Introduction

So far I have scanned in the Gabriel Grub slides (a melodramatic Dickensian moral story, perhaps it need the full story text), the Weekly Telegraph cartoon set, a few of the hundreds of Egyptian ones I have, a few of a large building of the Canadian Pacific Railway set, and some from the Paris Exhibition of 1900. More will come now I have the scanner. Most of these are from around 1900. I'm also setting up some more realistic animations.

My scanner is an old Epson Perfection 1640SU with light box. It can scan transparencies up to roughly 10cm by 12cm. The software to get it working on Windows 7 appears dodgy but so far OK. Epson tell me that a new scanner with light box (to scan transparencies larger than 35mm slides) would cost a number of thousands of pounds! Let's hope the old faithfull keeps working.

Victorian magic lantern shows

The show would start with a series of "Welcome" slides.

Slides

The slides were either 3.25 square glass slides displayed using a carrier, or from glass built permanently into a wooden frame. The image on the glass would be protected by a second sheet of glass.

		Suez Canal This shows the Suez canal, a photograph taken in 1890 to 1910, hand tinted.
Tahrir Square, Cairo Cairo around 1910.
		Paris 1900 We have a whole set of the Paris exhibition of 1900.

Fading between slides

See the set of "Fire in London" slides.

Moving slides

The larger wood frame mounted slides include many with more than one piece of glass, controlled by levers, so that moving images can be obtained. Sometimes one piece slides relative to another, sometimes one rotates. Some have three separate pieces of glass.

Lastly there are complex mechanical dynamic slides representing the start of the cinema, in which repeated slowly changing images are projected.