The LDS Church’s mammoth audiovisual infrastructure stems largely from the early efforts of one man. James E. Talmage.

Ninety years after his death, Elder James E. Talmage of the Quorum of the Twelve is primarily remembered as an intellectual defender of his faith and the author of several lengthy theological books like The Articles of Faith and Jesus the Christ. But thirty years before he entered full-time Church service, he was a polymathic scientist and orator, activities which quickly transformed him into a prototypical documentary filmmaker.

Born in England in 1862, Talmage was raised in the Church and began his education at various primary schools before his family moved to Provo, Utah when he was fourteen. He studied chemistry and biology at Lehigh and Johns Hopkins Universities, and put his newfound knowledge to use by supporting academic and social causes back in Provo. He began giving fundraising lectures for institutions like the Provo Free Reading Room, the forerunner of the public library, and quickly became one of the most popular speakers in Provo and Salt Lake City. Depending on his topic, he might include scientific experiments or other visual aids in his presentations, and thus quite early in his speaking career he secured a camera and began illustrating his lectures with the magic lantern.

Dating back to the 1600s, the magic lantern was a small box that illuminated a glass slide, thus casting a projection like a twentieth-century slide projector. By the late 1880s they had progressed technologically past flame and even gaslight to utilize electric lightbulbs, with some versions, called stereopticons, equipped with dual lenses that could create fades and other optical effects. The projected images would be accompanied by a spoken narration of tales like The Pilgrim’s Progress or Ben-Hur, or, as in Talmage’s case, factual presentations.

Talmage’s first recorded magic lantern lecture was “The Earth’s Formation” in February 1885. He followed that with dozens of others such as “A History of the Earth” (April 1887), “An Hour with the Insects” (November 1890), “Fragments of Earth-lore” (February 1894), and the wonderful “Geology, Historical Sketch of the Sciences: In the Beginning, the Geological Record; Development and Progress Declared by the Rocks: Unity of Design Apparent; illustrated by stereopticon views” (March 1895).

Lectures like these used either Talmage’s illustrations or photographs printed on the glass slides, which by itself makes him akin to a prototypical educational filmmaker (motion pictures were not presented to the public until December 1895). But he moved even more into the role of a traditional documentarian when he started photographing his European travels and using these to relate a history of the places he visited. The first of these was apparently “Pompeii, a City of the Past” in November 1894, followed by presentations about Rome, Finland, tsarist Russia, and elsewhere. The Salt Lake Herald reported that his 1897 lecture “The Eternal City,” about Rome, featured “very fine and numerous” slides, with images of “the catacombs, ruins, the cathedrals and other objects of interest, [which] lent a vividness and reality to the word paintings.”

So popular did his presentations become that he became the top fundraiser on the Utah lecture circuit. He repeatedly filled both the Assembly Hall and the Tabernacle on Temple Square—then the largest assembly room in the United States. Usually charging either ten or fifteen cents per person, he raised money for the Deseret Museum, local kindergartens, and Church organizations like the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement League, which received a staggering $500 from one of his lectures. When he created sequels to his Russia and Pompeii lectures, the local papers predicted “the tabernacle will without doubt be thronged,” which apparently proved true.

Other considerations took his attention by the 1900s, but in 1911 when someone took illicit photographs inside the Salt Lake Temple and attempted to extort the First Presidency in exchange for repressing them, it was Talmage who promoted the idea of the Church itself commissioning high-quality photos and releasing them as an official publication. President Joseph F. Smith jumped at the idea and asked Talmage to write a book—which became The House of the Lord—to accompany the photos—though they were also sold as magic lantern slides in New York City. Smith called Talmage as an apostle while the work was underway.

Had he had access to the inexpensive and lightweight 16mm filmmaking equipment invented in the 1930s, James Talmage surely would have filmed his foreign tours and presented those to the paying public. As it was, he got as close as he could, and in the process helped acclimatize Mormon leaders and lay members to the idea of using visual media in their worship. It was a memory of one of Talmage’s lectures, this one about Utah and given in Scotland, that transformed David O. McKay into a lifelong champion of Church filmmaking, which he encouraged from the 1930s until his death.