Second Image Cafe

Being a photographer within Eastman Kodak Company’s research facilities in Rochester, took me to many areas of new ideas being hatched by the many young scientists working a great variety of projects. Each staff member was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that basically said nothing could be revealed about the work being done within a one year period of leaving the company.

Typical laser beam bombarding sample in a research lab

I too had the “black journal book” in which any research carried out had to be documented. No skipped pages, each page dated and signed. As a research photographer I did a few experimental projects. One was using Polaroid materials to set up some graphic derivations in color using high contrast Kodak films in registration and exposing the color Polaroids through separation filters. Once an interesting image was made, I would replace the Polaroid film (4×5) with Kodak negative and positive ones. A technical paper evolved from this and sent to all Kodak facilities interested in research.

Another was comparing two identical 35mm slides projected with the top-of-the-line Kodak Carousel projector against the Lecia Prodovit. It took more than a week’s efforts to make the Prodovit look as poor as the Carousel. Many staffers in my building were selected to view the dual projections with both projectors hidden under large white boxes. I could reach into the Prodovit’s box and remove the elements interferring with the projection. It was a “Wow!” factor when the boxes were removed. No paper for this one.

On one of my many photographic assignments I was photographing in a darkened lab with a young scientist who was working on lasers and other technical apparatuses. When the laser shooting project was completed he asked me to take a look at something he had been working on and asked if I thought it would amount to anything. Inside of a stainless steel or aluminum constructed box about a foot square with lots of wires and supports within the interior I saw, as I remember now some forty years later, a square piece of glass about three inches on each side. It seemed to be a laminated object with a mass of very thin wires or ribbons of electical conducting strips going into the edges. I was looking straight down onto it like a piece of glass would normally be sitting on a table. The flat side, not the edge.

The room was still very dim and he pressed a button or threw a switch. I don’t know what he did actually but suddently there appeared a dark, photographic image within the glass sandwich. I was not especially impressed because it looked like a positive black and white film image of which I’d made thousands while at the George Eastman House and which, if requested, would mount this “slide” onto thin glass. These were slides that accompanied Beaumont Newhall’s “History of Photography” book and distributed to educational institutions. Most were in cardboard mounts but we could mount them in glass if requested.

I didn’t say anything until he pressed another button, or whatever. A new image replaced the first one! Then another and another! Nothing was moving. He was not using some device to remove and insert films. This was being done electronically. Now I was impressed.

He asked what I thought about what I was looking at.

I said that if he could package this technique, it would be fantastic and would compete directly with film! It came to pass, but Kodak was very late getting into digital cameras. It wasn’t until 1991 that they hooked up with Nikon to produce a $13,000 camera. Sony had a video capture camera in 1981 that put data onto a floppy disk for viewing on a computer and in 1988 Fuji came out with the first true digital camera.

However, the first completely built digital camera did come from Kodak in 1975. It was built by Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, who, it might be, was the one in the dimly lit lab I had been photographing lasers. The sensor, however, was a Fairchild CCD developed in1973. Did it have an LCD screen? I don’t know, but here’s a photo of his device.

Steven Sasson’s prototype digital camera. 1975

I have heard that Kodak did have the pattent for the LCD, which no doubt ran out way before they made any money on it.