Unusual Artifacts: A Magic Lantern and Slides, 1890s

German Magic Lantern Slides
1890
The Victoria & Albert Museum

The “magic lantern” was a Eighteenth through Nineteenth Century device used to project slides.  Lantern slides were first made in the 18th century.  These early examples for quite large and cumbersome with wooden frames.   All early lantern slides boasted hand-painted images on glass.  For a very long time, there was no standard size for lantern slides.

After 1880 lantern slides were made to a standard size, 3¼ by 3¼ inches to allow them to be fitted into a slide carrier. The pictures in these later slides were usually produced by lithography (transfer) or photography as opposed to hand-painting though many manufacturers still produced high-quality painted images.

Most slides were square-ish.  These slides are unusual in that they are circular and, therefore,  would have needed a special type of lantern. This set was  made for children and feature scenes of Robinson Crusoe, Little Red Riding Hood, portraits of famous people,  and assorted illustrations of the different human races in sets of eight per disk which could have been turned in the lantern. These images are all hand-colored and the glass is mounted in metal frames. 

These were made around 1890 in Germany by Ernst Planck.