Once Upon A Time - How The World
Looked, Lived, and Vanished

A Global View Of The World

With Rare Photographs & Text
By The Keystone View Company

I've always been fascinated by pictures and photographs of people and places of long ago. Many years ago I came across a set of old glass lantern slide photographs, in a box, being thrown out by a local school district

 A Little Bit of History

Before I get into the company, let's first discuss the history, very briefly, of the lantern slide.

Transparent magic lantern slides were very popular forms of entertainment prior to the development of photographs. Made of glass, they were used to project drawings. The first recorded use of an image projection system was the Sturm Lantern in 1676. It was capable of "...producing small, dimly lit images" (http://www.magiclantern.org.uk/history1.htm, George Aukland, 2001).

The first photograph was developed in 1839 by Louis Jacques Mande' Daguerre, a French painter (Jensen, Kerr, & Belsky, 1970). Now you know from where the term 'Daguerreotype' photograph comes.

It was Daguerre who coated a copper sheet with a thin coating of silver. Polishing this sheet to a high luster, it was then placed in a closed box and activated with iodine fumes, allowing the silver to be sensitive to light. In darkness he placed this activated "film" in a plate holder and then into a "camera." Exposing this plate for 15-30 minutes, produced an image. However the image was not made visible until it was "developed" over mercury fumes (today we know how poisonous mercury can be).