These stereoscopic View Masters from past QBO sales look quaint, but modern versions are still produced by American educational toymaker Fisher-Price. Not bad for a century-old invention!
Stereoscopic viewers exploit the fact that human eyes are (more or less) a standard distance apart. Our forward-facing eyes create a large overlap between what each eye sees and our brains meld the two inputs to create depth perception. By setting up two cameras the same distance apart as our eyes, and simultaneously snapping two photos, when those two photos are viewed through a device that shows your left eye ONLY the left camera’s shot, and your right eye ONLY the right camera’s shot, what you see in the viewer looks 3D.
The stereoscopic photography technique was invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838, while Sir David Brewster made the first portable 3D viewer. Early stereoscopes held two photos about the size of postcards in front of an eyeglass-like viewing platform mounted on a wooden handle. Each view had to be changed one at a time. The photos were black and white (color film not having been invented yet), but more expensive versions were laboriously hand-tinted with paint. Most early stereoscopes offered photos of famous landmarks. Since they predated both T.V. and the internet, they were essentially the Leisure Travel programs of their day.
View Master arrived in the early 20th century when Edwin E. Mayer bought Sawyer’s Photo Finishing Service in Portland Oregon and started off printing customer photos, later producing commercial souvenir postcards of attractions. In 1926 Mayer took on several business partners and one of them, Harold F. Graves, along with German-born photographer William Gruber, helped Mayer design a compact stereoscopic viewer cast in Bakelite (an early plastic) through which a flat cardboard reel could be rotated to look at 7 different 3D scenes. On every reel you’ll see 14 separate ‘slides’, which are the two different LEFT eye and RIGHT eye photos taken and paired together for each of the 7 scenes, rendering them 3D. Matching slides are opposite each other on the reel to meet the spacing requirement between your eyeballs! The transparencies used the same Kodachrome film as old-school color slides, just much smaller. While most stereoscopes today are toys, in the 1940s the military bought thousands of View Master stereoscopes to use for training troops and also used analysis of aerial stereoscopic photos taken by spy planes to help find hidden enemy installations.
For the rest of us, View Masters debuted at the New York 1939 World’s Fair and were sold in the same gift shops as souvenir post cards. The black Bakelite View Master here is a very early model, but there have been many variants including later ones featuring improvements made by Charles “Chuck” Harrison, the first African-American to receive the Lifetime Achievement National Design Award by Cooper-Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum. There has even been a VR View Master model that worked with your phone but it was discontinued in 2019.
As the decades rolled on View Master stuck to wholesome, kid-oriented educational material, which probably contributed to their longevity. Technology now offers a dazzling array of entertainment options, but parents have never tired of handing their toddlers a sturdy, economical View Master and a handful of low-cost educational, Disney or Sesame Street reels.
Tuesday Treasures was started by our staff member, Jeanne Lusignan. Each week she will be featuring items that have been found at our estate sales. If you would like to submit a treasure for Jeanne to feature in a future installment of “Tuesday’s Treasures”, please follow the button below and send us an email! Please attach a few photos of your treasure in a beautiful setting as well as any details you have about your item such as manufacturer, use, age, region of origin. If you don’t know about the piece, that’s okay! We still might be able to research it for you! Don’t forget to tell us what makes this item such a treasure to you!