On Dec. 9, historian and collector Mike Zahs shared images from the late-1800s and early 1900s using magic lanterns, one of the first forms of image projection.

By Paige Schlichte
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The hum of a 104-year-old projector and the voice of historian Mike Zahs were the only sounds that could be heard as the audience looked at images that were more than a century old in a dark room in the Old Capitol.

Zahs, a historian and former middle-school teacher, shared a presentation on one of the oldest forms of entertainment: magic lanterns.

The event was part of one of the Old Capitol’s current exhibits The Faces of Iowa Through the Early Lens, which has been up since the end of September and will run until May 2018.                                                                              

“These students come in that don’t particularly know Iowa City history,” said Kathrine Moermond, the education and outreach coordinator at the Old Capitol. “This exhibit is the perfect opportunity to highlight Iowa’s and specifically Iowa City’s early history so other folks can appreciate it.”

Magic lanterns use a light source to projected images from slides, which were often hand-painted. Zahs said the closest modern equivalent would be slide shows, but the concept of projecting images is one of the earliest forms of entertainment.

“The human voice is the only form of entertainment that goes back further than the projected image,” Zahs said. “It started with people using fire to tell stories by casting shadows.”

From there, magic lanterns developed in large part because of the Catholic Church, which in 17th-century Europe used them to project images of demons during horror shows meant to scare Protestants into becoming Catholics.

In the 1800s, the magic lantern became a medium of education, though it was later increasingly used for entertainment.

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“Often, you would purchase a set of slides that would depict something in sequence, and you would tell a story,” said Greg Prickman, the head of Special Collections at the UI Libraries. “It was a precursor to motion pictures.”

Zahs hit the magic lantern jackpot 36 years ago when cleaning out basement that contained the belongings of an early 20th century Washington, Iowa, couple. These belongings included 700 magic lantern slides and some of the earliest movies in the world.

“Starting in about 1879, this couple traveled the Midwest from Texas to Minnesota, putting on these magic-lantern shows until about 1908,” Zahs said. “Then they ran the theater in Washington, Iowa, until he died in 1919.”

The couple’s last name was Brinton, and the collection became known as the Brinton Collection. A film called Saving Brinton has been made about Zahs’ efforts to preserve the collection, some of which is housed in the UI Special Collections.

On Dec. 9 at the Old Capitol, the public got to see some of the slides from the collection, projected by a 1913 magic lantern made in Davenport that still contains the original lamp bulb.

Some of the slides, most of which were hand-painted, contained cranks that, when turned, give the illusion of motion by making several layers of glass slide over each other. Zahs noted this effect was also created using dissolving projectors, where one image would fade into another.

“You’re seeing the slides Brinton used on the projector he used, so it’s a bit like time travel,” Prickman said.

Many of the slides contained images of historical landmarks, such as the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, and Mount Vesuvius.

 “Magic lanterns were a way of bringing the world to Iowa,” Zahs said.