Of motors, martians and jazz age cities : The stereoscopic inventions of Laurens Hammond

Our article focuses on Laurens Hammond’s stereoscopic inventions of the 1920s. The ‘Teleview’ system, an early example of S3D cinema, synchronized projectors and seat-mounted viewing apparatuses with the a/c motor that would later drive his musical instruments. Shortly after its acclaimed New York premiere in 1922 (mere months after the similarly ill-fated S3D Fairall system), Hammond reconfigured his invention into a live vaudeville act using his competitor’s simpler but less effective anaglyph technique. Patented and licensed to the Ziegfeld Follies, his largely forgotten ‘Shadowgraph’ astonished audiences with live stereoscopy. Our article postulates that this apparent regression from electromechanical cinema spectacles to disposable theatre glasses was due less to the technical and economic challenges of Hammond’s initial system, and more to its construction as a form of Tom Gunning’s so-called ‘cinema of the attractions’.