When lantern shows put people to sleep
Before smartphones and tablets, people had television sets; before television sets could be found in every American household, people flocked to the cinema and before that…well, cavemen simply stared at their own reflections in the water or their shadows on the cave walls. And at some point in between, people were mesmerized by the “magic lantern show,” a type of screen entertainment created before movie screens, that became quite popular in the early and middle 20th century.
As explained by the Boston Globe, the lantern show consisted of someone painting an image on a piece of glass then projecting it onto a big screen. You might think of it as a PowerPoint presentation, the only difference being that the lantern show was meant to get people to fall asleep (although, we have to admit some PowerPoint presentations today also have this ability). At one point, magic lantern shows were organized during secret societies events, with Masons reportedly using magic lanterns and putting to sleep around 6 million people monthly.
With the advent of the cinema, no one wanted to go to the theater and be put to sleep anymore, so magic lantern shows got less popular until they became extinct. Speaking of cinema, check out these 12 Unedited Behind-the-Scenes Photos from Your Favorite Eras.
You’ll want to gallop away with this last fact…..
5 thoughts on “8 Baffling Things You Won’t Believe People Did 100 Years Ago”
I’m 80 years old and I’ve NEVER heard of this old law. I was born in the St. Louis, MO area.
Did you know, Rita, that the mayor is defunding the police and St. Louis is beating Chicago in murder rate now?
When I was a little girl
When I was a little girl my mother made my costume, but that was before mothers worked outside the home. Mostly I went as a hobo or a clown.
I started smocking in High school. I remember saying “they” can’t make American’s stop smoking. How can they enforce it ? LOL
“The first orphanage in America was first opened in 1729 for white children”…
Let’s be fair here, in America then there were practically nothing BUT white children. This sounds like it was established as a racist institution. I doubt the Indians were going to put their war orphans in the enemy’s care anyhow.