Bruguiere No. 7

France, 1950s

Bruguiere made stereoscopes for several decades starting with cardboard No. 1 in the ‘40s. By the 1950’s we’re up to this beautiful, sleek, 2-color No. 7 viewer. It came into our collection with 15 boxes of stereoviews and we’ve added many more boxes since then. One stereoview boxed set we’ll highlight in particular here is the S/S Normandie. The Normandie surpassed all other passenger ships in size and speed in 1935 when France put it into service. It never made much money given the economy at the time. It wound up in New York and through a series of incidents became the USS Lafayette. Unfortunately, in 1942, it caught fire, capsized and settled to the bottom of the Hudson River.