The first attempts to determine parallaxes using photography were done during the period 1887-1889 by Pritchard at Oxford. Although there was considerable debate over the merits and even possibility of doing astrometry using photographs, photography turned out to be an excellent way to measure parallaxes, as the accuracy was much greater than using visual methods and the labor was much less intensive. Furthermore, by taking a photograph, a permanent record was made of the measurement, so that the image could be examined at once or later, and it could be remeasured again and again for new information. In 1900 Kapteyn designed a systematic method to take these photographs, in allowing each photographic plate to be exposed three times during a single night, and four nights spaced throughout the year, such that in the end there are twelve exposures for every star on the plate.
A requisite to visual measurement of parallax would be an eyepiece that not only has an adjustable micrometer, but also one that does not distort angular position depending on the star's location in the field of view. Perhaps the first eyepiece of this type is the "Orthoscopic" design ....
"The design of the original Orthoscopic eyepiece dates back to the 1800s [sic -- should be 1880's] when Ernst Abbe first designed them to be used for accurate measurements of linear distance on microscope slides. The term "orthoscopic" denotes an eyepiece that introduces no barrel or pincushion distortion, so that an object will have the same size when observed anywhere in the field of view. The Abbe design employs a triplet field lens and a singlet eyelens."
That pretty much takes accurate visual parallax measurement out of the game (unless you have a very accurate measuring system on the telescope Right Ascension and Declination axes, and then use a simple fixed reticle eyepiece) until well after the advent of photography.
