Wheatstone, Charles

Wheatstone’s inventions spanned acoustics, optics, and electrical engineering. He is best known for inventing the stereoscope. He demonstrated that depth perception arises from the brain combining two slightly different images received by each eye. In 1832, he invented a large reflecting stereoscope and a compact open refracting stereoscope.

Wheatstone introduced his instruments in 1838, together with a presentation at the Royal Society of his paper Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, Part the First. On Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision.

Wheatstone’s inventions provided the first scientific explanation of binocular vision and laid the foundation for stereoscopy.

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