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About Lantern Slides and Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Lantern Slide Lecture Sets

After lantern slides were introduced in the mid-19th century, lantern slide shows quickly became a popular form of entertainment, but their most enduring use proved to be in illustrating educational lectures. Brooklyn Botanic Garden was among those museums and academic institutions that produced illustrated lectures for loan. The Garden's first director, Charles Stuart Gager, expressed an early educational goal in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record of 1912:

The contemplated work of popular lectures and instruction will necessitate the preparation of a large collection of lantern slides for purposes of illustration. During the year 310 slides have been made, practically all of which are from negatives owned by the Garden, so that the collection is unique. One hundred twenty-five (125) of these are hand-colored slides, all but five being of native wild plants, including trees, colored by Miss E.M. Kittredge, and made from negatives taken by her especially for the Garden. Miss Kittredge combines with an unusual artistic ability, an accurate knowledge of the local flora. With each negative, she has submitted for our confirmation the specimen from which the negative was made, and also a colored print. In this way we are sure not only that the determination of the species is correct, but also that the coloration is accurate. Thus the collection of slides possesses, not only rare beauty, but scientific accuracy.¹

Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubescens

Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubescens Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubescens lantern slide

Caltha palustris

Caltha palustris var. palustris Caltha palustris lantern slide

Veratrum virginicum

Veratrum virginicum Veratrum virginicum lantern slide

BBG's lantern slide sets include both unique, hand-tinted slides by Kittredge and other photographers and commercially produced lantern slides. Titles include: "Fall Wild Flowers," "Spring Wild Flowers," "Summer Wild Flowers," "Conservation of Native Plants," "Conservation of the Soil," "Ferns and Fern Allies," and "Forestry." A prepared lecture accompanied each set and was meant to be read as the lantern slides were projected in a lecture hall or auditorium. Thus, in a pre-electronic age, talks written by BBG experts could reach beyond the Garden to a wide audience in schools, garden clubs, and other groups. (See lecture notes below.)

The lantern slides are 3.25" × 4" and consist of two pieces of glass. One has a transparent positive image—hand-colored, in the case of the Kittredge slides. A second piece of glass is placed over the image to protect it, and the two panes are sealed on all edges with tape. All of this collection's slides were given unique numbers that appear on the slides' labels with other identifying information. The introduction of 2" × 2" slides and the invention of the Kodachrome three-color process in the 1950s eventually made lantern slides obsolete.²

Lantern slide set

Lantern slide set

Lantern Slide Lectures

NOTE: These lectures are artifacts and do not necessarily reflect current scientific consensus.

  1. Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1, no. 2 (1912): 43.
  2. "Lantern Slides: History and Manufacture," The Library of Congress, American Memory web site