Keystone View Company
Overview
The Keystone View Company was a stereoscopic view and photography company based in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1892 by B. L. Singley, it produced and distributed educational and comic and sentimental stereoviews, and the stereoscopes used to view them, from 1892 through 1963. By 1905 it was the world's largest stereographic company. Keystone distinguished itself by building a large Educational Department that sold views and lantern slides to schools, by absorbing the negative libraries of nearly all its competitors between 1915 and 1921, and by surviving long after the parlor stereoscope had faded, diversifying in 1932 into vision-testing and eye-training products. Its Meadville manufacturing site closed in 1972, but the Keystone name continued in use on eye-training equipment.
B. L. Singley and the French Creek Flood
Benneville Lloyd Singley was born on December 8, 1864, in Union Township, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. In 1886 he came to Meadville, in northwestern Pennsylvania, to enroll at Allegheny College's preparatory department; college records list him as a first-year preparatory student for three years in a row, and after 1889 his name disappears from the listings. In 1889 he married Anna Caraway, whose family lived in Meadville. Before founding Keystone, Singley had been a salesman for Underwood & Underwood, the era's leading stereoview firm, so he knew the canvassing trade from inside. A frequently told account holds that as a student he was shown a stereograph of two silver-gray foxes in the woods, and that the three-dimensional image convinced him of the educational potential of stereoscopic photography. The company's practical origin, however, was a news event. When French Creek flooded Meadville in 1892, the amateur photographer Singley photographed the damage, developed multiple prints from 30 negatives, and pasted them on cardboard mounts bearing the name Keystone View Company. Those flood views were the first prints sold under the Keystone name.
Early Growth
Growth was rapid. By 1895 the company had issued approximately 700 different views covering educational, comic and sentimental subjects, and by the end of its first year its trade list had already reached about a hundred titles. In 1898 Keystone began selling its own stereoscopes, and in the same period it entered the boxed-set market that Underwood & Underwood had popularized. Prior to about 1897 Singley made the negatives himself, and prints from that period are generally of poorer quality; after 1898 he hired dozens of photographers to travel the world taking pictures, and quality improved with a larger, more skilled team and better equipment. When the company was incorporated in 1905, it was the largest business of its kind in the world. Manufacturing remained in Meadville, while branch offices operated in New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Toronto and London. With salesmen and staff photographers scattered around the world, the company was offering over 20,000 different pictorial views, a catalog that would grow to more than 40,000 commercially produced titles by 1940.
The Educational Department
Keystone's most distinctive move came in 1905, when it began its Educational Department, selling stereoviews and glass lantern slides to schools throughout the country, together with lantern slide projection equipment. Selling visual teaching aids to schools had been pioneered by Underwood & Underwood, and for several years the two firms competed for the growing educational market. According to Keystone's own 1953 sales manual, Keystone's more aggressive sales methods and more progressive editorial policies made it the acknowledged leader, and Underwood & Underwood gave up the contest. Over the years the company marketed hundreds of educational sets teaching geography, social studies, science, history and reading, prepared teachers' manuals to accompany its stereograph and glass slide collections, and even produced sets for medical students. In a typical classroom arrangement, lantern slides and stereoviews were combined: one side of a view printed on glass could be projected for the whole class, after which students took turns seeing the three-dimensional version through stereoscopes. Large classroom sets came housed in furniture-quality wooden cabinets made by the company. This school business gave Keystone a durable institutional market long after home entertainment moved on to radio and film.
War Views and the Stereographic Library
News and war were central to Keystone's catalog as they had been to its rivals'. The company issued boxed sets of First World War views under its Stereographic Library imprint, in boxes designed to imitate volumes of books. A representative set, World War Through the Stereoscope, issued around 1923, contained 100 images of the war and its aftermath taken roughly between 1917 and 1921, with other sets running to 75, 200 or 300 images. Prints were pasted on Keystone's distinctive grey curved mounts, with extensive descriptive text printed on the reverse, and numbers indicating the order in which they should be viewed. Such sets let schools and families study the war in sequence, almost as a visual textbook, and they were among the company's most successful products in the years immediately after the war.
Absorbing the Competitors
Between 1915 and 1921 Keystone purchased the negatives of nearly all of its competitors, including Underwood & Underwood, H. C. White and the Kilburn companies. When stereoviewing declined, rival publishers sold off their inventories and Keystone incorporated them into its own holdings. Reissued views carried marks of their origin: prints originating with Underwood were identified by a V prefix, and catalog references also used letters for other acquired sources. By the 1920s Keystone was the sole surviving major producer of conventional card-mounted views, and by 1935 it held approximately two million stereoscopic negatives. One account puts its available numbered views at over 50,000 by the 1930s. This consolidation is why so much of the entire stereoscopic era survives under the Keystone name: Keystone did not just outlast its competitors, it bought their archives.
Diversification into Vision Products
As sales of entertainment stereoviews fell with the spread of radio, film and television, Keystone found a second life in vision care. In 1932 it launched its Stereophthalmic Department, producing stereoscopic vision tests and products for correcting vision problems. Stereoscopic instruments originally designed for viewing photographs could be adapted to testing depth perception and training the eyes, and schools and clinics provided a continuing institutional market similar to the educational trade. Keystone produced stereographic sets into the mid-twentieth century and kept a stereoscopic photographer on staff until at least 1955, while regular production of stereographs had stopped in 1939 and individual orders were filled for years afterward.
Later Ownership and Closure
Singley retired as Keystone's president in 1936 or 1937 and died in 1938. He was succeeded by two longtime employees, Charles E. Crandall and George E. Hamilton; Crandall died in 1956, and Hamilton continued as sole president until his death in 1962. In 1963 Keystone was purchased by the Mast Development Company of Davenport, Iowa. In that year the departments selling stereoviews to families and to education were closed down, and as a Mast subsidiary Keystone concentrated on telebinoculars, eye-training products and overhead projectors. Mast closed the Meadville manufacturing site in 1972, but continued to use the Keystone name on eye-training equipment.
Legacy and Archives
At its closing Keystone possessed what was described as the world's largest collection of stereographic negatives and negative contact prints. That stock was later donated to the University of California, Riverside, where it is held by the university's Museum of Photography, making it the central archive for the history of commercial stereoscopy. Keystone sets are also preserved by university special collections across the United States, where they are still used to teach the history of photography, visual education and the First World War. The company's historical importance is threefold: it brought systematic visual instruction into American classrooms, it preserved — by acquisition — the output of an entire industry, and it demonstrated how a photographic company could reinvent its core technology, the stereoscope, as an instrument of medicine and education after its entertainment market disappeared.
