Kodak Carousel S

How hosts shared their holiday snaps at a '70s party before the vol-au-vents and wife-swapping

- Delwyn Mallett

SEASON ONE OF Mad Men, the '60s-set Madison Avenue ad-land series, concludes with hero Don Draper pitching an advertising campaign for a new slide projector to Kodak execs who have named it 'The Wheel'. Draper performs an emotional presentation of slides from his disintegrating life and commences: 'This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the Wheel, it's called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around and back home again.' Moved almost to tears by the poignancy of the presentation, his audience sits absorbed. Needless to say, the agency wins the account and the Kodak Wheel gets a new name.

Shining a light through a hand-painted glass slide to project an image on a screen predated photography by hundreds of years, with Dutch physicist Christian Huygens commonly credited with inventing the 'magic lantern' in 1659. Huygens' device was candle-powered, so hardly blinding. Things got considerably brighter in the 1830s with the introduction of limelight as a light source, by directing a flame of oxygen and hydrogen onto a cylinder of calcium oxide. Projection improved immeasurably when these potentially incendiary devices were supplanted by the incandescent lightbulb.