HF The History of Photography 600pág

256 The collodion period
normal distance apart. This defect was overcome in Claudet's improved instrument,
patented in March 18 5 5, in which the lenses were set in adjustable tubes. The same
patent also protected his invention of the large revolving stereoscope in which up to
100 stereoscopic slides were mounted on an endless band and rotated by knobs.
Duboscq, Claudet, and others worked for many years on the possibility of combining
the stereoscope with the zoetrope, and their experiments with 'moving
photographic figures', as Claudet termed them, marked the first step towards threedimensional
motion pictures. In his patent of February I 860 P. H. DESVIGNES suggested
showing for this purpose a series of stereoscopic views in a revolving cylinder, and
cited as an example photographs of a steam engine 'in which each view must be
taken when the engine is at a different part of its stroke'. Several pairs of stereoscopic
pictures of posed consecutive phases of an action such as a man taking his hat off were
mounted in a revolving cylinder with as many slots as there were views, and thus
the illusion of relief and motion were combined in the pictures. Such instruments,
called 'stereotropes', were shown at the International Exhibition, 1862.
Claudet's stereomonoscope, described to the Royal Society in April 185 8,14 was
an improved viewing instrument in which the two stereo-pictures were combined
into a single image on a large ground-glass screen, enabling several spectators to see
the picture at the sa1ne time.
The sudden popularity of the lenticular stereoscope, which almost superseded the
reflecting stereoscope,15 seems to have gone to Brewster's head, and his personal
antagonism to Professor Wheatstone led him to make certain incorrect statements in
an attempt to deny him the credit of being the first to obtain stereoscopic effect from
flat pictures. In his book The Stereoscope ( 18 56) Brewster stated that James Elliot of
Edinburgh had preceded Wheatstone 'in the general conception of a stereoscope',
although Elliot himself had renounced all claim to priority-which was based on a
mistake-four years previously.16 Brewster was extremely tenacious of an opinion
once he had formed it, and revived the controversy in a most extraordinary manner
in an anonymous letter to The Times in October 1856, in which he not only disputed
Wheatstone's claim to the invention of the stereoscope, but even denied his priority
in the discovery of the principle upon which it is founded. In the ensuing polemical
correspondence between himself (no longer anonymous) and Wheatstone in October
and November, Brewster showed extreme spite. He thoroughly enjoyed public
duelling, not only with Wheatstone but also with other scientists. Though his misrepresentations
of fact were completely refuted by Wheatstone, Brewster took the
opportunity to renew his attack on the occasion of the discovery at a Lille museum
in I 8 59 of two almost identical drawings by the seventeenth-century Florentine artist
Jacopo Chimenti. These he acclaimed as stereoscopic drawings made over two
centuries before Wheatstone-an assertion refuted by scientists in England and France :
only the members of the Photographic Society of Scotland politely agreed with their
disputatious President. It is therefore the more astonishing that Professor Stenger,
writing about early stereoscopy,17 should give credit to these Chimenti drawings,
although they are drawn in such a way that any relief they present is the result of
slight unintentional variations between the original and the copy made from it.
When the collodion process had established itself, stereoscopic photography, like
photography in general, received a tremendous impetus, for paper positives mounted
on cardboard could be mass-produced and sold at a fraction of the price of stereoscopic
daguerreotypes.
In 1854 a man of humble origin, GEORGE SWAN NOTTAGE, founded the London
Stereoscopic Company for the manufacture and sale of lenticular stereoscopes and