LONDON — There is a scene in an early episode of “Mad Men” in which Don Draper pitches a campaign for a new slide projector called the Wheel to two Kodak executives. During the pitch, he projects a series of images from his family album: embracing his wife on their wedding day, dancing with her at a party, the birth of a baby, playing with his children and sprawling on a sofa with them one Christmas.

“This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he explains. “It goes backwards, forwards, and takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel, it’s the Carousel.” Up pops a final slide revealing the product’s new name beside a colorful fairground carousel. The Kodak executives sit in silence as if awed by his eloquence and the poignance of the memories he has shared with them. “Good luck at your next meeting,” drawls another ad man, as he ushers them out of the room.

Improbable though it seems to us in an age when we can shoot and screen not only slide shows, but mini-movies on our phones, the real Carousel was hailed as a dazzling innovation when Kodak introduced it in the early 1960s, and not only by sycophantic advertising executives. One version of the projector was also acclaimed for other aspects of its design, the Carousel-S, which was developed by Kodak’s German subsidiary and celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Technically, the Carousel-S now seems as archaic as any other slide projector, but is still a stunning example of design aesthetics.

Slide projectors date to the 1930s, but did not become popular until the 1950s, when people started gathering together to watch their vacation or wedding photographs magnified on to screens, as if they were at the cinema. The new projectors were fun, but cumbersome. Each slide had to be placed inside by hand, until rectangular trays were designed to hold them in position. Even so, the slides often jammed or tumbled out if the trays were dropped.