We’ve Got Bigger Problems: Preservation during Eastman Color’s Innovation and Early Diffusion

In a 1959 speech, Kodak Research Labs scientist Dr. Paul W. Vittum observed regarding the innovation of chromogenic color film, “It almost goes without saying that the development of manufacturing methods to produce these complex multilayer materials has been one of the triumphs of modern science and technology.”¹ The self-evident pride of the scientists notwithstanding, the engineering accomplishment of a viable monopack color stock seems decidedly less awe inspiring five decades later. The poor preservation characteristics of Kodak’s mid-century monopack products, and particularly of its print film, notorious for fading to pink, have tarnished its “triumph.” As Eastman Color stocks became pervasive in the 1960s and 1970s, they acquired a reputation as cheap and easy replacements for the more difficult, more lovely, and—crucially—more stable Technicolor. Over the long term, this proved to be the case, even if, as we will see, the relationship between Technicolor and Eastman Color was more complicated than this simplified story might suggest. But Eastman Color’s sullied reputation misses key features of its innovation and initial adoption. Eastman Color was a complex and remarkable technology. The raw stock was expensive to innovate and, in the 1950s, expensive to purchase.² Moreover, the necessary creation of color-processing facilities added significantly to the costs and complexities of Eastman Color adoption. The trade-offs involved in this process of technical development and commercialization hold valuable lessons for historians and archivists today.

This article considers how the development and early uses of Eastman Color technology shaped its stability. Drawing on primary sources, including documents held in the Eastman Kodak Collection at Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, trade press accounts, and Kodak veteran John Waner’s personal memoir of Eastman Color in the 1940s and 1950s, I show how and why the innovators of monopack color so often subordinated preservation to other considerations. In so doing, I also hope to resuscitate some of Vittum’s original awe at these technologies now that they face extinction with the rise of digital formats.

INVENTION

The innovation of monopack film stocks took decades. Through the 1940s, the future of monopack was considered uncertain because of its incredible chemical complexity. In the first half of the twentieth century, film stock manufacturers desperately wanted to supply monopack, but first they had to innovate a product that was economically viable, visually pleasing even when projected onto a large screen, reasonably safe to process, and acceptably stable. This was no easy task.

In 1913, the German chemist Rudolf Fischer hit upon a fascinating reaction: the addition of “certain materials” to certain developing solutions (specifically, those containing p-phenylenediamine or p-aminophenol) created a color image. The added compounds reacted with oxidized developer to create tiny dye clouds around developed silver grains. Because it required both the added compound and the oxidized developer, the reaction was dubbed “coupling.” The compounds, in turn, became known simply as couplers (or color couplers, when more precision was necessary). Ultimately, Fischer was able to produce dyes in five different classes with coupler reactions, and he patented them all.³

Fischer realized that emulsions with different sensitivities could be layered onto a single base and then coupled in development to form different dyes in each emulsion layer. Color film made in this way could, at least in theory, be run through a standard camera by any user skilled enough to shoot black and white. Fischer envisioned a film stock that was sensitive to the light primaries (red, green, and blue) and that, in development, reproduced the complementary subtractive primaries (cyan, magenta, and yellow). His idea laid the foundation for monopack film stocks by outlining the chemical reactions behind “chromogenic”—literally, color-generating—photography.

Several issues, however, curtailed practical applications for Fischer’s discovery. Both the sensitizing dyes that triggered exposure and the couplers that generated color had a tendency to float free between layers of Fischer’s negative. This not only led to poor color rendition (as the relationship between primary pairs was broken) but also reduced sharpness in the...