Biography

American amateur photographer Benneville Lloyd Singley founded the Keystone View Company, which by the early twentieth century had become the largest stereographic company in the world. Born in 1864, Singley began his career as a salesman for the firm Underwood & Underwood, an early producer of stereoscopic images. Then, in 1892, he photographed a flood in Meadville and distributed the images under Keystone View. This was the foundation of the business, which, by 1905, had salesmen and photographers around the globe, selling some 20,000 different views that held social, historical, cultural and geographic significance.