Returning to the crucially important theme of science as entertainment. Before science became a tool for war and torture in 1946, science was often mixed with magic and entertainment. The Magic Lantern was the intersection of the two.
This time I’m not trying for historical authenticity; I’m mixing periods and making up things that could have happened. I’m just having fun.
Here we see Polistra and friends arriving at work in her Bantam panel truck. It’s the golden hour of sunrise, a good time to paint some lantern slides.
The little Bantam is carrying a foldable easel and palette for painting slides, and a kit for classifying slides.
Now the crew is at work inside the upper floor of the building
Polistra sets up the easel and starts painting. This easel was a self-contained portable kit for painting. The sun reflects off the base through the frosted glass, illuminating the slide itself from behind. The porcelain palette has dips and troughs for transparent watercolors. (These devices were real.)
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Slides are in fact aperture cards, and the users and sellers of slides felt the need for better classification methods but never really got there.
One 1888 catalog of slides expressed the need for a categorizer:
We have made a gigantic effort to arrange the almost unlimited number of lecture sets, stories, poems, etc, into something like discoverable order. Whether the divisions will meet the views of our readers we do not know, but if some do not we must crave their indulgence, for it has been an extremely difficult task. At the very outset we found an alphabetical arrangement unworkable, even were that a good system, a thing we doubt. Some sort of classified division was imperative, but it was not until we were in the thick of the fray that we found the real difficulty of the task. To start with, titles are of no value whatever to rely upon. But with the question of title overcome, there are still some sets which partake of two natures, or even three. To give one example, let us take, say, “The War in Egypt. ” One set under that title will be so constructed that it can well be placed into the history division, but another contains perhaps nearly all views of places, and really only one or two views which could be directly connected with the war.
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McBee and similar systems solved this multiple-category problem, but didn’t arrive until 1935. I’m imagining how the animated sliders could have been McBeeized. Each slider would have holes in the top for McArrows, each with a barb to allow the McBow to grab it. Happystar is using the McBow to pick up all the sliders relating to History. The McBox has slots to align the McBow with the different categories.
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The individual slides themselves could have been expanded into Filmsort cards, but that would have made them incompatible with the rest of the system. The McBee solution for the slides would have placed each slide in an envelope made of card-stock, with punchable slots on top corresponding to the categories. The regular McBee method would then work with the McPackets.
Here’s a set of McPackets, each containing at least one slide. Each McPacket has a series of holes along the top, with category labels for each. I’ve punched several of them for Kansas, and several others for Telegraphs.
McBee was an inverse selector. Instead of pulling out the items that fit your desired category, you pulled out the misfits, leaving the fits in the box.
The McTumbler inserts into the Kansas line and pulls up the McPackets that are NOT punched for Kansas:
In the front view you can see how the Kansas line is punched on all the remaining cards in the box.
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Finally, Martian is working on a scientific entertainment, taking advantage of the same low sun that Polistra is painting.
He has set up a prism to form a light spectrum on a paper screen. Happystar is moving a ‘car’ carrying a thermopile, which is a voltage generator sensitive to temperature. A thermopile is basically a set of thermocouples in series. The voltage is feeding a Galvanometer Slider in the Magic Lantern, showing how the temperature is higher at the red end of the spectrum.
Happystar moving the thermopile:
View from the right, showing the Galvanometer Slider clearly.
This was a real experiment, illustrated in Silvanus Thompson’s 1895 book Light Invisible and Visible.
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The Magic Lantern was later simplified into the slide projector, but the essential ingredient of ANIMATION was lost. After 1910, the catalogs and manuals for Magic Lanterns no longer listed any of the animated devices or scientific views, just simple photographic slides. All animation shifted to the new Motion Pictures, where it was no longer interactive.
A similar shift happened within the digital world when the HTML globalized web took over from individual computers. Desktop computers from DEC to Commodore to Apple II were centered on animation. A Windows program was capable of hugely flexible and interactive animation. Most of the ability was lost in the HTML web, as globalization narrowed down the range of available skills. Every extra capability must be subsumed to the latest Github Update. Instead of interactive controls, most animation must be Motion Pictures frozen into the frames of an MP4 file. The only control is the timeline.
ENTERTAINMENT IS THE OPPOSITE OF GENOCIDE.
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Relevant footnote: Swamp Angel is a real place, sort of. I used it for this part of my Lonely Railways set because the name had always fascinated me.
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Irrelevant sidenote: When I formed up the porcelain palette it seemed unfamiliar. Looking at it now in context, I realize it’s thoroughly familiar! In grade school we had Prang watercolors in metal boxes with hinged lids. The lid became the troughs when open.
Polistra's Mill 