History of Polarized Image Stereoscopic Display
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Walworth, Vivian K.
Stereoscopic photography became popular soon after the introduction of photographic processes by Daguerre and by Talbot in 1839. Stereoscopic images were most often viewed as side-by-side left- and right-eye image pairs, using viewers with prisms or mirrors. Superimposition of encoded image pairs was envisioned as early as the 1890s, and encoding by polarization first became practical in the 1930s with the introduction of polarizers in large sheet form. The use of polarizing filters enabled projection of stereoscopic image pairs and viewing of the projected image through complementary polarizing glasses. Further advances included the formation of images that were themselves polarizers, forming superimposed image pairs on a common carrier, the utilization of polarizing image dyes, the introduction of micropolarizers, and the utilization of liquid crystal polarizers. 
 Thank you, John. Well, the history of 3D with polarized light has been fascinating to me, and I hope is to you too. I'm going to start with a little prehistory, because I think it's fascinating that Wheatstone looked into binocular vision early on, and it was even before photography started, and he designed the mirror stereoscope and showed with stereoscopic drawings that our two eyes function together to make depth perception. And these are some of the drawings that he used to demonstrate this. He lectured before the Royal Society in 1838, and photography came along just a few years later, and immediately people were fascinated. He designed a mirror telescope, I'm sorry, stereoscope, which is not unlike what we can use today, and this type of stereoscope has been very much used by stereographers and is still very important. Then the next development that became important was the realization that you could put two images, one over the other, and code them. Hugo Stavron invented the anaglyph back in 1837 to 1929, but he had a patent, a US patent that was issued around 1900, and the anaglyph, of course, is still very much used. So that's sort of our background, and a British physicist, John Anderton, decided that one could encode by polarization, and he designed several types of polarization incorporated into projection devices and viewing devices, and this particular patent was issued in 1906. It shows polarization by a pile of plates, a pile of glass plates, polarizers, which is a very impractical solution to the problem, and as far as we know, we never actually built this device. This is how the pile of plates works as a polarizer, and at the correct angle, the reflected beam is polarized, and the transmitted beam is also polarized. So that was the situation until Dr. Land came along, and he was fascinated by polarized light, and he was also intrigued by a publication by the British physician, Dr. Herapath, who put together, for some reason we don't know, added iodine to the urine of a dog that had been fed quinine, and got these marvelous polarizing crystals. They were very tiny crystals, but they were highly polarizing, and this is only recently was the structure of Herapathite, which was named after Dr. Herapath, understood, and this is a picture of the structure of Herapathite, and what's interesting is that the iodine arranges in a very neat rule. The purple spheres are the iodine atoms, and iodine itself can form sharp polymeric chains, and so this was a very effective method of polarization, but the crystals were very small, and Herapath and others tried for years to grow large crystals, and it seemed impossible. At one point there was a German scientist who apparently grew large crystals of Herapathite, and I'm not sure, well that's Dr. Lann, I'm sorry, I've gotten out of sequence a little bit, but the Zeiss Company was marketing polarizers that were made by presumably large crystals of Herapathite. The scientist who developed the large crystal system was responsible for what Zeiss was making, but just a few years ago the scientist who worked out the structure of the Herapathite actually bought a polarizer from Zeiss and took it apart and could not find a large crystal. It looks as if maybe it was a plastic embedded with small crystals, which is what Dr. Lann had invented, but we don't know. At any rate, pre-polaroid Lann had formed a company, Lann Wheelwright, with a physics instructor that he met at Harvard, and they formed the Lann Wheelwright Company, and the system that Lann used was to mix the tiny crystals of Herapathite into nitrocellulose and extrude that material to orient the crystals, and that was the basis of the first commercial polarizer, which was J-polarizer, and that's Dr. Lann at an early time with two polarizers crossed, and you probably recognize that as the symbol for Polaroid Corporation, which he formed later. That was the beginning. In 1938, Polaroid introduced the H-polarizer, which is a polyvinyl alcohol, which looks like the top row and below is the, on the right, is the polymeric iodine, which attaches very strongly to polyvinyl alcohol, and that forms the H-polarizer, which is still the polarizer that is used by everyone now, and it's very efficient. So that was the beginning of Polaroid Corporation, but even before Polaroid, before the Polaroid Corporation formed, Lann and Wheelwright were selling J-polarizer to Eastman Kodak for making camera filters. So in 1938, Polaroid introduced the H-polarizer, which is this polyvinyl alcohol, iodine complex, and that is still the main polarizer used. In 1934, Lann and Wheelwright met Smith College Professor of Art, Clarence Kennedy, and he specialized in Italian sculpture of the Renaissance period and was photographing to show the details of sculpture and was very interested in being able to display three-dimensional sculpture. So he hired Lann as a consultant and he obtained some funding from Carnegie, and Lann provided Kennedy a stereo camera, which was a pair of cameras, and a stereo projector, a pair again, and Kennedy became a consultant to Polaroid when it formed in 1937. And his work is still very exceptional, and he has thousands of photographs of sculpture that are in the archive of Harvard University's fine arts, and he served as a consultant to Polaroid for years, and Kennedy is the person who coined the name Polaroid, which of course became the name of the corporation that Lann formed in 1937. Now, as early as 1934, Lann and Wheelwright were experimenting with stereo motion picture photography, and they had parallel 16-millimeter cameras and a pair of projectors, and they went to Rochester and demonstrated this before Dr. Meese, who was the director of research at the time at Kodak, and Meese became very supportive and provided them an endless supply of color film, which at that time was Kodakolor, which was an additive material. Kodakrome didn't come along until 1935, so Lann and Wheelwright presented the first stereoscopic full-color motion picture demonstration at a meeting of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in 1935, and in 1936 the New York Museum of Science and Technology opened in Rockefeller Center, and they had a display of polarization 3D, which they called Polaroid on Parade, and that was 1936 before the Polaroid Corporation formed even. The manufacturer of polarizers at Zeiss was going on, and they were actually demonstrating 3D movies in Germany in the late 30s, and their catalog still lists the Bernatier polarizing filter, which is what they claimed that they could make it large enough to cover a windshield, but there's no evidence that that really happened. At any rate, there was interest at Polaroid also in doing polarized headlights and windshields to protect against the glare from oncoming vehicles, and Polaroid for a number of years was trying to market this to the automobile companies, but that never happened. It became less important as we developed divided highways, and oncoming cars are not quite so much of a problem. The next big thing was the 1939 and 1940 World's Fair, and in the Chrysler Pavilion there was a 3D movie shown. It was black and white in 1939, and then in 1940 it was in Technicolor. The movie showed the self-assembly of a Plymouth car engine in which the parts of the engine moved themselves into place. There were no people showing, just the parts dancing into place, forming the engine. This is quite an exciting movie, and millions of people saw it at the Chrysler Pavilion. I guess a few people have seen it recently because it's been shown at the 3D Expo, and that was a pretty big milestone. I guess the next thing that happened at Polaroid was the Vectograph process, and there was a Czech inventor and stereo enthusiast called Joseph Mahler who wrote to Dr. Landon and suggested that the Antiglyph principle could be realized with images in terms of polarization. Dr. Landon invited Joe Mahler to come visit, and subsequently he moved to the U.S. and became part of the Polaroid Vectograph Research Lab. He and Landon co-invented the Vectograph, and all this happened starting in 1938, and Mahler left Czechoslovakia just shortly before the Nazis took over this country. That was a very good confluence of events. I guess I should have moved some slides here. Well, that's all right. This is the 45-degree stretcher, which became very important in construction of Vectograph film. The film enters the machine at 0.90 degrees and emerges stretched at 45 degrees. What's important about that is that you could then laminate two such layers back to back, and they would be obviously oriented 45 degrees. That also made it possible to make long-winds of film that were suitable to motion picture production. There were big possibilities there. I joined the company in 1944, and when I joined the company, I was assigned to the Vectograph Research Lab, and Joe Mahler was there, and Sam Ketroser, who was a wonderful photographer engineer, had come from France. He was born in Veseravia, and had fled the communists and gone to Paris. Then he met an American woman and decided to come to the U.S. with her, and he became a very important part of Polaroid. He established a Vectograph studio and took many pictures trying to optimize the camera conditions. I'm getting ahead of my story again. That's the Zeiss catalogue page that shows the Prenetar filter. The scientist was a man named Bernauer. That's a picture of Joe Mahler about the time that he came. I'm sorry. I think the slide that says Vivian need a picture says that this was the set of slides we were working on, and not the final set, but that's all I wanted to say. Anyhow, when I joined Polaroid in 1944, the company was very involved in supporting the war effort. In December of 1940, Dr. Land had set as Polaroid's priority the support of the war effort. Over the next several years, they provided the military with many optical devices, including specialized goggles, the Reneight Vision goggles, and they developed a cast plastic optics department and made optical elements very quickly. They developed an optical ring sight and a heat seeking missile system, as well as the Polaroid Vector Graph. To expedite the use of the Vector Graphs for aerial reconnaissance and surveillance, Polaroid established a war school in this building, which is an historic building in Cambridge. It was at that time the factory of the Walworth Company, which is a coincidence because we're only distantly related Walworths. This building was recognized as the place where Alexander Graham Bell made his first long distance phone call. The Walworth Company offices were in South Boston, and they borrowed some telegraph lines and hooked up a telephone at each end and had a two and a half hour conversation between Bell and Mr. Watson, who was famous for having taken the first phone call when Edison said, Mr. Watson, I want you, and he could hear him. But anyhow, they had a long conversation. So the telephone pioneers of America recognized this site, and this is a plaque that they put on the building. And of course, now it's also recognized as the place where Dr. Landhead is office and lab, just inside where that plaque is. And we're working now to get a plaque to honor Dr. Land's use of that building. And I think that's going to happen. So in the course of the vector graph work, the school was set up in this building to train military technicians in the making of vector graphs. And Polaroid made a, this is a picture of the school with students in it. They came for a two week course, and then they went out to serve in the field and Polaroid shipped kits that were packed in foot lockers. And they were used both in the Pacific Theater and in Europe. And I've got a few, oh, this is the aerial camera that was popular at the time. And the aerial reconnaissance planes would shoot successive pictures as they flew over a terrain. And two successive pictures made a very good stereoscopic pair. So that was an important part of the battle at Guadalcanal. We were able to detect the Japanese camouflaged gun emplacements and other things. And that was a very important piece of the work. I'm sorry, I've got the wrong slide here. There was a Bay of Fig's picture, but that came much later. These are some of the pictures that were made in the school. Goodness, I'm sorry. There was a Professor Jack Ruhl at MIT who made a number of vector graphs teaching celestial navigation. And in the demo session I will have some of his vector graphs to show. These are more pictures. They also made on off girls for fun. The two pictures don't have to be stereoscopic. Polaroid continued to make vector graph kits, not in foot lockers, but they sold the vector graph materials and instruction books for a number of years after the war. And meanwhile, they were also working on color vector graph. I'll see what comes up now. Oh, I've gone way ahead. Let's want to go back to the demo. We're into the 1950s. And that was the beginning of the 50s 3D craze, which didn't last long enough, unfortunately. That was a picture of the audience at Bonadil, which appeared in Life Magazine in, I think, 1941, a 51. And then we come to Melody. And that's a big adventure. Polaroid and Technicolor worked together for a time in the early 50s trying to develop vector graph motion pictures. And they printed, they were using at that time the impovision printing process, which is like dye transfer, where you make relief matrices in gelatin, dye them, and then transfer one color at a time to make a three color image. The course vector graph requires two of these. And we had a good dye transfer process working in the lab, but it was so difficult and really demanding because you had to have six matrices which were in perfect register and transfer them all to one vector graph sheet. Polaroid made a number of those. Dr. Land gave a talk before the Optical Society in 1973 showing lantern slides that we'd made in the lab, but it was too costly process to be developed commercially. So that didn't happen. But at Technicolor, they had good equipment for synchronizing. And so they had a pilot machine and they produced a test on a live action film, Tauza's Son of Cochise, and they produced a test film of Melody. It never got me on the pilot stage, of course. And Melody was the first Disney cartoon that was shot in 3D, so that was a wonderful test. The movie producer, Frank Ford Coppola, was very interested in 3D. He had visited Dr. Land and he decided in the 90s that he wanted to include a 3D sequence in a film he was planning. And he assigned his associate, Kim Aubrey, to look into this. And Kim got me to come to San Francisco and I met with them and we discussed at that time Polaroid was still able to make the 35 millimeter film, but they hadn't done it for years. And it didn't turn out to be practical. But in the course of this investigation, Kim and Coppola visited Technicolor and found out that nobody there knew anything about it. The president management just was unaware that there had ever been this work. But a long time employee who worked there mentioned that he remembered working on Melody. And Kim managed to track down a person who had saved pieces of the Melody film. He had apparently cut it up to give out clips to his friends. But Kim and a professor at Cal Arts tracked this down and Kim was able to piece it back together using a complete Melody film and 2D for guidance. And they put together a really nice 3D Melody, which I was very happy to see. I went to a showing at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where they were reviewing Technicolor films that had been made by the impovision transfer process because there was growing concern about the instability of the negative positive films that Technicolor had gone to. And at the same time, Kim was able to show me the 3D Melodies that they had reconstructed. And I understand now that that's been shown at the 3D festivals that have been put on. And it's really quite exciting that it still exists and is in reasonable condition. So in the course of following up on this with Kim Aubrey, I talked to Scott Duncan, who was the professor at Cal Arts, and to Jeff Joseph, who has managed the 3D festivals. And Jeff told me that he had recorded an interview with Richard Goldberg, who had been the director of research at Technicolor at the time we were doing this work together. So I was able to listen to these interviews with Dr. Goldberg. And I found that very exciting. Dr. Goldberg is still living, but he's 89 and not very well. I talked to his wife recently. And it's just interesting to be able to reconstruct all these things. So the Restoration ability was just a very exciting development. And did they show it again last year? So it's still doing fine. I have a couple of frames of Taza's Son of Cochise, which I'll put on display at the demo session. And it still looks good. So I guess that's about all I need to say about Vectograph. Let me see what else is here. There's Son of Cochise. This is taken from a talk I gave in, I think, 1985 or so at the... I'm trying to think what it was called. It was a conference of... Similar to this, that was before the Stereo Displacement Applications. I don't recall the name of the conference now, but anyhow, we talked about the difference between circular and linear glasses. And this slide shows the difference at tilt angle with linear and with circular polarization. And there's some obvious advantages to circular because you can tilt your head and not lose the stereoscopic effect and not see double images. And I was very pleased when Real 3D came along and decided to use circular polarization. And Lenny Lifton had been at the earlier meeting and I think that influenced him. I hope it did. So that conference was called Three-Dimensional Display Techniques. And it was in 1983. And then the SVAE conference in 1984 was Optics and Entertainment. And I was a proponent of circular polarization and I had gotten Polaroid to make circular polarizing viewers and test them when JAWS 2 or JAWS 3 was introduced. JAWS 3, thank you. And Polaroid showed it in 2D in some theaters and had other theaters show it in 3D. And they did not report a significant difference. So Polaroid did not pursue that. But fortunately Real D did. So I guess there we are with Real D. And I think it was very convincing use of circular polarization. And that of course goes on. I'm sorry my slides are really quite out of order. But these are crystals of herapithite. And that is what Dr. Land had observed before he learned to align them. Well I don't have to worry about slides anymore. The other things I wanted to mention were liquid crystal polarizers which came along. And crystallize was Lanny Lipton's first real use of 3D for display and computers. And the point that makes liquid crystals interesting is that they are rapidly reversible electrically. And I guess the next thing that came along was the micropolarizer and sodic ferrous of Revio company displayed really beautiful 3D slides at the SDNA conference in 1994. And then V-Rex has made use of that in a number of products. Then in 2010 the LG company introduced its film type pattern retarder which utilizes a very thin liquid crystal pattern layer that can be coordinated with the 3D images. And the film type retarder coordinates with the raster screen. So every other line of resolution is lost. But the patterns are so fine now that it really doesn't matter. And the film type retarder I think is really what will predominate in the television 3D. So I guess where we are now is that 3D television is coming along and certainly the 3D movies are doing very well. And we're very fortunate that all this is working as well as it is. And I'm sorry that I got my slides jumbled but I think I've told you about everything I know. So if there are any questions I'd be happy to answer them. Steven has the microphone. If there are any questions or comments please put your hand up and Steven will supply the microphone to you. When you were working at Polaroid how many other women were working in your field? How many other women were working in your field or at Polaroid? How many other women? Women? Women? Not girls. Quite a few. Polaroid was very liberal. And I should mention perhaps that there's a certain amount of serendipity in my being at Polaroid because when I graduated from the university I knew I was going to live in Rochester because my husband had taken a job in Rochester. He graduated a year ahead of me. So I knew I was going to go to Rochester and I had an interview with a recruiter from Kodak and he assured me that there would be a job for me at Kodak. I had good grades and good recommendations. So when I got to Rochester I went to Kodak for a follow-up interview and they did offer me a job but it was a secretarial job and they explained that they didn't use women in the laboratory and this man who interviewed me was kind of a fat, tweedle, dumb looking person and he said, you know, in the plant you might have to climb over a steam pipe or something and I looked at him and thought, you know, I could do that better than you could, buddy. But anyhow, I did not take the job at Kodak and in Rochester there was also a company defender photo supply which later became part of DuPont and I was able to get a job in the research lab there and that was fine and our director of research came back from a meeting with a vector graph that he had been given and I was very impressed. So when we moved on to Cambridge my husband took a job in radar technology and moved to Boston to the submarine signal company which was doing sonar and radar at the time and I just went right to Polaroid and applied and I might not have even known about Polaroid if it hadn't been for that vector graph I had seen so that was pretty exciting and Defender was a very nice company to work for but I discovered that they had a peculiar strategy for wages. Everybody started at minimum wage and then you could advance but I found out that the part time student in our lab who was washing dishes was making more than I was because he was male and I was female and as I remember I was getting $18 a week and he was getting $22 so I complained and they raised me to $22 which was nice but when I went to Polaroid I discovered that there was not a difference between men and women as far as salary was concerned and Polaroid hired quite a few women and Professor Kennedy every year would send his best student to Polaroid and these would be arts majors and Dr. Land had the feeling that the confluence of art and science was very important and he could teach people to do experimental work and so some of his best people were art majors and Polaroid was a wonderful place for women. Anything else? I'd like to ask you about Stereojet because in the Polaroid story Stereojet is probably the latest step. Stereojet. Stereojet. Oh we formed Stereojet just a few years ago. I had well I guess I didn't mention but after making color vector graphs in the lab by the laborious dye transfer process when inkjet came along in the 1980s I thought that was really the way to do it and we did some very nice tests at Polaroid but the company was not interested in pursuing it so after I'd left Polaroid in 1985 I did some other things for a while but Dr. Land had formed the Roland Institute and I interested the Institute in developing the inkjet process and J. Scarppetti had a small lab devoted to developing Stereojet and he was a wonderful person to work with and we did show Stereojet at ISNT in the 1980s I think it was 1984 and I gave a paper also I think the following year on some refinements of the process but then Polaroid I'm sorry Roland merged with Harvard and that really shut down the project. J. retired and has since died. Then Polaroid had sold its fullerizer division to 3M and 3M continued making the 45 degree vector graph sheet for a time and then they closed that plant and that machine went into oblivion. It was presumably stored in Rochester but there was no possibility of making 45 degree sheet anymore so we decided that we should try to use the 090 configuration and we could then use linear stretch polarizer instead of 45 degrees and you can take 090 and cross them and have a stereo pair and if you add a circular polarizer you can convert the polarization to circular polarization and so that's really what got us started on Stereojet Incorporated and we're using a sheet that is linearly stretched and combining two so instead of printing on two sides of a 45 degree 45 degree sheet we're printing on 0 and 90 and putting the two together and then adding if we want circular polarization adding a retarder but we could also use linear polarization with 090 glasses and so that's what we're doing. Anything else? Thank Vivian for this talk but she'll be around here and we can continue to ask questions because
 Thank you, John.  Well, the history of 3D with polarized light has been fascinating to me, and I hope is to  you too.  I'm going to start with a little prehistory, because I think it's fascinating that Wheatstone  looked into binocular vision early on, and it was even before photography started, and  he designed the mirror stereoscope and showed with stereoscopic drawings that our two eyes  function together to make depth perception.  And these are some of the drawings that he used to demonstrate this.  He lectured before the Royal Society in 1838, and photography came along just a few years  later, and immediately people were fascinated.  He designed a mirror telescope, I'm sorry, stereoscope, which is not unlike what we can  use today, and this type of stereoscope has been very much used by stereographers and is  still very important.  Then the next development that became important was the realization that you could put two  images, one over the other, and code them.  Hugo Stavron invented the anaglyph back in 1837 to 1929, but he had a patent, a US patent  that was issued around 1900, and the anaglyph, of course, is still very much used.  So that's sort of our background, and a British physicist, John Anderton, decided that one  could encode by polarization, and he designed several types of polarization incorporated  into projection devices and viewing devices, and this particular patent was issued in 1906.  It shows polarization by a pile of plates, a pile of glass plates, polarizers, which  is a very impractical solution to the problem, and as far as we know, we never actually built  this device.  This is how the pile of plates works as a polarizer, and at the correct angle, the reflected  beam is polarized, and the transmitted beam is also polarized.  So that was the situation until Dr. Land came along, and he was fascinated by polarized  light, and he was also intrigued by a publication by the British physician, Dr. Herapath, who  put together, for some reason we don't know, added iodine to the urine of a dog that had  been fed quinine, and got these marvelous polarizing crystals.  They were very tiny crystals, but they were highly polarizing, and this is only recently  was the structure of Herapathite, which was named after Dr. Herapath, understood, and this  is a picture of the structure of Herapathite, and what's interesting is that the iodine  arranges in a very neat rule.  The purple spheres are the iodine atoms, and iodine itself can form sharp polymeric  chains, and so this was a very effective method of polarization, but the crystals were very  small, and Herapath and others tried for years to grow large crystals, and it seemed impossible.  At one point there was a German scientist who apparently grew large crystals of Herapathite,  and I'm not sure, well that's Dr. Lann, I'm sorry, I've gotten out of sequence a little  bit, but the Zeiss Company was marketing polarizers that were made by presumably large crystals  of Herapathite. The scientist who developed the large crystal system was responsible for  what Zeiss was making, but just a few years ago the scientist who worked out the structure  of the Herapathite actually bought a polarizer from Zeiss and took it apart and could not  find a large crystal. It looks as if maybe it was a plastic embedded with small crystals,  which is what Dr. Lann had invented, but we don't know. At any rate, pre-polaroid Lann  had formed a company, Lann Wheelwright, with a physics instructor that he met at Harvard,  and they formed the Lann Wheelwright Company, and the system that Lann used was to mix the  tiny crystals of Herapathite into nitrocellulose and extrude that material to orient the crystals,  and that was the basis of the first commercial polarizer, which was J-polarizer, and that's  Dr. Lann at an early time with two polarizers crossed, and you probably recognize that as  the symbol for Polaroid Corporation, which he formed later.  That was the beginning. In 1938, Polaroid introduced the H-polarizer, which is a polyvinyl alcohol,  which looks like the top row and below is the, on the right, is the polymeric iodine,  which attaches very strongly to polyvinyl alcohol, and that forms the H-polarizer, which  is still the polarizer that is used by everyone now, and it's very efficient.  So that was the beginning of Polaroid Corporation, but even before Polaroid, before the Polaroid  Corporation formed, Lann and Wheelwright were selling J-polarizer to Eastman Kodak for making  camera filters. So in 1938, Polaroid introduced the H-polarizer, which is this polyvinyl alcohol,  iodine complex, and that is still the main polarizer used. In 1934, Lann and Wheelwright  met Smith College Professor of Art, Clarence Kennedy, and he specialized in Italian sculpture  of the Renaissance period and was photographing to show the details of sculpture and was very  interested in being able to display three-dimensional sculpture. So he hired Lann as a consultant  and he obtained some funding from Carnegie, and Lann provided Kennedy a stereo camera,  which was a pair of cameras, and a stereo projector, a pair again, and Kennedy became  a consultant to Polaroid when it formed in 1937. And his work is still very exceptional,  and he has thousands of photographs of sculpture that are in the archive of Harvard University's  fine arts, and he served as a consultant to Polaroid for years, and Kennedy is the person  who coined the name Polaroid, which of course became the name of the corporation that Lann  formed in 1937. Now, as early as 1934, Lann and Wheelwright were experimenting with stereo  motion picture photography, and they had parallel 16-millimeter cameras and a pair of projectors,  and they went to Rochester and demonstrated this before Dr. Meese, who was the director  of research at the time at Kodak, and Meese became very supportive and provided them an  endless supply of color film, which at that time was Kodakolor, which was an additive  material. Kodakrome didn't come along until 1935, so Lann and Wheelwright presented the  first stereoscopic full-color motion picture demonstration at a meeting of the Society of  Motion Picture Engineers in 1935, and in 1936 the New York Museum of Science and Technology  opened in Rockefeller Center, and they had a display of polarization 3D, which they called  Polaroid on Parade, and that was 1936 before the Polaroid Corporation formed even. The  manufacturer of polarizers at Zeiss was going on, and they were actually demonstrating 3D  movies in Germany in the late 30s, and their catalog still lists the Bernatier polarizing  filter, which is what they claimed that they could make it large enough to cover a windshield,  but there's no evidence that that really happened. At any rate, there was interest at Polaroid  also in doing polarized headlights and windshields to protect against the glare from oncoming  vehicles, and Polaroid for a number of years was trying to market this to the automobile  companies, but that never happened. It became less important as we developed divided highways,  and oncoming cars are not quite so much of a problem. The next big thing was the 1939  and 1940 World's Fair, and in the Chrysler Pavilion there was a 3D movie shown. It was  black and white in 1939, and then in 1940 it was in Technicolor. The movie showed the  self-assembly of a Plymouth car engine in which the parts of the engine moved themselves  into place. There were no people showing, just the parts dancing into place, forming  the engine. This is quite an exciting movie, and millions of people saw it at the Chrysler  Pavilion. I guess a few people have seen it recently because it's been shown at the 3D  Expo, and that was a pretty big milestone. I guess the next thing that happened at Polaroid  was the Vectograph process, and there was a Czech inventor and stereo enthusiast called  Joseph Mahler who wrote to Dr. Landon and suggested that the Antiglyph principle could  be realized with images in terms of polarization. Dr. Landon invited Joe Mahler to come visit,  and subsequently he moved to the U.S. and became part of the Polaroid Vectograph Research  Lab. He and Landon co-invented the Vectograph, and all this happened starting in 1938, and  Mahler left Czechoslovakia just shortly before the Nazis took over this country. That was  a very good confluence of events. I guess I should have moved some slides here. Well,  that's all right. This is the 45-degree stretcher, which became very important in construction  of Vectograph film. The film enters the machine at 0.90 degrees and emerges stretched at 45  degrees. What's important about that is that you could then laminate two such layers back  to back, and they would be obviously oriented 45 degrees. That also made it possible to  make long-winds of film that were suitable to motion picture production. There were big  possibilities there. I joined the company in 1944, and when I joined the company, I was  assigned to the Vectograph Research Lab, and Joe Mahler was there, and Sam Ketroser, who  was a wonderful photographer engineer, had come from France. He was born in Veseravia,  and had fled the communists and gone to Paris. Then he met an American woman and decided  to come to the U.S. with her, and he became a very important part of Polaroid. He established  a Vectograph studio and took many pictures trying to optimize the camera conditions.  I'm getting ahead of my story again. That's the Zeiss catalogue page that shows the Prenetar  filter. The scientist was a man named Bernauer. That's a picture of Joe Mahler about the time  that he came. I'm sorry. I think the slide that says Vivian need a picture says that  this was the set of slides we were working on, and not the final set, but that's all  I wanted to say. Anyhow, when I joined Polaroid in 1944, the company was very involved in  supporting the war effort. In December of 1940, Dr. Land had set as Polaroid's priority  the support of the war effort. Over the next several years, they provided the military  with many optical devices, including specialized goggles, the Reneight Vision goggles, and  they developed a cast plastic optics department and made optical elements very quickly. They  developed an optical ring sight and a heat seeking missile system, as well as the Polaroid  Vector Graph. To expedite the use of the Vector Graphs for aerial reconnaissance and surveillance,  Polaroid established a war school in this building, which is an historic building in  Cambridge. It was at that time the factory of the Walworth Company, which is a coincidence  because we're only distantly related Walworths. This building was recognized as the place  where Alexander Graham Bell made his first long distance phone call. The Walworth Company  offices were in South Boston, and they borrowed some telegraph lines and hooked up a telephone  at each end and had a two and a half hour conversation between Bell and Mr. Watson,  who was famous for having taken the first phone call when Edison said, Mr. Watson, I  want you, and he could hear him. But anyhow, they had a long conversation. So the telephone  pioneers of America recognized this site, and this is a plaque that they put on the  building. And of course, now it's also recognized as the place where Dr. Landhead is office and  lab, just inside where that plaque is. And we're working now to get a plaque to honor  Dr. Land's use of that building. And I think that's going to happen.  So in the course of the vector graph work, the school was set up in this building to  train military technicians in the making of vector graphs. And Polaroid made a, this is  a picture of the school with students in it. They came for a two week course, and then  they went out to serve in the field and Polaroid shipped kits that were packed in foot lockers.  And they were used both in the Pacific Theater and in Europe. And I've got a few, oh, this  is the aerial camera that was popular at the time. And the aerial reconnaissance planes  would shoot successive pictures as they flew over a terrain. And two successive pictures  made a very good stereoscopic pair. So that was an important part of the battle at Guadalcanal.  We were able to detect the Japanese camouflaged gun emplacements and other things. And that  was a very important piece of the work. I'm sorry, I've got the wrong slide here. There  was a Bay of Fig's picture, but that came much later. These are some of the pictures  that were made in the school. Goodness, I'm sorry. There was a Professor Jack Ruhl at  MIT who made a number of vector graphs teaching celestial navigation. And in the demo session  I will have some of his vector graphs to show. These are more pictures. They also made on  off girls for fun. The two pictures don't have to be stereoscopic. Polaroid continued  to make vector graph kits, not in foot lockers, but they sold the vector graph materials and  instruction books for a number of years after the war. And meanwhile, they were also working  on color vector graph. I'll see what comes up now. Oh, I've gone way ahead. Let's want  to go back to the demo. We're into the 1950s. And that was the beginning of the 50s 3D craze,  which didn't last long enough, unfortunately. That was a picture of the audience at Bonadil,  which appeared in Life Magazine in, I think, 1941, a 51. And then we come to Melody. And  that's a big adventure. Polaroid and Technicolor worked together for a time in the early 50s  trying to develop vector graph motion pictures. And they printed, they were using at that  time the impovision printing process, which is like dye transfer, where you make relief  matrices in gelatin, dye them, and then transfer one color at a time to make a three color  image. The course vector graph requires two of these. And we had a good dye transfer process  working in the lab, but it was so difficult and really demanding because you had to have  six matrices which were in perfect register and transfer them all to one vector graph  sheet. Polaroid made a number of those. Dr. Land gave a talk before the Optical Society  in 1973 showing lantern slides that we'd made in the lab, but it was too costly process  to be developed commercially. So that didn't happen. But at Technicolor, they had good  equipment for synchronizing. And so they had a pilot machine and they produced a test on  a live action film, Tauza's Son of Cochise, and they produced a test film of Melody. It  never got me on the pilot stage, of course. And Melody was the first Disney cartoon that  was shot in 3D, so that was a wonderful test. The movie producer, Frank Ford Coppola, was  very interested in 3D. He had visited Dr. Land and he decided in the 90s that he wanted  to include a 3D sequence in a film he was planning. And he assigned his associate, Kim  Aubrey, to look into this. And Kim got me to come to San Francisco and I met with them  and we discussed at that time Polaroid was still able to make the 35 millimeter film,  but they hadn't done it for years. And it didn't turn out to be practical. But in the  course of this investigation, Kim and Coppola visited Technicolor and found out that nobody  there knew anything about it. The president management just was unaware that there had  ever been this work. But a long time employee who worked there mentioned that he remembered  working on Melody. And Kim managed to track down a person who had saved pieces of the  Melody film. He had apparently cut it up to give out clips to his friends. But Kim and  a professor at Cal Arts tracked this down and Kim was able to piece it back together using  a complete Melody film and 2D for guidance. And they put together a really nice 3D Melody,  which I was very happy to see. I went to a showing at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts  and Sciences where they were reviewing Technicolor films that had been made by the impovision  transfer process because there was growing concern about the instability of the negative  positive films that Technicolor had gone to. And at the same time, Kim was able to show  me the 3D Melodies that they had reconstructed. And I understand now that that's been shown  at the 3D festivals that have been put on. And it's really quite exciting that it still  exists and is in reasonable condition. So in the course of following up on this with  Kim Aubrey, I talked to Scott Duncan, who was the professor at Cal Arts, and to Jeff  Joseph, who has managed the 3D festivals. And Jeff told me that he had recorded an interview  with Richard Goldberg, who had been the director of research at Technicolor at the time we  were doing this work together. So I was able to listen to these interviews with Dr. Goldberg.  And I found that very exciting. Dr. Goldberg is still living, but he's 89 and not very  well. I talked to his wife recently. And it's just interesting to be able to reconstruct  all these things. So the Restoration ability was just a very exciting development. And  did they show it again last year? So it's still doing fine. I have a couple of frames  of Taza's Son of Cochise, which I'll put on display at the demo session. And it still  looks good. So I guess that's about all I need to say about Vectograph. Let me see what  else is here. There's Son of Cochise. This is taken from a talk I gave in, I think, 1985  or so at the... I'm trying to think what it was called. It was a conference of...  Similar to this, that was before the Stereo Displacement Applications. I don't recall  the name of the conference now, but anyhow, we talked about the difference between circular  and linear glasses. And this slide shows the difference at tilt angle with linear and with  circular polarization. And there's some obvious advantages to circular because you can tilt  your head and not lose the stereoscopic effect and not see double images. And I was very  pleased when Real 3D came along and decided to use circular polarization. And Lenny Lifton  had been at the earlier meeting and I think that influenced him. I hope it did. So that  conference was called Three-Dimensional Display Techniques. And it was in 1983. And then the  SVAE conference in 1984 was Optics and Entertainment. And I was a proponent of circular polarization  and I had gotten Polaroid to make circular polarizing viewers and test them when JAWS  2 or JAWS 3 was introduced. JAWS 3, thank you. And Polaroid showed it in 2D in some theaters  and had other theaters show it in 3D. And they did not report a significant difference.  So Polaroid did not pursue that. But fortunately Real D did. So I guess there we are with  Real D. And I think it was very convincing use of circular polarization. And that of  course goes on. I'm sorry my slides are really quite out of order. But these are crystals  of herapithite. And that is what Dr. Land had observed before he learned to align them.  Well I don't have to worry about slides anymore. The other things I wanted to mention were  liquid crystal polarizers which came along. And crystallize was Lanny Lipton's first real  use of 3D for display and computers. And the point that makes liquid crystals interesting  is that they are rapidly reversible electrically. And I guess the next thing that came along  was the micropolarizer and sodic ferrous of Revio company displayed really beautiful 3D  slides at the SDNA conference in 1994. And then V-Rex has made use of that in a number  of products. Then in 2010 the LG company introduced its film type pattern retarder which utilizes  a very thin liquid crystal pattern layer that can be coordinated with the 3D images. And  the film type retarder coordinates with the raster screen. So every other line of resolution  is lost. But the patterns are so fine now that it really doesn't matter. And the film  type retarder I think is really what will predominate in the television 3D. So I guess  where we are now is that 3D television is coming along and certainly the 3D movies are  doing very well. And we're very fortunate that all this is working as well as it is.  And I'm sorry that I got my slides jumbled but I think I've told you about everything  I know. So if there are any questions I'd be happy to answer them.  Steven has the microphone. If there are any questions or comments please put your hand  up and Steven will supply the microphone to you.  When you were working at Polaroid how many other women were working in your field? How  many other women were working in your field or at Polaroid? How many other women? Women?  Women? Not girls. Quite a few. Polaroid was very liberal. And I should mention perhaps  that there's a certain amount of serendipity in my being at Polaroid because when I graduated  from the university I knew I was going to live in Rochester because my husband had taken  a job in Rochester. He graduated a year ahead of me. So I knew I was going to go to Rochester  and I had an interview with a recruiter from Kodak and he assured me that there would be  a job for me at Kodak. I had good grades and good recommendations. So when I got to Rochester  I went to Kodak for a follow-up interview and they did offer me a job but it was a secretarial  job and they explained that they didn't use women in the laboratory and this man who interviewed  me was kind of a fat, tweedle, dumb looking person and he said, you know, in the plant  you might have to climb over a steam pipe or something and I looked at him and thought,  you know, I could do that better than you could, buddy. But anyhow, I did not take the  job at Kodak and in Rochester there was also a company defender photo supply which later  became part of DuPont and I was able to get a job in the research lab there and that was  fine and our director of research came back from a meeting with a vector graph that he  had been given and I was very impressed. So when we moved on to Cambridge my husband  took a job in radar technology and moved to Boston to the submarine signal company which  was doing sonar and radar at the time and I just went right to Polaroid and applied and  I might not have even known about Polaroid if it hadn't been for that vector graph I  had seen so that was pretty exciting and Defender was a very nice company to work for but I  discovered that they had a peculiar strategy for wages. Everybody started at minimum wage  and then you could advance but I found out that the part time student in our lab who  was washing dishes was making more than I was because he was male and I was female and  as I remember I was getting $18 a week and he was getting $22 so I complained and they  raised me to $22 which was nice but when I went to Polaroid I discovered that there was  not a difference between men and women as far as salary was concerned and Polaroid hired  quite a few women and Professor Kennedy every year would send his best student to Polaroid  and these would be arts majors and Dr. Land had the feeling that the confluence of art  and science was very important and he could teach people to do experimental work and so  some of his best people were art majors and Polaroid was a wonderful place for women.  Anything else? I'd like to ask you about Stereojet because  in the Polaroid story Stereojet is probably the latest step. Stereojet. Stereojet. Oh  we formed Stereojet just a few years ago. I had well I guess I didn't mention but after  making color vector graphs in the lab by the laborious dye transfer process when inkjet  came along in the 1980s I thought that was really the way to do it and we did some very  nice tests at Polaroid but the company was not interested in pursuing it so after I'd  left Polaroid in 1985 I did some other things for a while but Dr. Land had formed the Roland  Institute and I interested the Institute in developing the inkjet process and J. Scarppetti  had a small lab devoted to developing Stereojet and he was a wonderful person to work with  and we did show Stereojet at ISNT in the 1980s I think it was 1984 and I gave a paper also  I think the following year on some refinements of the process but then Polaroid I'm sorry  Roland merged with Harvard and that really shut down the project. J. retired and has  since died. Then Polaroid had sold its fullerizer division to 3M and 3M continued making the  45 degree vector graph sheet for a time and then they closed that plant and that machine  went into oblivion. It was presumably stored in Rochester but there was no possibility  of making 45 degree sheet anymore so we decided that we should try to use the 090 configuration  and we could then use linear stretch polarizer instead of 45 degrees and you can take 090  and cross them and have a stereo pair and if you add a circular polarizer you can convert  the polarization to circular polarization and so that's really what got us started on  Stereojet Incorporated and we're using a sheet that is linearly stretched and combining  two so instead of printing on two sides of a 45 degree 45 degree sheet we're printing  on 0 and 90 and putting the two together and then adding if we want circular polarization  adding a retarder but we could also use linear polarization with 090 glasses and so that's  what we're doing. Anything else?  Thank Vivian for this talk but she'll be around here and we can continue to ask questions because
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