distant that the two perspectives formed by the naked eye are no more distinguished from each other, recourse may be had to binocular telescopes and range-finders; and if the objects be so small that, in order to observe details on them, we must bring our eyes so close to the objects that they cannot accommodate the images, recourse may be had to binocular microscopes and magnifying glasses.
The construction of binocular instruments dates back over several centuries, and has now been brought to great perfection. The subject of their theory and history has been exhaustively treated by M. von Rohr, Die binokularen Instrumente (Berlin, 1907), the first publication to present a complete account of these instruments.
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Fig. 1. |
Binocular Instruments for Observation only.—The first binocular telescope, consisting of two telescopes placed side by side, was constructed in 1608 by Johann Lipperhey, the inventor of the ordinary or Dutch telescope. The subject was next taken up by the monks. The Capuchin Antonius Maria Telescope.Schyrläus (Schyrl) de Rheita (1597–1660) described in 1645 the construction of double terrestrial telescopes. Greater success attended the efforts of the Capuchin Chérubin d’Orléans, who flourished at about the same time, and constructed large double telescopes of the Dutch type of high magnification, for use in war, and smaller instruments of lower magnification; these instruments were provided with mechanism for adjusting to the interval between the eyes of the observer (fig. 1). After these discoveries the subject received no more attention until the 19th century; no improvements of these instruments are recorded in the literature of the second half of the 18th century.
The re-invention of the Dutch binocular telescope apparently dates from 1823, and is to be assigned to the Viennese optician, Johann Friedrich Voigtländer (1779–1859); but the credit of having placed these instruments on the market probably belongs to J. P. Lemière in Paris, who, in 1825, took out a French patent for an improvement of the Dutch double telescope. Lemière’s instruments were furnished with a common focusing arrangement, and the adapting to the inter-pupillary distance was effected by turning the two parallel telescopes round their common axis. The development of this instrument was studied by opticians for the remainder of the first half of the 19th century; the last improvement apparently was made by P. G. Bardou in 1854, and by H. Helmholtz in 1857 when he described the telestereoscope (fig. 2) with telescopic magnification. By utilizing the telescope with prism-inversion, devised in 1851 by Ignazio Porro (1795–1875), A. A. Boulanger succeeded in producing a binocular of an entirely new type in 1859 (fig. 3). But he overlooked the possibility of increasing the distance between the objectives; Camille Nachet introduced this improvement in 1875, but his instruments did not meet with much popularity. This was probably due to the fact that, at this time, the manufacture of the glass for the prisms was too difficult; this was overcome by E. Abbe, after the founding of the glass-works at Jena, who effected, independently of his predecessors, the wider separation of the objectives (fig. 4), and increased it in the telestereoscope (fig. 5), or relief telescope, in a manner nearly approaching to Helmholtz’s proposal.
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| Fig. 3. | Fig. 4. |
The first binocular microscope was invented by the previously mentioned Father Chérubin, whose instrument consisted of two inverting systems, and consequently gave a totally wrong impression of depth, i.e. depressions appeared as elevations, and vice versa, Microscope.or, as we must say after Charles Wheatstone, it presented a pseudoscopic impression; this quality, however, was not recognized by the microscopists of the time. The instrument subsequently fell into complete neglect for nearly two centuries, to be revived in 1852 by Charles Wheatstone, who has stated that he had previously studied the problem; the publication of his views in his second great paper “On Binocular Vision,”[1] in the Phil. Trans. for 1852, undoubtedly stimulated the investigation of this instrument, which was carried on with zeal and success more especially in England and the United States. In 1853 the American J. L. Riddell (1807–1867) devised his binocular microscope, which contained the essentials of Wheatstone’s pseudoscope. F. H. Wenham, another constructor, did not at first succeed in avoiding the pseudoscopic effect, but, by the application of refracting dividing prisms, he subsequently arrived at orthoscopic representations and continued the development of the different methods for producing micro-photographic stereograms; this was effected in the first case by placing a diaphragm over one half of the objective for each exposure, and in the second case by a suitable direction of the illuminating pencil (fig. 6). Of greater benefit, however, for stimulating interest in binocular microscopes, was his invention of reflecting dividing prisms (fig. 7). Other experiments, begun by Powell and Lealand, and developed with greater skill by Wenham, were concerned with the binocular vision of identical images. Such an impression could not possibly be stereoscopic, and these experiments led to the construction of a non-stereoscopic binocular microscope. Of the other workers in this field mention may be made
- ↑ The first part appeared in 1838.
