| It is the summer of 1871, we are in Paris, France and the city
is under siege. There has been no word in or out of the
city due to a communications blackout.
René Dagron a maker of photographics novelties had an idea. He proposed
that important documents and letters could be photographically reduced and sent by carrier
pigeon from Paris to Tours and back.
As many as 3,000 messages could be reduced and assembled on a single 35mm
x 65mm negative. Each pigeon could carry up to 18 negatives in a quill attached to it's
tail. When the bird arrived at it's destination the negative was projected onto a wall and
transcribed by hand.
Despite heavy losses from gunfire, birds of prey and getting lost,
thousands of pigeons got through, providing a communications line to the rest of the
country, but with the armistice of 1871 the need for Dagron's microfilm ended and it sat
in limbo for over fifty years.
The year is 1925, we are in New York and George L. McCarthy (a New York
City Bank Official) was troubled by a wave of fraudulent cheques. McCarthy devised a
system for photographing cheques simultaneously with their listing on an adding machine,
providing the bank with a permanent record of any transactions.
The Eastman Kodak Company had just introduced its 16mm Movie Camera and
continuous film processor, McCarthy seeing the potential of this new equipment persuaded
Kodak to redesign and produce a suitable camera.
Within ten years most banks, libraries, large stores and governments were
using this new technology. The film was archival, readily acceptable as a legal document
and easy to use.
The next 70 years has seen improvements in the speed and quality of image
capture, along with the other major change to film technology.
The change was that the Acetate film base used had been a
problem for microfilm as well as for motion pictures until the 1970's. Acetate is safe,
but acetate degrades in the same manner as nitrate, and sometimes at the same rate. People
were wrong when assuming that acetate was "as stable as good quality paper such as
that used for records" . Things have changed in a dramatic way with the introduction
of polyester. Polyester is to a little extent subject to hydrolysis, but demonstrates
outstanding mechanical properties with good dimensional stability. PET pet based
film has a life expectancy of several hundred years, even when stored at room temperature
( 20-30% RH, 70° F). Film is therefore the only truly archival medium. More stable than
most papers, probably much more stable than electronic media, with no worries regarding
hardware and software obsolescence. So before you rush out and check you supplier you
should be aware that to-day's film has nothing to do with microfilm used in the
1930's-late 1970's period.
We now have retrieval systems that use computers and special
Reader/Printers to find and print documents. Through the use of jackets and microfiche we
have updateable systems and still the numbers of users still increases
Computer Output Microform (COM) devices can produce reports at over 18,000
lines per minute and duplicate them at ten times that speed. These devices run 24 hours a
day all over the world producing the information and backup that industry needs.
Digital film readers and scanners have enhanced the use of microfilm, as
the data can be brought back from the archived films at a reasonable cost.
The use of microfilm is still growing as people combine the archival
storage of their information with the current scanning and CD-ROM technology to create a
successful working partnership.
A Brief history of Microfilm - PDF (85Kb)
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