Sir William Hamilton's Vesuvian apparatus.

In 1767 the great collector and vulcanologist Sir William Hamilton designed an 'apparatus' to depict an eruption of Vesuvius, This remarkable combination of moving pictures with light and sound effects was perhaps the closest the eighteenth century came to the cinema. A document explaining how it operated has recently been discovered, as Bent Sorensen explains.

Even in the second half of the eighteenth century, when a vast array of instructive entertainment was used to disseminate scientific knowledge to a popular audience, Sir William Hamilton's Vesuvian apparatus, as…