American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1932)

30 American Cinematographer • October 1932 AMATEUR SECTION Film Sends Alcoh conoi on By-Product Spree Alcohol in the Wood by Franklin Courtney Ellis Eastman Kodak Company WHEN the average person, in or out of the motion picture industry, thinks of film manufacture, he thinks of the finished product, cut-film, roll-film, X-ray film, and so on. Cinematographers may extend this list, because of their more or less intimate knowledge of the hundred different types of film that the photographic market demands; but beyond this, nine out of ten accept the layman's viewpoint, and feel that in so far as film manufacture is concerned, a film factory is rather like a sausage-mill: in go the raw materials at one end, and out at the other end comes the film. But it is hardly so simple as all that. When a film manufacturing plant attains such magnitude that it produces several million feet of film each year, and film of perhaps a hundred different varieties, it faces the same economic problems that confront any other big business enterprise. It must be assured of an adequate supply of raw material, and it must guard against the waste of any possible by-product which may conceivably have some commercial value. In this respect, it is only following the example of the sausage-mill we have already referred to: for anyone who has visited a big packingplant can testify that Messrs. Swift, Armour, et al, utilize every possible part of the pig except his squeal — and that, it is rumored, they now sell to the Radio people, for static! Therefore, the film industry must think first of its raw materials, and then of its by-products. Film can be no better than its ingredients. Quality must be kept to high standards, but at the same time, the greatest economy must be observed in their procurement. Some of these raw materials are standard chemical products which, once a definite standard of purity, etc., has been estab lished, can most economically be obtained on the open market. Others, however, are best obtained by the manufacturer producing them himself. In some instances this involves the acquisition of some large industry, apparently unrelated to the manufacture of motion picture film. One such case carries with it the story of an industry, large in its own right, which introduces some of film's "cousins." The raw material in question is wood alcohol. Motion picture film contains no wood alcohol, yet very large aggregate quantities are used in film manufacture. No mystery lies behind that statement. Wood alcohol is used to dissolve nitrated cotton, but is then driven out of the film "dope" as heat dries the solution into sheet film. Chemically pure wood alcohol — just one material used in film making — was important enough in the manufacturing economy to cause the largest photographic manufacturer to set up extensive lumbering operations in the forests of four states, to build a railroad system, and to establish a plant for turning waste wood from the forest and from the sawmill into chemically pure wood alcohol and other useful products. In the lumber business, only about 40 per cent of the average tree is utilized as lumber. Part of what is left is used in other ways. For instance, sawdust stokes the fires to run the machinery of the average sawmill. Much of the rest is waste — but what is waste for the lumber industry is raw material for wood alcohol and a number of other products. The lumberjack slashing limbs from a felled oak on a Tennessee mountainside may not even realize that the limbs he removes and loads on a mule-drawn sledge, play a part in the movie show he sees on Saturday night. So too do the rounded slabs sawn from logs in the company's sawmill in the process of squaring up lumber for the market. Charcoal, the residue after distillation, is an unusual "cousin" of motion picture film, but, as a product of this photographic subsidiary, it is charcoal with a higher education. Even the dust raised in screening the various sizes of charcoal is collected by a vacuum system for briquetting into dining car fuel that cooks the cameramen's meals when they travel to location. The chickens broiled for those meals may also have been fed powdered charcoal — a byproduct of the film industry. Dividing pyroligneous acid into chemically pure wood alcohol and other "solvents" for film making and into wood pitch and creosote oils — by-products — is less remarkable than what happens to the third general derivative of pyroligneous acid — -acetic acid. Acetic acid was comparatively unimportant in the whole scheme of the film industry when the plant for manufacturing wood alcohol was established. The alacrity with which a movie-conscious world has taken to personal pictures, together with the greater use of x-rays since the War, has increased the importance of cellulose acetate, made from acetic acid, in the film manufacturer's economy. Film for these two specific purposes is made from cellulose acetate. The so-called "safety film," rated by the National Board of Fire Underwriters as presenting somewhat less fire hazard than common newsprint paper of the same form and quality, can be used for amateur movies and x-ray work in homes, schools, and hospitals without the projection and storage precautions necessary with cellulose nitrate film. Lack of the needed equipment for adequate precautions would otherwise have greatly restricted two useful fields. Continued on Page 42