A lantern slide is a glass transparency that is viewed through a slide projector that casts the image on a wall or other surface. Centuries before the invention of photography, painted images on glass were projected for entertainment. In the 1840s, William and Frederick Langenheim, daguerreotypists in Philadelphia, first used a glass plate negative to print onto another sheet of glass, thus creating a transparent positive image that could be projected. Well into the 20th century, lantern slide projectors displayed photographic images for entertainment as well as education. Lantern slides were not difficult to produce in mass quantities and were therefore easily made available commercially.

Usually a lantern slide was created by placing a dry plate negative directly on light-sensitive glass, which, after it dried, was fitted with a cover glass and mat and sealed with tape. Sometimes a slide was hand-colored with special inks before it was covered. The lantern slide could be viewed through a projector with a light source that changed over time--oil lamp, limelight, carbon arc lamp, and then electric light.

Sumner Ives was a native of Maine and spent most of his life as a biology teacher in liberal arts colleges of the South. He came to Furman University in 1926 and served on the faculty until 1944. He began leading field botany camps in 1927 for college credit during the summer that led to offering a five-week course in field botany. He often used lantern slides in class and public lectures, using photographs taken by himself and James Huntington, a Greenville photographer.

Ives did extensive collecting in the 1930s and 1940s, greatly adding to the knowledge of the piedmont and mountain flora. Furman University’s herbarium is officially designated as the Sumner A. Ives Herbarium [https://sernecportal.org/portal/collections/misc/collprofiles.php?collid=269] [https://www.furman.edu/academics/biology/facilties-resources/natural-history-collections/].