Kaiserpanorama, the most elaborate and long-lived of the many devices for the display of stereoscopic pictures that flooded Europe and America during the mania for stereo views launched at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Intended as a commercial public entertainment, the Kaiserpanorama in its classical form seated 25 people around a circular structure to view two sets of 50 transparent stereo views rotated from within by a clockwork mechanism. First suggested by David Brewster in his 1856 book The Stereoscope, a working apparatus was sold by Claude-Marie Ferrier in Paris from around 1860 and became a travelling show for fairs and markets. Aloys Polanecky introduced his Ferrier ‘Stereogramm-Salon-Apparat’ in 1866 and exhibited it across Austria and Germany until 1899. The name Kaiserpanorama came from the show's most famous entrepreneur, August Fuhrmann, who travelled with a Kaiserpanorama in the 1880s in Breslau, Frankfurt am Main, and then Berlin. Fuhrmann organized the independent showmen scattered across Central Europe who used the apparatus, patented mechanical improvements, established a scheme for the rental and regular exchange of picture series, and produced new sets of views, in a business organization later closely replicated by motion-picture distributors. At its peak c.1900, his Berlin-based organization supplied c.250 affiliates from a stock of over 1, 000 series comprising c.50, 000 stereo images. From the beginning, the pictures for the Kaiserpanorama consisted principally of travel views of both exotic distant lands and European cultural monuments, initially provided by Ferrier and Soulier in Paris. Fuhrmann expanded the range of subjects so that about one-fifth of his offerings were of ‘news’ events like the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or subjects of social or political interest like the series ‘Martyrs of Science’. Later often established as a fixed exhibition in small towns, a few Kaiserpanoramas survived as local entertainments into the 1950s.
— Deac Rossell
