On the invention of stereoscopic glasses for single pictures : with preliminary observations on the stereoscope, and on the physiology of stereoscopic vision / by T. Wharton Jones.

Jones, Thomas Wharton, 1808-1891.

Date:: 1860

Credit: On the invention of stereoscopic glasses for single pictures : with preliminary observations on the stereoscope, and on the physiology of stereoscopic vision / by T. Wharton Jones. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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$experiment of making drawings on paper of the two dissimilar pempectives of an object of three dimen- fiions,—the one perspective as seen with the right eye, and the other as seen ■with the left,—and presenting them simultaneously, each to its respective eye, i. e,,. the dravdng of the right perspective to the right eye only, and the drawing of the left perspective to the left eye only. The result was, that the observer per- ceived an appearance of the olDject in relief or intaglio as full and complete as if the real object had been actually before him—an appearance incapable of being represented by a single drawing on a plain surface,, and unlike either of the perspectives of which the drawings on paper were actually presented to the eyes. This experiment was devised and the instrument for it—^the Stereoscope—constructed by Mr Wheat- stone more than twenty years ago. In thus attri- buting to ]\Ir Wheatstone the invention of the Stereo- scope, however, it would be unjust to ignore the claim of Mr Elliot, of Edinburgh, who, according to Sir Da^dd Brewster, had, a few years before Mr Wheat- stone published on the subject, projected a similar instrument, which, however, he did not publicly exhibit luitil 1839, a year after Mr Wheatstone had made known his invention. Mr Elliot’s dissimilar per- spective dra\vings, a copy of which Sir David Brewster gives in his work on the Stereoscope, prove that he had correctly conceived the prin- ciple of stereoscopic vision. Whatever may be the claiuLS of ]\Ir Elliot, however, to the honours of inven- tion, it cannot, I believe, be denied that it was directly from Mr Wheatstone’s Stereoscope, subsequently modi- fied and improved by the addition of Sir David Brewster’s lenses, and supplied by photography with perspectives for the slides embracing every variety of subject, that Stereoscopy, such as it is now known in all its beauty and jxirfection, was developed.$