Stereoview
Photograph
Date unknown
Museum Collection
The principle of three-dimensional perception from two dissimilar images was first demonstrated by British physicist Charles Wheatstone in 1838. While experiments in stereoscopic photography were made in the 1840s using the daguerreotype process, it was the development of an effective negative/positive photographic process that made it possible to produce multiple prints in large numbers. In he late 1850s, a number of companies were formed to produce and market stereographs featuring foreign and domestic scenes. The images’ remarkable three-dimensional illusion made the stereoscope a popular item in the Victorian parlor. Stereoviews, like this one of a Russian Cossack, a re ancestors of the “Magic Eye” pictures that were all the rage at shopping malls in the early 1990s.
