15.

FROM "FALLING PLATES" TO BOXES FOR EVERYBODY

Around 1900 every one recognized the shape of a  camera.

  

    
They were mostly of the folding type with bellows for studio or field cameras like this one.

My father's uncle was very proud of this semi-professional camera for single 12x18 cm glass plates. The combination of parts from Rietzschel, Bausch & Lomb and Rodenstock made his camera outstanding in those days. 

   

Early BOX CAMERAS used glass negatives. 

For amateurs cheaper and easier ways of photographing popped up during this time. Sometimes people called them Detective cameras (?).  Such an innocent looking little case did not look as the camera above.


The rear of the boxes had a magazine loaded with twelve negative glass plates in thin black sheet metal covers.                   

Mostly called Falling plates cameras the system seemed to work fine, though is has been designed already in 1890.
Above all it was cheap and handy. Not very sophisticated lenses and small apertures made bright sunshine a necessity. 
Amateurs gladly accepted that, as they could take 12 pictures in a row!

The entire camera had to be left to the local photo-shop that sent it over to a laboratory. There the plates got professionally handled in red light when developing the plates.

Paper prints were made and the camera was reloaded and returned with twelve new unexposed negatives.

1 Merkur was one of these popular Magazine cameras from Hüttig in Dresden Germany. It had fix focus and crude small apertures marked 1, 2 and 3. (No standard values)

2 Hasselblads Express was a copy of a similar box, but made in Gothenburg Sweden and sold by V.A. Hasselblad about 1899.











Here  I have tried to show that name again because it meant so much to me. In the 1950's HASSELBLAD was a very well-known camera maker. Little did I know, that this family business had started long before 1900. 

This Hasselblad Svea Camera from the early 1900's was a more sophisticated Magazinebox though. New inventions and designs reached the market every year. 

Family story: 
Arvid Hasselblad was a wholesaler who imported cameras already in 1877. He also started a special branch for selling photo equipment. The Swedish agency for KODAK products also was acquired.
Arvids son Karl was the father of the famous inventor Victor Hasselblad, who made this trademark famous in connection with the first Moon landing 1969. Of course KODAK film was used then.

  


 
The Kodak name was registered already in 1885 by George Eastman In USA. It rapidly became the greatest film factory of all. He provided celluloid film for Thomas Edison´s movie experiments. Then a market for film seemed to be a good idea.
Eastman came up with the name KODAK and sold millions of roll-films for still cameras by selling cheap Box-cameras too. 

 The first attempt Kodak no 1 was no hit, but this one called Kodak no 2 was successful and became the origin of all Box-cameras. It was made in Rochester NY USA about 1900.
 A friendly old man gave me this obsolete Box. The odd size of 9 cm films was then no longer obtainable. 

Unlike all later Box-cameras, the film was winded horizontally. The rear part had only the covering leather as hinges. Mine are still intact. But many owners meant that they were all to fragile.

The BROWNIE

was most profitable for Eastman's film sale. Extremely easy camera to make and handle. 

The cheapest price for a Brownie was 2$ !

  

These early boxes were made of cardboard. 

But over the years designs, sizes and materials were improved.
Camera makers all over the world very soon copied this new idea.
Boxes were the most common cameras for the first part of the 20th century.

14

SOME OLD GRAMOPHONE RECORDS

  78'S BEFORE THE 1920'S

Common gramophone records from 1900 to 1950
 were playing at a speed of 78 rpm (revolutions per minute). 

They were made of a black shellac resin and had a diameter of 25 or 30 cm.  

Two sided records became the norm after 1910.

Some years ago however I found a few antique single sided records. 

Engraved on their reverse side was no music, but a picture:

 The Gramophone Co trademark. 

The "Recording Angel" was registered trade mark in 1899. 

The inventor E. Berliner in USA however asked his contractor VICTOR the supplier of clock-work machines and recordings  to introduce the picture "His Masters Voice" on their records. That was a few years earlier than HMV became the final and greatest trade mark in Europe.

Common popular music was often delivered in simple flimsy paper covers with no information but the sales company or store.

The shellac material was furthermore very easily torn to pieces if not handled with care. 

Some said that the labels in those days looked like tombstones with their golden letters on a black background. But among all the companies that were established before the 1920's, many labels were decorated with colourful pictures. 

With a few exceptions the sound was not that colourful.  The "microphone" still was just a horn connected to the engraving machine. The range of sound frequency was limited. Recording studios however made a lot of inventions to enhance the sound quality. 

                        Self portrait of Enrico Caruso in the recording studio.

The acoustic gramophone of the time soon developed to an instrument of precision.

When records were handled with greatest care and the stylus had a correct tip diameter and angle, the music started to be taken seriously.

Music lovers among upper-class people could afford the latest model. They were familiar to opera and the most celebrated tenor in the world: 
                                     

ENRICO CARUSO THE FIRST GRAMOPHONE STAR.  

Apart from being an opera singer, he was a very intelligent man.
He knew exactly how to make the best of the early recording technology. 
His mix of barytone and tenor sound did fit the narrow frequency range perfectly.

The fact that he was an excellent caricaturist shows a great deal of humour too. As the superstar at Metropolitan Opera house for 18 seasons, he loved USA. Born in Naples 1873 he died in New Jersey 1920.

The branch of recordings was multinational. So matrixes made in USA were  distributed to affiliated companies. This one was recorded in 1914 by Victor but pressed in Germany. 

Oddly enough it is single-sided. Maybe it was the last shipment due to the beginning off WWI. During the war in 1917 Caruso recorded the soldier's song "Over there" and helped selling war bonds in USA. That might not have been popular in Germany then.                    

I found this strange record many years ago at a car boot sale in Copenhagen. 

Maybe it had something to do with the First World War too.
Written in Danish it says "His Enemies Voice" 
The message is clear enough. But I still think, that the picture was clever and very funny.





These antique gramophone records have no value any more. The music has now been taken care of by institutions, restored to digital enjoyable files. A lot of them are available on the net for free. 

13.

PARIS 1922

CINEMATOGRAPHY AS ART

 This ingenious and odd artefact was far from a toy. The Pathé Co had been dominating professional film production before WWI. Selling short excerpts from feature movies provided a new form of advertising. This very first simple home film projector for 9.5 mm film had a lot of outstanding new and clever design solutions.

 The artistic logo plate on the rear side is a proof from the well known factory of high quality cinema equipment. The rooster was their trade mark for many years. 

                              

The film size 9.5 mm kept film material costs down. Perforation in the centre increased the space of picture area. It was bigger and brighter than the 8 mm format films introduced by Kodak 10 years later. 

The lab could make three 9.5 mm copies simultaneously on the professional 35 mm film stock. The vast Pathé Co had gathered resources and technical skills to go their own way and avoid patent infringements.

 The very small cartridges though held only about 18 m of film. But among other clever inventions, the projector had a new gizmo to enhance the duration of the performances. 
 Thanks to the low volt lamp and non-flammable film base every text frame could be brought to stand still. The tiny notch at the edge of the film caused a mechanical sensor mechanism releasing the film-transport for ten seconds.
Ideal during the time, when silent movies was depending 
on several dialog texts. 
 9, 5 mm format survived and end got refined for decades. Cameras were made by many other companies too. One of them was Eumig in Austria. 

            The Pathé Brothers had started their carrier in sound recording.   

I am very impressed by these two entrepreneurs. 

They dominated the French market in phonograph and film market for years. Starting by making recordings on cylinders and later on disc records, they used revolutionary new production methods. Cylinders were dubbed from high speed large-diameter master cylinders with a smart kind of mechanical panto-graph. 

  Another relic from 1906 compared to a standard 78 rpm, was a marvel of ingenuity. Using the same type of masters, the grooves were cut vertically rather than horizontally. So special record Pathé players had to be used. They were played at 100 rpm, starting from the centre of the record. The stylus was a round sapphire that didn't wear out. Depending on the recorded material, the diameter could vary from 21.6 to 50.8 cm!

  All these new inventions resulted in a considerable improved sound quality in those days.

12.

 THE BLACK CLOTH

This big and expensive Thornton Picard camera once belonged to a nobleman nearby, who took photography very serious. It was a semi-professional field view camera for glass plate negatives. Still in the early 1920's it was high tech. The excellent Euryplan lens made by Schulze & Billerbeck in Berlin was a precursor to most modern lenses.

Thornton's own time-controlled roller blind (curtain) shutter of opaque rubberized fabric had a very good reputation. The sensitiveness of glass plates had increased considerably over the years. This "Time and instantaneous"- shutter driven by a spring motor had to be wound up before use. Then it operated on the same principle as an old fashion window blind, but with speeds down to 1/80 sec.

Upside down? Yes the "display" worked that way in those days. A simple optic principle.
To examine the scenery on the ground glass, the lens had to be opened to its widest aperture. But still the image was not very bright. So you had to cover the edges and your head with a black cloth to eliminate all unwanted rear light sources. That made it possible to adjust focus correctly and compose the picture.

Then the ground glass would be turned up. It was replaced by a large wooden box containing the light sensitive glass plate. Well into the adjusted dark camera the lid of the plate magazine was drawn out and the sensitive plate could be exposed.

Note the comparison to the size of an A4 sheet of paper underneath  this negative! After developing this glass negative you could make perfect photographic copies on contact paper.  The picture size was not less than 18x24 cm and might fit an entire side of a normal book.

Books with pictures of foreign places were popular in those days before today's communications had been developed. 

11.

COLOURFUL PLASTIC TOYS WITH OLD ANCESTORS

 Pop camera from 1997.

It came as a bonus in a package of confectionery from by Pingvin

    Lakrids, Denmark.

  PINGO was a fictional character  from the animated comedy         children TV series Pingu.

100 years earlier

a skilled designer Frank Brownell was asked by Eastman Kodak to design "The cheapest camera in the world" 1$. It had to be so simple, that a child could use it. 
As seen on this old bookmark scrap he succeeded. 

It got the name BROWNIE from a comic strip character. He was as well-known all over the world as 50 years later Disney's Donald Duck & Co.

     "Candid Camera" was a TV series that had nothing to do with the picture above though.    

       To be quite candid I doubt that this Candy Camera would tempt young children in these days.

Launched in 1959 was an adult-figured toy fashion-doll. It was called Barbie. 

Enormously popular by young girls it inspired the producers to an immense number of accessories. 

Among the vast number of Barbie branded goods of all sorts was this real 35 mm camera.

    

In 1966 GAF New Jersey US bought the View-Master factory. They initiated a cheaper mass-production and sold it as a toy mostly for fairy-tales and animated characters.

The book about Heidi was written by Johanna Spyri in 1880. It got popular on film (with Shirley Temple) already 1937. Dozens of TV productions were made and continued into the new century.





GAF in Belgium even made a simple plastic projector in the late 1960's. Though this grey model looked confidence-inspiring, it was just a cheap toy that lacked the joy of 3D-experience. The projected pictures became simply two- dimensional pictures of dubious quality.

Far better was this toy Episcope from Markes & Co, Germany about 1960. It displayed opaque materials by powerful lamp lighting on the object from above. Mirror and lens projected the images of book pages, printed photographs, etc. In the early 1900's, similar devices were used in lecture halls at high schools and universities as predecessors to video projectors.

  

Four sequentially operated lenses for fun filled shots. They were cheap novelty toys then. Their designs often had a tempting appeal.

It reminds me of the first patented experimental moviecamera by Louis Le Prince in Leeds UK 1888. But that far too complicated machine contained not less than 16 lenses.

Cheap plastic optical toy called Zoetrope can still be seen as an educational souvenir from a museum-shop. The printed paper strip with animated images is mounted into the drum. While turning it around the slots are acting as shutters . Looking through one of the slots the images appears to be moving. 

This was a novel invention by W G Horner in UK 1833.

Another forerunner to movies became a toy from mid 1950. I have got the gramophone record, but just a picture of the faceted mirror. It would have been attached to the top of the gramophone spindle and reflected animated living pictures while playing the music. 

Originally that kind of "Magic Mirror" was called Praxinoscope and invented 1877 by C E Renaud in France.

A camera that speaks for itself.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles talking camera ca 1990. It talks two seconds before the picture is taken.   The sentence coming out from the camera has been translated to me by the younger generation: 

"COWABUNGA! (= It’s an actor’s dream) SMILE!” 

The Turtle character originated from songs, comic books and TV programs and  since at least 1947.