Darrah, William C. (William Culp), 1909-1989

William Culp Darrah was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, 12 January 1909. He obtained the degree of Bachelor of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 1931. During the two years following he was a fellow of the Carnegie Museum, and from 1934 to 1942 an instructor in the division of Biology at Harvard and research curator of paleobotany at the Harvard Botanical Museum. Starting in 1942 he worked as a materials engineer with the Raytheon Development Laboratories, engaged in research on coal, oil shales, industrial raw materials, and fossil plants. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of Sigma Xi and the Botanical Society of America. His books include Textbooks of Paleobotany, Principles of Paleobotany, Introduction to the Plant Sciences, and Paleobotany of Coal. He went on to become professor of botany at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, from 1954 until his retirement at age 65. He married Helen Marie Hilsman in 1934 and had two daughters, Barbara Anne and Elsie Louise. He died in 1989.

Stereoscopic pictures are science and technology dealing with two-dimensional drawings or photographs that when viewed by both eyes appear to exist in three dimensions in space. A popular term for stereoscopy is 3-D. Stereoscopic pictures are produced in pairs, the members of a pair showing the same scene or object from slightly different angles that correspond to the angles of vision of the two eyes of a person looking at the object itself. Stereoscopy is possible only because of binocular vision, which requires that the left-eye view and the right-eye view of an object be perceived from different angles. In the brain the separate perceptions of the eyes are combined and interpreted in terms of depth, of different distances to points and objects seen. Stereoscopic pictures are viewed by some means that presents the right-eye image to the right eye and the left-eye image to the left. An experienced observer of stereopairs may be able to achieve the proper focus and convergence without special viewing equipment (e.g., a stereoscope); ordinarily, however, some device is used that allows each eye to see only the appropriate picture of the pair. To produce a three-dimensional effect in motion pictures (see 3-D), various systems have been employed, all involving simultaneous projection on the screen of left- and right-eye images distinguished by, for example, different colour or polarization and the use by the audience of binocular viewing filters to perceive the images properly. In holography the two eyes see two reconstructed images (light-interference patterns) as if viewing the imaged object normally, at slightly different angles. Stereoscopy - Encyclopedia Britannica Online http://www.britannica.com (Retrieved July 10, 2009)