Jules Fleury, known as Fleury Her­magis, born in 1835, was an opti­cian and the son of Hyacinthe Her­magis. In 1864, he took over his father’s busi­ness, a com­pa­ny spe­cial­iz­ing in pre­ci­sion optics and gen­er­al pho­to­graph­ic sup­plies, locat­ed at 18 Rue Ram­buteau in Paris and found­ed in 1845.
After the Uni­ver­sal Exhi­bi­tion in Lon­don and the devel­op­ment of stere­oscopy in France, the opti­cian became inter­est­ed in the phe­nom­e­non and filed a first patent (FR34,862, Decem­ber 26, 1857) for a stere­o­scope with par­al­lel spheres, intend­ed to improve stereo­scop­ic vision and reduce eye strain and image dis­tor­tions caused by prisms.
A pre­sen­ta­tion of the inven­tion took place at the French Pho­to­graph­ic Soci­ety dur­ing the meet­ing of Feb­ru­ary 19, 1858. A sec­ond pre­sen­ta­tion fol­lowed on Decem­ber 21, 1858, by Fleury Her­magis him­self, help­ing to clar­i­fy the exchanges between Her­magis and Claudet, the lat­ter claim­ing pri­or­i­ty in the use of lens­es instead of prisms in stereoscopes.
In 1865, Fleury-Her­magis filed a new patent (FR69,519, Novem­ber 29, 1865) for a sys­tem of com­bined lens­es, a more com­plex but more effec­tive opti­cal system.
In the 20th cen­tu­ry, Her­magis mar­ket­ed the prod­ucts of Mat­tey under its own label.
(from: Moulin­ier et al. His­toires de vision­neuses stéréo­scopiques français­es. Limo­ges, 2025, pp. 73–74. Author’s translation.)