100 years Null-Serie

[willeica]

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14 hours ago, pgk said:

Interesting but ..... a quick look at the specification suggests that this was probably not a very accurate rangefinder due to the 135mm lens and apparently relatively small separation of the rangefinder. Idea was good, but again it looks as though it probably mixes a helicoid (required for the rangefinder?) and bellows. So evolving but not yet there. Barnack's eventual solution is far better and as accurate as required within its design confines. As it still is on the M.

Of course it wasn't accurate, but it was a first for a camera. It is, of course, quite different to the 'automatic focus' on Barnack's II Model D, some 16 years later. Barnack's design was aided by the ergonomics of the Leica, not least the helicoid focus. I have been advising here about looking back at things through the prism of today. A lot of what Kodak Eastman, Zeiss, Goerz and Leitz were doing back then was being done for the first time or was establishing a new staging post along the highway. 

William 

Edited August 6, 2023 by willeica

[willeica]

1 hour ago, nitroplait said:

In what way could the Ur-Leica be used as an "exposure meter" for a movie camera? 

Are we talking test exposure on a smaller filmstrip?

We are talking about using a constant speed camera which would give some indication of the speed of a film sample. Back then there were multiple ratings for film and other material speeds ( e.g. check out Hurter and Driffield - H&D)  and some of these were divided up according to the country of the origin. The unifying force that ISO/ASA would become lay many years into the future. Some of the early exposure meters used systems in which a tiny piece of photographic paper was exposed and was timed to match a standard grey such as in these early Wynne and Watkins meters shown below. This was to measure ambient light, but the principle is the same as the film testing, which was partially necessitated because of manufacturing inconsistencies in the films available at that time. There is a video somewhere on YouTube where a guy is speed testing his home made dry plates by exposing them on different settings for a strip at at time and then choosing which strip matches his ideal exposure, this giving him the best speed rating for his plates

 

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I am having great fun at the moment trying to work out what a photographer from the 1890s was doing in his darkroom based on his notebooks. Getting back to an ISO equivalent is not easy - I am assuming about 1 or 2 ISO for ease of reference. It was the same when I tried to interpret the handbook of a 1915 VPK in order to get back to the 100 ISO 127 film I was using. The Kodak manual from 1915 made no reference to film speed, but I assumed it was about 8 ISO and everything worked out fine. 

Photographers these days are spoilt of course in respect of film/sensor speed.

William 

[LocalHero1953]

32 minutes ago, willeica said:

A lot of what Kodak Eastman, Zeiss, Goerz and Leitz were doing back then was being done for the first time or was establishing a new staging post along the highway. 

Aren't things always done for the first time or as a new staging post? Is there anything else?

The coherent story I am hearing from Roland gives me a clear impression of Barnack as an obsessive engineer who had the ingenuity (same root as 'engineer') to bring a number of existing solutions together with some creativity and, especially, precision engineering. But trying to identify one particular USP to Barnack is almost impossible - the closer you get to it the more you realise that without the surrounding people, his employer, the ideas of others, the state of the economy and market at the time, the Leica wouldn't have happened. Perhaps what we can say is that without Barnack as the focus (fulcrum? motive power?), the Leica would not have happened.

Written by someone who has no expertise in the.history of Leica at all (but quite a bit of knowledge and experience in the history or innovation in science and engineering).

[willeica]

2 hours ago, Roland Zwiers said:

I am a bit surprised by your replies.
As far as I know in Leica literature no attempt has been made to compare the technological ecosystem of 1912 (the available cameras, the features of these cameras, the available plates and films) with the reasons that Oskar Barnack may have had to embark on his Liliput project.

Maybe I am wrong and so I asked you directly: have I overlooked something in post-war Leica literature?
You do not give me a straight answer.
But after a long disussion you fortunately agree that the Leica was not created in a vacuum.

When I present a table that presents the technological trade-offs in 1912, based on contemporary literature, you do not discuss it al all.
But this is the discussion that we must have!
This discussion has been absent in Leica literature so far.
It is no problem to disagree; this may focus our questions when we visit the Leitz archive in October.

 

I have said already that your table is largely good, but we need to be careful about trying to interpret what Barnack was doing. It was your other references to Barnack copying the Kodak VPK that alarmed me and made me wonder whether you had ever used both cameras which are quite different in their design and mode of use. There some parallels such as folded shape, which was shared with others, and the original negative dimension (which was changed). As regards the latter you really need to look at the evolution of both the 127 and 35mm size formats in which Kodak and others were involved. Barnack created a camera which was quite different to anything else on the market at the time of its creation, but he was, of course, aware of the other cameras which were already on the market. As for the camera in the hand image, are you being serious? This is an advertising device which has been used countless times for many different types of product in order to show relative size. 

We seem to be going around in circles here. Let us hold any further discussion over until the PCCGB Zoom on 27th August and our first visit to the Archive on 18th October. I wrote to Tim Pullmann last night and gave him a summary of what we need to see. I will circulate the details of any response to the group. 

William 

[Pyrogallol]

Without a time machine we will never know what was in Barnack’s mind when he was thinking about his little camera, unless someone finds an undiscovered notebook.

[willeica]

9 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

The coherent story I am hearing from Roland gives me a clear impression of Barnack as an obsessive engineer who had the ingenuity (same root as 'engineer') to bring a number of existing solutions together with some creativity and, especially, precision engineering. But trying to identify one particular USP to Barnack is almost impossible - the closer you get to it the more you realise that without the surrounding people, his employer, the ideas of others, the state of the economy and market at the time, the Leica wouldn't have happened. Perhaps what we can say is that without Barnack as the focus (fulcrum? motive power?), the Leica would not have happened.

 

There are a lot of 'happy coincidences' there, Paul. Can you or anyone else point to any camera which predated the Ur Leica which has exactly the same combination of features as the Leica? My other question is whether anyone here has used both the VPK (or any other Kodak folder from that time) and a Leica I? The differences between both cameras in use is immense. Of course, Barnack would have used what were previously created design features e.g. fast focal plane shutters had been around since the closing years of the 19th Century and I have already mentioned this and posted a catalogue/manual where you could read all about it

16 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

Aren't things always done for the first time or as a new staging post? Is there anything else?

Of course. I was just trying to spread the 'credit', which should have been obvious

We should avoid 'football fan' stuff here. This is not a football match with each of us taking sides or waving different coloured scarves. What Barnack achieved is long since known and has been written about many times. He may have been an obsessive engineer who tested his creation over and over again until his death, but what he achieved was immense. As Roland says, no one creates in a vacuum, but we should give Barnack the credit he deserves and be objective and evidence based in any comments we are going to throw at him. 

2 minutes ago, Pyrogallol said:

Without a time machine we will never know what was in Barnack’s mind when he was thinking about his little camera, unless someone finds an undiscovered notebook.

Thanks. Some common sense at last. As you and others will have noticed I have arranged a visit  by Roland and others to the Leica Archive to attempt find any such undiscovered notebooks, but I suspect that any which exist there have been discovered already .

William 

[Roland Zwiers]

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3 hours ago, nitroplait said:

In what way could the Ur-Leica be used as an "exposure meter" for a movie camera? 

Are we talking test exposure on a smaller filmstrip?

Thank you for this interesting question.

In my analysis (AKA working hypothesis) it starts in 1912 with the M875 exposure tester.
Ulf Richter (2009) dismisses this exposure tester concept.
One reason is that it is not mentioned in Oskar Barnack's work notes of 1912 and 1913.

Now Ulf Richter (2009) also mentions that Oskar barnack was overworked in the second half of 1912.
What does an overworked tinkerer do when he is at home?
In my working hypothesis he simply continued tinkering and this exposure tester was an ideal low-key project.

In the same way I do not think it is a coincidence that the film loading system of the exposure tester was copied from the VP Kodak, that had appeared at the beginning of 1912.
Just compare the pictures on the left (courtesy Gevorg Mann 1992) with a similar perspective on the VP Kodak.

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[Roland Zwiers]

A few observations on the design of the M875 exposure tester

The exposure tester was designed for perforated 35mm film.
Turning the transport knob moves the film.
A pointer on the top cap turns in line with the eight sprockets of the film transport roller.
In this way one can accurately transport the film by e.g. 4 perforations (pointer turns 180 degrees), 6 perforations (pointer turns 270 degrees)
or 8 perforations (pointer turns full circle).

The exposure tester must have been compatible with the cine lens of Oskar Barnack’s 35mm movie camera.

The image circle of a cine lens has a diameter of 30mm (the diagonal of a 18x24mm frame).
The camera body has a 25mm hole bored through;
this suggests that the exposure tester had round negatives with a narrower image circle of 25mm in diameter.
In this way the round negative does not overlap the perforations.
The image below shows what I mean.

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The exposure tester must have been combined with a shutter that allows for a shutter speed of about 1/40^th of a second.
At first this must have been the built-in gravitational shutter.
When this solution proved unsatisfactory, Oskar Barnack may have used a separate external shutter in front of the Kino-Tessar lens.

[Roland Zwiers]

From the 1912 exposure tester to the 1914 Ur-Leica 

It is very likely that the exposure tester was unsatisfactory in practise.
One reason must have been the practical difficulties of film development on location.
I may come back on that later.

A second reason must have been the unrelialility of the gravitational shutter and the alternative external shutter in front of the Kino-Tessar lens.
So what would have been Oskar Barnack's next step?
His 1913 work notes give an interesting clue.
In combination with Leitz (1933) I can further expand on my working hypothesis.

In June 1913 Oskar Barnack writes:  Photokamera Eigenk[onstruktion], so photo camera own design.
Note also what he doesn't write:

• he does not write 'Liliput Kamera'. So it was not yet comaparable to the Liliput cameras that were already on the market.
• He does not write Handkamera either. So (like the M875 exposure tester) the camera may have depended on tripod use.

This implies that the Photokamera of June 1913 is something in between the M875 (which was not a camera) and the Ur-Leica of january 1914.

 

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Now Leitz (1933) states that in 1913 the Leica was equipped with a f/4,5 Summar lens.
In combination I infer that this applies to the Photokamera of June 1913.
In this way Oskar Barnack created an in-between design that already had a lens that would cover the full 24x38mm negative.
And so an in-between design that could already be used for taking pictures.

But it was not yet a hand camera, probably because of the lack of a reliable shutter.
In the absence of a reliable shutter this in-beween design may not have been suitable as an exposure tester either.
So instead of dual-use it was of no use 🙂  

   

 

 

[LocalHero1953]

1 hour ago, willeica said:

There are a lot of 'happy coincidences' there, Paul. Can you or anyone else point to any camera which predated the Ur Leica which has exactly the same combination of features as the Leica?

I'm puzzled by this question. I don't think I or anyone else has suggested there is. Nor did I think I wrote anything contentious!

[Roland Zwiers]

One thing leads to another

So what does a tinkerer do when confronted with a promising in-between design that still does not fulfil the requirements?
He focusses on the most pressing bottleneck, which was obviously the shutter.

Why would he design a focal plane shutter when a reliable compound shutter (the predeccessor of the Compur shutter) was freely available?
In my working hypothesis because he still needed an accurate shutter speed of 1/40 sec for the exposure tester function.
When using a compound shutter he had to selecta value in-between1/25 and 1/50 of a second.
That was not very reliable either.

When designing a dedicated focal plane shutter he could aim at the desired shutter speed of 1/40 sec right away!

Now in 1913 there were already miniature cameras with focal plane shutters.
But Oskar Barnack needed to design an even smaller version.
That was not so easy.
And so it would last up to january 1914 before he could write:

Liliput Kamera für Kinofilm (Handkamera)

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Note that this is the first time that he refers to the camera as Liliput camera (so on an equal level as the Liliput cameras that were already on the market).
And in addition het adds: hand camera, which suggests again that the Photokamera of June 1913 was not yet a hand camera.
 

 

[Roland Zwiers]

Dual use

So Oskar Barnack needed and accurate shutter for the exposure tester function.
But at this stage he was also aiming at a photo camera!

The in-between design of june 1913 already used a 4.5 Mikro Summar (so as to cover the whole negative).
And the advanced focal plane shutter would, of course, also perform very well on a hand camera.

So in this working hypothsis Oskar Barnack started in with an exposure tester for perforated 35mm film.
In 1913 he designed an in-between Photokamera that already used a 4.5 Mikro Summar, but that could not yet be used as a hand camera.

But then with a tinkerer like Oskar Barnack one thing leads to another.
By adding a reliable and accurate focal plane shutter he killed two birds with one stone;

• he had the reliable shutter that was required for the exposure tester.
• and this shutter in combination with a Mikro Summar couls also serve as a proper liliput camera.

Roland 

 

 

[Roland Zwiers]

15 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

I'm puzzled by this question. I don't think I or anyone else has suggested there is. Nor did I think I wrote anything contentious!

There are a lot of 'happy coincidences' there, Paul. Can you or anyone else point to any camera which predated the Ur Leica which has exactly the same combination of features as the Leica?

I'm puzzled by this question. I don't think I or anyone else has suggested there is. Nor did I think I wrote anything contentious!

I agree completely.

My point is that Oskar Barnack was not working in a vacuum.
In 1912 he was in the middle of a miniature, even Liliput revolution.
He wanted to create something new.
And for this he created the Ur-Leica as a new combination of features/ideas that were already around.
So he created something new by making a new combination of already existing ideas. 
Much in the spirit of the Austrian economist Schumpeter.

I don't unerstand why this logic would require the existence of a camera that predated the Ur-Leica while having the same combination of features. 

In a next posting I will draw the analogy with the Rollei.
It is strictly off-topic here, but it is a good illustration of what I mean to say.  

Roland

 

[LocalHero1953]

1 hour ago, willeica said:

We should avoid 'football fan' stuff here. This is not a football match with each of us taking sides or waving different coloured scarves. What Barnack achieved is long since known and has been written about many times. He may have been an obsessive engineer who tested his creation over and over again until his death, but what he achieved was immense. As Roland says, no one creates in a vacuum, but we should give Barnack the credit he deserves and be objective and evidence based in any comments we are going to throw at him. 

Reading back in this thread, I can't see any such football fan approach on the one hand, nor an unwillingness to give Barnack credit on the other. What I have found enlightening is Roland's detailed analysis from primary sources of just what happened when, placing it in the context of the (dynamic) social, economic and photographic environment of the time. This thread also seems to have been valuable in stimulating the presentation of primary source data from others that helps refine the story.

To add more context to those times, I recommend 'The Vertigo Years', by Philipp Blom, a history of the period 1900-1914 in the West. The sheer pace of innovation, what was driving it and what it led to is well described. Photography and the film industry are included in its scope.

Edited August 6, 2023 by LocalHero1953

[Roland Zwiers]

The Rolleiflex as a new combination of already existing ideas

It is not difficult to tell the Rolleiflex story from a narrow Rollei point of view.

You begin with the stereo camera of the early 1920s that still used plates.
It had the name Heidosmat.

Then you observe that a few years later this stereo camera was redesigned for roll film.
The new name would be: Roll-Heidosmat, but that was a bit of a tonge twister.
So the name was streamlined to Rolleidosmat.
With that the name Rollei was born.

Now in 1929 there was a further streamlining:
why not create a twinlens reflex by deleting the second stereo lens?
And there we have the Rolleiflex, the second standard bearer of the second miniature revolution.

It is also possible to observe that the rolleiflex was not created in a Rollei-vacuum.

The twin lens reflex was already used in Victorian Britain, albeit with glass based dry plates.

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For the roll film addition we are indebted to Eastman Kodak.

And the 6x6cm negative is also an Eastman Kodak idea, although the first advanced miniature for this format may very well have been the 1912 Icarette.

 

So these two alternative story lines show how one can tell a similar story from:

• a narrow point of few (one Rollei product leads to another) and
• as a new combination of already existing ideas (much in the line of Schumpeter).

 

Roland

 

 

 

[pgk]

1 hour ago, Roland Zwiers said:

From the 1912 exposure tester to the 1914 Ur-Leica 

It is very likely that the exposure tester was unsatisfactory in practise.
One reason must have been the practical difficulties of film development on location.
I may come back on that later.

On site processing is really not a significant problem as it had been around since the beginning of photography and in comparison to wet plate photography, processing a strip of 35mm film would have been a relatively simple task. And would have been a very cost effective thing to do if the alternative was to waste a large amount of expensive film. In today’s world of ease and immediacy it is very easy to forget that practical solutions were the norm and would have been accepted as an essential part of many systems even if awkward.

[Roland Zwiers]

 

Cine negative film development on location in 1912-1914 

Hello Paul,

Thank you for your reply.

On the relative difficulties of film development on location in 1912 I am not sure.
So I have not even formulated a working hypothesis.
Instead I have some building blocks that I would like to discuss with you.

For measuring the light Oskar Barnack would have had to develop the negatives of the exposure tester on location.
I assume that he would make everal exposures with different apertures.
This would lead to a film strip from which he would select the best exposed circular frame.

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With the film wind knob and the pointer of the M875 exposure tester Oskar Barnack could accurately transport the film by e.g. 4, 6 or 8 perforations. 
In order to avoid both waste and overlapping frames he would have chosen for 6 perforations per negative.

For this procedure he would have had to develop and fix the film strip on location in a dark room.
In the 1910s portable dark room tents were indeed available.
There was even a combined developer-fixer so that Oskar Barnack could very quickly obtain the required results.
With colour blind film he could control development in yellow light.
With self-sensitised orthochromatic of panchromatic film he had to select the appropriate safety light. 

Although this procedure looks light-tight, there would still be an underlying problem.
When the chemicals and/or the development procedure for on-the-spot development differs substantially from that of the film reel itself,
how can the exposure test be fully comparable?
In order to solve this problem Oskar Barnack had to perform his regular dark room procedure in the dark tent.
For this he would have needed temperature control.

Would Oskar Barnack have done so?
In his work notes of October 1913, February and July 1914 he mentions an electric heating table with temperature control.

Was this heating table designed for use in the Leitz factory?
Or was it (also) a necessary part of the exposure tester procedure on location?

In 1912 car batteries were readily available.
What do you think?

Roland

 

[willeica]

11 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

I'm puzzled by this question. I don't think I or anyone else has suggested there is. Nor did I think I wrote anything contentious!

It was stated that Barnack copied the VPK. I was only responding to that by saying that the two cameras were quite different.  

 

11 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

Reading back in this thread, I can't see any such football fan approach on the one hand, nor an unwillingness to give Barnack credit on the other. What I have found enlightening is Roland's detailed analysis from primary sources of just what happened when, placing it in the context of the (dynamic) social, economic and photographic environment of the time. This thread also seems to have been valuable in stimulating the presentation of primary source data from others that helps refine the story.

There is a lot of assumption and guesswork here about what Barnack was or was not doing about 110 years ago. I also feel that his achievements are being confused with a lot of what happened prior to his becoming a camera designer. Of course, he knew about previous designs and may have been led by them, but his own design was very innovative and was more or less unprecedented in many respects at the time of its prototype and also at the time of its market introduction. The 'fan' thing relates to the fact that while I own about 50 vintage Leicas, mainly LTM models, I am not actually a Leica fan, nor am I a Barnack fan. I also believe that Kodak was probably the most influential company in the history of photography, but I am not a Kodak fan either. My comments about Leica and Barnack are not motivated by any kind of fandom. 

Yes, the information provided by others on this thread has been very useful as has the enormous amount of research already done by Roland. 

Roland and I know one another and we have had hearty debates on Zooms and by email long before this thread ever started. I have provided material and photographs to him for his now very long article. I have also arranged for Roland to visit the Leica Archive in October in the company of some of the leading Leica experts in the world. Roland has done an immense amount of very useful research, but this should be helped further by the upcoming visit. Last night I asked the Archive to allow us to see M875 plus any papers relating to it that might be in the archive. Roland was not the only member of our group to ask to see M875. Barnack's own notes were often very cryptic, as the examples above show. I think that a group discussion after the Archive visit might be very useful. Many of the other people who contributed here will be in the group visiting the Archive. 

William 

[Roland Zwiers]

It was stated that Barnack copied the VPK. I was only responding to that by saying that the two cameras were quite different.  

William,

If you read carefully what I stated, than you will see that I did not state this at all.
What I said was that Oskar Barnack used (copied if you like) features of many (miniature) cameras that had been part of the first miniature revolution since the 1890s or so.

One feature is the helicoid, that was present with engraved settings on the Anschütz camera of the 1880s.
Note that the British patent of October 19, 1889 explicitely mentions the use of a pointer in combination with engraved marks. 

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The first model of the Anschutz camera had a rigid body.
The later use of bellows mechanism wasn't a step backwards.
There were many ways to combine bellows with a rigid body (Ensignette, Shew, Ihagee Patent Klapp Reflex, Super Ikonta, Retina to name but a few).
I would agree that some bellows camera designs (folding beds) tend to sacrifice stability and are not suitable for a precision camera without a focussing screen.

A second feature that inspied Oskar Barnack  is the focal plane shutter with a coupling between the shutter and film transport.
This was already present on the 6x9 Film Palmos of 1900.
The Film Palmos also made use of the helicoid focussing with engraved settings as used by the Anschütz camera.
So from a technological point the Film Palmos is already a forerunner of the Ur-Leica, much more than the 1912 VP Kodak!  

Then we arrive in 1909 - 13.
In this period there has been a whole invasion on Liliput cameras.
One imporant one is the 1909 Ensignette, which introduces a miniature film format (but not perforated 35mm film). 
In 1912 the British Ensignette is copied by the VP Kodak, which introduced the slightly bigger 127-film.
The Ensignette and the VP Kodak introduce dedicated enlargers for 9x14cm prints.
Small negative, big print!

Then I also asked attention to several features of the 1912 VP Kodak that in my opinion are incorporated in the M875 exposure tester of 1912 and also in the Ur-Leica of 1914.

One feature is the streamlined body that nicely fits in the palm of ones hand.
Ulf Richter (2009) mentions this feature severaltimes, but does not link it to the VP Kodak.
I do indeed.
When one compares the 'feel' of the following two advertisements, you will see what I mean.

 

Another VP Kodak feature is the film loading system.
The VP Kodak has not a door on a hinge that leads to the spools.
It uses a cover instead.
In my working hypothesis is is not a coincidence that the M875 exposure tester has the same solution.

 

A third feature of the VP Kodak are the proportions of the negaive, which with 4x6,5cm approach the golden mean of 1: 1,618.
Ensignette and VP Kodak negatives were printed on postcard size photo paper (9x14cm, 3½ x 5½“) with similar proportions.
These proportions are more rectangular than the 1:1, 2:3 or 3:4 ratios that were used for other miniature cameras
(6x6 and 6x9cm roll film, 4,5x6cm plate cameras). 

Now one crucial addtional feature is the use of perforated 35mm cine negative film for photographic purposes.
Leica literatue makes clear that this was not  an original Oskar Barnack idea eitther.

In my analysis his genius is manifested my making a new combination of all of these features/ ideas.
As you say, this combination was not made before! 

Now in 35mm terms  it would have been very easy for Oskar Barnack to have settled for the 2:3 proportion (24x36mm) straight away.
But he simply didn't do so!
Van Hasbroeck (1987) mentions that the curtain-opening (window) of the Ur-Leica measures 25x40mm.
This proportion is almost identical to the golden ratio. Van Hasbroeck further observes that the window was later reduced to a width of 38mm.
Likewise, Ulf Richter (2009) observes that the film gate of the Ur-Leica is 38mm long.

The most logical explanation is that Oskar Barcnack initially preferred to use the golden mean proportion of the VP Kodak negatives so as to facilitate printing on the popular 9x14cm paper.

William,

I don't mind if you quote me as saying that Oskar Barnack for his 1914 Ur-Leica copied several features of the 1912 VP Kodak.
But I never said that Barnack copied the VPK.  
Following on this misrepresentation you have a whole discussion that the two cameras were quite different.  
And imply that I keep overlooking this obvious fact.

I tried not to respond to this as it would lead me futher and further off-topic.
But now you give me no choice.

Fortunately in your culture you like robust discussions and in my culture I like to be frank.
So we can still be friends and we can look forward to a pleasant and productive meeting in Wetzlar.

 

Roland  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[LocalHero1953]

7 hours ago, willeica said:

It was stated that Barnack copied the VPK. I was only responding to that by saying that the two cameras were quite different.

It wasn't stated by me, to whom you were replying - hence my puzzlement.