In 1849, Brewster patented his own stereoscopic viewer that used lenses instead of mirrors. Users peered through two prisms at a piece of cardboard printed with two side-by-side eye images. Since the prisms bent light, the left image appeared on top of the right image in the center of the card, creating a single stereoscopic picture. The prisms also magnified the images, which meant they could be more detailed and printed on smaller pieces of paper. The device could even view stereo photographs on glass slides produced via Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype process. And since the whole rig fit into a handheld wooden box the size of a pair of binoculars, it was easy to set up, use, and carry.
Brewster’s stereoscope made its debut at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations—the first world’s fair, held in 1851 at Hyde Park in London—where Queen Victoria tried the device. Her Majesty was amused, and her approval kicked off one of the biggest fads of the era, driving huge demand for stereoscope viewers and imagery. Over 250,000 image cards (or stereographs) were sold in France and England in just three months after the royal viewing, depicting everything from landscapes to photographs of newsworthy events to formal portraits of world leaders. Within five years, Brewster had sold around half a million viewers, and imitators sold countless more competing products, including deluxe units mounted in mahogany cabinets with polished brass hardware. A high-end stereoscope was a must-have item in any respectable Victorian parlor.
Across the Atlantic in the former colonies, one of the United States’ most famous thinkers saw a need for a populist alternative. In 1861, the author, poet, and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. created what became known as the American stereoscope—a simple inexpensive viewer for the masses. His design was minimalist: two lenses in a wooden frame, an eye hood made out of pasteboard, and a small bracket for holding cards, all attached to a central spine with a short handle on the bottom.
“I felt sure this was decidedly better than the boxes commonly sold . . . and could be made much cheaper than the old-fashioned contrivances,” Holmes wrote later in The Philadelphia Photographer. He also believed that money could be made from the device, but he wasn’t looking for profit, so he tried to give the design away to anyone who would manufacture it.
“I showed it to one or two dealers in Boston, offering them the right to make all they could by manufacturing the pattern, asking them nothing,” Holmes wrote. “They looked at the homely mechanism as a bachelor looks on the basket left at his door, with an unendorsed infant crying in it.”
But hobbyists saw the value of the device right away. Holmes’s friend Joseph Bates was a wealthy merchant and amateur photographer, and after he saw the design, he decided to build one of the viewers for his own use. Bates improved on Holmes’s prototype in a few key ways, including the addition of a focus adjustment slide and wire card holders, and after he built one for himself, he made and sold a few more to fellow stereoscopy enthusiasts. From there it caught on quickly, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Holmes-Bates stereoscope was as ubiquitous in American homes as the television would be a hundred years later.
Holmes probably never anticipated how much demand there would be for his humble skeletal stereoscope. But he certainly understood the potential for virtual worlds to disrupt technology and society. “Form is henceforth divorced from matter,” he wrote in an essay for The Atlantic magazine. “In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it . . . We are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized [as beginning] a new epoch in the history of human progress.”
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I grew up with an antique Holmes stereoscope in my house, though I didn’t know what it was at the time. My father kept it on top of a tall bookshelf with some other old stuff I wasn’t supposed to touch, so of course sometimes when I was bored I’d stand on the couch and take it down. I remember being equal parts intrigued by the strange device and slightly grossed out by its age—it was always a little dusty and had an old, stale smell. I’d hold it up to my eyes, look through the lenses, and pretend it was something interesting, like a submarine periscope or an eye-mounted laser cannon. It was usually entertaining for a minute or two at most. Years later, after I started researching this book, I realized what the stereoscope was, and the next time I visited my parents, I made a beeline for its place on the shelf.
It had the same scent I remembered, a combination of rust and old wood varnish. The aluminum eye hood was pitted with oxidation, and the crossbar that held the stereograph cards was wrapped with a piece of yellowed tape. A faint design stamped into the metal gave a hint to the object’s origin story—an angel flying past an ornate Art Nouveau building with a barrel-vaulted roof, and a short line of text in French: EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE INTERNATIONALE. Our family stereoscope was a souvenir of the 1900 world’s fair in Paris.
I’ll never know how the stereoscope made its way from the halls of the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées to my great-grandparents’ house in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. But I do know that the product is a Perfecscope, a brand introduced in 1895 by a Vermont firm called H. C. White. Legal information etched on the bottom of the viewer reveals a global demand for H. C. White’s products and hints at the size of the stereoscopy fad—patents had been registered in the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria, and Belgium. When it was new, the Perfecscope was a relatively high-grade product, lined with red velvet along the edges of the engraved hood. H. C. White advertised the model as “the crowning triumph of stereoscopic invention, combining beauty, utility, strength and elegance.” It sold in stores for about forty cents.
My dad kept a collection of old stereograph cards in a .30-caliber ammunition can on the bookshelf, so I pulled one out at random, fit it into the scope, and peered through the lenses. After few adjustments, a sepia-toned photograph of an unfamiliar city came into focus. It appeared to be three-dimensional, but only in the most basic sense; buildings in the foreground appeared closer than those in the back. The stereoscope created depth, but no immersion. To my modern eyes, the technology was primitive and unimpressive, not much better than looking at a landscape painting in a museum. I couldn’t understand how Holmes thought stereoscopy could replace actual tourism, much less usher in a “new epoch in the history of human progress.”
And then I realized what I was looking at. City streets intersecting at a 45-degree angle, with a plaza in the middle and a tree-filled park off to one side? This was Madison Square, the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan. I knew this place; I’d worked in this neighborhood, walked these streets a thousand times. Suddenly I forgot my skepticism and was immersed in the illusion, almost as if I was standing on the roof of the Flatiron Building in 1905, not in my parents’ basement over a century later.
Instinctively I fell into a little game New Yorkers sometimes play when they’re walking down a familiar avenue, picking out storefronts and trying to remember their provenance: “When I moved here that was a bar. Then it was a shoe boutique, and now it’s a frozen yogurt shop.” Just like that, only in reverse. An elegant Victorian hotel? That will be an office tower in a hundred years, and the ground floor will be the 40/40 Club, a sports bar owned by Jay-Z. A corner building topped with a billboard that says Continental Cigars Ten Cents will be a showroom full of expensive kitchen and bathroom tiles. A man on the street headed toward the park really caught my interest—one day in the future I will trace his footsteps as I walk to Shake Shack to stand in line for a double cheeseburger.
I was lost in the image for a long time, imagining what it must have been like to dodge horses speeding down Broadway instead of taxicabs. I realized the “primitive”
stereoscope had grabbed my attention just as effectively as a full-blown VR simulation. To a viewer back in 1900, Holmes’s device must have been mind-blowing.
After a while, I put the stereograph away and pulled another from the ammunition can. A label printed on the card identified it as Lakes of Killarney, Ireland, copyright 1902 by the Keystone View Company—a Meadville, Pennsylvania, publisher that hired photographers around the world to capture local points of interest, and eventually sold more than twenty thousand different stereographic images. This one, a shot of a tranquil lake in a mountain valley, had a caption on the back that included a you-are-there anecdote so a virtual tourist might enjoy some of the same Irish wit as a real-world visitor: “An Irish writer tells us that the Garden of Eden was surely at Killarney. Here Adam and Eve spoke the Gaelic . . . but someone retorts that it was for speaking Gaelic that they were put out, and deserved to be.”
Other stereograph cards in the collection depicted slice-of-life scenes that seemed to be set up and staged for cuteness (Me an’ Billy, published 1899, a photo of a grumpy-looking toddler sitting next to a disinterested goat) or domestic comedy (Trials of Bachelorhood, circa 1897, shows a man with a white shirt on his lap trying to thread a needle, while two women peek around a dressing screen behind him, smirking and laughing). Several of the cards dug deeper into misogynistic humor: Married Life as he found it—Words without music shows a man sitting in a chair, leaning back as if exhausted, clutching his head with one hand and rolling his eyes so hard his pupils are barely visible. Behind him, a woman leans on a table, a stern look on her face, seemingly in the middle of a never-ending lecture.
A few of the cards even captured real-life moments in world history, a kind of primitive photojournalism. I lingered for a while on President Roosevelt Seeing the Sights at the Jamestown Exposition, Opening Day, April 26 1907. The photo doesn’t capture any of the sights that might have attracted Theodore Roosevelt to a world’s fair in Norfolk, Virginia—it’s just a bunch of men standing around wearing dark overcoats and top hats. But I got a genuine thrill viewing a three-dimensional image of the twenty-sixth president; it kind of felt like I was in the room with him, and it gave me a better sense of his hale charisma than any two-dimensional picture could.
As I was focusing in on the last of the cards—a photo of a British army camp from the Boer War in South Africa—my six-year-old niece wandered into the room and asked me what I was doing. “I’m looking at some old pictures,” I said, holding up the Perfecscope. “If you look at them through this, it makes them seem real.”
She eyed the ancient stereoscope and gave me a skeptical look. When I reached over to hold the viewer up to her eyes, she hesitated for a second and then cautiously leaned forward to peer through the lenses. “Whoa, it’s cool!” she exclaimed. “It looks alive. It’s like magic!”
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As devices like the Holmes scope cast their spell over nineteenth-century viewers, inventors everywhere scrambled to capitalize on the phenomenon. Most of them focused on the approach pioneered by Wheatstone and Brewster, and built handheld or tabletop viewers packed with lenses or mirrors. But some entrepreneurs weren’t satisfied with gadgets limited to a solo user. They wanted 3-D they could take public—something for which they could sell tickets to see in a theater.
That was not a simple proposition. Stereopsis works because binocular vision captures two slightly different views of the world, and the brain combines those images into one three-dimensional picture. You can simulate that for a single viewer if you use mirrors or lenses to show each of their eyes a different image. But how do you do that with an audience scattered all over an auditorium? There’s not a prism on Earth that can scatter light so perfectly as to hit multiple viewers in one eye but not the other. And what about when spectators look around or shift in their seats? Even a twenty-first-century computer vision system would have a hard time tracking and targeting the position of every eyeball in a theater.
The solution was to flip the stereoscope model on its head. Instead of showing a viewer two separate images that combine into one, show them one combined image that separates into two. This kind of image, called an anaglyph stereogram, is usually composed of opposing hues—for instance, the left-eye image in red and the right-eye image in cyan—and then viewed through a pair of glasses with tinted lenses. If the right eye looks through red glass, it can’t see the left-eye image; when the left eye looks through cyan glass, it can’t see the right-eye image. The brain superimposes the two to create a single image that appears to be three-dimensional.
The first anaglyphs, created around 1853 by German inventor Wilhelm Rollmann, were little more than colored lines drawn on paper. But in 1858 the French physicist Joseph-Charles d’Almeida realized he could use two lanterns—one with a red filter and one with green—to shine colored light through images painted on glass slides, and they would combine to project an anaglyphic picture onto the screen of a theater. All an audience had to do was wear colored glasses and they could see a three-dimensional image, no matter where they were sitting.
D’Almeida was an academic, not a showman, so the idea didn’t really go public until the 1890s, when it was picked up by French optician Alfred Molteni, the owner of a company that was one of the world’s leading manufacturers of theater lighting. Molteni simplified d’Almeida’s system by building a single projector with two built-in colored lenses; he called it a biunial magic lantern, and his 3-D slide shows became a popular amusement for Parisian audiences.
Molteni’s productions were a big moment in humanity’s long hunt for immersive entertainment. By combining the techniques of stereography with the power of theater, his magic lantern shows created a compelling artificial reality. But as the twentieth century approached, an even more convincing technology was already on the horizon.
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It came on like a freight train—literally, in some cases. In 1895, French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière wowed audiences with their Cinématographe, a camera that photographed a series of images on a strip of perforated film and could also project these “motion pictures” onto a theater screen. The first public showings included a series of under-one-minute films depicting dubiously interesting scenes like workers leaving a factory, a man trying to mount a horse, and parents feeding a baby. But audiences were captivated anyway. The most famous Lumière short, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, consisted of a single fifty-second shot of a steam locomotive rolling toward the viewer as it pulled into a station, and it reportedly (and perhaps apocryphally) caused members of the audience to flee from the theater, afraid that they were about to be run over.
Audiences that once lined up for panoramas, dioramas, or magic lantern slide shows now flocked to the moving pictures. When the world’s first purpose-built movie theater opened for business in 1896, demand was so great the operators kept the doors open thirteen hours a day and still continuously packed the theater. In its first year alone, the seventy-two-seat Edisonia Hall welcomed 200,000 visitors.
If stereoscopy had launched a worldwide fad, moving pictures sparked a frenzy. By 1908, there were more than 8,000 movie houses across the United States. A 1910 article in the magazine World’s Work counted 12,000 theaters, and estimated that 5 million Americans attended the “picture shows” daily—about 5 percent of the US population at the time, or one out of every twenty people. “Five-cent theatres abound on every hand,” the magazine reported, and “squads of police are necessary in many places to keep in line the expectant throngs awaiting their turn to enter the inner glories.”
Inside the grand picture houses and nickelodeon storefront theaters, those film audiences experienced a kind of primordial virtual reality. Early moving pictures might have been monochrome and silent, but the photographic images and lifelike motion were real enough to transport viewers into the world of movies. Audiences were whisked out of their seats and away to an
cient Egypt, or to the surface of the moon, or into the middle of a gunfight in the Wild West. When an outlaw cowboy took aim and fired his pistol directly at the camera at the end of The Great Train Robbery, theatergoers screamed in terror, because at some level, they’d forgotten it was only a movie.
Of course moving pictures were still just flat two-dimensional images. The directing style of the time was flat too, with most films staged like a scene from a play—a single stationary camera pointed at actors lined up in front of a painted backdrop. So some filmmakers tried to make movies more immersive by using the techniques of stereoscopy. In 1915, The Great Train Robbery director Edwin S. Porter showed off a short anaglyphic 3-D movie at New York City’s Astor Theatre; the audience wore red and green glasses and watched a few minutes of footage that included dancing girls and shots of Niagara Falls. According to a review in the New York Dramatic Mirror, the audience was “frequently moved to applause” and regarded the scenes as “forerunners of a new era in motion picture realism.” But shortly after the screening, Porter quit directing and never improved or shared his technique.
It took a few years for other filmmakers to develop their own anaglyphic technology, but in September 1922, a feature called The Power of Love became the first 3-D film commercially released in theaters. The movie was shot with two cameras and presented on screens using two projectors; critics gave it positive reviews, but the setup may have been too complicated, since it played only a handful of times in Los Angeles and Manhattan. Other 3-D films failed for similar reasons. In December 1922, the Selwyn Theatre in New York City debuted engineer Laurens Hammond’s Teleview system, which required not only special projectors but mechanized viewing devices affixed to each seat in the theater. The two projectors were set up so that one frame from the left projector would show on-screen, and then one frame from the right, forty-eight times per second. As audience members watched through the viewers, a synchronized spinning shutter blocked and unblocked their vision so that each eye would see only the frames from a corresponding projector. This technique, known as the alternate-frame sequencing method, was ahead of its time—sixty years later it would power 3-D video games and amusement park attractions. But in 1922, Teleview was too expensive, complicated, and uncomfortable to be practical, so the Selwyn was the only theater to ever try out the system. (Hammond did okay, though—a decade later he invented the Hammond electric organ.)
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