FISHERVIEW Glass WWI STEREOGRAPH Card Stereoview PLATE

Description: WD-5 Fort Ham Blown Up By Up By a Mine. This is, or was, an old castle fort which was built during the tenth century and enlarged and remodeled during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The fort was built in the form of a rectangle 400 feet long by 250 feet wide and with walls 35 feet, high entirely surrounding the fort. The moat which we see in the foreground extends around the four sides of the fort and is 90 feet wide and 30 feet deep. In the dungeon in this fort Joan of Arc, Louis of Conde, Prince Napoleon Bonaparte and others who played important parts in French history have been held prisoners at different times. Before the war this fort was used for an armory and a government prison, but on account of its strategic value in a line of defense along the Somme it was armed against invasion. The fort was completely destroyed when the Germans passed through the town; a mine caused the powder magazine to explode with the result which you see. (From Great War in 3D Online) Fisher Scientific Materials Company of Pittsburgh, PA, founded by 20-year old Chester G. Fisher in 1902, sold laboratory supplies to the Army during World War I. Fisher was tasked to equip a research laboratory to identify German gas weapons. The company exists today as Fisher Scientific. In the early Twenties, the company produced a set of 72 medium-format glass stereographs. All images were authorized by the French War Department and were obtained from French manufacturers Paris Stéréo and STL. The plates have a characteristic layout of a black center bar with logo and sequence number and a black bottom bar with the title. Fisherview images are not in the standard French medium format, which is a glass plate 59-60mm x 129-130mm with a 6mm title bar at center. The Fisherview plate is 62-63mm x 126-127mm. The 6mm center strip was used for the company logo and a 12mm strip was created at the bottom for the number and title. The viewing area of a Fisherview plate is 6050mm2, or about 81% of the area of a standard French medium format view (7440mm2). Production of photographic equipment was out of character for Fisher. The company does not have archives today that explain the reason for it. A possible explanation may be that Chester Fisher’s artistic bent led him to acquire rights to a batch of Great War stereo images when given the opportunity during his war work. He became a prominent art collector specializing in paintings related to alchemy and chemistry, building an extensive collection eventually donated to the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. Fisherview plates were sold in boxes of 12 plates for the "Fisherview," a crude stereoviewer of two wooden boxes with the lenses in one and the image holder in the other; the inner box slides in-and-out to get the correct focus. The World War set was accompanied by a Catalog of Plates describing each view in much the same manner as the text on the reverse of Keystone stereoviews. The catalog mentions additional sets, all related to the war. They include the London Peace March, the return of American troops to New York, and the bombardment of Rheims.

Price: 14.95 USD

Location: Elyria, Ohio

End Time: 2025-01-23T00:43:35.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD