About Lantern Slides and the Brittingham Family Collection, continued

In 1955, Margaret Brittingham Reid and Thomas Brittingham, Jr. donated the Brittingham family home, fully furnished, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (it currently serves as the official residence of the UW System President). Thirteen years later, several wooden boxes containing lantern slides and film and glass plate negatives were discovered in the attic. The trustees of the Brittingham Fund agreed to donate the collection to UW-Madison. In 1969, UW-Madison President E. B. Fred determined there were 1847 slides in the collection and calculated their value at $2,820.50—the cost of producing that many glass plate slides ($1.50 per slide at that time) plus the value of the cases holding the slides¹⁶. Obviously, this unique collection's intrinsic social and historical value far surpasses that estimate. Today the collection contains 1,845 slides; two have been lost over the years. 1,620 of those images have been digitized for this online collection.

Lantern slides were a popular way to view and share photographs in the 1800s and early 1900s. Created from negatives, the slides are positive images enclosed between two plates of glass. They were positioned in front of a light source in handheld viewers or special projectors (whose predecessors were called "magic lanterns") that projected the image onto a wall or other surface.

Most of the slides in this collection were created from negatives taken by the family, usually one of the senior Brittinghams. Nearly all of these images are framed by a paper border, upon which one of the Brittinghams recorded the date, location, title, and, on occasion, the photographer.

A second group of slides in this collection was created from professional photographs that were most likely purchased by the Brittinghams during their travels abroad. Many of these commercial slides, especially those from Japan, have been hand-painted; the paint was applied directly to the black and white image. Although hand-painted images were common during this period, only two of the Brittingham's personal slides were painted.