Ian Hamilton-Tait, whose parents had bought a retail business selling photographic materials and Meccano in Edinburgh shortly after World War 2, gives another interesting account of how some enterprising finishers built their own equipment when nothing else was available. They soon realised that photo processing was an important part of the business.

In 1947 Ian left school and did his apprenticeship behind the counter and in the small black and white processing department.

The business was successful and in 1949 they moved into much larger premises and started doing black & white D&P for other retailers. This, as with other finishers of that time, was very labour intensive.

In 1954, at the suggestion of Gevaert they started colour processing: first Gevacolor followed by Agfacolor and later Kodacolor C22 negatives. Film and paper processing was done using Fribo hand tanks.

Initially they exposed the colour paper using a borrowed Priox additive single sheet contact printer but soon bought three Leitz Focomat enlargers, which had a drawer for colour filters. With hit and miss grading they were able to expose 40–50 prints per hour including test prints, but the finished output was much less. This was insufficient for their requirements and with no commercial printers on the market, they set out to produce their own equipment.

They adapted a Kodak VPP black and white projection printer for colour work by fitting a rotating filter wheel with blue, green and red printing filters in front of the lamp. Using three variable transformers to switch the lamp to different intensities while projecting through the different colour filters, they were able to control the exposure and colour balance of the prints. Colour grading was largely guesswork and dependent on the experience of the operator. This was made more difficult by the considerable variations between batches of films and papers.

Their first attempt at something better was to use a Pakolor grader, which measured the density of the colour negative films through blue, green and red filters. This improved the pass rate of prints but was still very slow.

To process their rolls of paper they installed a Williamson single-track paper processor specially adapted for Gevacolor paper. Later they added a glazing drum to avoid having to put wet paper on a glazer manually, a common practice at that time.

By 1956 they had the idea of speeding up production by controlling the printers with a five-hole punched tape, similar to those used for telex machines. After processing and grading, a tape was produced for each film. They called this ALEC (Automated Line Equipment Control).

Business was growing, so in 1958 they moved into a purpose-built lab in Penicuik near Edinburgh. They installed Wainco dip and dunk processors for the films and a Kodak three-strand processor for the colour paper. They also took delivery of six English Kodak S1 printers, which was a big step forward as these printers incorporated colour and exposure control.

They gave serious thoughts to adapting their ALEC system to these printers, both to speed up their operation and to integrate them with their invoicing and accounting system. At that time there were many roll films, 120, 126, 127 and 828, so they decided to splice them together and punch a small hole near the edge of each frame to act as a location so that they could transport the films automatically through the S1 printers, correcting the exposures where necessary by means of the punched tape. The idea was also to use the printing information for invoicing using an early computer. The system speeded up the S1 printers from 400 to 600 prints per hour.

They tried to sell the system to other finishers, but it was a system before its time, made obsolete by the much faster colour printers which came on the market a few years later. Interestingly, systems incorporating some of the ideas from ALEC were produced some years later by Gretag and others, for handling re-orders.

OUT OF THE DARKroom
A short history of the Photofinishing Industry
By Peter L M Rockwell and Peter W Knaack.
Paperback 180 pages ISBN10  0-9554072-0-6 or ISBN13  97809554072-0-8
Published by 2P Press, London UK £12.99 US $23.99