#London Stereoscopic Company

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Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell by Denis Pellerin

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Halloween 1865 (ph. London Stereoscopic Company)

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8th February 1928 saw John Logie Baird demonstrate his invention, the television, transmitting from London to New York.

A man and a woman sat before an electric eye in a London laboratory tonight and a group of persons in a darkened cellar in this village outside New York watched them turn their heads and move from side to side.

The images were crude, imperfect, broken, but they were images none the less. Man’s vision had panned the ocean; transatlantic television was a demonstrated reality, and one more great dream of science was on the way to realisation.

The demonstration was made by the Baird Television Development Companyof London, using short-wave radio sets for transmission of the “vision sound” and the televisor invented by John L.Baird – who has also invented an instrument for seeing in the dark – for turning this sound back into vision after its ocean hop.

The transformed vision of the man and woman in the London laboratory came through the ether in the form of a bumblebee’s hum, a musical buzz or irregular cadence representing in sound the lights and shadows of their faces – all that was transmitted in the test.

When the televisor, a black box compact enough to be carried around in a taxi, had done its work with this rhythmic rumble from across the sea the visions gradually built themselves up of tiny oblongs of light suspended in a whirling rectangle of brilliance in the machine’s gaping mouth.

The vision of the woman appeared broken and scattered, but it was still plain that she was a woman and that she was showing first the full face and then the profile.

The demonstration was attended on this end by Captain O.G.Hutchinson, managing director of the Baird Company, who came to this country especially for the purpose; Benjamin Clapp, who has been working on secret tests of the televisor; R.M. Hart, owner of short wave radio station 2CVJ, who has done the receiving of the vision sound; and an Associated Press reporter.

The vision sound was sent across the ocean by short wave radio station 2KZ, of only two kilowatts power.

In the following years he also gave the first demonstration of both colour and stereoscopic television. The basis of which later would form the basis of the technique used by NASA to bring live colour TV pictures from the moon (he continued to be fascinated by colour television, and in the 30s and 40s demonstrated colour pictures that were of outstanding quality

[partial extract from leader in New York Times, February 11th 1928]

…His success deserves to rank with Marconi’s sending of the letter “s” across the Atlantic – the first intelligible signal ever transmitted from shore to shore in the development of transoceanic radio telegraphy. As a communication Marconi’s “s” was negligible; as a milestone in the onwards sweep of radio, of epochal importance. And so it is with Baird’s first successful effort in transatlantic television. .… Whatever may be the future of television, to Baird belongs the success of having been a leader in its early development.

[riaaanna]

Paywall alert so I pasted the article below...

It happens to be international Stereoscopy Day on the day that I interview Brian May. The rock star marks it by wearing a T-shirt from which a portrait of a Victorian scientist, Charles Wheatstone, looks out. Not that I would recognise him. This musical instrument-maker turned scientist is hardly a household name — unless of course you are a follower of the astrophysicist turned lead guitarist of Queen. Then you may well have stumbled across him because May is quite possibly Wheatstone’s biggest fan.

His passion dates back to his childhood days in suburban Feltham, he explains. May turns 76 next month, “But I still remember the moment as clearly as if was yesterday,” he says. “I opened a Weetabix packet at breakfast and found a little card inside, only a few inches across. It had two coloured pictures on it, of hippos. They looked the same and I wondered why they were giving me two. ‘For glorious full-colour realism send off now for your 3D viewer,’ the instructions said. [He still has them.] So I sent off one-and-sixpence — I earned pocket money for doing chores like mowing the grass — and a packet top and a little viewer arrived in the post.

A James Elliott stereoscope, Ophelia

“I put the card in the viewer. It was like looking through a window. I felt as if I could touch those hippos. I could almost smell their breath. I could almost have fallen into their mouths. And I thought if this is what photography can do, why is anybody bothering with flat pictures? Why isn’t this stereoscopy everywhere?”

Stereoscopy — creating a three-dimensional illusion from flat images using small changes in angle — preceded the invention of photography, May explains, and Wheatstone was quick off the mark in spotting its potential. Producing the first working model, he coined the term “stereoscope” at a Royal Society unveiling in 1838. “The Victorians were completely knocked out. It became an enormous craze. Before, people had only seen drawings of the pyramids or tea planting in China. Suddenly they could look into this little dark box and feel as if they were there. And it was utterly astonishing to them.”

May too was entranced by this new kind of magic. “I was hooked. I quickly figured out how it was done and took pictures of Mum and Dad in the garden. And I was a stereoscopist from then on. I even invented my own imaginary company called See Through Ltd. And years and years later with the help of friends we founded, or rather re-founded, the London Stereoscopic Company, which had been such a major force in Victorian times.”

This month the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, will be hosting a stereoscopic celebration in the form of an exhibition, Victorian Virtual Reality. It will present more than 150 images from May’s now massive archive built up over the course of 50 years — at first little by little when he was a student, but subsequently amassed at a voracious rate by a rock star who, according to recent estimates, is worth about £167 million.

Among the images on show will be one of the youthful May taken when his trademark bushy hair — now completely grey — was still black. Visitors will be invited to look at pictures that range from Egyptian pyramids to a portrait of Charles Dickens or rural scenes by May’s “ultimate hero”, the photographer TR Williams, to a Waterloo veteran with three-cornered hat and wooden legs.

It’s easy to understand how thrilling they must once have been. But May, who studied astrophysics at Imperial College London, is interested also in stereoscopy’s futuristic relevance.

Freddie Mercury and May at Live Aid, 1985

As a teenager he built his iconic Red Special guitar and, later, quit a PhD in astrophysics (A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud) to follow his rock dreams. He eventually completed his doctorate, almost 40 years later, and now spends a lot of time working with Nasa. As a self-confessed “stereoscopic evangelist” he loves bringing this Victorian technology to play in present-day situations.

About seven years ago, he explains, Nasa launched a mission, Osiris Rex, which involved sending a spacecraft to an asteroid about half a kilometre in diameter. “The whole point of the project,” he says, “was to bring a sample back, which meant that they had to land the craft momentarily upon the surface. But this object is not solid; it’s a rubble pile — an aggregation of rocks and pebbles and dust. It’s very uneven and so hard to find a spot where you can land safely. If the spacecraft fell over, the whole mission would fail.”

What stereoscopy was able to do, May explains proudly, was put together 3D images of the terrain and so find a safe site. “They landed the craft, sucked up the stones and rubble that they wanted, and now it’s on its way back to Earth,” says May, who plans shortly to publish a book, Bennu 3-D: the first atlas of an asteroid, with the added dimension of 3D.

And how does stereoscopy come to bear upon his own future? He describes virtual reality as “the grandchild of the stereoscope”. So will Queen go virtual? Will they create their own version of the hugely successful Abba Voyage show? Will a hologram bring Freddie Mercury back to the limelight?

“Not while we are alive,” May says. “We have toyed with these things. We actually use some images of Freddie in our show. But we prefer to keep it more real. The whole thing about Queen is that we never play to clicks. We don’t have backing tracks; we just play live and dangerous. And if there was too much jiggery-pokery going on with regards to Freddie, I think we would lose that.

“I was told in school that I couldn’t be an artist and a scientist, that I had to choose,” May continues. “I resented that and I think I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to prove people wrong. I believe that to be a complete person you should have all these facets. The truly creative minds understand both. Isaac Newton was a musician as well as a scientist. And a lot of scientific discoveries and concepts are fuelled by an artistic appreciation of nature. Think of Watson and Crick who discovered the double helix: they didn’t discover it through electron microscopy. It was intuition. They woke up and thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if it was a spiral and things were connected across the middle?’ They were being like artists and scientists at the same time.

“I spend a lot of my time still with astrophysicists. I spend a lot also making music. But I also spend a lot of my time trying to rescue wildlife and to change the laws that should be protecting it. To me it’s all part of the same thing — part of being a complete three-dimensional human being.”

At his Save Me Trust — a campaigning wildlife institution founded by May, who is vice-president of the RSPCA — a couple of hundred hedgehogs overwintered last year. There are also rescued deer, foxes, mice and bats. But badgers appear to be his presiding obsession. “One of the great tragedies of our lifetime, and I think the greatest crime against wildlife in our generation, is the culling of badgers,” he says. “Culling them is a tragic mistake. It hasn’t achieved anything. It hasn’t saved a single cow’s life; it hasn’t made a single farmer’s life better.”

May acknowledges that managing the environment is very complex. Soil microbes, veganism and food miles all crop up in the course of his impassioned conversation. If he had to recommend one action that we could all take tomorrow, it would be to get rid of all our pesticides. “Go into your garden shed and get rid of anything that’s poisonous for the sake of your wildlife, for the sake of your children and for the sake of the birds who eat the snails and slugs. Don’t ever use a slug killer again.

“And don’t eat meat,” he adds — he is a vegetarian verging upon vegan, but still partial to the occasional bit of fish — “because meat is one of the biggest polluters of the planet and it’s one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Every responsible prime minister should be telling us not to eat meat.”

May nearly died during lockdown. He suffered a heart attack followed by stomach problems that led to him coming “close to dying”. But he is back on top. At the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee he followed his extraordinary Golden Jubilee performance on the roof of Buckingham Palace with an equally iconic appearance and even persuaded the Queen to tap along. He’s always ready to innovate and adapt. Knighted this year, he confesses that he wrestled for a while with whether he would like to be known as “Sir” or “Dr”. “I worked really hard for my doctorate and I didn’t like giving it up. But the easiest thing is to move on, so I went with the new appellation. Sir Bry is fine. I don’t mind what people call me really. As long as they don’t call me late for dinner,” he adds, quoting Groucho Marx.

Rock bands and badgers, Nasa and the RSPCA all come together in this family man (he is married to the actress Anita Dobson and has three children with his first wife, the model Chrissie Mullen) and musical icon, calmly spoken interviewee and political ranter (look at his online blog, Brian’s Soapbox). Little wonder that May is so entranced by stereoscopy. You need that sort of vision to pull all his many facets into one whole.

Victorian Virtual Reality is at the Watts Gallery (wattsgallery.org.uk) in Compton, near Guildford in Surrey, July 4 to February 25

(Thank you renrensoh for sharing!)

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Champion Jamaican/ Australian heavyweight  Boxer Peter Jackson (by London Stereoscopic Company, 1889)

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Singers Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe of the African Choir, pose with an early camera (by the London Stereoscopic Company in 1891)

[victorianchap]

🔸 This idyllic photograph entitled “window call” was taken by William Morris Grundy in 1857. He captures the rural life in England during the Victorian era. Born in Birmingham in 1806, Grundy took up photography in 1855 and made dozens of stereoscopic photos, primarily posed genre scenes of rustic pursuits such as hunting, fishing, and farming. The London Stereoscopic Company bought about 200 of his negatives, and individual stereographs still exist. However, Grundy’s work is best known for the twenty original albumen prints based into the anthology Sunshine in the Country, A Book of Rural Poetry Embellished with Photographs from Nature (London, 1861). #victorianchaps #oldphoto #victorian #vintage #goodolddays #rurallife #1850s #nostalgia #williammorrisgrundy #pastlives #history #england #retro #fashion https://www.instagram.com/p/CpBAOeVjiCt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[nyctinasti]

Print depicting Isa Bowman and Bessie Hatton as the Young Princes in Richard III, from an original photograph by the London Stereoscopic Company. (V & A)

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Brian May's London Stereoscopic Company Christmas Ad 2023

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"This idyllic photograph entitled “window call” was taken by William Morris Grundy in 1857. He captures the rural life in England during the Victorian era. Born in Birmingham in 1806, Grundy took up photography in 1855 and made dozens of stereoscopic photos, primarily posed genre scenes of rustic pursuits such as hunting, fishing, and farming. The London Stereoscopic Company bought about 200 of his negatives, and individual stereographs still exist. However, Grundy’s work is best known for the twenty original albumen prints based into the anthology Sunshine in the Country, A Book of Rural Poetry Embellished with Photographs from Nature (London, 1861). He died in 1856.

https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1040D2

https://mashable.com/feature/william-grundy-english-views

https://www.rct.uk/collection/2906231/reclining-smoker

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rural-victorian-england-photos-william-grundy/

> Steve Gallagher > Public Domain Photos and Images

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London Stereoscopic Company - Coral, about 1860

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From the London Stereoscopic Company, 1865

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Halloween Greetings - The Country Lane Ghost - A Stereo Card by Beverly Via Flickr: This is a London Stereoscopic Company card from the series the 'New "Spirit" Photographs' series, "The Country Lane Ghost". Happy Hauntings to all my flickr friends! I am also posting the detail of one side of the card.

[scotianostra]

14th June 1946 John Logie Baird, inventor of the first television, died.

Much has been said about Baird, some claim that due to the fact his version of the Television did not get taken up that he is not actually the “real” inventor. However without Baird’s innovations Television might not have been taken up , or come about as it did.

  Even as a child, Baird—who was born in Helensburgh, Scotland—showed great aptitude for innovation. As a youngster, he facilitated easier communication with a few of his best friends by setting up a rudimentary telephone exchange from his bedroom that would allow him to quickly connect with his buddies.

  Baird used whatever items he could find to begin building a prototype for his mechanical television, including an old hatbox, some bicycle lights, a pair of scissors, darning needles, glue, and sealing wax.

The first public demonstrations were in Selfridges in 1925, The store sent out a circular, which stated:

Selfridge’s

Present the First Public Demonstration of Television

In the Electrical Section (First Floor)

Television is to light what telephony is to sound-

It means the INSTANTANEOUS transmission of a picture, so the observer at the “receiving” end can see, to all intents and purposes, what is a cinematographic view of what is happening at the “sending” end.

Over the next several years, Baird continued to make improvements to his tele visor, and kept increasing the distance that it could transmit content.

In 1927, he managed to transmit an image a total of 438 miles between London and Glasgow.

  On February 9, 1928, his Baird Television Development Company produced the first transatlantic television broadcast, from London to New York. Even with all those firsts, Baird kept pushing for more. On August 10, 1928, he demonstrated the first 3D television, which he called “stereovision.” “By applying the stereoscope principle to television, it has now become possible to transmit television images with all the appearance of depth and solidity; and, by a further combination of colored television with stereoscopic television, the complete illusion of images in natural colors, and with depth and solidity becomes possible,” wrote the Radio Times in November of 1928. “All this has been recently demonstrated in the Baird Laboratories.” He dreamed of big-screen TVs with high-definition pictures.

Baird wanted to televise ‘live’ sport in cinemas, and in 1931, he invented a TV camera for ‘outside broadcasts’.

John Logie Baird died on this at Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex in 1946 aged 57.

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​​​BRIAN MAY: “STEREOSCOPY IS GOOD FOR YOU: LIFE IN 3-D” BOOK SIGNING​

The London Stereoscopic Company Shop

PROUD GALLERIES​​

32 John Adam St, London WC2N 6BP

​​9th December 2022

​​12PM – 1PM

...Anyone want to go with me? 😄

[astrophysicist-guitar-god]

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