Jay Blades revisits three amazing inventions that have had a profound influence on the development of the film and video technology we take for granted today.

First, a magic lantern brought into the barn by Marie-Noelle. She can remember her grandmother using it to show her images when Marie-Noelle was a child, but the light source has gone, some of the slides don’t fit and the exterior is showing its age. Jay uses fascinating archive footage to show how the magic lantern was developed and used to produce some of the earliest sequences of moving images, using the same principle as modern day video.

The second repair is a mutuscope owned by David Powell from Hampshire. The machine is like a flip-book: it rotates a series of still pictures past a viewfinder at speed to give the illusion of motion (again very similar to the basic premise of modern day TV and film). Jay explain the role the mutuscope played in the development of the cinema and how it gave rise to some of the first silent movie stars.

Finally, a projector owned by Allan Barham is used to show how home projectors like this were one of the key stepping stones for today's film and video. Show less