In the late 1950s the View-Master was redesigned, redesigned by Charles Harrison, and this is how it came to be according to Charles Harrison.

Due for a Redesign

Actually, the most visible design I’m probably known for came while I was working for Bob, and it was almost an accident. Podall’s was retained to design products for Sawyer’s Inc., which manufactured slide projectors, slide trays and other photographic equipment. One day a project came in from Sawyer’s – it was a 3-D viewer – and Bob just put it on my desk and said, “Here’s another product.” There was nothing special about it. It had been around for quite a while, so I didn’t invent it myself. Up until that point it was made of a hard, dark plastic called Bakelite, which involved a very slow compression molding process. As a result, the product was costly because it took so long to make.

Sawyer’s Inc. retained Robert Podall Associates to design its products during the late 1950s and early 1960s. I was assigned the project to update the View-Master. The design parameters required a lower-cost item that incorporated many new features and engineering improvements. One of these new features was a disc with pre-selected slide-type visual stories. Additional stories could be purchased separately.

Switch to Injection Molding

My contribution was to design it for a different process, injection molding, that could produce units 10 times faster and would reduce cost considerably. The projected volume was high enough to support the tooling costs, while keeping the amortization costs low for each piece part. This made it possible to get the finished product to the consumer at the target selling price. I changed the visual esthetics of the viewer, giving it an appearance that was appropriate for its time.

I changed its form factor and color to match the rest of the Sawyer’s product line. The project really wasn’t very big. It was something that came in and was out in two weeks! We made models of it and it was put into production. The View-Master was one of my most recognized designs and longest-selling products I designed.

After Sawyer’s

The View-Master was later bought by GAF and marketed as a toy. And it sold and sold. I think its success and popularity were due to the excitement for kids to see photographs in three dimensions. There was not as much television around then, kids didn’t have TVs in their rooms as they do today, and they had no personal computers. If their parents were watching something the kids didn’t like, the kids were out of luck. So they could take their View-Master and see a story, or use it to keep entertained when traveling in a car. It just happened to hit the American lifestyle at a time when it could fill an entertainment need.

Over time, I don’t know what happened to Sawyer’s. The tooling for the View-Master was sold to GAF, and the colors were changed to give it more flair and appeal to children. I designed it in the late 1950s and eventually it was sold to Fisher-Price®, but only recently, after almost 40 years, was the form factor changed. The View-Master still survives despite all the competition from other high tech products and toys because of the appeal and fun of its little bit of three-dimensional magic.