Lanterna Magica
The principle of
projection with a magic lantern is mentioned already in the 1650s, with technical developments in the next centuries. In the 19th century, itinerant showmen would travel the towns and villages across Europe. Because it used superimpositions, special effects, smoke tricks and the like, the system is also a precursor of animation and cinema.
In the 1950s, my primary school teacher used to reward us to a slide show, a very special treat; the old projector was very hot, the light not bright, the slides were cartoons like Tintin, or images and photos of the Congo.
During my school years, slides were used by teachers to illustrate lessons in geography, but also in art, mainly the great painting and architecture. Sets of slides could be borrowed from the Mediatheque, together with discs or cassettes and we could listen to the commentary whilst watching the show. A superb but simple audio-visual aid.
Pedagogy
In the early 70s, a teacher's training college in the UK made good use of a strange unit as an interactive teaching aid. It looked like a bulky portable TV set, but contained a tray of slides and a remote control.
One slide showed a question and you would choose an answer number on the remote; it would then go to your choice and show you your result.
A bit cumbersome maybe, but teachers could produce their own program and it was a good self-learning tool. Many of the instruments created with digital technology still use the same basic principle.
Lectures and training
The humble slides had their glory days from the 60s to the 80s, when many explorers gave lectures on their travels, illustrating their live commentary with fabulous slides on a cinema screen. The same format is still used these days by traveling lecturers like those at Nadfas.
Speakers and trainers used 35mm slides extensively because they delivered high definition, sharpness, clarity, accuracy of colour needed by professionals, and they were cheap to produce and easy to project on large screens.
Faces and places
During that golden age, slides consisted mainly of faces and places, and concrete objects. As texts and diagrams were difficult and expensive to produce, lecturers, speakers and trainers preferred to show us "real life", keeping texts, diagrams and the like for the flipchart, the blackboard and the overhead projector.
White on blue
This was not to last. Quickly, slides would hold only text and lost of it, mainly in the form of bullet lines in white on a blue background: this annoying design became the corporate norm in the 70s onwards and has sent a multitude of bored participants to sleep in darkened meeting rooms. The first trick "de rigueur" was to build up a bullet list, one line at a time, whilst fading the previous line: neat, tidy, useful, but used, abused and overused to death. I can still hear the snoring to this day.
Still worse was to come: when computers started to invade the audio-visual landscape, texts and only texts were everywhere, ad nauseam; after the slide shows, we were invited to the inevitable Powerpoint presentation, with laptops connected to a video/date projector, aka a "beamer".
By the end of the 90s, slides were relegated to the museum of audio-visual technology, never to be seen again.
