ABSTRACT
IN 1857, Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the famous jurist, lifted a stereoscope to his eyes for the first time. After the initial strain, as the lenses forced his eyes to accommodate the different images only inches away, Holmes experienced two “visions.” One emerged as the neurons were tricked into fusing two disparate scenes into one. The other was the brilliant flash of historical insight. Holmes verbalized it in a kind of Brechtian soliloquy:
Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it…. There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed, — representatives of billions of pictures, — since they were erected! Matter must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle of South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses of little worth, (emphasis in the original) (Holmes, 1859, p. 251f)
