A tangential story is about Dr Carroll. The story goes that he had applied for
a job at the Kodak research department and some of the big wigs (I think James,
Mees, etc.) invited him to lunch. They were supposed to "sound him out" to see
if "he got game" in photographic research. But, as happens among people
fascinated with their work, they began to ignore him and discuss their latest
problem relating to color film and how to filter out the blue light once it has
exposed the top blue sensitive layer. It appears that most emulsions, even
those dye sensitized for red and green light, still have some residual
sensitivity to blue resulting in desaturation of image color if blue light gets
past the top layer. They were moaning about how difficult it was to desensitize
the red and green layer to blue light. They also moaned that, once the put a
yellow filter after the blue layer, they didn't know how to get rid of it.
Well, quiet, modest Dr. Carroll said, "How about a colloidal dispersion of
silver at just the right particle size to be a yellow filter. And then, when
film goes through the silver bleaching step (just about every color film
process has a bleach and fixer to remove the silver image and leave the pure
color dye image) it would remove this dichroic color filter." The "big wigs"
stared at him with their mouths open, then looked at each other, then one of
them offered Carroll a job on the spot and pulled a secrecy form out of his
valise and had Carroll sign it. And the rest, as they say, is history. I
remember Dr. Carroll as a rather old man, well past retirement age, who loved
to continue teaching photo science at RIT. He was one of those brilliant people
who were so quiet, polite, and modest you had no idea how much was packed into
their brains.
From: "Robert Shanebrook" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2017 5:03:29 AM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: What's in high speed film?
The point is that it is multiple seemingly small differences that separate the
films from 1900 with films (including color) of today. Through the years the
scientific work has refined and perfected the componrnts and processes used to
make film. It is not a totally new technology but rather a slow and tedious
improvement that separates the performance of 1900 films from the color films
of today.
Tens of thousands of photographic scientist in academia, Kodak, Fuji, Agfa,
Konica, Ilford etc. worked their entire careers making step-wise improvements
in silver halide imaging. As Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees said: "we are silver halide
men".
On Friday, August 11, 2017, 1:48:22 AM EDT, Martin magid
<martin.magid@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is really getting interesting. I would not have guessed that cows' diets
had anything at all to do with film speed.
Bob Shanebrook, when you said that film from 1900 had 90% of the chemicals that
today's color films have, do you include color print film C41 process? All
color film?
Sometimes I wish I had gone to RIT, or just had one class by Davidhazy.
Marty
