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Monday 4 October 2021

Silent Movie Glass Lantern Typewriter Slides

I've had this set of six silent movie glass lantern typewriter slides for probably 12 years or more, and have never bothered to look at them very closely until today. They've been sitting gathering dust with my now small typewriter collection. I don't know an awful lot about this type of cinema technology, but I gather the slides could be more than 120 years old. The six show a man using a very early typewriter. He gets progressively frustrated until he explodes in anger.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia tells me a cinema slide consists of an image supported on a glass substrate or base (82mm or 3½ inches square), with a cover glass to protect the surface of the image. The two pieces of glass are held together with gummed paper or cloth tape. To print the image on to the slide, two methods were commonly employed - contact and optical. Contact printing used a frame to hold the emulsions of the negative and slide together in close contact. A light is shone through the negative exposing the emulsion of the slide. The slide is then processed using photographic developer, stop bath and fixer and then washed and dried. Once dry, the slide is mounted with the optional aperture mask and cover glass and then bound together with gummed tape. The optical printing method exposes the image by projecting the negative on to a slide coated with emulsion. The processing procedure is the same as that used in contact printing.







3 comments:

Ted said...

Fascinating! (:

Bill M said...

Wonderful!

Norman R. Ball said...

Great images and a very clear technical explanation. Loved it. Many thanks.