The invention of 35 mm photography. A story of extraordinary people and products

The latest evolution in the field of professional photography is indicated by many as the assertion of full-frame mirrorless cameras in place of the traditional and bulkier Reflex cameras.

Setting aside any consideration on the debate about whether, how and when this presumed umpteenth turning point of the market will occur, we would like to dwell for a moment on the term full frame, which indicates that the camera sensor fully covers the 36×24-millimetre format — a format so universally adopted that it is the “frame” par excellence.

But why exactly 36×24 millimetres, and not some other measure? Obviously because this has been by far the most widespread format in 35 mm cameras since the days of film, and made practical and popular by the use of the classic film cartridge whose standard is called 135.

In the transition to digital photography, cameras have been modified by replacing the digital back with the cartridge for 135 film, and obviously the entire technology — optical and electromechanical — of the devices has remained the same, continuing to evolve, but always based on the same frame size.

We are so used to taking this format for granted that few know the story that led to its invention and diffusion. Indeed, the very numbers of this story are not in obvious correlation with each other. Why does the photography called 35 millimetres have a 36×24-millimetre format? Why is the 35-millimetre cartridge — in which neither dimension is 35 millimetres — called 135?

If you have a little patience, we are about to tell you, together with the extraordinary story of the people, companies and products that made today’s photographic technology what we know.

As often happens, there is no real project that led from nothing to the invention of 35 mm photography. It is rather a set of facts, stories, episodes and characters that in one way or another determined the course of events and contributed to writing its history.

As always happens, only survival through the passing of eras provides the measure of a product or invention’s success. Among millions of patents filed during the modern era, only very few gave rise to successful products and to the birth of true myths.

And the history of 35-millimetre photography is studded with mythical products.

Like all stories that get lost back in time, it is not always easy to reconstruct the reality of the facts, and on the web you often find conflicting accounts and sources. Moreover, when dealing with industrial secrets, stories of competition and tales written by marketing people, it is not easy to separate objective reality from corporate mythology. However, we at Spazio Chirale particularly like stories about innovation in processes and products — after all, it is our job, and we are convinced that today’s dynamics are very similar to those of a century ago. With a touch of critical spirit and knowledge of the industrial world, after gathering and consulting many sources, we believe we can tell you a story very close to reality.

Our story begins on 4 September 1888, when the American entrepreneur George Eastman founds Eastman Kodak Company…

Don’t worry, we don’t want to start from Adam and Eve just to be pedantic: the fact is that three years earlier, in 1885, Eastman had purchased from a certain David Houston the patent of roll film. Until then, in fact, films were produced and sold as flat plates packaged in special cartridges.

George Eastman was an entrepreneur with very clear ideas and a precise market strategy, aimed at spreading and popularising technologies that could increase product sales.

The importance of roll film would show in all its evidence when, in 1891, it allowed the famous inventor Thomas Edison to invent cinema by patenting his Kinetoscope.

Shortly after, the Lumière brothers arrived, who refined cinema technology, making theatrical projection possible and producing both films and devices in-house.

Meanwhile, an Edison employee named William Kennedy Laurie Dickson cut a 70-millimetre Kodak film in half, obtaining two 35-millimetre strips by joining the two ends in a single roll.

We don’t know why Kodak produced films exactly 70 millimetres wide: probably it was a format wide enough for the resolution of the time and compatible with the production machines that used mechanical parts of who knows what industrial standard. The fact remains that on that day 35-millimetre cinema film was born, and many people, including outside Edison, began to use it.

At the beginning, as always happens, there was no standard — everyone used different formats and mechanisms. Aided by the chaos and rapid development of the cinema industry, pirate machines and products began to circulate — that is, those that violated the various patents — until in 1909, to bring order to the sector, the Congress of Film Editors was held in Paris, which established that the format first used by Edison would be the standard for 35 mm cinematography.

In 1928 the format was modified again to allow the addition of the soundtrack.

In the cinematographic standard, the film is 35 millimetres wide, but since there are perforations on the sides, the frame is 24 mm wide and 18 mm high.

We will spare you the discussions on the standardisation of the number of perforations.

Since by then kilometres of 35-millimetre cinema film were being produced, more than one player tried to launch on the market a camera that would use it. Until then, in fact, portable cameras were based on roll film of larger format. Several standards were in use. Kodak, as always, was the leader in film production, and the progressive numbering of its products was also used to identify format standards — such as the 120 and 127, still produced today.

In 1908 the inventors Leo, Audobard and Baradat filed in England the patent for a 35 mm camera that was never produced. Between 1913 and 1920, the first 35 mm device that history remembers appeared on the market, called Homeos — a stereoscopic-photography camera designed by a certain Jules Richard, but without much success.

The first camera with a measure of success was the American Tourist Multiple, launched in 1913 for an upscale market given its exorbitant price for the time of $175 (about €4,000 at today’s value).

And this is where the second important character in our story comes in.

Oskar Barnack was a brilliant engineer and fine designer specialised in precision mechanics who, after a first work experience at Zeiss, ran the design department of Ernst Leitz Optische Werke, a medium-sized company specialised in microscopes and precision optics operating in Wetzlar, Germany.

Leitz, at the time owned by Ernst Leitz II, son of the founder, also had a small production of large- and medium-format cameras — without of course being able to compete with the more structured Zeiss, which would shortly become a true giant following the acquisition of several German companies, as we will tell later to add another important piece to our story.

Barnack was also a passionate amateur photographer, but unfortunately suffered from asthma, and the heavy cameras of the time did not facilitate the practice of his hobby.

Barnack had long nurtured the dream of being able to build a lighter and more transportable camera; however, projects of this kind were not in Ernst Leitz II’s plans.

The right opportunity presented itself when Barnack was asked to study a new model of 35-millimetre cine camera to be put on the market.

With the excuse of experimenting with the characteristics of 35-millimetre films from different producers, Barnack managed to get authorisation for the development of a camera on which to expose strips of film for testing purposes.

In reality, he dedicated himself to his project and had an idea that turned out to be brilliant. Instead of using the film vertically, as in normal cine cameras, he thought of inserting it horizontally, at the same time doubling the small dimension of the frame, obtaining the current 36×24 mm rectangle.

The greater area available for the frame allowed better quality of enlargement and a competitive performance with the 120 and 127 photographic formats used until then in more portable devices.

There was only one last important problem to solve: the shooting lens. None of the optics on sale at that time were designed to cover the new format — neither the heavier medium-format lenses, nor the cinema lenses suitable for 24×18 mm.

But for Leitz, specialised in quality optics, designing and producing a lens was no problem, and here intervenes the brilliant optician Max Berek, who designs for the occasion an optical scheme of 4 lenses in three groups, derived from the fundamental Cooke triplet, similar to but actually quite different from Zeiss’s Tessar, which was modified only some years later to cover the new photographic format.

The resulting lens will be the legendary Elmar 5 cm: the name seems to derive from the contraction of the names Ernst Leitz and Max Berek — an optic of impeccable quality that will allow the small format to lose nothing in quality compared to photos taken in 6×6 or 6×4.5 format, and that will sanction the birth of a new myth.

The first prototype of a 35 mm camera will therefore be presented to Ernst Leitz II in 1913, who will decide to invest in its production; however, the advent of the First World War will force the company to postpone the release of the new product, which will only come out in 1925 with the name Leica I (from the contraction Leitz Camera).

In addition to being a masterpiece of precision mechanics and being equipped with a fantastic optic, the Leica I came with a series of accessories that made the system practical and usable. To allow film loading in light conditions and therefore in the field, Barnack had patented a special light-tight metal cartridge, which was prepared in the darkroom and could subsequently be loaded under normal conditions inside the camera. The closing mechanism of the camera door unlocked the cartridge, allowing the film to scroll.

The product was an immediate success, and Leitz constantly invested in improving the product, creating a real system, rich in accessories and above all standardised. With the release of the Leica Standard in 1932, the screw mount for lenses was standardised.

The small provincial company had given birth to its myth and had begun to compete with the Zeiss flagship, which obviously did not stand by and started its own compact 35 mm camera project.

At the head of the design of the product — which would later come out under the name Contax — was Dr. August Nagel.

Nagel, who as a young man had worked as an apprentice in a precision-mechanics factory and subsequently as a salesperson in several companies, was passionate about photography and designed cameras for fun, until in 1908, at the age of 26, he founded in Stuttgart, together with his friend Carl Drexler, Drexler & Nagel — later known as Contessa-Camerawerke Stuttgart — a hugely successful company that was one of those acquired by Zeiss in 1926 in the great operation that led to the formation of Zeiss Ikon AG.

Nagel was given the role of Production Director, but — disappointing his expectations — he was not granted a seat on the Board of Directors, as had happened for other entrepreneurs whose companies had been acquired in the operation.

The discontent matured by Nagel led him to break with the new ownership and to conduct a hostile spin-off operation in which he took away much of the technical staff involved in the Contax project — which because of this would significantly delay its market release — founding Dr.-August Nagel-Factory, demonstrating that he was a successful designer and entrepreneur by designing and putting on the market devices that have had their place in the history of photography, such as the Librette and the Vollenda.

While Nagel was proving his qualities on the market, the great Kodak — which on the market continued to grow strong on its strategy based on the paradigm that Americans call Razor & Blades (the one where they sell you a product cheaply, like the razor or the inkjet printer, in order to favour the sales of a complementary product, like interchangeable blades or ink cartridges) — was deciding to attack the 35 mm camera segment as well.

Kodak was known for producing rather poor but very inexpensive cameras. The goal was in fact to popularise photography to favour film sales.

However, to make 35-millimetre cameras, expertise in precision mechanics was required that the technicians of the rough cheap medium-format cameras produced in the United States did not possess.

Kodak therefore decided to acquire a German company in order to take advantage of the opportunity to also open a factory in Europe.

The Dr. August Nagel Factory represented the ideal solution, also in light of the particular technical skills possessed by the founder and his historical collaborators.

This time the transaction, concluded in 1932, was satisfactory for Dr. Nagel, who maintained a primary role and a large part of the exploitation rights on his patents, becoming Director of the new Kodak AG with the goal of producing a 35-millimetre camera that, at the time of its release on the market, would be significantly cheaper than its competitors.

Two years later the new product had been completed, and in the summer of 1934 it was presented to the market under the name of Kodak Retina and product number 117 at a price lower than that of the Leica Standard and Zeiss’s Contax, which had come out in the meantime.

The Retina 117 mounted the excellent Xenar lens produced by the German Schneider, since Zeiss refused to supply its own Tessar lenses due to the never-mended differences from the events that led to Nagel’s exit.

Together with the Retina n. 117, a new ready-to-use 35-millimetre film cartridge was patented and presented, usable in light, compatible with the loading system of the Leica and the Contax. The Daylight 135 cartridge was born — the one still used today. The number 135 is the identifier assigned to it by Kodak, which progressively numbered all its products. In reality, the new film format should have had another number, but it was decided to use 135 to give a clear reference to the film format.

From that moment on, the cartridges of Leica and Contax that had to be pre-loaded in the darkroom were no longer needed, as the new 135 cartridge was already ready for use, and soon their commercialisation was discontinued.

The Retina was one of the few Kodak cameras to have a build quality comparable with that of the Leica and Contax cameras, but soon new materials technologies allowed Kodak to produce new low-cost 35-millimetre cameras in line with the Razor & Blades strategy characteristic of the company. But this too contributed to the universal assertion of this standard, which is currently experiencing a new exciting period of development.

At Spazio Chirale in Garbatella it is possible to experience the technologies and products that made the history of photography, alongside the latest novelties of the contemporary industry.

We study the products, technologies and entrepreneurial stories of the past to understand the present and learn to design the processes of the future. We cultivate with passion the Sciences, Technologies, Arts and Crafts of the 21st Century.