Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952

8. Essaying Utopia

8 Essaying Utopia A Few Stereoscopic Patents While the motion picture industry consolidated in the 1920s with greater technological developments for color and sound, Utopian inventors continued to file patents for three-dimensional moving images. These efforts were frequently attempts to simplify production of stereoscopic movies and generally did not come to fruition. Undoubtedly, it was the growth of motion pictures as entertainment that spurred attempts at stereographic innovation , which continued to present itself as the ultimate form of crowning realism for the moving image. A U.S. patent (no. 1,363,249) of 1920, granted to Fred N. Hallett of Seattle, Washington, for a "Moving-Picture Camera," described an improvement "to provide a camera that will take pictures having a stereoscopic effect similar to that produced in the human eye." The camera was designed with "two lenses, the light from which is reflected on the film at a single point, the rays from each lens cooperating to produce the desired effect." Hallett's simple design used mirrors positioned behind the twin lenses. "By means of the two lenses and the mirrors, the images passing through each lense [sic] is reflected on the single film and combined, as in the human eye, to produce the same stereoscopic effect."1 The internal mirrors were adjustable and placed behind the twin converging lenses to reflect directly on to the single strip of film. Hallett's patent, though granted, may not have had sufficient detail for reduction to practice. It is also likely that a separate, and dedicated, system for projection of the single-strip stereo pairs of images would have been required. This patent did foreshadow, Essaying Utopia 129 however, numerous subsequent efforts, from the 1930s up to the 1980s, to build a single-strip 35-mm stereoscopic camera. A 1923 U.S. patent (no. 1,477,541) assigned to Clement A. Clement by Axel Bors-Koefoed of Houston, Texas, titled "Motion Picture Machine" describes and pictures two separate stereoscopic projectors for single-strip 3-D films. Two separate pages of figures depicted 35-mm film with side-by-side stereo pairs in a single frame of film, as well as a single strip of 35-mm film with vertically alternating left-right images. The object of Bors-Koefoed s invention was "to provide a machine . . . whereby images taken at optic angles may be simultaneously projected on the screen so as to give a relief effect."2 Bors-Koefoed s patent includes provision for a stereoscopic motion picture camera and rotating disk shutters used in front of both projectors. The patent , which does not go into great detail, seemed to be an attempt to protect two different single-strip stereoscopic film configurations. A 1921 U.S. patent (no. 1,396,651) granted to Edgar B. Moore for a "Stereoscopic-Motion-Picture Mechanism" was virtually identical to Hammond s Teleview patent, albeit slightly less detailed. Moore's patent for "a new and useful Improvement in Stereoscopic-Motion-Picture Mechanisms" described "a mechanism whereby a pair of stereoscopic pictures, or two stereoscopic series of motion pictures, can be projected on a screen and the binocular effect of depth and solidity observed by all in the audience." Moore's mechanism, like Hammond's, projected left and right images on the screen in rapid succession using a rotary shutter that was run by a synchronous electric motor. An improvement was claimed with the novelty of Moore's invention for the combination of rotary shutters and electric motors , "whereby exact synchronism is preserved at a high speed thus giving an improved stereoscopic effect."3 Moore neglected to specify the exact rate of the high speed, however, thus failing to sufficiently differentiate his patent from Hammond's. Motional Perspective Inventors have perennially attempted to create a stereoscopic process that does not require a viewing apparatus. The technique of employing camera motion to produce horizontal parallax was attempted by several inventors, whose aim it was to achieve an autostereoscopic movie. This technique had some singular drawbacks and, when presented as an oscillating image, sim- 130 Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film ply did not work. That, however, did not stop the inventors in their endeavors to realize this most unique variation of the Utopian dream. With a 1920 U.S. patent (no. 1,351,508) titled "Method of Producing Stereoscopic Effects in Motion Pictures," Raymond A. Duhem and John D. Grant described an invention...