Sets of stereographic images, and the stereoscopes needed to view them, were ubiquitous objects in Victorian drawing rooms. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary refers to the stereoscope as a “quintessentially nineteenth-century device” (59) that operated in a very different way from earlier technologies including the camera obscura.

February 5, 1861

A patent is issued for the Kinematoscope. The Kinematoscope projected a series of still pictures, each picture not seen whole at once but by degrees as the cylinder revolved. It was made to give the impression of motion and was built using the existing stereoscopic lens technology.