Tray-Stereoscope ‚Nouveau Stéréoscope‘

This unusu­al­ly elab­o­rate exam­ple of Mack­en­stein’s Nou­veau Stéréo­scope, intro­duced in 1911, was prob­a­bly made dur­ing the ear­ly years of the mod­el. The cab­i­net is fin­ished in high­ly fig­ured bird’s-eye maple veneer and dif­fers in sev­er­al details from the more stan­dard­ized ver­sions pro­duced lat­er. Among these is a spring mech­a­nism that auto­mat­i­cal­ly push­es the front cov­er for­ward when released, facil­i­tat­ing access to the inter­change­able trays.
Each tray holds 25 glass stere­oviews. Turn­ing the side crank rais­es the select­ed slide from the tray into view­ing posi­tion; con­tin­ued rota­tion low­ers it again and advances the tray to the next image. A sep­a­rate con­trol allows the tray to be moved rapid­ly for­ward or back­ward to select a par­tic­u­lar view. Focus and inte­roc­u­lar dis­tance can be adjust­ed at the eyepieces.
In adver­tise­ments, Mack­en­stein active­ly pro­mot­ed direct con­tact with cus­tomers and repeat­ed­ly invit­ed prospec­tive buy­ers in his adver­tise­ments to vis­it his Paris premis­es and try his stereo­scop­ic equip­ment before mak­ing a pur­chase. This par­tic­u­lar stere­o­scope may orig­i­nal­ly have served as a demon­stra­tion mod­el in Mack­en­stein’s Paris salesroom. An unusu­al­ly promi­nent set of oper­at­ing instruc­tions is per­ma­nent­ly mount­ed on the front of the low­er cab­i­net, explain­ing how to advance the views, select a par­tic­u­lar image and return to the first view. In addi­tion, the brass mech­a­nism inside the stere­o­scope is com­plete­ly lac­quered, pro­tect­ing it against oxi­da­tion and wear. Togeth­er with the excep­tion­al­ly lux­u­ri­ous fin­ish in high­ly fig­ured bird’s-eye maple veneer, these fea­tures sug­gest an appa­ra­tus intend­ed for repeat­ed demon­stra­tion rather than an ordi­nary domes­tic example.