To commemorate Sir Charles Wheatstone on the 150th anniversary of his death, I thought I’d share a post to try and bring a sledgehammer to some of the perpetual myths of stereoscopy.

Many of the myths about the first thirty years of stereoscopy were said to have been laid to rest with the publication Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D, written by Denis Pellerin and edited by Brian May, and published by the London Stereoscopic Company in 2021; and yet here we are, in 2025, still finding at least two recently published texts continuing to share some proven fallacies. Let’s get to work!

Myth: Stereoscopy was popularised by Queen Victoria after she viewed a Brewster-type stereoscope and some stereoscopic images by Jules Duboscq at the Great Exhibition of 1851, had her portrait taken there, which was gifted to her with a stereoscope. This led to hundreds of thousands of stereoscopic images to then be produced shortly afterwards to meet public demand.

Facts: Part of the myth appears to have been started by Sir David Brewster in the press in May 1852, and continued in his 1856 book The Stereoscope, Theory and Construction, and many more publications ever since have reproduced and added to it. Denis Pellerin, photo historian, wrote in Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D that no actual evidence has been found of Queen Victoria even seeing Duboscq’s stereoscope or images at the 1851 exhibition, but she did buy a stereoscope from Antoine Claudet late in 1852. Pellerin also states that the stereoscopic craze really began at the end of 1856. You have to keep in mind the context of which photographic processes were available when, and, in turn, when stereoscopic photographs and stereoscopes could be produced substantially and commercially, to become affordable enough for the masses, once the public demand was there.

Myth: The stereoscope was invented by Sir David Brewster/ James Elliot in 1834.

Facts: It was Sir David Brewster who propagated the myth about Elliot inventing the stereoscope, and there was a public spat in newspapers of the 1850s between Brewster and Wheatstone which dispelled this myth. Ultimately, Wheatstone and others proved Wheatstone invented the (reflecting) stereoscope in 1832, but he didn’t present his paper on the physiology of vision and demonstrate the stereoscope at the Royal Society until 1838. Brewster himself wrote in 1861:

Even this statement, however, may be questioned with Wheatstone’s early refractive and lenticular stereoscopes in the collection of King’s College London Archives, but proving a date for their initial production may be more difficult. Brewster’s greatest innovation with stereoscope design was to cut a lens in two, to make each half used for each eye in the stereoscope pretty much optically identical, but this design was also criticized by others because it was said to limit the size of the lens. Source of facts: Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D.

I also read within the last few years that Sir David Brewster is considered the ‘father of VR’. See above, it is Wheatstone; he even used to rock up at the Royal Society wearing a VR headset (OK, I exaggerate). N.B. The company that was perpetuating the Brewster VR myth, and unfortunately named themselves after it, has since ceased trading.

Myth: Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term ‘Stereograph’ / ‘Stereoscope’.

Facts: The source for the claim of coining ‘stereograph’ is Oliver Wendell Holmes’ June 1859 text ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, The Atlantic Monthly, p738-748:

It’s important to note here, that within the same text, Holmes also used ‘stereoscopic picture’, ‘stereoscopic views’, ‘stereoscopic doublet’, ‘stereoscopic photograph’, ‘paper stereograph’, and ‘glass stereograph’, interchangeably, where appropriate. ‘Stereograph’ was already in popular use before Holmes said he had coined it; one example can be found in The Stereoscopic Magazine, published in 1858 by Lovell Augustus Reeve, where ‘stereograph’ was used quite consistently throughout. Thanks to Professor Roger Taylor and De Montfort University, you can also see the term was already in use in British photographic exhibitions in 1858.

‘Stereoscope’ was most certainly the term given to the, erm, stereoscope, by its inventor, Sir Charles Wheatstone, in his 1838 paper, where he stated:

Source: Charles Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the physiology of vision. —Part the first. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, phenomena of binocular vision.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dec. 1838, Vol. 128, p371-394.

Myth: Many American stereoscopic photographs have curved mounts so that the images have more 3-D depth/ so the photographic images do not get scratched when laid face down.

Facts: In a recent article, author Nancy Nehring states the curved card mounts were introduced by the Kilburn Bros in 1877. She has extensively searched any available leads, and the Kilburn Bros do not appear to have ever claimed the curving produced any additional depth effects or improvements in viewing. I don’t want to add too many spoilers, but Nancy states that Kilburn redesigned their stereographs in 1877, and it was the way they were produced which caused the curving. Source: To read the full article, please see the National Stereoscopic Association’s magazine Stereo World, July/August 2025, Vol. 51, No. 1, p26-30.

Myth: The foremost pioneer of stereoscopic photography was *insert later stereoscopic photographer’s name*.

Facts: To put this in context for pioneer stereoscopic photographers, Wheatstone commissioned stereoscopic photographs from William Henry Fox Talbot in 1840, and in 1841 from Henry Collen, Richard Beard’s studio, and M. Fizeau. He also commissioned Antoine Claudet to make stereoscopic daguerreotypes at some point in the 1840s, who later offered them commercially in 1851. Louis Jules Duboscq is said to have made stereoscopic photographs for Brewster and the stereoscope he designed in 1850, and later offered a catalogue in 1852, with known examples of him commissioning other French photographers to take stereoscopic images. The London Stereoscope Company, as it was then called, is reported to have begun in 1854, when some stereoscopic photographs brought over from France were put in the window of the Art Repository. They later advertised ‘groups and views’ for the stereoscope for sale in 1855, and offered one thousand views in August of that year. Source: Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D.

Myth: To make a 3-D photo, you can paste two exact copies of the same image side-by-side.

Fact: When you photograph a subject and either move the camera from left to right between photos, or take the scene simultaneously using two lenses a horizontal distance apart, such as with a stereoscopic camera, the subtle differences in perspective showing the shift in position of an object when viewed from different points is called parallax. A good example is if you point a finger in front of your face and close each eye independently to see the shift in what you can see behind the hand, and also which areas of the finger you can see with each eye. You need these shifts in perspective, or parallax, to be able to produce the 3-D effect, which your brain interprets when you view the two images simultaneously but separately with each eye. If you use the exact same photograph on the left and right halves, you sure can fuse them, but it’ll be as a single flat image instead of a single 3-D image. This also includes if you scan a mono image, move it a bit to the right on the scanner and scan it again. Yes, I have read that.

I should also add here that squinting or cross-viewing images that are supposed to be parallel-view will cause them to appear inverted, and vice-versa. I once heard visitors to an exhibition being described as unenthusiastic about the stereoscopic images on display, and it turned out the institution hadn’t checked whether the images they were sharing were cross- or parallel-view, meaning they were a mixture, and the poor visitors were being made to look at cross-view images with stereoscopes designed for parallel-viewing. Please check the images first before you think the complaints are because people don’t like viewing things in 3-D!

This post will be updated when I have more time, but please feel free to add or suggest any additions in the comments.

Coincidentally, to make Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D more accessible, and to help get the well-researched facts about the first thirty years of stereoscopy in front of more people, The London Stereoscopic Company are very kindly offering a whopping 25% discount on the book for three weeks around the 150th anniversary of Wheatstone’s death. The offer ends on the 25th October 2025, please see their website for more details.

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