Description
In his famous 1838 Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, the British physicist Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) demonstrated that the role of the two eyes is to produce stereoscopy, that is to say the perception of depth and relief. More precisely, stereoscopy was revealed to be the result of the slight difference between the two retinal images due to the convergence of the ocular axes. If this discovery was fundamental for the development of nineteenth-century physiology of vision, it also launched an entirely new way of displaying images. The apparatus popularized by David Brewster (1781–1868) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) was intended to enable the stereoscopic perception of photographs. By taking two shots of the object from a slightly different angle, two photographs were produced, corresponding to the two retinal images. The photographs were then placed into a small apparatus—a lenticular stereoscope—that allowed each eye only to see the corresponding image, which artificially recreated stereoscopy. Such stereoscopes met with an extraordinary success during the second half of the nineteenth century. They were largely commercialised since the 1850s and remained highly popular until the 1920s.

08/07/2014
Created by: Allison Ksiazkiewicz on 08/07/2014