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are wondering what on earth that has to do with developing machines. Well, it hasn't very much — it just came into my head when I was thinking about the three of us getting on so well together. For we all three got rolling drunk one evening without having a single drop of anything to drink! We were very interested at that time in the problem of getting our news pictures upon the screens in the shortest possible time. Now the two great sources of delay are the necessity of washing the films thoroughly, which takes time, and of drying them afterwards, which takes much longer still. It's the gelatine that's the trouble. It takes a long time to wash the chemicals out of the gelatine and much longer still to dry it afterwards.
But I happened to remember a little-known process which does not have gelatine in its make-up. It is called collodio-bromide and, as may be imagined, collodion takes the place of gelatine and a rinse is sufficient to clean it and it dries in a minute or two. Its drawback is that it is terribly slow — wants a very long exposure to the printing light. However, it can be accelerated tremendously by treating it with a little eosine, which is the dye from which red ink is made. This process had been used for glass lantern-slides very successfully and I determined to experiment with it. But directly the dyed emulsion was coated upon celluloid a strange thing happened. Every particle of the sensitising dye was sucked out of the collodion by the celluloid and all the valuable extra speed went with it. It appeared that celluloid had a tremendous affinity for eosine and stole it from the collodion. It dyed the celluloid red and left the collodion white, and so insensitive to light that it was impossible to do anything with it.
The drunkenness? Well, that happened this way. Collodion is made by dissolving gun-cotton in a mixture of alcohol and ether. The sensitising agent is added to it in the dark-room. We three, in the dark except for a red lantern, and looking, I should think, like a trio of witches, were stirring the stuff for a considerable time and the vapour had the same effect upon us as though we had been drinking heavily. Anyhow, we finished off the job and then went out for a walk to Shepperton, singing loudly and rolling arm-in-arm all the way.
So far as I can gather from the printed catalogue of 'selected' films which was issued later, we do not appear to have had much use of the stage now that we had got it. Almost every picture was taken in natural scenery and the great majority were deliberately
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