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[[image: very dark, blurred photo of buildings and street scene]]

VECTOGRAPHY

[[image: dark, almost blackened, photo of building]]

[[image: a polaroid viewing device]]
[[printed on device]] 
Press IN on nose  
Edges bend and grip.

  for POLAROID* 3-DIMENSIONAL PICTURES

  Press IN on nose
  Edges bend and grip

  This is not the type viewer designed for
[[/printed on device]]

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[[image: photo of 3 military officers collaborating and looking at films]]
[[caption: Vectograph goes to war.]]

Instant History

Eight years before it introduced the first instant camera, Polaroid unveiled a 3-D photographic process that some thought would revolutionize the industry.

[[yellow highlighted]] The year was 1940 [/yellow highlighted]]. Roosevelt had just been re-elected. Gone With The Wind was breaking records at the box office. And the three-year-old Polaroid Corporation was settling into its new headquarters on Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Polaroid, then with a work force of about two hundred, specialized in light polarization technology, much of it based on the pioneering research of company founder Edwin H. Land. Polaroid's product line included photographic filters, sunglasses, desk lamps, and glare-resistant automobile headlights. [[yellow highlighted]] It would be another four years ^[[1944]] before Land would conceive of the instant photographic process and eight years before Polaroid would sell its first instant camera. [[/yellow highlighted]]  ^[[-1948]]

[[image: diagram showing how right and left eye can view a photographed object differently through glasses]]
[[image note 1]] this image appears in full contrast to left eye...invisible to the right eye.[[/image note 1]]
[[image note 2} this image appears in full contrast to the right eye...invisible to the left eye.[[/image note 2]]
[[image note 3]] Vectograph film had an image on each of its two sides, each polarized in a different direction. [[/image note 3]]

[[pencil underlined]] But Polaroid was ready to announce something apparently even more exciting: Vectograph, a film that would allow viewers wearing special polarized glasses to see flat images in breathtaking 3-D. [[/pencil underlined]]

Polaroid had already dabbled in 3-D imagery, having produced  stereoscopic motion picture, In Tune with Tomorrow, for the Chrysler exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. But [[pencil underlined]] Vectograph was based on a completely new film design that offered greater realism and which replaced the traditional chemical principles of photographic film development with polarization technology. [[/pencil underlined]]

A Vectograph 3-D picture actually comprised two images which would be shot simultaneously with a special stereoscopic camera having side-by-side lenses. The twin images would then be exposed onto either side of the Vectograph film, leaving a pattern of light polarization which would be visible only when viewed through a similarly polarized filter.

To separate the superimposed pictures, one for each eye, Victograph film was so designed that the two sides of the film had their optical "grain" running in different direction, at 90 degrees relative to one another. The viewing glasses had their polarized lenses arranged in the same way, so that the viewer's left eye would see one image, the right eye the other. The result was the perception of three dimensions.

[[pencil underlined]] Vectograph found its first practical application in World War II aerial reconnaissance photography. Martin Lipson of Brooklyn Camera Exchange in Brooklyn, New York, was sent to Polaroid's Cambridge headquarters by the Marine Corps in 1943 to learn how to develop Vectographs. [[/pencil underlined]] "We were working with photographs taken over the Aleutian Islands," he recalls. "They were staggering in 3-D. I still remember the mountains coming right up at us through those glasses." Vectograph pictures were employed both in the Pacific and during the invasion of Normandy.

[[image: photo of movie audience wearing 3-D glasses]]
[[caption]] The premier of Bwana Devil. J.R. Eyerman LIFE Magazine [[copyright sign]] 1952, 1980 Time Inc.[[/caption]]

[[image: photo of man looking through Vectography viewer]]

Vectograph's heyday was brief, however. The last hurrah came in 1952 with the premier of Bwana Devil, the first-and the last-Vectograph motion picture. "Popular interest in 3-D movies and photography just fizzled out after the early fifties," says Robert Alger, curator of Polaroid's corporate archives. "Polaroid continued Vectograph research for some years after that, but nothing ever really came of it."

In other words, don't expect to see Bwana Devil II at your local theater anytime soon.

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