.
>Paris meeting was great, to my point of view.
.
>Berger's mystery stays a mystery.
Perhaps not for very long...
> By coming to Paris I was before all very curious of discovering the
> visage of a lot of persons I had been writing to for more than a year.
> But I must confess that I was also curious of another important thing:
> the unveiling of Mister Berger's secret.
> Alas! After 15 minutes of demonstration I was not convinced.
The "demo" actually consisted of a show of prints and a few comments.
I had several conversations with Berger throughout the meeting, between
translations, etc. and here's what transpired:
First of all: If you could give me a method to enlarge a small neg with
a regular 150-Watt enlarger, directly onto a gum dichromate paper, I
would not personally use it because I am not a gum printer. The
invention would be worthless to me, although it could be of interest to
the many Demachys out there on this list.
It this worked with dichromated gum, it should work with carbon transfer
however. Indeed, it should work better and there are very interesting
commercial applications here...
After seeing my carbon transfer prints, Berger approached me privately
and told me that all along, this is the process he wanted to use because
it could provide continuous tone images, etc. He'd tried it from an old
book before but failed to obtain a decent image and abandoned the
process. He thought it was impossible to make the process work but I and
others (Brochet, I think had excellent carbon transfers) proved this
wrong. He is a trained chemist and not a very experienced printmaker.
As I kept doing the MCing and translating he was reading through my
books (he can read English but does not speak nor write it) and from
time to time he would ask me questions about various things, etc., as he
had never heard of me nor of my books before this meeting, etc. I told
him I wanted to document his effort about the Sury process (more on this
one later), which is mentioned in my Encyclopedia, p. 440.
To make a long story short: At one point he offered me one of his Sury
prints, inscribed, and then later he offered me a blank Sury matrix and
then (good thing the meeting was coming to an end as Heaven knows what
he would have offered me next;-)) ... he offered me *all* of his
(dichromated research) trade secrets if
(a) I was keeping them to myselves and
(b) I agreed on helping him with the carbon transfer process...
When I informed Klaus and others about this later, they were
flabbergasted!
So, assuming he hasn't changed his mind by the time I get back to my
Canadian office (I'm still in Paris for a while), one of us here will
know what this is all about...
I'm pretty good at keeping the lid on trade secrets... but I'll sure be
happy to report whether the thing works or not. If it works, you'll
know, and that will be it. If it does not work, you'll know as well...
For him to make such an offer does indicate a certain degree of honesty.
Like most chemists, his area of expertise and understanding is very
narrow and he did make mistakes in areas that were not immediately
related to his field of research. This is perfectly normal though. I
have on many occasions corrected top chemists who work for Kodak,
Ilford, etc., when they ventured on thin ice just outside their field.
BTW, this is the reason folks why you often don't get a reply on this
list when you write "perhaps a chemist could answer this or that".
Everybody is so specialized nowadays that it is impossible to know about
all aspects of chemistry (among other things)
So, stay tuned if you want to find out more about the great dichromated
colloid secret...
Luis Nadeau
Paris, France (for a while...)
(phone no. available on request)