By Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves
The so-called social winter season, which aligned with solar time (from October to April) rather than with the winter season, was a bustling period of cultural activities in the Netherlands during the first decades of the twentieth century. As the local newspaper Haarlem’s Dagblad reminded its readers at the start of the season of 1925/26:
"With the end of daylight saving time, it seems to us as if the door behind the summer is shut with a bang; suddenly, the long evenings begin, seemingly without twilight, and we think again of books and courses, meetings and lectures, concerts, and performances. There are plenty of options, but a choice must be made."
Lantern lectures were among the activities organized by the many associations and societies established in Haarlem, an average-sized city situated less than 20 kilometers west of Amsterdam and home to about 75 000 people at this time. To put it in today’s terms, a public lantern lecture could be described as a combination between a café scientifique, an occasion to engage with science and technology outside the traditional university lecture hall, with the media and entertainment dimension of the Ted Talk.
This instructive leisure occasion featured a public lecturer, or speaker, and the projection of photographic lantern slides, a media technology that would eventually be replaced by slide projectors and 35mm diapositives (and later on by the PowerPoint presentations). Most lantern lectures were organized by a variety of associations, from general philanthropic associations to associations focused on science, arts and culture, or trade unions and professional organizations. Other organizers were the so-called popular universities, which in the Netherlands were in fact independent associations with no institutional connection to universities. They specialized in organizing courses taking place after working hours, to wider and diversified audiences, for a small attendance fee. These associations were responsible for a significant portion of the season’s lectures; by 1925/26, Haarlem was home to not only one but two popular universities.
As part of the project “Projecting Knowledge—The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880–1940”, we gathered information from advertisements and reports published in local newspapers and printed annual programs to outline the type of stakeholders involved, as well as to assemble the scientific, cultural, or even practical matters discussed during the season. We then visualized this information as a calendar, rather than as a simple Excel table for instance, to gain further insights into this phenomenon.
First of all, the calendrical visualization helps one to understand the programming pattern throughout the season. This pattern is shaped to a large extent by the course calendar of the popular universities, which divided their annual plan into two periods. Occasionally, one course “before Christmas” could have a follow-up option within the “after Christmas” course offer, but most courses were a one-off series of eight to ten weekly lectures. The busiest months were November and February because these were the months in which courses were in full swing, after uneven starting dates in October and January. In December, there was a Christmas break.
Secondly, the week-by-week calendar visualization also reveals another important pattern: most lectures were held during the week, with a general preference for the beginning of the week; some associations even had a fixed day for lantern lectures (e. g. Monday). Although further research is necessary to test this hypothesis, it is possible that this was a pragmatic choice determined by available space and by social convention. Since lantern lectures were held in concert halls, theaters, cinemas, and other venues, it is possible that the lectures had to be accommodated with other activities programmed for the same spaces. It is interesting that this seems to be an issue that the organization of the current café scientifique also takes into consideration, preferring the quieter evenings of Mondays and Tuesdays. This is a pattern that is particularly difficult to see without the calendar view.
Finally, this calendar presents a clear and compelling case for the lantern lecture as a pervasive type of event in the Netherlands: it shows that lantern lectures were once an almost daily feature of the social winter season. This prevalence certainly warrants further study of this largely neglected historical performance practice. But while performative historical phenomena are challenging research objects due to their ephemeral nature, the growing number of materials made available by digitization, notably the treasure trove of historical newspapers, can be a wonderful resource for science communication research.
To know more about the project, read also the author’s article On the trail of 19th century science performers: the case of L. K. Maju.
The research program “Projecting Knowledge—The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880–1940” is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
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Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves is a history researcher with a background in visual arts, design, and cinema. She is currently in the final stages of her PhD at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University, within the research project ‘Projecting Knowledge – The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880-1940,’ funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Her research, “Science for the People”, is the first large-scale survey of the public lantern lecture as a cultural phenomenon of the Dutch social life between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War.