Treasures of pre-cinema history 

Hand coloured slides

The technic of a printed outline on glass became known in the beginning of the 18th century. The process was initially invented for the pottery industry, before the the London businessman Philip Carpenter used it for magic lantern-slides. He offered as early as in 1822 lantern slides made in the new technique. Printed outlines on a round piece of glass, then hand coloured and finally framed in wood. The year 1822 marked the beginning of the mass production of lantern slides. The workshops in Germany did not adopt the new technic for the next three decades. The labour costs in the small family run workshops of Nuremberg was obviously still lower than the investment in expensive brass printing blocks. As late as in the 1850th, Nuremberg workshops implemented for the first time the new technique. With different results. Some workshops could not shift away in their figurative language from the hand painted children slides. The slides look shallow and with a fast hand lousy coloured. New founded businesses, among them Heinrich Denecke, Johann Neussner and probably Peter Konrad Kalb used the new technique and offered a new contemporary design on the slides they offered. Either in their motives, which they took over from the popular Munich illustrated broadsheets, Münchner Bilderbogen, or the carefully hand coloured outlines in bright colours, which still shine today. At the same time, due to the success of dissolving view-shows in the country, Nebelbilder-Vorstellungen, the demand for toy magic lanterns was rapidly growing and new techniques needed to come. Even when the hand colouring of outlines on glass was time saving compared to a hand painted slide, the process was still time consuming. Hand coloured slides had their heydays between 1855 till 1870, before transfer slides flooded the market.