Ricalton, James

James Ricalton (circa 1844 -1929) was a New Jersey school teacher, traveler, inventor, and photographer. His occasional work for Thomas Edison included traveling through Asia to discover bamboo plants suitable for light bulb filaments (1888-1889), and testing Edison's motion picture camera (1912). In 1891 he resigned from teaching to become a full-time photographer and war correspondent, working primarily for Underwood & Underwood. His books include India through the stereoscope (1900) and China through the stereoscope (1901).

In 1882 Elmer and Ben Underwood set up an office on Ottawa, Kansas to distribute Eastern photographers' stereographs to the Western market with door-to-door salesmen. By 1891, they had established a plant in Ottawa to manufature stereo photographic cameras, stereo views and stereoscopes; moved their headquarters to New York City, opened branch offices in Baltimore, New York, and Liverpool. By 1901, Underwood and Underwood was manufacturing packaged sets of stereo views--25,000 a day (more than seven million a a year), and 300,000 stereoscopes a year.

See Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, "Stereographs and Stereotypes: A 1904 View of Mormonism," Journal of Mormon History 18 (Fall 1992): 155-76.