A Portland, Oregon pharmacist, Edwin Mayer, started a photo-finishing business and bought into Sawyer's Photo Finishing Service in 1919 and by 1926 renamed the business Sawyer Service, Inc. The company produced photographic postcards and album sets as souvenirs. Sawyer was the nation's largest producer of scenic postcards in the 1920s.
Introduced at the New York World's Fair in 1939, the View-Master was originally manufactured and sold by Sawyer's, the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding thin, circular cardboard disks. Each disk contained seven Stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film. A lever on the unit would rotate the disk to the next image. The View-Master was an extension of the old two-dimensional cards.
The advent of Kodachrome color film made the use of small high-quality photographic color images practical. Tourist attraction and travel views dominated in View-Master's early lists of 3D Stereo reels, most of which were meant to be interesting to users of all ages. View-Master's highest-quality viewer, Model D, was available until the early 1970s. Today, children are the View-Master's main sales target.
Note: Shown above is Model C, made of bakelite and produced from 1946-55. My father had one. It is in my collection.
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