The View-Master wasn’t a toy. It was a Kodachrome stereo photography system

Despite what many people believe today, the View-Master wasn’t a toy. It was a photographic product, sold for decades alongside disks of stereoscopic photo pairs that took you a world away. And that’s where my story with the View-Master – and even my interest in photography – begins.

But my part of the story comes later. The View-Master’s story starts at the mouth of a cave in southern Oregon in 1938.

According to the Oregon Historical Society, Harold Graves, the president of Sawyer’s, a photo-finishing company in Portland, was vacationing there when he met a photographer named William Gruber, who was carrying a homemade stereo photography rig.

Sawyer’s had become the nation’s largest producer of scenic postcards. Gruber had figured out how to mount tiny chips of the then-new Kodachrome film into a paper reel that could be viewed through a small handheld stereoscope. Graves, Gruber and Sawyer’s co-owner Edwin Mayer, sensing an opportunity, struck up a partnership and developed the View-Master, which made its debut at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

It’s worth thinking about what Sawyer’s thought it was selling. The View-Master was pitched as an alternative to the scenic postcard, targeting the same channels postcards did: gift shops at scenic locations, stationery stores and even photography shops. Notably, not toy stores.

Originally, View-Master’s reels mirrored postcard content: National Parks, famous landmarks and scenic destinations around the world.Dale Baskin

Even the US military took notice; it ordered 100,000 of the viewers to use for training during World War II.

The View-Master wasn’t the first device for viewing stereo images, a technology that predated practical photography; Charles Wheatstone, a member of the Royal Society, described his stereoscope, which used drawings, in 1838, a year before the daguerreotype was announced to the world. But photography made stereo viewing far more compelling than drawings ever could, and “stereographs” became a popular form of visual entertainment in the latter half of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries.

What the View-Master managed to do was productize stereo photo viewing in a dummy-proof device that was easy to use, in beautiful Kodachrome color. The earliest reels featured the same things as postcards, including National Parks, famous landmarks, and scenic travel destinations.

The View-Master-as-toy came later. In 1951, Sawyer’s bought Tru-Vue, its main competitor, which had a license with Walt Disney Studios, and Disney reels and other entertainment brands like Looney Tunes and The Muppets followed. So, the View-Master was eventually sold as a toy. It just didn’t start as one.

Gruber’s key innovation was fitting Kodachrome film chips into a paper reel – giving the View-Master its signature full-color stereo look.Dale Baskin

As a child, I loved the View-Master. Whenever we got a new set of picture disks, it gave me a new world to explore. I would pass the time on my family’s summer road trips in the back of our banana-yellow station wagon, looking at photos through my View-Master.

That’s pretty remarkable when you think about the fact that each disk contained just seven pairs of images. In an age where the phones in our pockets put limitless media at our disposal, that seems like a staggeringly small set of photos, but somehow I just kept looking at them. Over and over again. I probably looked at some of those photos thousands of times, and I never got tired of it.

Back then, View-Master disks could be found at tourist locations. Every National Park gift shop had them. Sure, you could buy a postcard, but the View-Master disk of the park was way better. (Unless, of course, you actually wanted to send someone a postcard.) You could relive the experience of that National Park for hours in the back of a station wagon during the drive to the next National Park, where you could acquire a new set of View-Master reels. In contrast, you had to wait until you got home to see the photos your parents took.

In 1952, in a further nod to photographers, Sawyer’s launched the View-Master Personal Stereo Camera, which allowed you to capture 69 pairs of photos on a 36-exposure roll of film. The company offered a mail-order mounting service, or users could mount their own photos on View-Master reels. You still had to wait until you got home to process your images, but you could have View-Master reels of your trip. It’s amazing to think you could buy an entire camera system built around this.

The View-Master Personal Stereo Camera was designed to let photographers create their own View-Master reels. It allowed photographers to capture 69 pairs of photos on a standard 36-exposure roll of 35mm film.John Alan Elson

While visiting my parents recently, I found a box with my childhood View-Master inside. Nostalgia is a strong thing, so I immediately took it off the shelf, inserted one of the reels and found myself staring at Yosemite National Park, displayed in rich colors and deep shadows. It had the unmistakable look of Kodachrome and reminded me of the slides my father shot on family vacations.

My father was always taking pictures. No vacation was complete without a camera coming along. Back home, we’d gather in the living room for slideshow nights, kind of like movie nights today, where he would load one box of 36 slides at a time into the stack loader on our Kodak projector, allowing us to relive whatever slice of our lives had passed during that roll of film. Those slides were usually Kodachrome, too.

The images on those old View-Master disks had that same look, but with a couple of important differences. First, they were stereo pairs, and the depth made them less like pictures and more like places.

The second one mattered more. Most were of incredible landscapes I had never seen in person, or had interesting people from different cultures and faraway lands. It was like browsing through the photos in a National Geographic magazine (something else I did a lot as a kid; I wasn’t as good about reading the articles back then), except better. My father’s slides showed me where we had been. The View-Master showed me where I hadn’t been yet, and I wanted to go to those places and take pictures of them.

For years after its 1939 launch, the View-Master was sold as a photographic and travel product, not a toy — it didn’t reach toy stores until after Sawyer’s bought Tru-Vue in 1951.Dale Baskin

In retrospect, I think the View-Master was a proxy for the camera I didn’t own yet. Today, I realize that it wasn’t just looking at the pictures that I enjoyed, but the act of holding the device up to my eyes, of looking through the viewfinder up close, and having the all-immersive experience of seeing that and nothing else.

Although we live in an age where taking photos often involves holding a screen at a distance from our eyes, I still don’t get the same satisfaction from that experience as bringing the viewfinder to my eye, focusing on the image and letting the rest of the world fade away. And I suspect that’s one thing that draws a lot of new photographers to a dedicated camera. Once you know that feeling, it’s addictive.

As a kid, I wanted to take photos like my Dad. I wanted to take photos like the ones in National Geographic. And I wanted to take photos like the ones I saw in the View-Master.

And when I finally bought my first roll of film with my own money, it was Kodachrome.

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