Joe Reid wrote: > It is unlikely that Agfa > would produce 1-3/8" film and call it 35 mm. Also, if SMPE > shaved down the width of the f9m, why did they preserve > the metric sprocket spacing and the metric frame size? Well, they could have manufactured it as 34.8 mm and rounded the published size to 35 mm. The bothersome fact is that the film I measured (and I have lots of it) is precisely 1-3/8" wide. The film is Kodak. When I have a minute to find it, I'll check some Agfa and some Fuji. Some of the historical information shows 35 mm film as being a derivative of 2-3/4" wide film, slit down the middle. That would, of course, account for an unsprocketed 35 mm film, but not necessarily for the sprocketed standard on which the industry standardized. Note the following, from "One Hundred Years of Film Sizes," at http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/filmsize.html (which, as you'll note, is a Dutch site). The comment in brackets is mine. <start of excerpt> In May 1889 Thomas Edison had ordered a Kodak camera from the Eastman Company and was apparently fascinated by the 2 3/8" [does the author mean 2-3/4", I wonder?] roll of film used. Thereupon W.K.L.Dickson of his laboratory ordered a roll of film of 1 3/8"(34,8mm) width from Eastman. This was half the film size used in Eastman Kodak cameras. It was to be used in a new type of Kinetoscope for moving images on a strip of celluloid film, which could be viewed by one person at the time. Lumi�re film The Lumi�re brothers introduced in March 1895 their Cin�matographe for 35mm film, which was also used at their first public show of 28 December of that year. Their strip of film had only one round hole per image, whereas Edison used four rectangular perforations per frame. <end of excerpt> As you can see, Edison is credited with the standard four perforations per frame, as opposed to the single perforation per frame of the Lumi�re brothers' product. Could it be that Edison used what was available (34.8 mm/1.375") and worked in metric on the other axis (and for the frame size)? The mystery deepens. Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
