View-Master
trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes
View-Master is the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding View-Master "reels", which are thin cardboard disks containing seven stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film. It was originally manufactured and sold by Sawyer's.
The View-Master system was introduced in 1939, four years after the advent of Kodachrome color film made the use of small, high-quality photographic color images practical. Tourist attraction and travel views predominated in View-Master's early lists of reels, most of which were meant to be of interest to users of all ages. Most current View-Master reels are intended for children.
There are over 4300 different View-Master reels.
History
1919–1956: early photo services
Edwin Eugene Mayer worked as a pharmacist at Owl Drug store in downtown Portland, Oregon, after serving in the U.S. Army in World War I. He built up a photo-finishing business there, and bought into Sawyer's Photo Finishing Service in 1919 with the help of his father August Mayer, his fiancée Eva McAnulty, and her sister Vi McAnulty.
Edwin described how he started the business in a letter dated April 1, 1954: "Suffice to say that in 1919, what little it was, was purchased with borrowed ($3,500) money from Dad, aided by about $1,600 in insurance money Eva got when her father died and which was left in permanently, and $1,600 borrowed from Vi and repaid, along with Dad's notes, within a few years."
As the business grew, Ed Mayer incorporated in about 1926, taking on partners Harold and Beulth F. Graves, Thomas and Pauline Meyer, and Augusta and Raymond F. Kelly, renaming the business Sawyer Service, Inc. The company relocated to a large two-story building at 181 Ella St., near Morrison Street in Portland, Oregon.
The company was producing photographic postcards and album sets as souvenirs by 1926, when Harold Graves joined Sawyer's.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “View-Master” is trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through View-Master, trademark and name, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q188057. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1919, 1956 and 1954.
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This entry incorporates text from “View-Master” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.