Re: Eye Doctor's Viewer

[bjay@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Chuck Field said:
>I recently found a Holmes style viewer that had been painted an awful
>shade of green. - - - - - -

It sounds like a viewer from a Keystone eye exercise set.  If it is,
it probably does not have a folding handle, instead it would very
likely have a handle similar to the focusing grip on the bottom of
the sliding picture holder.

Mine were packaged in a box with about a dozen or so eye exercise views
and an instruction booklet.  Some boxes had viewers with the green
paint and some had brown viewers with wrinkle paint (crackle paint?)
on the hood.  The brown viewers were slightly larger and the hoods
were wide enough to fit over most peoples' eyeglasses.

The numbers on the stick (on mine) are in diopters, going both ways from
the zero in the middle.




It appears that they may have been prescribed by optometrists or by
opthalmologists for eye exercises.  However the oldest doctors I know
of either type couldn't confirm this.  A fringe benefit of the inquiry
was that one of them gave me a lot of catalog material from Keystone,
which didn't shed much light on the question.

It is my opinion that these viewers were produced into the '40's
and possibly into the '50's.  When Keystone advertised a sell-off
of various stuff a few years ago there were some stereoscopes of
this type.

Incidentally, I have one set consisting of a pedestal-mounted
Keystone stereoscope in a large steel "portable" case, with a set of
eye examination cards, covering visual acuity, astigmatism, depth
perception, color blindness, etc.  Grading standards are included
for determining whether the "examinee" was qualified for flying duty.

It works, but I'm grateful for the more advanced equipment in use now.



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