Welcome And The Big Question

Kelly 0:14

Hello and welcome to the Lowdown on the Plus Up, a podcast where we look at everyone's favorite theme park attractions, lands, textures, and novelties. We talk in, over, about, and through our week's topic, and then, with literally no concern for practicality, safety, or economic viability, we come up with ways to make them better. My name is Kelly McCubbin, columnist for the theme park website Boardwalk Times, and with me as always is Peter Overstreet, University Professor of Animation and Film History in Northern California.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Hey Pete. Yeah. What are we talking about today?

Pete 0:56

Well, today we're going to be going down a cul-de-sac of weird old history in order to explore some origins of how people think about theme park amusements. Okay. Like it's it's all well and good to talk about various imagineers and talking about all these new technical innovations that people came up with. But ultimately, a lot of these ideas are very, very old and some of the oldest tricks. I mean, we've talked about stuff like Pepper's Ghost, which is utilized in the Haunted Mansion, which was invented in the 1860s. Oh, and and it's it's uh precursor, the Dirk's Phantasmagoria. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. There are so many different different things that come, but I want to talk about even the oldest notion of entering into a fantastical world through artificial means. Okay. And some of the people who helped innovate this. And there's gonna be some pretty fun stuff here. So there's is there opium involved? There might be. I mean, we are gonna be in the Swiss Alps. I mean, they were dealing a lot with the East here. Actually, there is gonna be some opium involved. Excellent. Dealing with some of the trade. All right. Okay, so opium and tea. It's all yeah, we're gonna talk about some of the old the old origins. This is kind of like a peat deep dive. Okay. The oldest origins of some of the theme park attractions and effects that we all know and love. Yeah. Probably

Ancient Temple Machines And Automata

Pete 2:20

the oldest one that I want to talk about. I mean, we could we could go into some of the earliest forms of hydraulics and animatronics as generated by Heroon of Alexandria.

Kelly 2:31

Yeah, like automaton.

Pete 2:33

Well, yeah, very early stuff. I mean, Haron of Alexandria basically established uh a couple of temples, including the temple of Apollo, in which you would have to fill a cistern of water. You like the priest there, he would say, I want an audience with the god, and they would say, Okay, take this clay pot, take it all the way down that hill, fill with the water of Poseidon, bring it all the way back up and make an offering in this well. The well was completely flat, I mean up to the brim with water. Yeah. It was flush with water. So you go down, fill with water, you're sweating, and basically the monks are watching you laughing.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Sucker.

Pete 3:11

Yeah. And you get up to the top of the hill and then you pour the water into the vessel, the vessel never overflows. But what it is doing is it's pushing water down in through a little valve in the bottom of this urn. Yeah. And it's pushing water that operates a series of levers and gears underneath the temple that would open up the doors of the temple. Oh. Revealing a statue of the god. Right. And they would usually have somebody with a big brass horn going, Who are you? I am the voice of Zeus.

Kelly 3:42

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Pete 3:45

Oh, well, speaking of that, some people were really clever, like here in Alexandria.

The Sock Puppet Snake Religion

Pete 3:51

Some people were not so clever. Like one guy who established an entire religion around a sock puppet. Uh-huh. And there was a there was, I forget his name, but he was. Tell me it was Lamb Chop. Tell me it was Lamb Chop. The puppetry was similar. So what happened was this guy was trying to find a way. He was in debt. Yeah. He was a philosophy philosopher. He was in debt up to his eyeballs in debt with some locals, and they were like ready to kick his butt. Yeah. And he was at the shores of some lake, and he found some snake eggs, and he made snakes appear out of his hand, miraculously. Okay. And he said, I have cultivated a god. So I've created this god. And Glycon speaks to me. So it's the great god Glycon.

Kelly 4:39

Okay.

Pete 4:39

And Glycon is a god. Sounds like I need insulin for that god. Kind of. Yeah. Kind of, because he actually had like a flowing mane of hair on top of his head. Wow. And you would go into the temple, and you the curtains would open, and there would be a soothsayer with this large snake wrapped around him.

Kelly 4:59

Yeah.

Pete 4:59

And then the snake's head, though, would talk to you. And it was a puppet. And it was it was a ventriloquist dummy. Basically, the guy had the real snake's head tucked underneath his arm. Yeah. And then he was manipulating this fake head. Hi Hole, I'm Glycon. It's Kermit the Glycon. Yeah. It's like, and there was a whole religion. It lasted for sev the cult of Glycon lasted for 70 years until it was finally revealed to be a fraud.

Kelly 5:28

So was this one of those things where like he had like a fake arm and so that his arm could be used to manipulate. Okay.

Pete 5:34

Yeah, it's because it looked like it was tucked into his robe. And then he had just had this big pet snake, this huge constrictor or whatever, hanging out with him. So people thought they were talking to this real godlike snake, and he was like the oracle of Glycon. So this notion of having a puppet interacting with the public for religious purposes of this particular case, but for entertainment is very, very old. That's neat. Yeah. And and people want to be fooled. They do. They do. We want to be fooled. We want to be amazed by things. Yes.

Kelly 6:06

Yeah.

Pete 6:06

Yeah. We have a need for this. We jump into our time machine and we jet forward a couple thousand years.

Ra-Ree Peep Shows And Mini Worlds

Pete 6:12

We wind up in this around the Swiss Alps. Actually, not just all the Alps, all the European Alps, because this is a mix between Swiss, Italian, and French craftspeople. They all just kind of pooped into being about the same time. Yeah. And these were guys that would wander around countryside with these boxes strapped to their backs. Okay. Some of them were true, like filthy Montebanks. Others who were a little bit more sophisticated actually had very elaborate costumes and other apparatus to make them look a lot more impressive. And some were snake oil salesmen to make an extra buck. Yeah. But their main attraction is they would call out one word and that's all they had to say, and people would come running to see what they had, which was Ra-Ree. Okay. Ra ri, rah ri. They would say this over and over again.

Kelly 7:00

Yeah.

Pete 7:01

And it means a rare show. Ra ri. Rare show. All right, all right. And basically they would set this box down. Sometimes it's just a single little box with a hole on the side. Some of these, some of these rae boxes uh have six holes cut into it that multiple people could watch simultaneously and are so elaborate that one actually had a music box that was powered by a squirrel in a cage. And the squirrel in the cage would run around in this cage like a cylinder and it would power the music box on the on the cage on the outside. We have the little sprues. That's great. Yeah. We don't use the term rahemen for them now. We call them peep show men. These are the peep shows. Okay. Peep shows start off from the classic notion of cabinets of curiosity.

Kelly 7:46

Yeah.

Pete 7:47

In which people would collect strange objects, whether it be like look at this exotic shell. Yeah. Some obje art in these collections were fakes, like hairy salmon. Where they would take a fish. You're making that up. No, there were there were there were taxidermied creatures. We're talking stuff like jackalopes, where they would they would mix up these taxidermists, would very clever and very skillful, but they would put Minx you know fur on a fish. Like the Chip a Lope. The Chipalope we talked about in our gravity show. The Fiji Mermaid is another later example of this. But a lot of these cabinets of curiosity were mainly just natural oddities, like look, here's a whale, a whale bone, or here's a tooth, or here's you know, that sort of thing.

Kelly 8:27

So the the this is like an antecedent to Raleigh Crump's Museum of the Weird that becomes the haunted mansion later, right? Like pretty much. Like little little things in boxes that are just weird.

Pete 8:37

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And in the case of the Ra Ree show, sometimes it was just look at this object, and he would pull it out and put another one in. And you didn't get to see the object unless you looked into the box to look at it.

Kelly 8:48

Yeah. Yeah.

Pete 8:49

Others got more elaborate where they would do things like make like a paper theater and they would narrate a paper theater puppet show by moving characters in and out using strings on the side of the box. Ooh, neat. And they would narrate it and move the characters around. Some were even so elaborate that they would actually, especially later, they would use very early forms of animation like finicinetoscopes and zootropes embedded inside the boxes. Yeah. So look, here's this fairy, she's got a dance for you, and brrrrr it would spin around. Yeah. You look through the top hole, she would dance, and then you see the rest of the story through the other holes.

Kelly 9:22

Yeah.

Pete 9:23

And why I talk about them is this is the notion of building up a miniature world to be entertained by. Yeah. To look through. And today we use VR helmets. Right, yeah, yeah. But it's essentially the same thing. Yeah. It is also akin to Walt Disney's love of miniatures like Storybook Land. Right. That's another great example. And some might actually argue the notion of an amusement park ride are just blown up versions of Rae shows.

Kelly 9:53

Hmm. Okay.

Pete 9:54

Now there's other there's other elements that go into that, but this is kind of the start of this. This is this starts around the earl the late 16th century.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Right.

Pete 10:02

There's still a couple of Rae performers today. There's one guy in Great Britain whose name is Tony Littington. He's a buddy of mine. His name sounds familiar. And Tony does Ra Rhee shows. Okay. And his are more of a he's actually a very fascinating guy. He has a doctorate in ancient entertainments. He loves talking about stuff like the Ra Ree shows, yeah. Sort of thing. Yeah. Uh and there's a fellow in China who has a very elaborate Ra-Ree box that's made of brass and it has mirrors and magnifiers in it. And sometimes it's just a tr a bunch of pictures, like just with a reel-to-reel picture thing. Like and it's a storybook. And then this happened, and then he reels it, and then there's another picture in front of the hole. Later on, Pepper's Ghosts, miniature Peppers Ghosts would be used, and it really became elaborate. Yeah. In

Salzburg’s Clockwork City Spectacle

Pete 10:48

Salzburg, however, the Ra Ri show took an epic proportion in an elaborate palace that was owned by a cardinal whose name was Joachov von Dietrichstein. And that name is a mouthful.

Kelly 11:05

I know that that's like a German in a Mel Brooks movie.

Pete 11:08

Yeah, it is, but it's a real dude. The palace that he had built for himself had these elaborate gardens that were all water powered by water wheels. Neat. And there's little hidden caves and things that you could walk in and out of these beautiful gardens with fountains. And some of the fountain, one of my favorite fountains is has Perseus rescuing Cassiopeia from the kraken. Yeah. It's like this little naked lady attached, and she's wiggling, going, Save me, save me. And this kraken comes out of the water, made of metal, going up and down. And it's all powered by water wheels. Yeah. But that's not the most elaborate one. Okay. The most elaborate one is this massive theater that looks like a city. Yeah. And it's about 12 feet tall, 12 foot wide, and there's the and it's separated by a little moat. So you'd be out in the garden, you know, fanning yourself, having a great time. And then they would open up these doors and they'd start up, and it has a music, a wind and leather, wood and leather music box in it, playing music. And while it's doing it, there's about 300 little figures all populating the city, doing various things at different strata of class and structure. So you have people slaughtering a cow for beef, you have people storing a sheep, you have tailors sewing, and they're all made of heart hand-carved wood. Yeah. And they're all moving these basic movements. Right. And they're all powered by this giant gearbox underneath that turns these wheels and moves these little levers to make them move. Yeah. And way up at the top, you actually have a model of Jakob von Dietrichstein fanning himself and looking down at this city of working perfectly with perfect order. That's so great. Pretty amazing stuff. And these are automatons. So this is, and but when you look at this, when you actually get to see it, they do operate it now and again. Yeah. You could find it on YouTube actually. There's a great video. The BBC did a great documentary about automatons, in which this guy shows all these great close-up details within the machine. Yeah. The reason that this is so important to um theme parks, when you watch it, you suddenly realize you're looking at the beginnings of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Kelly 13:10

Yeah.

Pete 13:11

You immediately, you immediately flash back to the model in the Ten Sennial video of walking Julie Reim through the model. Yeah. They're about the same size of the little figures. So you see the little village that with the flames and everything in the model that they built at Imagineering, and you go, that's the same thing. It's the Salzburg City automaton. Wow. It's pretty amazing. These are the sort of entertainments that were really quick to digest, really simple. They weren't meant to be cocktail party attractions like Pirates, where you you take your time by it. You're floating and you're forced to go by it. Yeah. But you're taking your time through it. You're not rushed through it. Yeah. Uh but there are other entertainments out there that are starting to blossom. We talked

Belzoni Builds An Egyptian Experience

Pete 13:52

about Giovanni Belzoni. Remind me. Okay. Giovanni Belzoni was an engineer. He was from Padua, Italy. He was your height. Oh wow. Almost he was 6'11. And he was twice your width. Uh-huh. Because he was incredibly muscle bound. Okay. Because of his Italian origins, he went to England to seek his fortune as an engineer. Yeah. Focused mainly on hydraulics. And the problem is that racism. Yeah. So he was relegated to becoming a strong man. He was known as the Padouan Samson. And he would lift his entire family and set of friends up on metal bars and lift them all just with his arms. Wow. So there's fabulous paintings of him doing this. Yeah. Well, later on in life, like he got tired of that and he moved to the one place where he thought that people might actually appreciate him, which is Egypt. Because this is during the Napoleon's invasion and of Savants. Yeah. Napoleon Bonaparte had taken over Egypt and was starting to ransack all of the great tombs. Yeah. And shot the nose off of the Sphinx. Yeah, shot the nose off of the Sphinx and things like that. Belzoni went there seeking his fortune, and because of the the England's rivalry with France, the English wanted to make embarrass Napoleon as much as possible by getting their own artifacts. So this one guy named Henry Salt actually hired Belzoni to acquire the seven-ton granite head of Ramses. Yeah. The head of Memnon. Colossal head of Memnon.

Kelly 15:25

Yes, we talked about this in the Disneyland Hotel episode.

Pete 15:28

Yes, we did. That's right. And he had a whole series of adventures of discovering tombs. He discovered more tombs than any other archaeologist in Egypt. Wow. And also when he came back, he established the first theme park.

Kelly 15:43

Hmm. Okay.

Pete 15:45

In a he bought a small venue in Piccadilly Circus in London. Uh-huh. He made it look like a mastaba with all of these Egyptian lotus columns and statues of Egyptian gods all over it. Yeah. And the it was the Egyptian hall. Mm-hmm. And what's interesting about the Egyptian Hall is so many theme park effects were developed here. This is the first time where you are transported to a different world in a small dark space. Yeah. Because he built he recreated the tombs of Seti I inside the halls. Wow. And you'd walk through and there'd be real artifacts, the the friezes and the statues and the artifacts, and there'd be glass cases with scorpions and snakes and stuff in them, and natives playing native music. And then the end result would be going into the small theater in the back and he would unwrap a mummy for you. Oh wow. Which was the f he was the first person to do a mummy unwrapping.

Kelly 16:40

Yeah, and and I know later that becomes kind of this weird fashionable party thing, like doing mummy unwrappings.

Pete 16:47

Sadly, yes. Unfortunately, yes. So but he had a rival entertainer, which was a guy named Wolfgang von Kempelen.

The Turk Chess Trick Explained

Pete 16:56

Okay. Wolfgang von Kempelen had invented an illusion which was of this Turkish chess player. Mm-hmm. That supposedly beat Napoleon Bonaparte, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe in chess. But it was a it was an illusion? Yes, von Kempelen would open up the bottom box and he would take a candle, and there were doors in the front and the back, and he would light a candle from the back. Yeah. And he'd say, look at all these gears, see, it's just a machine. And he closed the door and he'd open up the back of the figure of this Turkish man, full-size Turkish man, and there's a chess board on this big box that he's sitting in front behind. And on the top of the box are all the chess pieces and a chessboard. Yeah. Inlaid with what looked like gunmetal, black, metal squares for blacks, and alabaster for white. Okay. Okay, keep that in mind. Yeah. So then he'd close up the box, wind up the figure, and he would tell some audience volunteer you make the first move. Mm-hmm. And then move the chess piece. And then the machine would lift up its head, look around. And he had his hand, one hand was off to the side. Yeah. And if you took too long to make a move, it would start tapping. Like getting bored. Yeah, it would get impatient with you. And it would reach over, grab a chess piece, and move it, and it was wicked deadly at playing chess. Okay. Edgar Allan Poe, uh famous magician by the name of Jean-Eugine Robert Houdin, they were all obsessed with this machine. Yeah. Poe actually came up with the closest solution to what it was. Yeah. The solution is that the entire box is a vanishing cabinet where it hides an individual neatly behind all of the gears. So when the doors are open, you think you're seeing through the box, but the person is quite comfortably secreted inside of it. Yeah. And as soon as those front doors are open, he unfolds everything and he's got a little chessboard in front of him below, so he can actually operate the chessboard. And remember, alabaster as stone, when it's thin enough, is translucent. Oh. So the light on top would, and it was a one-way mirror because mercury being used for mirrors was employed at this time. So it's these there's one-way mirrors and alabaster squares. So he could see the chess pieces from below. Wow. And he would operate this puppet. But it was so elaborate, there was another famous person who played against it. Yeah. And that was Ada Lovelace. And she was so inspired by that. That was one of her inspirations.

Kelly 19:30

The inventor of modern computing. Well, modern computing. The inventor of computing.

Pete 19:34

Computer language. Yeah, computer language. She wrote the first computer language. Yeah. That was that was Wolf Eingang. So people were going either to see that or they're going to go see Bill Zoni, but there was a third competitor. The

Phantasmagoria Ghosts And Mist Projections

Pete 19:46

competitor in question is a guy named Etienne Gaspar Robertson. Okay. Or Robert. Yeah. He was a Belgian inventor who was mainly focused on optics. Uh-huh. And you would pay him to meet you for his show, and he would meet you at the crossroads in the middle of the night with a lit candelabra and lead you through brambles and gravestones into what essentially looked like a chapel. It was in a disused crypt. Yeah. And he had old church pews all set up, and there were human bones all over the place. This is England and France at the time. And he would do some sort of falderall. This is about in the 1790s.

Kelly 20:29

Okay.

Pete 20:30

Okay. And all of a sudden ghosts and demons would appear and rush at you out of the dark. Uh-huh. Sometimes right in front of him. So he'd be standing there and the ghost would rush through out of him towards you. And it made people scream and shout. The show was called Phantasmagoria. Yeah. And this is early ghost projection effects that are still used even now, like at the Haunted Mansion. Yeah. Now Belzoni, bless him, thought, what a great idea. Belzoni, remember, was into hydraulics. Yeah. And he used to do, before he went to Egypt, he was developing different types of nozzles for spraying in order to make mists and tinkling little fountain nozzles and so forth. He had what he called the color dancing fountains, in which he would shine light through the water and the hoses would rotate from water pressure and make these beautiful rotating fans. Does this sound familiar to you? Certainly does. Like Disneyland Hotel water extravaganza? It absolutely does. And what was great is he took an idea from Robertson and said, What if I projected ghosts of Egypt on mist? Oh wow. And so he would unwrap the ghost, and then his magic lantern would project ancient Egyptian gods who'd been angered by the mummy unwrapping, but it was being projected on mist. Yeah in fans. So Disney's world of color knows everything. To Giovanni Belzoni.

Kelly 22:01

Yeah, fantasmic as well.

Boardwalk Times Break

Kelly 22:14

Belowdown on the Plus Up is a Boardwalk Times podcast. At Boardwalk Times.net, you'll find some of the most well-considered and insightful writing about the Walt Disney Company, Disney history, and the universe of theme parks available anywhere. Come join us at BoardwalkTimes.net.

Hallucinogens And Static Shock Theater

Pete 22:51

His name was Johann Georg Schrepfer. And he was from Leipzig in Germany. He owned a coffee house in Leipzig. In his show, you would go and you'd pay your ticket, and this kind of creepy, gothy woman would lead you with a candlebra up three flights of stairs to the third floor of the coffeehouse building. One at a time. And then she would offer you a drink when you were up in this black attic, and it was full of candle obras made of human bone, and there were occult symbols painted on the black floor. Yeah. And there was this horrible smell of incense and rot in there. And so you're sitting, so we're talking 1790s with the colorful Amadeus wigs and stuff hanging out, right? And so this guy, these guys would, and she would make you take off your shoes because you were on hallowed ground. Uh-huh. Unholy ground, you said. And there were all these Catholic and Kabbalistic symbols everywhere. Yeah. One at a time you'd be waiting there, and she'd give you a drink. Uh-huh. And while you're sitting there sipping your drink, what you don't realize, I should tell you right off the bat, is that these drinks are heavily laden with hallucinogens.

Kelly 24:00

Yeah, I was gonna say, is this where the opium comes in? Yes.

Pete 24:04

Yes. And so you're upstairs, balls tripping, and waiting for everybody to come in, and then you would all join hands. Johann Schreffer would do this occult ceremony, and flames would pop out of the floor, and all this other kind of stuff would happen, light effects. Yeah. It was very, very and go sounds would come from the dark, voices from the dark, and that kind of stuff. But my favorite thing is that your hands would start to spark between each other's hands. Oh, do they have it like a Tesla coil or something? I didn't tell you what was on the second floor. Uh-huh. A giant Vimhurst generator. Wait, what is a Vimhurst generator? Wimhurst generator is it's a static electricity generator with the two wheels that go counter counterclockwise to each other. Okay, all right. Only imagine a giant one with five discs, each disc four feet in diameter, and two guys cranking it, and the wires, these copper wires, are lined all the way on the roof of the second floor, which is the floor of the third, what you are standing on. So they are basically low-grade electrocuting you while you're on hallucinogens and being flashed ghostly images with a magic lantern.

Kelly 25:14

Getting you high and turning you into a bumper car. Pretty much.

Pete 25:18

And guess what? What? That is exactly those designs are utilized to make bumper cars work. Unfortunately, Schrepfer actually claimed to really be in contact with the occult. Oh, yeah. So he was put on trial for fraud. Yeah, I was gonna say you gotta be careful about that. Yeah. Unfortunately, in the end, after his trial, he was announced to be a fraud and he had to repay all these people. Yeah. He immediately left the trial and shot himself in the street. Oh, wow. And that was the end of Von Schrepfer there.

Mirrors And The Blue Room Illusion

Pete 25:50

Yeah. So you've got all this phantasmagoria, but the notion of optical illusions is really catching on. Yeah. And a lot of it has to do and centered around the Egyptian Hall, because the Egyptian Hall is also where the Pepper's ghost was invented. Yeah. For Charles Dickens. Yeah, yeah. And also the Blue Room illusion, the Sphinx illusion, which is a very, very famous illusion with mirrors that has been utilized to this very day. Uh-huh. They all came from the Egyptian Hall. Because Belzoni passed away around 1825. Yeah. Because he sold everything and he went off on one great adventure. Yeah. And he died of dysentery on this adventure in Timbuktu. Uh-huh. No joke. That's where he died, Timbuktu. And so he sold it off to a magician, Maskaline. Maskaline was one of England's prominent magicians of the time. Yeah. And he ran the Egyptian hall. He got rid of all the Egyptian stuff in the lobby, all of the artifacts, donated to the Egyptian museum. Mrs. Belzoni took the rest, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And he turned it into a legitimate magic theater, and it remained so until like the 1920s. Wow. So it had been around for a long. I think it's a pharmacy now. But I mean, in France, by the time Masculine takes over, in France, there are there are people who are working. I should mention the Blue Room. Because the Blue Room illusion is like a Pepper's Ghost effect. Yeah. Except you can make ghosts appear and vanish and interact physically with the actors and props on the stage by walking away. So it fools you. Like at first you go, oh, it's Pepper's Ghost. And then it's like, no, he's walking right towards me. Yeah. Oh, he's real. How do they do that? He literally vanishes right in front of your eyes. Yeah. There's a great video, it was done in the 90s that shows this illusion. Look it up on YouTube. It's really worth watching. And keep in mind, when you're watching it, there's no blue screen, there's no optical effects that are done post post, there's no modern effects. It's done in camera. Wow. And now why this is important has to do with another automaton builder, John Joseph Merlin. Okay. Yeah, yeah. John Joseph Merlin was a Belgian inventor. Yeah. He also invented roller skates. But he didn't invent brakes. I think we've talked about him. We did. We did talk about him before. He busted a huge mirror at Buckingham Palace one time because he was roller skating around, playing a fiddle and serving drinks dressed as a barmaid at a party. Anyway, his fabulous silver swan automaton is well worth checking out. So look up Merlin's Silver Swan on YouTube. Okay. It will blow your mind. It's made of silver and glass. It's incredible. Anyway, the notion of replacing a 10,000-pound mirror, and we're talking money, not weight. Right, yeah. At the time in the 1790s is astronomical.

Kelly 28:49

Yeah. I mean, no who nobody has that.

Pete 28:51

Yeah. But the good news is a new process of making mirrors was invented using mercury. Uh-huh. Because silver mirrors tarnish. When you look at old mirrors, they always have those blackened blobs all over the sides. That's because air is sneaking into the seal and it's tarnishing the silver inside the mirror. Right. Mercury mirrors don't tarnish. They're poison. They're poisonous. And yes, we have moved on to mylars and other types of chemical treatments. But we're talking this early new development where they can manufacture mirrors very quickly and they would not tarnish. Huh. And you could also control what was printed on the mirror. So you could actually make frosted, translucent mercury patterns by putting different types of chemicals on there to paint on top. So when you put the mercury on top, you'd have like beautiful flu flowers and stuff without etching it. Oh neat. Magicians knowing this, and I know I'm giving away a magician's secret, but this has everything to do with the blue room. Yeah.

Kelly 29:52

It it caused if if Teller comes for you in the night, I'm I'm not getting into that.

Pete 29:58

It's not like anybody's going to go off and build a blue room because it's very elaborate. It's basically a giant sheet of glass moving at a 45 degree degree angle, just like a pepper's ghost. Yeah. But it's a mirror that has been masked off with a grid of lines that get fatter and fatter and fatter mercury. Yeah, yeah. So it goes from transparent to fully opaque in mirrors. Yeah, I've seen that kind of design before. And from the stage, you can't tell. Yeah. Because the lines are so minute. Yeah. And that's because of the new chemical processes using silvers. Yeah. Now, why is this important, Pete? You might ask? Using mercury. Mercury. Yeah. And in order to make it adhere, you have to use the same type of chemical process that's used to adhere these silvers and mercury to glass. Uh-huh.

Dioramas Photography And Mercury Vapor

Pete 30:48

Because in the 18 early 1820s, there was a guy named Nisaphor Nyps. That's his real name. Folks, he's doing this without notes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not using any notes. This is from my brain. So this is literally a journey into Pete's brain. I don't know. As my partner says, why do you know this junk? But I do. This is my speciality. Nisafjor Nippt experimented with silvers and salts and mercury and painting them onto glass and exposed it to light. Yeah. He had created the heliotrope. Early photography. Okay. Using the same techniques that these mirror makers were using. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He had a student whose name was Louis Daguerre. Yes. These two guys would experiment with so Nisafor Neps made the very first photograph. Known as a heliograph. Okay. Daguerre started off his life as a young boy wanting to be a Rari man. Are you smelling where I'm going with this? Yeah, yeah. A box with a hole in it? Yep. The Daguerreotype. Yeah. Yeah, we're talking pinhole camera inspiration, right? But he invented something else that was actually really clever. Yeah. You would go into a little theater and he would do these presentations with these beautiful vistas of like Mount Vesuvius. Yeah. And then he would make it erupt in front of you with brilliant light and color. Ooh. And it's a new form of entertainment. It's a very complicated setup. Yeah. But basically it's it's a backlight effect. That's all I could really boil it down to shorthand. Yeah. But it's inspired by the mechanical city of Jach von Dietrichstein. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. And it was called the Diorama. Okay. He invented the diorama. Wow. And then he got involved with Nisafornip and experimenting with photography. Yeah. And it was Daguerre who actually realized using mercury vapor in the process actually helped develop the film the uh glass plates, photography plates, quicker. Oh, okay. He was taking a photograph and the exposure time was like an hour. Yeah. But he realized like clouds had covered the sun. He's like, oh merde. So he took the plate and he put it into a cabinet, thinking, okay, I'm just gonna leave that there for now. Yeah. Then he came back the next day and he opened up the cabinet. He pulls out his glass plate and he goes, Oh, it's already developed. That's the picture. Yeah. So it was the mercury vapor. It wasn't the development time, it was the need of mercury vapor to help develop it.

Kelly 33:30

So the mercury vapor that came from the picture itself?

Pete 33:33

No, the mercury vapor was literally just the mercury was like sitting in a little blob in a in a jar with an open top. Because we hadn't fully realized how toxic. But he had developed the daguerre type. Yeah. The early photography. And the diorama became an extension of 18th century stage plays with mechanical sets that would open and close and little ships that would ride across the stage and rolling waves that were giant corkscrews of cloth. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Kelly 34:06

Right. And anytime you see like Gilbert and Sullivan performed in film from the period, you've always got that.

Pete 34:13

And a great way to actually see the inner workings of this kind of stuff is to watch the Terry Gilliam film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. They actually recreate a lot of these great effects. And also the Tom Hulse film of Amadeus. Yeah. Yeah. They show a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff of these elaborate setups for operas.

Kelly 34:31

Yeah, I think you get some of it in Mike Lee's Topsy Turvy as well.

Pete 34:34

Yes, you do. There's a fabulous book, actually. It's from Dover Publications, and it's this Encyclopedia of Magic Tricks, and it goes very deep into a lot of the information that I'm telling you now. Actually, a lot of what I'm saying right now is actually from this book. Yeah. So it's worth getting your hands on if you have an interest in older illusions. Yeah. But these this notion of building miniature towns is enhanced with light effects, right? Like this is dark ride stuff. Yeah. Right. These effects would eventually be incorporated into attractions like old mill rides. Yeah. We talked about that before with the old mill rides, which became dark rides. And it's all of these crazy illusions that sprung out of this. Okay. Now I have I share this with my students a lot, and I have to do this because this will be really, really fun for your for our listeners. Okay. Nisaphor Nips may have been involved with some of the most notorious murders of all time.

unknown 35:31

Okay.

Cadavers Dinosaurs Silicon And Fate

Pete 35:33

Also, it's a con a confluence of great inventors and thinkers that I think actually led to Jurassic Park. The king of England, who preceded Victoria, Victoria, was very big on science and medicine. And the one uh the one place that anybody wanted to go to learn how to be a doctor was the University of Edinburgh. Yeah. Well, uh, the only place to get bodies to dissect was from prisoners and people who had been executed. Okay. So at the University of Edinburgh, there were there were two doctors. Yeah. One was Dr. Robert Knox. Dr. Robert Knox, and he was a bit of a dandy, and he was he was very, very popular with the students. Like people loved because he was big and showy. Yeah. Dr. Robert Knox. You also had his rival who was kind of this cranky old fart, who was very old school. Yeah. As in, when he did surgeries, he didn't use anesthetic. You know, he would just sit there and spurt, spurt. Oh, that would be an alter. Uh-huh. Well, Knox hated Monroe, but Monroe hated Knox enough to actually work out a deal with the king to state that only Dr. Alexander Monroe could get dead prisoners for dissection. Okay. Knox couldn't. Enter William Burke, William Burke and William Hare, two Irishmen who had emigrated to Edinburgh, to try to cash in on the burgeoning state of the city. Right. But they were broke. Yeah. And William Hare's wife, Lucky, Lucky Hare, real Christian name. All right. She owned a ho a hostel, basically. She owned a hotel. They call it a hotel, but it was more like a hostel. And they had a bunch of clients who were like poor. I mean, this is the poorest of the poor. Yeah. One of them died. Yeah. And they didn't know what to do with the dead body. So William Hare had an idea. He had actually heard that Dr. Knox was looking for cadavers. So they stuffed the guy into a herring barrel backwards and they rolled him over to the university and sold him for five pounds. And Dr. Knox promised them more money if they could find fresh bodies like that one in the future. Yeah. They had just come up with their own business. Yeah. Resurrectionism. While all this is going on, in another part of Scotland, there's a man who's on a honeymoon with his wife out in the heather. Yeah. And she finds some bones. Yeah. And she says, These are rather big. And he says, Aye, they are. Well, they were English, but you get one. The guy's name was Gideon Mantel, and his wife was Marianne Mantel. Uh-huh. They had discovered the first dinosaur bones. Oh, huh. Gideon Mantel was the person who actually invented the word dinosaur. Oh, okay. And he had named the dinosaur an iguanodon. Meanwhile, the same year, in Sweden, there's a man named Jons Jakob Berzelius. And Jons Jakob is a chemist. Yeah. And he discovers silicon. While this is going on, Nissiforn Nieps is assisting Robert Knox and Alexander Monroe with photographic, heliographic experimentation with cataloging dissection of human beings. Whoa, okay. Taking photographs, it is suspected of some of the dead bodies procured by Birken Hare. Okay. So Nisaphorn Nips may have actually been witness to some of the victims of Birken Hare. Oh, wow. Okay. The king had actually set up this basically a contest of who's going to get the big postlaughter, who's going to get a big chunk of money for having the greatest discovery. Right. They all show up at the University of Edinburgh weeks after William Burke is hanged. Yeah. And Nysaphor Nieps is talking about heliography with Louis Daguerre, who is there. Uh-huh. Belisarius is over there from Sweden showing off silicon. And you also have Gideon Mantel showing off dinosaur bones. Jeez, that's insane. Isn't this insane? Yeah. Now, why I talk about this. So eventually, what it becomes is Belisarius' discovery of silicon is the development of computers. Yeah. To be used in CGI. Yeah. Nice for Niep's development of photography leads to filmmaking. Uh-huh. Right? Yeah. And then Gideon Mantel and is their discovery of dinosaurs leads to a huge inspiration of when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

Kelly 40:09

Huh. Okay.

Pete 40:10

Okay. Yeah. One last thing I do want to

Dinner Inside A Dinosaur Sculpture

Pete 40:13

talk about. We're going to end in the eighteen fifties. Yeah. There's another guy who several years several decades later, his name is William Waterhouse Hawkins.

Kelly 40:24

Okay.

Pete 40:25

Waterhouse Hawkins is a sculptor and a naturalist, mainly focused on birds and lizards. Well, he sees the skeletons of Gideon Mantel, which are incomplete, by the way. Yeah. And they're put together wrong. Okay. And Iguanodon has a huge horn on it, what looks like a thumb. Yeah. And that's meant for digging. Okay. But they thought it was a nose horn like a rhinoceros. So they put it together wrong. Yeah. Well, Waterhouse Hawkins, he found out that Prince Albert, husband to Queen Victoria, loves science and had commissioned for her 25th, 25th anniversary of her crowning, the building of this huge glass structure known as the Crystal Palace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In order to show off this British contribution to science, the discovery of dinosaurs, he was commissioned to actually build these large sculptures of dinosaurs, which would eventually wind up in Sydenham. Syndum? Sydenham. It's said Sydenham, but it's spelled Sydenheim, basically. Okay. Sydenham. Yeah. But anyway, it's it's a park. That's not it's not where the Crystal Palace was. It's it's another part of London. But the the park is still around, as are the dinosaurs. They still stand to this day. You can still see them. Huh. As built by Waterhouse Hawkins. Wow. And they're built out of concrete and brick. They they make like a brick core, but the iguanodon is the coolest part because he wanted to show it off for New Year's Day, so he invited the Prince and the British Royal Academy of Sciences to a New Year's Ear New Year's Eve dinner, and he built a big tent in his art studio around the iguanodon, lit it up with candlelights and lanterns, and he left the back plate off of the iguanodon sculpture and put a table down the middle of it, and they had New Year's Eve dinner inside a dinosaur. Wow. There's drawings of it. We even know what they ate. They ate quail, they had custard, they had like potatoes with cherries and all this. Like we know exactly what they ate because we still have some of the memorabilia from that evening. Oh, they would drink each other the health of these dinosaurs. Yeah. This is a themed restaurant. And the Crystal Palace is basically a giant world's fair. Yeah. All of these entertainments, like one leads to another. Yeah. And it just keeps going and going and going. And anybody who knows me, I mean, Kelly, you know me, and my students who are bless you who are listening, God knows why you want to hear my voice anymore. But they've heard these crazy stories. Yeah. And they're blown away on how interconnected bits and pieces are in history. Yeah. And how they affect each other. And it's really amazing.

Old Tricks Inside New Rides

Pete 43:05

We love to talk about Disneyland and Universal and all these other theme parks. Yeah. How sophisticated their effects are. And yet, some of these effects, like for example, in the rise of the resistance, you get on board the escape ship. Yeah. In order to make that pod look deeper, there's literally a mirrored blue room illusion that actually makes the cockpit look deeper than it actually is. Yeah. The animatronics are actually on their back turning around and looking up. Yeah. But there's a mirror at a 45-degree angle that makes it look deeper than it actually is. Yeah. And that trick is developed in the 1850s, guys. Like we we And it still works. And it still works. Yeah. And so my my lesson for tonight, folks, is that sometimes the old dog actually has the best tricks.

Kelly 43:57

It's absolutely true. It reminds me of the the great. Great uh Greel Marcus book lipstick traces. Yes. Where it's just if you go back to you know like the the situationists in France and then you combine it with Quator Mass in the Pit and you move forward through the Dadais and you end up in punk rock and then and it's just like all of these things are just little traces through history that that connect enough. Like some someone was inspired by that one thing that they saw and they built something else out of it. Oh yeah. And those things just keep cascading.

Pete 44:36

Well, I mean, the cascade with the like, yeah, absolutely. I mean the cascade, the real short, short, short version of my lecture is those dinosaurs at Sydenham were viewed by a young Scottish lad who also went to the University of Enderborough to become a doctor. His name was Arthur Conan Doyle. Those dinosaurs inspired him to write The Lost World. Yeah. The Lost World would inspire Willis O'Brien, an animator from Oakland, right, to make the Lost World animation film. Right. And he would eventually do King Kong. Right. King Kong would inspire other animators like Ray Harryhausen who did the dinosaur things. Yeah. And it all leads to like compute the development of computer animation, and we get to a little island off the coast of Costa Rica, Jurassic Park. Yeah. And it's like, wait, what? Yeah. So many things are so connected. Wow. And this is the and I carry this stuff in my head, Kelly. Yeah. If it ain't theme parks, it's this nonsense.

Kelly 45:34

So much.

Pete 45:35

Anyway, yeah. So I do it so you don't have to.

Kelly 45:38

Yeah. But now I'm burdened with it. Yeah. Everybody who peed Damuel to hell.

Pete 45:43

Yeah. And the same thing with all you people at home. So seriously, look into this stuff, folks. It's really, really fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 45:50

That's a great place to start. It is. So anyway, I'm Peter Overstein. Kelly McGovern. Thanks for listening. You are listening to The Lowdown on the Plus Up.

Pete 45:59

Ha ha ha.

Where To Find Us Next

Kelly 46:10

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Lowdown on the Plus Up. If you have, please tell your friends where you found us. And if you haven't, we can pretend this never happened and need not speak of it again. For a lot more thoughts on theme parks and related stuff, check out my writing for Boardwalk Times at Boardwalk Times.net. Feel free to reach out to Pete and I on our Lowdown on the Plus Up Facebook group, or send us a message directly at comments at lowdown-plus-up.com. We really want to hear about how you'd plus these attractions up and read some of your ideas on the show. Our theme music is Goblin Tinker Soldier Spy by Kevin McLeod at Incompitech.com. We'll have a new episode out real soon. Why? Because we like you.