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Anyone got the B.I.O.S./ F.I.A.T. report on Portriga?

Lachlan Young

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This is largely the outcome of acquiring a copy of Ron's emulsion book & looking through Glafkides' text - I'm interested to see how many errors crept in when Glafkides transcribed Portriga etc - and I prefer the tonality of Portriga to Brovira. I can read technical German without major issues.

Obvious disclaimer: I'm not expecting to be able to make the emulsion work with modern gelatins without serious amounts of work - I just want to see if I can understand the hows and the whys of the way it was made. If anyone knows when Portriga became Portriga-Rapid and what the changes were, that would also be interesting. Going by some early-ish Agfa/ Orwo developer formula sheets, they seem to have co-existed for a while.

The extra-hard Brovira (and why Glafkides couldn't get it to work) and the Isopan formulae are also of interest, but probably a discussion for another time...
 
I'm about attempt the pop centennial paper
Just made pop collidion paper which I learned with mark Osterman
Sorry not to answer the question
 
I would like to see it as well. Unless someone has gotten a copy and put it online, they are hard to get. I wrote an email to the Library of Congress about a year ago looking for one of the reports and managed to find someone that knew what I was looking for. Most of the reports have never been scanned and are filed away in archives. Apparently, you can get the actual archived report volumes (a copy I'd imagine, not original) on inter-library loan but I didn't have a good library locally to set up the transfer. You need a university library or major public library. Little town libraries are not set up for it, especially in the internet age.
 
The RIT and UR libraries both apparently have the FIAT and BIOS reports. GEM does not have them but gets them as needed from these other sources via their "Voyager" program.

Glafkides has numerous errors. Some of the errors are pointed out elsewhere on PHOTRIO.

PE
 

Cheers - I've found that the FIAT report seems to have had a reciprocal publication with HMSO, so the National Library of Scotland has a copy - reckoned they'd likely have BIOS, wasn't sure about FIAT. Not sure how much overlap there is between the reports.

Having finally got hold of a copy of your book (which is fantastic, looking forward to getting on with properly trying the recipes), it was curiosity about what specific active gelatins were used in Portriga - with the idea to possibly explore how readily inert gelatins & chemical sensitisation could be used, especially bearing in mind your comments about potential issues with sulfur & gold sensitising of chlorobromide emulsions - and wanting to get a handle on the reasons for why it seems to follow an approach of adding excess silver in the initial precipitation, then dumping in the chloride to carry out a second, reversed precipitation. The fact it seems free of the nastier metal salts is also quite attractive...

As you say both here & elsewhere, Glafkides manages to omit the gelatin types, and only mentions in passing that the Portriga emulsion was spectrally sensitised and had to be stabilised with anti-fog & anti-yellowing agents without saying any of what they were or when they were added. No addition rates either.
 
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I'll have to look all of those things up, if I even have them now. I can say that gold sensitization of Chloride containing emulsions is notorious for causing low contrast and high fog. It is very hard to control.

Usually, salt is always in excess. Except for the one I have in my book with excess Silver to give a brown tone along with copper.

PE
 
It's over 40 years since I last read Glafkides, I was already maing emulsion before I read it and only took a little it.

As has been discussed before there's apparent errors but that may be for numerous deliberate reasons. German companies hiding thier commercial secrets, report compilers not wishing to divulge everything they found, etc.

There's a lot of secrecy about how and what allies investigated and discoverd when they visited German companies after WWII. We only discovered my father a Mechanical Engineer had spent time in Germany while still in the army after the war a week beforehis death. His regiment an IEME (Indian Electrical and Mechanichal Engineers) light tank regiment had been handed to the new Indian army when the war in Europe ended. He was in Britain for a major engineering conference before the end of the war and the only military officer which appears to be related to his time in Germany. He'd signed the British Official Secrets Act and was of a generation that never spoke about anything covered by it

We forget that the US, UK and Russia all visited factories taking blue prints or tooling and copied Geerman cameras, some like Reid & Sigrist better than others. MPP copied the Linhof Technika and Rolleicor/Rolleiflex, AGI the Reflex Korelle.

Ian
 
Photo Engineer said:
Usually, salt is always in excess. Except for the one I have in my book with excess Silver to give a brown tone along with copper.
Click to expand...

This is something I'm struggling to find an answer to: why was reversed precipitation used? Does it grow a very specific form of crystal structure?

Ian Grant said:
MPP copied the Linhof Technika and Rolleicor/Rolleiflex
Click to expand...

And by the looks of it, the Micromatic enlarger was an Omega E3/ E4 copy or something extremely close.
 
Apparently, Glafkides copied the reports incorrectly as his work comes directly from those reports.

I hope to look into this as soon as I can find my notes.

Reverse pptn. was very rare. High vAg (Silver excess) causes fog as a general rule. So, reverse pptn. has high vAg by definition.

PE
 
Ian Grant said:
There's a lot of secrecy about how and what allies investigated and discoverd when they visited German companies after WWII.
Click to expand...

The scope of investigation was broad. It went from from military high tech as rockets over the electrical grid system to industrial design of consumer goods.
 
I have reviewed my notes on the BIOS and FIAT reports and find that the only formulas that use reverse addition (Salt into Silver) are those claimed to be warm tone. They also use Cadmium and Copper salts to enhance the curve shape and tone. The reports cover much the same material and dovetail together as if the writers said "you do this and I'll do that and we will issue 2 complementary reports" and that is about it.

Due to the lack of photo and German skills, the reports are fraught with many errors which were compounded each time someone copied them and thus we have many many errors. One in particular involves the German "sz" which in type appears like a Greek Beta. It is rendered into a capital B in these reports and the actual word (geissen or to coat) becomes 2 words and takes on a variety of meanings depending on who reads them.

So, if your formula is brown toned, it probably involves reverse addition of salt to Silver.

PE
 
The word in that example is "gießen"

In the long past it was written gieszen, then a new letter emerged, a ligature, and it became gießen. (There even was variation between the German speaking countries on this) .Today the spelling giessen is popular as the ligature may be missing on ones keyboards, or if the addressee of the text is a foreigner.
 
I originally wrote it "sz" in my post but decided it might not be correct. In any event, Glafkides and the two reports had many errors in translation and transcription that led to problems duplicating what was written. The word we are referring to was supposed to be "coating addenda" but was interpreted by some as "overcoat" due to it being a very bad spelling for "basting sauce".

PE
 

Cheers for this - I'll check back in once I've had a look at the reports in the NLS.
 
So it turns out that the central library for Glasgow has the full set of BIOS/ FIAT/ CIOS reports - finally had a chance to go & look at B.252 yesterday which has an appendix with the formulae, coating addenda ('Begießzusätze') and supercoatings transcribed in German - my first look at it suggests that 'Brovira Braun'/ 'Portriga Rapid' is a reverse addition using Lead Nitrate in the harder grades & additional dye sensitisation (of the 'formula unknown, from Wolfen' sort), with a 'regular' Portriga in two grades that uses cadmium iodide (which Glafkides somehow turns into potassium iodide). Neither are washed or supercoated. What effect does Cadmium Iodide have compared to Potassium Iodide?
 
If you think back to Record Rapid in the 80's which still had Cadmium in it helps development at short times or high dilutions when trying to gain the maximum warmth from a paper which is caused by grain size, So with reduced development it's producing finer grain. Ron, PE, will be able to give a better explanation athough I may well have it in a book.

Ian
 
Cadmium does indeed give more warmth, but it also can help adjust the toe for best highlights. Iodide can increase contrast depending on when it is added.

Cd can be added before, during or after pptn. depending on quantity and effect desired. I have seen huge quantities used, and this was one of the major pollutants that Kodak eliminated in the 70s from all of its papers.

PE
 

Do you happen to have a source that definitively confirms Record Rapid ever had Cadmium in it? I'm just somewhat sceptical because the BIOS report suggests no usage of Cd salts in most of the Agfa paper emulsions (apart from a tiny amount of Cadmium Iodide in Portriga - not Portriga Rapid) but there is a good quantity of Lead Nitrate in the Brovira Braun/ Portriga Rapid formulae - which I suspect became the basis of Record Rapid/ Portriga Rapid in the subsequent decade. There seem to have been quite a few other emulsion changes in materials in the 70's & 80's other than just the removal of Cd - and I wonder how many of those were blamed on the belief it was all to do with the Cadmium rather than (say) a change of hardener causing an overall redesign of the emulsion. Glafkides seems obsessed by Cd in paper emulsions, but I've not looked too hard for his sources (apart from his mangling of the BIOS/ CIOS/ FIAT reports).


It's a tiny quantity of Cadmium Iodide added after pptn - I'll double check the quantity later - it differs between the two grades, which are also (helpfully) scaled to make different quantities. It just struck me as rather odd given that most of the other formulae use KI & I was much more aware of the uses of the other Cd salts than the iodide.

One other thing I noticed was that the warmtone Lupex had extra copper chloride added in the pre-coating finals - is this significant?
 
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Cd use in low levels was used to tweak the toe contrast IIRC, and Copper salts were used to tweak the tone of the image.

Cadmium is VERY toxic.

PE
 
Photo Engineer said:
Cd use in low levels was used to tweak the toe contrast IIRC, and Copper salts were used to tweak the tone of the image.

Cadmium is VERY toxic.

PE
Click to expand...

I have no intention of using Cd salts! Their casual use by the wetplate fraternity makes me quite seriously worried about their future health.

Toe contrast tweaking would largely tally with the recipe differences between grades.
 
We also used it to make the toe of color papers neutral, pink or greenish depending on market. It was replaced in 1970 in Ektacolor 30 papers with organic compounds of far less toxicity and which were used in far lower levels.

PE
 

The last rendition of Portriga Rapid greatly changed the surface of the paper -- one of its original beautiful features. I used the middle variety in much of my work in the 80s -- perhaps early on I tried some of the older variety that folks liked to split tone (something that got lost in the variety I used most.) The loss of Portriga Rapid was one of the things that modivated me to try Carbon Printing.
 

This follows my suspicions about changes in the paper: a move to a washed, modified emulsion in the 70's (so that an RC variant will work), then a hardener change & reformulation in the late 80's (thus the surface finish change you observed).
 
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Back in the late 1980's there was plenty of information from Agfa themselves that Record Rapid had been re-formulated to remove the Cadmium and those of us that used both versions noticed a very significant difference in terms of the flexibility to greatly increase warmth and colour shift with dilution/decreased development and increased exposure.

There's some confusion because the names Record Rapid and Portriga were used for the same or similar products in some markets, Portriga Speed was like an RC version of Record Rapid.

Surprisingly Kodak continued making a warmtone paper with a higher level of Cadmium for some time longer than Agfa, Ektalure - not a paper or surface I liked, John Blakemore used quite a lot which is where I came across it. Cadmiumalso helped extend the shelf life as well as the warmth and I suspect it was old stock confectioned as needed, rather like Kodak stretch the last master roll of Kodachrome, sales of Ektalure were low,



It's unlikely the Agfa employees were totally honest with all the information that went into the FIAT reports, after all they were being asked to give away trade secrets. We are also forgetting Kodak had already been given access to many of Agfa's trade secrets etc when the US Government took over Agfa Ansco in 1941/2. Agfa of course gaine access to some of Kodak's technology when they took over the relatively new Kodak Ltd coating plant in Hungary which made amongst other films Tri-X.

So somewhere Kodak has more accurate information on Agfa emulsions than in the BIOS/FIAT reports, they'd only be missing any improvements made 1941-5.

Ian
 
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