Take a Look at the View-Master

Everyone knows about the colorful plastic toys you use by holding it to the light and clicking through disc after round disc of picture slides. But did you know that the timeless classic toy Viewmaster wasn’t intended as a children’s diversion at all?

William Gruber invented the Viewmaster in 1939, and Harold Graves marketed it to Sawyer’s, a photo-finishing, postcard and greeting company, which produced the color reels using then-new Kodachrome film.

Initially, the reels depicted the world’s great landscapes, like the Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon.

But it wasn’t until 1951 when Sawyer’s bought out its competitor, Tru-Vue, and thus acquired Tru-Vue’s license with Walt Disney Studios, that Viewmaster sales really began to take off. During the 1950s, Sawyer’s produced Viewmaster reels featuring all of the popular Disney animated characters, as well as slides of the newly-opened Disneyland theme park.

Sawyer’s eventually sold their company to General Aniline & Film Corporation in 1966, which resulted in a switch from landscape scenes and Disney characters to other images from movies, TV, cartoons and sports and a switch from Kodachrome to E6 film – the film that’s still used in Viewmaster reels today.

Viewmaster is now owned by Mattel.