Laser pointer predecessor

[c4r0]

Look what my brother found today at our Polish internet auction service :yh: Looks like it's an optical pointer used even before HeNe pointers! Here's the auction: LINK. The seller has no idea how old it is. Have you seen something like this before?

 

[tysonc1979]

My old high school teacher used to have one like that for the planetarium lectures to point at the fake stars and that was about 15 years ago. Im not sure if it is a laser though being as the arrow is white and i don't think they had white laser pointers around back then.

 

[daguin]

I have one similar to it. It uses an incandescent bulb. The "arrow" is created using a mask.

Peace,
dave

 

[Meatball]

My siblings and I used to cut out our own masks from "detailed" coloring book images.

An ordinary flashlight could make the image huge when shown on a wall.