A Magic Lantern Slide: What Is It?

The magic lantern, also known as lanterna magica, was an early type of image projector that used pictures, paintings, prints, or photographs on transparent plates made of glass. It was the predecessor of the slide projector and had a long and fascinating history. The earliest slides for magic lanterns consisted of hand-painted images on glass, projected by a single lens.

The magic lantern was invented in the 1600s, probably by Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. Lantern slides are positive transparent photographs made on glass and viewed with the aid of a “magic lantern”, the predecessor of the slide projector. In 1850, two Daguerreotypists in Philadelphia, William and Frederick Langenheim, invented a transparent positive image of a photograph in the form of a glass slide that could be projected onto a wall or screen using a magic lantern.

Magic lantern slides were the primary means to show motion and project images. Early on, images were hand-painted on glass slides to create “moving image” projections for entertainment. Since it was difficult to hand-paint fine images, a magic lantern was a simple form of image projector that required a light source, a concave mirror to intensify and focus the light, and a lens to project images.