~1920 Table Stereoscope "EDUCA", made by A. Mattey under the Label UNIS FRANCE, with Original Complete Slide Collection "La France" (504 Original 3D Stereo Pairs on 42 Glass Plates with no chips, no scratches), and Original Manual with Matching Picture List - Very Very Rare in this Condition

In a Nutshell
"EDUCA" stereoscope, complete and possibly world-wide unique, with all original slides and manual, just in time for the new 3D hype

Introduction:
This unusual French viewer from around 1920 was most likely intended for educational purposes and is therefore very solid and easy to operate. It was built by the principal French maker of stereoscopes of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, A. Mattey of Paris. Mattey produced stereoscopes under several trademarks, with UNIS FRANCE for better quality products. The viewer can be seen in Paul Wing's 1996 book "Stereoscopes - The First One Hundred Years", page 204.
Very special is the slide format (pict.34): two interleaved rows of 6 black-and-white positive stereoscopic image pairs are exposed on a 5" x 7" glass plate. The plate with the 12 stereo pictures is inserted into a black wooden frame extending through a slot on top of the viewer, and a picture brought into focus by sliding the frame's side lever on the right up and down. To change between the two rows, the ocular box is slid horizontally for each level. The lower storage compartment contains a set of 42 glass plates, resulting in 504 stereo pictures.
Whereas most EDUCAs sold or for sale come with less than 42 plates, chipped or scratched slides, and/or contain unspecified mixtures of plates made by EDUCA (refs.2,3 below), I have not seen an instance of the viewer, coming with the complete original set of 42 individually numbered (1 through 42) plates of the Geographical Collection "La France" (picts.13-33), and - equally important - the original manual "L'enseignement par l'Aspect" [= Unterricht durch Betrachten = Education by Viewing] (picts.35-39). The manual not only explains how to use the viewer and how to handle the plates (never touch the gelatine side of a plate!), but contains a complete list of all 504 pictures with their descriptions, that match one to one the plates.
The plates have no chips, the images themselves are of very good quality without any scratches, well exposed and shot with a professional consideration of depth, as can be seen from the 12 examples in picts.41-52 (please read the techies below, to straight-view the pictures without the help of a stereoscope).

For the techies only:
Writer and director James Cameron's Avatar broke new ground in 2009, turning 3D into an overnight phenomenon. This time it seems sustainable. 3D movies were popular in the early 1950's, Francis Ford Coppola's film Captain EO with Michael Jackson had been playing since 1986 in Floridas Epcot Center, without generating this type of hype. After all - 3D imaging is more than 150 years old, since in 1844 David Brewster invented the Stereoscope, an instrument that could take photographic pictures in 3D. More 3D movies were released in 2010 (Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland, DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon and Warner Bros.'s Clash of the Titans, and today (Jan. 2012) ref.5 lists more than 100 3D movies since then. Movie theatres around the world experience costly upgrades for 3D. You can now buy a 3D TV set for less than $1000 and a Blu-ray player for $100. What happened? It seems doubling HDTV bandwith and content improvement had to come together to make the final breakthrough.
The physical and physiologic basis of stereo (3D) viewing is to present to the two eyes two slightly different 2D pictures, taken from two points in space (e.g. two cameras) horizontally displaced from each other by about the distance between the eyes of a human being (about 2.5"). It is only the technical implementation of allowing your left eye only to see the picture from the left camera and your right eye only the one from the right camera, which leads to the different 3D technologies: lenticular screens, anaglyph (red-green) glasses, polarized light and glasses, shutter glasses, etc. A stereoscope achieves the separation by simply blocking the view of each eye to the wrong picture. This can be most easily done by requiring both eyes to look at virtual pictures at infinite distance (parallel-parallax or parallel lines of sight), which forces them from experience also to focus at infinity for a sharp picture. The stereoscope has a focussing lens in order to reduce the focal length from infinity to typically reading distance (about 1 foot) or shorter, allowing your eyes to keep the adapted correlation between physical and focal distance. Now the two pictures can be mounted side by side at a relative distance of about 2.5" and presented to the eyes in reading distance. After some training a self-disciplined person can decouple parallax and focus of his or her eyes and is able to view stereo pairs (and/or SIRDS Single Image Random Dot Stereograms) without a stereoscope, either by straight viewing (left eye sees left picture, right eye sees right picture) or by crossed eye viewing (left eye squints at right picture, right eye squints at left picture, see pict.56).
Here is how you can try to train yourself to view my (straight view) pictures 41-56: Each picture shows two isolated dots, that should be on your monitor separated by less than or maximally equal to your eye distance. To achieve this you can either resize your browser window (since my graphics scales in most browsers), view the pictures with a graphics program that lets you resize them, or print them out. Approach your head to the monitor screen such that you see 4 blurred points and try to collapse the two inner ones into one. Slowly move your head away from the monitor trying not to split the collapsed center point again. Your eyes should automatically try to sharpen the point. Finally move your eyes up into the picture - and - voilà ? Once you see a picture in 3D, keep your eyes on it, and blindly hover your mouse over the other stereo thumbnails; the pictures will snap in without any delay. The last 4 pictures (picts.53-56) are from my own work and not included with the stereoscope. They are here to demonstrate the power of 3D, especially in computer generated stereo.
Sidenote: You can generate your own stereo pictures with a computer, print them out on an overhead transparent foil, put the foil between two glass plates (<1/16" thick each), and view it with the EDUCA viewer. You can even mount your own stereo or pseudo-stereo diapositives taken on regular 35mm film, this way, since the format (24x36mm) almost perfectly matches the size of the "France" pictures.

Here are the specifications:

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