Stereoscopy—creating three-dimensional visual experiences from two-dimensional materials—informed most every visual medium of the Modern age: art, photography, cinema, television, and newspapers. In the nineteenth century the marriage of stereoscopy, photography, and industrial production resulted in the first photographic mass media: the Victorian stereoscope. Popular from 1850-1920, the stereoscope answered desires for greater realism in visual representation while its popular, yet intimate, visual experience prefigured visual media like cinema and television. Eventually overshadowed by cinema and later electronic visual technologies, the optical principles of the stereoscope grounded many popular visual entertainments of the twentieth century: View-Master viewers, 3-D cinema and comic books, and Magic Eye stereograms.

The Victorian stereoscope was part of a general trend in the nineteenth century towards more realistic visual representations, mass-produced for an emergent commodity culture. It has been long known that two-dimensional representations, like drawing and painting, are a poor imitation of...