A Visual Documentation

This website began as a 2020 pandemic project and its goal has always been mostly visual: putting vintage stereoscopes in the spotlight and showing off their creative designs and overall coolness. Where possible, the photos are supplemented by interesting history and design facts.

Our collection was initiated by 4 things: a book, Google, an antique store discovery, and Tom Martin. It started with the book.

1. Murder and … Architecture?

Sometime between 2005 and 2015, we read Erik Larsron’s book, “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.” The featured murderer, H. H. Holmes, was nowhere near as fascinating as the story behind the creation of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago — the planning, the architecture, the execution. Spark ignited.

2. From 3D to Virtual Reality (VR)

Early in 2015, a partnership was formed between Google and Mattel to re-imagine the classic View-Master 3D viewer as a VR device, basing it on Google’s new Cardboard VR platform. We were amused and intrigued by this old-school-meets-high-tech endeavor and it made us more aware of 3D viewing devices.

3. Tru-Vue & Another World’s Fair

Early in 2017, we wandered through one of the antique stores on San Carlos Blvd in San Jose and came across a small Tru-Vue stereoscope from the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. The stereoscope had the Century of Progress World’s Fair logo on the front and was being sold with several rolls of 3D filmstrips. We knew absolutely nothing about Tru-Vue or stereo filmstrips but we bought it because of the connection to a Chicago World’s Fair — an interest sparked a few years earlier by the Larson book.

4. A Collection is Born

When researching the Tru-Vue viewer, we came across Tom Martin’s wealth of information about Tru-Vue and caught the collecting bug. Besides Tru-Vue, we were interested in finding the other 35mm stereo film viewers he mentioned from that era: Novelview, De Vry, Filmoscope, etc. Next, our interest expanded to other mid-century 3D viewers. We learned there was a whole world of 3D viewers that were not View-Masters! We set out to build a cool, mid-century viewer display, rich with historical context, that could serve as a visual style guide to more than a century of worldwide 3D innovation. To keep the collecting scope small and manageable, we initially avoided Holmes- & Brewster-style viewers from the 1800’s, tabletop viewers, and View-Masters. Then, we gradually began to include those if some aspect of their design intrigued us enough.

Today

Our collection features hundreds of vintage stereoscopes from around the world but we’re not even close to being experts in 3D. We’re not even decent stereo photographers. However, we are passionate about vintage 3D viewer design aesthetics and how that has evolved. We enjoy connecting the dots in their design history, have made interesting discoveries, and, for sure, have a wealth of obscure knowledge guaranteed to glaze the eyes of most non-collectors. We have particular use case interests that have spun off into sub-collections: branded viewers, advertising viewers, folding cardboard viewers, and lithographed tin viewers. We enjoy putting them online so others can see and learn about them. And we appreciate the escape: the time spent researching, organizing, studying, arranging, photographing, comparing, and wondering where this hobby is leading us.