Under fluorescent strip lights in the archive library at King’s College on London’s Strand, Brian May is transporting me back in time. On the table between myself and the Queen guitarist is an original Victorian stereoscope, a box-like wooden contraption that is akin to a primitive pair of virtual reality goggles. “Take a look,” he says.
Although May is best-known for playing arenas with the band he formed over 50 years ago, one of his numerous scientific hinterlands away from the stage is stereoscopy. For the uninitiated, it was an early way of looking at photographs via a special viewer that fused together two flat images to create a single 3D picture. Stereoscope machines entranced Victorian society for a short period in the 1850s and 1860s before being usurped by a different craze.
But Queen Victoria was an avid fan. Charles Dickens too. And May, who has a PhD in astrophysics and has collaborated with NASA, owns one of the world’s biggest collections of stereo photo cards (150,000 images and counting). He has also revived the long-defunct London Stereoscopic Company, which publishes books on the phenomenon including the new Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D.
May’s glee is clear when I’m taken aback at the sheer 3D-ness of a picture of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Later, he’ll pick up his smartphone, take two pictures of me, and turn me into a stereoscope photo card. “Every time somebody goes ‘Oooh, really?’, somebody who hasn’t experienced it before, it’s just a joy,” the 74 year-old says. We all take the notion of 3D for granted. But you can trace all use of the medium – from the films Avatar and Jaws 3D (my first encounter with it) to ABBA’s upcoming tour as dancing CGI ‘ABBAtars’ – back to this Heath Robinson-esque Victorian box.
As we chat, it emerges that these strange contraptions have modern resonance in another way too. They fired the starting gun on society’s obsession with seeing pictures of celebrities. Far from being an esoteric curio from almost two centuries ago, stereoscopes were a forerunner to Instagram. May’s obsession, far from being a flash in the pan fad, was actually very prescient.
