From Forests to Film: Chemistry, Industry, and the Rise of Nonflammable Film Stock

Abstract

From Forests to Film: Chemistry, Industry, and the Rise of Nonflammable Film Stock Alice Lovejoy (bio) The first motion picture system to use 16mm film was the Ciné-Kodak, Eastman Kodak’s camera-projector pair, which, in the words of a 1924 advertisement, “enable[s] you to show in motion on your screen the sort of pictures you turn to first in your album. Train the camera, press the button and the motor cranks the camera.”1 Echoing the catchphrase that sold Kodak’s Brownie camera—“you press the button; we do the rest”—the ensemble was marketed as a motion picture equivalent to this affordable, push-button device, which put photography into the hands of nonprofessionals. A cornerstone of the Ciné-Kodak was its custom-designed film stock, which was unique in several ways. Instead of using the established negative-positive process, the stock was “reversal.” Requiring only one strip of film, it was exposed in camera as a negative and then processed to a projectable positive. But for the Ciné-Kodak’s promise of moving film out of studios, cinemas, and everything they entailed, the stock’s most important feature was that its base was made of nonflammable cellulose acetate instead of cellulose nitrate, the highly combustible plastic that caused countless fires in cinema’s first decades.2 Nonflammability was further guaranteed by the [End Page 151] film’s very gauge: by cutting the Ciné-Kodak’s stock to 16mm instead of 17.5mm, Kodak ensured that thrifty filmmakers couldn’t simply halve a strip of 35mm nitrate.3 The Ciné-Kodak was immensely popular, and within a decade, the company’s 16mm stocks included panchromatic and color versions.4 The material’s uses also extended beyond the Ciné-Kodak to other companies’ cameras and projectors and to Kodak’s pioneering microfilm system, the Recordak. But 16mm film was difficult to make. In the early 1920s, cellulose acetate was expensive and not widely produced in the United States. Acetate base had to be coated with emulsion at a slower speed than its nitrate sibling, limiting manufacturing capacity.5 The growing market for 16mm thus demanded changes to Kodak’s production processes. At the heart of these changes was Kodak’s new chemical subsidiary, the Tennessee Eastman Corporation, where Kodak transferred all of its cellulose acetate production in 1930. Kodak was attracted to Kingsport, Tennessee Eastman’s headquarters, by the town’s unfinished wood alcohol plant and by its dense forests, which provided many of cellulose acetate’s raw materials. Tennessee Eastman’s path from forests to nonflammable film is the subject of this essay. This path was charted by military, economic, and scientific developments that radically expanded Kodak’s industrial identity. In turn, they cast a different light on 16mm’s cultural and social dimensions than those announced in the Ciné-Kodak’s breezy advertisements. ________ Cellulose acetate was not a new material when Kodak introduced its 16mm system. In 1865—only ten years after Alexander Parkes invented cellulose nitrate—French chemist Paul Schützenberger created a nonflammable form of celluloid by combining cellulose (cotton or wood) with chloroform instead of nitric acid; Kodak began experimenting with the substance in 1909.6 Some manufacturers introduced cellulose acetate stocks in 1911–1912, but the material was brittle and difficult to splice, limiting its use in film as well as other products\.7 World War I changed this. In a chemical and air war, non-flammable [End Page 152] plastics were suddenly crucial, and film manufacturers, already experts in celluloid, began to supply the material to militaries on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, Agfa and Pathé manufactured acetate gas mask components, while Kodak’s first large-scale production of cellulose acetate was not for film but for weatherproof airplane lacquers.8 Cellulose acetate was just one of many chemicals whose production World War I shocked into expansion.9 Yet demand fell after the war just as swiftly as it had risen, and by summer 1920, the United States was in the midst of a “chemical depression” that would last until the end of 1921.10 It was during this chemical depression that George Eastman visited the half-finished...