Research Disclosure, Vol. 176, December 1978, Item 17643

Hello,

While looking through various Kodak silver halide emulsion patents, references to 'Research Disclosure 17643' (full title in thread title above) occur very frequently, and, it appears, that the document could be loaded with information describing detailed emulsion making procedures - but given that Kodak held a lot of secrets close to the vest, I have some doubts. I have downloaded other Kodak Research Disclosures from years ago, and in some cases, they do describe emulsion fabrication steps. But...I have never been able to get a copy of Research Disclosure 17643.

Does anyone have a copy of this doc, or know where to get it?

Thanks!

- Bob

Hi Bob, I too have noticed that this RD document is commonly referenced in many patents. I have tried to find a copy of this document before, but your post inspired me to dig with a bit more fervor. I found that these RDs can be purchased through an entity called Questel for the price of 45 USD or 35 EUR:

I decided to bite the bullet and I purchased it and I was emailed the document this morning. On first perusal, it unfortunately seems to be rather worthless to people interested in learning about emulsion making. It is mostly just a list of very general concepts (no details that would actually enable you to implement any of the topics). These brief, un-detailed descriptions are comprised mostly of lists of references to:
1) Patents
2) Other Research Disclosures
3) Some journal papers
4) The handful of already well-known published books (Mees/James, Duffin, Glafkides, Hamer, Birr)

If it wasn't so easy to search the patent literature, the patent references might be useful. After buying this one RD, I'm not persuaded to buy more since it was not that useful and later RDs with the same name seem to be very similar to the earlier versions, just with more updated patent references. The journal references are nice, but most are not available online, even if you have access. The books, insofar as I have read them, are good but there are not many and they only go into so much detail. They are also quite old for the most part.

There is no record of 17643 online that I could find, but to get a sense of what it is like, you can see this preview of 308119: https://www.researchdisclosure.com/database/RD308119
The first two sentences of 17643 and section I)A) of the preview of 308119 are word for word identical and the rest appears to be slightly reworked into new sections and with updated references.

Do you have a link to the RDs that you managed to find online? Did you find them to contain much useful information?

All the best,
Ian

The original link I found was for the Kenneth Mason outfit in the UK about 15 years ago. I successfully downloaded about 40 of them. Why I didn't go hammer and tongs after more I honestly do not remember. It may have been that I was skiving off work duties at the time (we are talking about emulsion making here) while downloading, or maybe it was a trial subscription.
Here are a few (so far):