Around 1900, an assortment of folding tin stereo viewers was created by Neue Photographische Gesellschaft (NPG), which translates to New Photographic Society. Arthur Schwarz holds the German patent (#157580) & U.S. patent (#720849) for the viewer design. NPG advertised it in their catalog as their “Imperial” pocket stereoscope and it was used for their extensive variety of miniature stereoviews. NPG began selling the viewers as promotional items to a number of early 20th-century businesses around Europe and the U.S. Initially, the promotional viewers would still carry the Imperial brand name printed on the top but eventually, the entire surface of the viewer was promotional in nature with only a tiny NPG logo in the lower left to indicate the origin — some don’t even have the NPG logo. There are 2 viewer styles, one allows for the cardholder to slide back and forth for focusing and the other is fixed focus. Around 1920, NPG sold its stereoscopy assets — views and viewers — to Bing-Werke who continued producing the miniature folding stereoscope in all black.

Design

The art nouveau design around the outer edges of most of the fixed-focus NPG viewers followed a standard pattern (usually in blues, greens, & gold) that we call the “flower” template because of the 10 horizontal flowers directly beneath the lenses. The standard design around the outer edges of the adjustable viewer is a pattern we call the “organic wave” — it’s a flowerless, wavy design in almost neon green. The center of those standard designs is usually tan. One of the fun parts of collecting NPG viewers is finding the ones that are different from the standard flower and organic wave design (see Suchard, Eichhorn, and Royal Netherlands) and those with full, non-standard colors and no tan center (see Grünfeld Linen Factory and Dürkopp-Blue) or large colorful graphics (see De Jong-Style 1, Dr. Georg Schneider and Hexenbrille). As for their boxes, most of the viewers came in a plain, dark red cardboard box with space for the viewer and a selection of stereoviews. However, some had specialty boxes like Grünfeld Linen Factory, Dürkopp, Suchard, and Stollwerck.