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The Museum of Gloucester is celebrating the two hundred and twenty-first anniversary of the birth of polymath Charles Wheatstone in Barnwood, near Gloucester. Although his name is still remembered all over the world, Wheatstone never got the credit he really deserves. This prolific inventor, musical instrument maker and professor of experimental philosophy was a shy person and, unlike some of his contemporaries and their modern equivalents, never blew his own trumpet.
Whilst some inventions which he helped promote have been wrongly attributed to him, others have been credited to somebody else and history has not been kind in honouring him. There are no monuments to him, no statues to remember his achievements by, and even his grave in Bethnal Green is so undistinctive that it is difficult to find.
Photo historian Denis Pellerin, from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy, will take you on a three dimensional journey to discover the inventor of Stereoscopy (which we now call 3D) and show how this invention, which, strangely enough, Wheatstone never considered as his most important, changed the way the Victorians perceived the world around them. Stereoscopy gave birth to a craze which may not have lasted very long but produced millions of amazing images and has been through several revivals since it first started back in the 1850s.
Nearly two hundred years after its discovery, Stereoscopy is not only the magic carpet it was for Wheatstone’s contemporaries, taking them to far away places without leaving their fireside; it has also become a wonderful time machine, showing us the Victorians, famous or anonymous, as they really were, in a way no traditional photographs can.
Details and booking: https://www.museumofgloucester.co.uk/events/celebrating-charles-whe...
Victoria and Albert Museum's photography collection
National Science and Media Museum
RPS Journal 1853-2012 online and searchable
Photographic History Research Centre, Leicester
Birkbeck History and Theory of Photography Research Centre
William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné
British Photography. The Hyman Collection
The Press Photo History Project Mapping the photo agencies and photographers of Fleet Street and the UK
The correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
Historic England Archive
UAL Photography and Photography and the Archive Research Centre
Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group
www.londonstereo.com London Stereoscopic Company / T. R. Williams
www.earlyphotography.co.uk British camera makers and companies
Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock.
National Portrait Gallery, London
http://www.freewebs.com/jb3d/
Alfred Seaman and the Photographic Convention
Frederick Scott Archer
© 2023 Created by Michael Pritchard.
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