ABSTRACT
Magicians were the master showmen of Europe and the United States in the 1800s. What most people in their audiences didn’t know was how important projected images were in their acts. As early as the 1790s, magicians used slides to project mystical pictures onto smoke rising from canisters in their darkened theaters. This “magic lantern” presentation grew more sophisticated through the 1800s. It makes sense, then, that magicians were particularly interested in the experiments that inventors in the latter part of the century were conducting in creating and projecting moving pictures. All of these inventors’ devices involved preparing a series of drawings of objects in which each drawing was slightly different from the one before it. When the drawings were made to move quickly (say, if they were pasted next to one another on the side of a revolving drum), it appeared to the viewer that the objects were moving.
