Symbols of Tomorrow

QUESTION: Many years ago I purchased a snowglobe from the 1939 New York World’s Fair that contains a miniature Trylon and Perisphere. What’s unusual about this snowglobe is that the snow in it is black. Have you seen one like this?

ANSWER: I get almost as many questions about souvenir items from the 1939 New York World’s Fair as there were items sold or given away at the Fair. Well, not really, but pretty many.

This snowglobe, featuring the Trylon and Perisphere, is one of the rarer souvenirs from the Fair. Originally, the snow inside the snowglobe was blue and orange, the colors of the State of New York, but over time, they reacted to the water and turned black or brown.

The Trylon and Perisphere were two monumental modernistic structures designed by architects Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux that together were the Theme Center of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Harrison later went on to design the United Nations Headquarters.

After considering many different designs, the Fair Committee chose the Trylon and Perisphere to represent the Fair’s futuristic theme.

They chose the name "Perisphere," combining the Greek prefix peri-, meaning "all around", "about", or "enclosing" and the name "Trylon," coined from the phrase "triangular pylon." The simple structures could be seen from mid-town Manhattan as the Trylon was the tallest structure in Queens at the time.

Adjacent to it stood the Perisphere, a tremendous sphere 18 stories tall and 180 feet in diameter, connected to the 610-foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world's longest escalator. The Perisphere housed a diorama by Henry Dreyfuss called Democracity which, in keeping with the fair's theme "The World of Tomorrow," depicted a utopian city-of-the-future.

The exhibit took up a space more than two-times the size of Radio City Music Hall. After paying 25 cents, visitors viewed the exhibit from two rotating balconies, dubbed “magic carpets,” that encircled the model while a multi-image slide presentation appeared on the dome of the sphere. Every six minutes a recorded narration extolled the wonders of this utopian city, and the lights dimmed to mimic nighttime as phosphorescent paint made the buildings look like they were lit from the inside. The theme song “Rising Tide” by William Grant Still accompanied the narration.

After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot-long (290 m) spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere. The 18-foot-wide Helicline had a mirrored underside.  Since it was one of the highest locations at the fair, the Helicline became a popular spot to take in views of the fairgrounds.

It took 2,000 cubic yards of concrete and reinforced steel, more than 7,000 individual pieces, to create the Trylon and Perisphere. Their combined weight came to approximately 10,000 tons. In order to test the durability of the design, models were subjected to 70-mile an hour winds in a test tunnel.

Originally, the designers planned for the Perisphere to be covered in a smooth and seamless layer of concrete. However, due to the high cost of that material, they decided to use gypsum instead. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts to smooth it out, the gypsum created an uneven texture and had visible seams. Also, surrounding fountains damaged the fragile coating and their arches of water had to be lowered.

The design for the Perisphere called for eight relatively small hidden support pylons,  giving the illusion that the sphere was floating. Strategically placed fountains and mirrors covering the supports enhanced the effect. At first, the fountains didn’t provide enough coverage, but the Fair engineers increased their pressure and added additional ones to create the desired effect.

At night, projectors with custom designed batteries and the largest long-focus lenses ever commercially made projected moving images of clouds and other things onto the Perisphere from nearby buildings using specially designed glass-mounted slides. Since the amount of light needed to project the images would have burned through regular film, the exhibit designers enclosed the slides in glass.

The Fair Committee licensed the image of the Trylon and Perisphere for use on an estimated 25,000 different products, including this snowglobe. In 1939, licensing was a  new concept, but it still earned the Fair $1 million in the first season alone.

Every visitor took home some sort of souvenir, from small toys to three-legged folding cane/seats to wallets, bracelets, woman’s compacts, and thousands of pins—all with the image of the Trylon and Perisphere on them.

Learn more about 1939 New York World's Fair souvenirs by reading "Souvenirs from the 1939 New York World's Fair Highly Collectible" in #TheAntiquesAlmanac.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about  the Industrial Age n the 2020 Winter Edition, "The Wonders of the Industrial Age," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

The Magic of Light

QUESTION: Recently I watched a documentary on PBS called “Saving Brinton,” a part of the America Reframed series. It’s the story of a man in Iowa who ended up with one of the greatest collections of early films and projection entertainment equipment and accessories. It centers around William Franklin Brinton and his wife, Indiana, who traveled around the Midwest giving slide presentations and showing early movies, the earliest of which was from 1908. One of his pieces of equipment was a “magic lantern” projector. I had never heard of anything like it before and found it mesmerizing. What can you tell me about a magic lantern projector? How far back did they exist and who invented it?

ANSWER: Don’t feel bad. Most people probably haven’t heard of a magic lantern projector. It was the forerunner of slide projectors used until around the turn of the 21st century. But its history goes far back to the 17th century.

Historians credit Christiaan Huygens,a Dutch scientist, with the invention of the magic lantern in the 17th century. Candles illuminated this early form of slide projector but as technology evolved, a variety of sources from kerosene lamps to limelight and electricity were used. Magic lanterns work like a camera in reverse—they shine light out through a lens and project it onto a screen, with a static or moving slide or slides inside them, between the light and the lens.

The magic lantern, also known by its Latin name laterna magica, projected images painted, printed, or produced photographically on transparent glass plates. People commonly used these devices for entertainment purposes. By the 19th century, magic lanterns began to be used for educational purposes.

The magic lantern used a concave mirror in back of a light source to direct as much of the light as possible through a small rectangular sheet of glass—a "lantern slide"—on which was the image to be projected, and onward into a lens at the front of the apparatus. The user adjusted the lens to focus the plane of the slide at the distance of the projection screen, which often was simply a white wall, on which it formed an enlarged image of the slide on the screen.

Originally, artists hand painted the images on glass slides. They initially rendered  figures with black paint but soon used transparent colors. Sometimes they first did the painting on oiled paper. Usually they used black paint as a background to block superfluous light, so they could project figures without distracting borders or frames. Artists finished any slides with a layer of transparent lacquer, but later on they used cover glasses to protect the painted layer. Finally, they mounted the slides in wooden frames with a round or square opening for the picture.

After 1820 the manufacturing of hand colored printed slides began, often making use of decal transfers. Makers produced their slides on strips of glass with several pictures on them, then rimmed them with a strip of glued paper.

During the 1790s, Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten, a mathematician from Gotland, who historians believe met Christiaan Huygens and from him learned about the magic lantern. In 1670 Walgensten projected an image of Death at the court of King Frederick III of Denmark. This scared some courtiers, but the king dismissed their cowardice and requested to repeat the figure three times. The king died a few days later. After Walgensten died, his widow sold his lanterns to the Danish Royal collection, but they have not been preserved.[9] Walgensten is credited with coining the term "Laterna Magica", assuming he communicated this name to Claude Dechales who in 1674 published about the machine of the "erudite Dane" that he had seen in 1665 in Lyon.

According to legend, Athanasius Kircher secretly used the lantern at night to project the image of Death on windows of apostates to scare them back into church. He hid his magic lantern in a separate room so his audience would be more astonished by the sudden appearance of images.

The earliest reports and illustrations of lantern projections suggest that they were all intended to scare the audience. Pierre Petit called the apparatus lanterne de peur, or lantern of fear, in his 1664 letter to Huygens. Surviving lantern plates and descriptions from the next decades prove that people used these early projectors not just for horror shows, but for projecting all sorts of subjects.

In 1675 Wilhelm Leibniz saw an important role for the magic lantern in a plan for a kind of world exhibition with projections of attempts at flight, artistic meteors, optical effects, representations of the sky with the star and comets, and a model of the earth, fireworks, water fountains, and ships in rare forms; then rare plants and exotic animals.

By the 1730s the use of magic lanterns started to become more widespread when traveling showmen, conjurers, and storytellers added them to their repertoire. The traveling lanternists, called Savoyards because they supposedly came from the Savoy region in France, became a common sight in many European cities.

Thomas Walgensten was the first person to use the term Laterna Magica. He not only realized the technical and artistic possibilities of the magic lantern, but also its economic potential, traveling round Europe demonstrating and selling them.

In the early years of the 19th Century, showmen with lanterns traveled around the country giving shows wherever they stopped. These were known as 'Galantee' showmen, and they would give shows by projecting on walls or white sheets. The subjects probably related to Biblical, moral and current events, and the showman would create stories for the children watching.




The Galantee showmen gave way to the “Professors,” showmen who had access to more elaborate equipment and wonderful, but expensive, animated slides. The development of oxy-hydrogen limelight and arc light made it possible for these projectionists to create huge images and elaborate effects in front of large audiences. The peak of the magic lantern trade occurred in the 1870s and 1880s.

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