ABSTRACT
Perhaps the first use of instructional media can be traced to the school museum, a collection of exhibits, maps, photographs, lantern slides (forerunner to the slide projector), study prints, and other instructional materials. A catalog of materials allowed teachers to request specific items. The first school museum opened in St. Louis in 1905, and soon after others appeared in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio. Horsedrawn wagons and then trucks circulated materials to local schools. These museums served much the same purpose as today’s school and school district media centers. The majority of the items displayed in these school museums were visual media. Projection devices included the magic lantern (a lantern slide projector) and the stereopticon, a single-user device for viewing stereographs, or three-dimensional photographs. This 3-D view is actually two images mounted side by side. Each picture was taken from a slightly different viewpoint corresponding approximately to the spacing of the eyes. When seen through a stereopticon, the left eye sees only the left photograph and the right eye its corresponding half, thus forming a stereoscopic or three dimensional image.
