Record Details

Name/TitleTray-Stere­o­scope ‘Série III’

About this objectThe wood­en trays con­tain 25 slides each and can be insert­ed into the view­er by flip­ping down its front. Then, by turn­ing a crank on the right side of the hous­ing, one slide after anoth­er can be exam­ined. Each half-turn of the crank advances or returns the slides and moves the tray for­ward. A met­al lever inte­grat­ed into the counter on the left side of the view­er enables free slide nav­i­ga­tion. A fold-out mir­ror at the back adjusts light for opti­mal image illumination.
The view­er illus­trat­ed has a beau­ti­ful­ly dec­o­rat­ed base which seems to be orig­i­nal but still can’t be found in the cat­a­logues. Prob­a­bly, it was made to order. As there is no stor­age base in ‘Série III’ this view­er only comes with one orig­i­nal tray, which is the Autochrome ver­sion with 12 thick­er slots. It’s still equipped with its 12 Autochrome colour slides in the rare 10x15cm format.
‘Hemdé’ view­ers are among the rar­er tray-stere­o­scopes, and are tes­ti­monies to the remark­able diver­si­ty of French stereoscopes.
In-depth infor­ma­tion on ‘Hemdé’ and their view­ers can be found on André Ruiter’s blog: Hemdé

Place MadeFrance

Mak­erHemdé

Mak­er RoleMan­u­fac­tur­er

Date Madec. 1910

Tech­niqueMul­ti-view, tray-based

Tech­niqueFocus, lens board

Peri­od1893–1939

Sub­ject and Asso­ci­a­tion Descrip­tionHemdé was a French trade­mark for pho­tog­ra­phy acces­sories and stere­o­scopes, named after its loca­tion in Hem and its founder, Mau­rice Delé­caille. Ini­tial­ly focused on pho­to­graph­ic glass plate devel­op­ment, the com­pa­ny patent­ed a stere­o­scope mech­a­nism in 1907 in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Émile Cuny and Paul Sorel. After the dis­so­lu­tion of Delécaille’s com­pa­ny in 1909, Sorel con­tin­ued pro­duc­ing Hemdé stere­o­scopes. The com­pa­ny ceased oper­a­tions some­time in the mid-1920s.
One of Hemdé’s spe­cial­ties was the use of wood­en slide trays. Far more impor­tant was their crank mech­a­nism incor­po­rat­ing a inge­nious­ly thread­ed rod that serves for both lift­ing the slides into view­ing posi­tion and mov­ing the tray, allow­ing smooth for­ward and back­ward navigation.

For­mat10x15cm

Object TypeStere­o­scope

Sub­ject and Asso­ci­a­tion Key­wordsFR380115 (É. Cuny, P. Sorel, M. Delé­caille, 1907)

Medi­um and Mate­ri­alsGlass Slides

Object num­berM‑ST059

Copy­right LicenceAll rights reserved