I have clear memories of the "family tours" at the Kodak processing laboratory in North Vancouver, British Columbia Canada where my father worked. Every few years they would close down the processing lines for a day, and set things up so that staff and their families could tour the operation, to see what really happened there (they even had the lights on).
This was quite a production, because during the summers (in the late 1960s and early 1970s) they were running the Kodachrome and Ektachrome machines 24 hours a day, using three shifts. They didn't even have colour print facilities there - everything was either slide film or movie film (how things have changed :rolleyes: ).
The machines were massive. All the rolls of film to be processed were pre-spliced on to large reels, and then run through those massive machines at quite high speeds.
For the tours, they ran the leader through the machines. If I recall correctly the leader rolls were very long (100s of yards?, 1000s of yards?). The leader roles were necessary, because in order to calibrate the process correctly (a procedure repeated on a regular basis), the machines had to have either film or leader running through them, because otherwise the normal amounts of chemistry would not be displaced, and the calibration would be incorrect. Again, if I recall correctly, the first calibration run each day (or possibly each shift) was done using just the leader.
I expect that some of this process may have since then been streamlined somewhat, or made more appropriate for smaller volumes, but as I understand it the Kodachrome process has very narrow tolerances, and requires such high volumes to maintain those tolerances, that home processing would be very difficult to accomplish.
If I have mis-remembered any of the details above, I trust that PE or someone else will correct me.
As you may guess, those tours, plus all the rest of my youthful exposure to all things Kodak, had a lasting effect on me.
