In 1821 a Birmingham instrument maker called Philip Carpenter began selling a new kind of magic lantern. He named it the Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern – a little tin projector, complete with sets of hand-painted glass slides illustrating animals, religious scenes, views of the world, kings and queens, and astronomical diagrams. For two pounds and eight shillings, purchasers could raise ephemeral images of life, the world and the universe. The lantern was wildly successful and helped to establish a public appetite for magic lanterns and domestic media consumption. A rapid succession of optical media instruments emerged between 1817 and 1833 – the Kaleidoscope, Phantasmagoria Lantern, Myriorama, Thaumatrope, Phenakistiscope, Stereoscope – each offering new powers to control images and play with perception, embedding long-rumoured visual deceptions in a new consumer framework. Optical media technologies would soon be commonplace. Photography, lithography and rapid printing presses (later joined by phototelegraphy and moving pictures) all unrolled into a vast media network that changed how images and information could be transmitted and consumed. This network began to coalesce in a series of commercial experiments in the 1820s, led by Philip Carpenter.

The Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern was hugely influential, but its success was not some flash of commercial genius. Instrument makers had always made novelty items for curious consumers. The explosion of images and optical devices that followed Carpenter's lantern instead expressed something of the moment. New commercial possibilities were emerging as consumer appetites and manufacturing potentials shifted. Carpenter utilised a network of metalworkers and artisans that were rapidly increasing their production outputs as the economy began to recover from the post-war depression of the 1810s. Mass production of scientific instruments was also becoming viable for the first time. Novelty consumption was growing among the middle classes, providing new markets for instruments, printed paper toys and other trifles. Public interest in natural philosophy was on the rise, with famous scientific writers advocating for rational learning as a means to understand a fundamentally knowable world. New printing technologies and innovations led to a flood of natural scientific, astronomical and religious-historical texts alongside general compendia and cyclopedia. Carpenter offered a machine that could project such knowledge into the air of a drawing room. It offered a public display of natural and scientific classification that could be applied to education as easily as to play.