A photo-finishing firm, a piano technician and a World’s Fair.

View-Master grew out of a photo-finishing business in Portland, Oregon. English Wikipedia says Edwin Eugene Mayer, a pharmacist who had served in the U.S. Army in World War I, bought into Sawyer’s Photo Finishing Service in 1919 with money from his father and his fiancée’s family. Around 1926 he incorporated the business as Sawyer Service, Inc., taking on partners including Harold Graves, who joined that year and handled marketing while Mayer ran the company. By then Sawyer’s was making photographic postcards and souvenir album sets, and it later added photographic greeting cards sold through department stores.

The viewer came from a Portland photographer. Wikipedia describes William Gruber as a player-piano technician of German origin, trained by Welte & Sons, who had built a stereo camera rig from two Kodak Bantam Special cameras mounted together on a tripod. His idea was to update the old stereoscope with the new Kodachrome 16 mm colour film, mounting tiny pieces of transparency into discs cut from the heavy paper stock used by the player pianos he serviced. The Strong National Museum of Play, in a National Toy Hall of Fame entry published in August 2021, describes Graves as president of Sawyer’s and says he met Gruber at the Oregon Caves National Monument in 1938, saw him using two cameras strapped together, and had agreed a deal with him by the next morning. Wikipedia, citing a 1960 court document, also dates the start of the Gruber–Sawyer’s venture to a 1938 meeting, and says a formal agreement between Gruber and the Sawyer’s partners was signed in February 1942.

The name took some deciding. Wikipedia says Mayer and others at Sawyer’s were unsure what to call the product before settling on View-Master, and that Gruber disliked the name because it sounded to him like a kitchen appliance — a Toast-Master or a Mix-Master. The viewer was introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, marked “Patent Applied For”, as an alternative to the scenic postcard, and it was sold at photography shops, stationery stores and gift shops at scenic attractions. Early reels showed places such as Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon. The patent was issued in 1940, and that original design came to be called the Model A viewer. Wikipedia says the View-Master soon displaced the postcard business at Sawyer’s.

From Sawyer’s to GAF, Tyco and Mattel.

Each View-Master reel holds fourteen film transparencies arranged in seven pairs; one image of each pair goes to each eye, which is how the viewer produces its sense of depth. Wikipedia says the basic design of the reels and of the internal mechanism stayed the same through many changes of model and material, so that any reel works in any viewer.

The 1950s widened the subject matter. In 1951 Sawyer’s bought Tru-Vue, its main competitor, and with it Tru-Vue’s licence for Walt Disney Studios characters; The Strong says that purchase brought the stereo rights to the Disney characters, and Wikipedia records reels of the newly opened Disneyland in 1955. Wikipedia credits the artist Joe Liptak with many of the Disney and early Hanna-Barbera reels. A View-Master Personal line, launched in 1952, included a stereo camera so that users could make their own reels. The viewer changed shape too: the Model E of 1955 had a more modern body with large ivory buttons on the levers and a wide V-shaped slot on top for the reel, and the battery-lit Model F of 1958 was designed by a team led by the industrial designer Chuck Harrison. Early viewers were made of Kodak Tenite plastic and then Bakelite; in 1962, with the Model G, lighter thermoplastic versions arrived, a change Wikipedia credits to the Sawyer’s president Bob Brost.

Ownership then passed through several hands. In 1966 Sawyer’s became a wholly owned subsidiary of the General Aniline & Film (GAF) Corporation, and under GAF the reels turned towards children’s subjects, cartoons and television series; the actor Henry Fonda appeared in television commercials for the GAF View-Master. A Talking View-Master followed from 1970. In 1981 GAF sold View-Master to investors led by Arnold Thaler, who formed the View-Master International Group. That group bought the Ideal Toy Company in 1984 and became the View-Master Ideal Group, which Tyco Toys bought in 1989. Tyco merged with Mattel in 1997, and View-Master was placed in Mattel’s preschool division and marketed under the Fisher-Price name. Wikipedia says the View-Master plant in Oregon closed in 2001, and that in December 2008 Mattel stopped producing the scenic reels of tourist attractions while continuing to make reels featuring animated characters.

Design and documentation.

A toy brand often reaches its buyer through the package before the toy itself is ever touched. A window box lets a child see the figure, doll or vehicle through a clear panel while the printed board around it carries the name, the artwork and the age guidance, so the logo has to read clearly across a crowded shelf and still leave room for the product to show.

Blister cards work in a similar way on a smaller scale: a printed backing card, a moulded plastic bubble and a hang hole at the top. The card is usually designed to be seen hanging on a peg, which pushes the name and character art towards the upper half and keeps the logo bold enough to survive at a distance.

Die-cast and other small vehicle lines tend to rely on compact logos that can be printed on a box end, a card or even the base of the toy. Character mascots add another layer, standing in for the brand in advertising and on packs, so that a face or figure becomes as recognisable as the lettering beside it.

A disc, a lever and a hyphenated name.

View-Master’s identity rests on one object repeated across eight decades: a paper reel with seven pairs of pictures set around its rim, and a hand-held viewer with a lever that advances it. The reel format has stayed constant while the viewer has been redrawn many times, from the Bakelite Model A to the thermoplastic models of the 1960s, so the brand can be read from the disc as well as from the name printed on the viewer.

The name is a hyphenated compound with a capital at each end. Under GAF the product was presented as the GAF View-Master, and under Mattel it sat within Fisher-Price. In February 2015 Mattel announced a collaboration with Google on a View-Master Virtual Reality Viewer built on the Google Cardboard platform: a smartphone slots into the back of the viewer, and reels are scanned through an augmented-reality interface rather than placed inside it, unlocking panoramas, 3D models and small games. An updated DLX model followed in 2016, and Wikipedia says both VR editions were discontinued in November 2019. The National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, inducted View-Master in 1999.

The classic viewer is on sale again today. Basic Fun!, the Florida-based toy company, lists View-Master among its brands and sells View-Master Classic and Deluxe viewers with reels of animal photographs in a retro style; Basic Fun! says the viewer has been delighting children since 1939.

For a design guide, View-Master shows how a product format — the disc, the seven pairs, the lever — can outlast its owners, its materials and its technology, carrying one name from souvenir photography to virtual reality and back. Compare it with GAF, its owner from 1966 to 1981, and Fisher-Price, the Mattel name it was marketed under after 1997. For this guide we use fair red, Bakelite brown and reel cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep View-Master’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.