”

Thirty years ago, I first spoke of this painting then named The Magic Lantern. My continued interest in this has revealled that international and reputable fine art galleries around the world are now calling this painting The Camera Obscura and not The Magic Lantern.

There is some honour given by van Loo in this painting when he highlights the optical discovery into the painting. The innocent and naïve little girl, the inquisitive boy wondering what’s inside the box, and the mother with that look on her face. I can hear her also thinking . . . “this box we have here is going to revolutionize picture-taking.”

This portrait of van Loo is by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. It was painted in 1785 and is oil on canvas. It hangs at the Museum of the History of France, the department of paintings, the Louvre.

Chevalier Patrice d’Arcy, also known as Patrick d’Arcy or Comte d’Arcy, was an Irish-born French mathematician, physicist, and military officer who made significant contributions to science and served in the French army.

His 1765 paper, Sur la durée de la sensation de la vue, explored the former persistence of vision, and the newly coined Apparent Motion, measuring the duration of visual impressions (approximately 0.13 seconds) using a rotating burning coal, laying groundwork for later developments in cinematography.

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D’Arcy did this experiment in 1765, demonstrating that the afterimage lasts as long as the time it takes for the piece of coal to make one revolution. The time was measured and recorded as 0.133 or 2/15th of a second.

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1767
BODY SHADOWS
Body Shadows is a pre cinema cousin to the Shadow Theatre wherein I have spoken of already in chapter one. However, in Body Shadow the entire body of the performer intervenes with the light as opposed to only a stick puppet or a hand.

A full body shadow is cast.

Also, in opposition to the hand puppet, where the hand shadow creates the moving image, the Body Shadow actor’s entire form interrelates with the lighting. The operator is between the light source and the screen, often in profile borrowing from the Marionette and Silhouette.

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Chinese Shadows were popular in the East such as Java, Greece, and among the Turks. They did not however appear in Europe until much later, and first in southern Germany where they were popular under the name Schattenspiele (Shadow Plays).

Shortly after L’Heureuse Pêche appeared, the famous François Dominique Séraphin opened his first theatre in Versailles in the Lannion garden. In 1780, his “changing scene shadows” as they were then known, were admitted to the court where he performed three performances a week for the children of France.

Séraphin, pictured here, is next up in our study of pre cinema history.

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WATCH Shadow Theatre: Discovering Human Motion from a Sequence of Silhouettes, produced by Jungdam Won, and Jehee Lee. This video was uploaded by Jungdam Won. It’s a little over four minutes in length and provides a special understanding of Body Shadows and how they would have looked in 1767.

In English.

1767
SHADOW THEATRES
FRANÇOIS DOMINIQUE SÉRAPHIN (1747-1800)
In Europe, Shadow Theatres appeared in the middle of the 18th century, first Italy, Germany, then France. L’Heureuse Pêche, a comedy of shadows premiered in Paris in 1767, and was still running in August 1770.

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A pre cinema puppet show aimed at youngsters, the Fantoccini had its beginnings in Italy in the middle of the 18th century. It was controlled mostly with strings.

Italian Marionettes if you will.

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Shadow Theatres were very common, offered to children throughout the 19th century. Left is a French edition pictured, around 1840, sold with 19 engraved shadows to be cut out. The set is very small, a square of 7.8 inches and 4 inches in depth.

The other two pictures are modern adaptations of the Ombres Chinoises available today.

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These two Shadow Theatres below, were also produced at the time of the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition. They came with seven coloured and pierced panels that let light in and could be illuminated artificially. The children could animate the scenes with pre-cut figures.

Automatons contributed to pre cinema history in two significant ways: by advancing mechanical technology and by pioneering the concept of visual and temporal illusion.

1. Advancing Mechanical Illusion and Movement
Automatons were intricate clockwork or hydraulic devices that created controlled, repeated, lifelike movements. This development of mechanical systems for performance is a direct ancestor to the machinery of the film camera and projector, which also rely on precise, continuous mechanical motion (gears, sprockets, etc.).

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As some theorists note, the camera itself is an “automatic” device, mechanically capturing an image stream

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Automata were used as early forms of mechanical theatre, such as the devices described by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century BC. Later examples, like the tableaux mécaniques (mechanical pictures) of the 18th and 19th centuries, were essentially framed, moving scenes that were extremely popular, demonstrating a public appetite for mechanical visual entertainment before the invention of cinema.

Automatons captivated audiences by creating the illusion of a living, self-operating figure (a “self-operating machine”). This quest to replicate and represent lifelike motion and existence is a core goal that was ultimately achieved with greater fidelity by cinema.

The concept of a process or a scene unfolding automatically, without direct human intervention once started, is a central theme shared by automatons and the cinematic device. As some theorists note, the camera itself is an “automatic” device, mechanically capturing an image stream.

In essence, automatons and their successors, like the mechanical theatres and animated tableaux, were major components of the popular entertainment landscape in the centuries leading up to the 19th-century optical toy boom, which were the more immediate forerunners of cinematic technology.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz dedicated himself exclusively to clock-making from 1738 until 1747. He created a line of longcase or grandfather clocks with progressively advanced movements that outperformed anything before available.

His dexterity with his hands, precise nature, and serious devotion to his art, as well as the reasoned application of mechanical principles, inspired him to embellish his watchmaking movements with music and automata.

His designs quickly drew the attention of an affluent and demanding clientele.

THE JAQUET-DROZ WRITER
This automaton of Pierre Jaquet-Droz is perhaps the most famous and best-known in the world. The Writer is highly complex. With a system for each letter written, the Writer can scribe a letter capable of containing 40 characters.

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A masterpiece is what the BBC calls the Jaquet-Droz Writer in this five minute video. A fascinating look at the inner workings of this marvel of years gone by, yet still highly relevant today.

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Encouraged by their success, the Jaquet-Droz family hit the road to show off their magnificent masterpieces. They travelled from La Chaux-de-Fonds to Geneva and then to Paris in 1775, where they presented the automata to Louis XVI and his queen, Marie-Antoinette.

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Here, the front and back of these three famous members of the Jaquet-Droz automaton family and a clipping from the London Post, 1776, advertising the writing and drawing figures, from the Harry Houdini Collection.

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Below, a portrait and autograph of Pierre Jacquet-Droz; A figure of Cupid drawn by The Writer; Jacquet-Droz Writer in an older photograph; a view of the mechanism from behind — all from the brochure issued by the Society of History and Archæology, Canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

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Dated to 1785, an extremely rare Jaquet-Droz automaton fetched $305K at auction in 2014. The Singing Bird Cage Clock Automaton sings, turns, hops, flaps its wings, tail and beak. SEE a 38 second video of the bird here.

Yes, that’s a waterfall in the back.

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SEE the story of the Pierre Jaquet-Droz Automatons here. Runs 17:49

1769
LARGE DESK CAMERA OBSCURA
GEORG FRIEDRICH BRANDER (1713-1785)
Brander presented a large and very practical Desk Camera Obscura illustration from his Beschreibung dreyer Camerae Obscurae of 1769. It stood approximately four feet high with a similar length.

The apparatus which one could actually sit at, had an extended aperture with four sliding bellow sections for focusing. The artist would sit at the desk and see the subject before him on the table top through the aid of a 45° mirror within the camera. A large hood allowed privacy and shade to see the image better.

Brander was a student in mathematics and physics at Nuremburg and later wrote several books on the Camera Obscura. Brander edited Beschreibung dreyer Camerae Obscurae twice, in 1775 and 1792. He was a major producer of scientific instruments.

His factory was in Augsburg, which was considered a centre of instrument production in the 18th century, along with Paris, London, and Leipzig.

Brander created devices for a variety of disciplines, including geodesy, astronomy, and physics. This was not unusual at the time: instrument builders did not specialise in one subject or type of instrument until the early nineteenth century.

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LEFT | Eight figures of Camera Obscuras built by Caspar Höschel illustrated in Beschreibung dreyer Camerae Obscurae, Table I, published by Georg Friedrich Brander, Augsburg in 1792 (2nd edition).

RIGHT | Two Camera Obscuras built by Caspar Höschel illustrated in Beschreibung dreyer Camerae Obscurae, Table III, published by Georg Friedrich Brander, Augsburg in 1792 (2nd edition).

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One of those many instruments that Georg Friedrich Brander made is this large Camera Obscura in the second half of the 18th century. This beautiful pre cinema instrument is held at the Deustche Museum.

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READ Beschreibung dreyer Camerae Obscurae by Georg Friedrich Brander from 1792, at Google Books. See Brander’s Desk Camera Obscura illustration (Table II, Figure 1) on the last pages of the book.

c. 1770
THE MEGASCOPE
The Megascope was a Camera Obscura Lens which projected large scale images of smaller objects. The Megascope became fairly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Additional mirrors were used to supremely illuminate the subjects. A focal length of plus thirty inches was typical.

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In 1872 Amédée Guillemin will publish his The Forces of Nature, outlining the Megascope along with illustrations (A. Guillemin, 1877, London, p302).

One of Guillemins illustrations from his book The Forces of Nature that we have highlighted below.

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The Megascope shown here reminds us of a typical room Camera Obscura except that the focal length (sometimes longer than thirty inches) was great enough to fill the room (IMAX?).

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Left- A Megascope illustration taken from La Pratique Des Projections by H. Fourtier, 1892, p44.

Right- The Megascope, Figure 24, in A. E. Dolbear’s The Art of Projecting. A Manual of Experimentation in Physics, Chemistry, and Natural History with the Porte Lumière and Magic Lantern, 1877.

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1770
PAINTED GLASS FOR THE BURNING MIRROR
THE DIAPHANORAMA
FRANZ NIKLAUS KÖNIG (1765-1832)
A Diaphanorama is an interesting optical device that was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, often considered a precursor to more elaborate forms of visual entertainment like the diorama and even early cinema.

A spin-off of the Panorama but perhaps more so the Diorama, is the Diaphanorama, on a much smaller scale. Of Dutch origin, the Diaphanorama appears to have made its entrance into pre cinema in the 1700s.

_{Image Helmut Walde author of The Dutch Diaphanorama}

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The core idea of a Diaphanorama is to create a sense of depth and realism by painting scenes on multiple panes of glass, often with elements painted on both sides of each pane. The most distant objects would be on the back panes, creating a layered effect.

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_{Image Rijksmuseum}

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The name Diaphanorama itself comes from the Greek word for translucent painting. The transparency of the glass and the careful application of perspective on each layer were crucial to achieving the illusion of depth.

The first publications that can be found that reported on these “finely painted glasses” for the burning mirrors and other similar glass images, were the Dutch newspapers. The earliest advertising found, appeared in the Oprechte Haerlemse Courant (the oldest still-publishing newspaper in the world) on 6 January 1770, with the following:

_{– Helmut Walde, The Dutch Diaphanoramas published in The New Magic Lantern Journal, Volume 11, No 9, June 2014, pp7-10}

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Originally, these glass paintings were often viewed in conjunction with a concave mirror (sometimes called a burning mirror) and illuminated by candles behind the box holding the glass panes. This reflection and lighting further enhanced the sense of depth.

The images originally drawn onto paper were later painted onto glass where their perception of depth was achieved with multiple glass panes, each painted on both sides. You looked down, or through, just like in a Tunnel Book pictured here.

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König’s Diaphanoramas were showcased across Europe, notably in Switzerland, Berlin, and London, and gained popularity for their novel use of light and transparency.

His innovation laid the groundwork for these later developments in visual storytelling and theatrical displays. König gave public shows of Diaphanoramas by 1811 bringing popularity to the genre.

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_{Images Rijksmuseum}

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Candles, being the only illuminant of the time, were placed at the rear of the box which typically held 3-4 painted panes. A portion of a scene was painted on each side.

Key to the visual experience was the concave mirror which was placed at the front, turned towards the box.

See this completed Diaphanorama panel, below.

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_{Completed Diaphanorama image Rijksmuseum}

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As Helmut Walde, author of The Dutch Diaphanorama published in The New Magic Lantern Journal, Volume 11 Number 9 (June 2014), pp7-10 says, “nothing comparable to the Dutch-made Diaphanorama is found outside of Holland.”

Diaphanorama comes from diaphanous meaning translucent light.

Though not as widely known as Panoramas or Dioramas today, Diaphanoramas were an important part of the history of visual illusions and pre cinematic entertainment.

Guyot also publishes Nouvelles Recreations Physiques et Mathamatiques (Paris, 1770) with an illustration (volume 3, plate 20, p180) of an upside-down pyramid Camera Obscura (figure 4) on legs, and a Magic Lantern figure 5.

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Guyot’s work may have indirectly influenced the development of devices like the Magic Lantern, as he explored the properties of light and lenses, key components in those devices. However, he didn’t create any specific “motion” devices that are central to pre cinema.

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Guyot’s work influenced the development of Magic Lanterns and their application in the Phantasmagoria

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Guyot described a way of using two slides in a projection system in 1770. He pictured a rough sea tossing ships about and that the slides be meticulously painted to create a realistic and appealing animation.

His projection may have been similar to the mechanical slide here, showing one slide for the sky and one for the ship and ocean.

His studies on light transmission through lenses would have directly influenced the development of more refined and powerful lanterns, potentially leading to improved clarity, brightness, and the capacity to project more detailed or colourful images.

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Guyot’s Traité de la lumière (Treatise on Light) is one of the primary documents where he outlines his studies on the nature of light, refraction, and the behaviour of light through various mediums. This treatise laid the theoretical groundwork for understanding how light behaves when passed through lenses or reflected off mirrors.

The Magic Lantern relied heavily on such optical principles to magnify and project images. This work also influenced later developments of photographic lenses, which became key to early cinematic devices.

Over the course of the next 30 to 40 years, Guyot’s description of these moving effects spread widely. It appeared in both the German translation of his own book, which Johann Christian Thenn translated, and in a pirated English edition, which William Hooper also added to.

Hooper suggested that the lantern could be “rendered much more amusing, and at the same time more marvellous, by preparing figures to which different natural motions may be given, which every one may perform according to his own taste.”

Hooper gave no credit to Guyot.

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SEE Nouvelles Recreations Physiques et Mathematiques published in 1770 and captured digitally from its original state two hundred fifty years later by Google Books, here.

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WHO WAS WILLIAM HOOPER
William Hooper (fl. 1770s) was an English physician and natural philosopher best known for his influential four-volume work, Rational Recreations (1774).

His work was a cornerstone of 18th century popular science, designed to educate and entertain the public through experiments in optics, electricity, magnetism, and pneumatics. For those interested in the transition from natural philosophy to visual entertainment, Hooper is a pivotal figure who helped bridge the gap between scientific inquiry and the “pleasing deceptions” that later evolved into cinema.

This compendium was primarily a compilation of existing knowledge, much of it translated or adapted from Guyot’s Nouvelles Récréations Physiques et Mathématiques (1769).

Hooper’s stated goal was to use science to debunk the “visual illusion scams” of the era by teaching the public how they were performed.

Hooper was part of a movement that transformed specialized scientific knowledge into a form of middle-class leisure. His work remained popular for decades, seeing multiple editions (notably the corrected fourth edition in 1794) and served as a primary source for later writers like Sir David Brewster.

While he is often overshadowed by the original French authors he translated, Hooper’s English volumes were instrumental in domesticating the study of light and motion, turning the ‘magic’ of the 18th century into the technical ‘recreations’ of the 19th.

1770
MECHANICAL ORRERY WITH VISUAL EFFECTS
DAVID RITTENHOUSE (1732–1796)
Rittenhouse was a polymath from Pennsylvania, and is best remembered as an astronomer, clockmaker, and instrument builder, often seen as America’s equivalent to England’s George Adams Jr.

However, buried in his reputation as a man of science is a significant and, in my opinion, overlooked proto spectacle machine: a mechanical orrery built in the 1770s–1780s that integrated moving light, mirrors, and mechanical gear-work to simulate astronomical events in visually compelling ways.

This puts him squarely in pre cinema lineage, even if the term wouldn’t have meant anything to him. Known for his orreries, he built one with optical illusions—geared mirrors simulating sunrise and eclipse movements.

Though not a projection device, its rotating light effects qualify it as a proto cinema machine—used in public lectures on astronomy. President Jefferson praised his devices as both scientific and poetic.

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His most sophisticated orrery included carefully mounted reflective surfaces and hidden light sources that simulated sunrise, sunset, eclipses, and even the phases of the Moon.

This is where it transitions from demonstration to optical illusion. Using epicyclic gears, he could simulate retrograde planetary motion (like Mars appearing to move backward) and combine this with slow-shifting light that appeared to move across celestial bodies—mimicking changing skies.

He presented these devices in public lectures or for visiting dignitaries, essentially creating scientific theatre. Visitors described the movements as “majestic” and “sublime”—words more often reserved for art or religion than mechanics.

_{Image Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, University of Pennsylvania Museum. Courtesy of the Penn Libraries, photographer Eric Sucar}

While his machines did not project images onto walls or screens, they did use light as performance, with manipulative optics (mirrors, shadows, layers); and simulating natural spectacles artificially.

This places him in conceptual proximity to later inventions like Brewster’s Kaleidoscopic Phantasmagoria, Athanasius Kircher’s Catoptric Theatre, and even later mechanical theatre boxes.

Thomas Jefferson, a friend and fellow Enlightenment figure, wrote admiringly about Rittenhouse’s machines saying “He has not merely taught the motions of the heavens, but made them visible to the eye—rendering science poetic and sublime.”

This poetic framing by the President is unusual for science at the time, and indicates the aesthetic power of the device.

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In a young America without much access to European optical shows (Magic Lanterns, etc.), Rittenhouse’s work likely stood out as one of the few home-grown mechanical spectacles of scientific illusion.

His machines bridged the gap between Renaissance mechanical philosophy and later scientific visual culture—which would bloom in the 19th century with Pepper’s Ghost, Reynaud, and Muybridge. Parts of Rittenhouse’s original orreries survive and are held at; Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society: University of Pennsylvania Museum; Some replicas are on display at Franklin Institute and private collections.

_{Images Princeton University Archives}

None of them are fully intact with the original lighting/mirror systems, as these were not as well-documented or preserved as the planetary gearing.

Rittenhouse deserves a slot under “18^th century Enlightenment Machines of Wonder,” “Mechanical Simulations of Natural Phenomena,” and especially “ Proto Cinematic Use of Motion and Light for Public Awe.”

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David Rittenhouse wasn’t just a clockmaker or scientific instrument builder—from what I can tell, he was building early machines of spectacle that used mechanical motion and controlled light to simulate celestial events.

And these weren’t passive models; they were professional theatrical devices, complete with illusion, rhythm, and emotional impact.

He didn’t project images, but he staged visual effects that foreshadow the optical illusions and immersive simulations within pre cinema.

No Magic Lantern, no screen—but what he did was close in spirit to the Kaleidoscope or Catoptric Theatre: artificial manipulation of light and motion for public engagement, housed in machinery dressed as science.

If we draw a line from Renaissance automata to the 19^th century Phantasmagoria, Rittenhouse’s eclipse-and-sunrise orrery sits right on that timeline—part science, part illusionism, and definitely a proto media device.

_{Image Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society University of Pennsylvania Museum, Courtesy of the Penn Libraries, photographer Eric Sucar}

1770
THOMAS SHERATON (1751-1806)
This Baptist furniture making Pastor made an intricate pocket camera. Along with his camera in the handle of a cane, and Herigone’s goblet, this camera was just two inches by three by three inches. A box within a box.

The smaller, inner box slides out to allow focus.

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When closed, this Optical Box is 19.3 inches long; 14.5 inches wide; 9.5 inches high. Pictured are four of the optical views that could be seen in this 1730 Engelbrecht viewer. Also by Martin Engelbrecht.

^{Photos Stéphane Dabrowski The Cinémathèque française.}

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REAL LIFE PHANTASMAGORIA
He used some form of optical projection to produce apparitions — Magic Lantern projection is the standard scholarly assumption — combined with darkened rooms, chemical fumes, and theatrical staging to create the illusion of summoned spirits.

Schröpfer was one of the earliest to use a Magic Lantern to project ghostly images in the Phantasmagoria style. Mixing real life occult, it didn’t go well. He first started his performances in a coffee house he ran in Leipzig.

Before he used the lantern to project images, he told his coffee patrons he could talk to the dead and even raise them.

Being a Freemason, Schröpfer gave his first demonstrations to other members of the organisation. This could clarify how he became entangled with the occult. Schröpfer’s wife was one of the backstage personnel and performers in his early productions.

Masonic lodges and occultist / Rosicrucian circles overlapped considerably in that milieu. However, I cannot confirm from solid primary-source documentation whether there is proof of his actual lodge membership, or whether the Masonic association is a recurring secondary-source claim that has never been rigorously verified.

He had used his wife’s money to buy the establishment.

LIVING THE PHANTASMAGORIA
Schröpfer had most likely never experienced a Freemason lodge meeting when he started his own lodge of “true Masonry.”

Nonetheless, he claimed to be the sole person with knowledge of the real secrets of Masonry and to be able to communicate with the spirit world. Schröpfer was one of the earliest I have found to use a Magic Lantern to project ghostly images in the Phantasmagoria style, even before the great Robertson.

Mixing real life with the occult however, it didn’t go well.

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Schröpfer was one of the earliest to use a Magic Lantern to project ghostly images in the Phantasmagoria style, even before the great professor Robertson

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EPILOGUE

A Magic Lantern and another type of projection box from his collection are now in the Museum Waldenburg — the projection box is decorated with a crucifix and a skull with wings. That’s a rare case of surviving material evidence directly connected to a pre Phantasmagoria operator.

1771
SILHOUETTES THE AND MAGIC LANTERN IN THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF PHYSIOGNOMY
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER (1741–1801)
Lavater has an indirect but notable relationship to pre cinema, primarily through his promotion of Silhouettes in physiognomy and the cultural links that created shadow play and later film practices.

Lavater was a Swiss theologian, and poet best known for his multi-volume Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (Essays on Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind 1775–1778).

He argued that a person’s fixed facial features (especially the profile) revealled moral character and the soul. He strongly favoured Silhouettes (Schattenrisse) as the most accurate and objective form of representation because they reduced the face to a pure outline or shadow, eliminating fleeting expressions and details that could mislead.

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THE PHYSIONOTRACE

He described the Silhouette as “the faintest and emptiest but… also the truest and most faithful image.” He promoted or used a simple “Silhouette machine” (Schattenrissmaschine) portrayed by the Physionotrace, invented in 1783 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien, that projected a sitter’s profile shadow onto a translucent screen for accurate tracing.

Seen here is the Chrétien Physionotrace, of male Silhouettes made by Lavater from his work Physiognomische Fragmente, volume 2, figures 6, 7, and 8 from 1776, reproduced in Fictions of Legibility: The Human Face and Body in Modern German Novels from Sophie von La Roche to Alfred Döb by Gabriela Stoicea, 2020, on page 45.

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Scholars note that while Lavater wanted to still the swarm of living faces into stable, legible profiles, the Silhouette “would not stay still”—moving shadows and shadow theatre blurred those boundaries and inspired further experimentation with motion.

Motion it seems did not want to stay still.

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There are at least two contemporary satirical etchings that depict Lavater operating a Magic Lantern in a political / religious allegory, playing on his public image and the era’s optical entertainments. This, is one of them.

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Lavater has an indirect but notable relationship to pre cinema, primarily through his promotion of Silhouettes in physiognomy and the cultural links that created shadow play and later film practices

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Early film theory also draws on physiognomic traditions associated with Lavater when discussing the revelatory power of the cinematic close-up and the face.

Pictured here from the British Museum is Bonaparte and the Pope from the series Moralisch-Politischer Kurier 4th booklet described as:

“Four ovals showing Bonaparte, Auguerau; a pope walking on stilts and Lavater directing his Magic Lantern at a man’s face and exposing the latter’s skull; page two of the fourth volume of the Politisch Moralischer Kurier. 1798 Etching.”

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READ Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind at Internet Archive.

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On a fold-out page preceding the frontispiece of his book, Priestley provides his readers a Biographical Chart outlining the great names in optics over the centuries from Alhazen in the 11^th century up to his own time.

In chronological order.

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PHANTASMAGORIA
The Phantasmagoria became an extremely popular piece of entertainment, until showtime. Its popularity soared throughout Europe, particularly in Germany but never as much as in France. Fontana gave us a sneak peak in 1420.

Born of a combination of the Shadow Play, the Magic Lantern and the desire to deceive or trick, the Phantasmagoria could be considered the forefather of today’s horror movie. Its basic purpose was to produce through simple techniques, an illusion.

Subjects were primarily of the black magic or necromancy categories; ghosts, spirits, dead relatives or personalities and politicians. The purpose was to scare the audience to death. Robertson, the master professor as much as said so in his Memoires.

Techniques included the use of smoke, the use of two or more Magic Lanterns, rear projection, hidden projection, projection on glass, use of mirrors, projection from below the stage, movement of the lantern on wheels which by the 20th century we will call dollying, all offering the illusion of subject-motion and many other ingenious strategies. 

The great magician Robertson had at the time of the French Revolution, an elaborate system which made the effigies of the dead appear to his stunned audiences. He compensated the movement of the lantern (s) by changing the position of the lens and thereby was able to show a figure growing larger and remaining in sharp focus throughout the show.

In this manner he obtained the compelling impression of an approaching figure.

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the Phantasmagoria became an extremely popular piece of entertainment, and a lot of fun, until showtime

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ITINERANT TRAVELLING SHOWMEN
Travelling from city to town to village, the travelling Magic Lantern showman was a virtual cinema on legs. He carried his lantern, oil, slides and stories with him on his back. Sometimes travelling in pairs in order to share the audio/visual element of the program and to attract more patrons, their shows were known as Galantee So.

This English title Galantee So comes from the meaning of a fine show. Only the ‘show’ part was mispronounced through the accent of the showman to come out as ‘so.‘

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Much much more on the Itinerant Travelling Showmen, Savoyards, Galantee So, Raree Shows, and the Phantasmagoria in subsequent chapters.

His shows lasted through the French Revolution and into the next century. Marionettes, a French entertainment-art, had dominated France until this time as the number one stringed puppet show, and never would regain its hold on audiences as it had.

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In Europe, Shadow Theatres appeared in the mid-18th century, first in Italy and Germany, then in France.

The Magic Lantern and the Phantasmagoria would for more than one hundred years hold that title, until the coming of Cinema.

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By 1772 families were able to purchase and create their own Ombres Chinoises at home. That’s how popular the Ombres Chinoises were. More modern versions from the 21st century are shown below.

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Séraphin is seen as the most important figure in the development of Ombres Chinoises.

His work is believed to have been seen by Philip James de Loutherbourg, giving him inspiration for his mechanical work including the Eidophusikon. More on de Loutherbourg coming up. Stay tuned.

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SEE a modern version of the Ombres Chinoises from the Shadow Theatre Group, here. Runs 4:11.

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FAST FORWARD 136 YEARS
LES OMBRES CHINOISES (1908)
This 3:26 film is from Segundo de Chomón paying tribute to his pre cinema past and uses stop motion animation to create his Ombres Chinoises, mixing with live action. From the Silent Film House.

SEE it here.

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In developing the Ombres Chinoises Séraphin presented the use of a clockwork mechanism to automate the show. An example of the robotic mechanism used by Séraphin or Automaton, was this donkey shaking its head, opening its mouth, and walking. Also shown is a closer look at its base and working parts.

^{Image Cinémathèque française Collection}

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Luc-Vincent Thiery de Sainte Colombe (1734-1811) in his work Guide to Amateurs and Travellers in Paris had this to say following one of Séraphin’s Ombres Chinoises programs:

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Here from Olive Cooks Movement in Two Dimensions- A Study of the Animated and Projected Pictures Which Preceded the Invention of Cinematography, Hutchinson and Company, 1963, on page 71 we read about the demise of Séraphin’s shadow theatre and shades / shadow theatre in general:

1773
JOHANN HEINRICH LAMBERT (1728-1777)
Lambert was one of the 18th century’s sharpest scientific polymaths. Born in Mulhouse to a poor tailor’s family, he had no formal university education, but by sheer self-training he became a major figure in mathematics, optics, astronomy, cartography, and early photometry.

Lambert wrote Nouveaux Memoires de l’Academie Royale in which he documents the use of the Camera Obscura to record cloud height. Previously, cloud height had been detected through observance of the shadows on the ground.

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Lambert is best known today for proving the irrationality of π and developing the first rigorous theory of map projections. Several projections still carry his name (Lambert conformal conic, Lambert cylindrical equal-area).

_{Image of Johann Heinrich Lambert from the School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland}

His Photometria  (1760) laid the foundations of quantitative light measurement—he introduced what we now call Lambert’s law of cosine emission. He designed and refined optical instruments, including improved telescopes and photometric devices.

He experimented with mirror systems and light–shadow demonstrations; nothing in his surviving record points to proto animation devices, but his work on projection geometry and luminous intensity fed indirectly into later Magic Lantern optics and 19th century image measurement.

1774
LITERARY TECHNOLOGY
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749–1832)
It is evident that the Magic Lantern was sufficiently familiar in German culture by 1774 to be used as a recognizable metaphor by Goethe in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), his novel first published in 1774 when he was twenty-five years old.

We find on page 40 Werther telling Wilhelm “Wilhelm, what is the world to our hearts without love? What is a Magic Lantern without light? You have but to kindle the flame within, and the brightest figures shine on the white wall; and, if love only show us fleeting shadows, we are yet happy, when like mere children, we behold them, and are transported with the splendid phantoms.”

Goethe is describing the familiar operation of a Zauberlaterne (Magic Lantern): light is introduced into the apparatus, and figures appear upon a wall. And there is something fascinating about Goethe’s wording.

He isn’t explaining what a Magic Lantern is to his reader.

He knows the image is immediately intelligible, but, “without light” nothing appears; but “kindle the flame” and “the brightest figures shine” upon the “whited wall” as Mannoni states in The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of The Cinema.

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his contribution is precisely that he captures the Magic Lantern’s place in the visual imagination of 1774

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We can see several overlapping strands: in the 17th century as the “lanterne de peur” began to wane, the Magic Lantern becomes associated with spectacle, illusion, educated apparition, and the supernatural.

In the18th century it enters literature and popular culture as something ordinary readers are expected to understand. Goethe’s 1774 Werther is a particularly pleasant example of this.

By the19th century the lantern becomes deeply embedded in popular entertainment, education, science, advertising, lectures, religious instruction, and any kind of visual storytelling.

As the 20th century approached, the language surrounding lanterns starts to overlap increasingly with photography, projected images, animated images, and eventually cinematography.

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If we pursued it systematically, we could build a chronological list of literary Magic Lantern references from the 1600s through the 1890s, distinguishing very carefully between:

🎦 actual descriptions of lanterns
🎦 metaphorical uses of the lantern
🎦 references to lantern shows
🎦 references to projected images
🎦 references that merely use lantern terminology

This, could produce some surprisingly early evidence of how people thought about projected images, not merely how the machines worked.

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Goethe using the Magic Lantern metaphor without explaining the apparatus suggests that the concept was sufficiently recognizable to his intended readers

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THE MAGIC LANTERN AS A LITERARY TECHNOLOGY
Dickens and Tolstoy both wrote about it and Dickens even incorporated it into his novellas. The Magic Lantern wasn’t just something Dickens happened to mention; it became part of his literary machinery for creating visions and transformations.

And Tolstoy is valuable for a different reason: his references show how deeply the lantern had entered the broader 19^th century Russian imaginative vocabulary.

The progression is fascinating:

Goethe — 1774
The Magic Lantern is already sufficiently familiar to serve as an everyday metaphor for images appearing on a wall.

Dickens — mid 19th century
The lantern becomes more than a metaphor. Dickens incorporates the idea and experience of projected images into his storytelling and visual imagination.

Tolstoy — late 19th century
The lantern likewise appears within literary descriptions, demonstrating that the technology had become part of the common conceptual language of visual experience. Tolstoy spoke of it with emotion and love.

And Dickens gives us an especially good case because he was writing during the period when the Magic Lantern was transitioning from an apparatus of wonder into a mass visual medium.

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A LEGITIMATE PRE CINEMA OBSERVATION
And there’s an important distinction here. When a novelist writes about a Magic Lantern, we’re not necessarily learning something new about the technical history of the instrument.

We’re learning something potentially just as valuable─what people in these periods understood a projected image was, compared to 400 years earlier when even the mention of projected apparitions would get you excommunicated or worse.

The fact that Goethe can use the Magic Lantern metaphor without explaining the apparatus suggests that the concept was sufficiently recognizable to his intended readers. In other words, Goethe’s evidence is primarily cultural rather than technological.

He tells us that by 1774, the Magic Lantern had become part of the imaginative vocabulary of educated German readers.

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And frankly, I think that’s a worthwhile mention on Goethe’s part, giving pre cinema history something that patents and technical treatises cannot do: evidence of how an optical medium entered cultural consciousness.

That is actually an enjoyable aspect of this entry, as a 25-year-old Goethe was already using the Magic Lantern as an immediately intelligible cultural metaphor.

He was not a gentleman-scientist; he came up through the ranks by practical hard work. Harris wrote Treatise of Optics but it was not published until after his death (London, 1775, 2nd Book, pp 269-282) where he describes using many fine depictions, “the image made with a lens.”

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Harris sits in the same practical-technician tradition as George Adams Sr. and Jr., Benjamin Martin, and John Dollond—though Harris was more mathematically rigorous and far less commercially focused.

From the Joseph Harris book Treatise of Optics (London, 1775, 2nd Book, p269) read what Harris says about the Camera Obscura.

Remember Paleographic history still applied itself well into the 19th century: therefore, replace the long s (f) with a short s when you see it.

In Treatise of Optics (London, 1775, 2nd Book, p269 Harris refers to the Scioptric Ball. He also gives constructional notes for a painted box (a stage-like Diorama) using wings / side panels and controlled lighting to produce “surprising” visual effects — this is directly relevant to pre cinema box / Diorama devices and Magic Lantern theatrical staging.

Joseph Harris talks about the portable Camera Obscura for the younger artists not learned in perspective, on p273.

He also explicitly describes a truly pocketable Camera Obscura (6–8 in. × 2–3 in.), mentions lenses ~1–2 inches in focal length, and even notes examples fitted to cane-heads — a concrete 18^th century precedent for small, portable imaging devices useful to draughtsmen and, by extension, for mapping small optical apparatus in pre cinema.

On the pocket camera, Harris states; “To a person who is accustomed to draw by his eye, a camera of about 6 or 8 inches long and 2 or 3 inches wide, which he can easily put in his pocket, may perhaps answer all his purposes. … To a person who is accustomed to draw by his eye, a camera of about 6 or 8 inches long and 2 or 3 inches wide, which he can easily put in his pocket, may perhaps answer all his purposes. … They have been made with a lens of about 1 or 2 inches focus, and fitted to the heads of canes; but these are much too small to answer any purpose.”

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On this matter he stated; “Any camera obscura, wherein the picture is received upon paper at the bottom, may be easily converted into a shew-box, or one for improving prints. … The print to be viewed is to be placed at the bottom of the box with its top inwards, where it is enlightened thro’ the front, now left open, either by day or candle-light; but it shews much more natural and pleasant by day-light… The box should be big enough to take in a large print or a book of prints; and it would be of some advantage, if two thin blacked boards be fastened by hinges to the sides near the top, to be set to the margins of the print; so as to limit the sight, as much as may be, to a view of the print only.”

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Harris gives hands-on, instrument-maker advice for measuring focal lengths and recommends a small “ox-eye”  apparatus (a simple short-focus arrangement) — the same class of lens used for bright, short-throw projection and for small portable cameras.

This practical note helps compute lens sizes and projection geometry when you reconstruct 18th century projection or camera devices.

Harris is quoted as saying: “An ox-eye fixed to a window looking easterly or westerly, so as it may face the sun when he is low, will be very convenient for finding the focal lengths of such lenses as may be readily screwed to it. Or a short tube fastened to the window, and having without a plane speculum which may be so inclined as to reflect the sun’s rays directly upon the lens, will do still better. The paper for receiving the light should be parallel to the lens…”

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READ Joseph Harris Optics at Google Books.

1777
MATTHEW BOULTON (1728-1809)
Some research suggests that photographs may have been produced at Boulton and Watt, in 1777. Historian Jerome Harrison for one, states in his A History of Photography, (Scovill, New York, 1887) “these were of the aquatint process.”

Harrison states they were mechanically produced on metal, large scale, 4 feet by 5 feet, and coloured (p13, chapter two). He further states that this process was of an employee — a Mr. Francis Eggington.

Boulton’s grandson discredits this in a pamphlet published in 1865.

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It should be noted that Francis Eggington in his own right became well known for his work in enameled glass and stained glass, as well as his work alongside Boulton in reproducing oil paintings using a mechanical process. Here is Boulton’s Soho Manufactory, in Birmingham UK.

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Understanding the aquatint / polygraph process requires knowing that aquatints (l) are etchings that print-makers use create a wide range of tonal values. Final prints resemble watercolour or wash drawings, and not photographs.

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Here we see the two pages by Jerome Harrison from his A History of Photography, Written as A Practical Guide and An Introduction to Its Latest Developments, Scovill, New York, 1887, chapter II, pp13 and 14 where he talks of the process.

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1777 
LIGHT NOT HEAT
CHARLES WILLIAM SCHEELE (1742-1786)
Scheele was a Swedish chemist and apothecary, renowned for his significant contributions to chemistry despite limited formal education and working in modest conditions. Born in Stralsund, Swedish Pomerania (now Germany), Scheele developed an early interest in chemistry while apprenticing as a pharmacist in Gothenburg.

His lab c.1889 below.

His career was marked by groundbreaking discoveries, though he often received less recognition than contemporaries due to his tendency to publish in Swedish and his untimely death at age 43.

Scheele was considered a great chemist, and was working with silver chloride and sunlight. He found and proved that the different hues of the spectrum had substantially different effects on silver when exposed.

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Scheele independently discovered/named oxygen around 1771, before Joseph Priestley, by heating substances like mercuric oxide and potassium nitrate.

His findings, published in Chemische Abhandlung von der Luft und dem Feuer (1777), were delayed, so Priestley is often credited.

Scheele produced chlorine gas by reacting hydrochloric acid with manganese dioxide, describing its properties, though he didn’t recognize it as an element. Other elements he identified include molybdenum, tungsten, barium, and hydrogen.

In his History of Photography, Josef Maria Eder, translated by Edward Epstean, Columbia University Press, New York, 1945, p131) identifies the work of Scheele as we read:

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He confirmed that light is what affects a nitrate base, not heat, as others had said.

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Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s contributions to the study of light and optics, particularly those relevant to the early foundations of photography, centre on his experiments with silver chloride and its sensitivity to light. While Scheele is primarily known for his chemical discoveries, his work in this area laid critical groundwork for photochemistry, which later influenced the development of photographic processes.

Referring to Scheele and the heat v. light debate, these two pages (pp32 and 33) are taken from The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969.

Scheele observed that silver chloride (AgCl), a white compound, darkened when exposed to sunlight. He noted that this darkening was due to a chemical change, specifically the reduction of silver chloride to metallic silver under light exposure.

In his experiments, described in his 1777 treatise Chemische Abhandlung von der Luft und dem Feuer (Chemical Treatise on Air and Fire), Scheele exposed silver chloride to different parts of the solar spectrum.

He found that the compound darkened most rapidly in the violet and blue regions of the spectrum, less so in red light, demonstrating that light’s wavelength influenced the reaction. This was one of the earliest systematic studies of a substance’s photochemical behaviour, showing that light could induce chemical changes.

Even beyond this point in time, there were some who continued to document heat to be the agent in action, regarding silver salts and the like.

Below, a photograph of Scheele’s Home Pharmacy and Laboratory prior to a fire in 1889. Photo taken before the fire and reproduced in the 1908 book Den svenska farmaciens historia by Karl Ahlberg. READ it here at Internet Archive.

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A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN PHOTOCHEMISTRY
Scheele’s experiments revealed that silver chloride’s darkening was not just a physical change but a chemical one, producing metallic silver and releasing chlorine gas. He wrote, “The silver chloride, when exposed to the sun’s rays, becomes dark and finally black… and gives off a gas” (paraphrased from his notes).

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From Middleton’s The New Complete Dictionary 1778, we see an illustration of two Camera Obscuras, plate 14, on p3, (figure 1, figure 2) along with the corresponding description of each on the opposite page.

From Middleton’s The New Complete Dictionary 1778, we see an illustration of a third Camera Obscura, plate 14, on page 3, (figure 3) along with the corresponding description of it on the opposite page.

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1750
BLACK MIRRORS – PRE PHOTOGRAPHY
CLAUDE LORRAIN (1600-1682)
Also called the Claude Mirror, this pre photographic optical instrument was very popular in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Black Mirrors were landscape display devices used by painters.

Consider the Black Mirror as an early virtual reality device working like a rear-view mirror.

Named after Claude Lorrain, a landscape painter of the time, they could be as small as a pocket mirror, or large enough to hold in both hands. Black Mirrors are made today.

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And because you were seeing real life in the mirror, it is like looking at a movie on an oval-shaped screen with all the movement of life itself.

Pictured is Derwentwater in Lake District National Park, in north west England.

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From The Artifact: Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the Black/Claude Mirror explained.

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In the Lake District of England during the Picturesque Movement, there were Viewing Stations where Black Mirrors were available and you could rest and render a landscape. Below is Claife Station, Lake Windermere in the Lake District, talked about by Thomas West.

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The Black Mirror with its concave mirror and dark colour, showed the reflected image as if in a dark room. To facilitate use with pencil and notebook, the Black Mirror had hooks allowing them to be hung on a tree branch, freeing the hands to draw.

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Claude Glass is manufactured even today.

Enslen staged room-sized Camera Obscura demonstrations. Instead of a small tabletop device, he used entire darkened chambers where the outside world was projected onto the indoor walls. This walk-in Camera Obscura was a kind of proto immersive experience, marketed as both education and wonder just as Cardano and Villanova had dome hundreds of years earlier.

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He experimented with Panoramas (circular or semi-circular paintings viewed in a specially constructed building) and Cosmoramas (optical peephole views). These positioned him within the same lineage of immersive pre cinema attractions as Robert Barker and Daguerre.

I found scattered 19^th century references suggesting that the young Enslen either attended or was influenced by Johann Georg Schröpfer’s (1738–1774) séances before Schröpfer’s on-stage suicide in 1774.

If true, it would place Enslen as an early transmitter of Phantasmagoria technique from occult/seance contexts into mainstream optical spectacle.

Pictured is Diana auf einem von zwei Hirschen gezogenen Wagen, (Diana and her entourage on a car pulled by deer) undetermined year 17^th century.

One report says it’s a pencil drawing, another says it’s watercolour and ink on paper. Suermondt-Ludwig Museum, Graphic Collection.

Schröpfer died when Enslen was only 15, so their contact would have been during Enslen’s youth. Some historians (e.g. Helmut Gernsheim, History of Photography) mention this link but note it is anecdotal and not firmly evidenced in primary documents.

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His room-sized Camera Obscura shows are an important step toward immersive visual environments, and he may indeed represent a conduit of Phantasmagoria techniques, though the personal connection to Schröpfer remains more suggestive than fully documented.

1778
THE ROYAL ACCURATE DELINEATOR
WILLIAM STORER
William Storer was an English instrument maker active in the late 18th century, known for his innovative work in optics. He patented a device called the Royal Accurate Delineator in 1778, which was an advanced form of the Camera Obscura.

This advanced device was designed to address some limitations of earlier Camera Obscuras, particularly their reliance on bright sunlight. Storer’s design incorporated a pair of rectilinear front lenses, a reflex mirror, and a third lens to produce a brighter and clearer image on a glass drawing screen, even in low-light conditions like candlelight.

This made it suitable for drawing portraits, landscapes, buildings, and other subjects with greater accuracy and detail. Utilizing rack and pinion motion, Storer’s camera contained two boxes, one sliding within the other.

Storer’s Royal Accurate Delineator had two lenses in the aperture with the schematic from the patent showing lens a and lens a.’ A third lens h b h allowed for a brilliant picture and clear focus; however, the depth of field was lessened.

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Storer, who styled himself as “Professor of Optics to His Majesty” (King George III), gained recognition for this invention, with notable figures like Sir Joshua Reynolds reportedly praising its capabilities.

The William Storer patent Royal Accurate Delineator had a polished mahogany body, with sliding lid fitted with brass patent arms and printed label on the underside:

The device was granted a British patent № 1183 on 4 March 1778, and was described in contemporary accounts as a tool for artists and those interested in optics. Horace Walpole, in 1777, wrote enthusiastically about Storer’s invention, noting its potential to enhance artistic work in light and shade (below).

Several examples of the Royal Delineator are preserved in collections, such as the Science Museum in London. Storer also produced other optical instruments, including telescopes, microscopes, spectacles, and an artificial eye which was another camera obscura variant, showcasing his broader contributions to optical technology.

The Royal Delineator by William Storer was unquestionably the most intricate and advanced Camera Obscura in the late 1700s.

A William Storer Royal Accurate Delineator resides at the Science Museum in London.

1778
TALKING HEADS
ABBÉ MICAL (1730–1789)
Mical was a French mechanician and inventor best known for creating speaking automata. In particular, a paired automaton named “Le Dialogue” that spoke using bellows, reeds, and leather lips. These automata delivered full sentences, their heads nodding and lips moving in synchrony.

_{Mical Speaking Heads illustration by E. A. Tilly c. 1783, MeisterDrucke}

Mical presented them to Louis XVI around 1780. He claimed they were the first to simulate human conversational logic (AI), mechanically. They’re a clear precursor to dialogic pre cinema or, illusion-based “performance machines” built to speak, act, and react.

Later Phantasmagorists were likely aware of Mical’s devices, as they blended speech with spectacle. He worked in a period when automata were reaching peak popularity in scientific salons, often blending mechanical ingenuity with physiological curiosity.

Mical’s machines were showcased to scientific societies and monarchs, but the technical details were largely kept secret, adding to their mystique.

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Abbé Mical’s fame rests primarily on two automaton heads, jointly referred to as “les têtes parlantes” (“the talking heads”), built around 1778–79. These devices could reportedly pronounce short phrases in French.

Unlike earlier automata focused on gesture or music (like Vaucanson’s flute player), Mical’s ambition was to replicate speech, using:

⚙️ Bellows as lungs
⚙️ Valves as glottal controls
⚙️ Metallic or organic reeds as vocal cords
⚙️ Tubes or leather membranes simulating the throat, mouth, and nasal cavities

He was not alone in this pursuit. His rivals included Christian Kratzenstein in Copenhagen and Wolfgang von Kempelen in Vienna, which I have spoken about, both of whom were also trying to produce artificial speech.

But Mical’s mechanism differed in that it was fully mechanical and autonomous, requiring no human manipulation once triggered. The two phrases spoken in French were:

🗣️ “Le Roi a donné la paix à l’Europe.” (“The King has given peace to Europe.”)
🗣️ “La paix fait le bonheur des peuples.” (“Peace brings happiness to the people.”)

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He refused to allow detailed inspections, and no complete schematic or replica survives. This has led to a kind of mythos around his work.

However, Charles Burney, the contemporary music historian, saw them and wrote a detailed account in his Musical Tour through France and Italy (1770s–80s). Burney noted the unnatural quality of the voices but was impressed by the imitation of certain consonants and vowels. Where are they now?

The original heads were destroyed by Mical himself. No confirmed surviving example of Mical’s devices exists today. A few caricatures and descriptions survive in 18^th century journals. Mical’s work influenced later automaton-makers and phoneticians, especially during the 19^th century push toward mechanized sound.

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Mical’s automata are significant not just for early speech synthesis, but also for their theatrical presentation, as public spectacles that blurred the line between machine and performer.

This resonates with pre cinematic illusions of life, agency, and simulated presence.

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Air passing through these glottal structures vibrated the membranes, producing low to high-pitched tones. A combination of these resonances, coupled with lip-like movements, yielded an “imperfect imitation of human voice.”

The Journal de Paris (N187,6 July 1783, p778) reports the heads engaged in a conversation:

🗣️ First Head “Le Roi vient de donner la Paix à l’Europe.” “The King has just given Peace to Europe.”
🗣️ Second Head: “La Paix couronne le Roi de gloire.” “Peace crowns the King with glory.”
🗣️ First Head: “Et la Paix fait le bonheur des Peuples.” “And Peace brings happiness to the Peoples.”
🗣️ Second head “O Roi adorable ! Père de vos Peuples ! leur bonheur fait voir à l’Europe la gloire de votre Trône.” “O adorable King! Father of your Peoples! Their happiness shows Europe the glory of your Throne.”

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Mical presented his talking heads to the Académie des Sciences in 1783 and under scrutiny again in 1784. Louis XVI apparently heard the heads speak in the same year that the Montgolfier brothers hot air balloon was debuting.

The king favoured the balloon exhibition, and Mical received no financial backing. Broke and feeling underappreciated, Mical destroyed his own works in 1789 and died in obscurity.

1780
EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIES
JACQUES ALEXANDRE CESAR CHARLES (1742-1822)
Charles was a prominent French physicist, chemist, and inventor, best known for his work on Charles’s Law and his pioneering efforts in ballooning with hydrogen-filled balloons in 1783.

However, within the context of pre cinema history, Charles was commissioned by Louis XVI to construct at the Louvre in Paris, a projection machine known as a Magascope which would project images onto a wall.

Charles had also conducted early experiments with light-sensitive materials before Schulze.

As well, around 1780, before Nicéphore Niépce’s breakthroughs in photography, Charles conducted an experiment where he captured a silhouette on paper impregnated with silver chloride, though he could not fix the image permanently.

This experiment demonstrates his interest in optics and light, which could theoretically connect to projection technology like a Magic Lantern or Magascope.

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Gaston Tissandier states, in his Les Merveilles de la photo- graphie (Paris, 1874, figure 2, p15 below), that Charles “about 1780,” employed the Camera Obscura for rudimentary photography, projecting (light from outside) Silhouettes of persons on paper coated with silver chloride.

Tissandier is demonstrating how the Cesar Charles event would have appeared.

Tissandier’s account suggests Charles was experimenting with light-sensitive materials and optical projection, placing him among the early pioneers of photographic principles.

Tissandier’s statement indicates that Charles projected Silhouettes (likely profiles of people, a popular subject in the 18th century) using the Camera Obscura with light from outside passing through the box to form an image on the treated paper.

This aligns with early attempts to capture images chemically, a significant step toward photography.

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Before Niépce’s Heliography and Daguerre’s Daguerreotype in the 1820s and 1830s respectively, scientists like Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy (both circa 1802) also experimented with silver compounds to capture images, though they faced the same issue of unfixable images.

Charles’s 1780 experiment, if accurate, predates these efforts, making it a notable early contribution. Historian Joseph Marie Eder in his book History of Photography (1945) on p141 had this to say on the Gaston Tissandier position that Cesar Charles ever projected Silhouettes onto a wall.

Neither Charles or Tissandier were German. I leave it up to you.

Tissandier founded the weekly magazine La Nature of which I will speak of several times within this website. He also became a hot-air balloon aviator.

Cesar Charles on the other hand, is known in history as the man who invented the hydrogen balloon, which Tissandier will use along with his brother Albert to escape Paris in 1870 during the Prussian siege.

1780s
GAINSBOROUGH’S SHOW BOX
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH (1727-1788)
The Gainsborough Show Box took twelve painted landscapes on glass transparencies which were then viewed through the adjustable lens at the front. This specially constructed wooden box machine was described as:

Gainsborough’s Show Box held twelve painted glass transparencies placed in front of a wetted light-diffusing silk screen. Illumination was from three candles. The Show Box had openings at the back and top. Transparencies could be stored inside. Images V&A Museum.

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The Show-box is a closed, wooden structure with a movable lens displaying painted transparencies. The single lens allowed one spectator at a time. The precise function of the movable lens has recently been determined by Dr. F. A. B. Ward of the Science Museum:

A system of cables and pulleys with a mobile carriage for the slides allowed the viewer to, without taking his eye from the lens, pick whichever slide he desired to see, or peer through the series one by one. Images Jonathan Mayne, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Gainsborough was undoubtedly stimulated by the example of glass paintings of his contemporary Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, made for his cinema-style theatre called the Eidophusikon (of which I will be reporting on very soon) in 1781.

Loutherbourg’s and Gainsborough’s devices had nothing physically in common. They were in differing ways, attempts at illustrative expression through artificial illumination for optical entertainment.

Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon had widespread favour in the 1780s.

According to Gernsheim the earliest mention of a similar device is in an anonymous Latin manuscript, Life of Leon Battista Alberti, published in Giorgio Vasari’s Le Vite de’più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori et Architettori (Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects).

I spoke of this in chapter three.

Dr. H. Elsner von Gronow suggested that Gainsborough may have been inspired by an apparatus by a “Dr. Parrat” published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 of which I have made mention of here before in chapter six.

I don’t think Parratt’s Camera Obscura is in any way similar. And Parrat wasn’t a doctor, at least he didn’t sign his letter as a doctor. Refresh your memory on the opinionated editorial letter of Simon Parrat from earlier in this chapter here.

Simon Parratt’s letter makes it clear that his apparatus was a Camera Obscura and not a Show Box, Perspective Box or viewer. SEE the letter from Simon Parrat in The Gentleman’s Magazine April 1753 Volume 23 Issue 4, page 171 here at Internet Archive.

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SEE the Thomas Gainsborough Show Box in this 36 second personal video from @CloramaDorvilias at You Tube. She gives us a quick Panoramic view of room 88 at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Notice several of Gainsborough’s glass transparencies framed on the wall.

By James Stow (1770–1823) after Edward Francis Burney (1760–1848). In the British Museum.

It’s widely regarded as a direct ancestor of the planetarium projector and an awfully striking example of early pre cinema spectacle.

Walker named it after the Greek roots meaning roughly “image / shape of the heavens.” In practice it was a giant circular display of the Solar System, often described as a 20-to-30-foot diametre transparent orrery.

Audiences saw moving planets, comets and constellations rendered on translucent panels and screens.

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Standing at 60 feet in circumference, the Eidouranion was equipped with a glass globe representing the earth, and its oceans. Figure 1 is a photograph of an animated lantern slide demonstrating the curvature of the Earth and it’s tilt.

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Contemporary descriptions and Walker’s own publications make plain that the Eidouranion combined mechanical gearing with transparencies and back-lighting so painted images could be illuminated and changed during the lecture.

That combination of mechanical motion and layered transparent imagery is what links it technically to later planetarium and projection devices.

These scenes could of course portray any aspect of the skies the lecturer desired like the constellations, and telescopic views of the planets.

This rendition of The Proscenium of the English Opera House in the Strand, shown at the English Opera House in 1817 is taken from Geared to the Stars; The Evolution of Planetariums, Orreries, And Astronomical Clocks, by Henry C King and John R. Millburn, UTPress, 1978.

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Detailed mechanical drawings and a full technical specification are scarce in the surviving record. Scholars have reconstructed its working principles from lecture accounts, playbills, pamphlets and a few engravings, but some fine points like the exact gearing arrangements, the method of changing scenes during a show, and internal lighting technology remain incompletely documented.

Here is Adam Walker’s description of his Eidouranian from his booklet An Epitome of Astronomy, on pages 1 and 2.

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Left image from Bodleian Libraries. Right from Geared to the Stars- The Evolution of Planetariums, Orreries, and Astronomical Clocks, by Henry C. King, and John R. Millburn, 1978, University of Toronto Press, p312, figure 19.3.

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These diagrams that Adam Walker used were made to show the eclipses of the sun and moon, the planets with their satellites, and the comets with good long tails.

And according to the Literary Gazette in 1821, the Great Comet of 1811 had a very long tail:

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Sometime about the turn of the century, large transparencies began to be used with these lit orrery’s. As well, the Magic Lantern seems to have been first employed in astronomical demonstrations in and around the same time the Phantasmagoria was also first seen in England.

Left image Mr. Walkers Eidouranion, Special Collections and Archives, University of Missouri.
Right image a Stipple engraving after S. Drummond in the Wellcome Collection.

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Named from the Greek ‘idea of the heavens,‘ the Eidouranion was accompanied by a Celestina, a resonant harpsichord, a resonant harpsichord providing musical accompaniment like in a silent movie.

Adam Walker’s Eidouranion, with its revolving lighted and moving globes continued to be exhibited by his son’s William and Deane after his death in 1821. The Eidouranion is the great great grandchild of today’s Planetarium.

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18^TH / 19 CENTURIES
THE GREAT OPTICAL BOXES
Optical boxes, known in French as boîtes d’optique, were popular entertainment devices in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in Europe.

These devices, often associated with the broader Enlightenment fascination with optics and visual phenomena, were used to view specially designed prints called vues d’optique or perspective views, which created an illusion of depth and perspective when seen through the box’s optical apparatus.

^{Photos Stéphane Dabrowski, la Cinémathèque Française}

Optical boxes were wooden or metal boxes fitted with lenses and sometimes mirrors, designed to enhance the viewing of vues d’optique—hand-coloured engravings depicting cityscapes, historical events, or exotic locations. The boxes used optical principles to create a sense of three-dimensionality, making the images appear more immersive.

They were a form of ‘armchair travel’ for viewers, offering glimpses of distant places or significant events. The inventor and manufacturer of this Optical Box from 1780 is unknown according to Laurent Mannoni of la Cinémathèque Française.

It is however, a box for perspective viewing in the Martin Engelbrecht style.

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), the prominent outdoor painter who was influential in light and landscape perspectives, had this to say of the Boîte d’optique which was taking Europe by storm in the late 18^th century;

Optical Boxes were often used with or referred to as Zograscopes, a simpler device consisting of a stand with a lens and mirror.

The term Zograscope is sometimes used interchangeably with optical boxes, though Zograscopes were typically less enclosed. Optical boxes emerged in the early 18th century in England, with their popularity peaking from the 1740s to around 1800–1820.

They spread across Europe, with major production centres in London, Paris, Augsburg (Germany), and Bassano del Grappa (Italy). The boxes were part of a broader Enlightenment interest in optics, spurred by scientific advancements like those of Isaac Newton (Opticks, 1704) and the development of telescopes and microscopes.

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This Optical Box houses a painting or engraving laid flat at the bottom of the box and is viewed via one or more lenses. Some of these boxes hold a magazine with many changeable perspectives. There were two main types of optical boxes.

Catoptric Boxes used a mirror inclined at 45° to reflect the image, viewed through a convex lens. The print was placed flat at the base of the box, and the mirror redirected the image to the viewer’s eye.

Dioptric Boxes allowed direct viewing through a lens without a mirror, often used for prints with translucent effects (e.g., illuminated scenes like fireworks or nighttime views).

Some dioptric boxes had perforations or translucent paper to simulate glowing effects when backlit. This Optical Box (top half) is in the Collection of the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image. It measures 15 long by 22 wide by 27.5 high, and folds in-ward to the shape of a book.

^{Photos Stéphane Dabrowski, la Cinémathèque Française}

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In aristocratic and bourgeois salons, finely crafted optical boxes were both entertainment and educational tools, teaching geography and physics. They were expensive, with Zograscopes costing up to 2 pounds 12 shillings in London, and coloured prints costing around 2 shillings—equivalent to a manual worker’s daily wage.

For the income-impaired, Itinerant showmen, known as Savoyards in England or ‘montreurs d’optique’ in France, carried portable optical boxes to markets and fairs, charging a small fee for passersby to view the prints.

These shows, called Raree shows in England or ‘Guckkasten’ in Germany, made the experience accessible to the lower classes. This Optical Box (top and bottom half pictured) houses a painting or engraving laid flat at the bottom of the box and is viewed via one or more lenses.

Some of these boxes hold a magazine with many changeable perspectives. Photos Stéphane Dabrowski, la Cinémathèque Française.

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Vues d’Optique (Perspective Views) were copperplate engravings, often hand-coloured with vibrant gouache or watercolor. The prints emphasized strong linear perspective to enhance the illusion of depth when viewed through the Optical Box. Common subjects included:

🎞️ Topographic views of cities, ports, and monuments (e.g., Versailles, London, or the Lighthouse of Alexandria).
🎞️ Historical or biblical scenes.
🎞️ Exotic or distant locations, appealing to “armchair travellers.”

Here, a Boîte d’optique in the Mondo Nuovo style from 1780, Milan. It offers four glass openings for the viewing of 15 engraved, painted and openwork scenes for day and night effects, all arranged at the top of an upper level.

More on the Mondo Nuovo in a future chapter.

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The views descend one by one via a bevy of strings. The magazine can hold 22 views. A double flap on the front gives access to the interior of the box. Two candles, each in a metal cylinder have their smoke evacuated thanks to pierced holes in the upper level.

Some prints were designed for nighttime effects, with perforations or translucent paper that, when backlit, simulated illuminated scenes like fireworks or fires. In dioptric boxes, a crank or cords could scroll through a series of images mounted on a roller.

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The floor of the box is lined with floral wallpaper. Two engraved scenes are applied to each side wall, in order to present exquisite and accurate perspective. Elements of a pasted engraving are also placed on the upper part of the frame, inside.

Major publishers included Georg Balthasar Probst in Augsburg and Jean-François Daumont in Paris. Prints were sometimes reversed (with text mirrored) to account for the mirror in catoptric boxes.

^{Photos Stéphane Dabrowski, la Cinémathèque Française}

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On the opposite side two doors allow other candles to illuminate as well. The roof is surmounted by cornices (ledges). Four gables are removable and are retained by four metal hooks. Under the box, there are two straps in braided fabric in order to carry the device.

The boxes relied on binocular vision principles. A large convex lens (12–15 cm in diametre) refracted light to create a sense of depth, with the print placed at the lens’s focal distance (70 cm for some devices). The strong perspective and bold colours of the prints enhanced the effect.

^{Photos Stéphane Dabrowski, la Cinémathèque Française}

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Elite versions were ornate, often made of polished wood or decorated with marquetry, and could be considered works of art. Portable versions used by colporteurs or peddlers, were simpler, designed for durability and ease of transport.

Some had handles or cranks to manipulate the prints. In the 17th century, complex systems of Catoptric Theatres (Theatrum Catoptricum) appeared in the Cabinets of Curiosities across Europe.

The German Athanasius Kircher describes a whole plethora of curiosities of this type in his famous work Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae published in 1646.

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Many of the travelling itinerant showmen who moved from village-to-village broadcasting “the curiosity to see” through their Magic Lanterns, also carried and presented an Optical Box.

These Savoyards occupied a principal slice in the spread of the luminous image. Optical Boxes were part of a broader family of optical entertainment devices, including Magic Lanterns and Camera Obscuras, which also projected or manipulated images for amusement.

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Optical boxes were used to teach geography and perspective, especially to children. Madame de Genlis, an 18th-century educator, recommended them for young girls’ education. They contributed to a shared European visual culture, spreading idealized images of places like Versailles or St. Petersburg.

However, many prints were not entirely accurate, as engravers often compiled images from other sources rather than firsthand observation.

Vues d’optique are now valued by collectors and museums for their historical and decorative appeal. They are seen as precursors to later visual technologies like stereoscopy and 3D imagery.

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Optical Boxes with multiple functions where day and night effects are seen as a simple perspective box or as a darkroom for painters, have taken the shape of hefty folio books, wrapped in calf’s hide as we see here.

Some optical boxes and vues d’optique are preserved in collections, such as at the Cinémathèque française. Prints by artists like G.J. Probst (a 1781 view of Delft Canal) or Jacob Wagner are available through antique dealers, with prices ranging from $300 to $12,250 depending on condition and rarity.

Examples include views of Paris’s Pont Notre-Dame, the Buitenhof in The Hague, or the Lighthouse of Alexandria, often with vivid hand-colouring.

^{Photos Stéphane Dabrowski, la Cinémathèque Française}

The Victoria and Albert Museum has the world’s largest collection of Vues d’ Optique or Perspective Views for the Boîte d’ Optique or Optical Box.

The Magic Lantern and the Optical Box will perform significant roles by the entering in of the 19th century. They will prepare peoples minds for more and more kinds of optical entertainment, and keep us on the path towards Cinematography.

1780
CAMERA OBSCURA IN ART
PAUL SANDBY (1731-1809)
Considered the father of watercolour, Sandby has depicted in his painting Rosslyn Castle, Midlothian from c. 1780, a camera being used by a lady.

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William Storer’s Royal Delineator was certainly the most intricate and the most urbane Camera Obscuras in 1778. To provide a bright overall image on its glass drawing screen, it used a pair of rectilinear front lenses, a reflex mirror, and a third lens.

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1780
HONOURABLE MENTION
JEAN PAUL MARAT (1743-1793)
Marat is a fascinating figure because he belongs to both the history of science and the history of the French Revolution.

Today he is remembered almost exclusively as the radical revolutionary murdered in his bathtub in 1793, but before politics consumed his life, he spent years investigating light, optics, electricity, and vision.

He is important to mention because, in the late 1770s and early 1780s, he published serious investigations into light and optics. Among his principal scientific works are Découvertes sur la lumière (Discoveries on Light, 1780), Recherches physiques sur l’électricité (Physical Researches on Electricity, 1782), later writings on optics and fire.

In Découvertes sur la lumière, Marat challenged some of the accepted optical theories of his day, particularly those associated with Newton.

He carried out experiments on reflection, refraction, coloured shadows, the decomposition of light, visual perception, and most optical phenomena.

While many of his conclusions were later rejected, the experiments themselves illustrate the intense eighteenth century interest in understanding vision and light—the scientific foundation upon which photography, projection, and eventually cinema would be built.

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Marat did not of course invent or improve the Magic Lantern. His contribution is clearly indirect. The eighteenth century can be broken down into two parallel pursuits within pre cinema.

1. inventors and showmen improving optical devices (Magic Lanterns, microscopes, telescopes, Panoramas)
2. scientists trying to understand how light behaves and how the eye perceives it

Marat belongs to the second group.

Understanding vision was essential to later developments such as: persistence-of-vision theories, retinal afterimages, physiological optics, stereoscopy, and Chronophotography.

Before the Revolution, Marat was taken seriously enough that he sought recognition from the French Academy of Sciences. However, many leading scientists criticized his methods and conclusions.

His disputes with established figures, particularly over Newtonian optics, damaged his scientific reputation.

His investigations into light and visual phenomena, and the relevance of optical science to the broader development of visual media are significant contributions however today, historians generally regard him as an energetic and imaginative experimenter rather than a major contributor to optical science.

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1781
THE EIDOPHUSIKON
PHILIPPE JACQUES DE LOUTHERBOURG (1740 – 1812)
In 1781 Loutherbourg, a proficient and well-known painter, put the finishing touches on what he called an Eidophusikon which attempted to present motion through the presentation of successive pictures.

Based loosely on the Camera Obscura room and its ability to entertain crowds, and leaning more towards the Panorama and Diorama, the Eidophusikon was first set up in a room in his own house. Guests would peer through an aperture no less than six feet square to see pictures painted on fine taffeta with colours which were translucent.

Light was projected from behind at different distances depending on the desired effect. Reflecting mirrors were added to define the scenery with brilliance and life.

In his Musical Memoirs of 1830, Parke would comment on the Eidophusikon as the ….“newly invented transparent shades upon which was shed a vast body and brilliancy of colour producing an almost enchanting effect.” A darkened auditorium aided Loutherbourg in setting a mood consistent with the program, and agreeable to the audience.

It would be just over another hundred years however, before patrons would sit in make-shift theatres with a screen lit.

This is how close we are to Cinematography in 1781. Loutherbourg’s first showing was that of an early morning scene of London.

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in many ways it appeared like a life-sized moving projection lantern slide that has come to life

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AUTHOR’S NOTE:
I have also seen the names of both Lauterbourg and Lutherbourg associated with de Loutherbourg. Adolf Hübl in a 1947 published work was announced by the German film director Werner Wekes as a post-biblio source for his 1986 documentary on the prehistory of cinema, and he links de Loutherbourg as the inventor of the Flip Book in 1760.

I have not found any other reference.

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the Eidophusikon was an early attempt to portray story-telling with motion, to an audience in a theatrical setting

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Below Left: An illustration of the Eidophusikon from a newspaper of the time, along with a description: “Moving Pictures, representing the Phenomena of Nature.”

The illustration is by Edward Francis Burney showing Satan arousing his fellow fallen rebel angels during a performance of Milton’s Paradise Lost on a stage in a cartouche-pen and grey ink and grey wash, with watercolour.

This is the only known print of de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon and is kept in the British Museum.

Right Image: Robert Poulter’s working Eidophusikon of 2006. Experience it here.

Image the British Museum

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Philip Jacques De Loutherbourg was also an outstanding set designer for London’s Drury Lane theatre. The Eidophusikon debuted in Leicester Square in February 1781 and was the city’s artistic achievement for many years.

The apparatus was really avant-garde, drawing the audience in with regulated lighting, clockwork automation, 3-dimensional models, and accompanying sound effects.

The Eidophusikon displayed views of London, a storm at sea, and even a Milton scene dubbed “Satan arraying his troops on the banks of the fiery lake, with the raising of the Palace of Pandemonium” as shown above.

During his time at Drury Lane, he was interested in creating theatrical spectacles that combined art, technology, and performance. He constructed illusions such as a moving moon and withering trees using lantern slides, with such life-like effects that nature fell to the willing suspension of disbelief.

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Three newspaper clippings on Eidophusikon exhibitions from 1781 which can be clicked and read in a new page.

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The Eidophusikon or Eidophusicon, means image of nature and has also been referred to as a moving Diorama. The Eidophusikon was approximately seven feet by three feet by ten feet. The viewing screen was in parallel to an auditorium just like the modern Cinema.

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the development of this mechanical theatre was a significant step forward in visual motion-storytelling

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Scenes from the Eidophusikon appeared indistinguishable from their natural equivalents by using machinery and instruments placed onstage and hidden from view. Remember Kircher suggesting the lantern be hidden from view in 1646.

In The Storm and Shipwreck Conveying an Exact and Striking Idea of the Frequent Hurricanes in the West Indies, for example, de Loutherbourg used the shaking of a thin sheet of copper to fill the auditorium with a thunderous soundscape.

W. H. Pyne writes in his book Wine and Walnuts how these events “seemed a reality” to seamen who had experienced the real thing.

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De Loutherbourg’s first showing was that of an early morning scene of London. Below is a modern version of how the Eidophusikon would look in 1781.

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The idea of the Eidophusikon persisted long after de Loutherbourg’s death, with updated copies being created as late as the 1850s and named The New Eidophusikon. This was even after the original Eidophusikon was destroyed by fire in 1800.

Its eventual extinction, and perhaps the reason it is so unknown in modern society, stemmed from its replacement by more recent immersive media, such as the already well-known Magic Lantern and early cinema from the late nineteenth century.

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Then using the Pantograph, a reduced Silhouette is generated. Zooming out, without a lens.

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Merken wrote Liber Artificiosus Alphabeti Maioris in 1782 with engravings by Heinrich Coentgen (1727-1792). This calligraphy book included fifty-six engraved plates; some silhouettes made with the Silhouettograph.

^{Images Luc Devroye, School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal}

This work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is classified under drawings, prints, and books from Germany during the 17^th and 18th centuries.

1782
THE VISUAL PEDAGOGY OF MADAME DE GENLIS
STEPHANIE FELICITE DE GENLIS (1746-1830)
She was one of the most influential educators and writers of the late eighteenth century, and she also has an interesting connection to the history of optical entertainments and pre cinema.

This was not simply entertainment in her view—the use of the Magic Lantern was “educational technology.”

Her full name with title was Caroline Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, Countess of Genlis. Born in Paris, she is almost always referred to as Madame de Genlis.

She publishes Adèle et Théodore, describing the use of approximately 400–500 custom-painted historically-themed Magic Lantern slides projected four times each week as part of a structured educational programme. She commissioned an extensive set of historical lantern slides:

📽️  she used them regularly in teaching
📽️  she narrated them in English, teaching history and language simultaneously
📽️  she rejected the conventional comic lantern subjects in favour of educational imagery

Hers is among the earliest documented examples of the Magic Lantern being systematically incorporated into a planned educational curriculum, anticipating the educational lantern lectures and visual instruction methods that became widespread in the nineteenth century.

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Caroline Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, Countess of Genlis was a novelist who wrote more than 140 works and was one of the most celebrated educational theorists of her age.

She was also:

👍  Governess to the children of the House of Orléans, including the future King Louis-Philippe I
👍  An advocate for practical, visual education rather than rote memorization
👍  Her educational novels describe children learning through carefully staged visual presentations that resemble later nineteenth-century museum displays and optical exhibitions

Her educational philosophy anticipated many nineteenth century teaching methods by emphasizing:

👍  demonstrations
👍  experiments
👍  models
👍  maps
👍  pictures
👍  scientific apparatus
👍  and dramatic performances

In her educational writings she recommended:

👍  Magic Lantern demonstrations
👍  optical experiments
👍  shadow effects
👍  educational tableaux (students would perform silent dramatic scenes)
👍  theatrical performances
👍  miniature stage scenery
👍  scientific spectacles

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From a pre cinema perspective, 1782 is the moment when the Magic Lantern becomes part of a coherent educational philosophy instead of an occasional curiosity

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Many historians I have discovered regard her promotion of children’s tableaux as precursors to later nineteenth century educational pageants and living pictures.

Among her most influential works include Les Veillées du Château (1784), Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes, and Annales de la Vertu. These books were translated throughout Europe.

READ Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l’éducation first edition 1782 here at Google Books.

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Pictured, are the pages (54 and 55) of Adèle et Théodore that pertain to what I believe are the most important passages in the book. Translation below.

Within the history of pre cinema where the Magic Lantern is used in education, I would place Madame de Genlis in a lineage that looks something like this:

👥  Athanasius Kircher — projection as wonder and instruction
👥  Johann Samuel Halle — optical demonstrations as public education
👥  Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis — visual pedagogy for children and the aristocracy
👥  Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi — object teaching
👥  Nineteenth-century school Magic Lantern lectures like Moigno, Molteni and Meunier more than a hundred years if the future
👥  Educational cinematography of the 20^th century

That makes Madame de Genlis one of the important intellectual bridges between the seventeenth century world of scientific spectacle and the nineteenth century world of visual education.

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FOUR TIMES EACH WEEK
Caroline Stéphanie Félicité explicitly mentions the Magic Lantern (lanterne magique) by name, and refers more generally to “projected images” and “optical demonstrations.”

That’s a subtle distinction, and if we examine the original 1782 French edition closely, we may be able to identify one of the earliest pedagogical discussions of the Magic Lantern in French educational literature.

That is arguably the earliest documented curriculum built around a Magic Lantern. Looking inside Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l’éducation, (Adèle and Theodore, or Letters on Education) (1782), an extraordinary passage occurs in the section where Madame de Genlis explains how virtually every childhood amusement can be turned into instruction.

This sets the tone in the entire work. In the original French she writes:

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PROJECTION AS AN ACTIVE TEACHING MEDIUM
My translation from page 55 of Adèle et Théodore continues:

These short passages actually strengthen her importance in pre cinema history—it shows that she was thinking of projection as an active teaching medium, not simply as an illustrated book on a wall.

The publication of Adèle et Théodore changed everything. Madame de Genlis wasn’t merely recommending illustrations—she built an entire educational philosophy around seeing.

In Adèle et Théodore, she argues repeatedly that children retain knowledge far better when instruction is made concrete through objects, demonstrations, models, performances, and carefully staged visual experiences.

The work became enormously influential throughout Europe, going through numerous editions and translations. Something that should interest us all from a pre cinema perspective is her use of tableaux.

Long before the Victorian craze for living pictures, Caroline Stéphanie Félicité had children learning history, morality, and literature by arranging themselves into silent dramatic scenes. These were educational performances in which pose, costume, gesture, and composition carried the lesson.

That approach anticipates one of the central ideas of nineteenth century visual culture: that a carefully composed visual image and one I might point out, might ‘move,’ can communicate as effectively as a spoken lecture.

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Madame de Genlis had practical experience educating the children of the House of Orléans, especially the future Louis-Philippe I.

Many scholars believe that the methods described in Adèle et Théodore draw heavily on her real educational work, even though Adèle and Théodore themselves are fictional.

Why these passages are historically important is because just a few sentences lay out the ground work for several remarkable facts:

📽️  she explicitly uses the term Lanternes Magiques Historiques (Historical Magic Lanterns)
📽️  she commissioned 400–500 custom glass slides
📽️  the slides illustrated history, not comic or grotesque scenes
📽️  she projected them four times every week
📽️  she presented them herself
📽️  she used the presentations to teach English simultaneously
📽️  she deliberately contrasts her educational slides with the stock comic slides commonly found in eighteenth century lantern shows

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Madame de Genlis is an important intellectual bridge between the 17th century world of scientific spectacle, and the 19th century world of visual education

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OPTICAL MEDIA BEGINS TO EDUCATE
I also think historians have understated Madame de Genlis’s importance to Magic Lantern history. She did not invent any optical apparatus, but she helped legitimise visual media within education.

Before figures like her, the Magic Lantern was often associated with itinerant showmen, curiosity cabinets, and popular entertainment. I am guilty of this myself.

By incorporating visual demonstrations into an educational program for elite children, she contributed to the gradual shift that made the lantern an accepted classroom instrument in the nineteenth century.

That cultural shift is at least as important as many technical inventions.

I think Madame de Genlis deserves a place alongside people like Johann Samuel Halle and Jean Paul Marat—not because she advanced optics scientifically, but because she advanced the idea that optical media could educate.

HISTORICAL CONNECTION
Around 1780–1782, both Marat and Caroline Stéphanie Félicité were publishing influential works in France—but from very different perspectives.

Marat was asking “How does light behave?” Madame was asking “How can light, projected images, and visual experiences be used to teach?”

Together, they represent the scientific and educational currents that fed into the development of pre cinema, even though their lives would soon take dramatically different paths.

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Félicité did something different: She asked, how can projected images become a regular part of a child’s education? Her answer was astonishingly practical:

📽️  commission 400–500 historical slides
📽️  project them four evenings each week
📽️   narrate the images in English (Genlis used the Magic Lantern also as a vehicle for language instruction, narrating the projected images in English so that her pupils received two lessons simultaneously)
📽️  use the changing pictures to maintain attention
📽️  replace the stock comic slides with historical scenes

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For someone tracing the progress of visual media before cinema, 1782 is a genuine milestone.

This image is a reproduction of a Jean Senebier portrait from 1790.

His Mémoires include multiple experiments on the action of sunlight on silver precipitates, which in 18^th century chemical terminology includes silver chloride (then also named précipité blanc d’argent or cornet d’argent).

He devoted an entire section on how light acts silver precipitates (p 205 in the Google Books scan). This indicates a systematic experimental program on silver compounds.

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🧪⚗️ comparing precipitates exposed for different durations
🧪⚗️ controlling the amount of air in the vessel
🧪⚗️ comparing exposure under full sunlight vs. partial light READ the Senebier’s Mémoires physico‑chymiques here at Google Books.

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Senebier’s work is part of the early chain of photochemical research that I have also reported on:

📸 Wilhelm Homberg (1694) first noted light‑induced darkening of silver chloride
📸 Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1777) analyzed the chemistry more deeply
📸 Thomas Wedgwood (1800) and Humphry Davy (1802) later attempted image formation
📸 Herschel (1839–1840) provided the modern chemical understanding

Senebier’s contribution is therefore an important intermediate step in Photographic History by measuring the effect, not merely observing it.

1783
HONOURABLE MENTION
JEAN JOSEPH MERLIN (1735–1803)
Merlin was a Belgian-born inventor, mechanician, and showman who made a significant mark in Georgian England. He’s best remembered for his eccentricity, his role in the world of automata, and a notorious incident involving an early version of his famous inline / roller skates.

But behind the flair, Merlin was a skilled mechanist who contributed meaningfully to the development of musical instruments, automata, clocks, and optical devices, making him highly relevant to pre cinema history.

He is well documented as a lesser known pre cinema player for his public exhibitions which were a key feature of later Phantasmagoria shows. Merlin was a close collaborator with James Cox, the famed London jeweller and showman.

They worked together on automata and mechanical curiosities for export to China and India, many of which were complex, clockwork-driven devices that mimicked lifelike movements.

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Merlin opened his Mechanical Museum in Hanover Square, London between 1783 and 1803, where he displayed his inventions to a paying public. This was a critical node in the history of pre cinematic display culture. It was part theatre, part science museum, and part fairground.

The Museum also had mirror illusions and optical devices that used principles later found in Phantasmagoria and other Magic Lantern shows.

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Pictured are two clippings from the London Morning Chronicle dated Tuesday 8 February 1803 (right) and Thursday 24 February 1803 (left).

Some of my other sources include; Fanny Burney’s journals which provide rich eyewitness descriptions of Merlin’s exhibitions.

🔎 Contemporary newspapers and pamphlets on Cox’s Museum
🔎 Royal Society papers – some technical specs and public commentary
🔎 The Bowes Museum
🔎 The Science Museum, London
🔎 Wellcome Collection
🔎 British Library for 18^th century ephemera relating to Merlin’s exhibits

The illusion depended on continuous lateral motion, not intermittency. They simulate cinematic continuity without frames, projection, or mechanical animation.

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Carmontelle had been experimenting with scroll imagery earlier (1780s), but 1793 is the year he explicitly documents and consolidates the form during his retreat from court life after the French Revolution.

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One might be tempted to suggest that rouleaux transparents are conceptually closer to pre cinema than panoramas, which would emerge publicly a few years later (Barker, 1790s).

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These rolled-up transparencies were viewed in a backlit viewing box accompanied by narration. Some of the scrolls have survived across the centuries. Below, SEE a full Rouleaux Transparents by de Carmontelle called The Four Seasons running twenty-three minutes.

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This de Carmontelle transparency below is a fragment of a scroll. It has been mounted in a frame but when stretched between two reels and lit from behind, it scrolled before the spectators sitting out front giving the impression of Moving Pictures in 1783.

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Here from Illusions in Motion – Media Archaeology of The Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles by Erkki Huhtamo, MIT Press, Boston, 2013, available at Google Books, Erkki tells us more about de Carmontelle.

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his Rolling Transparency displayed moving bands of paintings in a pre cinematic story-telling fashion

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Two sections are seen here of the de Carmontelle transparency he called The Campaigns of France, played in his Rolling or Moving Transparency, of 1783. Motion Pictures of the late 18^th century.

It featured a cylindrical wick housed between two concentric metal tubes, allowing air to flow through and around the wick, and a glass chimney to enhance airflow. This design produced a brighter, cleaner flame, emitting up to 10-12 times more light than a candle or conventional oil lamp, with less smoke.

The lamp used whale oil and became a standard for home, shop, and lighthouse illumination until the rise of kerosene lamps around 1850.

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Argand faced significant challenges with his lamp’s commercialisation. In France, his acquaintance Antoine-Aroult Quinquet copied the lamp, adding a glass chimney, and won a legal battle for patent infringement, leading to the lamp sometimes being called a Quinquet lamp.

In England, Argand partnered with William Parker and Matthew Boulton, securing a patent in 1784, but manufacturing difficulties and rampant imitation limited his profits.

The French Revolution’s abolition of patents further hindered his ventures, particularly at his lamp factory in Versoix, near Geneva. Argand was noted as having said “ten to twelve times more powerful than a simple candle.”

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An inner tube was a conduit for air to rise into the centre to support combustion on the inner surface and outer surface of the cylindrical flame.

Argand’s mental health deteriorated, reportedly due to the stress of legal battles and financial losses, and he contracted malaria, which plagued him for 20 years until his death in Geneva in 1803.

His nephew, Isaac Bordier-Marcet, continued his work, applying Argand’s lamp technology to lighthouses.

Pictured is an Argand lamp in use. A popular theme for artists when new scientific inventions were born–portray the invention within their art. This example; A Portrait of James Peale, using an Argand lamp from 1822 by Charles Willson Peale, is an 1822 photo bomb.

Argand’s lamp revolutionized lighting during the Enlightenment, influencing industrial and domestic illumination for over a century. Despite personal and financial struggles, his innovations laid groundwork for advancements in lighting and other fields.

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In the beginning, patents were first hand written, going back to the 15^th century. Below are two pages hand written from Argand’s patent for the Argand Lamp, 1784. An excellent work on Argand is by John J. Wolfe (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999) entitled Brandy, Balloons, and Lamps: Ami Argand, 1750-1803.

The illustration of the Argand lamp on the left, is from the Louis Figuier (1867-1869) book Les meirvelles de la science in 1870.

1784 
ETIENNE – GASPARD ROBERT (1764 – 1837)
Étienne-Gaspard Robert known by his stage name Robertson, was a multifaceted figure from Liège (then part of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, now Belgium), celebrated for his contributions to physics, optics, stage magic, and early aviation.

He was a painter, physicist, inventor, balloonist, and a pioneering developer of Phantasmagoria, a form of theatrical horror show using Magic Lantern projections.

Robert blended science, art, and spectacle in a way that epitomized the late 18th and early 19^th century fascination with the intersection of rationalism and mysticism. His, is the name synonymous with the Magic Lantern and the Phantasmagorie.

Robertson did more for the art than any other magician, performer, or showman. His version of the Phantasmagorie grew out of an early interest in a mixture of magic, horror and optics.

A professor of physics in his native Liege, he states in his memoirs that he read the works of Porta and Kircher, and began on the road to horror by devising what would become the most prolific entertainment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

He was not wrong.

Robert studied at the University of Leuven, where he became a professor of physics specializing in optics. His early passion for painting and drawing led him to move to Paris in 1791 to pursue a career as an artist.

While there, he supported himself as a painter and draughtsman but also attended lectures on natural science at the Collège de France.

His deep understanding of optics and physics shaped his later innovations.

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“Remember the Phantasmagoria!”

^{– Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Memoires}

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In 1784, Robertson gave an exhibition of an improved magic lantern. He was greatly influenced by the earlier work of Musschenbroek’s motion attempts, and had been impressed with the works of the Shadow play artists including Seraphin, a decade earlier in Paris.

He published articles, worked as an assistant to Alessandro Volta, and demonstrated galvanism and optical experiments. In 1801, he assisted Volta in a dramatic presentation at the Institut National, igniting hydrogen with an electric spark before Napoleon and leading physicists.

This engraving below, appears on the frontispiece of the E. G. Robertson book Scientific and Anecdotal Recreational Memories in 1840. Simply known as, his Mémoires. Published after his death.

Robertson headed towards Paris in 1784 with his Fantomes Artificiels (Artificial Fantoms) to begin his career in horror.

Robert performed globally, including at Paris’s Jardin de Tivoli in 1826, and lived comfortably from his ventures. He died in Paris in 1837 and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, where his Gothic tomb, adorned with skulls and reliefs depicting his Phantasmagoria and ballooning feats, remains a striking monument.

His work laid groundwork for optical entertainment and influenced the development of film and photography, while his ballooning exploits contributed to early aviation. Robert’s ability to blend scientific rigor with theatrical showmanship made him a unique figure of his era, embodying the Enlightenment’s tension between reason and wonder.

The tomb of Étienne-Gaspard Robertson in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, is adorned appropriately in honour of what he brought to the world in horror motion-entertainment.

Charles Dickens called Professor Robertson “an honourable and well-educated showman.”

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Much more on Robertson as this and the next chapter unfolds.

This drawing could then be reduced and engraved onto copper plates for multiple prints, often in aquatint. He collaborated with artists like Edme Quenedey and later Jean-Baptiste Fouquet to refine and reproduce these portraits, which were popular during the late 18th century, especially around the French Revolution.

The term Physionotrace refers to both the device and the resulting portraits. Physionotrace of Chretien 1792.

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The initial large drawing was then reduced using the same Pantograph or a similar device to create a smaller, more manageable image, typically about 1.8 to 3.6 inches in diametre. This reduced outline was engraved onto a copper plate, often using techniques like etching or aquatint, to produce multiple prints.

Gilles-Louis Chretien marketed a new device for the beginner to create Silhouettes in 1784, owing to the strong demand for this inexpensive art form. It was dubbed a Physiognotrace, a portmanteau of the word’s physiognomy and trace.

This is a modern replica below.

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The Physiognotrace was between the artist and subject, and a stylus follows the subject’s contour. The tracing is translated to a drawing by the Pantograph arms, which are displaced from directly behind the subject where the artist can see it.

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The Pantograph is the original photocopier

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Chrétien initially worked with miniaturist Edme Quenedey, who helped produce and market the portraits. Later, he partnered with Jean-Baptiste Fouquet, who specialized in the engraving process.

Chrétien’s workshop in Paris, particularly at the Palais Royal, became a hub for Physionotrace portraiture. A Physiognotrace portrait of Thomas Jefferson, completed by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin in 1804. The engraving resulted in a copperplate measuring 2.8 x 2.6 inches.

^{Image Graphic Arts French prints                    Image Princeton University}

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A clipping from the Poughkeepsie Journal (New York) in 1809. Written by Everet Howard on 21 November. “fide-view likeneffes.”

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This entire image you see, is an engraving of an etching being completed using the Physionotrace from a drawing by means of a Pantograph.

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The Physionotrace is considered an early step toward photography, blending mechanical drawing with artistic engraving. Its influence is evident in later silhouette-based art forms and early photographic techniques.

Operating in near-darkness with only the light from one candle as Chretien did, watch Tracing the Shadow, a George Eastman House production of historian Mark Osterman giving a real-time demonstration on how to make a silhouette using the Physionotrace by Gilles-Louis Chretien in 1784. Runs 1:28

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Here is a depiction of Cagliostro below, deceiving patrons during one of his shows using a child as a prop in some kind of hypnotic trick. Some are shown as not caring much, as we see one woman who doesn’t seem to care much.

This engraving is taken from Picturesque History of the Franc Maconnerie and the Secrete Societes Antique and Modern by F. T. B. Clavel, Pagnerre, editor. 1843.

^{This image was obtained from Bridgeman Images, photo Giancarlo Costa / Bridgeman Images / In private collection}

Another source for this image of Giuseppe Balsamo that I found, is the Getty Museum in Los Angeles who state this engraving is in the Bibliothèque Nationale De France Library with a photograph of the exact same image taken by De Agostini for Getty Images.

At least they both agree it’s an engraving.

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Balsamo became quite popular throughout Europe, and famously known. As a gifted Magic Lantern showman, he used the craft purely for his own ends.

Orson Welles played Cagliostro in the alternately-titled Black Magic in 1949. Sadly, Welles replaced Magic Lantern projections with hypnotism as the main theme.

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In trying to figure out who Cagliostro was, the authorities concluded he was in fact Giuseppe Balsamo in disguise

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As a gifted lanternist, Cagliostro introduced himself as an occult mystic, faith healer and noble. He was actually an exotic quasi physician of mysterious ancestry.

He was a con-man who continued to use the Magic Lantern to cheat people as had Johann Georg Schröpfer, who I spoke about earlier in 1770. Much more is known of Balsamo / Cagliostro but for my part and his involvement with the lantern, I conclude my entry on him.

1786
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826)
In London in 1786, Jefferson purchased a Scioptric Ball, which could be attached to a window shutter to create a Camera Obscura in a darkened room.

Jefferson may have been inspired from having seen the giant camera at the Greenwich Observatory on his way back to the US.

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You will recall that in 1636 Daniel Schwenter, professor of mathematics and eastern languages at Altdorf, devised the Scioptric Ball, a lens in a swivel mount, also called an ox eye lens.

It was made of a hardwood sphere with an axial hole through which a compound lens was placed.

Illustration from from Hammond pp33, 34.

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Four different views of a Scioptric Ball lens, made from boxwood, glass and paper fibre product. Resides at King’s College, London.

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1787 
EMERGENCE OF WIDE SCREEN CINEMA – THE PANORAMA
ROBERT BARKER (1739-1806)
Barker receives a patent for a new form of entertainment which contained huge and I mean huge, painted pictures. It is recorded on the patent as “an entire new contrivance or apparatus” called by him “La nature a coup d’oeil.”

Barker, having spent some time in jail, was said to have needed light in order to read a letter and came up with the idea of lighting from above when using a shaft of light falling through a crack. He was a Scottish painter, and had seen the work of de Loutherbourg and his backlit spectacles, of whom I have just completed sharing with you.

Barker’s entertainment became known as the Panorama. Some were three hundred feet in length and fifty feet high.

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One of Robert Barker’s “new contrivance or apparatus called by him ‘La nature a coup d’ oeil.” This panorama by Barker is of the city of Old Edinburgh. These enormous paintings were a precursor to today’s wide-screen cinema.

This Panorama of ‘Old Edinburgh’ by Robert Barker is still in existence and resides at the Edinburgh Virtual Environment Centre, University of Edinburgh. Image Copyright City Arts Centre. SEE it here in a much larger format.

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The Panoramas of Robert Barker were installed in specially-built structures called Rotundas and were lit from above by skylights that were concealed from view by a wide, umbrella-like canopy.

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The picture completely encompassed the observer from the central platform. Vistas seemed to extend indefinitely in all directions. According to Robert Barker’s patent of 1787, the Panorama provides “an entire view of any country or situation, as it appears to the observer turning quite round.”

The British Museum has two versions of this key print, one in French and one in Dutch. Princeton has three; in English, French, and German.

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The Classic Encyclopedia based on the 11th edition of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica defines the Panorama and explains it as … 

“the name given originally to a pictorial representation of the whole view visible from one point by an observer who in turning round looks successively to all points of the horizon. In an ordinary picture only a small part of the objects visible from one point is included, far less being generally given than the eye of the observer can take in whilst stationary.

The drawing is in this case made by projecting the objects to be represented from the point occupied by the eye on a plane. If a greater part of a landscape has to be represented, it becomes more convenient for the artist to suppose himself surrounded by a cylindrical surface in whose centre he stands, and to project the landscape from this position on the cylinder.

In a panorama such a cylinder, originally of about 60 ft:, but now extending to upwards of 1 3 0 ft. diameter, is covered with an accurate representation in colours of a landscape, so that an observer standing in the centre of the cylinder sees the picture like an actual landscape in nature completely surround him in all directions.

This gives an effect of great reality to the picture, which is skilfully aided in various ways.

The observer stands on a platform representing, say, the flat roof of a house, and the space between this platform and the picture is covered with real objects which gradually blend into the picture itself.

The picture is lighted from above, but a roof is spread over the central platform so that no light but that reflected from the picture reaches the eye. To make this light appear the more brilliant, the passages and staircase which lead the spectator to the platform are kept nearly dark.” [sic]

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that the eruption of virtual reality and dominance of visual media that we have in 2024, coincides directly with the pre cinema history of past media like the Panorama, is no accident

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The portrait painter Robert Barker coined the word “panorama,” from the Greek word pan meaning all and horama meaning view describing paintings of Edinburgh, shown on a cylindrical surface, which he soon was exhibiting in London as the Panorama.

The Panorama was a spectacular visual entertainment event like going to the movies. It was motion entertainment at its pre cinema best, and flourished throughout the 19th century, mostly in Europe and the United States.

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Barker gave his Panorama a French title, calling it “La Nature à Coup d’ Oeil” meaning “Nature at a glance.”

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Massively elegant, these striking Panorama rotundas advertised sensational visuals and lured visitors to their doorstep, matching the spectacle created by the magnificent paintings inside, and the hope for the motion-entertainment it promised.

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Panorama paintings often served as a form of pseudo-travel and offered escape-like the movies did in the 1930s following the depression.

Panoramas included Roman Ruins, the Nile River, the Congo, Mount Vesuvius, and the Palace of Versailles.

The Panorama of Thun is twenty-four and one half feet high and over one hundred twenty-five feet long. Below, the Wocher Panorama rotunda 19^th century and today. SEE the wonderful 207-year-old Panorama of Thun in a large HD digitized interactive format, HERE.

So detailed was the Panorama of the town of Thun by Wocher, that the viewers could see up close and personally, the people in the street looking up and tipping their hats as if looking back at you as the painting streamed past.

Below, four sections of the Panorama of Thun.

Standing within the rotunda and watching this massive Panorama painting move past us, it seems more so than watching a movie but also as a bird flying past the roof tops.

Here are two views of what viewers see today, inside the Wocher Panorama rotunda.

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THE PANORAMA OF GARIBALDI
The extant Panorama of Garibaldi is two hundred seventy-three feet long, a double-sided watercolour and one of the longest Panorama paintings in the world. One of its massive sections pictured below.

Thanks to Proust in the Cinema @ProustCinema on X.

The Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi Panorama is four feet high and nearly as long as an American football field. Brown University Library’s Department of Italian Studies has digitised it for online viewing. SEE it here scrolling with narration.

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In the 1830s the Panorama came to Russia. Franz A. Roubaud started painting Panoramas such as The Battle of Borodino seen here, which can be viewed at the Panorama Museum in Moscow.

SEE this Panorama, digitized and scrolling (loads slowly) HERE.

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It’s no accident that the eruption of virtual reality and dominance of visual media that we have in 2023, coincides directly with the pre cinema history of past media like the Panorama.

It can take a definite bow for its contribution to the media world we live in today.

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1787
THE LUCERNAL MICROSCOPE
GEORGE ADAMS JR. (1750–1795)
A London-based scientific instrument maker and author, he was a key figure in late 18^th century visual world, known for aggressively advancing the Camera Obscura and optical projection devices beyond mere scientific tools, into the realm of public spectacle.

Including using a microscope as a projector. Adams work straddles Enlightenment empiricism and pre cinematic entertainment—much like his contemporaries Athanasius Kircher before him or Johann Nepomuk Czermak after him.

He was the son of George senior, the well-known instrument maker to King George III. After his father’s death in 1772, George junior inherited the family business, published many popular science manuals and treatises aimed at both amateurs and professionals, making complex scientific ideas digestible to a wider audience.  

He held the official title of Mathematical Instrument Maker to His Majesty.

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He positioned the Camera Obscura not just as an artist’s tool but as a scientific instrument for studying optics, perspective, and vision

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Adams developed portable models of the Camera Obscura with folding wooden cases and described devices that combined concave mirrors and lens systems for sharper, brighter images. Some of his variations projected onto glass surfaces with paper beneath, useful for drawing or natural studies.

Pictured is a surviving Adams Lucernal Microscope sitting on it’s packing case, manufactured by William and Samuel Jones of London, housed at the National Maritime Museum.

He positioned the Camera Obscura not just as an artist’s tool but as a scientific instrument for studying optics, perspective, and vision. In his Essays on the Microscope (1787) and other works, Adams writes about optical tools with a didactic tone, often referencing practical use in drawing, microscopy, and what he referred to as “philosophical amusement.” 

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The Lucernal Microscope was Adams’s projector.

It used a candle or oil lamp as a light source, along with mirrors and lenses to cast an enlarged microscopic image onto a screen. Unlike the solar camera which I have spoken on and which required daylight, the Lucernal was indoor and artificial-light driven, allowing for nighttime demonstrations.

The image was projected onto a vertical screen and could be seen by multiple observers—a hybrid between scientific demonstration and proto cinema.

Adams emphasised it could be used for public lectures or drawing lessons—combining education and entertainment, much like a Phantasmagoria show but with biological specimens.

Page 74 and plate III of Essays on the Microscope (1787).

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A precursor to later lantern slide microscopes and microcinematography (a word I had not heard before and coined by Adams), the Lucernal Microscope functioned almost like a live science performance—anticipating early cinema’s roots in lecture halls and fairgrounds.

Adams was at the centre of what you might call didactic spectacle—the display of scientific phenomena as both wonder and lesson. He explicitly marketed his devices to those seeking “rational amusement” —a growing category of Enlightenment leisure at that time.

A study of Adams blurs the line between pre cinema, education, and optical illusion.

Adams helped shift the microscope from a private cabinet of curiosity object, to a projected, and shared experience simply because many could view at once, what was going on in a microscope with the help of the camera.

This is the only time I have ever seen this kind of friendship amongst the sciences. His work influenced later 19^th century showmen and educators who used Magic Lanterns and optical toys for group viewing.

Lucernal microscopes survive in museum collections today, and are now seen as transitional devices between Enlightenment science and 19^th century visual entertainment.

He composed the first Hungarian opera, Pikkó hertzeg és Jutka Perzsi (1793), a tragicomic work that gained significant success, though the music for his operas is now lost. The idea of tying music with imagery in an optical way wasn’t new.

In fact, it was 200 years old. Arcimboldo was the earliest to attempt to match pictures with sound that I know of, in 1590. See my entry on Giuseppe Acrimboldo.

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And there were others, like the Ocular Harpsichord of Castel (1725) and Bishop’s Colour Organ in 1877. We later saw the Audiovisual Telegraph come to life 100 years later in Columbia Picture’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.

Apparently, the aliens already had it.

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Chudy brought computer computations, algorithms and Sir Francis Bacon’s binary code into the 1787 discussion of optical transmissions, when Siegfried Zielinski tells us “when the last lamp is covered, this stands for the letter A, which is written OOOOI; for the letter B, the fourth lamp is covered, OOOIO; C is OOOII, and so on.”

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Let’s fast forward to 2012 and read how Chudy’s optical telecommunications system concept of 1787 is the basis for our algorithms of today, as César Escudero Andaluz explains. The recorded street cam is from Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets in New York City.

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The Buróns were one of the very first to publish an illustrated catalogue in 1844. It contained no less than 310 engravings.

From 1818 the company won numerous awards; a silver medal in 1834 and 1839 then a gold medal in 1844.

Below are five pages from the Burón catalogue.

Nöel inherited the Paris shop from his father Joseph in 1818 after Joseph had started the business in 1744. Nöel expanded the business calling it “Manufacture of Optical and Mathematical Instruments.”

The Buróns knew Daguerre, and wrote on his work in photography.

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Below, a Daguerreotype camera by the Buróns in 1840. It was advertised in the booklet we just showed from 1841. It originated in a book by Smee and E. de Valicourt in 1843 and then advertised again in Buróns catalogue of 1844.

This camera seen here reminds me so much of the lensless camera of Wolcott which I will be talking about in a much later chapter.

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1790
PIERRE LOUIS GUINARD (1748-1824)
Guinard was a Swiss glass maker and optician who made significant contributions to optical glass manufacturing. Born on April 28, 1748, in La Corbatière (La Sagne), in the Canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Guinard was a pioneer in producing high-quality flint glass, which was critical for improving optical instruments like telescopes and microscopes.

It took him almost twenty years to discover how to manufacture nearly flawless lenses approaching 6 inches in diametre.

In the late 1700s, Guinard developed a method to produce defect-free flint glass by using a fireclay stirrer to create a homogeneous mixture, a technique inspired by French chemist Antoine Baumé but refined by Guinard.

This breakthrough allowed for larger, higher-quality glass, surpassing the expensive English imports of the time. Pierre Louis Guinard in a lithograph by Étienne-Ovide Domon, 1844. Guinard greatly advanced the process of grinding glass into finer lenses for optical use.

Here’s a drawing of a Guinard melting furnace for the production of optical glass. Held in Private Collection.

Guinard set up the world’s first foundry for the production of optical glass in ain a Benediktbeuern (Bavaria) monastery in 1805. He works closely with the young German scientist Joseph Fraunhofer, of whom I will speak of very soon.

Guinard worked for the Kingdom of Bavaria, where he shared his glassmaking techniques with Joseph von Fraunhofer at Joseph von Utzschneider’s glassworks. Fraunhofer later became a renowned optical instrument maker, partly due to Guinard’s mentorship.

the 18th century, Guinard invented a method for producing homogeneous glass lenses that evaded bubbles, and circumvented aberrations. This technology was adopted by Carl Zeiss, who continues to be recognized for their high-quality products today.

He supplied high-quality lenses for major observatories, including the Paris Observatory, and worked with prominent opticians like Robert-Aglaé Cauchoix and Noël-Jean Lerebours.

His lenses earned a gold medal from the Paris Scientific Society in 1824.

After returning to Les Brenets in 1814 for family reasons, Guinard continued producing achromatic lenses with his son Aimé. He also entered an agreement with Utzschneider to not disclose his glassmaking secrets in exchange for a pension, though he later resumed his work, losing the pension.

In 1910 began the industrial production of celluloid frames but proving incendiary as the Cinema industry knew, factories that used it suffered frequent fires. Celluloid is therefore abandoned and the use of var (ethyl) acetates is used, a practice that still continues today.

1790
CABINETS OF CURIOSITY
ADAM WILHELM VON HAUCH (1755-1838)
The son of a military man, Hauch showed a deep passion for science, physics, and optics. His Physiske Cabinet, i.e. physics collection, and catalogue were created during the years 1790-1827. He published books and essays, did research, and gave lectures in the collection.

He became well-known as a result, joined a number of scientific associations, and eventually rose to the position of president of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences and Letters.

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An illustration from the Physike Cabinet of Adam Wilhelm Hauch in Copenhagen demonstrates the projection of inverted opaque objects mounted on or screwed to a black screen.

His description reads:

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Because the objects inside the instrument are not limited to flat space … “it is much easier to design them with mechanisms to enable them to change during viewing.”  Figure 6 in Hauch’s Physikes Cabinet Magic Lantern slides, depicts a coffin with moveable lid:

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Hauch’s Physiskes Cabinet is a formidable collection of physics apparatus collected during the period 1790-1827. Bought by King Frederik VI of Denmark in 1815 and then bestowed to Sorø Academy in 1827. Pictured are two rooms of the Hauch Cabinet in Sorø Academy, also pictured.

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The A. W. Hauch Physiskes Cabinet is today seen by Denmark as one of the best collections of its kind in Europe

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Six more Phantasmagoria-themed Lantern slides from the Physikes Cabinet of Adam Wilhelm Hauch started in 1790.

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From the Hauch Physics Cabinet a matching pair: an illustration of, and the actual Pyramid Camera Obscura obtained by Hauch for his cabinet on his journey in 1788 when he travelled throughout Germany, Holland, England and France.

Housed at Sorø Academy, Denmark. Both have been authenticated as the same camera, by the Academy.

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Two illustrations with matching photographs of Camera Otticas, which Hauch called a Camera Clara. The Ottica is a device using a lens to receive a view onto a glass screen, which can then be used to create a drawing or painting. A cousin to the Cameras Obscura and Lucida.

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Like many museums do, the Hauch collection was moved to the attic at Sorø Academy and forgotten for many years (the Academy didn’t tell me how long) until rediscovered. The A. W. Hauch Physiskes Cabinet is today seen by Denmark as one of the best collections of its kind in Europe.

1790s
PIERRE SEGUIN (c. 1743-1812)
From what I can tell, Seguin was an amateur illusionist, known mostly because of being named in pamphlets. An artisan-opticien, or experimental mechanic and instrument maker, almost no hard biographical data exists on him.

He is mentioned in ephemeral Parisian catalogues as the maker of “boîtes de transformations” (transformation boxes), which used mirrors, coloured filters, and hidden candles to create ‘visual riddles.’

These were used in parlour settings where images would appear to morph, e.g., a man into a skeleton; a building into ruins; through multi-layered transparency tricks kind of like Dissolving Views.

He may have been one of the anonymous contributors to “Cabinets Fantastiques,” a Paris salon show (c. 1797–99) that prefigured Phantasmagoria-style illusions.

Séguin is a shadowy and little-documented figure, but his name surfaces in a handful of French sources from the revolutionary and early post-revolutionary era in connection with experimental optics and what we might now call proto cinematic effects.

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Seguin is associated with itinerant spectacles, educational demonstrations, or early “physique amusante” shows. One entry vaguely credits a ‘Seguin’ with improving devices for “illusion par transparence,” suggesting overlays, projection through tinted gauze, or lantern slides staged in sequence.

Few diagrams survive that I can find. Bulletins des Sciences par la Société Philomathique de Paris (1790s) has a cryptic mention of an “S. Pierre S***” demonstrating effets de lumière changeante par dispositif mobile, describing a rotating filter wheel or prism-mounted slide for dynamic visual effects.

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He probably worked independently or for private audiences, which would explain the lack of patent records. His combined contributions would prefigure:

🔍 Reynaud’s multi-layered Praxinoscope Théâtre
🔍 Seraphin’s backlit Shadow Theatres
🔍 The Dissolving Views of Childe
🔍 Meggendorfer’s Mechanical Pop-up Books

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Here is a closer look at the working base of Séraphin’s Articulated Iron Donkey, how it operated with its rods, drive wheel, disk, and spring. These moving iron figures were behind a proscenium and out of view of the audience.

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Séraphin’s Articulated Iron Shadows were designed to be in motion, operated from below. Here is an acrobat juggling on a chair placed on a table and, a flute player. You can just see them bending, turning and hear the music.

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Séraphin’s figures were made using a Silhouetted design. He had quite a repertoire of characters as the templates below show.

As Lotte Reiniger did one hundred fifteen years later, he used a cut-out pattern to avoid repetition and to save time. An animator’s trick called simultaneous illustration.

Here, a shadow figure showing a woman walking and then hiding her face under the mask of a donkey’s head.

Attributed to Séraphin, around 1790.

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1791
THE WEIMAR SHADOW STAGE
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749–1832)
While Goethe is known globally as a colossal literary figure in 2025, his active involvement in stagecraft, and adding optics to create popular spectacle, provides a lesser-known link to pre cinema culture in Germany in particular, back in the very late 18^th century and early 19^th century.

Goethe started out as a poet, playwright, scientist, and then theatre manager of the Weimar Court Theatre and then authored many works featuring optical devices.

Goethe was an influential patron who included Schattenspiele (Shadow Plays) in the programs at the prestigious Weimar Court Theatre where he did not see the Shadow Stage as mere entertainment, but as stately illusion.

He helped legitimize it by commissioning or staging sophisticated Shadow Plays as part of the official court repertoire.

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Goethe made sure the Shadow Play was taken seriously as a distinct visual art form, not just a children’s amusement, thus securing its place in visual culture right up to the emergence of cinema

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His most famous play was Faust, which featured a scene (the Walpurgisnacht or, the Walpurgis Night) that was often later adapted for spectacular shadow and Laterna Magica shows, appealing directly to the public’s fascination with projected illusion and the demonic / fantastic.

“Remember the Phantasmagoria” said Robertson in his mémoires.

Pictured is the scene where Faust gazes into a magical mirror and is captivated by the vision of a beautiful woman seemingly projected by Mephistopheles.

It’s significance to pre cinema was that Goethe’s endorsement was vital. By incorporating the Shadow Stage (Schattenbühne) into high-culture settings like the courtly theatre, he helped ensure its survival and artistic development, leading directly to the later work of artists like Paul Ebell in the 20^th century.

Goethe made sure the Shadow Play was taken seriously as a distinct visual art form, not just a children’s amusement, thus securing its place in visual culture right up to the emergence of cinema.

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THINKING LIKE A FILM DIRECTOR
Goethe’s relationship with the Shadow Stage is a prime example of a figure whose main fame obscures a direct, practical contribution to the foundations of pre cinematic projected spectacle.

Goethe experimented extensively with theatre in Weimar, including the introduction of masks around 1800, creative lighting, and stagecraft innovations, which critics later described as creating a “shadowy” or “ghostly stage effect.”

From 1791 onward, Goethe managed the Weimar Hoftheater, shaping it into a leading cultural institution.

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His fascination with shadow projection influenced how he thought about stagecraft and led to his writing of his Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre) in 1810. The English translation by Charles Lock Eastlake appeared later in 1840.

Modern scholarship and some theatre historians that I have read, use terms like “shadow stage” metaphorically to describe Goethe’s blending of science and theatre, especially his interest in how light and shadow shape perception.

Pictured is Goethe’s Colour Wheel taken from his book Theory of Colours published in 1810 in German and 1840 in English.

LISTEN to it here on LibriVox
READ it here at Internet Archive

1791
MAGIC LANTERN LEARNING FIT FOR A PRINCE
COUNT JEAN-PHILIPPE-GUI LE GENTIL DE PAROY
(ALSO KNOWN AS THE COMTE DE PAROY (1750–1824)
Paroy was an artist, engraver, and royalist who served as a defender of the royal family during the French Revolution, and did offer a Magic Lantern (Lanterne Magique) for the education of the Dauphin.

He acted in an educational / advisory role (sometimes described as précepteur or tutor) and suggested its use to Marie Antoinette to engage the young prince’s imagination through projected images, making lessons more memorable.

The relevant Dauphin was Louis Charles (Louis XVII, 1785–1795), who became heir apparent after his older brother Louis Joseph’s death in June 1789.

Sources often date Paroy’s involvement with the Magic Lantern to around 1791, during the royal family’s confinement at the Tuileries Palace amid the Revolution. Paroy’s own Mémoires (published later) describe his suggestions and work on slides for biblical topics, French history, etcetera.

It was for pedagogical use—projecting educational images to hold the child’s attention better than traditional methods. Paroy reportedly made or commissioned slides and even later claimed influence on developments like Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s Phantasmagoria.

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Paroy, as an artist and miniaturist, contributed by painting or copying images onto the slides himself. The goal was to create a large repertoire that would “strike the Dauphin’s imagination and engrave themselves on his memory,” as Paroy advised Marie Antoinette.

_{Pictured is an authenticated 1791ish lantern}

Paroy later claimed his work influenced later developments in projection, and he saved some related materials from the Revolution.

Exact slide lists or images from the Dauphin’s sessions don’t appear to have survived in public records, but the project fits the era’s growing use of Magic Lanterns for pedagogy among the elite.

Caroline Stéphanie Félicité, Madame de Genlis (1746-1830), a French writer and educator, popularized the use of Magic Lanterns as an educational tool in the late 1700s by projecting images of plants to teach botany. In the 1800s, her pedagogical methods were translated into English and published in the US.

I cannot say with any certainty that Paroy was inspired to approach the Queen regarding the Magic Lantern as an instructive tool because of Félicité.

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It was for pedagogical use—projecting educational images to hold the child’s attention better than traditional methods

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The lantern was a custom made optical device of the period (with an oil lamp and lens), customized with Paroy’s custom slides. The project was interrupted by the escalating Revolution and the family’s imprisonment, however Paroy did not lose his head (pardon the pun).

Jean-Philippe-Gui Le Gentil, comte de Paroy was a staunch royalist and active supporter of the royal family during the Revolution. He served as an artistic advisor and educator which included the Magic Lantern tutoring sessions.

Pictured are two slides etched by Jean Philippe Guy Le Gentil, comte de Paroy with ten Bacchanal scenes in each. ─ The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He helped the family in various ways (e.g., portraits, inventions like a bulletproof vest suggestion, messages, etc.). He went into hiding after the fall of the monarchy to avoid arrest, disguising himself at times.

He survived the Terror (1793–1794), when thousands of royalist sympathizers were guillotined. After the Revolution, he lived on, continued artistic and entrepreneurial work (including engraving and printing innovations), and died of natural causes on 22 December, 1824, in Paris at the age of 74.

He was buried in Paris and his Mémoires were published posthumously. He faced real danger and hardship (including financial ruin later in life), but he avoided execution and outlived the revolutionary period by decades.

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The grid structure provides a coherent layout while emphasizing the individual elements within each section. ─US National Art Gallery.

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A Bacchanale with Egyptian and Classical Figures, 1787, etching and aquatint with roulette on green prepared laid paper by Jean-Philippe-Guy le Gentil, Comte de Paroy, after Charles Monnet.
This is a decorative frieze with mythological figures and creatures. The image features a symmetrical arrangement of classical figures and mythical themes.

There are several nude figures in dynamic poses, interspersed with garland-adorned satyrs and fantastical beasts. The composition is tightly packed and richly detailed.

The central figure is framed by garlands held by surrounding figures, and flanked by architectural elements and mythical creatures. Jean-Philippe-Guy Le Gentil, comte de Paroy, created / etched several Bacchanal scenes like this one, often after designs by other artists like Charles Monnet.

These were decorative prints fitting the neoclassical taste of late 18th century France. ─ US National Art Gallery. This Bacchanal frieze was obviously not included in the teaching of the boy prince.

1792
ROBERT BARKER (1739 – 1806)
Barker makes his first public presentation of his new Panorama at Leicester Square, London in 1792. Patrons sat in the centre of a slowly revolving rotunda, which measured sixteen feet high and forty-five feet in diameter. The view was of the British navy moored between the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth and was named The English Fleet.

Shortly thereafter, Barker toured with his Panorama showing such epics as View of London, Battle of Aboukir, The Environs of Windsor and Lord Howe’s Naval Victory.

While touring in Germany, his show was given the unfortunate German translation of Nausorama. Panoramas were as wide as three hundred feet and as high as fifty.

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This is a 2023 Panorama photograph taken by the Edinburgh Camera Obscura and World of Illusions folks for me.

1792
THE ERGASCOPIA
JOHANN CARL ENSLEN (1759–1848)
SCHIRMER & SCHOLL
Messer’s Schirmer and Scholl (no first names or dates known) claimed in their 1805 pamphlet that “Professors Enslen and Scholl invented and exhibited their ERGASCOPIA, or the real action of phantoms” in 1792. It became an instant competitor to the Phantasmagoria.

It was exhibited at Vienna and Petersburg and reportedly attracted the attention of European courts. By 1804, Scholl was partnered with Schirmer, who together with Scholl, had succeeded Enslen as proprietor and brought the Ergascopia and floating automatons that Enslen had created to London.

The important source is their 1805 pamphlet entitled Sketch of the Performances, at the Large Theatre, Lyceum; and a Short Account of the Origin, History and Explanation of all the late Optical and Acoustic Discoveries, called the Phantasmagoria, Ergascopia, Phantascopia, Mesoscopia, &c. Together with The Invisible Girl which can be READ here. It explains everything.

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“the most graceful phantoms that cannot possibly be distinguished from real or natural life”

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Contemporary scholarship specifically cites pp18–20 for their description of the Ergascopia and its supposed superiority.

For instance, on p20 we read that Schirmer & Scholl call “dull and lifeless” the phantoms that come out of the Phantasmagoria lantern compared to the Ergascopia’s “living and acting apparitions.”

They (whoever ‘they’ were) strongly suggest that the “learned professors in the difficult science of Optics” confess that the Ergascopic phantoms produce the “neplus ultra of optical delusion on the human vision.”

The Latin neplus ultra is described in the Google translation dictionary as “the perfect or most extreme example of its kind; the ultimate.”

The more I read of the theatrical presentations, without a solid physical description of a device, the more I think the Ergascopia is the actual exhibition itself that also may have involved a special apparatus, although no device is mentioned.

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PERSONAL AND PUBLIC WAY
Schirmer and Scholl were openly attacking the existing Phantasmagoria business. They claimed that the established Phantasmagoria was essentially an elaborate presentation of effects already obtainable from the Magic Lantern, and criticized the commercial exploitation of such effects.

Their rhetoric was that their own apparatus was genuinely scientific.

They also attacked Robertson and Philidor for frightening audiences and “affecting the nerves,” of women and children, contrasting that with their own supposed scientific and educational purpose which would be “a pleasing winter amusement.”

They purposefully allowed the London audience behind the scenes to show them exactly how standard Phantasmagoria light tricks worked. Once they demystified their rivals’ tricks, they used the Ergascopia to deliver a superior, unexplained display.

This strategy is offered to patrons on page 22 to show that the lowly Phantasmagoria could even be performed “in their own houses.”

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ENSLEN’S AEROSTATIC FIGURES
The pamphlet says that the Prussian king gave Professor Enslen a large estate near Dantzig where he operated a foundry from 1795 to 1811 and was famous for his large aerostatic figures, including human and animal forms.

That is highly significant because the Ergascopia programme described those enormous aerostatic figures as “Automatons” that needed to be “air filled.”

The pamphlet’s description of the Ergascopia is unusually heavy on “aerostatic spectacle.” Enslen as one of the original inventors of the Ergascopia was known for constructing and exhibiting large balloon figures.

My biographical source specifically records his painted, hydrogen-inflated human and animal forms and their exhibition in European cities including Vienna, Breslau and Dantzig.

One later study reproduces the programme’s structure: the second act consisted of large aerostatic figures, while the third act introduced the Ergascopic illusions.

The aerostatic figures were extraordinary:

🎬 Diana, seated in a Grecian car drawn by stags
🎬 an Aerial Knight mounted on a grey charger
🎬 a young lady playing a “species of glass harmonica”
🎬 a male youth playing a pan flute

All large inflated balloon-type figures made by Enslen at his foundry at Dantzig. The pamphlet gives dimensions of roughly 11–12 feet high for some of these constructions.

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the Ergascopia programme described those aerostatic figures as “Automatons” that needed to be “air filled”

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THE AERIAL KNIGHT
The pamphlet describes on page 10 the Ergascopic figures as: “the most graceful phantoms that cannot possibly be distinguished from real or natural life” and the programme apparently included action, not merely changing size or position like the Phantasmagoria did, regardless of the spectre.

For example, the aerostatic presentation included a Roman / Aerial knight who was:

🏇 shot
🏇 made to fall from his horse
🏇 represented as a wounded hero
🏇 then recovered and balanced himself to the music

This is reported from the 1805 pamphlet itself. So, we have something much closer to “animated spectacle” than the conventional conception of the Phantasmagoria as simply projected ghosts.

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Ergascopia (more properly ergaskopia) is built from Greek elements and can be understood roughly as ‘observation of action’ or ‘seeing action.’

Therefore ἔργον (ergon) = work, deed, action, activity, accomplishment. σκοπέω (skopeō) = to look at, examine, observe; from this comes -scopia / -scope. And -σκοπία (-skopia) = looking at, examination, observation, bringing us full circle to Ergascopia.

Schirmer and Scholl were not simply another name for a Phantasmagoria.

They were deliberately positioning their Ergascopia as a competitor and big-time improvement to the Phantasmagorie.

The 1805 pamphlet went much further than just advertising the show: it claimed to explain the optical apparatus and compared Ergascopia with Phantasmagoria in a fiercely competitive way.

The London show places the Ergascopia at the Lyceum’s Large Theatre upstairs around the end of 1804 and beginning of 1805.

One historical account says the spectacle opened in January 1805, while another describes Schirmer and Scholl launching it in late December 1804.

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they presented the Ergascopia as “living or acting phantoms,” rather than merely projected ghost images as they claimed the Phantasmagoria did

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BYPASSING THE COURTROOM
During the early 19th century, the boom of “optical shows” like the Phantasmagoria sparked a fierce wave of legal battles, patent enforcement, and trade-secret disputes.

Because these shows were incredibly lucrative, showmen went to great lengths to legally monopolize projection techniques—or, conversely, to legally dismantle their competitors’ claims.

Because enforcing a patent was an arduous, expensive process in the 1800s, Schirmer and Scholl bypassed the courtroom entirely when they arrived in London in 1804.

Instead of suing Philipstal et al or dealing with patent litigation, they used public demystification as a marketing weapon.

By literally taking audiences behind the curtain to show how standard patented or protected Phantasmagoria tricks worked, they tried to ruin their competitors’ commercial appeal without ever filing a lawsuit.

1793
OPTICAL BALLET
TIBERIUS CAVALLO (1749–1809)
Cavallo represents one of the lesser-documented pioneers in the cluster of Viennese optical entertainments of the early 1790s that fed into the global Phantasmagoria craze.

In 1793 he took the pleasure of giving Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides the name Optical Ballets. Cavallo (an Istrian gentleman) is credited in the 1805 Schirmer and Scholl Ergascopia pamphlet with producing Optical Ballets this year in Vienna.

These used “Magic Lanterns with sliding stained glasses, skins, or paper to make grotesque, comic, and caricature figures appear and disappear.”

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these were the pre cinematic vocabulary of motion during this period

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Tiberius Cavallo was a very well-known Italian natural philosopher and electrical experimenter living in London.

Istrian points to the Istrian peninsula (then under Venetian or Habsburg influence; today largely in Croatia / Slovenia).  Cavallo was a Royal Society physicist known for electricity, gases, and scientific instruments. He also wrote extensively on optical amusements for polite society.

In the early 1790s he experimented with Magic Lantern slides that produced motion — not by true frame-by-frame animation, but by mechanical movement of parts.

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This fits squarely within the late 18thcentury tradition of mechanical slides, metamorphosis slides, and “action” slides used by lanternists before Robertson’s Phantasmagoria.

Cavallo’s contribution was to frame these motions as a kind of optical performance, not merely a trick. They also demonstrate how scientific instrument culture (Royal Society demonstrations, optical toys, physics lectures) fed directly into popular visual entertainment.

The optical ballets — Cavallo’s choreographed Magic Lantern sequences — appear in Recreations in Natural Philosophy (1793), and expanded editions of Elements of Natural and Experimental Philosophy.

His Magic Lantern essay is embedded inside these larger works where Cavallo gives one of the earliest scientific analyses of the Magic Lantern, including its optics, mechanics, illumination, slide construction, and animated effects such as his optical ballets.

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A list of the slides used in the 1790s include:

📽️ Slipping slides — two plates sliding past each other to create movement
📽️ Lever‑action slides — limbs or objects moved by a brass lever
📽️ Rack‑and‑pinion slides — smoother, gear‑driven motion
📽️ Chromatropes — rotating geometric or floral patterns
📽️ Metamorphosis slides — transformations (face becomes a skull, building becomes ruins)
📽️ Dissolving‑view slides — early cross‑fade effects using two lanterns

These were the pre cinematic vocabulary of motion during this period.

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This fits the broader late 18^th century Viennese scene of optical and scientific entertainments. Magic Lantern shows and related illusions including early Phantasmagoria-style ghost projections were popular there around 1790–93.

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Cavallo represents one of the lesser-documented pioneers in the cluster of Viennese optical entertainments of the early 1790s

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Mechanical animation is the core of Cavallo’s contribution. He describes how moving parts — limbs, masks, clouds, flames, eyes — can be slid, rotated, levered, geared to produce visible motion on the screen. This is the technical foundation for his optical ballets.

Here are two historically important sentences that scholars frequently cite from Cavallo’s 1793 Recreations in Natural Philosophy:

Representing one of the lesser-documented pioneers in the cluster of Viennese optical entertainments of the early 1790s that fed into the global Phantasmagoria craze, he is a genuine and important part of the development of mechanical / moving slides — a direct precursor to later animation effects, dissolving views, and Phantasmagoria transformations.

Cavallo explains how a sequence of mechanical motions can be arranged to resemble dancing, bowing, turning, gesturing and group movement. He frames these as miniature theatrical performances created entirely through projection.

This is one of the earliest conceptualizations of projected choreography — a pre cinematic idea.

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1799
Robertson applied for a patent for his portable Fantoscope, a mobile Magic Lantern. A representation of a Magic Lantern on wheels used for recreating motion during Phantasmagoria shows of the late 18th and early 19th century. Robertson’s 1799 patent he said, was to “protect his art from dangerous uses.” Remember Johann Schröpfer?

From Robertson’s own hand, his patent drawing of 1799 for his Fantascope. Let’s read what Robertson said in the patent request:

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Phantasmagoria is a pre cinema spectacle of projection that appeared in the midst of a revolution. Purely for horrific entertainment, it is considered to have been invented by Robertson but we must add Philipsthal and Schröpfer some 18 years earlier.

And let’s not forget Johannes Fontana in 1420 who illustrated for us what is without question the first depiction we know of, of devilish characters seen from a lantern.

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Few if any know, and I have not seen historians and commentators on Robertson tell us about his assistants of whom I have no names.

From his memoirs called Scientific and Anecdotal Recreational Memories by E. G. Robertson in 1840, I reveal some trinkets of information:

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what is without question the first depiction I know of, of devilish characters seen from a lantern

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The authorities initially shut Robertson down at first because his audience believed the spectres were real. Another reason was because his smoke was made from aqua fortis or what we call today, nitric acid mixed with oil of vitriol which can also be referred to as sulphuric acid.

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The work in the German tongue is the Oekonomische Encyklopädie (later retitled the Oekonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie).

It appeared in 242 volumes between 1773 and 1858, each volume running roughly 600–800 pages, for a total of around 170,000 pages. It began as a planned translation of two French encyclopedias but grew into a wholly independent work that far surpassed its sources.

Krünitz himself completed the first 72 volumes during his lifetime. After his death, a succession of editors carried it forward for another six decades.

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THE MAGIC LANTERN ENTRY — VOLUME 65, 1794
On pages 467-522 of this book, we see five plates along with numerous detailed descriptions on the Magic Lantern. One of these plates pictured below.  The Magic Lantern appears at the end of Volume 65. They can be seen here with some unfortunate folding that happened while scanning.

The cross-sectional illustration of the Magic Lantern shows the mechanism of projection: light emitted by source C is reflected in the concave mirror AB, penetrates the slide DE, passes through the lens, and projects the inverted image of the slide as HI.

This is notably a pinhole-based projection diagram. The illustration was later reprinted in Friedrich von Zglinicki’s Der Weg des Films (Berlin, 1956), which is how it circulated into film history scholarship.

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In 1796, Krünitz died in Berlin while working on the 73rd volume of his Oekonomische Encyklopädie.

1794
ELIZABETH FULHAME (1750-1820)
The Scottish wife of a doctor, Fulhame had a great interest in producing images. Possibly influenced by her husband, she wrote and published An Essay on Combustion: With a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting this year. Fulhame wrote on the need for a catalysis in decelerating the action of light on silver and gold compounds and conducted experiments on reducing oxidation.

Some (like Schaaf), have given great respect to Fulhame when considering her work on the chemistry of silver salts and early photography.

She was a chemist in her own right. Little is known about her personal life, and even her first name is uncertain, as she published under Mrs. Fulhame. She likely conducted her experiments at home, given the limited access women had to formal laboratories at the time.

Her research began around 1780, motivated by an interest in chemically infusing cloth with metals like gold and silver, though her findings extended into theoretical chemistry.

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Despite her contributions, Fulhame’s work faded from prominence by the 19th century, only to be rediscovered later by historians and scientists like J.W. Mellor. Her experiments are now recognized as foundational in catalysis and early photography, marking her as a significant yet underappreciated figure in the history of chemistry.

This clipping from her essay in 1794 is taken from a news pamphlet of the times. It reads in part;

“It may appear presuming to some that I should engage in pursuits of this nature, but averse from indolence, and having much leisure, my mind led me to this mode of amusement which I found entertaining and will, I hope, be thought inoffensive by the liberal and the learned. But censure is perhaps inevitable; for some are so ignorant that they grow sullen and silent and are chilled with horror at the sight of any thing that bears the semblance of learning, in whatever shape it may appear; and should the spectre appear in the shape of woman, the pangs which they suffer are truly dismal.“

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1794
PYRAMID-SHAPED CAMERA OBSCURA
A book-shaped Camera Obscura with a pyramid-style look. This illustration appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica 1794. The mirror (L) and lens (d) were stored in the top (ABCD). The base (GFE) collapsed when not in use.

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A common occurrence in 18th and 19th century encyclopedias was that many contained technical aspects of optical devices. One example of this from an 1817 encyclopedia, in the two images in grey and white. The coloured photo is a replica of the pyramid-shaped camera.

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A book-form Camera Obscura shown both open and closed, from the Werner Nekes Collection c. 1750, made of wood, glass, and leather. When open, the device measures twenty-two inches in height.

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Here are four views of a floor or table-sitting Camera Obscura shaped as a pyramid where you can sit at the table it’s on, and render your drawing. From the Vyne Estate, National Trust / Mark Scott.

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Early cameras came in all shapes and sizes; from a goblet, to a lapel pin. Here are four views of a folding tent-type Camera Obscura. It has an adjustable 90° mirror in a framework that rotates vertically. Dated to 1800-1824 (more in chapter eight). Images Science Museum / Science and Society Picture Library.

1795
BRIDGING THEATRE WITH CINEMA
FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759–1805)
Schiller was one of the most important German writers, philosophers, and dramatists of the late 18th century. Born 10 November in Marbach am Neckar (then in Württemberg) he was not an inventor, scientist, or experimenter in optics.

He had no technical role in pre cinema however, there are two areas where his work intersects with the pre cinema world:

1. Theatrical Lineage
Being one of the great dramatists of the late 18th century, and his plays (The Robbers, Maria Stuart, William Tell to name three) were hugely popular subjects for Magic Lantern shows, Panoramas, and early melodramatic theatre in the 19th century.

The emotional intensity, violent imagery, and moral conflicts of his dramas lent themselves to the visual, spectacular adaptations that later fed into proto cinematic spectacles.

Travelling lanternists and Panorama showmen sometimes advertised “Schiller pieces,” dramatizing episodes from his historical plays for projection or Diorama staging, knowing that would draw an audience.

2. The Aesthetics of Illusion
In his philosophical writings, especially On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) [read it here in pdf format http://public-library.uk/ebooks/55/76.pdf], Schiller emphasized the importance of ‘play’ and aesthetic illusion as a way to reconcile reason and passion.

This concept of illusion, freedom, and suspension of disbelief carried over into 19^th century discussions of Phantasmagoria and optical entertainments, where audiences knowingly entered into the aesthetic game of shadow, light, and representation.

Schiller’s ideas influenced Romantic thinkers who explicitly linked theatre, projection, and imagination which was part of the intellectual climate that nourished pre cinema experimentation.

_Screenshot

Schiller’s plays provided content for Magic Lantern and Panorama shows, and his theories of illusion fed the cultural mindset that valued immersive, projected spectacles. Lucerna (via the EYE Film Institute collection) holds a 24 slide set called Das Lied von der Glocke (Projektion für Alle, c.1918–1928).

Lucerna records 24 thumbnails with photos credited to Sarah Dellmann (CC0). All images Lucerna Lantern Web Resource, lucerna.exeter.ac.uk, item 3008847.

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The Museum of Precinema in Padua Italy and related scholarship, treat Magic Lantern shows, Phantasmagoria and literary sources (Schiller’s texts among them) as part of the cultural pre history of cinema

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THE CONNECTION TO OPTICAL ENTERTAINMENT
Visual culture in the 19th century frequently borrowed from popular dramas, operas, poetry. Magic Lantern shows often used religious, historical, tragic, romantic, or Gothic subjects.

Schiller’s themes overlap heavily with those genres. He’s referenced inside a story that explicitly uses a Magic-Lantern. In Schiller’s serial fragment Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer) a Laterna Magica is used as a device in the plot, writing the lantern into fiction, showing awareness of the technology.

Commercial lantern-slide catalogues from the late 19th and early 20th centuries list slide-series based on Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke (explicitly described as “with the poem by Schiller” in a 1902 catalogue), so his poetry was packaged as projected visual entertainment.

Below, four of the 24-slide set called Das Lied von der Glocke (Projektion für Alle, c.1918–1928) with photos credited to Sarah Dellmann (CC0). Slides 1, 5, 7, 16.

Some scholars treat Schiller as part of the literary/moral imagination that lantern shows and Phantasmagoria drew on.

Literary research on the Magic Lantern notes Schiller’s Der Geisterseher as a key example where projection/Phantasmagoric effects are thematized and used to explore deception, spectatorship and ‘spectres,’ connecting his work to that cultural history of optical entertainments.

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Schiller wasn’t an inventor of projection technology, but his work and texts were directly implicated in pre cinematic culture in two ways:

1. he uses the Magic Lantern within his fiction as a narrative/technical device, as once again Dickens accomplished in his Novellas, and
2. his poems and dramas were adapted into Magic Lantern slide series and similar projected entertainments in the 19th century.

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An explicit, narrated instance appears in Der Geisterseher when a character explains how an apparition was produced “by means of a Magic Lantern.”

The surviving lantern-slide set based on Schiller’s poem is held by the EYE Film Institute / Lucerna, it’s catalogue holding a 24-slide set adaptation of Schiller’s poem into projected slides.

Images are reproduced by permission of the EYE Film Institute; digital photos credited to Sarah Dellmann (CC0).

Pictured is slides 6 and 11 in the 24-slide set called Das Lied von der Glocke from Lucerna Magic Lantern Web Resource.

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The Museum of Precinema in Padua Italy and related scholarship, treat Magic Lantern shows, Phantasmagoria and literary sources (Schiller’s texts among them) as part of the cultural pre history of cinema.

His career also spanned the era of Charles X, Napoleon I [1769–1821] (to whom he supplied optical equipment) and the King of Westphalia, Jérôme Bonaparte (1784–1860) Napoleon’s youngest brother.

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Among the most highly acclaimed Parisian optical houses was J. G. A. Chevallier. He established his shop at 1 Quai de l’Horloge, Paris, in 1796 and adopted the honorific “l’Ingénieur” (the Engineer), often signing his optical instruments as “l’Ingénieur Chevallier.”

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Here, one of his optical instruments, J. G. A. Chevaliers Camera Lucida illustration from around 1815. And, the finished product of 1834 along with accompanying advertisement.

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1796
REDISCOVERY OF LITHOGRAPHY
ALOIS SENEFELDER (1771–1834)
While Alois Senefelder is known for his invention of lithography, his process was absolutely pivotal to the pre cinema industry in Germany, enabling the mass production of:

🎬  Lanterna Magica slides
🎬  Zoetrope strips

Senefelder was a Bavarian actor and playwright turned inventor. Lithography (planographic printing using limestone). Revitalised in Munich around 1796; perfected and commercialized in the early 19th century.

Senefelder re-developed the printing method based on the chemical principle that oil and water repel each other which has been known for millennia.

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Senefelder’s contribution was not an optical device, but a reproduction technology that enabled the visual industries of the 19th century to reach a mass market

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An image is drawn onto a smooth limestone surface with a greasy substance. The stone is then treated so the image area attracts ink while the non-image area retains water, repelling the ink. This allowed for incredibly fine detail and high-volume reproduction.

Before lithography, most image printing from engravings and etchings were slow and expensive. Senefelder’s process allowed for the cheap, rapid, and accurate printing of images that were then hand-coloured onto glass slides.

This was critical for the Lanterna Magica industry.

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Whilst the technique has been around since ancient times, it wasn’t until the 18th century in Germany that the process was perfected.

Firms like Ernst Plank, who supplied a large portion of the mass market, relied on lithography to quickly reproduce hundreds of thousands of popular slide images (landscapes, comic scenes, technical diagrams, etc.) needed to support the public’s insatiable appetite for projected lantern shows.

Without lithography, the Lanterna Magica could not have become the dominant pre cinema medium that it became. Senefelder is a classic example of an inventor whose innovation in one field (printing) was foundational to the economic and popular success of another (projected spectacle).

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More broadly, the invention fundamentally drove the 19^th century explosion in printed, illustrated media (newspapers, magazines, art reproductions), effectively training the public to process and accept visual information in a mass-produced format—a key step in preparing the audience for cinema.

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Without lithography, the Lanterna Magica could not have become the dominant pre cinema medium that it became

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Pictured is a Marketing Card of the time, promoting a Lithography service and Senefelder’s image.

Senefelder’s contribution was not an optical device, but a reproduction technology that enabled the visual industries of the 19th century to reach a mass market economically.

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1798
THE MASTER OF THE LIVING MACABRE
ETIENNE-GASPARD ROBERT (1763 – 1837)
His first public Phantasmagoria performance took place on 3 January 1798 at the Pavillon de l’Échiquier in Paris. The shows later moved to the crypt of the Couvent des Capucines, which became their famous permanent venue near Place Vendôme.

The chapel presented as the ideal venue for his phantoms, spectres, and ghouls. Illustration of that very program below.

Robert’s path to the Phantasmagoria grew out of several converging threads. He was born Étienne-Gaspard Robert in Liège (now Belgium).

He studied physics and optics, and was fascinated by natural philosophy and optical phenomena. He later adopted the stage name Robertson to sound more exotic. He built on a well-established tradition of Magic Lantern projection going back to the 17th century, but he pushed it further.

Key predecessors include the travelling lanternists and, more directly, the work of showmen like Johann Schröpfer in Leipzig in the early 1770s, and Paul de Philipsthal.

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Robertson developed a projector mounted on wheels — his Fantascope — that could be moved toward or away from a translucent screen while remaining hidden from the audience. This allowed the projected image to grow or shrink dramatically, giving ghosts the appearance of rushing at the spectators.

Combined with rear-projection (so the apparatus stayed invisible), smoke, sound effects, and a darkened room, the effect was far more controlled and theatrical than earlier attempts. Robertson used his mobile lanterns, smoke, mirrors and the lively imaginations of the patrons of Paris.

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Robertson used a variety of techniques and strategies in order to scare his audiences. He framed the shows with Enlightenment-era skepticism — ostensibly debunking superstition by revealing how such illusions are made — while simultaneously terrifying his audiences.

That tension was central to the appeal. His famous show at the monastery near the Palace Vendôme created a stir not lived down too soon.

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Using huge sheets of glass, roving lanterns, waxed linen, smoke and mirrors, Robertson became the talk of Europe and the Phantasmagoria soon made its way to North America. Robertson’s advantages over Johann Schröpfer and Paul de Philipstal were scale and duration (years of continuous public performances), showmanship and theatrical framing and his written Mémoires, which shaped his own legacy.

Portrait of Professor Robertson below, c. 1790. Copper engraving Collection Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett. The Capucines crypt as a spectacular permanent venue was ingenious.

He was also known as Stephan Kaspar Robertson.

1797
GIOVANNI BATTISTA VENTURI (1746 – 1822)
Venturi decodes the mirror writing of Da Vinci and publishes his work showing detailed and scientific descriptions of the Camera Obscura and the Pinhole Image as seen by Da Vinci (Essai sur les ouvrages phisico-mathematiques, de Leonardo da Vinci, Paris, 1797).

Venturi became professor of geometry and philosophy at the University of Modena in 1773 and physics in 1776 also at Pavia. In 1814 he wrote his Commentari sopra la storia e le teorie dell’ottica (Bologna, 1814) on the history of optics. 

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A presentation illustration for an opening chapter in Robertson’s Memoires page 304, volume one, published in 1831.

As Robertson states; “All these subjects were tastefully chosen and very suitable for phantasmagoria; a few were executed and pleased.”

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Ala Archimedes, Robertson’s design for a simple burning mirror, from p140 of his Memoires. READ volume one of Etienne-Gaspard Robert’s Memoires, the first edition published in 1831 here at Internet Archive.

READ the 2^nd edition 1833 HERE.

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Right: Robertson’s The Dance of the Sorcerers from Wonders of Optics by Fulgence Marion in 1871 on p199. How he wanted it to appear when projected.

Left: a preliminary sketch Robertson made, on p284 of L’Optique also by Fulgence Marion in 1867.

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Robertson’s conception of motion projectors precedes dollying and panning, which was used by the cinematographer in the early 20th century

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Below is Robertson’s description for an Animated Megascope he was creating. The Living Phantasmagoria. An anecdote that Robert shared in his first edition of Memoires which brings the true meaning of it all to life.

1798
LOUIS NICOLAS VAUQUELIN (1763-1829)
Vauquelin was a French chemist and pharmacist renowned for his contributions to analytical chemistry. Born in Saint-André-d’Hébertot, Normandy, he worked as a pharmacist’s assistant before studying chemistry in Paris under Antoine Fourcroy.

Vauquelin became a professor at the École des Mines, Collège de France, and Faculty of Medicine in Paris. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1791 and served as its president in 1827.

In the History of Photography, (J. M. Eder, Columbia Univ. Press, NY, 1945, p119) Eder tells us that in 1798 the French chemist Louis Nicolas Vauquelin discovered chromium during his work on the analyses of minerals.

The new metallic element he called chrome, after the Greek word chromos meaning colour. Vauquelin observed that chromic acid forms with silver, a carmine red salt (“un precipite du plus beau rouge de carmin”) which turned purple when exposed to light (Eder p119).

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1798
SIR BENJAMIN THOMPSON (COUNT RUMFORD)
also, REICHSGRAF VON RUMFORD (1753-1814)
Rumford presented to the Royal Society a paper entitled An Inquiry Concerning the Chemical Properties That Have Been Attributed to Light.

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Referring to Count Rumford and the darkening of silver salts due to heat and not light, this excerpt is taken from The History of Photography – From the Camera Obscura to The Beginning of The Modern Era, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, p30.

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1799 
A WORTHLESS PIECE OF FURNITURE
THE ROBERTSON FANTASCOPE PATENT
ETIENNE-GASPARD ROBERT (1763 – 1837)
Robertson applied for and now obtains a patent for his portable Fantoscope, a Magic Lantern on wheels which I reported on at the 1796 mark . . . . “A representation of a magic lantern on wheels used for recreating motion during phantasmagoria shows of the late 18th and early 19th century.”

This hand-written patent for what Etienne G. Robert referred to as the “improvement of the Kircher lantern” was filed by citizen Gaspard Robert, on 17 March.

The word and the specific theatrical format most associated with Fantasmagorie is strongly linked to Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, whose shows at the Couvent des Capucines from 1798 onward used the mobile rear-projection lantern (his Fantascope) and the name Fantasmagorie.

He promoted himself aggressively as the originator and fought legal battles over priority — which itself tells you the field was contested. The technique — rear-projection with a mobile lantern (the Fantascope/laterna obscura mounted on wheels or rails, projecting through a translucent screen) — developed incrementally.

Precursors include Schröpfer’s Leipzig shows and Paul de Philipsthal (Philidor) who was doing shows in the early 1790s in Paris and London that used some of the core mechanics.

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Included in his preamble, Robertson declares that while looking for a mechanism “to apply to the orientation of Buffon’s mirrors,” he discovered a means to make usable, “a physics instrument that had previously appeared to be a worthless piece of furniture in a physicist’s cabinet.”

Regarding Kircher’s lantern, Robertson said, “that we owe the instrument which I call Fantascope and which is the improvement of Kircher’s lantern, I ask for five years’ insurance of this property which is the reward for the research and expenses which I have made for this improvement. This instrument thus perfected becomes useful for the demonstrations and the explanation of all the problems of optics, dioptric and catoptrics; it gives easy ways to explain the illusions of optics and the rules of linear and aerial perspective.”

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Compare these two illustrations of the Robertson Fantoscope from page 326 of his Memoires, Volume one, published in 1831 on the left, and from his patent of 1799 on the right (Image Patrice Guerin).

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Interestingly, Robert went on to explain in great detail the construction (Walnut), size (five feet high by two and ½ wide and three feet long), lighting (Argand, in French ‘Quinquet’) but did not at any time refer to what was to come: the Phantasmagoria.

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1799
ROBERT FULTON (1765-1815)
Fulton, an American who is generally recognised for creating the first steamboat in the US, was granted a license of exploitation that allowed him to introduce the Panorama into France. Fulton was a painter and a key player in the early development of Panoramic painting, particularly during his years in London and Paris.

KEY FACTOR
He became interested in mechanical devices, hydraulics, and optical amusements. A classic pre cinema crossover figure.

Around 1795, Fulton got involved with Robert Barker’s Panoramic enterprise in London. His British patent of 1799 (№ 2340) was for a type of improved Panoramic display, including a Moving Panorama concept prefiguring later scrolling Panoramas, with mechanisms for lighting and illusion enhancement, potentially an early idea for a Diorama or Cyclorama hybrid.

This patent shows early thinking toward motion-based visual storytelling, a clear bridge to pre cinema.

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The first Panoramic painting to be displayed in Paris was exhibited by Fulton. It was Vue de Paris depuis les Tuileries, 1800, painted by Pierre Prévost.

It depicted Rue des Panoramas translated as Panorama Street. Fulton suggested mechanical and lighting improvements for displaying Panoramas, including better methods for hiding seams (because the paintings were so long), and integrating lighting with naturalistic effects.

He even applied for British patents relating to Panorama construction and optics. He proposed hydraulic platforms, rotating floors, and artificial perspective systems to improve the immersive experience, well ahead of his time.

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Robert Fulton’s work in Panoramas has been largely overshadowed by his steamboat legacy, but he was one of the first Americans to engage seriously with immersive visual technologies in Europe. His designs prefigured Moving Panoramas, Dioramas and the use of rotating platforms in theatres.

Here is a portion of Pierre Prévost’s Panorama of Paris seen from the Pavillon de Flore.

In 1800 Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned Robert Fulton to design a submarine, called The Nautilus.

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TOP
CHAPTER EIGHT

Welcome	About	Introduction	Chapter One beginning of time – 999 AD
Chapter Two 1000 AD – 1399	Chapter Three 1400 – 1599	Chapter Four 1600 – 1649	Chapter Five 1650 – 1699
Chapter Six 1700 – 1749	Chapter Seven 1750 – 1799	Chapter Eight 1800 – 1819	Chapter Nine 1820 – 1829
Chapter Ten 1830 – 1839	Chapter Eleven 1840 – 1849	Chapter Twelve 1850 – 1859	Chapter Thirteen 1860 – 1869
Chapter Fourteen 1870 – 1879	Chapter Fifteen 1880 – 1884	Chapter Sixteen 1885 – 1889	Chapter Seventeen 1890 – 1894
Chapter Eighteen 1895 – 1896	Chapter Nineteen 1897 – 1899	Chapter Twenty 1900 + post cinema	Chapter Twenty-One Addendum 1911+
Copyright	HOTDOC Internet Archive Channel	HOTDOC X Channel	HOTDOC You Tube Channel

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