This evening Mr. Penhallow has just finished mounting fourteen new chromatic slides; their pigments are dry, their condensing lenses polished. There is no greater pleasure in our age than the moment when a darkened hall draws its first collective breath at the throw of focused light upon canvas. We mean that earnestly. We mean every word of it.
Press any slide in the cabinet at left. The apparatus does the rest.
We are forty-seven men and women of Essex County who hold the firm conviction that focused light, passed through a hand-painted plate of glass and thrown upon a darkened wall, is the most important educational invention of our century. We do not say this lightly. We say it because we have watched a Sunday-school class of mill children stop breathing for forty seconds in front of a slide of the rings of Saturn. We say it because we have watched a man weep at Vesuvius. We say it because Miss Croft, who is twenty-three years old and was a milliner before she was a painter, can mix sixteen distinct shades of nebular blue from four pigments and she does this for the love of it.
The Society meets every other Wednesday in the upper room of the old Custom House on Water Street. Members pay two dollars per annum, which goes toward pigments, glass plates, replacement wicks, and the lantern itself, which is a magnificent biunial instrument from Messrs. Newton & Co. of London, donated in 1884 by Mr. Westcote himself.
If you have not yet attended a projection, we ask you with all sincerity: come. Bring a friend. Bring a child. Sit near the front. We are not putting on a show. We are showing you the universe with the lamps we have.
— the Membership Committee, March 1887