![]() ![]() Instead of fiddly individual slides, customers could buy a simple disk with a set of seven stereo images, drop it into the viewer, and step through the image pairs by pressing a lever which engaged with locator holes near the edge of the disk. Gruber worked out that the size of the 16mm film images, combined with human eye-spacing, allowed a set of 14 images to be arranged in a ring, sandwiched between two card disks, providing seven stereo pairs of images. Gruber designed and refined the distinctively original-looking View-Master design in 1938/39, and the new product was launched at the 1939 New York World's Fair. In 1938, Graves met William Gruber, another keen photographer who had experimented with 3D photography, but also had a background in engineering and design, having worked with organs and player pianos at Welte & Sons, Germany. What was needed was an foolproof and well-designed viewer and simple and appealing way of encapsulating the slides. Once someone had purchased a viewer they would be able to see sights from around the world in 3D as a sort of "remote tourism", and would have an appetite for buying further slides, which Sawyer's would be only to keen to supply to them. Sawyer's understood that they could reinvent the old 3D viewer business model by having a small, lightweight plastic viewer, with cheap-to-produce slides, supported by and their experience of the postcard photography business. With the appearance of Eastman Kodak's new 16mm three-colour Kodachrome colour film in 1935, Mayer decided that this created the opportunity to create a brand new type of product to supplement the existing "scenery postcards" range – Kodak's 16mm cine film was priced with amateur and home moviemakers in mind, so the price per still frame was low – with a sufficiently affordable viewer, with a lens for each eye, users would be able to view the transparencies using natural light via a diffuser, and if the viewer could show pairs of images, one per eye, the result could be an updated version of the old 3D novelty slide viewers that had played such a large part in the catalogues of the big German toy and novelty manufacturers such as Bing. Harold Graves joined the company in 1926 to handle marketing and the business grew, branching out into the production of scenic postcards. Ed was looking for a career, and managed to scrape together enough money from family members to buy out Sawyer's stake. Photography enthusiast Ed Mayer bought into the company in 1919, having finished his military service in WW1. Specht as a photo-finishing business, the idea being that since Specht was in local management at the Owl Drug Company chain, Sawyers would be able to capitalise on this and supply photo services through local Owl stores (this convergence between drugstores and photofinishing services was also successful for "Boots the Chemist" in the UK, which still offer photo printing as a service). was founded in 1914 by Carleton Sawyer and A. In 2015 it was announced that the View-Master brandname would be used on a new range of virtual reality (VR) headsets, in conjunction with Google. ![]() It was later used by the US military as a training tool, and a bright red thermoplastic version was heavily promoted in the 1970s as a toy, with slides of film and tv scenes. The View-Master 3D slide viewer was originally produced in the late 1930s, with it's disc-based format used as a way of delivering 3D slide views of tourist scenes. ![]() View-Master Reel 157, seven stereoscopic views of New York ![]()
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