'Feeling Seeing': Touch, Vision and the Stereoscope

Oliver Wendell Holmes and David Brewster both described stereoscopy in terms of its sculptural quality as a way of emphasising the haptic quality of viewing stereoscopic photographs. The phenomenal realism of the device augmented the indexical realism of photography. This article details the way that the stereoscope intervened in longstanding philosophical and scientific debates concerning the relationship between vision, touch and depth perception. It also unpicks the popular reception of the stereoscope in so far as explanations of its working became the subject of conflicting claims by opposing groups of scientists drawing on nativist and empiricist accounts of depth perception. Debates over the meaning of the stereoscope in the 1840s and 1850s caution against locating it simplistically as a new, disruptive way of seeing; rather, Brewster's influence on popular explanations, achieved through his relentless work for the periodical press, suggests its pleasure drew heavily on traditional paradigms from optics and natural theology.