Étienne-Gaspard ROBERTSON

The story

Étienne-Gaspard Robert was born in Liège in 1763. Physicist, painter and balloonist, he made Volta's experiments on electricity known in Paris and perfected the fantascope: a projector on wheels that threw moving images onto a screen of smoke or gauze and left them hanging in empty air.

Under the name Robertson the Phantasmagore, he opened his show in January 1798 at the pavillon de l'Échiquier, a hall off the Grands Boulevards, then moved it in 1799 into the disused chapel of the Capuchin convent, near the place Vendôme. There the audience watched the ghosts of Marat, Robespierre and Danton rise up, all three dead less than six years: people fainted, and all Paris wanted a seat.

He did not invent phantasmagoria: he saw Paul Philidor's séances in Paris in 1792 and improved on them. What he did invent was the projected-image show before a paying audience, a century before cinema. Total darkness, a projector on wheels, an invisible screen: every conjuror of the nineteenth century would take up the recipe.

His second life was in the air. He made balloon ascents at Hamburg, Vienna, Saint Petersburg, Riga and Copenhagen, and carried out his physics experiments at altitude. He was said to have been chosen to fly a balloon for the emperor of China, but nothing establishes that he joined the Russian embassy of 1805, which turned back in Mongolia.

He died at Les Batignolles, then a village at the gates of Paris, on 2 July 1837. He lies in Division 8, under the tomb he had built for himself: two bas-reliefs show the man with the projector and the man with the balloon.