The Audio Slideshow: How we got to this point…

Reading through our posts, I think we’ve said quite a lot about how the audio slideshow has found its niche in modern media and retains an important role. But that got me thinking – where does our fascination with narrated stills actually come from?

So I thought I’d enlighten you (and you’ll see why I use that word) with a brief history of the audio slide-iverse…

 

Amazingly, the slideshow is a concept that goes all the way back to the mid-17^th century. It’s highly debated who came up with the original idea, but the generally accepted theory is that a Dutch scientist called Christian Huygens was the first to really bring to light (sorry, more light puns) the idea with a ‘magic lantern’. This was a basic device that used a painted slide, backlit with a candle to project an image onto a wall. And ‘magic’ certainly was the apt title, as for the first 200 years of its history it was primarily used by conjurers to convince audiences that demons and ghosts were being made to ‘appear’ in front of their eyes.

It wasn’t until the invention of photography in the 19^th century that the slide show really took on a universal use though. With negatives now being put onto plates by two brothers called The Langenheims, the magic lantern could be adopted to show images of people or places for public consumption. Indeed, the brothers started to charge audiences to come and view slideshows, as they would narrate archaeological images and give educational lectures to supplement.

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Lantern slides remained popular even moving into the 20^th century, but with the invention of mass produced, bulb-driven slide projectors, the 1950s saw slideshows enter the home and become a part of social interaction. Families would gather to view holiday images or give social lectures, while schools began to use the slide as an educational tool, with companies beginning to produce audio tracks to accompany nature, public health and sexual education slideshows.

With the rise of video in the latter part of the century, the audio slideshow began to die out as a medium and it moved more into the niche market that it now largely inhabits. With forward steps in technology such as Flash, it has become easy to combine audio track and images, replacing the spoken narrative that accompanied the slideshow in much of its history.

So there you go. A 400-year potted history trip through the audio slideshow to today!

Hopefully that has given you a little insight into where our interest in narrated stills has come from and why we still respond to the medium today. All that remains is to see whether the audio slideshow has the longevity for another 400 years…