TELEVISION BEFORE TV

Ernst F. Tonsing, Ph.D.

Thousand Oaks, California
September 10, 2006

Of course, there was television before TV. Our first TV, a black and white set,
was installed in our home on January 20, 1951, just in time to see the inauguration of
President Dwight Eisenhower. The screen was large for the day, but almost miniature
compared with the huge flat screen affairs today. But, this was not the first television that
we had viewed.

As children living in grandmothers big house above the Missouri River during
World War II, we were never without a lot of things to explore and to see. But, on rainy
days, when we would really like to play outside anyway, but little feet making muddy
tracks through the house was not to a parent’s liking, grandmother had a way of finding
interesting things to do. We would enter the large library room and seat ourselves around
an ornate table in the center of the room. Then grandmother would go to one of the giant,
walnut bookcases located on the south wall and open the door to the bottom cabinet. She
would get a small, black suitcase and place it on the table, open it, and draw out a strange
affair of wood and metal. It had a flattened, circular piece at one end with two lens, and a
handle that swung down on the bottom. A stick went vertically out from the apparatus,
and, and across it was a sliding cross stick with wire brackets at the ends.

In the suitcase were rows upon rows of cards, each containing two pictures. They
looked almost identical, but, if one examined them carefully, each side was taken at
slightly different angles. One by one she would pull out a slide, insert it in the wires, and
we would hold up the device to our eyes, and a magical thing would occur. Suddenly the
two dimensions of the photographs would become three-dimensional, and one could
almost peer around objects and people. Soon, we were engrossed in seeing the images of
places far, far away, people in strange costumes, and beautiful objects in museums. Our
“television” (from the Greek word, “tele-,” meaning distance) was even more exciting
than the ones today, because we could use our imaginations to fill in the stories of the
things we were seeing.

This device was not called a television, but a “stereoscope,” or sometimes a

“stereopticon,” and it had been around for over a hundred and fifty years. It had a viewer
with double lenses through which one could see cards with two photographs, side-by-
side, that had been taken simultaneously from a slightly separate angle with a special
camera. The stereoscope’s lenses were tipped slightly in, so that the pictures were merge
in view, producing one, three-dimensional image.

Queen Victoria was delighted with the new “machine” when she saw it at the
1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, called by many, the first World’s Fair. The well-known
writer and poet, Oliver Wendell Homes, invented a simplified version, but did not patent
it on purpose, so that everyone could have one. It was popular in the 1860’s, but
especially from 1880 to 1910. The better slides sold for six for a dollar, but some were
available at three cents a piece, or eighty-five cents per one hundred. Some 300 million
stereographs, also known as “stereoviews,” “stereo cards,” or “stereo pairs,” were
published between 1854 and 1920, being made available through mail-order catalogues,
drugstores, given away by tea and cereal companies as premiums, and even sold door-to-
door by college students, such as the young Carl Sandburg.

The best known company that manufactured stereo slides was one founded in
Ottawa, Kansas, in 1880, by two brothers, Elmer and Bert Underwood. They began
peddling their slides door to door, and, improving their processes, soon they took over the
publishing for three other companies. Branch offices were placed across the United
States, Canada and Great Britain. After their move to New York City in 1891, they took
on selling photographs to newspapers and magazines, the first being of the Greek and
Turkish war by Bert Underwood while embedded with the Greek army. Booklets
advertising the machines and pictures were issued, the covers of which had a railroad
train on one side and a luxury ship on the other, with the question in bold type above
saying, “Can you afford this?” Below it, a family is seated in the parlor, with a child
holding the stereoscope up to his eyes, with the assertion above it reading, “You can
afford this.” The production of stereoscopic views soared, and by 1901, 25,000 were
printed each day, and 300,000 stereoscopes were sold each year. With freelance news
photographers around the world, the Underwood and Underwood sales agency dominated
the news photographs for thirty years.

Measuring 17.4 cm. (6 7/8 inches) by 8.4 cm. (3 5/16 inches) and larger, the cards
included notable scenic and historic buildings and sites, views of factories, notable public
figures, dramatic scenes, people at play, war, parades, and even of death. Some of them
were Grand Tours of Europe or Asia, and Underwood and Underwood published the
“Underwood Travel System” in which the cards were kept in imitation book bindings.
Underwood and Underwood and the Keystone View Company printed the identification
of the scene on the front side below the pictures, and often had a more detailed
description on the back. Some companies even produced booklets with remarks by well-
known scholars that could be read as the slides were viewed. They were seen as
educational tools, and soon, public schools employed them in their classrooms.

When the stereo slides and viewer were passed on to me by my father, they were
still grouped by subject, bound in string, and labeled on little slips of paper in
grandmother’s handwriting. Here is her list of categories (in no particular order), along
with the number of slides bound together with her string:

Penn RR—10
Boston Mass—3
Lookout Mt. Tenn—7
Yosemete (sic) Calif—12
Misc—29 [Mostly Switzerland]
Misc US—25
Misc US—15
 Yellowstone & Yosemite—37
Washington DC—17
Philadelphia, Penn—5
National Solders’ Home, Dayton, Ohio—11
Centennial, Philadelphia, Penn, 1876—3
Wisschickon Creek & Schuylkill—7
Misc—11
Rome & Italy, Misc Eur—11
Vatican City & Pope—10
England, Scotland, Ireland, Africa, Martinique—24
Teddy Roosevelt & Wm McKinley & Sp. Amer War—19
The Great Fire in Chicago, October 1871—13
NY & Central Park—9
Minnesota—4
Soldier’s Home, Togus, Maine—7
West Point, NY—9
Switzerland—19
Shaws Garden, St. Louis, Mo—6
Bunker Hill—4
Battleships-0-4
Montana—3
Civil War—10 ½ [One has been torn in two]
Foreign Views—21 [Mostly Switzerland]
Mammoth Cave—8
Misc Views—7
Colorado—25

Thus, there are some 396 cardboard slides, mostly showing scenic places in the United
States, but a number from Europe, especially Switzerland. Of note are the ones from
Chattanooga, Tennessee, where grandmother’s father, Col. John A. Martin, had fought in
the Civil War. Also of note are the slides of soldiers’ homes, a special concern of her
father, who spearheaded the movement to establish these institutions throughout the
United States after the Civil War. The slides from the Centennial of the United States in
1876 in Philadelphia also recall that her father had been one of the Vice Presidents for the
commemoration, and had been on the dignitary’s platform for the ceremonies. One must
definitely note, however, that no pornography or drinking scenes were in grandmother’s
collection, although these were popular among viewers.

Yes, there was television long before TV, as entertaining and educational as the
present electronic versions. With the peripheral vision limited in the sterioscope, and the
images startling real and three-dimensional, I felt as if I was really standing there at
Lookout Mountain, Jerusalem, Tokyo and Yosemite. In many ways, the sterioscopes
were much more expansive and beneficial, as the stereo views not only educated one in
geography, history, foreign customs and culture, but enriched the imagination. Without
imagination, there can be no advance in society, no understanding other peoples in the
world, and, perhaps, no hope for peace.