The diarist Samuel Pepys bought a lantern from Reeves on 19 August 1666, a fortnight before the Fire of London.

Walgensten not only realised the technical and artistic possibilities of the Magic Lantern, but also its economic potential, travelling round Europe demonstrating and selling them.Ī Frenchman, Balthasar de Monconys, recorded how he visited the London optician, John Reeves, on to be shown 'how a bull's-eye lantern works'. Thomas Walgensten was the first person to use the term Laterna Magica. His father kept pestering him to send him a lantern so he could 'frighten his friends with it.' Huygens had a lantern in usable form at least as early as November 1659. Kircher is one of the most famous names in the history of the lantern and is often mistakenly credited with its invention, but Kircher did not publish details until 12 years after Christiaan Huygens had a lantern and six years after Samuel Pepys had bought one.Īll over Europe, people such as Dutch astronomer, mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) and the Danish mathematician Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten started to develop working models of Lantern Projectors. The book was translated into English as Natural Magick in 1658.Īthanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit priest, published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, in which he improved on della Porta's work, including arrangements to project using sunlight or candle light, using a convex lens as an objective to focus the images. 1589Ībout 160 years later, Giovanni Battista della Porta published Magiae Naturalis Libri Viginti, in which he described the ancient art of projecting mirror writing. 2) that he had described the real concept of a magic lantern. A number of modern nursery toys work in the same way, and produce quite effective images.Īlthough there is no particular evidence that Fontana invented the Magic Lantern, Willem Tebra argued very strongly (in New Magic Lantern Journal Vol. The image on the lantern is upright and the projected image is also upright, which is quite correct optically. Fontana describes it as a nocturnal appearance for terrifying viewers.Ĭlearly the device has no projection lens, so the image it produced would not have been very sharp, though no doubt it served its purpose. The detail of the lantern shows the outline of a small image of the devil. The illustration shows a man holding a lamp or lantern, and on the wall is a large projected picture of the devil. The earliest reference known to anything like a projection lantern is from Liber Instrumentorum by Giovanni de Fontana, published c.1420. The text reads Apperentia nocturna ad terorem videntium. This was a time when there was much interest and scientific excitement about optics, in theory and practice.

1,000 years laterīut for lanternists the most significant developments occurred a thousand years later. When light from a small bright source is reflected from the mirror onto a screen an image is produced (usually of the Buddha) although no image is visible on the mirror itself. A Magic Mirror is basically a highly polished disk of bronze. The Chinese and Japanese made Magic Mirrors, the earliest recorded instance occurring in 5th century AD Chinese documents. They noticed that if strong daylight entered a darkened room through a tiny hole in the window shutter or curtain, a dim but clear inverted image of the outside world appeared on a white wall opposite the hole. The Romans knew about the Camera Obscura. The origin of Shadow Shows must go back to the time humans discovered fire, entertaining and terrifying each other with shadows on the walls of caves, using the fire as the source of light. The rudiments of image creation have been known about for hundreds of thousands of years, and image projection for at least 2,000 years.

Magic lantern