Fifty one year old Kodak documentary

Ray Rogers · Feb 3, 2009

Photo Engineer said:
The Agfa animation of slide coating is pretty interesting. It has been posted here on APUG, but I have been unable to locate the video again.

I would love to see that one... anyone know where it is?

Photo Engineer said:
I firmly believe that this film was probably made at least 10 years earlier than the copyright date, due to the equipment in use.PE

Well, I am half guessing that that windup ticket is dated 6/3/47

alan doyle · Feb 3, 2009

thanks for this i love these old clips...
i assume this was made for the southern states of america as his accent was difficult to understand.
as my old gran would say..
danke,
Alle mensen worden vrij en gelijk in waardigheid en rechten geboren. Zij zijn begiftigd met verstand en geweten, en behoren zich jegens elkander in een geest van broederschap te gedragen.

Ray Rogers · Feb 3, 2009

David A. Goldfarb said:
That looked like it was originally 16mm and converted by telecine. Even if Kodak has an English language copy in their archives, I wouldn't expect a digital conversion any time soon.

Interesting. I know of a 16 mm film about how paper is made....
What clues are the give away that this film was a 16 mm too?

In any case, there were a lot of educational films done on 16 mm.
Kodak has two other interesting (to me anyway) films, one on glass blowing and one on oh I would have to go check but anyway, bell curves and distribution of varriance around the mean or something like that.

Someone mentioned getting help finding the original at Kodak... that is probably a dead end, GEH would be likelier, but about a year ago I inquired and came up empty - but then again, not all of their collection is in the catalogues.

I know someone who has the paper film, but I have not been able to get him to keep his promise of sharing it yet. It may be even older than this one; it is a slient 16 mm.

Sal Santamaura · Feb 3, 2009

Ray Rogers said:
...What clues are the give away that this film was a 16 mm too?...

From the "latest news" page of the site which hosts that film:

How film is made
The lab got a very nice present, a 16mm colour film titled; 'How film is made'. It shows how a black/white still photo film is made from the beginning to the end. You get a very good idea how even today our cine films are also produced! Don't forget the film is dated 1958. Click this page to view the 18 minute film, in Dutch language and full colour. (Depending on your internet connection it might take some time to load.) Many thanks to Ton, Rene, Andre, Nico and Erwin!
[30 January 2009].

wildbillbugman · Feb 3, 2009

Thanks PE,
I have always wondered how pasta is made!
Regards,
Bill

Marco B · Feb 3, 2009

Ray Rogers said:
Someone mentioned getting help finding the original at Kodak... that is probably a dead end, GEH would be likelier, but about a year ago I inquired and came up empty - but then again, not all of their collection is in the catalogues.

I did, but I am pretty sure the original English language film will be stored safely here in the Netherlands as well, as they must have used it as the source for creating the Dutch narration.

And we have a vast, well managed, archive of everything related to our television history here in the Netherlands that contains literally hundreds of thousands of hours of film, video and sound (radio) material going back decades. The entire archive of the Polygoon news is now managed by the "Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid" in Hilversum, the Netherlands. They probably have it.

I am sure they can dig it up, question is, is it worth it and is someone willing to pay for the extraction of the archive and a necessary conversion to digital film format...

Let alone any owner / copyright issues related to putting it on the internet...

Joe Grodis · Feb 3, 2009

Super flick! Thank You for Sharing!!

amuderick · Feb 3, 2009

Could they have been discussing using radioactive alpha emitters to remove static electricity from the acetate roll before coating? Polonium-210 static brushes on an industrial scale?

Just as Kodak would never reveal the details of today's coating operation, in 1958, they were probably just as concerned about what the competition could glean from a public video. So, you publish a video that still looks awesome but is 15 years out of date. Useless to the competition. Still makes everyone feel swell. Same thing happens today...that and subtle disinformation campaigns inserted into these videos. It is not noticed by a casual watcher, but a competitor would be thrown out of kilter if they tried to follow the 'example'.

dyetransfer · Feb 3, 2009

I wonder why it is only men who work the coating lines, etc. And only women working the packaging area? Maybe it was because of exposure of (potentially) pregnant woment to toxic chemicals? Or is that concept too advanced for the limited eco-awareness of the 1940s?

Regards - Jim

Photo Engineer · Feb 3, 2009

dyetransfer said:
I wonder why it is only men who work the coating lines, etc. And only women working the packaging area? Maybe it was because of exposure of (potentially) pregnant woment to toxic chemicals? Or is that concept too advanced for the limited eco-awareness of the 1940s?

Regards - Jim

Jim;

All of the above. Today, AFAIK, men still predominate.

PE

DWThomas · Feb 3, 2009

Tom Kershaw said:
PE,

The film shows some reasonably sophisticated control technology; I presume achieved with gearing and other electro-mechanical devices. Do you know when computers started to be integrated into the process control systems?

A surprising amount of control technology prior to computers used pneumatics. The last company I worked for had a line of pneumatic controllers that were still selling into the 1980s. We had one little gizmo that could output an air pressure equal to the square root of an input pressure! Pressures were on the order of 5 to 15 PSI.

Film makers might have embraced computerized stuff sooner than others, it was at least theoretically capable of higher precision. But as late as the 1970s and 80s, computer control was viewed with suspicion in many companies. Pneumatic and electro-mechanical systems had a reputation for being installed, tweaked, then running for twenty or thirty years, something even today's computerized systems struggle to do.

DaveT

Photo Engineer · Feb 3, 2009

We had air piped into all labs in KRL. The only equipment run by air pressure were mixers. We used tiny compressed air stirrers with prop mixers on them. They made a high pitched whining noise when at speed but did the typical putt-putt at low speeds. They were quite economical when doing multiple melts for coating. With 24 cans in the CTB and little tiny mixers over them, the lab sounded like it had a bad asthma attack.

Or a bunch of whining cats.

Larger scales used huge electric mixers, many with shrouds to prevent arcing when solvents were added.

PE

Ray Rogers · Feb 3, 2009

Speculation

dyetransfer said:
I wonder why it is only men who work the coating lines, etc. And only women working the packaging area? Maybe it was because of exposure of (potentially) pregnant woment to toxic chemicals? Or is that concept too advanced for the limited eco-awareness of the 1940s?

Regards - Jim

Hi Jim-

Very perceptive. I was going to bring it up myself but you got there first

First, if you think in terms of evolution, the men problably designed and built, then helped design and had built, the complicated machines and thus had a deeper knowledge of their functioning. The other stages, esp. packaging labeling etc. were even done using children in the good old days! I can imagine that perhaps the level of compentency required and the cost of a mistake, was lower in post production stages... and there is no certainity that the wages were the same either, so there might have been economic reasons at play too.

I have seen this division of labor transend political, economic, linguistic and geographic borders. There seems to be a heavy concentration of women in post sensitization phases, with perhaps more men in research.
German, Dutch, British, Japanese and American companies all hired women to do much of the routine repetitive chores (actually I don't have enough information on what the men in these companies actually did; in any case, it seemed the companies hired more women than men, true or not)

[Seeing this for the first time is a real shocking eye-opener to the naive passer-by. I first had this awkward feeling upon visiting NY's 47th St. Photo (many years ago) where it seemed every employee belonged to the same relegion; not that that implies necessarilly some specfic impropriety, but it does beg the question: What, they don't hire non-followers?]

Jim, what was the male:female ratio you experienced first hand in your own visits?

archphoto · Feb 3, 2009

Thanks Sal, great show !
It reminded me of so many photographic things when I started in photography as a 10 year old, back in the early 60's.

Peter

Ray Rogers · Feb 3, 2009

amuderick said:
Could they have been discussing using radioactive alpha emitters to remove static electricity from the acetate roll before coating?

No. They were discussing the testing of air for radioactive particles.

Ray Rogers · Feb 3, 2009

Photo Engineer said:
The only equipment run by air pressure were mixers.

How was emulsion moved around the lab, to and from de-aeriation, and to the coating heads?

Photo Engineer said:
With 24 cans in the CTB

CTB?

Photo Engineer said:
Larger scales used huge electric mixers, many with shrouds to prevent arcing when solvents were added.

Could you say a bit more on this?
Do you mean the solvents might catch fire?

I have observed underwater arcing? sparking? once or twice when "bumping" the heating/mixing equipment... I was quite surprised!

Photo Engineer · Feb 3, 2009

Ray;

I moved the emulsion by cart in 1 L - 20 L containers with light-tight covers. What?

CTB = Constant Temperature Bath.

Solvents can catch fire due to arcing in electric and electronic equipment. So yes, there was a potential hazard. The mixer motor was above the solution. It cannot be below or it would short out.

PE

Louis Nargi · Feb 3, 2009

Thanks, interesting to see how its done.

dyetransfer · Feb 4, 2009

Hi Ray - when I visited Fotokemika in Croatia, there was about a 50:50 mix of men and women working. The emulsion chemist was a woman, the coating engineer was a man, two women did all the mixing and chemistry work, young men clambered all over the coating machine in the dark looping up the emulsion on the dryer, and a mix of men and women worked the slitting boxing and inspection area.

Regards - Jim

Ray Rogers · Feb 4, 2009

dyetransfer said:
Hi Ray - when I visited Fotokemika in Croatia, there was about a 50:50 mix of men and women working. The emulsion chemist was a woman, the coating engineer was a man, two women did all the mixing and chemistry work, young men clambered all over the coating machine in the dark looping up the emulsion on the dryer, and a mix of men and women worked the slitting boxing and inspection area.

Regards - Jim

Interesting. That sounds atypically well intergrated, but I guess we are missing data for the total numbers employed, rather than just what we have actually seen in pictures and first hand.

I wonder if there is more equality between the sexes in Croatia in general?

John Shriver · Feb 4, 2009

The film being spooled is Verichrome Pan. So this movie has to be made after the introduction of Verichrome Pan in 1957. Also, the emulsion of the film being loaded is grey, if it were Verichrome (ortho), it would be a bright magenta color.

So perhaps Kodak chose to use an absolutely obsolete coating machine for the part of the film that was "sensitive" to competitors. Or maybe they used more obsolete technology for Verichrome Pan, and saved the newer coating machines for the professional films? Or, since Verichrome Pan was by far the most popular film in 1957, they were using both old and new machines to make it, just for capacity reasons.

Interesting that the spooling machine is spooling either 620 or 616 size film. I suppose it would be easy to tell from the pattern of frame numbering.

David A. Goldfarb · Feb 4, 2009

Ray Rogers said:
I wonder if there is more equality between the sexes in Croatia in general?

Generally in the East Bloc, gender equality was encouraged in professional and industrial spheres under Communism, so there is quite a large proportion of women in medicine, engineering, and the sciences compared to the West, but women were still expected to play a large role in raising children and in the household, so while there was equality in some spheres, it wasn't exactly universal.

Photo Engineer · Feb 4, 2009

Generally, Kodak was very sensitive to the positive mutagenic or teratogenic properties of some chemicals and so they were quite conservative. There were a lot of women managers and researchers. The Asst Dir of Res was a woman and quite a superb emulsion maker.

PE

Ray Rogers · Feb 4, 2009

Photo Engineer said:
The Asst Dir of Res was a woman and quite a superb emulsion maker.PE

JS?

Photo Engineer · Feb 5, 2009

Yes. Judy!

Thinking it over, this requires a considerable effort on your part to just look up such trivia, whereas for me it is easy as I knew her personally.

PE

Fifty one year old Kodak documentary

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