Science or Magic? The Optical Lantern

Over the past year, myself and colleague Kiara White have been researching and documenting the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine's slide and optical lantern collections, also known as magic lanterns. While not directly related to SF, the application of an early form of scientific technology to create effects that were considered magical is another example of the crossover between science and fiction, common in the 19th and early 20th centuries (see Futures Past, P. 5).

The historical development of these instruments dates back to at least the 17th century, with the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens often being cited as a key figure in their invention. The peak of production was during the second-half of the 19th century. Magic lantern shows provided a popular form of entertainment in both public and domestic settings. Combining slide projection with live narration, music and other special effects, lanternists delivered highly successful entertainment spectacles, including phantasmagoria (gathering of ghosts) shows. Slides could have moving parts, and the use of two lanterns in conjunction with pairs of slides could produce ‘dissolving’ (transforming) images. In the days before moving pictures, it was this ability to produce projection effects that appeared miraculous to audiences and gave lanterns their 'magic' moniker. As Marina Warner writes in her book, Phantasmagoria:

Magic lantern images reveal an instrinsic unexamined equivalence between the technology of illusion and supernatural phenomena: Kircher projected souls in hell, leering devils, the resurrection of Christ, and other products of imagination, not observation.
 

The mention of Kircher is a reference to the 17th century German priest Athanasius Kircher, another figure credited in the development of the magic lantern. The lanterns in the Museum’s collection are recent by comparison, dating from the early 20th century, and were once used for teaching. It was thought that using visual aids would improve memory retention in students, and lanterns and slides provided a convenient way of reproducing images and displaying them to a large audience.

More interesting still, a short article in the Review of Reviews (1890) reveals that Leeds may have been quite pioneering in its uptake of the magic lantern for use in lectures. The article, entitled ‘How to Utilise the Magic Lantern; Some Valuable Hints for Teachers’, cites ‘The Optical Lantern as an Aid to Teaching’ by C.H. Bothamley, which gives details about the use of lanterns in classrooms at the Yorkshire College, now the University of Leeds. Bothamley refers to Professor Miall (then Professor of Biology), who promoted the use of the magic lantern for teaching students, and was able to demonstrate its successful use even in day-lit rooms. According to this article, “in the Yorkshire College almost every department has its lantern”, used to illustrate lectures on a range of “widely different subjects”. The educational slides in the Museum’s collection are representative of this variety, covering a huge range of topics, including the sciences, engineering, history, art, architecture, industries, geography and travel.

This post is adapted from an excerpt of the 'magic lantern and slides object history files' by Kiara White and Liz Stainforth.

Life in Wax: Teaching Collections at Leeds

Still from Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

For many years now, arguably since the advent of the SF genre, insects have enjoyed an association with aliens in the popular imagination. From the archetypal bug-eyed monster depicted on the covers of early SF magazines, to the nightmarish insectoids of Starship Troopers, to the ant-like physiology of the creatures in Quatermass' pit, writers and filmmakers have drawn much inspiration from the insect world in their representation of martians, forms often regarded as frightening and strange.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the first thing I thought of when I saw the wax models of Hydrophilus piceus, or 'The Great Water Beatle' (see image below) were dormant, chrysalis-like aliens. These are part of the collection at the University of Leeds' Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and were formerly used in University teaching from the late 19th century onwards. What is unique about Hydrophilus is that it is the only insect to have been reproduced by the noted embryo modeler Adolf Ziegler (1820-1889). Louis Compton Miall (1842-1921), former Professor of Biology at Leeds, was widely acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost experts on The Great Water Beatle, second only to Karl Heider (1856-1935), who provided the drawings that the wax series was based on.

Hydrophilus piceus, or 'The Great Water Beatle'

While scaled up in size, the models replicate even the minutest features of the beetle throughout different stages of its life cycle, making them ideal for the study of biology and zoology, since they could be observed by a class of students. With real specimens being both expensive and difficult to present, wax models provided a clear visual aid to teachers trying to explain the development of human and animal embryos as three-dimensional structures.

During the latter part of the 19th century, wax models became instruments not just for teaching, but for research. Embryological development was called upon as key evidence in evolutionary debates and the models' great detail and accuracy meant they could be used in new investigations. Due to the public interest in embryology, wax models, along with text and print images, were displayed in a number of private and public museum collections. 

As well as Ziegler's water beetle, the collection holds series detailing the development of the pig, the vertebrate eye, the human heart, and the convolutions of the human brain. For further information, please visit: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/museum-of-hstm/  

'The diagram of her bones...'

Skull from the HPS Museum

I have a confession. I’m a serial volunteer. At one stage, I even suspected I might be on the path to becoming a professional volunteer but the need for paid work won out in the end... One of my latest volunteer incarnations is as a taskforce member of the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, at the University of Leeds. For the past few weeks, every time I've been down to their collections store, I’ve become distracted by animal skeletons from the biology collection. I struggle to explain why I’m drawn to these old, flaking bones but there’s something about the receding surfaces and porous textures that puts me in mind of a set of ruined vessels (which I suppose, in a sense, they are). The skulls, with their decayed, uneven teeth, are like alien forms, eerie and other-worldly, yet incredibly tactile. In truth, I think part of the appeal of these bones lies in the fact that I can touch and handle them. I find myself completely absorbed, and wonder if I’m experiencing something of what J.G. Ballard calls ‘the spinal landscape’ in ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, an essay on surrealism. Of The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst he writes:

This spinal landscape, with its frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp, has attained an organic life more real than that of the solitary nymph sitting in the foreground. These rocks have the luminosity of organs freshly exposed to the light. The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are -- the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living facades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness.

Heavily influenced by the surrealists, Ballard’s writing frequently alludes to internal landscapes and bodily geographies. An episode from his 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition called ‘The Geometry of Her Face’ focuses on the character’s attempt to make sense of himself and his surroundings, which is resolved at last in the structure of a woman’s face: ‘the diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature’. Although I’ve compared them to alien forms, I can also relate to this dull, instinctive sense of recognition through my encounter with the animal bones.

Rhino skull from the HPS Museum

The juxtaposition of the strange and the familiar has been explored by the artist William Cobbing, who cites Ballard as an influence. On a recent visit to the Wellcome Collection, I saw his work, Palindrome, a modified artificial human skeleton, with a skull for a pelvis and a pelvis for a skull. Cobbing was inspired to create the piece by a section from The Atrocity Exhibition, in which the character imagines that ‘the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remains of a lost sacral skull’. Something resonates about this anatomical reconfiguration. In viewing Palindrome, quite apart from the fact I couldn’t decide where to look, I was confronted with a superficially alien anatomy that was also irreducibly human.

So, from the University’s biology collection to the Wellcome Collection (via a few detours), those bones have got a lot to answer for...

Visit the Wellcome Collection’s blog, where Palindrome was featured as object of the month.