Short­ly after the suc­cess of the ‘Véras­cope’ stereo­scop­ic cam­era, Jules Richard and his engi­neer Louis Colardeau patent­ed the first mod­el as ‘Stéréo-Classeur’ in 1899 and start­ed pro­duc­tion in the same year. It was renamed as ‘Le Tax­iphote’ in 1900. The 6x13cm ‘Le Tax­iphote No. 1bis’ was first men­tioned in 1903 and was still avail­able in the final years around 1940. The met­al eye­pieces were intro­duced in 1911 and the view­er illus­trat­ed is most like­ly pro­duced in the ear­ly 1920’s accord­ing to its ser­i­al number.
All mod­els were avail­able in two stan­dard ver­sions, one in waxed wal­nut and one in pol­ished mahogany. There were also deluxe ver­sions with chang­ing designs such as inlaid pat­terns of dif­fer­ent woods or addi­tion­al ornaments.