Bring out your dead

Recently we worked on resurrection hologram of Morecombe and Wise - famous Brit comedians for the BBC. Tupac broke boundaries in a fully artificial head - now there is talk of more afterlife performances.

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Dircks and Pepper's Ghost

I came across a reference to an intriguing invention of the 19^th century involving plate glass which was used by theatrical companies. Called Pepper’s Ghost, it first appeared on stage in a production of Charles Dickens’ The Haunted Man in 1862.

The plate glass (which was so clear as to be invisible to the audience) was placed at an angle on stage, reflecting the image of an actor in a pit below the stage. When the ghost was ready to make its appearance, the room beneath the stage would be brightened, allowing the” ghost” (or reflection of the actor) to appear suddenly to the audience.

Image from Eyes, Lies and Illusions: the Art of Deception. 2004. This excellent history of “optical wizardry” reproduces a number of images of early optics research. This engraving of Pepper’s Ghost originally appeared in Die Physik in Bildern Eßlingen (1881). Rakow Research Library.

Pepper’s Ghost got its name from a scientist at the Royal Polytechnic Institute, John Henry Pepper. Pepper had recently seen an invention by engineer Henry Dircks who had the idea to use plate glass to create the illusion of ghosts.

Theatrical performances involving supernatural elements, called Phantasmagoria, were popular at the time, but Dircks’ invention proved too expensive to be of interest to theatres. Pepper, however, was able to modify the invention so that it was affordable for theaters to install. He and Dircks filed a patent and Pepper’s Ghost became the rage of London, and– rather quickly– other cities world-wide. P.T. Barnum, in his account of Humbugs of the World (1866), refers to “Professor Pepper, at the Royal Polytechnic Institute, in London, [who] invented a most ingenious device for producing ghosts which should walk about upon the stage in such a perfectly astounding manner as to throw poor Hamlet’s father… quite into the ‘shade.’ ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ soon crossed the Atlantic, and all our theatres were speedily alive with nocturnal apparitions” (quoted from the Gutenberg Project’s edition of Humbugs of the World).

Dircks himself wrote in his publication, The Ghost (1863) that the illusion was so popular that the Thames Plate Glass Company had completely sold out of the large plates of glass necessary for performing the stage trick.

Barnum wrote about Pepper’s Ghost as if it were merely an entertainment, but Professor Pepper and Dircks saw the Ghost as a means to educate audiences about scientific principles of physics, light and optics. Other scientists, like Augustin Privat-Deschanel, in his Elementary Treatise on Natural Philosophy, made reference to Pepper’s Ghost as well, describing it as one of several “ingenious illusions that have been contrived” which rely on “the laws of reflection from plane surfaces” (From the Internet Archive). Pepper’s Ghost is still studied by illusionists and magicians today. Disney even adopted it for use in the Haunted Mansion in the 1960s to create the illusion of ghosts in its grand ballroom!*

September 11, 2012 by Regan Brumagen