1940s

Mark Sense card (early 1930s – 1970s)

Mark Sense technology was developed as an automated test scoring system in the early 1930s by a teacher, Reynold B. Johnson, and it allowed data to be read from a punched card after being marked by the student with a special pencil that contained electrically conductive graphite. Johnson went on to work for IBM who bought the rights to Mark Sense, or electrographic technology, and released the IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine in 1937.

Mark Sense card were also used for purposes such as medical questionnaires, opinion polls, meter readings and class scheduling.

In some instances, the Mark Sense card was read by a machine (such as the IBM Reproducing Punch, first introduced in 1949) and then punched according to where the marks were, for subsequent use in a standard punched card reader.

The technology was widely used in from the 1940s to 1960s, but was superseded by optical mark recognition technology in the 1960s (also sometime wrongly called ‘mark sense’) that could simply read the marks optically.

IBM withdrew its last Reproducing Punch, the 514, in 1978.

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Federal Perma Disk (1940s)

Federal Perma Disk (note the strange spelling of ‘disk’) was a brand of lacquer disc (sometimes known as an acetate or instantaneous disc) that was produced in the US by the Federal Recorder Co. Inc. They seem to date from around 1940 onwards.

Like many other lacquer discs, the core of most Federal Perma Disks is made of aluminium, making the disc much heavier than a standard shellac or vinyl record. Some Federal Perma Disks had a glass core. Later discs seem to have dropped the word ‘Federal’ from the name. They seem to have come in a range of sizes, with perhaps 6½-inches being the most popular.

The extra holes on near the centre of the disc were to prevent slippage on simpler cutting machines that lacked a vacuum to hold the disc in place, and are typical of discs designed for home recording.

Federal Perma Disks may have typed or handwritten information on the label, and can be difficult to date. The lacquer coating wears much quicker than standard shellac or vinyl records, and a chipped stylus can damage the disc in one play.

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16 mm microfilm (1925 – 2000s)

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16-mm-microfilm

16 mm microfilm was used to store reduced-size photographs of documents that can then be viewed in a microfilm reader that magnifies the image to a readable size. 16 mm microfilm was generally used to store images of documents that were A3, A4, or Letter size, or even smaller sizes such as bank cheques or betting slips, whereas 35 mm microfilm tended to be used for larger documents such as newspapers or engineering drawings.

16 mm microfilm was first used commercially to take pictures of bank cheques, and a machine called the Checkograph was introduced in 1925 for this purpose. The 16 mm film format was relatively new at this stage, having been introduced in 1923.

The film itself is unperforated, and may have one continuous strip of images (simplex) or two lines of images where the front and back need to be stored together (duplex). It generally comes in lengths of 100 feet, 130 feet or 215 feet. Film in 215 foot lengths was thinner and tended to be used for duplex microfilming of documents such as bank cheques, insurance documents or and medical forms.

The film could be stored on an open reel, or it could be housed inside a cartridge.

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Autochrome Lumière (1907 – 1955)

Paris: Aux Champs Elyseés, 1914. On glass Verascope Stereoview

Autochrome was one of the very first practical method of colour photography (the similar Jougla Omnicolore was introduced a few months previously) and was first marketed by the Lumière brothers in 1907, becoming widely used before the advent of subtractive colour film in the 1930s.

Autochrome used an additive method, with a glass plate coated in microscopic grains of potato starch that were dyed red-orange, green, or blue-violet, underneath a panchromatic photographic emulsion. The plates needed longer exposures than contemporary black and white photography (about thirty times more). Although there was no need for any special camera, there was a need for a yellow filter to correct the over-sensitivity to blue light, and a tripod was needed for the long exposures.

The resulting positive image was quite dark and needed bright light for viewing. Autochrome plates could be viewed with a special stand called a diascope, that offered a brighter image, or they could be projected with a magic lantern but they needed a very powerful light. Unfortunately, Autochrome images on glass plates were difficult for artistic photographers to exhibit and so most autochromes were taken by amateur photographers.

The Autochrome process produces images that are considered very attractive and dreamlike. Stereoscopic Autochromes were available, and combined both colour and depth.

Despite being much more expensive that monochrome plates, the Lumière factory was making 6,000 autochrome plates a day by 1913, in a range of different sizes.

From 1932, film versions of Autochrome became available, but faced competition from new subtractive colour films such as Kodachrome and Agfacolour Neu. Autochrome film was finally discontinued in 1955.

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Minox film slides (late 1940s – 2003)

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The Minox camera was a subminiature camera first produced in 1937. It used very small film cartridges with unperforated film that produced images just 8 × 11 mm in size.

Initially produced in Latvia, production stopped in 1943 and was then restarted in Germany in 1948. The camera was high-quality and expensive, and become both a luxury item and a tool for spying. The Minox camera was developed over time through several versions, and added features such as autoexposure, as well as a range of accessories including a projector for use with Minox slides.

It is unclear when the first black and white slide (reversal) films were made available for Minox cameras, but since the first slide projector was introduced in 1950, it may have been prior to this. The first colour slide film for the Minox was made by Agfacolor in 1954.

The first projector, introduced in 1950, was made by the Hollyslide Company at the request of the American Minox subsidiary. It could project direct from the transparency holder, or from Minox slide film mounted in standard 2-inch slide mounts.

The Minox HP30 projector line followed in 1954, and this was followed by the HP24 in 1970. Some models offered semi-automatic operation, autofocus and remote control, and the HP24 offered the ability to connect a cassette player to control the projector (rather like a tape-slide set). Some models could project slides from 16 mm film or 110 film.

Minox discontinued production of the HP24 slide projector in 1988, but continued to produce Minochrome slide film until 2003.

It is still possible to obtain reversal film (and negative film) for the Minox from some sources, or it is possible to use a film slitter to make film for the Minox from 35 mm film.

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Book music (1892 – )

Book music is a means of storing music for mechanical organs. Patented by organ maker Anselmo Gavioli in 1892, it consists of thick cardboard sheets with holes that can either be read by keys in the organ, or that allow air to pass through (keyless music). The sheets are joined in a zig-zag fashion, and as they pass through the organ mechanism, they fold into a neat pile that unlike paper rolls, is ready to play again almost immediately.

Barrel organs mostly use a pinned wooden cylinder (rather like a larger organ cob) but this limits the amount of music, and they are heavy and expensive to produce. Book music does not have such restrictions on the length of the music, though it is heavier and more expensive to produce than paper rolls.

While book music is usually used in larger organs such as fairground and street organs, it has also been used in smaller instruments such as organettes.

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McBee Keysort card (1932 – 1980s)

McBee Keysort cards are a form of edge-notched card, that could be used in a manual or hand-sorted index card file. The notches around the edge could be punched out so the cards could be manipulated with a long needle to lift out cards that met certain criteria from a box or tray, and leave other cards behind.

Multiple sorts could take place to allow quite complicated searches, in effect creating a simple database

Egde-notched cards were first developed in 1896, and different variations have been sold under names such as Cope-Chat cards, E-Z Sort cards, McBee Keysort card, and Indecks cards. In 1932, the McBee Corporation bought the US rights to a design developed by Alfred Perkins for the Dunlop Rubber Company in England sometime before 1925.

Notches around all four edges of the card allowed for different fields to be searched, and a cut-off on the top-right corner of the card allowed users to spot cards that were the wrong way round. Information could be typed or written onto the central area of the card. Cards could be pre-printed to suit the application, for example employee records, library catalogue records, and course scheduling.

With the increasing availability of microcomputers, edge-notched card databases appear to have died out in the 1980s.

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Catalogue card (1780s – 2015)

Catalogue (or catalog) cards were used in library catalogues as a index to the contents of the library, and provided information about the books or other materials contained in the library, such as author, title, year, subject and call number (location). Cards could easily be added to the catalogue as new items were added to the library.

The first card catalogues appeared around the 1780s, but it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the 3 inch by 5 inch (7.5 cm by 12.5 cm, also known as ‘postal size’ at the time) card became the standard after being advocated as one of two possible sizes of card in 1877 by the American Library Association. The hole in the lower portion of a catalogue card allowed a rod to be passed through the stack of cards in the drawer to help prevent cards falling out if the drawer was removed, and discouraged library users from removing cards.

In 1901, the Library of Congress in the US began the sale and distribution of pre-printed catalogue cards to libraries.

During the 1960s the Library of Congress went on to develop the MARC (machine-readable cataloging) format that soon became an international standard for the sharing of bibliographic data.

OCLC, which ran a shared online cataloguing service, began printing catalogue cards in 1971 and reached a peak of 131 million cards printed in 1985. However, card catalogues quickly fell out of use as computer catalogues became widely available in the 1990s, and OCLC printed the last catalogue cards in 2015.

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Keystone View Company stereoview (1892 – 1963)

The Keystone View Company was formed by B. L. Singley in 1892 in Meadville, Pennsylvania to produce and sell stereoview cards, becoming the largest producer of stereoviews by 1905 at which point it offered 20,000 different views and also started selling educational lantern slides.

Most of their stereview cards were, like other stereoviews, two photographs mounted on card that when viewed with a stereoscope viewer produced a 3D effect. Keystone also produced the cheaper Keystone Junior stereographs that were much smaller images on photographic paper without the cardboard backing.

Between 1915 and 1921, the Keystone View Company bought the negatives of most of the their competitors, including Underwood & Underwood. The Keystone View Company was bought by Mast Development Company in 1963 and finally ceased distribution of stereoviews.

In 1978, the Keystone View Company’s negatives and prints were donated to the University of California and formed the Keystone-Mast collection of around 350,000 prints and original glass and film negatives, some of which is now available online.

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Zoetrope (1833 – )

Zoetropes are a form of animation where a series of illustrations or photographs are spun in a cylinder, with the images seen through slits in the cylinder giving the impression of motion.

They were invented in 1833 by William Horner who called the device the Doedaleum. Various version were introduced in subsequent years, with the most popular version being invented William Ensign Lincoln in 1865. This version placed the viewing slits higher up the cylinder, allowing for interchangeable paper strips to be used. The name Zoetrope was used in a patent of 1867.

Zoetropes were popular as a toy and were produced by Milton Bradley for a number of years.

Zoetropes can also be found in linear form, or with 3D models in place of the pictures.

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