This little children’s plaything helped to stimulate the study of the persistence of vision and led to a better understanding of motion. This in turn resulted, within a half century, in learning a way to re-create actual motion effects. Around 1760 Nollet developed the top which, though only an outline in form, when whirled rapidly appears to be a solid object. Nollet also described the use of the _camera obscura_ and the various types of lanterns for entertainment and teaching purposes. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), famed American statesman, writer and scientist, corresponded with Abbé Nollet. Franklin, though disagreeing with Nollet on electricity, admired him, calling him “an able experimenter.” Nollet marveled that such science as manifest by the publication of certain of Franklin’s works in Paris could come from America. At first he conceived that his enemies in Paris had falsified the papers to cause his embarrassment. Franklin made no direct contribution to the art-science of magic shadows but had a pertinent remark to make about the medium--light itself--which is nearly as true today as when he wrote it in 1752 for a paper read to the Royal Society in London: “I must own I am much in the dark about light,” he said. _IX_ PHANTASMAGORIA _Magic lanterns mounted on wheels and images projected on screens of smoke make ghost shadow plays--Robertson “resurrects” Louis XVI--Théâtre Robert Houdin, Paris, 1845, Polytechnic Institution, London, 1848 and Nazi Army, 1940--all use magic shadows for supernatural effects._ The tongue-twisting word, Phantasmagoria, stands for a certain type of light and shadow show popular immediately after the French Revolution. It marked a definite throwback in the story of magic shadows. It was essentially a revival of the medieval black magic or necromantic use of light and shadow to trick, deceive and keep everyone “in the dark about light.” Phantasmagoria is the magic lantern illusion associated with making phantasms appear before an audience. The only contribution to the art-science is that it created an illusion of motion through the novel means of moving the projector instead of the slides or film. The Phantasmagoria magic lantern was mounted on rollers and the lens was adjustable so that ghosts would appear to grow and diminish and move about. Certain dissolve effects were also produced. For Phantasmagoria the images--regularly ghosts--were projected not on a screen but on smoke, a factor which naturally contributed to the weird effects. Phantasmagoria was most popular in Paris in the late 1790s, probably as some kind of a psychological reaction to the horrors of the French Revolution. Men and women of the day thought much of death, ghosts and the like.