It started with giveaway cards inside boxes of Weetabix and the chance to send off for a plastic 3D viewer, price one-and-sixpence. For Brian May, a 10-year-old boy who would grow up to become a rock superstar with Queen, it resulted in a lifelong fascination with stereoscopy.
This week, May publishes a book devoted to the history of his passion. Stereoscopy: the Dawn of 3D, written by the art historian Denis Pellerin, contains images from May’s collection of about 100,000 photographs – including two previously unseen images of Charles Dickens – and comes with its own foldable viewer. May and Pellerin are also giving a talk hosted by the British Library and King’s College London on Wednesday.
The book focuses on the birth of stereoscopy in the mid-19th century and the enthusiasm with which Victorians embraced the 3D craze. “People had a stereoscope and a stack of cards on the parlour table, and when friends came they would look at stereos. It was a window to the world,” said Pellerin.
The images were of two photographs of the same subject, taken from viewpoints about the same distance apart as human eyes. By looking at these images through the stereoscope, the two pictures appeared as one 3D image.
Stereoscopy turned out to be a “rollercoaster ride with peaks and periods of total oblivion and neglect”, he added. After the Victorians, it enjoyed a revival during the first world war, and again in the 1950s when the young May became enraptured.
Recalling his Weetabix giveaways, he said: “There were two little flat pictures of hippopotamuses, but when you looked through the viewer, the animals leaped out at you in glorious 3D realism. You felt like you could touch them. Once you have experienced that, you never want to go back to flat photography.”
Another revival came in the 1980s, and in 2009 “we had [the film] Avatar and every TV set you bought was 3D-ready. Where is it now? It’s all disappeared.”
The book credits Charles Wheatstone as the inventor of the stereoscope. “He was denied his proper place, other people claimed that they had invented it, and some of those falsehoods survived until quite recently,” said May. The book sets the record straight, he added.
Among the images in the book is a stereoscopic portrait of Dickens taken moments before he began reading extracts from his Christmas stories to an audience in 1858, and another of the author writing at his desk. The first stereo of the moon is also included, alongside scores of images of Victorian life.
The instruments were advertised in the Times “at unprecedented low prices”, starting at sixpence, under the heading “No home without a stereoscope”. Cards were given away with magazines and circulated through special libraries.
Stereoscopy “takes a little time to appreciate”, said Pellerin. “It’s like good wine, not Coca-Cola – you can’t just gulp it down, it’s something you sip. You can’t just glance at a stereo. You have to look at it, examine all the details. And that’s what the Victorians were very good at.”
May, who has a PhD in astrophysics, is in the process of acquiring another set of images that will make his collection of stereos the biggest in the world. He is transferring all of them into the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy.
“This is a gift to the nation. It will be a national archive long after I’ve passed away. It’s like starting a museum so future generations can enjoy this incredible material.”
