 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to you here into our magnificent Chapel. My name is Siddharth Kapoor. I am the president and principal of King's College London. Now many of you would know that King's motto is Sankte at Sapienthe, which is Holiness and Wisdom. So it is wonderful that we are gathered here in a chapel, which is a monument to Holiness, to celebrate the dawn of 3D, which in many ways is a marvel of applied wisdom. So we will talk of both of these today. Now the history of this chapel interconnects with the life of the person we are here to celebrate, Sir Charles Wheatstone, who was our first professor of experimental philosophy. That's what physics used to be called in those days. Now, it's a truly stunning location to marvel. I don't know if those who are live streaming can see it, but if you look around, it's a marvellous 3D chapel here. And now Charles Wheatstone would not have seen this because in his days Kings was young and this was a rather meager chapel and it is said that in 1859, which is actually around his time and a bit after, it was thought to be remarkable for its meagerness and poverty for a college that was of Kings distinction. Well, things have changed, but might say it's the other way around now, and it is the other way around, thanks to someone we know rather all well, that's Sir George Gilbert Scott, because he was a contemporary of Wheatstone and he was invited to lead the redesign of this chapel and it is very close today to what he finished then. It might surprise you that its first such incarnation cost 7,000 pounds. Good days those were, I have to say as a college president, you could get a lot done in 7,000 those days. But let me now turn to Wheatstone, who was there at time. He was a prolific scientist, an irrepressible inventor and a great public communicator of science. Now, we will talk about his work in optics, but we cannot let go of his work in telegraphy, because he was one of the pioneers of the telegraph and not only was the pioneer of inventing the telegraph, he was the one who got it applied very first and the place of application was of course the railways. Now the railways didn't naturally get the value of that invention, it had to be demonstrated to them what it could do for the railways and one of the things Charles Wheatstone did, he was very good at demonstrations and the one demonstration that he did in the 1840s is at the terrace of Somerset House. Now by the way in those days the embankment wasn't running, the embankment wasn't even there. So he got a lot of royalty on the terrace of Somerset House, installed one end of his telegraph apparatus there and installed a cannon on the other side of the Waterloo Bridge and what he was demonstrating was that you press a button here and a cannon goes off. Now to all of us who've lived in a world of electricity and wires, I mean this like you know, it's a nursery school demonstration, but you can imagine that in those days for people to see that a non-mechanical transmission, no pulleys, no gears, just a little wire that goes all the way across the Thames and a cannon goes off would be truly spectacular. Sadly on the day of the demonstration, the cannon didn't go off. But they say he was such a good demonstrator that most of the people came away impressed at the power of telegraphy even though nothing happened. But look, the man has done a lot. His best known contribution to optics are his works on stereoscopy. It's based on the work of Euclid who was the father of geometry who understood that each eye sees a slightly different view. Now Wheatstone realized that the brain makes use of these subtle differences to determine perspective and consequently, his stereoscope provided a 3D, a three-dimensional image by combining the two pictures set in a slightly dissimilar perspective. He was the first person to show an understanding of the visual intricacies of spatial perception and it is his principles which brought to life the invention of the stereoscope. Did I say he was a professor of philosophy? He was indeed, but you can see there was physics and physiology in that I think he was the professor of everything Ph and he did that very well. Now so significant were his discoveries that all the work that has followed ever since on optical perception has been based on his principles and his work has influenced diverse fields from things that we use today like cutting-edge medical scanning technologies that we see in our hospitals next time you go have a CT or a PET scan some fundamental principles being used were the principles that he disanned and of course increasing line to the development of virtual and augmented reality. So it is this depth of discovery that we are here to celebrate and they're not just to celebrate but to experience as we gather to mark the launch of stereoscopy the dawn of 3D which explores some of the highlights of Wheatstone's extraordinary scientific, artistic and social breakthroughs written by the photographic historian Dennis Pellerin alongside Dr. Brian May they have dived into the King's archives no mean feat that is as these historic records extend to six kilometers worth the material which spans the history of science medicine literature I don't know how six kilometers was measured or how it was imagined, but wonderful six kilometers of data and All of that to publish this fascinating account of stereoscopy So thank you all for joining us today those who could be with us here in the chapel and those who are with us virtually It is an honor to be able to celebrate a luminary from King's rich history with you While marking the launch of this exploration of 3D innovation So thank you and let me now welcome our Dean of King's College London the Reverend Dr. Ellen Clark King Let me add my own welcome to you all to our beautiful chapel and to those joining us online Hosted by the British Library and the London stereoscopic company and It's especially a total delight to welcome you Dr. May back to this special space Professor Kapoor has spoken about the physical history of the chapel So let me just say a very few words about its spiritual significance within the life of King's King's was originally an Anglican foundation a Place where education has always had a purpose beyond itself as Professor Kapoor said in our motto of holiness and wisdom Words that we might nowadays live out as a a passion for justice and inclusion for positive change in the world and for spiritual maturity and depth in all our students Faith doesn't stand in the place of or in the way of scientific curiosity and questioning At its best faith calls us to look at our universe with eyes wide open to its wonder and deep curiosity as to its workings Which is why this is the perfect space to learn more about the discoveries Insights and the wonderful stereoscopic vision of Charles Wheatstone The theologian Irenaeus told us that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. I Cannot imagine a better way of being fully alive than combining creativity and music alongside intellectual rigor and discovery So please enjoy this evening as we listen and learn from dr. May someone who most definitely embodies all of those And now let me hand over to professor Wilder who is our host for this evening Thank you very much for those two wonderful introductions to the space and the event Before we begin I need to give some instructions to the people who are joining us online Welcome everyone who's joining us far away from here near or far I just want to say that you can submit questions to us even while we're beginning the introductions If you look at the form below your video window You'll be able to type in your questions for us and we'll be able to take them on later on in the conversation You can submit them anytime during the conversation during these introductions We'll we'll keep taking questions right up until the end If you would like by chance to buy a copy of stereoscopy the dawn of 3d During the event you can press the books tab at the top of the screen So send us your questions and now I will begin by I have a great the great pleasure of being able to introduce Dr. Brian May Among his many other talents. Dr. May is an accomplished stereophotographer inventor collector and head of Prolific and fantastic London stereoscopic company His collaborative publications from a village lost and frowned t.r. Williams through the Diablories To the republication of George Washington Wilson's fantastic and prolific stereoscopic works These have pushed the field of stereo of stereoscopy studies to reconsider these humble photographs as serious areas of photographic history and photographic history study In particular his invention of the owl viewer and His insistence on publishing books in which the stereos are reproduced full size so that they can be used with the owl viewer Has introduced a whole generation of scholars An enthusiast to looking at stereos in the viewers in 3d as they really should be seen It's made a huge difference to how we go to archives and view the material it's We can now take our own viewers with us and we can see these materials these historic materials as they were really meant to be seen His services to photographic history are many and varied and I could go on for much longer, but I won't I promise But they include this lasting legacy in the form of the archive of stereoscopy Which I know we will be enjoying for many years and now I'm going to invite you to introduce Denny Good evening everybody. I'm going to address myself to those out there first if I may just remind you that this is what it Should look like in your house right now you have your Your smartphone of whatever kind on its side You have your owl VR kit and the phone goes in here like this and you're all set for stereoscopy and you won't see me in 3d right now, but you will see all of our items which Denny will be showing you and I will be showing you this one So that's that and I'd now like to address my audience here if I may we have a wildly enthusiastic audience here of stereoscopic aficionados. Are you okay? I? Just wanted you to hear them to know that you're here Thank you all for being here I don't take it lightly at all that I'm speaking in this incredible place the home of so much innovation and Scientific thought philosophic thought over many generations. I'm very honored to be invited to speak here I'm only speaking in a humble role because I'm actually introducing Denny Pell around who is the author of our book But I want to just say a couple of words to you about what stereoscopy is now to some of you I apologize because you already know but I'm hoping we have a lot of casual visitors Who might be saying well, what is stereoscopy? Why does it matter? Well Stereoscopy is all around us But it's kind of hidden in plain sight because we're not really aware of it We don't pay much attention to it and we don't appreciate it Stereoscopy I use this word again is what came to be known in the 1950s as 3d Three-dimensional representation three-dimensional meaning height width and depth Why does it matter? Why would we need to do this? We're talking about Representational art here, which is painting or photography And a few other things and we're trying to represent as as our ancestors have done since the beginning We're trying to represent things around us, which we enjoy and we like to take away with us to enjoy in the comfort of our homes It goes back to cavemen Making representations of the animals around them in their caves and they were actually very good at it And again, they painted on a flat surface reasonably flat being a cave all I suppose And they had width they had height, but they did not have depth So this was art as it was first known to human beings but actually if you look at what happened in In the history of representational art nothing much changed for the next few thousand years in that sense We we find ourselves in the renaissance where Leonardo da Vinci and others discovered the miracle of perspective and they were able to Make parallel lines in real life converge to an infinity on the on the canvas and Introduce a lot more realism into what they did if you look at the last supper You can see these converging lines and the ceiling very impressive and if you close one eye It kind of looks 3d But what astonishes me to this day always is that the renaissance did not discover Stereopsis nobody twigged the fact that we have two eyes for a very good reason and In the evolutionary terms it must have been an incredible advantage to us As your president has told you What's happening here is your brain is being presented Every second of your life with two slightly different views of the universe and your brain all of our brains Perform this amazing function every second of our lives of combining these two pictures with their slight little differences Into a into a model of the universe which exists inside your head and it has width and it has height And it has depth. It's a miracle. This is called stereopsis and nobody in the renaissance to my knowledge tumbled upon this fact the man who did is Charles Wheatstone And as you've heard he was a professor here. So it's a very very important Significance to me that we're here presenting this this book in this place where he was a professor. I Feel very humbled looking at the genius of this man, but I also feel very reassured Because we all I mean those of us who who've learned about it respect him beyond belief But he was known in his time and I only know this thanks to Dany. I only know anything thanks to Dany He was known in his time as a very very shy and embarrassed Communicator in as as a lecturer. In fact, he was so bad that mainly they didn't ask him to do the lectures and There is one story where he was invited to give a presentation at the The Royal Institution just up the road here and he got so nervous that he Disappeared he ran out of the building because he was too nervous to give his presentation chased by Faraday apparently who brought him back hold him back in and Faraday eventually apparently gave the lecture at that particular time and henceforth if people were Invited to speak at the institution. They would lock the doors It's that they wouldn't run away at the last minute and and do a do a wheat stone Apparently as they used to say I love that story. So I always get nervous at these things I feel nervous right now because it's always a one-off. It doesn't ever get easier, but I'm thrilled to be doing it Okay, I'm gonna move on wheat stones genius Was to realize that this sensation that happens to us all the time this this stereopsis thing could be reproduced It could be reproduced by putting two dissimilar pictures in some kind of apparatus So that our eyes were presented with these two different pictures just like in real life, and then the miracle would happen again So this is the birth of the knowledge of humanity The consciousness that 3d exists and it's worth reproducing So now instead of painting on our walls or painting on a canvas we can paint in 3d and we get a much much more faithful Rendition of the scene that we're trying to reproduce Why is that important? Is it just entertaining? Is it just fun? Well, it is fun. We're all very familiar I think with James Cameron's mastery of the art of 3d and producing the film avatar Which really gave birth to a new awareness of what 3d is and suddenly every TV was 3d ready Funny thing is they're not anymore. Are they this reflects a strange phenomenon which associates itself with Stereoscopy that it comes everyone gets incredibly enthusiastic and then it kind of dies out because maybe it's too much trouble I don't know if I can really answer why But yes, it is entertaining and and we like our 3d films I think but it's much more than that again as your your present has told you Well, I can tell you I had a heart attack about a year ago and the man who put three stents in my arteries surrounding the heart Routinely performs that operation on patients in Australia while he's here in his lab here And it's done He wears a virtual reality mask and he has tools which are represented in Australia and he can do that incredibly fine operation By using virtual reality virtual reality is the great grandson of 3d It's the same thing. The only thing that's added is this very neat little trick with of the Objects that you're looking at will stay still while you move your head But it's it's basically what Charles Wheatstone invented and discovered and invented in 1832 So it's it has some very serious uses. There are other uses at present. There are a lot of space explorations going on Into our solar system. There are people Particularly NASA and ESA and JAXA, which is the Japanese version of NASA They are sending probes to visit all the other objects in the solar system apart from the earth so comets meet yours moons planets even Pluto and Of course, they're unmanned. So there's no man in there or woman Or being of any kind who can actually witness what these probes are seeing So how do we see it? Well, the photographs get telemeted back and I'm very fortunate to be working with a lot of these people to to seize the opportunity to make stereoscopic views from the photography that sent back So you can then sit in your in your home looking at your computer and you can imagine that you were there next to say a comet or an asteroid and you have eyes a hundred million miles apart and You're able to see this object in 3d. Now. This is the only slide. I'm gonna show you So if you've got your 3d equipment ready at home, here we are I'm not seeing that in 3d here. Let me see. Okay I'm hoping that you can see this but I'm cheating a little bit because what you can see at the moment I think is Mono, this is what would happen if there was no 3d in the world and this is the asteroid called Benu It's been visited by an amazing NASA mission called Osiris Rex. They loitered around next to this object Which is about half a mile across for a number of months took lots of wonderful pictures and this is an example of The kind of thing which these missions are sending back Things which have never been seen in human existence until now So now I'm gonna cheat. This is the mono version and can you guess what kind of shape this object is? Maybe it's something. It's a sort of flat biscuit thing with rounded corners. Maybe no if you see it in 3d It looks very different, right? And you can see the shape is like a well It's like a spinning top and this thing is rotating We're sitting on the equator here and a lot of these asteroid objects look like this They're kind of rubble piles. They're not very solid and the spinning motion generates this This spinning top shape and if you look you keep looking you see more and more You can see so much of the detail on the terminator between the light and the dark side these objects this particularly large object near the bottom is called Ben Ben and You can see it in glorious 3d if it was flat you wouldn't really register I think but the 3d gives you so much more So it's not just a toy and it's not just entertainment. This gives an instinctive understanding of so many objects Before the science even starts Okay That's my only slide. I'm gonna leave it up there in case you like it, but um No, we should take it down I'm here to introduce Denis Pelerin and Denis Pelerin and myself if you look at us You see two men who have had a very similar dream for most of their lives two men who? Wanted to bring a full awareness of Victorian stereoscopy into the 21st century Getting to know each other over the last ten years. We've made great strides and Actually a lot of the dreams have come true. I Guess we we fit together in in a complimentary fashion We've both been interested in 3d all our lives I had the passion of collecting 1850s stereoscopic cars for the last 50 years at least Denis has had the passion of Investigating the origins of these stereo cards Denis has the tenacity to actually live in the 19th century. He very seldom comes out So you're very you're witnessing something quite rare here. He lives in the 19th century I guess I live about halfway between the 19th and the 21st century But he has the talent for living in this this situation Researching it in incredible depth and of being able to write it up in a coherent fashion. I've become an editor Kind of by default because of the London stereoscopic company as it is now and I've enjoyed so much Collaborating with to need to make this book and the London stereoscopic company as it is now recreated is the channel through which We can promulgate we can share this all from this all this and this wonderful information with the world So the London scape stereoscopic company I'm stuttering now the London stereoscopic company is very proud to to publish this work written by Denis and Of all the books we publish perhaps. This is the one that I most dreamed of putting out there because it is the very core of stereoscopic research, it's where it all started and And This is the book which I wanted to write and couldn't write it's been written by Denis Thanks to his his great works and his great research It's the very birth of stereoscopy and to be honest with you This story has never been told before in the way that it's told in this book There have been so many misconceptions and so many deliberate Misrepresentations as you will find if you read the book and I know Denis will refer to this So this is the first time the true story has been told It gives me great pleasure To introduce the author of our book stereoscopy the dawn of 3d Ladies and gentlemen, mr. Denis battle around Thank you everyone and we're going to leave space and get back in time for for a While So this is King's College as it was in the past. Sorry when we could only get flat pictures Which stone or nobody else actually thought of Taking stereos of King's College But you can see that if you know the building things some things haven't changed really the buildings not very old King's College was open in the early 1830s anyway, so not very old building But there have been some improvements, so it's a pleasure to be here I'm really proud that we can we can do this presentation here because it's the home of stereoscopy and I'm very grateful to the principal of the college and to the to the whole team to the British Library, of course who is a stream stream streaming this event this talk and We are going heels. We're here as well to celebrate the archive the wonderful Work of the people the team at the archives under the direction of a Jeffrey Brauel and We've worked here for quite a long time. I'm sorry, and we're here as well to celebrate this man So this man. This is Charles Whitstone. This is a late portrait by the London stereoscopic company Which was never actually meant to be to be Published in 3d, but we managed to find negative and here is towards the end of his life Short bars for four or five years before his death really here And I'm so so glad because when I was researching for that book I was trying to find a statue or a bust of Whitstone and that's the only one we found we found a bust in the basement of The science museum it was part of the Whitstone collection and it was down in the basement and It was in good company because Prince Albert was there and Queen Victoria and some other people Andrew Ross and Other people, but it's the only Best the marble bust of Whitstone in existence. There are no statues of Whitstone is really a sort of a Forgotten genius and I hope what we hope this book is going to put him back in the limelight So we are here as well to celebrate this book They're the dawn of 3d stereoscopy the dawn of 3d and we're going to examine how it all happened So it's not the first time Dr. May and myself have come to King's College. We were here in 2016 we gave a talk about Charlotte Whitstone actually and I was back again in 2018 and again when we managed to get this Box back to King's College. It was on loan at the science museum and this is how it all started And why did we bring it back here? Because I had this picture in mind The the stereoscope was at the science museum and it was going away to Swindon because The storage rooms at Blythe house were being vacated because they wanted to make luxury flats As everybody knows that's what London needs most And so everything was going away to Swindon and I had that picture in mind Which is the last picture of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know that warehouse and I was thinking oh my god This if this this disappears, we will never find it again. So thanks to Geoffrey and his team We managed to bring the stereoscope back to King's College and that's I'm very proud of that I must say and I'm very very grateful to Geoffrey and his team for that. So yeah So here it is it is the grail of stereoscopy. This is the very first stereoscope. It doesn't look like much It looks very crude. It's a DIY if you want it's but it's it is the first stereoscope ever and As you can see it's made of wooden glass just wooden two pieces of mirror and And that's it and that's how which stone managed to show his Contemporaries how stereoscopy how stereopsis worked. He could preview himself But he needed an instrument to show people how it worked and he did it with mirrors Two mirrors at an angle of 890 degrees and two Drawings on our panels on either side and that's how it worked and we were very very Fortunate dr. May and I to be able to hold it this afternoon. We were wearing gloves But we managed to hold it and to look at it again And this is an amazing really an amazing stereoscope Amazing piece of work. A lot of people would not even have a second look but for us it is the beginning of everything Now when which stone invented the stereoscopy there was no photography So to in order to prove what he was he was what his theories he had to draw pictures And this is one of them. We managed to find a few of the original drawings from which stone the ones he presented in At the in front of the Royal Society in 1838 and this is one of them And here is another one which was not in his presentation. It's very crude. It's not really perfect But these are the first stereo pictures ever these are the oldest ones We don't know exactly if they are from 1832 or 38 But they are from the the the 30s the 1830s and they are the earliest examples surviving examples of stereoscopic pairs now we found I found this letter the Royal Society as well and this is interesting I Intend the stereoscope the instrument which accompanies this letter as a present to your daughters is writing to a friend in Cornwall Their skills in drawing will enable them by following the rules contained in the paper to produce many beautiful effects by its aid My drawings you will see are confined to outline geometrical figures. So Which stone when he produced his stereoscope just sent the stereoscope people had to make their own drawings Following his instructions. So that's amazing people. I mean especially young girls at the time The their education lacked in many many respects, but they were mostly very good at sewing cooking and drawing So they managed to use the stereoscope Now this is another very important piece in the archive and that's another one we managed to get back from the Science Museum where it was on loan since 1924. This is a prismatic and lenticular Stereoscope now. This is very important because according to History of photography Brewster invented the lenticular stereoscope and this is Whitstone's prototype and it was made before Brewster's invention But which stone for some reason why Brian told us he was a very shy person didn't want to antagonize Brewster and he sort of accepted that Brewster was the inventor of the lenticular stereoscope, but this this proves that he was not Whitstone was and this this is a double stereoscope the the board at the bottom is prisms and The the board which is a bit of a flap which is lifted Lenses so you could actually fuse the images and with the lenses you could magnify them So it's a very clever prototype Not in very good condition. It was actually made made into for the commerce it was commercialized and this is an early example and This was given to John Percy who took photos for Whitstone stereoscopes in 1885 Now this is David Brewster the inventor of the Brewster type stereoscope, which you can see on the table next to him He improved he said he improved Whitstone stereoscopes and Whitstone actually let it go at that At the beginning when Whitstone presented his mirror stereoscope Brewster was very enthusiastic He said it's amazing what the mr. Whitstone did but gradually He got to to the point where he thought he had invented stereoscopy and it got very very bad It got to a fight a fight in the columns of the times Okay, so this is not a real photo I tweaked it of course, but this is this is exactly what happened They exchanged very violent Letters in the columns of the times to because Brewster was contesting Whitstone's claim as the inventor of stereoscopy Now for the the earliest photos we have for the stereoscope Unfortunately a lot of lots of them have disappeared all these portraits of Michael Faraday which is a daguerreotype or two daguerreotypes for the Whitstone stereoscope and this picture of Dr. John Adamson, which is a calotype and this this is a Self-portrait apparently which Brewster took to Paris when he was trying to Interest Opticians in making stereoscope and so the stereoscope is a British invention But it went to France because Brewster fell off fell out with everybody in Britain So nobody wanted to make stereoscope So he went to Paris he met this person Louis-Julie Dubosque who accepted to make the stereoscope for him and the stereoscope was introduced back in Britain at the time of the great exhibition of 1851 and this is an original daguerreotype from a doctor mace collection Showing the 1851 exhibition and as you can see this is the actual crystal palace There is an elm tree in the middle actually there were three there were two at the other end But we never see them in photographs Strangely, so this is a very early photo the first stereoscopic Photographs people could actually see where photos of the crystal palace now. This is just a page. It's flat sorry, but it's one of the most complete and most interesting article that was published on the stereoscope as early as January 1852 and it's illustrated with woodcuts obviously no photographs at the time and It shows lots of stereoscopic pairs, but nobody had a stereoscope at the time So the irony of it is that it tells you all about Stereoscopy but the photos well the drawings you have to squint to see them You can look at them without a stereoscope because nobody had a stereoscope at the time So that's the irony of it and it's a wonderful wonderful article And you've got you've got you can see two examples of stereoscope the Wheatstone stereoscope at the top with the mirrors and The Brewster stereoscope at the bottom one in the middle really at the beginning It was very expensive to buy photographs daguerreotypes photographs on metal So people use the stereoscope with Outlined figures like this one these were lithographs So they were not very expensive and there were lots of them published these are by Jules Dubois They were published in the late 1850s in France and the following ones are by Frederick Hale Holmes who was an engineer in Britain and he published two sets of these stereolithographs in In 1852 so these are the first commercial Images that were bought by people most of the images were actually mirror images So you drew one image and then you drew the mirror of that image and when you put it in the stereoscope You actually had depth Of course, they started taking taking portraits in studio daguerreotypes Daguerreotype portraits had been made since since 1839 40 so they started taking stereoscopic daguerreotypes of people of still lifes like here the Medici vase It's a replica, but it's still a very nice stereo And still lifes and this one is particularly interesting. It's also from dr. Miss collection like Nearly all of those pictures and it's show because it shows a Brewster stereoscope on the on the left and Underneath a Whitstone stereoscope and it's it's the only photo we found of a Whitstone stereoscope so far And there are some other stereoscopes as well in the image. This is another interesting one This is a photo by Claude Antoine Claude was a French photographer, but working in Britain and again It shows lots of a photographic equipment including including on the on the left the Whitstone stereoscope prismatic stereoscope and on the right the Brewster-type stereoscope so we know the Whitstone prismatic stereoscope was commercialized as well and at the bottom You have a box with a lithograph stereoscopic lithograph. So that's an amazing image and it's in the book Now some people were working to taking photos for Whitstone's Mirror stereoscope and one of them was Roger Fenton. This is a photo of the Isle of Wight by Roger Fenton also in 1852 and I chose this photo of Paris Notre Dame without the spire And when the morgue was about to be demolished from about the same time around 1852 And these are in the collection here in the Whitstone collection at King's College London and in the archives They have the largest collection of stereoscopic pairs for the Whitstone stereoscope about 96 pairs and they are so Incredibly difficult to find that it's a really a real treasure to have them here now the Victorians They nothing was impossible for them and this is a very nice example as well This is another thing we brought back from the science museum and it's here now. It is a panoramic stereoscope Invented by Jules Duboisk. So you would look through the oculus here, and if you see the back of the back of the Stereoscope here, you've got two two boards one above the other the picture unfortunately is faded But we managed to find the original slide from which the photos were made and this is it This is the original glass slide and it's an over under stereoscopic stereoscopic photograph, I mean over and there is what most DVD blue rays 3d blue rays use the technique they use Jules Duboisk in 1852 had already invented the technique he was using mirrors One pointed upwards one pointed downwards and you could see in stereo and this is what you could actually You could actually watch So this is a panorama 3d panorama 1852 Paris by Jules Duboisk and this is amazing They were already trying to find to create some sort of movement in the stereoscope One year after stereoscopy was introduced during the Great Exhibition for the Commercial stereoscopy I would say so this is a panorama of Paris in 1852 and that's really amazing now also in 1852 in May in the journal la lumière there was an article about which stone and Claude working on movement movement in the stereoscope and They were working separately Claude was working with two images Showing the the extreme phases of movement and which stone was working with the phenocytoscope You know this wheel with things which were drawn on it and when you spend the wheel in a mirror you could see movement and They were they were not aware of each other's research, but this is what happened. So this is Claude This is a daguerreotype of Claude so you can see that it's in 3d But there is something wrong with the hand Now why because you had to close one eye and then the other to see the movement and this is what it looks like So this is 1852 and this is the beginning of the cinema in a way Not very okay. You you can't see much and there is not much of a story But this is the beginning they were trying to apply 3d and movement one year after they started Seroscopy as a as a business in a way and this is a very very rare advertisement showing the bioscope the one bottom bottom left. It's it is a sort of Phenocytoscope but with photographs so animated photographs in 3d. Oh and This is the original disc the only surviving discs for all we know and as you can see it's very faded And it shows a steam engine and When you spin the disc and you look at it with a special stereoscope, unfortunately the bioscope has Disappeared totally we don't we don't know we've never found any surviving a sample of it, but when you When you look as it's in 3d in the stereoscope This is what you see you see movement in 3d and we are in 1852 Now this is in the book, but we couldn't see the film of course we couldn't show the film in the book So it had to be shown for you here So Gradually the photographers got out of the studio and you have to remember that in those days when you wanted to take a photo Somebody mentioned the wet collodion plate. You had to prepare your Well plate before you took the photo you had to coat the plate with collodion you had to sensitize it Expose it to the light in the camera develop it at once and then varnish it and then you could start another one And they did stereos two pictures Everywhere and they started exploring the world. So they needed the dark room They needed water and this this sorry the next photo. Yeah, the next photo shows The dark room tent of Francis Frith who went to Egypt in 1857 and later on as well and Started taking stereo photographs of Egypt and so then you can see stands at the bottom and you can imagine a black dark world black tent Very thick so that there was no light going through in the desert one in the under the Egyptian Sun and He Frith in his memoir says that the the collodion was mixing with the sweat from his face And the collodion was actually boiling on the plate And he still managed to take those images in amazing images If you wanted to take photos on the glacier, you had to take your dark room and your water and all your chemicals On the glacier as well and pitch your tent on the glacier If you wanted to take photos in London, you couldn't pitch a tent You had to have a portable dark room and If you wanted if you were traveling and taking photos through a Brittany like here or Normandy or Italy You could also have a sort of a dark room van a dark room van Which which you could take anywhere and it was a van you lived there It was a caravan and a dark room at the same time So that's what they did in the 1850s and by the end of the 1850s You could visit the whole world in 3d and they sorry they started making lots and lots of Stereos, they were many other factories of stereos and this is a very rare example of showing the making of stereo photographs and Gradually Stereos came into the parlor of the middle classes and this is a photo showing Alexi Godin his wife and his mother-in-law and two other people actually looking at stereos in the parlor and that's that was the TV of the Time a doctor may mention that it was the television of the 1850s You had stereos everywhere in every parlor of the middle class. It was quite expensive But so only for the middle class and they could discover the world They could get to a they could get to a I'm sorry going in the wrong way They could get to a busin bell for example as they had never seen it before very few people had been to Egypt very few people could afford the trip and very few people Wanted actually to suffer the heat and everything so Watching the world from from home from the fireside in a stereoscope was a very nice option And that's when the craze for stereoscopy started in around 1857 because Thanks to the progress in the making of photographic paper Cards became cheaper and by 1859 you could even visit Japan and China I mean how many people in those days ever went to ban in China and you could also Met your well the celebrities of the time. This is Charles Dickens taken Minutes before he was going to read one of his Christmas stories. This is a photo by Herbert Watkins So we have photos of celebrities in 3d. This is of course Is embarking in Brunel Standing in front of the Great Eastern This is one of the few stereos of Brunel and Of course, this is Queen Victoria Queen Victoria in 1854 dagger a type hand-tinted by Antoine Claudet and Throughout a rain we have photos of her This is a photo by Valentine taken in Scotland after the death of a resident and the young girl next to her is the youngest child Princess Beatrice and Here she is again this time in 1897 She was celebrating a six the 60th anniversary of a of a rain and she was still there and Stereoscopy shows her through all these years And of course you could have nice portrait This is a wonderful Hand-tinted dagger a type of a child by Dr. May's favorite photographer Thomas Richard Williams and this is another interesting portrait of Colonel Ewitt also by the same Photographer and notice the tinting I mean tinting an image, which is about seven centimeters high By six centimeters wide is a difficult But you have to tint to and to make sure that it's still stereoscopic They're very difficult nobody could do that and of course you could escape to the land of the fairies or Sorry or some fairytales like a little red riding hood and all these photos are hand-tinted again These these are on paper you could also Explore the supernatural with a ghost the making of Stereos of ghosts was a very popular Thing in the 1850s office if 758 and this is from that period You could also have photos showing the fashion of the time here a nice lady in crinoline and a gentleman with a the top hat Saying hello to the lady and you could also see occupations a wonderful photo by Frank M. Good Deep-sea divers Actually, it's dr. May sitting and I am the one without the helmet. We are Diving deep into the sea of stereoscopy Sculpture of course was amazing in the stereoscope especially when you use the mirrors because you could see both sides of the sculpture and To this day, I don't understand why Sculptures are not all photographed in stereo. I still understand why photograph a sculpture With just one image flat You could recreate paintings. This is the death of chatterton by after Henry Wallace a very famous painting from 1856 and you could also take photos of the moon So we're going to ask well doctor may explain a little always going to explain During the talk how you can take a photo of the moon when you are standing on earth and And Some social issues were also approached in the stereoscope This one is called out in the bitter cold and it's the fate of these widows they had 40 days to leave the premises after the death of their husbands and They were not rich if they didn't have any wealthy relatives. They ended up in the streets with their children and special effects as well rain, I mean remember Exposures worth about 20 seconds. So you can't photograph rain you can't photograph Dresses or skirts being blown by the wind. So you have to imagine special effects for the stereoscope So strings for the rain and wires, of course holding the dresses But it's it's still special effect that the very beginning and all this with the London stereoscopic company the the original one which was created in 1854 and it was part of it and Millions of stereos were sold by the London stereoscopic company in Britain and by other firms in France exam for example the Godin brothers in Paris and It's only fitting that we should actually write the new London stereoscopic company write a book about about stereoscopy and I will end here this is the Sort of the end of that in a way. It's our sort of a Way to say thank you to our predecessors the wonderful things they did and we wanted to pay tribute to them in that book and To pay tribute to Charles Whitstone and stereoscopy. Thank you very much Very much I want to remind those of you who are out in the ether You're not really in ether, but to us you are that we're very happy to take your questions if you want to type them in you'll see the questions Box at the bottom of your screen. Please send us in some questions and we'll take those in a few moments We can also take questions from our live audience eventually, but as moderator I get I get to ask the first bunch of questions Thank you very much to me. That was a fabulous introduction to the book There's so much more in it and some of it I think it would be really good for the audience to know those people who don't know the stereo industry from the 1850s and especially the 1860s do you want to talk a little bit more about the size of the industry once it left these few individuals doing really groundbreaking work it became an Enormous thing do you want to talk a little bit about that huge thing that was the industry both of you either of you? well to me there's a kind of analogy because I'm in the music business and You know the music industry at its best is entertaining people with a succession of new ideas and Everybody's waiting for the next record from whoever it might be and might be Madonna. I don't know it might be Lady Gaga might be Queen In those days, they were all absolutely psyched up and waiting for the next release from Elliot or from Sylvester You know and they would rush out and get them and obviously take them home and enjoy this lovely Private experience of looking into the box and being in the world that was created by these people It wasn't it was massive the London stereoscopic company had three outlets in London alone And they boasted a million views. So you had a wide choice of stuff and it was massive landscapes portraits items of Historical interest recreations of historical scenes like the signing of a Magna Carta or whatever All kinds of things everything that you could imagine was done in stereoscopy in those days I'm saying stereoscopy like to Nina. I think most people say stereoscopy, but it's a it's a kind of ugly word So Stereoscopy, yeah, what would you say to me? Yeah, I think it's well It's actually difficult to know how many cars were produced and by whom most of the time because there are no figures You can't find any information in the press of the time Unfortunately all the ledgers or the archives of these these companies are unfortunately disappeared. So we only left with the cars So we know for example Brian was mentioning Eliot Eliot James Eliot was a very very good photographer of genre scenes especially So we know he produced Thousands of them because they are very common to find even these days But some productions are they're only a handful left So we don't know and and it's it's what's actually interesting because we don't know everything and they're still There's still so much to to research. That's what I like Yeah, and there's all these great things to find away in the archives that people haven't yet seen Do you have a sense for? Maybe why that is that things are still hidden at the backs of the archives in terms of stereoscopy because There there is so much to say about it in such a large part of history And yet as you said somewhat hidden the detritus is all in the corners of the archives still curious Yes, obviously a lot of them have been people's attics Over the years and generally they were very carefully preserved as Family kind of heirlooms, I suppose so you can still find things which nobody has been looking at for a hundred years still happens and As Denise says it's incredible to us that we've been engaged in looking at this stuff for 20 30 40 50 years and we still find things which we have never come across before Outrageously beautiful and innovative bits of stereoscopy, which were obviously big at the time, but I've got lost as you say over the years Well, I think that the problem is that Stereo stereos apart from stereoscopic daguerreotypes, which were which were very expensive at the time and which have been preserved as gems and Most of the the other photos they were just stacked on this on the table I mean a bit like postcards if you want, you know or Christmas card Whatever they were just on the table with a stereoscope and people if people came to visit they would they would enjoy a couple of stereos and they were never really considered very precious and That's why they were neglected by a lot of historians and and they were also commercial And that's that's a rude world in the world of art. I mean as if art was never commercial Very interesting. Yeah, it's a good point area for me. I must say as an artist you wonder Is commercialism a dirty word? The two extremes are neither of them are very good. The one extreme is you're in your In your in your room and you make art and you never show it to anyone Which is actually not very helpful to anyone It's not a conversation and the other extreme is you just make your you convert your art into something Which is just about making money Which is obviously not a good extreme either but somewhere in the middle I believe is where artists normally sit and they want to create from their hearts It's a very private thing, but they want to be heard. They want to communicate They want to get a reaction from an audience and that's exactly where these Victorian Wonderful stereoscopic photographers sat it was commercial and they were vying for an audience But it was art and in my opinion very innovative and very true to to their hearts And there is something else as well. I mean The flat photos you can put in a frame you can exhibit, you know, but stereo you can't I mean a stereo Stereos are very small. They look ridiculous in a frame and and you can't just you know Just go around in a room with stereos. You have to stop and look at them. That's the that's the main difference and it Needs an effort and a lot of people are not ready these one these days And some will not maybe in the past to to to make that effort There are so I think the contribution of having a stereo viewer That you can take with you as a researcher Into an archive where the technology has been split apart from the images makes a big difference very often the technology is over It's one collection and the images are in a different collection and in order to view these you need both and very often those collections have been Separated artificially, but now that we can all carry our own with us. Thanks to you We can take them take them into the archive and view those images without having to merge to Archives. Yeah, you don't have to explain it if you can actually see it. This brings me great joy This is part of my dream that everyone should be able to have And that it brings you Of course of the fact that the stereos have been neglected was that some most of the time They didn't come with a stereoscope and in some archives I won't say which one at some point in the 1930s a curator took the stereos out of The cupboards and he decided to keep one half for the archive and one half for the public So he chopped all of the stereos in the collection in two halves Because he didn't have stereoscope to to look at them and see that the pictures were not identical They were slightly different and they were in 3d This is a kind of a battle which we still fight There is great prejudice really against the stereoscopic photograph and they very much And a photography has been viewed as the poor man's art from Painting circles and likewise the stereoscope has been viewed as the poor man's kind of photography by Photographers so we're overcoming this kind of prejudice the whole time and people of it very often just don't get it because they haven't experienced it There's a very good friend here. I won't embarrass her by Saying her name, but she got her doctorate By incredible persistence because her supervisor actually didn't really believe that stereoscopy was important And didn't understand why she thought it was important nevertheless. She persisted and she got her doctorate I'm thrilled to say And to me that that sums it all up. It's very hard. You know, we still find that people think this is a toy and I guess it's our mission in life to demonstrate that it's not that it's much more than that And this is the way photography should be done in my opinion Maybe we need one more link to make it a bit easier for people But this is a dream come true for me because this is the book. I always wanted to see Don't and thanks to Dany. This explains everything And can I ask speaking of dreams coming unless you wanted to talk about To go back to dreams come true I want to go back to our main characters main character of Wheatstone But especially to in this book you bring out this relationship between Wheatstone and another Fantastic favorite of photographic history Antoine Claude. Do you want to talk a little bit about their relationship and the things that they did together? Because I think Claude is one of those fantastic characters in photographic history who is also a bit of a mystery He is and maybe you want to talk about why he's a bit of a mystery But also why it's important that the two of them were inventing together No, that's interesting. Well, as you know from the name is was French He actually started working in glass in a glass factory first and then he got interested in Photography and he was one of the pupils of Daguerre the inventor of the Daguerre type and he opened one of the first photographic studios in London and when the stereoscope was introduced in Britain during the Great Exhibition he was He didn't really see there because it was nearly invisible. Nobody could actually see the stereoscope at the Great Exhibition It was just a very small object among a hundred thousand exhibits, but he went to a swarie Given by Lord Ross and he actually saw a stereoscope and he started he was one of the first to actually Advertise and make stereoscopic pictures of the crystal or the crystal palace the exhibition and he sent some to the Tsar in Russia and the Tsar couldn't come to the exhibition But he was so thrilled when he saw the pictures He said it's it's it's as if I had been there and he sent Claude a wonderful Diamond ring to thank him for the for the experience and Claude is is it is bit of a mystery because Actually, there is too much information about him. He advertised so much I mean so some people like T.R. Williams, for example They advertise three times in their career Claude advertised nearly every day and he changed the advertisements nearly every week So we have too much information and he was so prolific and he helped with stone with that at the beginning Taking photos he used different baselines to see the exaggeration too much depth or too little depth What was the the balance between the two so they work together, but unfortunately? All these early material has disappeared and that's terrible That's the curse of stereoscopy all the early images have disappeared in part That's because Claude's studio burned down just after his death when they gathered everything together to divide it Among the family that was when the fire happened, so we don't know what's disappeared sadly in Claude's fire So let's add in the other mix to the care of the other character to the mix Brewster We all know how cranky Brewster was and he has a reputation in the history of science and in photographic history Do you want to talk a little bit more about Brewster? We've tried to kind of Tread the fine line in the book Not wishing to kind of smash his reputation and we had a great reputation in many fields And he undoubtedly behaved badly Towards Wheatstone because he did actually claim the discovery and tried to steal it from Wheatstone He's very sad. We now know the truth, but that's falsehood was perpetuated for a hundred years you know So, you know fake do they call it fake news with the wisdom in existence even before Donald Trump so it's It's it's very I mean we discussed this a lot in the book You know, do we go the whole how far do we go to do we kind of? Push Brewster too far down No, we shouldn't because he was a very good scientist and did some great work and after all he was responsible for the Popularization you can't take that away from him. He really was he he decided on this particular format, which was very portable Very high quality and it could be produced relatively cheaply And that is the reason that it completely took over Victorian Britain and France and eventually the world So you can't take too much away from Brewster, but you know scientists are not immune from Defects in their personalities which can make them jealous and make them you know, I live in the scientific community I know this and it's not you know you think people get greedy for money well scientists very often do get greedy for recognition and You can see this in many many cases particularly in astronomy where people will seize upon an idea and they won't let that idea Go and they will defend it to their death even though they know that it's the wrong idea So scientists are very strange people. Science is a truth But scientists are always searching for the truth and not always giving you what you need The worst thing Brewster did was actually to invent that What we knew so far as this history of the stereoscope namely that Queen Victoria While she was visiting the exhibition She visited the exhibition 34 times or something like that She stopped at this the stand of a Julie boss so the stereoscopes and was amused and that was The success image an overnight success for the stereoscope. Well, and and this the myth Blasted for 150 years. It didn't happen. No. No, it didn't happen which Brewster invented the whole story. He wrote it in 1852 in the North British review He was the editor and he wrote it in the third person He did that he did that and it's never it's not corroborated by Queen Victoria's journal It's not corroborated by Dubosque who was supposed to have presented the Queen with a luxurious stereoscope It's corroborated by nobody he invented the story and in 1856 when he published his book about the stereoscope He used the same story, but this time he said I did this I did that and He was mr. Optics in his days. He was he was a Great person and people believed him and people believed him for hundred and fifty years And it was a lie, but on the other hand, I must say that he did a lot To promote the stereoscope the applications of the stereoscope Something which stone was not interested in at all which stone was interested in experimenting with binocular vision Brewster so all the applications of the stereoscope to science to a history to a archaeology And even to us the supernatural is the one who gave who gave the idea to create those ghosts in the stereoscope So so that's something very important He did all his theories about the stereoscope and all that the quarrel with a which stone is something we should we should really forget interesting nonetheless, I mean and these kinds of things did arise at the beginnings of photography at the beginning of stereoscopy These sort of contentious the 1850s were notoriously contentious for photography stereoscopy and Notoriously innovative because we can say with confidence that everything that you can do with stereo had been done by 1858 Everything every possible wrinkle and innovative Idea had been incorporated incredible the richness of their creative powers I think the Victorians didn't know the word impossible. I mean, I mean we showed you the film. I mean honestly 1852 being able to do that. It's of course it looks a bit crude to us But in those days with the technology they had that was amazing being able to recreate movement in 3d Yeah, and with photographs. Yeah, and that leads me to turn to one of our questions from the audience I'm just trying to see it now Which was do you either of you know when ophthalmologists began using those kinds of 3d drawings? Hmm in in diagnosing problems with patients Well, very early. We have some do boss Yes, we have we have some some yes some by the boss. We are in the 1850. That's right Yeah, they still use I had my eyes checked recently and they still use something quite similar They put a little stereoscope on you and they try different things and the early ones were very entertaining have a little budgie and a cage and if you do the thing right then the budgie will go into the cage So it's um, they're delightful these things. They are serious used to Opticians Yes, it's right trying to see how far you can actually converge and yeah, there are lots of images like that And some people of course have difficulty seeing stereo and other people like Can both of these previews? Yes, both of you can preview them. I know Danny can Yeah, it becomes a lifetime habit as a kid I used to line my my bed looking at the wallpaper and wallpaper is always repetitive So if you relax your eyes the pattern will move and lock in in different positions and suddenly the wall appears like it's coming towards you I remember being fascinated by this stuff And I remember lying in my bed also with one eye under the covers and the other eye not and thinking I've got two separate images here What what and it's like a ghostly image and all these sorts went through my head And I think that's why I was so fascinated when I discovered these little cars in Weetabix packets that actually used that fact and made your eyes do that thing and Yeah, I was good I was sort of dreamed that I I want to go back there and I kind of wish that I had invented it I would be like Bruce or I would be claiming that I actually did Do you have a special technique for teaching people how to preview it took me an hour on a train To do to learn to learn how to do it Well, the thing is to take a card which is not too big because I mean the bigger the car The more the more difficult it is to actually fuse and to really relax your eyes and and look Not at the card but through the card and look at one particular point so it could be for example the The steeple of a church, you know something like that You choose one particular point in the card and you just try to look through the card and just you know Just like when you are daydreaming you let you let your really your eyes relax and suddenly it uses And I love that moment when you suddenly fall into the image That's right And you've blocked out everything else and it takes over all of your perception and that's very important That's the the magic of stereoscopy you actually step into the image and that's something It's very difficult to explain unless you've actually experienced it But that's the magic and I mean both of us We've seen millions of images, but when we see an image each time a new image We have the same, you know thrilled Yeah, the thrill never goes it's funny It's a nice kind of select band of people who love this stuff, but it's it's growing and growing I have a wonderful community of of Young stereoscopes on Instagram now. I know a lot of you are watching Which thrills me and I follow all of them So I switch on my my phone on my computer in the morning and I can spin through lots of wonderful new Innovative stereoscopic images from this community, which is this right now. I love it. So it's growing. It's It's the best is yet to come Absolutely is and maybe that's a good point to take a question from one of our viewers about Current technology digital technology. How can we make stereo with our iPhones? It's incredibly simple. I Did it today with some of the people I met here. You just get your there's a little app actually, which is very nice called This is for you Richard. I'm going to show you it's called i3d Steroid and I don't know if you can see this is a little app But you can easily find it and if you go to our London stereoscopic company website You can see all this stuff, but you get your little app you go into your app and You hit the camera button and you can take a picture. I can probably show you here I'm gonna take a picture of Denny. Can you get me here? So you take a picture to me Denny's not gonna move he's gonna stay like this so I can take two pictures consecutively here's one Here's another So now I've taken the two images and this little app puts them side by side There's a little magic button down here, which aligns them in case I didn't do it accurately enough and then basically you can save your image you save You save that stereoscopic image to your photos at the original resolution resolution It's now saving and I can now go into my photos and Find that picture And here it will be Here's my photo to me if you turn you can't you phone on the side It's already you put this in your owl VR kit, which I assume you have and All of you here if you don't if you don't you need one and there you have Denny in the stereoscope And I wish I could show you it in 3d, but it's perfect Let me see does he look just as 3d as he looks sitting there. Let's make sure I'm gonna admit something No, I've blundered because I've saved it. I've saved the reversed image and I need to save That would be all right if you were cross-eyed what I like about that technique is that I mean phones now are much better than most Stereo cameras especially digital ones and it's actually the technique they use at the beginning because at the beginning of Stereo photography it was difficult to to find two lenses which were identical It's very difficult even nowadays actually is very difficult to make two identical lenses So they used one camera and they took one photo and they move the camera to the side and they took another one But in those days it took 20 30 seconds now You can do that in two seconds and see the results immediately and people still find this difficult going to check and see if you Look 3d. Oh look Actually, you look more 3d than you do in person The magic here I wish we could show you at home Why would you could show you here? Well, we can pass this around later But it's that simple to take pictures of your friends in 3d and they're forever if you take pictures of your kids in 3d as I've done for 50 years It's incredible because you those pictures are so much more evocative than a snapshot you I have pictures of my son When he was first learning to walk in 3d, and I feel like I'm there I could like I could talk to him. It's a wonderful thing So there you go, yes, I'll put this up on the on the site and you can see later on One of our viewers Laura. Yes, you can see all of these images that Denny showed They are in the book and an owl viewer comes with the book. So you don't have to purchase one extra There's an owl viewer in there and then you can use your owl viewer and your phone to make your own 3d images So a couple of them I want to get down to some of the questions. We've got a great pile of questions coming from the audience and James wants to know now that it's been found will the Wheatstone stereoscope be on display anywhere This is maybe not a question for you. Well, it wasn't display. It wasn't display in A display case in one of the corridors, but of course with COVID and things so it was taken out, but Maybe we need a Big thumbs up from the back of the room. So, yes I think it needs to be seen and that's one of the reasons why we Insisted on having it back here at King's College because it is important. Yeah, let it be noted. The president is nodding With the book I think that's a comprehensive yes a question about the tissue stereos They're part of the story of 3d could both of you say a little bit more about the tissue stereos Just to sort of in live in that story. Shall I start you go? There's such beautiful little works of art in themselves and so labor-intensive. It's almost impossible to believe that they were mass produced Basically, they would print a normal stereo image. I say normal, you know a decent stereo image On something on a very thin piece of paper almost like tissue paper but paper that you can see through Translucent you would say they would then turn it over they printed on this This very thin paper turn it over paint on the back All the colors which would make it come to life and they would also prick out all things like Jewelry and lights so that when you look at this thing from the front The colors come through and suddenly instead of looking at a black and white image You're looking at a full color image with things that glitter jewelry and eyes in the case of the Diabraries Their eyes were made to glow red because they've pricked out the eyes and put little Colored red gels on the back so they're utterly magical It's it would be magical enough in mono but in 3d with the depth as well They're incredibly beautiful things and you cannot make them now. We've tried Really hard yeah with all the technology that's available to us now you cannot make a French tissue of that kind of quality even a one-off mass production forget it Digital technology just doesn't hack it So to hold one of these things in your hand and think oh, here's a nice stereo view It's this black and white put it in here You hold it up to the light and suddenly the whole scene just bursts into life. They are so beautiful Diabraries are a very good example of it But there's lots of them. There's lots of theatricals. Denise you tell you about theatricals tell us about the yeah Well, it's the same principle and the actually the tissue part is to hide the works because you there is a very very thin Another layer of paper just for tissue paper So that it diffuses the light and it hides the it hides the back of the the card of the fabric is painted And the only thing is that they are thin paper and thin tissue They are very fragile they break easy especially when they have been you know pricked and sometimes Razor cuts as well But for example, there is a sword or something in theatricals You have people fighting and so they they use the razor to her to make the saw the flash and Unfortunately, it makes the picture very very fragile and so a lot of them are Damaged but but they are amazing and they produced a place Scenes from place In tissues and people Felt they were there. I mean we sometimes you know We have DVDs of plays or famous things and we can watch Shakespeare's on DVD It was the same they would go to the theater and they would buy a set of six or twelve cards with the main scenes from the play And it was a way of really relieving the plane It's amazing. I Think we have a good example of The Huguenot in the book. This is if you want to have a yeah, this is a Reproduction as best we can do. This is the way the card is particularly beautiful one called the fairy by Elliot This is how it looks when the lights all coming from the front when the light comes from the back It turns into this beautiful Coloured view This doesn't do it justice though. We've done our best, but if you actually hold these things and view them It's just magnificent works of art Now it's tissues They're quite incredible I can recommend to everyone to try and see one for real at some point the early one because after a while Yes, they're so why they did it was a bit Yes, that's the thing too. There were definitely phases in production Don't you think about the quality and about the level of the photographers who were making these stereos as well Do you want to talk a little bit about those the timeline of that? That's why the book is concentrating on under the first 30 years Well, actually less than that the further the golden age which lasted only six or seven years until the the exhibition of 1862 and after that it became a little more mass production and They're less artistic in a way and a lot of photographers actually stopped taking photos because they were no longer They didn't want to to mass produce too much They wanted quality and and after a while. Yes, stereo doesn't get as interesting unfortunately and The earlier stereos that are still means most of them and the later ones they have faded and They are badly swell survive. Yeah, they are It's quite interesting really the earlier the earlier the photo usually the best way to use I find that fascinating and you've turned just just the page that I was hoping you would turn to because From our audience about taking stereos of the moon and you said that you were going to tell us how to take a stereo The moon, so no Denise said I was gonna see You're the only one who can explain that Well, it's um, it's a it's a fun thing to do and as usually it was done very very early Warren de la Rue famous astronomer of the time had this idea that he wanted to take a Stereoscopic picture of the moon Now if you just go up there with a stereo camera and take a picture of the moon You get very little because your eyes are two and a half inches apart and the thing is a quarter of a million miles away so you really want your eyes to be about a Tenth of a million miles away something like that. You can't do that. So what do you do? Well, you let the moon do it for you you wait and the moon does this thing called liberation The moon is spinning on its axis and it's also going around the earth and they're more or less synchronized Which is why we always see the same side of the moon, but not quite because the moon is not going in a circle It's going in an ellipse so the spin gets ahead and behind and Viewed from the earth it wobbles so you wait for it to wobble this way and then wobble that way You put the two pictures together and it's as if your eyes were a hundred thousand miles apart So you get your stereo image and it works like a dream. I've done it recently with my very good friend astrophotographer Jamie Cooper and There's no limit to the the fun you can have With astronomical objects think about astronomical bodies is they all rotate so they all can do this You can take great pictures of Mars by waiting for Mars to rotate stereoscopic pictures I should say and the picture I showed you earlier of the asteroid Bennu That probe was actually more or less standing still and it's waiting for the The we just waited for the object itself to turn around There's a problem the problem is as it's turning around the illumination is changing So the shadows get all messed up and somebody has to sit there for hours and hours and fix the shadows That's generally me That was taken with my very good friend and colleague Claudia Mansoni who trawls through all the NASA archives they're all free folks NASA is by public subscription, so you can go on the archives of every NASA mission and Find things to make stereos out of and I know some of you out there are already doing this that applies to the most recent Mars mission Which I'm also involved in Very fortunate for me, so people are going in there and making their own stereos, and it's all good stuff And what's Interesting about Warren DeLarro is that he was using quite collagen again So not very sensitive and and sometimes you had to wait four years to get the two pairs Because this is Britain so you know even if you you're there ready. Oh, yes There are clouds in the sky. Oh, so you have to wait. Yeah, you have to match up the phases exactly So if you want a stereo picture of a half moon You have to wait for that exact moment when the illumination is right and normally there's a cloud in the way So you wait till the next month and the next month and as you say weren't a little or until a room waited for five years for the whole project James asked a question about whether Wheatstone and Brewster profited from the stereoscope, but I think it's interesting to note that The sort of role of publishers especially when you think about the stereos of the moon Which were wildly popular DeLarro patented his and had them sold through a publisher Maybe you want to talk a little bit about the role of the publisher and about how people actually made money in this way It's fascinating from me having recreated the London stereoscopic company I see myself encountering all the problems that they must have encountered. It's really interesting Problems of actually how you make the things how you reproduce them how you sell them how you advertise them How you handle your staff, you know, how you handle the credits to your stuff and the original LSE were notoriously Ungenerous they never credited their photographers. So I think that's rather immoral. I always try and credit people all those things But as for making money very difficult We we kind of break even I guess on what we do which is great I'm quite happy with that because it's all about getting the stuff out there There's no doubt that the London stereoscopic company in the late 1850s did make a profit But I think it disappeared quite quickly when the popularity declined and they had to diversify into different things they started selling musical instruments and Bicycles also bicycles and everything and they were still around until 1920 something or other But eventually the company was wound up. So they eventually obviously decided it wasn't profitable But boy, they had a good run. It's not bad from 1850 to 1920 and when you wanted to publish a book in the 1856 is with stereos You couldn't print the stereos you had to actually one that you could print photographs real photographs So they had to paste real photographs in the books And now, you know, it's done it's done with machines But those days somebody had to actually print contact prints all the images and paste them by hand in the book And that must have cost a lot But they did Which is probably why they began selling them as a sort of appended thing You'd get your text and then you would get your stereo as a separate object and the text and the stereos would go together Yeah, we can do it all in one book. We have a wonderful Designer Jamie Simmons who's here tonight who puts all these things together and a wonderful publisher who is? Robin Reese very small team and He interacts with the present-day printers and publishers to get the maximum quality because in an art book you can do quite well Things look very photographic if you're viewing it with the stereoscope you have a quite a significant magnification So normally even with a good art book, you'll see all the dots of the reproduction. We have a very fine Screen which is called stochastic. So there's a randomization of the dots. So this stands up pretty well in the stereoscope It's about as well as you can do now. So I hate it when you see a stereoscopic book Which someone spent a lot of time putting together, but you put your Stereoscope on it and suddenly all you can see is dots That's the kind of stuff which we as publishers we get into we want the quality we want people to enjoy them I go wow It's the wow which makes us happy And it really allows people to study them as and I think this is in in this way This is what I meant when I said this has contributed so much to us taking these objects seriously is finally we can get a book And and people around the world can use these to see what the stereo really looks like Obviously, you can't reproduce a daguerreotype in the same way Obviously, it looks a little bit different if it's this sort of ink versus hand tinting But at the same time it makes it possible To contemplate what these objects might look like were you to have them were you to be able to be here and see The fantastic stereos that are here absolutely We're engaged in all kinds of stuff in the LSE now because we've published a book about The moon landings on the 50th anniversary and of course they they were all real stereos We were able to go back into their archives and make stereos anew and Astronomy is is a very good subject for Syria and we're planning At this moment the very first stereoscopic atlas of an asteroid called Bennu the one I showed you earlier And it will have lots and lots of stereoscopic views in and a whole history of asteroids and this particular Voyage of discovery, so I'm very excited about that that the sky is the limit There is really no limit for what you can do with stereo And is this something you think both wheat stone that we've done thought about or talked about when he was first Thinking about this is how stereo vision works We think not no no Brewster honestly tried all the applications which stone was always Insisting on the experiments about binocular vision. That's that's what he was he had in mind He tried and he asked people to take photos I mean there is this amazing collection here at King's College of 96 stereoscopic pairs for the boost the Wheatstone stereoscope But they are very difficult to view because you can't free view them. They are too big so The best thing would be to photograph them and reduce them and so that they could so we have printed a couple here but So he wanted people to make photos for his stereoscope, but he never really got into the applications and what they could do Yes, he was an academic He was more a researcher and experiment. I mean he was professor of experimental philosophy for 40 years here So that's quite a long career It really is and it's been quite a long evening and I'm afraid it's now time for us to wrap up So I want to first thank the two of you Dr. Brian May to need Pella. Oh, thank you very much And I want to thank Kings for this fantastic venue and all their hospitality and the British Library for supporting launch of this fabulous book Once again, the book is for sale. It will be on your screen. There's a button to press somewhere on your screen And you too can have this in your living room and enjoy it as long and make your own Stereos to go in your owl viewer that you will get along with the book And can I say thank you Kelly Kelly Wilder so much presenting this and putting so much