German Pk Cairo 1906: Foto-Händler Rosenberg An August Fuhrmann; Stereoskopie

You are bidding on an interesting German postcard from 1906 out of Cairo.

addressed to the publisher of media entrepreneur and photographer August Fuhrmann (1844-1925) in Berlin.

With sender stamp "Michel, FJL Rosenberg // Spécialités 'Photos' // Caire Egypte // P, R Distrib. M--R."

DatedCaire (=Cairo), 24. March 1906.

Transcription:"Dear Mr. Fuhrman. Do you want fl. m. immediately. Post a special listing of your stereoscope images to me, e.g. come and/ quoted prices against net f. reseller. Also for so-called American. Stereoscopes and/collapsible bags Stereoscopes with Ia glasses as well as glass & paper-transparent stereoscope images so please v. the latter a few patterns z. Opinion. At Condenanz I hope more frequent orders z. make. Yours sincerely, FJL Rosenberg."

With a note from the recipient or an employee of his company: "31./3. quays. Pan. sent."

stationery(8.8x14cm).

Condition: Strong paper browned and somewhat stained; with creases and Monday marks. BiPlease also note the pictures!

Internal note: Ostbhf 23-08

About the recipient (source: wikipedia):

Carl Wilhelm August Fuhrmann (* 13. December 1844 in Namslau near Breslau; † 10 August 1925 in Berlin) was a German media entrepreneur and photographer. He developed and marketed the Kaiser Panorama, a device that enabled up to 25 people to view three-dimensional (i.e. stereoscopic) color series of images at the same time. He lent cycles of colored, stereoscopic photographs to his franchisees and is considered a pioneer of systematic photo reporting.

Life: August Fuhrmann came from an agricultural family of craftsmen in Namslau, Silesia. His father and grandfather were master saddlers who also owned and tilled farmland. The family owned a house at the Polish Gate in Namslau. August Fuhrmann was the eldest of five sons; two of his brothers died in early childhood.

August Fuhrmann was with Emilie, nee. Sparrow, (* 7. March 1850, † 3. October 1926) married. The couple had two daughters.

Fuhrmann learned the trade of cabinet maker. He was and is occasionally referred to as a physicist, but probably only because of his involvement with physical topics such as acoustics (especially telephony) and optics (fog images, stereoscopic photography) - it is unlikely that he studied physics at a university.

From the fact that Fuhrmann was the owner of the royal commemorative medals for 1866 and 1870/71, it can be concluded that he was a participant in the Prussian campaigns in the second German war of unification of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71.

Fog images and telephone concerts: Even as a schoolboy, Fuhrmann became acquainted with so-called fog images, i.e. the merging projection of two different images by two parallel projectors, with the first image gradually fading out while the second image gradually fade in. This crossfade technique brought movement to the images for the first time, as the first image seems to gradually transform into the second.

After his apprenticeship as a carpenter, Fuhrmann first traveled from town to town as a showman for foggy pictures with a triple lanterna magica (a so-called agioscope). After initial economic success, the competition from other smokescreen showmen increased, and so Fuhrmann gave up this venture and turned to the construction and demonstration of new electro-acoustic devices, namely the telephone developed by Alexander Graham Bell to market maturity in 1876 and the phonograph introduced by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877. He offered so-called telephone concerts, in which the live music of an orchestra was transmitted via telephone cable to loudspeakers in a distant auditorium - today one would probably speak of a PA system in this context rather than a telephone, but the basic principle of the Electrical transmission of an acoustic signal using a microphone, amplifier and loudspeaker is very similar. Fuhrmann continued to organize such telephone concerts into the late 1890s.

Stereoscopy: At the same time, Fuhrmann became interested in stereoscopy, i.e. photography with a three-dimensional effect. From London, at that time a stronghold of stereo photography, he had a large number of stereograms and viewing equipment sent to explore the current state of the art in this way. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the French optician Jules Duboscq (1817–1886) presented his stereoscopes for viewing stereo daguerreotypes, which he constructed based on the ideas and plans of the Scottish physicist and private scholar David Brewster (1781–1868). In 1849, Brewster brought out the first two-lens camera that could take stereoscopic pictures of moving subjects by simultaneously taking the two photographs needed for spatial impression. Until then, the two partial images had to be exposed one after the other and the camera had to be shifted between the two exposures at eye distance. With moving motifs, this led to two different image contents due to the movement of the motif, which disturbed the spatial impression. on the 7th On January 1, 1854, the Parisian Achille Quinet (1831-1900) acquired a patent for a "binocular" camera, which he named "Quinetoscop". In 1861, American physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) developed a simple and inexpensive stereoscope. This Holmes stereoscope became the standard apparatus in the following decades and was also found in private households around 1900.

Stereo photography remained popular for about a hundred years, peaking in the 1850s, circa 1900s, and into the 1950s.

Development of the projection apparatus: Fuhrmann took advantage of the great public interest in stereoscopic photographs. From the 1870s, the trained cabinet maker developed a wooden rotunda around which up to 25 users sat on chairs and looked inside this rotunda through stereo eyepieces, through which a cycle of 50 pairs of stereo slides ran. After about 20 seconds, a clockwork-driven rotary mechanism advanced the images by one position. This made it possible to show a cycle of images to several people at the same time without the viewers having to switch places.

on the 17th On August 18, 1888, the patent office in London accepted August Fuhrmann's specifications for a revolving stereoscopic panorama. on the 17th On December 1, 1889, the German patent office accepted Fuhrmann's patent application for a "Selbsteinkassenendes Wandelpanorama", a slightly modified variant of the former. At the time it was patented, however, the Kaiser Panorama had already been in use for eight or nine years of successful business use. For an entry fee of 20 pfennigs, the public could take part in cultural, sporting and political events in imperial Germany, as well as excursions to distant landscapes and cities, by viewing a series of pictures that changed every week. Fuhrmann's advertisement said: "The Kaiser Panorama solves the problem of making the world acquainted with the world."

However, Fuhrmann's "invention" was not particularly original - Brewster had already proposed a comparable construction in 1856. As early as 1866, the showman Alois Polanecky (1826–1911) embarked on the journey with his “Glass Stereogram Salon”, which corresponded to the design proposed by Brewster. Polanecky probably did not design his stereogram salon himself, but bought it from the French photographer Claude-Marie Ferrier, who incidentally later supplied August Fuhrmann with stereoscopic photographs.

Development of the Kaiser Panorama company: In 1880 Fuhrmann opened his first “Kaiser Panorama” in Breslau. After about two years, in May 1982, Fuhrmann left Breslau and moved to Frankfurt am Main. After just nine months, Fuhrmann ended his demonstrations in Frankfurt. In 1883 Fuhrmann moved his stereo picture show to Berlin in the Kaiserpassage, which connected the boulevard Unter den Linden with Friedrichstraße.

Thanks to his clever advertising and sales strategy, Fuhrmann's company quickly became very successful and extremely popular.

In 1889 Fuhrmann already had 38 permanent branches in major European cities.

In an early form of photojournalism, August Fuhrmann was soon supplying up to 250 branches in Europe and overseas with stereoscopic images from his "World Panorama Headquarters" in Berlin on the basis of licensing. Around 1907, Fuhrmann's panoramas existed in about 247 cities, 162 of them in Germany, the others mainly in Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Russia and the Baltic States.

Fuhrmann directed the "branches" from his headquarters in Berlin. The chain stores were independent entrepreneurs who had bought their demonstration device from Fuhrmann (purchase price: 3450 marks). The Kaiser-Panoramen was less a chain store than a kind of franchise system. The stereoscopic images circulated in ring loans.

The stereoscopic picture shows by Fuhrmann and his competitors were a real mass medium, which - thanks to the moderate admission prices - was not only aimed at the upper classes.

Color images thanks to polychroming that shines through indirectly:Fuhrmann's stereo photographs were black and white, reflecting the state of the art in photography in the 1880s; a patent for a color film was not registered until 1912, a good 30 years later. But Fuhrmann invented a process that gave the black-and-white photos a very natural-looking coloring. Fuhrmann called his process "indirectly shimmering polychrome". He kept it a secret. Today it is known that the black and white glass slides were colored by hand. Fuhrmann's stereos consisted of three layers of glass: the top layer was the cover glass made of clear glass, the middle layer was the photo carrier, i.e. also glass with the photo layer facing forward, and behind it was frosted glass. Each of these glass layers was about 0.8 mm thick. The contours of the picture motif, which are visible from the front, were applied as colored areas to the frosted glass using a pastel-like paint (the recipe of which is no longer known today; possibly an egg white glaze). In this reverse glass painting, a few shades dominated, such as beige and Braun , green and red, and occasionally blue and yellow. The sky was not painted in, but colored with a special color screen made of tracing paper placed between the image and the light source. If the glass color screens and the transparent paper screens were well matched, a black and white image resulted in a realistic color impression. Another special feature was the light source for the projections: it could not be mounted directly horizontally behind the images and color screens, but had to be mounted diagonally above the image plane so that the light passed the image at an angle of about 45 degrees.

Obtaining the image material: Fuhrmann took a small number of his stereo photographs himself, but bought the larger part from established photo agencies such as Claude-Marie Ferrier (1811–1889), Charles Soulier (1840–1876), and Léon & Lévy and others. Soon Fuhrmann could also afford to commission photographers to take pictures. In his best economic times, Fuhrmann employed up to eight photographers who, on his behalf, took pictures of current events all over the world with the company's own equipment in order to continuously deliver new stereo series for the up to 250 Kaiser panoramas. According to the standards of the time, however, "currently" meant that e.g. B. Recordings of the earthquake in San Francisco about half a year after the event on March 18. April 1906 were shown in the Kaiser Panorama. In 1909, 100,000 3D images were already in circulation.

Only a few of the photographers who worked for Fuhrmann are known by name. The Hamburg photographer Johann Hamann (1859-1939) should be mentioned here. The Austrian court photographer Alois Beer (1840–1916), who worked primarily in Klagenfurt, provided Fuhrmann with stereo photographs not only from Carinthia, but also from other parts of the Austrian monarchy, as well as from Switzerland and southern France. The court photographer Wilhelm Zink in Gotha and the teacher G. Hartung in Finsterbergen in the Thuringian Forest, who had borrowed a stereo camera from Fuhrmann, are known as authors of the series “A visit to Gotha and the Thuringian Forest”. The series "Celle, the old ducal city and the Lüneburg Heath" was created by Otto Wolff (1879-1920) from Celle. The naval purser Gustav Adolph Riemer (1842–1899) brought recordings of the “Hertha trip” back with him from his trip on the Corvette SMS “Hertha” to East Asia and the South Pacific from 1874 to 1877.

Fuhrmann may have bought some stereoscopic copies of motifs from Berlin from an American photographer of all people, namely Benjamin West Kilburn (1827–1909) from Littleton, New Hampshire.

Decline of Fuhrmann's media company:Practically from the start, Fuhrmann had competition on the market for stereoscopic picture shows and the associated demonstration devices, for example from Reinhold Fuhrmann, Dresden, Carl Friederich Hermann Rentsch, Dresden, the Kitz brothers, Leipzig, the Allgemeine Automatengesellschaft Riener, Pelzer & Co., Cologne, the photographic shipping and export business H. Schmidt, Kassel, the factory for photographic apparatus and panoramas G. Kügler, Görlitz, Bernhard Wachtl, Vienna, F. Ebelsbacher, Hanover or W. Zahorik, Eisenerz (Styria). It hardly seems to have harmed Fuhrmann's enterprise; the market was apparently large enough for several companies of this type. August Fuhrmann and his franchisees later, around 1895, faced significantly greater competition from the advent of cinemas. Fuhrmann responded by also offering film projection equipment.

After the German Kaiser abdicated and the Weimar Republic was founded, using the well-established “Kaiserpanorama” brand no longer seemed appropriate. August Fuhrmann therefore renamed his company “Weltpanorama”.

In the economically difficult years after the First World War, Fuhrmann and its franchisees had to struggle with a loss of income. Therefore, and for reasons of age - he was now 79 years old - Fuhrmann made the decision in August 1923 to withdraw from the management of the "Weltpanorama" headquarters. August Fuhrmann sold his "Weltpanorama" company by purchase agreement dated 5. August 1923 to Griese & Mücke, Berlin. In May 1927 a certain Victor Lewe was the sole owner of the "Weltpanorama" company.

on the 10th August Fuhrmann died in Berlin on August 19, 1924 at the age of 80.

August Fuhrmann and his wife Emilie are buried in Berlin-Kreuzberg in the cemeteries in front of Hallesches Tor on Cemetery I of the Jerusalem and New Church congregations in grave site 121-1-10.

Awards and honors for August Fuhrmann and his Kaiser Panorama

Royal commemorative coins 1866 and 1870/71

Landwehr award 2nd Class

Centenary Medal (Kaiser Wilhelm Commemorative Medal from 1897, "Lemon Order")

Purveyor to the court of Duke Alfred of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Deed Coburg 4. September 1897, approval dated 13. May 1898)

Prussian state medal in bronze for commercial achievements, 1900

Silver medal for art and science by Duke Carl Eduard of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, received on 5. December 1908, diploma dated 9. December 1908

Appointment to the Royal Prussian Commission Council, 13. January 1911

Royal Order of the Crown 4th Class 9. February 1914

Royal Swedish Medal

Golden Pius Medal

Gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition)

Red Cross Medal 3rd grade 6 December 1920