The quick sketches that Huygens drew for "a lantern" are quite remarkable: this very first indication that Huygens has knowledge of a projection lantern includes an attempt to represent movement and implies not only his knowledge of its two lens optical system, but also of the physiological necessities for reproducing movement, especially in the four central sketches which are drawn within circles, where the arm movements indicated for the skeleton are adequate to produce an illusion of motion.Ä«etween 16 Huygens's correspondence and diaries confirm his familiarity with the magic lantern and his ability to construct one on demand, which he seems to have done for Duke Antoine de Grammont. European imagery on the garden wall of his house in The Hague. The magic lantern never found any serious use in the scientific community which was its first circle of users and makers, but over the ensueing 250 years it became the principal apparatus for visual storytelling and for reproducing the illusion of movement, while also finding widespread application in education and moral instruction. For a few decades the solar microscope, a projection instrument first described in the 1670s that used a mirror to reflect the sun's rays through an enlarging optical system, was actually preferred to the microscope because more people could watch at one time. The microscope, for example, today seen and studied as a crucial scientific apparatus for exploring the structures of nature that could not be observed by the human eye, was considered principally an entertaining curiosity for nearly a century before shedding its initial reputation as an amusing diversion and becoming a proper intellectual tool. Obscura, binoculars and several others, were sometimes useful to scientists pursuing their explorations of physical phenomena, but more often were entertaining novelties for an upper class and emerging middle class that was bedazzled by scientific practice and had a passion for demonstration instruments. These new optical machines, which included the telescope, spyglass, microscope, polariscope, solar microscope, scioptric ball, various developments of the camera ![]() When the magic lantern appeared in Europe in the 1660s, it was the newest device in a family of instruments that were the pragmatic result of intense interest from the first generation of modern scientists in theoretical optics and the properties of light. ![]() By the decade of the 1890s, the magic lantern and its extensive repertoire of imagery, its established exhibition circuits, and its large numbers of experienced showmen were the foundations on which newly invented moving pictures quickly established themselves it was this substantial link with magic lantern culture that decisively turned a new medium that many people at the time thought was just another passing fad into the 20 century's most central th and characteristic means of visual communication. In the 19 century, as magic lantern th projections began to use photographic images, the apparatus was used more and more commonly for both educational and entertainment purposes, particularly for moral instruction or evangelical missions. By the end of the 18 century, th showmen using an improved magic lantern, often called Phantoskop, began to give the earliest projected entertainments advertised in advance to a paying public assembled at a specially prepared hall. In exploitative hands, it also provided from the beginning a means by which to deceive, to frighten, or to persuade unsophisticated viewers. Invented in the middle of the 17 century, the magic lantern provided the first th opportunities for projected storytelling and projected visual entertainment. The history of the optical projection apparatus known as the magic lantern is fundamental to any understanding of today's work in cinema, television, and digital media.
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