Filmmaker Dale Smith

Two Musicians Helped

Develop Kodachrome

Two American musicians had a big role in the development of the late lamented Kodachrome—taken off the shelf by Eastman after 74 wonderful years.

(Some early 1922 color film developed at Kodak is shown above. It features a gaggle of young women posing, primping and flirting for and with the hand-cranked camera. The color is remarkable.)

Retired filmmaker Dale Smith, an Eastman graduate before producing travel films, remembers seeing some Kodachrome footage shot of the 1938 Worlds Fair. (More on Dale later.)

Back to the Leopolds: Leopold Golowsky Jr. was a violinist as well as a chemist. He and Leopold Mannes, another musician, followed their art in New York while experimenting in color photography in their down times.

Eastman Kodak was so impressed with the results that the company contracted them in 1930 to move to Rochester and take advantage of Kodak’s research facilities. Three years later Godowsky and Mannes and the Kodak research staff had developed a marketable three-color emulsion process for color home movies.

Kodachrome 16mm movie film was released in 1935 and Kodachrome 35mm and 8mm followed a year later.

When filmmaker Dale Smith went to work in Kodak’s Research laboratories in 1955, Mannes and Godowsky were no longer there, but the stories about them were very much alive, he recalled, adding:

“Instead of using timers they timed the complicated process based on so many bars of classical music, which is kind of neat when you think about it.

“At some point I managed to get a friend in the labs to share a 16mm film shot on Kodachrome of the 1938 Worlds Fair.  Except for the splices coming apart, the color quality was pretty good.

“The main reason for the color stability is that the dye is put into the emulsion during processing instead of color couplers incorporated in present-day films.  It is easier to find stable dyes to put into the emulsion during processing than it is to make a complicated color coupler that has to form a stable dye during processing. Ektachrome is an example.

“As part of my orientation, I joined a small group of [other] new employees for a tour that included a Kodachrome processing machine undergoing maintenance.  It was a complex monster with huge drying facilities and large tanks full of chemicals.  I also knew a member of the camera club who designed the special slide coating hoppers that coated at least 17 layers in one pass of the film base.  That is the number of layers they were coating on Ektachrome when I left Kodak.

“I didn’t realize that they had experimental color film as early as 1922, but I suspect that it took some time to develop the film-coating technology as well as the total chemical package…The technology lasted a long time.  I have restored some old Kodachrome photographs and it is amazing how good they are with a little digital work.”