Abstract
Projection was invented by nature – witness the eye with its lens that projects an image of the world on the retina. Projection in this book (usually) signifies an optical process in which a two-dimensional transparency is illuminated so that the light passing through it is focused by a refracting lens (dioptric lens, in the literature of the seventeenth century) to throw an image on a screen. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) noted that a beam of light, when it passed through a small opening no matter its shape, formed a circular image (Mannoni 2000, p. 4). This phenomenon is the basis for the camera obscura, which projects an image of the daylight world through a pinhole aperture into a dark room onto a white wall or screen, as described below and in the Chap. 7. In addition to a pinhole or a lens, projection with a mirror (catoptric projection) is possible and it may well be that projection technology was first attained in China more than 4600 years ago based on a truly uncommon phenomenon.
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Notes
- 1.
Projectionists use the word throw in two ways, as it was just used, as a synonym for the verb project and as a noun to signify the distance from the projector to the screen.
- 2.
As we shall see in chapter 71, the magic mirror was the inspiration for the work of English television inventors John Perry and W. E. Ayrton in 1879.
Bibliographies
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Lipton, L. (2021). Huygens and the Magic Lantern. In: The Cinema in Flux. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0951-4_1
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