Educational Technology of Yesteryear

 At VocabularySpellingCity headquarters, we collect vintage educational technology.  We like to remember that we are not the first generation that is “revolutionizing” education. 

The integration of technology into education has been a thrilling challenge and adventure for a hundred years now! Here’s some high points of the ongoing revolution, all items are from the VocabularySpelling Collection.

This library card catalog is our most recent addition. It was donated by a local elementary school who said it was otherwise destined for the trash.

Library Card Catalog

When I was in school in the 1960s and 70s, learning these card catalogs and the associated Dewey Decimal System was an essential research skill.

These record players were often used as part of an audio visual presentation with a film strip.

Film Strips

 

The records (later audio cassettes) would start by explaining that this was an audio track to be used with the film strip and that a person would need to move the film strip forward when they heard a beep. Then, they’d explain that the film strip should be on the title page at this time.

Finally, it would say that we are now going to play a beep and then you should move forward one frame.

It was a great treat to be the student who was allowed to control the film strip projector.

Another highlight  of old technology in the collection is the typewriter. For a century prior to the introduction of electric typewriters, and digital word processors, there were typewriters which coupled with carbon paper, were the defacto when of creating formal documents.

 

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who remembers that “cc” use to mean a carbon copy of the original was made.

As carbon paper has disappeared, the term seems to have been redefined to mean “courtesy copy.”

 

In the Retro Educational Technology Collection, there are lots more.

Click through to see more the vintage educational tech materials in the SpellingCity HQ office collection.

 

A Manual Mimeograph Machine

A vital part of the educational infrastructure was the technology in schools for printing worksheets, tests, and handouts of information. In the RetroEdTech.com collection, there are a pair of mimeograph machines, both manuals which meant they had to be cranked by hand.  When I was in K12 in the 60s and 70s, there were two types of copying machines in the schools. There was what we called mimeograph machines (pictured here) which produced up to 50 copies which are very memorable because of the blue ink which made the printed papers smell so nice. There were also stencil machines which produced copies with black ink and could make hundreds of copies from a single stencil

Here is a Standard Rocket 1961 mimeograph machine.  I’m still looking for the electric version of this that was dominant during the 1960s and 1970s.

I’d like to mention one other set of technologies which is rarely visible in schools any more, dictionaries and encyclopedia. I have in the collection two complete sets of World Bank Encyclopedias and an old style complete dictionary.

 

World Book Encyclopedia 1962

A Random House Dictionary of the English Language

Laterna Magica or The Magic Lantern

Magic Lantern

I was thrilled when, in a flea market, I ran across a beautiful old Magic Lantern. 

With just a bit of haggling and a surprising small amount of cash, I took it home. It turns out that eBay and flea markets are awash in these small size magic lanterns.  

A magic lantern predates movies and slide. Essentially, it was a pre-electric version of a slide projector. They were popular in the late 1800s and into the start of the 1900s.

Mine is about ten inches tall, comes with the original box and slides, and has the little metal oil lantern that provided the light source.

Magic Lantern circa 1905

It appears to be a GBN toy magic lantern, similar to one that I found on the UK National Media Museum which cites a 1905 date.  But mine has metal legs and a different sort of chimney.  The toy ones are the ones for home use.    Wikipedia says:  The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen.^[1] Main light sources used during the time it was invented in the late 16th century were candles or oil lamps. These light sources were quite inefficient and produced weak projections.  

As I dug into this, I discovered online the Magic Lantern Society. They say; Introduced in the 1600's, the magic lantern was the earliest form of slide projector and has a long and fascinating history. The first magic lanterns were illuminated by candles, but as technology evolved they were lit by kerosene, limelight, carbon arc, and electric light.

I emailed them and quickly got this response:  The Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern does not cite GBN, but the companies making toy lanterns were mostly in Nuremburg, Germany. You are fortunate to have the box and slides that fit as well as the lantern. Is there an illuminant? Toy lanterns were very popular for children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You see them in movies such as Fanny and Alexander. Magic lanterns were once a premium for a childrens'  magazine in the early 20th century. They were used both to entertain but also to teach.

Larger lanterns were used in schools, churches, Secret Societies, and as the machine that brought Illustrated Lectures of travel, science, history and religion to the citizens of towns all across the country, We estimate there were over 100,000 magic lantern showmen, ie, people, mostly but not all men, who gave lectures and shows using the magic lantern. If you go on ebay you will see the wide range of magic lantern slides still in circulation.

If you are interested in the Magic Lantern and want to know more, the Magic Lantern Society has a quarterly research Journal that it publishes and a monthly enews letter of less scholarly news. We  have a bi-annual convention. If you are on the West Coast, it is a great chance to meet other collectors and to mine their knowledge of yourlantern and other interests.  We are an interesting group of people who collect lanterns, or slides or ephemera or whatever about the lantern and the culture around it. It was everywhere in the 19th and 20th centuries.  

This article was first published in 2012 and republished in 2025.

There is a Magic Lantern Society with get togethers and a website: http://www.magiclanternsociety.org/

UPDATE: In August of 2018, we finally tried lighting our magic lantern! And about a week after that, I noticed a Magic Lantern in the nursery of Mr. Banks' house (where Mary Poppins worked).