Amethyst under polarized light from a paper by David Brewster

Plate 10 from the paper “On the effects of compression and dilatation in altering the polarising structure of doubly refracting crystals”, by David Brewster, originally published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, volume 8 (1818) pp.281-286. Inscribed with figure numbers and bottom right ‘W.H.Lizars Sculpt. Edinr..’

Sir David Brewster (1781-1868) Scottish physicist was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815 and awarded the Society's Copley Medal in 1816 for "outstanding achievements... on the Polarization of Light by Reflection from Transparent Bodies" after publication of his paper "On the laws which regulate the polarisation of light by reflexion from transparent bodies" in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 105: 125–159 (1815) doi:10.1098/rstl.1815.0010. Brewster's work on polarisation was some of his most important, contributing to the understanding of the laws of light polarization by reflection and refraction. Brewster's angle, the angle at which polarised light can pass through a transparent surface without reflection is named after him.

The earliest systems for viewing film in 3-D employed polarisation to reflect away light of the unwanted polarity, filtering the stereo images to be seen by each eye. This application was first being explored in the 1890s. Polarized 3-D glasses became practical thanks to Edwin Land FRS inventing 'Polaroid' - plastic sheet polarizers. He privately demonstrated their use for projecting and viewing 3-D images in 1934.