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Talking Pictures
The laboratory superintendent is the czar of a realm which is always seventy-four degrees winter or summer, and which has a humidity that makes its atmosphere seem always a little "sticky." Film tends to curl in dry air, but the standard heat and humidity of the laboratory prevent this. In one day for a single studio the laboratory technician will run through his various machines, over 600,000 feet of film or an average of about 2 19,000,000 feet a year. This is 4,1 82 miles or the distance from Los Angeles to New York and back to Kansas City. These figures are for one large studio. Lovers of statistics may toy if they wish, with figures of the sort based on the total of 2,000,000,000 feet of film used annually by the American picture industry as a whole.
By inventing a superbly clever device, the modern laboratory head has made sure that he will never again have to worry about temperatures. In the old days, a love scene would be clear and brilliant in a print made one day; muddy, foggy, or dull and lifeless in prints produced twelve hours later. One of the great contributing causes was temperature, for if film developing fluid varies two tenths of one degree plus or minus sixty-five degrees, a definite impairment of photographic quality can be noted.
But today a controlling thermostat makes such a change virtually impossible. A laboratory superintendent's struggle to keep stationary the temperature of his developing chemicals can be compared with a doctor's efforts to bring a fever patient back to normal.
The term "print" has been used. The original nega
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