Design: Who Made Those 3-D Glasses?

Jens Mortensen for The New York Times

One morning in 1915, curiosity-seekers filed into the Astor Theater in New York for a new cinematic spectacle. As two film projectors rattled to life, the audience was immersed in a wonderland. "Hills, valleys, houses, the figures on a country road," wrote Lynde Denig, a reporter who attended the screening, "the effect is marvelously real."

Denig loved the illusion of depth, but he hated the cardboard viewer, with its red and green lenses, that he had to hold in front of his face. After half an hour, his arm ached. And when he took a "disillusioning glimpse at the screen with the naked eye," he shuddered. Because each of the films was tinted — one red, the other green — the people on screen looked like "hobgoblins."

But in most respects the show was a success. Put on by the director Edwin Porter and his partner William Waddell, it built an experience out of a hodgepodge of footage — including shots of Niagara Falls. The point wasn't the plot but to prove that the brain could be tricked into seeing images in three dimensions. The red-and-cyan 3-D system that grew out of their experiment enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1920s. But the technology worked only with a limited palette. Edwin Land would solve that problem by inventing polarized lenses in 1936, which worked in full color. These ushered in a new wave of 3-D mania when the technology made its way to Hollywood in the 1950s. At the same time, cheap red-and-cyan glasses based on the earlier system became popular in the world of comic books and B-movies.

"Every 20 to 30 years, you get this craze for 3-D movies," says Jack Theakston, a historian with the 3-D Film Archive, which then burns out. Today's "Avatar"-inspired boom is very likely no exception, Theakston says. Inventors, meanwhile, continue to work on the holy grail: 3-D effects with no glasses.

A VISION THING

Victor K. McElheny is the author of "Insisting on the Impossible," a biography of Edwin Land.

In the iconic 1950s Life magazine photo of a 3-D movie premiere, was the audience wearing the lenses developed by Land?
Yes. Those glasses were sold by the millions. But there were a lot of problems in the '50s. Projectionists had to run two strips of film at the same time. If the projectionist was a little slack and the films went out of sync, the people in the audience would get a headache. And there was an intermediate market for cheaper glasses — knockoffs that weren't so well made — and they would give you a headache, too.

These polarizing lenses delivered a different image to each eye?
Yes, one eye would see one set of signals, and one eye would see another.

You worked as a writer at Polaroid during the early 1970s. What were your impressions of Land?
He had a movie-star quality; a lot of people thought he looked like Cary Grant.

3-D MILESTONES

19th century: The stereoscope
The hand-held device worked for still images, but this technology was difficult to translate into film.

1920s: Anaglyph 3-D
Plastigram films toured the country, bathing the screen in red and blue and offering a first taste of the third dimension.

1950s: Polarized 3-D
"Bwana Devil" helped to start another 3-D fad. The poster promised to put "a lion in your lap."

2012: High-frame-rate 3-D
"The Hobbit" features this new technology, along with Elton John-size specs made from faux "hammer-forged steel."