History
(image courtesy of www.stereoscopy.com)
Stereoscopy was invented by English physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838. He wrote the first paper on the subject entitled, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision.—Part the First. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision.” on June 21, 1838. http://www.stereoscopy.com/library/wheatstone-paper1838.html
(image courtesy of www.stereoscopy.com)
In the paper’s first section he critiques this figure from Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura saying, “Had Leonardo da Vinci taken, instead of a sphere, a less simple figure for the purpose of his illustration, a cube for instance, he would not only have observed that the object obscured from each eye a different part of the more distant field of view, but the fact would also perhaps have forced itself upon his attention, that the object itself presented a different appearance to each eye. He failed to do this, and no subsequent writer within my knowledge has supplied the omission; the projection of two obviously dissimilar pictures on the two retinæ when a single object is viewed, while the optic axes converge, must therefore be regarded as a new fact in the theory of vision.”
Wheatstone then created
a viewing instrument for
representing three-dimensional figures from presenting two perspective
projections on two retinas and wrote, “I therefore propose that it be
called a
Stereoscope, to indicate its property of representing solid figures.”
This mirror
stereoscopic viewer required both paired
pictures to be reversed laterally. This arrangement allowed for
viewing large
pictures; in fact, the principle is still used today for viewing x-ray
stereoscopic pictures and aerial photographs. Wheatstone’s
prototype stereoscope is still preserved at the
Most people are
surprised to learn that the idea of
stereoscopy actually came before the idea of photography. Contrary to
popular
belief, Sir David Brewster did not invent the idea of stereoscopy. In
June
1838, Sir Charles Wheatstone gave an address to the Royal Scottish
Society of
Arts on the phenomena of binocular vision. Eleven years later
Brewster described
the binocular camera, leading to the production of the first
stereoscopic photographs.