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The Scientific American Cyclopedia of Formulas

David A. Goldfarb

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Has anyone else looked at The Scientific American Cyclopedia of Formulas, ed. Albert A. Hopkins? Here's a link to the 1910 edition--

http://books.google.com/books?id=io...&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

--which you can download for free. I found it so fascinating that I bought a copy of the 1928 edition from a seller on eBay for about $10.

Aside for formulas for everything from varnishes to bubble gum to soap to ginger ale, it's got about fifty densely printed pages of photographic formulas for processing chemicals, retouching materials, emulsions, POP, collodion, Autochrome, various printing process, lots of neat stuff. I bumped into it accidentally after Merg Ross mentioned over on the LF forum that he liked to process film in a metol-acetone formula, and I came across a number of pyro-acetone formulas here.
 

nworth

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A very interesting source. This should be at least cross referenced to the Alternative Processes Forum, since most of the material falls into what we treat in that area. It is quite valuable in that respect.
 
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David A. Goldfarb

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We don't have a method of cross referencing, and we try to avoid duplicate posts to avoid fragmenting discussion or having parallel threads, but it would certainly be reasonable to discuss relevant sections as needed in the Alt-Process forum. If someone were to search on the title on APUG, it would come up no matter what the forum.
 

ntenny

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Wow, thanks for the pointer! Apart from the photo section, this book looks like a very promising toy in a whole variety of ways. I had no idea it existed.

-NT
 
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David A. Goldfarb

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And just in case you needed a reminder of how much times have changed, in the theater makeup section there is a recipe for "N****r Black Face Paint."

Other useful information, from the section about cleaning blood from parchment--"In the manufacture of the finer classes of leather, such as calf for bookbinders, and various skins for glovemakers, also of parchment or vellum, after the unhairing process, and before dressing, the skins are subjected to a bath of dog's putrid dung mixed with tepid water. This mixture is said to remove all fat, grease, and other stains. Manufacturers have tried to find a substitute for this unpleasant mixture, but have not succeeded."
 

Murray Kelly

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Download?

When I was kid I had a book 4" thick, printed about 1880, that had all kinds of nostrums and stuff for the common man. Alas, it was thrown out as being too big to take when we shifted from one city to another. One item took my fancy. It was a powder used to weld iron together, for blacksmiths. You sprinkled it on when both parts were red hot then hammered the daylights out of the joint on the anvil. My father was a welder and I thought it 'quaint' compared to the electric arc and gas he used.

My query is, the link takes me to a site OK, but nowhere can I see how to download anything except a short reference to photography. How do you get to see more than this? Photography is pp. 673-734 and that's it, as far as I can get.

Any pointers, please, to get more?

Murray Kelly
Brisbane, Australia
 

Lee L

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Ian Grant said:
Murray, there's no download link when I open the page either, maybe it only works with US IP addresses.

Ian
Click to expand...
Likely concerns over varying copyright laws around the world.

Lee
 

nickandre

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I would guess it only works in the USA. Copyrights or some such crap.
 

Lee L

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Ian Grant said:
No it'll be a directive from the CIA
Click to expand...
Occam's Razor, applied to a country which has it's largest military base in Afghanistan attacked by a known computer virus (in the wild for over 10 months), crippling 75% of the base computers, running the highly secure over the counter MS Windows OS, overseen by military IT staff.

Simplest explanation for blocked IP addresses ... Google concerns over getting sued. Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by fear. If, however, your download gets redirected to Guantanamo and held there interminably without explanation ... CIA.

But yours is definitely a better story, so let's run with that.

Lee
 
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David A. Goldfarb

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The edition online is pre-1923, so it's well out of copyright.
 

Murray Kelly

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OK - that's what I wondered. So much for the 'coallition of the willing'?
I note there is a copy in the National Library in Canberra. It's a long way (1200km) to go read a book about the Great Satan's secret formulae.

Murray
Ian Grant said:
Murray, there's no download link when I open the page either, maybe it only works with US IP addresses.

Ian
Click to expand...
 

nworth

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So far as I know, the US Government does not (can not) block any otherwise public addresses from international access. Many other countries, and many ISPs just on their own, however, do block certain sites and other providers. Google is commonly blocked, both because of their content and because of advertising issues.
 

Ian Grant

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No but Google US can. Part of this may be because Google Books is still Beta.

I tried downloading via a Proxy server in the US but a page flashed up stating that the Proxy was banned by the courts here in Turkey. Youtube and all Geocities sites are banned by Court orders here, and Myspace was banned for a short time too now the proxies are also been screened to stop access to the banned sites. It's US technology being used to squash freedom of speech and information.

A very kind US APUG member, who I met on the recent Ilford factory tour, stuck the file on his own website just so I could download it. (Thanks Terry).

Ian
 

nworth

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It's true that Google will cooperate with foreign governments in these matters. It has to, or it will be entirely banned by them. It's not so much tha US technology is used to block freedom of speech as that UK law is blocking it.
 

Lee L

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Well, the UK has blocked parts of Wikipedia in the last day or so, due to a cover on a Scorpions album from 1976. Apparently the block has caused a wide spectrum of problems with connections to Wikipedia from the UK.

It'll probably get more cumulative views around the world from the news coverage of the block than it would ever have done otherwise.

Lee
 

Ian Grant

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nworth said:
It's true that Google will cooperate with foreign governments in these matters. It has to, or it will be entirely banned by them. It's not so much tha US technology is used to block freedom of speech as that UK law is blocking it.
Click to expand...

I'm not in the UK

Now I have the PDF of the book I printed it again via a PDF writer so that I now have a new PDF file that just has the relevant 61 pages on Photography.

Looking at the Formulae it's interesting that even by 1910 most of the developers & fixers are remarkably similar to today's. It is of course by then already 20 years since the first publication of Ilford's first "Manual of Photography", and 54 years after the founding of the British Journal of Photography. This book in comparison contains a lot of ambiguities and a lack of clarity, (in this section), the same developing agents being called a variety of names.

It's still a very interesting resource and needs some time to digest fully.

Ian
 
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