I have an old stereo viewer nicely made of wood and metal, you know the kind. We had always called it a Stereoptican, and I had thought, just from the folklore, it had been manufactured in Meadville, PA where my father grew up, and I went to college, but some of this is not right. I just read the metal stamped info on the viewer, and it says Underwood and Underwood, New York, Patented June 11, 1901. I see printed on some of the stereo picture cards that I have "Keystone View Company, Manufacturers, Publishers, Meadville, Pa, etc." so either they were competitors, or something. I will investigate this. Any input?

I do like stereo pictures. Early on, my eyes seemed to synch into viewing stereo fairly easy, for instance when viewing aerial photograph pairs in Geology, sometimes I could do it without a viewer. I have some pictures I took in Germany in 1970 in the Army where I took two pictures side by side in quick succession, then pasted the photos on a card to read in the viewer. They look pretty good, and have exaggerated depth because the distance between the pictures is more than the eyes expect. I thought I had lost the ability to do this, since I could never make those silly design hidden picture things work, even after staring and staring. Since then, I found that It was an eyeglasses thing, since I have a prism type difference between my eyes. These days I can look at a stereo pair like the one below and usually make it work with my bifocals. You have to get the right distance or zoom factor, and relax the eyes so they look at the images separately. The size below works for me.




These are from the Cheeney Co. in Manchester Connecticut in 1914, very interesting in themselves. This was reported to be the largest silk manufacturer in the world for years. The silk industry was hot, and was stealing business from Japan because Japan was still doing it manually, while U.S. industry started up industrially, able to rethink methods for volume and efficiency.(roles switched after WWII?) It says on the back that the big "ferris wheel" was used for "beaming off" the silk warp from this wheel to the loom roll at the bottom. It took very watchful eyes and skill to make sure no threads were dropped or crossed.