Can a Photograph Change History
How to develop a roll of film that spent decades on a mountaintop
Mt. Everest, June 8, 1924, 12:50 pm: George Mallory
(“because it is there”) and Andrew Irvine are spotted
800 vertical feet below the peak and “going strong for the top.”
Neither climber was ever seen again. Did they perish as they
continued their ascent or after having reached the summit,
29 years before the successful climb of Sir Edmund Hillary and
Tenzing Norgay? An answer—a photograph from the top—
may exist in one of the Kodak Vest Pocket Model B cameras
the two carried, a “miniature” (for the day) camera that had
become very popular with soldiers during World War I. In
1986 Tom Holzel, fascinated by the possibility, organized an
expedition led by Andrew Harvard with the express intent of
recovering those cameras. The team was eventually defeated by
10 days of continuous blizzards with temperatures of –30°F,
100 mph winds, and an avalanche that cost the life of sherpa
Dawa Nuru. Mallory’s body, but not Irvine’s, was subsequently
recovered by the Simonson Expedition of 1999, but no cameras
were found.
Our role during the ascent in 1986 was to identify a best
technique for developing the Kodak NC (Non-Curling) Film,
had a camera been recovered—film that would have had 62 years
of exposure to extreme cold, severe dehydration, and intense
radiation. We were fortunate to obtain for experimentation a roll
of identical film, expiration dated March 1, 1926, from Kodak’s
Patent Museum. The tin wrapping and wood and metal spool
were forwarded to Holzel to better tune his metal detectors.
Analysis of the film coupled with a review of archived Kodak
literature furnished us with information about the product’s halide
content, grain size, silver coverage, and chemical and optical
sensitization. ISO speed was estimated from the camera’s
construction and exposure recommendations included in its
operating instructions. Using a radioactive cobalt source, we had a
portion of the film exposed to an amount of radiation deemed
equivalent to six decades atop Everest, roughly the same as a roll
stored in Rochester would have received had it arrived on the
Mayflower. There was, of course, no way to mimic the actual
latent image age and cold storage. Snippets of the film were
imaged and subjected to a variety of development protocols.
Our best results derived from development by inspection
with a Kodak No. 1 safelight in Kodak Developer D-76
containing 5 mg/l of 5-methylbenzotriazole. Printing the
images on a grade 5 paper afforded a density range of 0.3 units,
very weak but clearly discernible. Remarkably, the irradiated
and unirradiated samples showed little difference in density
scale, though the former had a signif icantly higher fog level.
Among other developer additives explored were various
traditional antifoggants and chemicals capable of enhancing
grain-internal latent image (surface latent image could contain
appreciably more fog) such as sodium thiocyanate, potassium
chloroaurate, mercaptopropionic acid, and others, but none
yielded better image discrimination.
As word of our efforts spread, several other rolls of film
were donated that had been found, exposed but unprocessed,
in old cameras. These ranged from one found some 30 years
earlier in a Rochester bedroom to one exposed some 70 years
earlier and stored in a presumably very hot attic in Paris. By
processing snippets from the edges that extended perhaps a
quarter inch into the image area, we were able to explore
many more developer variations. Long story short, we did not
find any panacea procedure that worked with all old f ilms,
but we did make some interesting discoveries along the way.
One or the other of two distinctly different protocols usually
yielded the best results. The gentler of the two was to presoak the
film for two minutes in a 0.1% solution of potassium iodide
followed by development in Kodak Developer D-76. This failed
totally with the oldest films that had suffered the worst storage
conditions, but the presoak and seven minutes in D-76 gave
remarkable results with newer films, one of which yielded images
that looked like they had been exposed earlier in the day on freshly
manufactured film. The newest telltale we found on this roll was a
1956 Chevy, putting the latent image age at about 30 years.
The second and much more aggressive technique was to
use the same potassium iodide prebath followed by
development (often for only two or three minutes) in Kodak
Rapid X-Ray Developer (KRX) containing an additional 0.5
g/l of potassium iodide. This severely fogged the newer rolls
but worked rather well, considering, with the oldest. The
frame in the image plane, if any, was consistently the weakest
and discrimination always improved from the outside to the
inside of the rewind core. One roll in particular, estimated to
have been exposed about 1916, displayed images from an
ancient amusement park. Although prints on grade 5 paper
were still exceedingly f lat, faces were clearly recognizable.
But the film of Mallory and Irvine? The world may never
know. Readers who would like to learn more about their
attempt and subsequent searches for those pioneers and their
cameras may enjoy reading The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine,
by Tom Holzel and Audrey Salkeld, Mountaineers
Books, 2000 (ISBN 0-89886-726-6). ?
Dick Dickerson and Silvia Zawadzki are retired Kodak black-andwhite
product builders who have authored numerous articles for PT.
They can be contacted at querybw1@aol.com. Dick and Silvia reside
in Rochester, NY.
from PHOTO Techniques
by Dick dickerson & Silvia zawadzki
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