NSA '96 -- Meet "Mr. Stereo"!

[P3D Dr. George A. Themelis <fj834@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rochester '96 -- Meet "Mr. Stereo"

This year, for the first time, I signed up for the NSA Awards Banquet.  
And I am glad I did!  

After a nice dinner with the company of good friends like John Dukes 
(who shall be called "The inventor of that thing that you put in your 
projector, or around your neck if you prefer ;), and preview uncut rolls 
of realist-format slide film") and Dick Koolish (who shall be called 
"Stereo Photographer of comets and other Celestial objects" -- we all 
enjoyed his pin-sharp stereo of the recent comet), we moved back to the 
convention center to listen to, you guessed it, "Mr. Stereo"!

The Keynote speaker was Mr. Bill Ewald, retired from Kodak after 38 
years of product development work, much of which was in stereo (hence 
the nickname "Mr. Stereo").  The title of the talk was "Sixty Years of 
Stereoscopic Innovation".  Without exaggeration, this was the best talk 
I've heard in a long time.

Bill started by talking about stereo viewers.  (I thought to myself "I 
cannot believe this!  I am hearing a lecture on stereo viewers, my 
favorite subject!"  Too good to be true).  He explained how the 
interocular adjustment is there to control convergence and not to 
accommodate people with varying eye spacings as it is commonly thought.  
He explained why most people feel more comfortable with wider 
interocular so they can converge their eyes.

He then moved to stereo projection and many-many other topics.  I wish 
John Bercovitz was there.  He would have really enjoyed the talk.  An 
engineer is always and engineer.  Bill was not afraid to touch on 
technical details and draw lenses and rays of light to explain tough 
concepts.  He did a terrific job in that respect.

His talk was funny too!  He told us this long and very entertaining 
story of how he mixed nudes among his technical slides, to keep the 
audience awake.  (At this point, I noticed a few people in the audience 
waking up to hear and enjoy the story.... I am not going to mention any 
names, but, Earl, you still owe me a beer or two...)  

One day, Bill was giving his talk for law enforcement officers (like our 
very own 3-D Bear Hayden "My day starts when their day ends").  He tried 
to remove the nude slides but he forgot a few and he was very 
embarrassed.  After the talk, he was approached by a police officer who, 
in very serious voice, told him that he did not approve some of the 
slides that Bill showed.  "Last week we confiscated a few thousand nude 
3-d slides" the officer said. "Why don't I go through them and give you 
some better ones..."!!!!

Bill also told us about the time that they arranged for him to 
demonstrate his stereo projector to an upper level Kodak executive who 
was not reacting as a normal person would.  "You know, I am blind in one 
eye"  he told Bill.  "Can this have something to do with the problem?"  
"It is possible..." was Bill's polite response!!!

I learned a lot in this talk.  Here are a few highlights...

- Among other things, Bill invented a stereo projector that will let you 
align (vertically, horizontally and focus using, get this, a joystick!) 
stereo slides in two seconds, BEFORE the audience sees the slide in 3-d.  
The great benefit of this is that the audience is spared the eye strain 
caused by moving the controls while seeing the slide in 3-d.  Our very 
own Bill Davis (who was there with his lovely and amply stereographed 
daughter Diana and family) apparently got the projector out of Bill's 
basement and put it back to good use...

- He built a 3-d rangefinder.  A glowing diamond changes in size and 3-d 
location when moving a wheel.  You place the diamond over your subject 
and you read the distance from you.  Bill was big in rangefinders and 
Kodak built a special Kodak stereo camera with a rangefinder just for 
him. 

- He explained the concept and practice of looking BEYOND INFINITY.  The 
idea here is to make your eyes diverge.  That's not easy to do and Bill 
went over the basic procedure.  Once you make your eyes diverge, then 
you are actually gazing beyond infinity.  If you look at the stars, they 
will appear to be, not at infinity, but closer to you, as if they are 
projected in a big screen all around you.  What a neat concept!

- He told us how Mr. Lo, the inventor of the Nimslo camera (Nims and Lo) 
was a great genius.  He came to Kodak to demonstrate his 4 lens 
lenticular camera.  Kodak greeted him with their own 8 lens camera.  But 
Lo's lenticular samples were many times better than Kodak's.  That was 
the result of Lo's ingenuity and hard work.  He did most of the work in 
his own kitchen!  Bill explained to us why his lenticulars were much 
better than anybody has ever seen and much better than anything that can 
be produced commercially.  Of course, Kodak was not interested in the 
project and Bill still has Lo's lenticulars in his collection.

- He also told us about the Menardi (sp?) brothers who invented this 
amazing beamsplitter (more properly, framesplitter).  He showed us the 
prototype viewer made out of wood.  After the show I had the chance to 
check out the viewer and sample slide and, I promise, I am never going 
to say a bad word about beamsplitters again!  This one was splitting the 
full frame horizontally and was giving a 3-d image of landscape format 
and incredible quality, definitely equivalent to two lens stereo.  The 
prototype beamsplitter even had an adjustment for the f-stop used in the 
camera, to eliminate any distracting separation in the interface between 
the two images.  Kodak was very impressed and put the brothers in the 
payroll, without requiring them to do anything.  After waiting for many 
years and seeing Kodak's unwillingness to go ahead with the project, 
they left and finally Olden camera in NY made it reality.  But the 
commercial product did not have the f-stop adjustment and lacked the 
quality of results that came from the prototype.

- Finally, Bill stressed the conservatism in Kodak's philosophy.  Most 
great projects were never materialized because of the fear of failure.
"If you act and fail, you are in trouble.  If you do nothing, you
are safe."  Kodak had the film machines that were printing film 24 hours 
a day, 7 days a week.  These were like printing money for Kodak.  Why 
bother with anything else?  This is a sad but true reality for many 
large corporations.

That and more we learned that night... It was the prefect audience for 
Bill and everyone that I asked found the talk great.  After the talk I 
had the chance to handle the demonstration items and prototypes and 
could not help but wonder about the collectible value of these unique 
pieces.

Saturday night was one of the highlights of the convention for me.  I'll 
make sure that I don't miss another NSA Awards Banquet in the future!

George Themelis

PS.  Since the above was written out of memory, it might have errors.  
If you know better/more please feel free to correct or add to the story.  
Thanks!


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