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

[Photo Engineer]

Sorry to say that Kodak did not get much from Agfa-Ansco if anything at all. The two companies were "walled off" by the government. And as for the BIOS/FIAT reports, no Kodak engineer took part in the collection of data, and the reports themselves were gathering dust in the library due to lack of use. Except for some aspects of Gold sensitization, I think that Kodak was about 10 years ahead of Agfa in many respects.

PE

 

[Lachlan Young]

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.

I don't think Ektalure was ended due to cadmium content - lead salts seem far more likely when the era of withdrawal is considered & the well known use of lead salts in warmtone papers. I'd also be more inclined to argue that the manufacturers in the 80's might offer slightly misleading claims as to which specific heavy metal salts they'd removed in order to wrong-foot their competition about other significant emulsion changes, rather than being able to withhold production formulae in the more complex power relationships of the weeks after the end of WW2. If it really matters, I do have a good selection of Ektalure & Portriga/ Record Rapid covering several generations & could probably have them subjected to mass spectrometry or similar, but I'm not entirely convinced it would help.

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.

I don't think they had much choice in the matter, it being 6 weeks from the end of WW2 & the investigators having the full weight of the military occupation government behind them. I think they copied the formulae book, but don't seem to have been terribly interested in learning any exact alterations that may have happened in practice. Indeed, the general tone of the investigators who wrote B252 is quite dismissive of Agfa's technology at Leverkusen as fairly obsolete both in coating equipment & emulsion technology - the two things they pick up on as being of real interest are the air scrubbers and the experimental spiral drying tunnel on the one running coater. Interestingly, almost the self-same drying tunnel design appears in 'Silver by the Ton' as something Ilford used in the stages between festoon drying and more modern drying tunnel designs...

Rather than in-use formulae, any current R&D seems to have been kept from the investigators, possibly because having looked at the plant, they concluded that it wasn't worth going through everyone's lab notebooks - for example Edith Weyde is mentioned by name, but nothing about her work on DTR, although Copyrapid is in the formula list.

 

[Photo Engineer]

The people collecting information for those reports were not engineers, chemists or photo engineers. They were military intelligence for the most part with some having backgrounds in civil engineering or chemical engineering. They often spoke no German at all. They thus misunderstood many of the formulas and copied things down wrong as I have noted before. Overcoat and coating addenda often became interchanged for example.

PE

 

[Ian Grant]

Sorry to say that Kodak did not get much from Agfa-Ansco if anything at all. The two companies were "walled off" by the government. And as for the BIOS/FIAT reports, no Kodak engineer took part in the collection of data, and the reports themselves were gathering dust in the library due to lack of use. Except for some aspects of Gold sensitization, I think that Kodak was about 10 years ahead of Agfa in many respects.

PE

My understanding from numerous sources is Kodak were given complete access to all Agfa Ansco's technical secrets in 1942 on military grounds and were surprised to find how advanced Agfa were in colour film dye technology. Even though the systems used were different it allowed Kodak to suddenly make substantial break throughs.

One source Dr Douglas Arthur Spencer was a Kodak Ltd director and head of Research, later becoming Managing Director, Spencer was Kodak's foremost authority on colour films, he'd joined Kodak Research in 1939 to work on films for aerial photography for the RAF. Both Ilford and Kodak Ltd were under the control of the Air Ministry, Ilford being taken over by the Government Kodak just acting under guidance in terms or materials and research needed.

Another source a retired GAF employee who's memoirs are online somewhere, also various later publications.

At the start of the war Eastman Kodak (aside from Kodachrome) was way behind in terms of a negative/positive process or an easily processed colour reversal film, sure because of the war they ended up maybe a decade ahead in some ways but they'd learnt a lot from access to Agfa Ansco's work.

Ian

 

[Ian Grant]

The people collecting information for those reports were not engineers, chemists or photo engineers. They were military intelligence for the most part with some having backgrounds in civil engineering or chemical engineering. They often spoke no German at all. They thus misunderstood many of the formulas and copied things down wrong as I have noted before. Overcoat and coating addenda often became interchanged for example.

PE

It was only a week or two before he died that my father told my sister and I he'd been in Germany after the war until late 1947. He was a mechanical engineer, his IEME light tank regiment of Sikh troops had been handed to the fledgling Indian Army when the war in Europe ended, so why was he there. Only reference I can find is an Engineering conference in Britain late 1944 where he appears to be one of the only military engineers present (rank & regiment are listed with his qualifications). It appears that conference was about gaining information after WWII.

Part of our problem is that was a generation here who signed the Official Secrets Act and never spoke of those experiences. It would have been similar in the US so the Kodak access to Agfa Ansco (and Agfa Germany) research similarly hidden.

Ian

 

[Ian Grant]

I don't think Ektalure was ended due to cadmium content - lead salts seem far more likely when the era of withdrawal is considered & the well known use of lead salts in warmtone papers. I'd also be more inclined to argue that the manufacturers in the 80's might offer slightly misleading claims as to which specific heavy metal salts they'd removed in order to wrong-foot their competition about other significant emulsion changes, rather than being able to withhold production formulae in the more complex power relationships of the weeks after the end of WW2. If it really matters, I do have a good selection of Ektalure & Portriga/ Record Rapid covering several generations & could probably have them subjected to mass spectrometry or similar, but I'm not entirely convinced it would help.

My memory is Kodak stated Ektalure was no longer manufactured because of the heavy metals, I think it was John Blake more who mentioned the high Cadmium level, and Kodak as well.

I use to have a couple of Mass Spectrometers We used them to test precious metals and their alloys.

Ian

 

[Lachlan Young]

Cd use in low levels was used to tweak the toe contrast IIRC,

Have now gone back through the formulae: from what I can tell, Portriga 'Kräftig' used about 0.34g CdI2 per mol AgNO3 and Portriga 'Normal' used about 0.7g CdI2 per mol AgNO3. The addition sequence of the 'Kräftig'/ 'vigorous' grade seems to have been essentially as follows:

Part A:
Water
KBr
Gelatin

Part B:
Water
AgNO3

Part C:
Water
NaCl
Gelatin

Part D:
1% solution of CdI2

Part B is run into Part A over 4 minutes, then held for 5 mins. Part C is then added (no indication of addition time, so I presume it's dumped in all at once), then held for 30 mins. Part D is then added, the temperature raised & a further 30 min hold (digestion/ ripening with the aid of the active gelatins?) before it's allowed to cool/ set.


I've eliminated the parts from the recipe that seem to relate to active gelatins & have not yet calculated exact molar ratios etc - this is more to get a handle on the sequence of additions & roughly what is happening - and the likelihood of managing to get it to work with a less nasty iodide (& a more modern finish/ sensitisation) - if that's likely possible with this type of make?

My understanding of this make is that it's possibly attempting to form a bromide core & a chloride shell with some surface iodide to try & improve speed?

 

[Photo Engineer]

It depends on where the Iodide ends up. It can be a core, a uniform, or a shell emulsion wrt to I.

PE

 

[Photo Engineer]

My understanding from numerous sources is Kodak were given complete access to all Agfa Ansco's technical secrets in 1942 on military grounds and were surprised to find how advanced Agfa were in colour film dye technology. Even though the systems used were different it allowed Kodak to suddenly make substantial break throughs.

One source Dr Douglas Arthur Spencer was a Kodak Ltd director and head of Research, later becoming Managing Director, Spencer was Kodak's foremost authority on colour films, he'd joined Kodak Research in 1939 to work on films for aerial photography for the RAF. Both Ilford and Kodak Ltd were under the control of the Air Ministry, Ilford being taken over by the Government Kodak just acting under guidance in terms or materials and research needed.

Another source a retired GAF employee who's memoirs are online somewhere, also various later publications.

At the start of the war Eastman Kodak (aside from Kodachrome) was way behind in terms of a negative/positive process or an easily processed colour reversal film, sure because of the war they ended up maybe a decade ahead in some ways but they'd learnt a lot from access to Agfa Ansco's work.

Ian

AFAIK, Kodak was not surprised. See works by Wesley Hanson and others regarding work on encapsulated couplers versus Fischer (Agfa type) couplers. I've read many of the works Ian and Kodak and Agfa were keeping pace, but Kodak was aimed for slide coating, but Agfa did not know about this.

PE