Happy Monday, the first in November, and time for a new monday-connect where I aim to share something of interest I came across since last Monday. This week you can date yourself as having explored old technology, raise your hand if you have ever looked through a View-Master (raise two hands if you owned one, three is you still have it).
View-Master: Model C-3798 flickr photo by Jack W. Pearce shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA 2.0) license
Invented in 1939, these devices allowed you to see color stereographic photos from places around the world, each disk with maybe 14 images you could advance in the viewer.
Through a shared news article from the Santa Maria Sun I learned here about Dave Machin and an amazing effort to build a large, searchable database of View-Master reels. He bought one of these devices in an antique store and became keenly interested in how the photos of places portrayed in View-Master reels, 70 to 80 years old now compared to how they look now.
This began in 2020 as a “pandemic-hobby” where Machin started building a database of them in the online tool AirTable which now indexes thousands of reels.
I took a few search spins looking for ones say of the Taj Mahal landing randomly in images from the disk on The Taj Mahal and Red Fort Agra India.
Machin has built apps on top of this database, give the trivia game a try where you get four random images and have to choose from 4 presented choices to pick the location. I feel pretty good I got five in a row (getting one wrong for the SIlverton-Durango railroad which is not goot since I have visited there, There is also a Wordle like place guessing game.
There is more! Machine has made a short documentary about the View-MasterL
And for a “reel” treat find Machin’s YouTube channel for View Master Channels where he visits locations shown in one title and attempts to find the location to compare the old images with how they look now. I enjoyed The View-Master Photo No Map Could Find where he visited Joshua Tree National Park to find locations from a VIew-Master disk from 1950.
Okay, this is pretty obscure and old technology, but I am so impressed with the amount of effort and research one person has put into a passion interest and how it is generously shared (and its a nudge for me to learn more about Air Table).
Take a “spin” and share something of interest you find in the View-Master Database, how well you did on one of the quiz games, or something you find of interest in the View-Master Travels series.
Or if you had one, share you memory of using a View-Master –I have one I got maybe 20 years ago at a thrift store along with a few disks from the Grand Canyon.