A History Of The Magic Lantern - Page 2
The Projected Image
The Magic Shadow Show |
The rudiments of image creation have been known
about for hundreds of thousands of years and image projection for at least
2000 years. 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 Camera Obscura |
The Romans knew about the Camera Obscura. 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 Magic Mirror |
|
||
 |
The Chinese and Japanese made Magic Mirrors, the earliest recorded instance occurred in 5th century AD Chinese documents. A Magic Mirror is basically a highly polished disk of bronze. 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. |  |
|
1000 years later |
But for lanternists the most significant developments occurred a thousand years later. This was a time when there was much interest and scientific excitement about optics, in theory and practice. We could see this as equivalent to the modern interest in microchips and information technology. | ||
What do you need? |
|||
The Projected Image |
In order to produce a projected image you will
need to bring together four basic things, a source of light (the stronger
the better), an object you wish to project, a device to form the image,
and a screen to project the image on. In the next section I will introduce some of the "Founding Fathers" of the Magic Lantern. |
| Previous Page |
