While the priority question on the technical innovations Childe used is still debated, he established the use of double and triple lanterns for special theatrical effects, to the extent that the equipment involved became generally available through suppliers to other professionals.
[9][10] It was the combination of the double image and the improved lighting that made the lantern technique standard for a time;[11] credit for this advance in projection, underpinning "dissolving views" in practice, has been given to John Benjamin Dancer.
[12] The innovations of Childe and the instrument-maker Edward Marmaduke Clarke (the "biscenascope") played a part in displacing the diorama as a fashionable entertainment; it was a type of double lantern, but in fact had a single light source, divided by a mirror system.
He worked from 1807, and completed his method in 1818; a brother of the artist Elias Childe, he had learned while still a young man to paint on glass, and prepared his own lantern slides.
At that point, the search for the earliest written reference to the technique was pushed back only to 1843, in the 25 March issue of the Magazine of Science.
[14] It remains unclear what Childe himself invented, and when, but according to some sources his technique became established in British theatres in the 1820s and 1830s: the lantern was used as a heightened dramatic effect and supported "transformation scenes".
[19][20] In the phantasmagoria tradition, which continued to be popular with British audiences of the early 19th century, Childe showed Castle Spectre within a Gothic setting in 1828.
On 1 January 1863 the Illustrated London News reported on a lantern production of Cinderella at the Polytechnic, in which Childe was involved in painting slides, after designs of Henry George Hine.
The Polytechnic's slides were professionally painted, by a group including also Charles Gogin, Isaac Knott, and Fid Page.