Thornton-Pickard "Stereo Puck" stereoscopic camera

Puck stereoscopic camera by Thornton-Pickard.

This is a “Stereo Puck” stereoscopic box camera, manufactured by Thornton-Pickard.

Thornton-Pickard was a camera manufacturer, founded in Manchester 1888 by John Thornton and Edgar Pickard, and based in Altrincham from 1891. The firm gradually grew to become an important camera manufacturer in the years leading up to the First World War, when they were heavily involved in making military aircraft cameras. By the 1920s Thornton-Pickard’s cameras were becoming old-fashioned, leading the firm to launch several new products in an attempt to remain competitive, including the “Puck” range of box cameras aimed at the amateur photographer market.

The Stereo Puck was a fairly simple box camera in most respects, but had the special feature of being to produce stereoscopic photographs. Like other stereoscopic cameras, the Studio Puck two lenses positioned about as far apart as human eyes and its photographs each contained a pair of images of the same subject taken from slightly different perspectives. When seen with a special viewer, as supplied with the camera, the stereoscopic photographs gave the illusion of a three-dimensional image, which was quite the novelty at the time.