"He'd come back and give us a slide show on his projector.
Invading rioters broke his projector and set fire to the screen, he said, but mercifully the flames did not spread.
He envisions a wide range of applications for devices like his projector, from beaming interactive menus onto restaurant tables to projecting lessons onto each student's desk.
The old film spooling through his projector takes us back another 70 years, when he, a young, feckless entrepreneur called Julius Bedford (Rory Kinnear) first meets the eccentric Professor Cavor, played by Gatiss.
In "The World Brain," a book of essays published in 1938, Wells envisioned an era when "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica").
Plenty of mouthwatering structures whiz by on his projector screen, from wide-brimmed, somewhat louche Indonesian temples to Russian cathedrals capped with dazzling clusters of onion domes; elegant little Shaker houses huddling in the New England snows to vast Sydney warehouses crafted from eucalyptus so dense that it's more durable than steel.
Redditor Brian Maffitt (bmaffitt) did and decided to turn his projector, which was showing The Lorax, onto the snowstorm outside his window.
The results were screened, at first, at private parties where he turned up with his portable projector and his own choice of musical soundtrack (Messaien, Hindemith and Miles Davis were among his regular choices).
From the moment when the ten-year-old Bergman cranked his first projector and ran his first three-metre film loop through a magic lantern — lit by a paraffin lamp and throwing a trembly brown image on the whitewashed wall of his nursery wardrobe — the shadows on the wall, he says, "wanted to tell me something".
