How a Piano Repairman Invented View Master the Worlds Most Famous 3D Viewer

This is my Viewmaster Model A, made around 1940. It's not in the greatest shape and it seems very simple, but it's a clever invention with an astonishing history. You open it, put a reel in, close it back up, and advance to the first picture. When you look through the eyepieces, you suddenly see a full-color 3D scene. This is a modern viewer. It's USB charged and backlit. You can put this same reel in the slot, advance to the first picture, and it works just the same. The format hasn't changed after 85 years. At first I thought Viewmaster was just for kids. Movies, TV shows, and cartoons in colorful three dimensions. But that wasn't how it began. There's an incredible story here of an invention that opened a window to the world for millions of people. Hi, I'm Dave, and in these drawers are thousands of vintage scenic Viewmaster reels. Each one served as a souvenir of a journey taken or a glimpse of a place someone hoped to see. Today, they act like a time machine, giving us an immersive view of the world from long ago. As much as I like the cartoon and movie reels, these original travel reels are my favorite, and I've made several videos exploring the amazing places in my collection. Today, though, I'm taking a deep dive into Viewmaster itself. Who made it, how it works, and why this simple little viewer became one of the most enduring visual inventions of the 20th century. Before we can understand Viewmaster, I need to explain the surprisingly simple trick that makes all 3D images work. In the early 1500s, da Vinci observed that each eye saw the world slightly differently. But it wasn't until 1838 that the first stereo image and the device to view it was created. It was invented by Charles Wheatstone, a professor at King's College London, a modern-day da Vinci who worked in acoustics, optics, electricity, telegraphy, and even cryptography. Like da Vinci, he knew that if you looked at something, like a die on a table, with one eye closed and then the other, that each eye saw a different view. The left eye saw a bit of the left side of the die and the right eye saw a bit of the right side. But your brain combined these two views into a single three-dimensional object. Wheatstone wondered, could he trick the brain into seeing three dimensions when there was actually only two? If he drew two slightly different pictures of the die, each matching one eye's perspective, and built a device that would show the left eye's drawing just to the left eye and the right eye's just to the right eye, would the brain combine them into a single 3D object? To answer this, he built the world's first stereoscope, two mounted images on either side of two angled mirrors. This forced each eye to see only the appropriate image, and when he looked into the mirrors, he saw just one three-dimensional image. An original Wheatstone stereoscope is on display at King's College in London. Over the next several years, a couple improvements were made. First, the two mirrors were replaced by lenses, which allowed each eye to see only the correct image, and positioned the images together comfortably in front of the viewer. Second, Wheatstone's hand-drawn diagrams were replaced by actual photographs. This required linking two cameras together, or building a special camera so that two pictures could be taken at once just a few inches apart. For the first time, stereo images showed real people in real places, bringing the wider world into someone's living room. Stereoscopes were in full use for the Great London Exhibition of 1851, which was photographed extensively in stereo. It even caught the interest of Queen Victoria, kicking off a 3D craze that swept the world. This is my Keystone stereoscope. Here are the lenses that isolate the left and right image, insert a card and slide it into focus, and suddenly the picture appears in 3D. And that brings us to the 20th century, and to the innovator who would carry stereoscopy into the modern age. William Gruber was born in 1903 in Munich, Germany. These Viewmaster images show the city where he grew up. He was a skilled amateur photographer, but earned his living repairing extraordinarily complex player pianos. He specialized in German reproducing pianos made by Welte & Sons in Germany, among the most advanced musical machines of their day. When they opened a factory in New York in 1912, demand for skilled technicians quickly spread across the U.S. Gruber arranged for a job in Los Angeles servicing pianos for a major dealer, the Burkle Piano Shop on South Broadway. He came to the U.S. in 1924. His final job before leaving Germany was servicing the Welte Minion at the German Museum in Munich. That piano is still on display today, and when you see it, you can't help but notice how closely its design resembles the machine Gruber would later build to manufacture Viewmaster reels. The job in L.A. fell through, and Gruber made his way to Portland, Oregon. There was plenty of player piano work in the area, and the forests and mountains reminded him of Germany, so he decided to stay. In 1935, he met Norma Lenz at the Collins & Irwin Piano Company, and they were married in 1938. Now this is the moment in the story where Gruber will have his life-changing idea, but I think it's important to lay the groundwork for this innovation properly. Lots of people think that genius comes in a sudden flash of inspiration, but it's really a combination of preparation, opportunity, and imagination. So before I explain his invention, we need to understand the moment in time that made it possible. Gruber was prepared. He'd spent his life maintaining player pianos, which were among the most complex mechanical devices available in the world at the time. How they worked is directly related to his Viewmaster innovations. First, a performance had to be recorded. This was done by attaching small pins to the keys of a piano and placing a trough of conductive mercury underneath them. As the keys were played, the pin would dip into the mercury, closing an electrical contact which caused a pen to be lowered onto a continuously moving strip of paper, literally drawing the notes onto the paper as they were played. These pen marks were used as a guide to cut precise holes into the paper. Each hole represented the movement of one of the piano's keys. The patterns of holes on this master key roll could then be copied hundreds of times on two-player piano reels by using an organ roll recording machine. Second, a performance could be reproduced using suction. The piano roll was loaded into a reproducing piano machine, which had an array of pneumatic valves, constantly trying to draw air through the thick paper as it rolled past. If the valve encountered a hole, air would pass through, closing the valve and triggering the appropriate piano key to play. Driving a machine with pneumatic valves, making a device work by reading holes and notches, and mass producing a product using die-cut cardboard was critical for Gruber's Viewmaster, all ideas that came from his work with player pianos. Next was opportunity, which came from a revolutionary advancement that had just been made in photography, Kodachrome. Kodachrome was Kodak's brand new way to reproduce color in photography. It was released in 1935.