William Penn’s “City of Brotherly Love”, Philadelphia, was the home of several important American contributors to the magic shadow art-science. The first of these were two brothers, Frederic and William Langenheim.

William Langenheim came to the United States from Germany in 1834, the year Ebenezer Strong Snell, a professor at Amherst College, introduced in America the Plateau-Stampfer magic disks. Successively, he served in Texas during its war for independence from Mexico; was present at the recapture of the Alamo by American forces; was captured himself and sentenced to be shot; escaped, and served in the United States Army in the Second Florida Seminole War.

After three years of adventure, William decided in 1840 to settle in Philadelphia and enter business. He had his brother, Frederic, come to America to be his partner. Frederic Langenheim brought to his brother news of the latest developments in photography and they decided to embark upon that pursuit. The year before, 1839, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1789–1851), in France, and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), in England, had announced successful still pictures made with a modified portable form of our old friend, the camera obscura, fitted with a chemically coated plate which after development made the picture permanent.

Frederic Langenheim was familiar with all these advances when he came to Philadelphia in 1840 and he either brought with him a good camera or one was ordered from Vienna shortly afterwards. In the winter of 1840–41 the Langenheim brothers opened a studio at the Merchant’s Exchange, 3rd and Walnut Streets, Philadelphia. They were not the first photographers in the United States but were among the pioneers.

Pictures from the size of a pea to very large ones were advertised. President Tyler and Henry Clay were among those who sat for Langenheim. In an early adventure in the use of photography for advertising, the Langenheims had something less than a complete success, from the client’s point of view. A picture was made showing a number of prominent persons drinking at a local establishment. It was not good for business—a rigorous public objected to the “drinking scene.”

Frederic, who was the “outside man” of the business and the principal photographer of natural subjects—William handled the business end and the portraits—went to Niagara Falls in 1845 and made scene pictures that brought fame and renown to the firm of Langenheim Bros. Copies were sent to Queen Victoria, the Kings of Prussia, Saxony and Wurtenberg and the Duke of Brunswick, the province in Germany whence the brothers originally came; and to Daguerre himself. The latter praised the successful photography in a letter transmitted to the Langenheims.

In 1848 William went abroad and in England concluded a deal with William Henry Fox Talbot, British pioneer in photography, giving the Langenheims exclusive contract rights to the Talbot calotype process which used a negative from which any number of paper prints could be made. It was a vast improvement over the Daguerreotype negative-positive system which did not make possible printing of copies but the Langenheims were not successful in sub-licensing the Talbot process in America.

Shortly after this the Langenheims made an important contribution to the art-science of light and shadow pictures by developing a system which made it possible to project the photographs in the old Kircher magic lantern. This prepared the way for the projection of a series of photographs showing a single movement.

Kircher and the others who used his magic lantern, including the projection model of Uchatius, painted or drew their various scenes on glass slides. Until about 1850 when the Langenheim development was announced, there was no satisfactory method of making glass plates of positive photographs. Of course, the heat of the projecting lamp made it impossible to use pictures printed on paper.

Frederic Langenheim, with U. S. patent No. 7,784, dated November 19, 1850, solved the problem. The Langenheim system was called “Hyalotype,” from the Greek, meaning “glass” and “to print” or to print on glass. Prior to the invention, some time in the winter of 1847–48, the period of the California Gold Rush, it was said the Langenheims, by means of a Viennese camera converted into a magic lantern equipped with a gas lamp, projected Daguerreotype pictures. This probably was achieved with the aid of a mirror system.

The early Langenheim glass projector slides were circular and of a deep sepia tint; later excellent black-and-white plates were made. The Langenheim glass photo slides reproduced nature on the screen “with fidelity truly astonishing.” The two plates of the slide were made adherent with Canada Balsam, which is still used in this way as well as to attach parts of projection lens systems. Only very recently have new synthetic resins begun to displace Canada Balsam for these purposes.

In 1851 the Langenheim Hyalotypes made their debut in Europe under great auspices, at the famous Exposition of the Works of All Nations at London. The glass projection photos were “very remarkable and well appreciated by competent visitors,” according to Robert Hunt, a pioneer British photographic authority, who inspected the exhibit and wrote about it.

There is no evidence that the Langenheims combined their glass projection slides with the magic disk of Plateau to achieve motion pictures. They made one contribution and seemed to be satisfied with that. And it was successful for them, for in the next twenty-five years many thousands of these slides were sold in the United States.

Others who perhaps were much more familiar with the Plateau-Stampfer magic disks than the Langenheims combined their process with the Wheel of Life. The link nevertheless with the Langenheims is direct and immediate. All the followers used the photos on glass slides and the method was popularized by the Langenheim exhibition at the Exposition. Relatively little was done, however, in combining the glass photo slides in motion picture sequence with the magic lantern, because at the time there was no method of obtaining a number of successive photos of the same action.

Jules Duboscq (1817–1886) in Paris copied the Langenheim process of glass plates with great success. Duboscq was an exhibitor of optical instruments at the Exposition of 1851. He had been the licensee of Daguerre for England, but the method was never popular there as it was in the United States. On February 16, 1852, Duboscq received a French patent on an apparatus which combined photos and the Plateau Phénakisticope or Fantascope. His device was called the Stereofantascope or Bioscope.

One Duboscq model had two strips of pictures made with a binocular camera running next to each other on a vertical disk, as the original Plateau model, and the whole was rapidly revolved before a mirror by a spectator who wore specially-made glasses. The second and better system had the pictures mounted on the horizontal Fantascope or Wheel of Life, as developed by Horner in 1834, with one picture mounted above the other. There was, however, slight distortion because the pictures were bent to fit around the inside of the cylinder.

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875), who also combined photos and the magic disk, in 1852, had a marked influence on magic picture development during the middle part of the 19th century. In fact, it may well be that the efforts expended in trying to combine the third dimensional effect of his stereoscope with the magic disk retarded development of screen projection of motion pictures.

Wheatstone was a timid man, though a great scientist, and frequently had the great Michael Faraday announce his inventions at the Royal Society meetings. The Stereoscope was invented in 1838. (The reader may recall that centuries before d’Aguilon had coined the name “Stereo” for “seeing solid” effects). The Stereoscope achieves its effect by blending into one image pictures or drawings of an object taken from slightly different points of view so that the impression of relief is obtained in our sense of vision. Without our two eyes the stereoscopic effect would not be possible.

It had been known for a very long time that the two eyes did not see the identical picture. Wheatstone made an instrument which took advantage of this fact. He said he conceived the idea in 1835 and made the first presentation of the Stereoscope in August of 1838 at a meeting of the British Association held at Newcastle.

In 1850 Wheatstone was in Paris and showed his improved Stereoscope to Abbé Moigno, to Soleil and his son-in-law, Duboscq, who were commercial instrument makers, and to members of the French Institute. Its value was immediately recognized not only for amusement but for the arts and sciences, especially portraiture and sculpture, Moigno reported in La Presse of December 28, 1850. Duboscq immediately started to make one and used Daguerreotypes in it. Moigno praised Duboscq’s “intelligence, activity, affability, indefatigable ardour.” In 1851 Moigno brought Duboscq to the attention of the Queen by presenting her with a Wheatstone-type Stereoscope which he had made. That was the year Louis Napoleon seized power and was named president for a ten year term. In November, 1852 he proclaimed himself Emperor.

Wheatstone also developed a combination of photos and the Plateau disk which was fitted with a cog which made each photo rest momentarily as it was held before the mirror. The same instrument was made in France under the name of Heliocinegraphe.

Antoine François Jean Claudet (1797–1867), was a Frenchman who married an English girl and moved to London in 1827. In 1852 he combined the Plateau-Stampfer disk with the Langenheim method of photographs on glass plates. It is claimed that, while Claudet started work ahead of him, Duboscq had satisfactory results first. Claudet’s experiments were successful in May of 1852, about one year after the Langenheim exhibit at the Exposition. In 1853 Claudet became a member of the Royal Society.

Claudet, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Birmingham in September, 1865, spoke “On Moving Photographic figures, illustrating some phenomena of vision connected with the combination of the stereoscope and the phenakisticope by means of photography.” Claudet noted that from the beginning of photography those acquainted with Plateau’s disk thought that pictures would be more suitable than hand drawings to show the illusions of motion. But they also sought the third dimensional effect. Duboscq’s efforts were not completely successful, according to Claudet who described a machine he had worked out. The illusion of motion was effected by having one eye see one picture and the other eye the next picture. This resulted in a simultaneous motion and solid effect. The spectator was not conscious of the vision being transferred from one eye to another. Claudet’s example was a boxer about to strike and then delivering the blow.

The pictures in Claudet’s machine must have left much to the imagination but an interesting perfection of this device was shown in New York in late 1922 and early 1923, under the name of Hammond’s Teleview. An entire theatre was equipped with a special shutter device for each spectator. The shutters were synchronized with the shutter of the motion picture projector and the spectator, looking through the device, saw motion in three dimensions. The development was not commercially practicable because the apparatus was expensive, a nuisance to the spectators and the many little motors operating the shutters created an annoying hum in the auditorium.

In the United States the Langenheim brothers did much to popularize the Stereoscope and its various modifications. About 1850 they started to make and sell stereoscopic views in Philadelphia, by mail and through agents throughout the country. In those days, with the Gold Rush in California just subsiding, there was great interest in scenic wonders and views of remote places. Stereoscopic photos had a great sale and were eventually found in almost every parlor of the day.

Before the Civil War the Langenheims opened at 188 Chestnut Street the “Stereoscope Cosmorama Exhibit.” There each spectator sat and could see one stereoscopic view after another by turning a crank. It may very well have been this turning crank system which suggested an interesting motion picture device to the fellow citizen of Langenheims, Coleman Sellers.

Coleman Sellers (1827–1907) was a skilled engineer. He reproduced Faraday’s electric experiments in this country; constructed locomotives in Cincinnati chiefly for the Panama Railroad; he also worked on the Niagara Falls power development. Even for hobbies he turned to scientific toys and gadgets. In 1856 he was called to Philadelphia again to take his place in the family engineering company. Sellers’ family dated from one Samuel Sellers who received a royal grant of land in Pennsylvania in 1682.

Sellers patented on February 5, 1861 a device which he called the Kinematoscope, evidently the first use of the word “cinema” if we exclude the Frenchman who copied Wheatstone’s device under the name of Quinetoscope.

The Sellers device revolved a series of posed still pictures, paddle-wheel fashion, before the eye of the observer. A period of relative rest was achieved through this motion as each picture was coming towards the observer for a specific time and then out of view as the next photo came into position. Sellers’ motion photos include his wife sewing, his two sons, Coleman, Jr. and Horace, playing and rocking a chair. Sellers tried to combine motion and solid effects. He found the wet plate photographic process invented by Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857) in 1850 quite unsatisfactory for “posed” motion work. Archer did not trouble to patent the process.

During the Civil War the Langenheims took nearly 1,000 pictures which were mounted for showing in the projection magic lanterns, and during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71 several hundred photographs and drawings were released by the Langenheim brothers for lantern use. The last catalogue of the firm was published in 1874 and included some 6,000 colored slides priced at $33 a dozen, and those specially photographed and made at $4 each. William Langenheim died on May 4, 1874. Frederic tried to continue the business for a time but he, too, was getting old and eventually sold out in the Autumn to Caspar W. Briggs, another early Philadelphia photographer. At the Philadelphia exhibit Frederic had a showing of the Voigtlander lenses made in Vienna which were the best then available for certain types of photographic work.

Another Philadelphian, Henry Renno Heyl (1842–1919), a friend and associate of Sellers on the Board of Trustees of the Franklin Institute, was the first person in America to develop a projector which used “posed” motion photographs. The individual pictures were taken by the same method used by Sellers for his Kinematoscope.

Somewhat earlier, O. B. Brown, of Malden, Mass. obtained U. S. patent No. 93,594, dated August 10, 1869, on what is the first American “motion picture” projector. It, however, used only drawn designs and not photographs. In principle it was based, as other projectors of the time, on the system developed by Uchatius. In Brown’s projector the Plateau magic disk with the figures was mounted between the light source and the projection lens and was rotated by a gear arrangement. In front of the lens there was a rotating shutter with two holes which interrupted the light when the pictures were in intermittent motion.

Heyl perhaps may have obtained his basic idea from Brown or it may have come to him independently because the urge to combine the new photos and the older magic lantern was felt by many persons. At any rate, the Heyl apparatus bears very little relation to Brown’s. There is no evidence that Heyl attempted to patent his device, so the Patent Office never was called upon to decide the point.

Heyl, a native of Columbus, Ohio, who designed many types of machinery, including boxes and paper and book stitching devices, has been hailed by some as the first to use photos in a projection device. He himself, however, never claimed that honor. He published a letter dated Philadelphia, February 1, 1898, in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, “A contribution to the history of the art of photographing living subjects in motion and reproducing the natural movements by the lantern.”

“Among the earliest public exhibitions” of such a combination was one given by him at an entertainment held in the Academy of Music, in Philadelphia on February 5, 1870. A catalogue note announced as a feature of the varied entertainment the showing of “The Phasmatrope, a most recent scientific invention,” whose effects are similar “to the familiar toy called the Zoetrope.” The management expressed pleasure at having “the first opportunity of presenting its merits to our audience.”

Heyl and a dancing partner posed for six pictures in the various phases of the waltz at O. H. Willard’s photographic studio at 1206 Chestnut Street. Other photo slides were made of a then popular Japanese acrobatic performer—“Little All Right.” The time exposures were taken on wet plates, then prints were transferred to thin glass plates with the images only about three quarters of an inch high.

The six stills were duplicated three times to fill the eighteen spaces in the wheel of the projector.

The Heyl projector had an intermittent movement controlled by a ratchet and pawl mechanism operated by a reciprocating bar moved up and down by the hand. The fast movement was used for the acrobats with a complete stop at the end of each somersault, and a slow tempo for the waltz which was accompanied by an orchestra.

The problem of a shutter to interrupt the light while the pictures were moving was solved in the following way, according to Heyl: “This was accomplished by a vibrating shutter placed back of the picture wheel that was operated on the same drawbar that moved the wheel, only the shutter movement was so timed that it moved first and covered the picture before the latter moved and completed the movement after the next picture was in place. This movement reduced to a great extent the flickering and gave very natural and life-like representations of the moving figures.”

Heyl’s Phasmatrope was an ingenious apparatus but the imagination had to compensate for its many imperfections. When it was demonstrated on March 16, 1870, at a meeting of the Franklin Institute, it created so little notice that mention of the showing was not included in the minutes. It is interesting to note it was at this meeting that Sellers was elected head of the Franklin Institute. We can wonder what his reaction was to the fact that Heyl, a man fifteen years his junior, had added projection to the principle of his Kinematoscope which had also used “posed pictures” in a peep-show apparatus.

In 1875, in Philadelphia, Caspar Briggs, who had bought out the Langenheim interest the year before, introduced a device similar to the Heyl projector which also used still photographs made of drawings to simulate motion. His most popular subject was “The Dancing Skeleton,” a selection reminiscent of Phantasmagoria and the “black arts” or necromancy. The little pictures were mounted on the edge of a mica disk which revolved before the projection lens. Briggs also improved the Langenheim magic lantern slide process and gave a further impetus to photographic activity in Philadelphia.

From the Langenheims and their contemporaries in America the spotlight of magic shadow development shifts back to the Old World, to France, and to a scientist of distinction.