Past Perfect: 3-D, 19th Century Style
Instrument makers Henry Negretti and Joseph Zambra immortalize London’s Crystal Palace in stereoscopy
A few years after 12-year-old Enrico (Henry) Negretti emigrated from Italy in 1829, he enrolled at London’s Mechanics’ Institute. He quickly gained a reputation as a maker of optical and meteorological instruments and by 1850 had formed a partnership with Joseph Warren Zambra (1822–1897), a leading Anglo-Italian barometer maker. In the late 1850s they expanded their business to include the publication of stereo photographs—a new industry launched in 1851 when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were presented with a stereoscopic viewer at the opening of the 1,664-foot-long, 515-foot-wide glass-and-iron-structure known as the Crystal Palace. (Stereoscopic viewers recreate the illusion of depth by visually merging two photographs taken just 2.5 inches apart, the distance between the right and left eyes.) The Crystal Palace was erected in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition, a five-month-long celebration of British industrial achievement that attracted six million visitors. The building was dismantled and reerected in Sydenham, on the southern fringes of London, three years later. The reconstructed Crystal Palace was almost twice as long as the original and included a series of Fine Art courts. Negretti and Zambra’s stereoscopic views of these exhibit halls enabled armchair travelers all over the world to tour the wonders of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Byzantium.
By 1875, nearly 40 million visitors had strolled among the wonders of Sydenham’s Crystal Palace, taking in such sights as the “Aboo Simbel Tomb and Colossal Figures”. The Egyptian galleries contained over 1,300 artifacts, including sarcophagi, graveyard tablets, fresco paintings and the Rosetta Stone.
One of the consultants who worked on the Assyrian Court was Austen Henry Layard, who had shipped the first Assyrian antiquities to London’s British Museum in the late 1840s (see Deborah A. Thomas,
The Hall of Columns in the Egyptian galleries was inspired by the temple at Karnak, while the Greek Court contained friezes from the Parthenon and copies of ancient statues. In deference to Victorian sensibilities, the private parts of male statues were removed.
To build your own stereoscope, you can download the doubled images of the Hall of Columns and the Greek Court from our Web site (www.archaeologyodyssey.org). A model of a stereoscope is shown at www.funsci.com/fun3_en/stscp/stscp.htm, though the principle is simple. The object is to trick your eyes into focusing independently on the two nearly—but not quite—identical photographs.
First, take a piece of cardboard and cut two peepholes for your eyes. Then attach the cardboard to a perpendicular barrier about a foot long that splits your field of vision in two (left eye and right eye). Attach the barrier to a flat mount to hold the images. When you look through the stereoscope’s peepholes, each eye should focus on a different image. (You may have to adjust the length of the barrier and the distance of the photos from your eyes.) Your brain will interpret the two different (but almost identical) photos as a single image, creating a 3-D effect.