Lest we forget. Respects and love.
Bri
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BO RHAP live alert ! At this moment going on stage in Atlanta Georgia opening up for the Rolling Stones —— the Zac Brown Band !!! Seen here at the Hangout Festival 2015 (Google them).
Great to see these guys flyin’ our flag across the pond – Rock on Boys – more power to ya –
Bri
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Here’s some scenes from our pre-show visit to the Kings College Archives yesterday [Wednesday] I wanted to share with you.
It’s hard to explain the thrill of actually holding these historic instruments in your hands, when a large part of your life has been inspired by the work of their maker. Wheatstone’s original stereoscopes have a wonderful ‘home-made’ quality, yet already perfectly evolved to not only prove the theory of Stereoscopy, but stand on this desk around 180 years later and still deliver perfect 3-D images.
In the first pic, I’m holding in one hand Wheatstone’s hitherto almost completely unknown ‘side-by-side’ stereoscope, and in the other my OWL stereoscope. The resemblance is evident – but I’d never seen the original when I designed the OWL. What I had seen were a multitude of progenies of Wheatstone’s work of genius. Yesterday [Wednesday] was the first time I was able to figure out a closer connection. We’d solved a basic challenge in two different ways. The stereoscope has to achieve two things for our eyes – help them point more parallel without strain, and provide a focus very close-up. Wheatstone did it here with two sets of optics – a pair of prisms for the former function and a pair of positive lenses (which fold up, as here) for the latter. I solved it by only having lenses but setting them very wide apart – so the part of the lenses we look through is at the inner edge. The lenses thus act as prisms as well as magnifiers. This is why the OWL got its name – for having “Outstandingly Wide-separation Lenses. It also happens to look a bit like a hoot-owl !!! It also …. Works !!! That’s the secret of the OWL !
The last two pictures show Denis and me with THE ORIGINAL Charles Wheatstone mirror stereoscope. This design remained Wheatstone’s favourite all his life. A priceless treasure.
Bri