The motion picture projectionist (Nov 1931-Jan 1933)

Motion Picture Projectionist July, 1932 Motion Picture Film in the Making The third and final installment of Mr. Ellis's informative account of the ingredients, processes, and historical background of motion picture film, concerns itself with certain of the products and by-products of other industries which contribute their quota to the perfecting of film. The Motion Picture Projectionist wishes to take this opportunity to express its gratitude to Mr. Ellis for his genuine contribution to the literature of projection in this engrossing story of Motion Picture Film in the Making. The author is associated with the Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, N. Y. — The Editor. Part III. MOTION picture film, famous in its own right, has also some notable cousins and some interesting ancestors. Projectionists may top off their fuller acquaintance with the physical medium of the motion picture art by examining some of film's surprising relationships. Film's ancestry reaches back nearly two centuries, through a chain of photographic materials recognizable as forbears of the present transparent, flexible film only because their common object was to record light images. We may also fancy, as motion picture film's progenitors in a more immediate sense, the ingredients of film. Those who have followed this brief series of articles on film manufacture will recall reading in an earlier part a list of the far-collected raw materials — but the "case history" of at least one substance entering the manufacture of film is sufficiently curious to warrant further description. Film's cousins, as here imagined, By Franklin Courtney Ellis are groups of commercial products which are chemically akin to film or to its raw materials but which are concerned with the affairs of projectionists only as curiosities — and because extension of the film industry's scope into related fields increases the ability to make better film. The relatives of motion picture film include such widely separated materials as chicken feed and artificial leather. Early Work Motion picture film began its remarkable career some time during George Washington's lifetime, in the form of a surface of silver nitrate and chalk spread by a German named Schulze. This crude beginning of definite photographic experimentation produced vague images, but promptly lost them again for lack of any means of "fixing." One of the English pottery-making family of Wedgwoods later tried his hand at the problem and so did Sir Humphry Davy, a versatile English chemist. Their results were perhaps less crude, but no more permanent, than those of Schulze. Daguerre, the first name in photography which everyone knows, was a French painter whose laziness revolutionized the world's pictures. To save himself the tedious necessity of sketching, he studied the possibilities of photography and succeeded in making good photographs that remained as they were taken. The discovery of "fixing" by the English Herschel permitted Daguerre to achieve the latter result. Daguerre's medium — the first serious historical ancestor of motion picture film — was a silver plate, treated The) Sort of Wood From the Sawmill That Goes Into Retorts Earliest Sunlight Picture of Human Face. Original Daguerreotype Taken in 1840 with iodine to give a light-sensitive surface of silver iodide. The famous Frenchman's process of causing mercury vapor to adhere to the lightaffected parts of the plates, thus imaging the light areas of the picture, is less interesting than the observation of Daguerre's plates as predecessors to the many modern millions of film feet. Evolution of Negative Negative processes came next. Daguerre's had been a positive process. Paper, and then glass plates, were used, but with both materials it was necessary to take the picture while the emulsion was still wet. That necessity was very confining to an ambitious art like photography, and eventually the progress of invention yielded gelatine dry plates. George Eastman's start in photography was as a manufacturer of dry plates, and his first invention was an apparatus for coating dry plates mechanically. So far as the emulsion goes, the gelatine dry plates of 1880 were comparatively modern. Speed, color sensitivity, and numerous other important refinements have been added by the scientific forces which the photographic industry has marshaled over the past half century, but the fundamental emulsion-making principle of suspending silver salt grains in gelatine remains the same. As for the film base, George Eastman was the outstanding man to realize— and he realized it immediately upon giving serious consideration to the problems of photography — that glass plates were retarding photography's progress; that a light, unbreakable material to carry the