Transcript

The astronomical lantern slide and the visual communication of popular science

Martin Bush, 8 November 2017

[CHAIR & INTRODUCTIONS: FIONA KINSEY]

Welcome, everyone, to the October presentation in the 2017 History, Culture, & Collections lecture series. It's hosted by the Humanities department of Museums Victoria. And I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we are on today-- the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation and pay my respect to elders both past and present.

And so I'd just like to introduce Dr. Martin Bush sitting here behind me. His lecture is titled The Astronomical Lantern Slide and the Visual Communication of Popular Science. His lecture is based on his recently completed PhD on the history of popular astronomy in Australia in the era of the lantern slide, which he has been recently almost awarded by Swinburne University of Technology. So congratulations on finishing that, Martin.

Martin won the 2016 Mike Smith Student Prize for History of Australian Science or Australian Environmental History, which was awarded by the Australian Academy of Science. He's winning essay, which has been published in the journal Historical Records of Australian Science, was titled "The Proctor-Parkes Incident, Politics, Protestants, and Popular Astronomy in Australia in 1880." I'm not sure if he's touching on that today. But if he doesn't, you can go and look it up in that journal I mentioned.

And prior to his PhD study, Martin worked at Museums Victoria for 13 years, including as the curator of scientific instruments and Antarctic history and as technical programmer and scientific communicator on the Melbourne Planetarium production team. These interests have combined in his fascination with astronomical magic lantern slides. Martin is currently a research associate in the Humanities department at Museums Victoria. And he's also a research fellow at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. So please join with me in making Martin welcome now.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. In 1868, Henry James Masterton commenced an astronomical lecturing tour of the colony of South Australia. The Adelaide Observer remarked that his lecture was extremely interesting and illustrated by means of transparencies. It would be all downhill from there. On the same day, the [INAUDIBLE] observed that the response to that same lecture had, in fact, been one of great disappointment.

It was not the quality of his lecturing, however, that disappointed. He might have been as great a muff as ever addressed an audience, and we would have forgiven him. But we cannot excuse his deficiency of memory.

He forgot to pay his printing account and his hotel bill. This would be how he would operate in Australia-- placing advertisements without paying for them in order to obtain hotel rooms for free. He did not travel as Henry James Masterton but styled himself as Professor Muggeridge.

At Kapunda Institute, he drew a very fair attendance. But the Kapunda Herald observed that the proceedings occupied less than an hour and that the lecturer's diagrams were too small and poorly illuminated to be of much use to the audience. Things would get even worse for Masterton at Kadina.

By then word had got out about his little scam. He arrived on the Sunday 16th of August as Professor [INAUDIBLE] with little slips of paper pasted over his old name on his cards. But then the newspapers arrived on the Monday containing details of his previous frauds and Masterton fled.

Only this time, he would be brought down by a pair of slippers. Evidently having worn out his own boots in his journeys from town to town, he stole a pair of slippers from the hotel owners and sewed his boot tops to them. He would be sentenced to 20 [GARBLED AUDIO] hard labour theft, having been left behind two or three yards of [GARBLED AUDIO] coarsely painted over with illustrations of the heavenly bodies.

There is much that is amusing about this story. But there are a few things that I find particularly interesting-- firstly, that astronomy lecturing was such good cover for a swindler, and that this astronomy lecturing could not be attempted without some pretence at illustration. Throughout the 19th century, astronomy would be associated with grand and noble ideas and communicated with visual media. Indeed, these associations have persisted through the 20th century and well into the 21st, I hope with a little bit less fraud.

But in the 19th century, no technology was more important in creating this association between astronomy, the sublime and the visual, than the magic lantern was. This lecture will describe how these links were created and how they appeared in colonial Australia. In so doing, we'll uncover the role of the magic lantern, not just as a novelty form of pre-cinema image-making, but as an important technology in its own right, one that largely created the screen culture in the first place.

However, I don't want to replace a simple story that sees everything created, that sees screen culture created with cinema with an equally simple story, that sees everything created with the lantern. So I'll touch upon some of the other forms of visualisation that we used for popular astronomy in the 19th century as well. This will be in the third section of my lecture, when I briefly describe a few examples of the use of popular astronomy in Australia in order to give a sense of the range of motivations of popularizers. And finally, I'll draw a few lessons about visualisation and popular astronomy to the magic lantern.

The magic lantern was one of the most powerful media forms of the 19th century. Yet, it remains largely obscure today. Lanterns were essentially large format slide projectors, capable of producing a range of special effects and animations. Yet, as I've already described, their importance goes so far beyond this.

The history of magic lanterns goes back to the 17th century with Christiaan Huygens now generally credited with the invention of the first true projection lantern. But the heyday of the magic lantern was really from about the 1840s until the end of the 19th century, when cinema did, indeed, replace lantern as a form of public entertainment. This transition, however, was certainly not immediate.

The lantern and the cinematograph co-existed for a considerable period of time. And in more restricted educational context, schools, universities, churches, community groups, the lantern persisted well into the 20th century. As I've already mentioned, paying attention to both the preceding technologies and the long historical tale of the magic lantern is something that I'd particularly like to stress.

But in terms of the heyday of the magic lantern, there were two technological developments that really enabled the lantern to become this strong form of public entertainment. The first is the development of slide-making technologies and in particular the copper plate process developed by Philip Carpenter around 1823. This allowed the black outlines to be printed directly onto the glass of slides for magic lanterns with the remaining colour to be added in. And this allowed images, slides, to be made much more quickly, much more [GARBLED AUDIO] than the whole lantern slide had to be painted by hand.

The second technology is the development of the limelights. This is the brilliant light that can be created when a flame is directed against a block of quicklime. It was discovered in the 1820s and first applied for surveying and lighthouses and then used in theatrical environments. And this is where we get that metaphor "in the limelight" from.

Limelight was applied to lantern projection in 1840 at the Adelaide Gallery in London. And the result of this was a lantern that was able to project images that were 8 or 10 metres across in size-- so sort of even larger than what you're seeing at the moment and certainly big enough to be seen in a large hall. For the first time, lanterns were capable of projecting an image that could be seen by a large crowd of people at the same time.

Before this, the best illumination source for a lantern was various forms of oil lamps that could project images of 2 or 3 metres across and that in a quite darkened room. So these lanterns were good enough for small audiences and domestic use. But they were not capable of producing stage [GARBLED AUDIO].

Australia magic lanterns started to appear pretty early in the colonial period. They're advertised for sale as early as 1825. And by the 1830s, you're seeing public performances of lantern projection. So that's pretty early. That's before the big demographic boom of the 1830s and '40s-- the one that transformed colonial Australia from a penal colony into one dominated by free settlers, albeit still ruled by military institutions.

And so lanterns appeared in Australia not very long after they appear in Britain. And throughout the 19th century, Australia shared in most of the developments of lantern technology that was seen there. But there were a couple of major differences between the traditions in the two countries.

First of all, in Australia, colonial Australia, the large public institutions, like the Adelaide Gallery or the [INAUDIBLE] museums weren't established until the mid-century and certainly in the 19th century, at least, never became quite as grand as those London establishments were. And at the other end of the scale of performance, the distances between settlements in colonial Australia meant that the itinerant lanternist didn't become a viable proposition in Australia until much later in this period, where it was quite a common form even in the early 19th century. In Australia, it was really the middle layer of small institutions-- the mechanics institutes, schools, churches-- that accounted for the bulk of lantern practise or public lantern practise.

Now, a particular aspect of lantern practise was the development of commercially available sets of lantern slides complete with readings. These sets meant that anyone with a decent education and performance skills was able to present to an audience as an expert on just about any given subject. These lantern slide sets quite literally delivered culture in a box. And one of the first pieces of culture to be boxed up and one of the longest lasting was astronomy.

The astronomical lantern slide set was developed at the end of the 18th century in 1799. The optical instrument maker William Jones of London was offering for sale a new set of movable painted slides showing the fundamental principles of astronomy with the real and apparent motions of the planets, stars, et cetera. And soon afterwards, the microscope maker Charles Blunt was also offering a set. But as I've mentioned, for the first few decades of the 19th century, magic lanterns remained primarily a small form of entertainment and a form entertainment for small audiences, schools, and domestic use.

But when things took off in the 1840s with the limelight, a number of British manufacturers had already joined Jones and Blunt in producing lantern slides-- the astronomical lantern slide sets. Carpenter and Westley, Newton, Dolland, Theobald, Watson are some of the names of manufacturers. And there were plenty more firms that were retailing these sets.

Then you have firms like Millikin & Lawley and Griffith, who are thought not to have produced their own lantern slide sets but to have bought them from others and then rebranded them. And at this stage, copying of imagery and formats was really common. So tracing the origin of particular sets can be a bit of a challenge.

The form of the astronomical lantern set was surprisingly stable. With a pretty small range of variation, the standard astronomical lantern lecture followed a pretty familiar format. I don't have time to reproduce one entirely. But I will step you very quickly through an example from the collections of Museums Victoria.

For the reasons I just described, the manufacturer of this set is uncertain. But it may have been based on one of the sets by Charles Blunt. If there are any reporters from the Kapunda Herald in the room, note that this is going to take much less than an hour.

So the standard astronomical lantern lecture opened with a question that hasn't much occupied science communicators in recent years, although I understand there has been a bit of a revival of Flat Earthism lately. So I shouldn't speak too soon. But nonetheless, a proof that the world is round is not something that has featured heavily in recent presentations that I've seen.

So we have here, if the world were flat, then ships sailing away from us would just get smaller and smaller but retain their shape. Whereas, on a round Earth, we can say that ships disappearing over the horizon their bottoms will disappear first. And the last thing that will be visible will be their masts or like stacks in later versions of this slide.

This would be one of animated slides of this set, showing the motion with this lever. Operating this lever would send the ship sailing around the world. And you would be able to picture that for yourself.

Having proved that the world is round, we would now turn to other phenomena that are visible with the naked eye, particularly the appearance of the Moon-- a full moon, half moon, crescented moon. So I am illustrating how the various phases of the Moon are created by a moon which always shows half a face to the Sun, revolving around the Earth.

We would then turn to telescopic views and a tour of the Solar System, starting with the Sun and its sunspots, moving through the planets-- the inferior planets, Mercury and Venus, which a telescope can show [GARBLED AUDIO], like the moon, the planet Mars, and then the asteroids, of course, newly discovered in the 19th century. When they were first discovered, they were considered planets in their own right. But by the time certainly this set was produced, then they were more commonly being referred to as the asteroids. The large planet Jupiter with its Galilean moons, and Saturn with its ring here seen in two views or sets-- with the ring inclined and with the ring edge-on.

Then when you get to Uranus and Neptune. So we can see that this set is produced after the discovery of Neptune. And interestingly, it also shows the rings-- something that the astronomer William Lassell reported but then quickly rescinded. So an interesting aspect of these slides or any of these media is they fix in time particular aspects of astronomical knowledge or presumed knowledge, regardless of whether that knowledge is later rescinded. So details like that can assist in dating slide sets like this.

And then finally, we consider the Solar System body in our tour of comets, comets being of enormous interest of the 19th century, partly because that century was so blessed with so many spectacular comets appearing in their night skies. But comets also, with their very elliptical orbits, this showing the formation of the tail getting larger and larger as it approaches the Sun, but it always pointing away from the Sun.

We then have a look at a few comets, views of comets, this being the comet of 1680 and the comet of 1811. Mentioning that the elliptical orbits of comets demonstrates the truth of the Newtonian version of the solar system, we then conduct a bit of historical study of the various systems of the world-- that is, theories about how the solar system is constructed. And people are probably generally familiar with the Ptolemaic system with the Earth stationary at the centre and all of the planets revolving around the Earth.

Then there is also the Copernican system, which was also referred to as the Pythagorean system, something that we wouldn't say today, with the Sun at the centre and all of the planets in their circular orbits around the Sun. People may now be less familiar with the Tychonic system. But clearly, that was within the historical memory of 19th century audiences-- kind of a hybrid system, which one, contained a stationary Earth, but the mathematics of Copernicus. So we have the Earth at the centre, the Moon and the Sun going around the Earth, but all of the other planets going around the Sun-- a neat compromise. But then we have the true system of Newton with its elliptical orbits and, in particular, its highly elliptical orbits of the comets.

So having done our historical digression, the [GARBLED AUDIO] rather, we then turn to another question, which is not commonly posed today. And that is, how do we know that the Sun is bigger than the Earth? Well, if the Earth were bigger than the Sun, then the shadow of the Earth in space would grow and expand indefinitely through space. And we would see the outer planets and certainly the Moon going through this large shadow, at least occasionally.

Even if the Earth was exactly the same size as the Moon, that shadow would extend indefinitely through space. And because we never see this, we can know that, in fact, the Earth is smaller than the Sun and that the shadow terminates in space. We never see it reaching out even as far as the orbit of Mars.

But understanding the shadow of the Earth in space gives us the understanding of eclipses. So here, we will see diagrams of how solar and lunar eclipses are created-- a solar eclipse created when the shadow of the Moon puts a dark spot on the Earth and a lunar eclipse created when the Moon goes through the shadow of the Earth on the other side. We would then turn to the other two animated effects in this lantern slide production, in this case slipping slides, where one sheet of glass would be drawn slowly across another and the dark patches-- a crook moving across the face of the Sun would create the effect of a solar eclipse and similarly for a lunar eclipse.

The next slide concerns the zodiac, that band of constellations that's seen in the sky along the path that the Sun appears to travel. And we would also consider the cause of the seasons caused by the obliquity the Earth's axis and how that shifts the angles of sunlight as the Earth travels around the Sun. Also, the cause of the tides created by the gravity mostly of the Moon but also partially of the Sun. So we have the spring tides when the gravity of the Sun and the moon line up and act in concert and then the neat tides when the forces of gravity are obviously in different directions. And so the tidal effect from the Sun slightly negates that of the Moon.

Getting towards a close, we look at the appearances of stars in the sky, the constellation Orion, which lies across the celestial equator and so can be seen-- or close to the celestial equator can be seen from both hemispheres. And Ursa Major, the principle constellation of the North from which the North Star and, thus, the direction of North can be discerned.

Travellers to Australia as they took the-- in the 19th century, colonial migrants as they spent their journey south in the Atlantic Ocean would watch Ursa Major slowly descend into the northern horizon and, at the same time, the Southern Cross rise up over the southern horizon. And for this and other reasons, the Southern Cross became known as the principal constellation of the southern hemisphere and explicitly paired in the memory of these migrants with Ursa Major. There's an interesting story there that I've got no time to talk about.

But the final image, which I used as the frontispiece of my thesis and of this lecture, shows the Milky Way and nebulae-- nebulae being the cloud-like appearances, the fuzzy patches in the sky. And the actual nature of the nebulae was one of the great questions of 19th century astronomy. So there you have it, over an hour's worth of 19th century culture in a box in 10 minutes or so.

I won't describe in as much detail here, but just for comparison, here are eight slides from a set of 22 from a Jones set. This is to give you a sense of the similarities and the differences. So you can see it's very similar content. We've got the same proofs that the Earth is round. We've got the same tour through the Solar System, description of eclipses and tides.

This one is a much more finished set. The painting is a little bit more detailed. And it does have-- one difference that it does have here is a neat kind of picture of the appearance of the Earth as it would be seen from the Moon. So that's quite nice.

This slide set also finished with a portrait of Isaac Newton, so reinforcing those British associations with astronomy. So there were a few differences. But overall, I trust you can see that these slide sets are really very similar.

The major alternate form of astronomical slide set consisted of set of 9 or 10 rackwork slides, that is to say slides that were animated by small gearwork. And this was the set that was illustrated earlier. So these were all animated. And they demonstrated motions such as the rotation of the Earth and, again, the cause of the tides or the motion of all of known planets in the Solar System.

These said were first developed by Carpenter & Westley in the late 1830s, early 1840s. But that was soon copied by Newton and Dollond and, again, with very similar form and content. Because of the intricate gearwork, these sets were much more expensive than the standard slide set. In fact, the [INAUDIBLE] slide shown here, which shows the motions of all of the known planets in the Solar System with separate gearing for each, is considered to be one of the most complicated lantern slides that was ever produced. But these sets clearly had a major impact.

As late as the 1920s, this old style of lantern slide was still being sold. This is from a catalogue from 1924 of very extensive lantern slide imagery, all of which is photographic in nature with the exception of this set. This is the only non-photographic slide that is still being sold in 1924 by Flatters and Garnett

Both sets of lantern slides were known and used in Australia. The magic lanterns and the associated slide sets were traded by generalist importers and retailers, like [INAUDIBLE], by British firms that traded directly to Australians, like George Richardson, and by more specialist businesses. So the opticians Abraham and Kasner and Moss for Melbourne both acted dealers for Carpenter and Westley slides. While Baker and Rouse were the local agents for Watson & Sons. Watchmaker James Searle appears to have distributed a number of sets, including the popular lecture set that I stepped through, as well as Carpenter & Wesley.

I apologise a little bit for the quality of these images. [INAUDIBLE] is an enormous resource. But the quality of images that you can get from it are not always first class.

We also find plenty of sets of astronomical lantern slides turning up in auction listings-- so as in here, the property of a gentleman having no further use for them. But the most definitive evidence-- or the richest evidence for the use of astronomical lantern slide sets comes from newspaper reports of lectures themselves. And these reports show how widespread the use of these sets were.

Religious ministers like Charles Price, John Jennings Smith; local gentleman, like Frederick Rays Godfrey; and schoolteachers, like Hugh Wiley, all gave astronomical lantern lectures using commercially available sets. That they were these sets is clear from descriptions of the lectures and, sometimes if you can read it, from this published syllabus for Hugh Wiley's lectures. And if you can read it, you'll see, figure of the Earth, rotundity of the Earth, full moon, half moon, crescented moon. This is exactly the descriptions of the slides that we saw earlier. He was using exactly one of those sets to do this lecture.

That these lectures are being given by ministers and school teachers and other respectable middle class citizens of colonial Australia reinforces that earlier observation about the middle layer of lanternist practise being dominant in Australia. And it gives some indication of how this kind of box culture was being used. And I'm going to turn to a few examples of these uses in order to provide a little more detail and to flesh out that diversity of motivations for popular astronomy.

And the first example is of purely commercial lecturing. And one of the first appearances of the astronomical lantern set in Australia was by the actor of John Meredith in Hobart in 1837, a purely money-making exercise. And the venture was successful enough for him to repeat it at least once in 1842. But it didn't do him a lot of good in the long run, because he died insolvent 10 years after.

There are a couple things I want to point about this usage. Firstly, it is notable that Meredith came from a theatrical background. And he is by no means the only practitioner of astronomical lecturing for which this is true. Both in Britain and in Australia, many of the early popularizers had a background in the stage rather than in science or education.

Secondly, Meredith advertises his lecture as a Dioastrodoxon or an Eidouranion. So what the heck are they? The Eidouranion and its later copies were large stage devices first developed in the 1780s by the Walker family and capable of entertaining a very large crowd.

There has been a bit of debate in the scholarly literature about exactly what they were up until a couple of years ago. No surviving diagrams of them were known to have survived. And some people argued that they were, in fact, a form of multiple magic lantern projection, despite the fact that they're projecting images on this size 40 years before the development of limelight technology.

But it seems pretty clear now that these were, indeed, as some people have argued all along, mechanical devices illuminated by backlit transparencies-- so a big wooden frame that revolved with the inset. In that revolving frame is particular transparencies that were backlit. This is a diagram that turned up in my PhD research.

A true Eidouranion never appeared in the Australian [GARBLED AUDIO] although [GARBLED AUDIO] was [GARBLED AUDIO] more than once. It's from the descriptive narrative lectures that he actually was just using a set of commercially available lantern slides, albeit that that would have been in 1937 quite a novelty in Hobart at the time. But not only is Meredith here performing popular astronomy for commercial purposes, he's explicitly drawing on a tradition of stage astronomy that has been crucial in establishing the lantern slide set as a viable proposition in the first place.

And Francis West, one of the sort of early manufacturers, made this quite explicit when he advertised his set of slides as accordingly-- these exhibit the fundamental principles of astronomy by the assistance of the little book, which accompanies the lecture may be read similar to those [GARBLED AUDIO] during Lent by Mrs. Walker, Bartley, Adams, et cetera. So that is Walker of the Eidouranion family and other performers of the Dioastrodoxon and similar devices.

That they were formed over the Lent and Easter season was due to a restriction on theatrical performances during this period, which established the conditions for astronomical lecturing to really be a big stage performance for a month or so in London. So it was a thing. And the Australian colonists were very well aware of that thing. But certainly, Meredith hoped, not so well aware of it, that they would be able to distinguish a lantern slide set from a true Eidouranion, at least not after till they had paid their money.

The second example I want to give is of celebrity lecturing. Probably the high point of astronomical lecturing in Australia came in 1880 when two of the most celebrated popularizers of their day both came to Australia-- Professor Pepper, the longtime manager of the London Polytechnic, that institution that had done so much to establish lanternist culture as a public spectacle to the colonies in 1879 and 1880. Richard Proctor, one of the most prolific authors on astronomy of his day and very possibly ever since, had a shorter tour of Australia and New Zealand from June to December 1880.

So if it's not clear, that's Pepper and Proctor lecturing at the Athenaeum in Melbourne. The two popularizers met with quite different success-- Proctor's immense. He lectured to sell-out crowds repeatedly through all of the colonies that he did it.

I should note that Proctor very much was not using a commercially prepared lantern slide set. He travelled with his own personally curated set of slides, mostly photographic in nature, although he also travelled with a set of large wall charts that he used for illustrations on the rare occasions that he could not procure a lantern. I think his first lecture in Geelong was the only occasion in which that happened in his time in Australia. But this is sort of an illustration of another one of those range of visualisations that was being used.

On that note, I should say that while a true Eidouranion never appeared in Australia, backlit transparencies were certainly known. They were used at least as early as the magic lantern slide. And it appears to be that effect that our friend Professor Muggeridge was trying to create with his calico paintings in South Australia.

But Pepper did, indeed, use a commercial set of astronomical lantern slides. He had his own set of slides on a whole range of subjects. But when he first started lecturing on astronomy in Sydney, he was clearly using one of these standard sets. And he was much less successful in his lecturing.

Proctor presented as an expert in a single subject. While, Professor Pepper was presenting as a generalist entertainer, someone a little bit from the past, talking about scientific subjects but also his Pepper's ghost routine and travel slides from around the world, military technology, and a whole range of subjects.

So at this time, we're seeing a bit of a shift in our understanding-- or people's understanding of authority and celebrity. And unfortunately, for him, Professor Pepper fell on the wrong side of that split. So one of the things this shows us is that by 1880, although it would continue to be used for decades after, as I've said, the astronomical lantern slide set was starting to look a little bit old fashioned, at least for the most sophisticated kinds of entertainment.

So Proctor and Pepper had pretty different successes on their tour of Australia. But they did have one thing in common, and that is clashes with authority about their Sunday lecturing. By Proctor in Sydney and Pepper in Melbourne attempted to give astronomical lectures on Sundays. Professor Pepper called his the secular sermon. And both of them had these lectures shut down by the police in response to complaints by sabbatarians, the people that thought that the Sunday, the Lord's day, should be used only for religious observance and necessary business and certainly not for any kind of entertainment purposes.

And this leads onto the third example that I want to talk about. And that is the use of astronomy lecturing within the secular free thought debates of the 1880s and 1890s. So in the wake of Proctor and Pepper tour, these debates sharpened in Australia considerably.

The Lord's Day Observance Society was reformed on the sabbatarian side. But this also was the high point of organised free thought movements within Australia and New Zealand as well. And for both of these groups, astronomical lecturing would be important.

For religiously motivated people, there had actually been a long tradition of astronomy lecturing-- and I've referred to that a few times-- particularly within what is called natural theology, that is the kind of religious thought that attempts to use scientific understandings to prove the benevolence and understanding of God. In fact, one of the first spikes of astronomical lantern lecturing by religious ministers occurs just after the publication of the Origin of the Species. So it's not possible to determine with certainty what motivated that spike in lecturing. But you can draw your conclusions.

But astronomy was important for the free through movement as well. In fact, free thought lecturers who were sent to Australia and the United States from Britain were specifically trained in a number of sciences, and astronomy was one of them. This was in an attempt to disprove the facts of the Bible, even though, interestingly, the facts of astronomy are much less centrally involved in these kinds of debates than those of the other sciences, like biology and geology, whose relevance was much clearer to these debates.

When you looked through, it is very hard to escape the conclusion that the prestige of astronomy was at least as important as its content for these debates. But important it was. And as a result, both religious and free thought lecturers could invoke very similar content using very similar slide sets but drawing entirely different conclusions.

And sometimes, they could be doing so almost next door to each other, as in this occasion in Christchurch when the free thought lecturer William Whitehouse Collins and the Unitarian minister John Hosking were giving lectures devoted to astronomy, including astronomy, at theatres that were [GARBLED AUDIO] apart from each other at the very same time. It's entirely a historical coincidence. But it does indicate that this use of content for deployment in other realms was highly significant for these movements. And it was the lantern slide set that allowed people to wrap their interpretations around the facts of astronomy so very well.

So what can we learn from the astronomical lantern slide about popular astronomy and visualisation? Why has this association of astronomy, sublime, and the visual being so persistent? Firstly, I'd like to draw attention to the experience that people have of astronomical observation. More than for most sciences, popular astronomy through media, such as lantern slides, enlists audience as assistants, as practitioners of the science themselves. Magic lanterns acted as the telescopes of the audience, revealing the secrets of nature under the careful superintendents of the popularizer.

Of course, astronomy is not the only visual science. Microscopy is a visual science as well. And it's had periods of quite strong popular interest. But it has never sustained a public tradition as long as or as well as astronomy, and nor have other visual sciences.

Meteorology, the science of the sky, is a part of daily life and of enormous interest to people all the time. But it's famously struggled to be considered as an exact science. Geological sciences, like stratigraphy, involve reading the landscapes around us but really require an expert eye to do so and less accessible to a popular audience for that reason.

The unique position of astronomy in the sciences, I would say, is that it's poised between the everyday and the untouchable. It can be experienced by almost everyone. And yet, it seems to speak of the grandest underlying laws of nature, the most reliable truths of science and to the divine. And this is one of the major aspects of the tradition of astronomy-- the consideration of it as the first science, as an exact science, in many ways as the exemplary science.

More than once, a history of astronomy has been used to stand for the history of thought itself. And certainly as indicated by the lantern slide sets that we stepped through, the history of astronomy was a major component of almost all astronomical lecturing. Every single one of Richard Proctor's lectures began with some historical vignette with astronomy.

This exalted status of astronomy is the reason why astronomy was featured so prominently in the free thought debates. These notions of perfection are reinforced by the dominance of the god's eye view, the mathematical diagrams of these lantern slide sets as compared with the more ground-based, experiential imagery of astronomy that we see coming up in people's personal reflections in the diaries and manuscripts that document people's understanding of the sky.

So this tradition of astronomy and its relationship with the common experience of the audiences distinguishes the traditions of popular astronomy from other forms of popular science. And indeed, for this reason, and for analogous reasons, I would say that there are many different forms of popular science, and that we actually need to understand the much greater diversity of forms of popular science, both in a historical sense and in a contemporary context.

But the traditions of popular astronomy don't just draw from the traditions of the science. Tempting as it may be for some science communicators to draw a hard distinction between content and form, I think the history, let alone current practise, shows that it's very hard to do this. Actors were central to the process of establishing popular astronomy as a genre. Richard Proctor was the preeminent scientific lecturer of his day, but his success is largely due to good theatrical management by the impresario Robert Sparrow Smythe, who managed his tour in Australia and New Zealand.

And I also mentioned the importance of the trading chains of firms for these products and performances that enabled the practises of popular astronomy. So it's only through this combination of scientific tradition, personal experience, performance, and trade that such complex layers of meaning are able to be built around popular astronomy-- the apocalyptic imaginations that have been common in popular astronomy for centuries, the religious interpretations for/against, and even national identity, such as that built around the Southern Cross.

It's through this interplay of the intellectual and the experience that we can come to understand popular astronomy and the popular scientific practises that can actually change people's lives, rather than just being something they think about, the practises that allow people to do things. As I can't put it any better than Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, but if people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I also bet they would live life a lot differently.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you very, Martin. That was fantastic, such extraordinary images, and a little bit of controversy in there too with the Sunday lectures, very interesting. I just want to give you a bit of housekeeping, again, now. So just reminders that the microphones are on either side of the audience.

And I just wanted to let you know, at the end of the question time, Martin has some magic lanterns down the front from the museum's collection that you can come and look at. I do ask you all not to touch them. Martin will come down, and we'll turn the light box on, and you can have a look. But I just wanted to ask a quick question before I throw to the audience, which was, were there any women who were doing these lectures, Martin?

There wasn't-- women were very important in popular astronomy in this period but very, very few as lecturers. After this period, absolutely. So Richard Proctor's daughter, Mary, became a popularizer in her own right. She did a tour of Australia herself in 1913, which is actually part of the history of the Mount Stromlo telescope, because she was doing a tour to raise funds and awareness for the development of a solar telescope in Australia, which the project that would eventually become Mount Stromlo.

And interestingly, that's a story that's not told in the histories of Mount Stromlo. But through the 19th century, there was a strong tradition of women writers on popular science and on popular astronomy. Some of the most famous popularizers and historians of science-- of astronomy in the 19th century were women.

Great. That's always reassuring to hear that they were there in some way. Does anyone out there have a question? Just raise your hand, and the microphones can come to you. So Alice?

Thanks for that. Thanks for that talk. I just want to-- do any of the scripts survive anywhere, like in newspaper records or anything like that, like what they actually said in the theatricalness of it or otherwise?

So a number of the readings exist. There are at least for astronomical lantern readings in sort of complete or partial existence. These aren't strictly scripts. They're sort of more outline. Some are more detailed than others.

But one of the great things about 19th century newspapers is so many column inches to fill. And particularly in the early period and in some of those slower moving towns, you get very detailed descriptions of what lecturers said. So there are some lectures that you can get very close to verbatim transcripts for.

Richard Proctor's lectures were also published in Australia, which they were never published anywhere else in the world. So it's one of those things when you're sort of doing research, and all of a sudden someone from overseas goes, you've got what? You've got a complete transcript of Richard Proctor's lecture? Doesn't everyone? It's like, yeah. So yes, there are pretty good.

Martin, you mentioned public lectures, but also schools you mentioned as well, churches as well. In terms of schools in educational use, are we talking about visiting lecturers coming into a school or school teachers taking up this technology and using that in class, if that makes any sense?

Both. Both practises existed. On Pepper, when his tour was foundering on the rocks, one of the things that he did was to advertise himself for schools to go around and do school lectures. And there were other people that did that. It wasn't an enormously successful commercial venture, as people who have some experience of that might suggest that it's still not sort of. It can be hard making a lot of money doing that.

Primarily, this was schools that happen to have access to a magic lantern and a slide set for either because the school teacher had it or one of the local people owned it, and this was presented. Interestingly-- or I find it interesting-- one of the shifts of education towards the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century was to move science much more towards observational and description and hands-on experimentation. But a kind of perverse consequence of that is that astronomy tended to actually slip out of the curriculum at that time, because most astronomical observations, of course, are taken at night outside school hours.

So directed observation was-- astronomical observation is difficult for schools to do in their regular time. Of course, there are exceptions. And people, I'm sure, are thinking of the sundials and the various things that you can measure with that. But astronomy was much more a part of a school's curriculum when it was based in the earlier 19th century tradition of more kinds of theoretical or abstract or sort of ideal understandings, rather than the later trend towards science education.

Thank you very much, Martin, for such a stimulating talk. I really like the way that you took us to a time when the ideas were very different. But also, I enjoyed thinking about how some things-- some of the themes are still very relevant for the way that we think about astronomy and its presentation today. I just wondered, there was one word where you said there was something about a disappearing or dissolving-- dissolving slides. And I wondered whether that was some technique that was used in the magic lantern shows?

So dissolving views, one of the main, possibly even the main, special effect of the magic lantern was its capacity to do dissolving. So if you had one slide in one chamber and another slide in another chamber, you could cross fade between the two.

And this could give effects of going from if you had, say, the same scene illustrated between summer and winter or between day and night, you could give-- a skilled lanternist could give a beautiful transition that sort of showed night falling and the stars coming in a particular scene, sort of seamlessly. It was a dissolving view and absolutely wonderful. In fact, dissolving views was one of the terms that was used for magic lanterns for a period of time, because of the prevalence of that effect.

Have you got any comments on the use of astronomical images in stereoviews and stereo cards. Is that something that you've studied?

No, it's not something I've studied. It's-- yeah. My only comment is that it's very interesting, and I haven't studied it.

Sorry, I have another one. You mentioned a story about the Southern Cross.

Yep.

Do you have time to tell it now? Or is it really long?

How much time do I have?

I don't know. [INAUDIBLE].

So I mentioned that Ursa Major was referred to as the principal constellation of the north, which it was something that most migrants, or at least sort of all migrants who had some experience of looking at the stars at night from Europe would have seen and recognised and understood. And in fact, the experience of losing the stars, changing-- going to a new place that has different stars is a really powerful emotional one. I mean, this is so clear in the diaries, in the records.

And it's something that's-- I mean, obviously, it's not unique. It's something that's unique for migration from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere, as compared with, say, migration from Britain to North America, for example. There's this really strong emotional connection of place with stars.

And there's a big field of study in environmental history, environmental understanding. And one of the things that is central to that is that people understand environments as personal memories. And it's pretty clear that migrants-- 19th century European migrants to Australia understood the stars as an emotional memory of home, of people, and of places.

Now, it's entirely by coincidence that in the night sky the Southern Cross and Ursa Major lie almost exactly on the same meridian, which is to say that as one appears, the other disappears. Sort of, they go together. They're paired together.

Now, on top of this, the Southern Cross was already something that had been talked about a lot in European stories. Von Humboldt had drawn attention to it. And this was sort of widely publicised. So the Southern Cross was the constellation that certainly the decently educated migrants would know about. But it's also-- you can say that it's something that people are talking about on their shipboard voyages.

So you have this combination of this strong emotional transition at the same time as the Southern Cross appears. So in fact, a lot of that, the Southern Cross becomes this mnemonic for home. It's something in which for Europeans, for European migrants to Australia, memories of home reside in the Southern Cross, because it reminds them of Ursa Major and because Ursa Major reminds them of home.

And this is one of the absolute genesis of why the Southern Cross became so important to Australians, and particularly to Australians, because Australians maintain that col-- New Zealanders and Australians, and New Zealanders maintained that idea of a colonial connection to home sort of a bit more than some of the other migrants to the southern hemispheres.

Warwick Thornton has recently put out a new documentary on the meaning of the Southern Cross in 20th century Australia, called We Don't Need a Map. It's fantastic. You know it's sort of-- I urge you all to go and have a look at it. And of course, in the 20th century, there's been sort of enormous, and not entirely positive, political associations with the Southern Cross. But I think there's a really interesting 19th century backstory as to how it became so prominent in the first place for white Australians.

Thank you so much. That was really great answer. Thanks for asking that, Alice. Nice question. So before you go and have a look at those lantern slides, please join with me to think Martin for a fabulous talk and really great answers to the questions. Thank you so much.

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