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MOVEMENT IN TWO DIMENSIONS
until her owl seemed coming directly upon me, it was so like my nightmare dreams that I shrieked aloud.'
The Phantasmagoria, which functioned by means of a screen set up after the manner of Kircher between lantern and audience, was named by M. Philipsthal in 1 802 when he exhibited it with enormous success in London and Edinburgh. It was not an altogether new form of entertainment, but Philipsthal, a mysterious character reported to have dabbled in alchemy after having been trained as a doctor, was a better showman than his predecessors and rivals. A sternly critical viewer, the scientist Sir David Brewster, has left a description of Philipsthal's procedure.
'The small theatre of exhibition,' he writes, 'was lighted only by one hanging lamp, the flame of which was drawn up into an opaque chimney or shade when the performance began. In this semi-obscurity the curtain rose and displayed a cave with skeletons and other terrific figures in relief upon its walls. The flickering light was then drawn up beneath its shroud, and the spectators, left in total darkness, found themselves in the midst of thunder and lightning. A thin transparent screen had, unknown to the spectators, been let down after the disappearance of the light, and upon it the flashes of lightning and all the subsequent appearances were represented. The thunder and lightning were followed by the figures of ghosts, skeletons, and known individuals whose eyes and mouths were made to move by the shifting of combined slides. After the first figure had been exhibited for a short time, it began to grow less and less, as if removed to a great distance, and at last vanished in a small cloud of light. Out of this same cloud another figure began to appear and gradually grew larger and larger and approached the spectator until it attained its perfect development.'
One of Phihpsthal's favourite tricks was to show the head of Dr. Franklin and to transform it slowly into a skull. He also presented fully dressed persons who retired from the spectators with all the freshness of life, only to come into view again a moment later in the form of grisly skeletons; these skeletons were then clothed step by step, first with flesh and then with appropriate garments. The performance generally ended with a mustering of ghosts, skeletons, and monsters, who with one accord advanced upon the trembling audience,
Optic toys in the Barnes Collection, including a rackwork slide, Thaumatrope discs, a Zoetrope, a Phenakistiscope, a Praxinoscope, peep-eggs, and a cylindrical mirror with polyoptic pictures, together with various magic lanterns, a Kinora, and a Projecting
Phenakistiscope on the shelf behind