Lantern Slide Pictures

In the days before black and white movies, magic lantern slide shows were popular in the towns and villages of the new and old worlds. The images projected unto a large screen or hung sheet presented a fascinating view of life around the Victorian world. Audiences thrilled to see pictures of British or American soldiers (like the famous General Custer before the Battle of Little Big Horn at right) or the fighting against the Boers in South Africa, bushmen from Borneo and strange animals in Australia.

Though mostly black and white some of the glass slides were painted by hand to add color to what was then a very drab and hard life in the frontier towns. This lantern slides entertainment was quickly overtaken by black and white silent pictures and then sound movies.Lantern slides owed their existence to the photographic pioneers of the early Nineteenth century. The earliest popular form from 1839 were known as Daguerreotypes which were made on polished copper plates. Thousands of photo shops sprang up to provide portraits and family pictures using this process.

This was followed by a method of capturing an image on tin plates (tintypes) and later glass plate negatives (ambrotypes) backed with black paint, paper or cloth to give a positive image. There were two sizes of lantern slides commonly used and two types of projectors lit by oil and later electricity. The English version used three and one quarter inch square slides and the American five inch by three and a quarter inch format. The P. L. Spencer Collection, like the one on the right, is of the English type and includes many hand colors as well as black and white images of exceptional quality. There are 2,300 Lantern Slides in the P. L. Spencer Collection.