The motion picture projectionist (Nov 1931-Jan 1933)

July, 1932 Motion Picture Projectionist emulsion would be necessary if photography were to become widely useful and adaptable. Eastman's first attempts to make a film involved a paper base in a rollable form. The first Kodaks used such a film. The paper negative was prepared for printing either by greasing or by stripping off the emulsion layer and mounting it on glass. But, obviously, paper was not the perfect film that Eastman sought. At the time when he was improving paper film, Eastman was also directing experiments toward the production of a film support transparent as well as flexible. The motion picture industry is testimony to the success of these experiments. Edison's order for a piece of the new film, back in 1889, is still in the files of the Eastman Kodak Company. That first piece of film bought from Eastman showed Edison that the new discovery was the "missing link" in a motion picture system as well as a radically new material for photography. Embraces Many Fields The previous articles of this series have shown that photographic manufacture is amazingly delicate and diversified. It is a paradox that as size and versatility of product have multiplied the complexities of photographic manufacture, ingenuity and organization have simplified the processes. Modern engineering, modern research, modern economics have kept within the bounds of control an industry characterized by a vast mass of detail. Advanced methods peculiar to the photographic industry have kept one step ahead of the manufacturing difficulties introduced by each new improvement in motion picture materials. One hundred types of film — the stock in trade of the typical film manufactory we have been surveying — give us a clue, by.theirvery number, to the problem involved, without even any thought of a subject related to manufacturing: raw materials. But the film industry has to think of raw materials. Film can be no better than its raw materials. Assurance of raw material quality has been one means of reducing complex variables in film manufacture. Cotton is easy enough to get, once the best variety for film use has been determined by long experimentation and the standard to be met has been established. Most of the other raw materials of motion picture film also are standard chemical materials — although our plant typical of the film industry has to make certain of its own raw materials because the best available commercial product is not pure enough for film-making requirements, or because a sufficient and regular supply can not otherwise be obtained. One such case carries with it the story of a related industry, large in its own right, and introduces some of film's "cousins." The raw material in question is wood alcohol. Motion picture film contains no wood alcohol, and 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 it is 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. It is interesting to keep in mind that such a remote and far-flung industrial operation carries on with one objective: to keep the narrow strip of film clicking its way successfully through the projectors. 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 it, but the limbs he removes and loads on a mule-drawn sledge play a part in the movie show he sees on Satur day night when he goes to town. So too the rounded slabs sawn from logs in the company's sawmill in the process of squaring up lumber for the market. Here a large lumber business is merely a by-product. What interests the film maker is the "waste" wood which he distills into pyroligneous acid, reputedly the stuff with which Egypt embalmed its mummies. 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 out the various sizes of charcoal is collected by a vacuum system for briquetting into dining car fuel that permits projectionists' meals when they travel to be cooked over longerburning coals. The chickens broiled for those meals may also have been fed powdered charcoal that was a byproduct of the film industry. A Product of By-Products 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 this source plant for wood alcohol was established. The alacrity with which a movie-conscious world has taken to personal motion pictures, together with the greater use of X-rays since the war, has in(Continued on page 29) In Coating Film Base, Dim Colored Light or Total Darkness Is Required. The Illustration Shows the Front of a Machine for Coating Emulsion on the Film Base. Each of These Machines Is Several Hundred Feet Long.