I had some exposure to photography (no pun intended) as far back as
I can remember but my introduction to practical work came when my dad
took a course from the boy scouts. He came home with a Kodak Darkroom in
a Box. This had three small trays, a couple of film clips, a small
printing frame, a ruby lamp (that was my safelight) Some packages of
Kodak Tri-Chem Pak, a package of Velox paper, probably some other stuff.
Well, he didn't do anything with it but I set up in the basement and
did. I am pretty sure the film was a roll of 127 Verichrome. I have no
memory of what the pictures were of, maybe the front of the house, but I
sure do remember developing and printing them.
Verichrome and Ansco or AGFA Plenichrome were "box camera" films,
moderate speed, orthochromatic, long margin (wrong word but I am drawing
a blank on the right one) to accomodate poor exposures. Very similar films.
Somewhere around 1960 both were replaced by panchromatic films,
Kodak with Verichrome Pan (IMO an outstanding film) and Ansco with All
Weather Pan. One reason was that cameras had changed. Older box camras
used very simple lenses, mostly simple single element meniscus lenses
with no color correction at all. Using blue sensitive or orthochromatic
film aided in obtaining reasonably sharp images since the largest
deviations of chromatic aberration were in the yellow and red range.
As the inexpensive cameras in which these films were used became
more sophisticated with better lenses the desire was for better tonal
rendition rather than to avoid blur from seriously uncorrected lenses.
So ortho films other than for special uses pretty much disappeared from
the market.
Kodak stated in a couple of places that Verichrome Pan was the same
emulsion as Plus-X but without retouching surfaces but a comparison of
curves and experience using both shows that it was not the same. I
always preferred Verichrome Pan to Plus-X, it was my favorite medium
speed film for as long as it was made.
BTW, I think I remember reading, perhaps in Ira Current's memoirs,
that Ansco had their wedge spectrograms made by Kodak since they could
not afford the equipment. Boy they sure look the same.
BTW, my start in electronics also dates from a course in radio my
dad took from the Boy Scouts. We built a crystal set on a real
breadboard with coils wound up on toilet paper tubes. Worked like a charm.
My dad was a lawyer but was also interested in mechanical things.
On 9/12/2017 11:57 AM, Eric Goldstein wrote:
I once worked with an old timer who used to lament that one of the darkest days in film history was when Verichrome was replaced by Verichrome Pan