I don't think people now realise how big a revolution 126 was to the bottom end of the photography market, it really took reasonable quality to the masses, I never had a 126 camera but my mother did, and having her old 127 Brownie camera got me first processing films and printing.
Ian
My mother also had a 126 Instamatic, purchased from a Players cigarette token catalogue! 126 may have made things easier, but it signalled a decline in the quality of family snapshots. Ours were taken a 120 box camera from pre-war well into the 1960s. With the arrival of the Instamatic the rich tones of roll film shots was substituted for blurrier, grainier, 126 enlargements, but my mother loved the idea of colour because it was "real" (though her early Instamatic shots were all black and white).
While 126 cartridge was the limit of her race to the bottom, other members of our extended family went for 110 pocket cameras and their images bear no comparison to the box camera photographs of forty years previously. I suspect the same decline was evident in most non-enthusiast photo albums. I can still recall my mother taking her box camera to the local chemist to be loaded and unloaded and have him fit another film, which would be about 1967. You push the button, we do the rest stuck in the consciousness of people who thought photography was a dark art decades after the phrase was coined.
I still recall looking inside her empty box camera as a child, in the same awe one might inspect a magician's or an alchemist's prop, expecting some photographic spirit to emerge and jump out at me for daring to peer within its workings.
