Getty Museum

Horse-Head Tricycle

Date

about 1855

Medium

Color lithograph

Culture

French

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

In 1838 Charles Wheatstone established that humans can perceive depth when the brain combines two slightly different images. Separated by two to three inches, each eye sees a distinctive aspect of the object before it. The discrepancy, Wheatstone believed, is what allows us to experience the world in three dimensions. To prove his theory, he constructed the stereoscope to view these paired images, known as a stereograph. Here, the tricycle on the left is positioned at a slight angle, while the one on the right has been shifted a little and faces directly forward. Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.