Today competition in the form of digital media and the short attention spans of the View-Master's target market has hurt sales. Still it holds an appeal all its own.
Today competition in the form of digital media and the short attention spans of the View-Master’s target market has reduced their market share. Still it holds an appeal all its own.
Life is not flat. It moves through space and has shape. However, our understanding of this was limited until 1838 when Sir Charles Wheatstone published a paper on ‘binocular vision.’ His paper explained why we see things with perspective and depth and not flat like seen on a photo. He showed us that depth of vision occurs because our eyes see slightly different images when pointed at the same object. Our brain combines these images to create a composite that gives us perspective and depth. He built a device called a stereoscope to demonstrate this phenomenon.
The World in 3-D
In 1850, Sir David Brewster introduced a tabletop version of the stereoscope. The viewer would look through two magnifying lenses at images that were mounted side by side. Thus, the ‘flat’ photos looked dimensional. Then Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Bates made stereo views mounted on a stiff card that could be attached to a hand-held viewer, making it cheaper and more accessible to the average person.
The stereoscope had many avid fans including a man named William Gruber, who loved to shoot his own 3-D pictures.
A Meeting of Minds
In 1938, inspiration struck while Gruber was recovering from surgery. He figured out a way to use movie film to create stereo pictures. He also figured out how to group the images so that they could be viewed in a simple and inexpensive manner. However, the reality of being a newlywed and the lack of capital put his idea on the back burner.
Fate intervened. That summer, Gruber was visiting the Oregon Caves National Monument with his 3-D cameras. There he ran into another photographer, Harold Graves, the president of Sawyer’s Photographic Services a company that printed picture postcards. Graves and Gruber struck up a conversation about their love of stereography. The two hit it off and Gruber felt that he could trust Graves and decided to risk his unpatented idea by sharing it with Graves.
Production and Success
Within a year, Sawyer’s Photographic Services invested $50,000 dollars, a huge sum of money in those days, to build the machinery designed by Gruber to create View-Masters.
Intially, View-Master targeted adults. The first reels were views of national parks and other natural attractions. Gruber, whose successful invention allowed him to turn himself over completely to his passion, took the photos.
In 1951, View-Master entered the world of children when they bought out their competition the Tru-Vue Company. The most important thing about the acquisition of Tru-Vue was the obtaining the licensing rights to Disney Characters. Business boomed.
Good Design
The viewers for View-Master have changed over the years but the reels have not. A reel from 2007 can be viewed in a 1939 viewer and a reel from 1939 could work in that vintage 1960’s viewer you picked up at a garage sale.
The design of the reel is simple. It holds seven pairs of pictures taken on 16-millimeter movie film. Each pair is mounted on a disk 2.5 inches apart (about the same distance as between the human eye). A simple magnifying device and viewing system allows you to view the image when you point it towards the light. A push of a lever the reel spins to the next scene.
A Difficult World
How does the View-Master compete with electronic toys with moving images and fancy sounds? Walsh says it best “It is a visual toy, but its sounds are so distinctive; the windshield wiperish swoosh of the reel advancing, the echoey clack of plastic when your fingers slips off the lever, the hollow reverberations of the hidden spring. The sound I like best though are the “Oohs” and “Aahs” that come from my seven-year-old when she slides a new reel in and looks out her window to the world” (Walsh, 61).
Sources
Walsh, Tim. Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005.
