Re: Eastman House gum prints
That is a great story for sure . . . and I have the chemicals as stated in PF2 but aint yet used them. Now, once again, via the story of serendipity, I'll give it a try. And, are you people all still getting bundles of emails? I've simply had none since that blitz. Jack On January2007, at 9:34 PM, Judy Seigel wrote: Have corroborated in two or more sources, now, the originator of gum over platinum (Silberer) who was doing so in 1901 because his article came out Jan 5 1902 in the Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung--what the heck is that??? Algemeine = general sport = sport (?) zeitung = newspaper (literally "time") One more day in the stacks and I haven't even made it to the 60's!!! What am I going to do...oh, did I tell you that the Eastman House has 100 different photographic journals??? Yegads.Approximately 1982, a young man in my thesis class at grad school showed me the section of the main reading room at the NY Public Library that had a shelf of "Photo Abstracts." Published annually, it had a 2-sentence summary of every article about photography, apparently, in the world. I went back one day and leafed through as many as I could before my brain melted. (That was of course before digital cameras, tho it was possible to stand in line to get individual pages photo copied for 25 cents each.) At one point the term "specular silver" popped into view. That was about the time of Halochrome's arrival. We'd been experimenting with it, and intrigued, tho it was an expensive experiment. The source was a Swedish photo magazine. The librarian had a catalog that listed what libraries in the US had which magazines. This one was in only 2 of them -- Eastman Kodak Library and Harvard. I wrote both before leaving for a workshop (with Beaumont Newhall --- what a lark!!!) at Asilomar. When I got back, maybe two weeks later, the article was in my mailbox, 5 pages photocopied by Kodak, no charge. Harvard wrote that they didn't have that issue. So I walked into the chem office at school & said I needed something translated from Swedish, and a fellow sitting there waiting to see the professor's assistant said he was Swedish. So I took him to lunch and .... voila. (I told this story with more bells & whistles in P-F #2, but it still strikes me as so amazing I tell it again... a propos of Kodak, libraries, Rochester, and ALL THOSE PHOTO JOURNALS !!!) This article by the way, although in Swedish by a Swede was about a Yugoslavian's discovery. I wonder if he ever got any money from Halochrome -- isn't that Rockland Colloid??? Or Berg & Berg ? I wonder if he even knew about Halochrome... Of course he published the whole chemistry of the process. Would anyone do that today, I wonder. I also wonder, does Kodak still have its library? J.
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