[pure-silver] Re: Formula #87 in Anchell
- From: richard lahrson <gtripspud@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:54:42 -0800
hi, and thanks richard! please tell us about the development of kodachrome
somtime....best, rich
On Jan 19, 2012 12:28 PM, "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Hall" <robert.g.hall@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 12:38 PM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: Formula #87 in Anchell
> Richard,
>
> I would pay hard money to have all you have written on fixers in a book.
>
> Thank...
Thank you, however its already in books. Some are not so easy to obtain
now. About the last comprehensive book on photographic chemistry is the one
written by Grant Haist, formerly a scientist with Kodak Research
Laboratories. I am not sure of its current availability. Grant republished
it himself perhaps ten years ago, well printed in hard covers and properly
bound. I don't know if Grant is still alive. Much of the other information
is scattered in various technical publications but nearly all of the
important research was done at Kodak.
One of the main drives behind the research into both developers and
fixers was the motion picture industry. The need for increased numbers of
prints and for duplicate negatives for foriegn distribution were behind the
development of finer grain films and D-76, originally devised for the then
new fine grain duplicating film. Since the only thing a producer has after
production is the camera negative there began to be considerable interest
in how to extend the life of the film and also how to prevent early
degradation of prints. This led to extensive research into fixing and
washing. Most of this research is still valid. Somewhere I have a brochure
on the history of the Kodak Labs written around the 1970s sometime. Its in
with a bunch of books in storage and I have to find it. It is much more
forthright than the self-serving history written much earlier by Kenneth
Meese and others in the labs.
Kodak's labs were established when George Eastman hired Kenneth Meese in
1912 to create a good research lab. Meese was a partner in Wratten and
Wainwright, an English company which had discovered how to sensitize film
for color and how to make good filters. Meese had studied in Germany and
was familiar with the German chemical industry. Meese agreed to work for
Eastman but only if Eastman bought out his partners and allowed them to
continue running W&W. This merger is the reason color filters include the
name Wratten to this day.
The inspiration for the labs was, of course, the one set up by Thomas
Edison, probably the first industrial research lab in the U.S., maybe the
world. The famous lab at General Electric was the direct inheritor of this
lab.
One of Eastman's primary goals in establishing the lab was to devise a
good, practical, color film. While the labs did much important work color
eluded them for twenty-five years and they were beaten to the punch by AGFA
who began to make a workable multi-layer, color incorporated film in about
the mid-1930's. Kodak was able to release Kodachrome at about the same time
but they could not figure out how to incorporate the color couplers in the
emulsion layers so the film required a special, and very complex,
development process. It took several years for Kodak to catch up.
Meese wrote extensively and anything with his name on it is worth
reading. He also decided that the lab's work should be published in
established, peer-reviewed, scientific and technical journals, which gave
it immediate status. However, one must look at many sources to find all the
lab reports rather than having a single house organ to research.
BTW, it was evidently Meese who, as a member of the board of directors
of EK, decided to turn down Chester Carlson when he approached with his
xerographic copying process because "We are a chemical company and this is
not a chemical process". Carlson took it to a small competitor of Kodak,
the Haloid Company, which took it on and soon became Xerox.
Enough for now...
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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