Australian toy photographer Ray of ToyShoots recently purchased this old school stereoscope that was apparently manufactured in 1896. It�s the device people used to view stereoscopic photos as one 3D image (the View-Master, which was released in 1936, is also a stereoscope).
On one side of the device are two lenses to look through, and on the other end is a holder for side-by-side stereoscopic cards.
When you look through the lenses, the two photos appear to be a single 3D photograph:
Ray tells us that he picked up this old stereoscope when he found a couple on eBay that was selling processing dishes and heaps of other photo gear. He was able to purchase the viewer and about 200 stereoscopic card for about $20 (the photos were of family vacations in the 1930s).
�I�ll spend the next week going through the pictures as they are so well printed and documented by the photographer,� Ray tells PetaPixel. �It almost feels worthy of a limited edition book run on Kickstarter.�
If you�re interested in browsing through some vintage stereographs online, the Library of Congress website has an enormous digital collection of scanned stereographs that were made from the 1850s to the 1940s.
A Civil War stereograph found in the Library of Congress� collection.
There are currently around 8,000 digitized images from the Library�s collection of 52,000 stereographs.
Image credits: Photographs by Ray/ToyShoots and used with permission
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.