Tray-Stereoscope ‚Le Taxiphote Richard-Chauvelon‘, Art Deco style

Fol­low­ing the suc­cess of his Véras­cope stereo­scop­ic cam­era, Jules Richard and his engi­neer Louis Colardeau devel­oped the first Tax­iphote, patent­ed as the Stéréo-Classeur in 1899. Renamed Le Tax­iphote in 1900, it became one of the most suc­cess­ful French stereo­scop­ic view­ing sys­tems and remained in pro­duc­tion for around four decades.
The Tax­iphote sim­pli­fié, intro­duced in 1908, fea­tured a con­ve­nient crank mech­a­nism instead of the lever used in ear­li­er mod­els. Designed as a more afford­able alter­na­tive, it became the basis for the Richard-Chau­velon, a spe­cial ver­sion intro­duced in 1936 and pre­sent­ed at the Salon de la Pho­to in Paris. Chau­velon had already been involved in the tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment of sev­er­al Richard prod­ucts, includ­ing the Inverseur automa­tique in the 1910s and the Homéos prod­uct line around 1920. The Tax­iphote Richard-Chau­velon thus con­tin­ued a col­lab­o­ra­tion dat­ing back more than two decades.
The new mod­el com­bined the proven mech­a­nism of the Tax­iphote sim­pli­fié with sev­er­al prac­ti­cal improve­ments and a mod­ern cab­i­net reflect­ing the Art Deco style of the peri­od. Although offi­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed Tax­iphote Richard-Chau­velon, its dis­tinc­tive appear­ance led to it becom­ing wide­ly known as the Tax­iphote Art Deco. The mod­el was also described in the 1937 cat­a­logue as the sim­plest in the Tax­iphote range.
The Richard-Chau­velon illus­trates how Jules Richard con­tin­ued to adapt the estab­lished Tax­iphote sys­tem to con­tem­po­rary design pref­er­ences and prac­ti­cal require­ments dur­ing the final years of the stereo­scop­ic era before the Sec­ond World War.