In June 1838, the British scientist Charles Wheatstone published a paper describing a curious illusion he’d discovered. If you drew two pictures of something—say, a cube, or a tree—from two slightly different perspectives, and then viewed each one through a different eye, your brain would assemble them into a three-dimensional view. This was, he noted, precisely how our vision works; each eye sees a slightly different perspective. Wheatstone created a table-size device to demonstrate the effect, with a viewer that sent a unique image to each eye: the world’s first stereoscope.
A decade later, the scientist David Brewster refined the design, crafting a hand-held device you could raise to your eyes. Insert a card with stereo images —a “view”—and presto! A scene came alive. Better yet, the photograph had recently been invented, which meant Brewster’s stereoscope could display not just crude hand drawings, but vivid images captured from real life.
“All these inventions just dovetailed perfectly by mid-century,” notes Douglas Heil, a professor and author of The Art of Stereography.
Once Brewster’s design hit the market, the stereoscope exploded in popularity. The London Stereoscopic Company sold affordable devices; its photographers fanned out across Europe to snap stereoscopic images. In 1856, the firm offered 10,000 views in its catalog, and within six years they’d grown to one million.
“People loved it,” laughs Laura Schiavo, an assistant professor of museum studies at George Washington University. At pennies per view, stereoscopy could become a truly mass medium: People excitedly purchased shots of anything and everything. They gawped at Tintern Abbey in Wales and the Temple of Jupiter in Lebanon, and gazed at close-ups of delicate fancywork. There were comedic, staged views, like one showing a maid sneaking out of her house via manhole to see her lover. Wealthy families posed for stereoscope portraits.
The world in a stereoscope seemed transcendent, hyper-real. “The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced,” gushed Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American surgeon and author, in a 1859 Atlantic essay. “The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out.” Soon, Holmes amassed a collection of thousands of views. “Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses, on the face of his rockhewn Nubian temple; I scale the huge mountain-crystal that calls itself the Pyramid of Cheops.” He even gave this type of imagery a name: “stereograph,” from the Latin roots for “solid” and “writing.”