This is Metrology Day! I’ve done several relevant items in recent weeks, especially GenRad’s color comparator and a return to the alidade theme.
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I’ve been researching and modeling a lost tech, closely related to my recent sequences on Pinfeed and Pigskin, and Pinfeed and GenRad. Instead of regrouping the previous items, I’ll just give this one a related title.
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The Filmsort card connected the Pinfeed world to the Pigskin world. It was a McBee or Hollerith punchcard (pinfeed) with a square of photo film (gelatin) inserted in the middle. Filmsort lived in obscure places but turned out to be surprisingly pivotal in a weird way, like Comb Jellies.
I’ve condensed Filmsort history from a 1966 book published by 3M, who ended up as the maker of Filmsort. Author was DW McDonald, head of Filmsort for its later life. When the book was written, 3M was anticipating a bright future for Filmsort which unfortunately didn’t come true. 3M did continue making microfilm equipment.
History:
Before the war John Langan was working in the backstage parts of Hollywood and also working with photo mags like Life. He envisioned the aperture card as a way of storing and filing photos for both industries. The earliest patents and the last patents are by Langan.
In 1942 playwright Robert Sherwood became Coordinator of Information in DC. Sherwood brought Langan into the agency to help file and classify photos taken by spies and military units. COI also asked US tourists who had been in Europe before the war to contribute snapshots, hoping to help identify locations of targets. Tourists responded massively, and COI soon had a half million negatives and prints to sort through and classify.
COI merged into OSS, and Langan became head of Pictorial Records in OSS. Langan proposed copying all of these pics to microfilm, then attaching each to the middle of a Hollerith card. He developed a punch code (omitting the film columns) for all the necessary data.
Quoting directly from the book:
The situation changed, however, when the war ended. Like many other veterans, the microfilm aperture card had to look for a job. This reversed the adage. The microfilm aperture card became an invention in search of a need.
Atherton Richards, former president of Dole Pineapple, was deputy head of OSS. After the war he became a venture capitalist in partnership with a dude named Bill Casey. Yes, THAT Bill Casey. They bought the patents from Langan and formed Film’n’File, soon renamed to Filmsort. They contracted Dexter Folder, maker of folding and collating machines for the printing industry, to manufacture the mounting and viewing machines, and then got McBee to make the cards and do the sales and marketing.
The aperture card moved back into the commercial realm as McBee cards, not IBM. That’s where I saw them first. McBee is the generic name for edge-punched cards regardless of coding method. This pictured card is by E-Z-Sort. Each brand had its own punching code, and most users invented their own codes for their own purposes. (More on the latter in a future item.)
The edge-punched format was more suitable for aperture cards than Hollerith/IBM, since McBee was generally handled in a less mechanized way, less likely to damage the films. McBee was a Foy solution, partial automation with a solid connection to human muscles and senses. Hollerith could only be sorted by machines. McBee could be mechanized but preferred hand sorting.
If you needed a card with handwriting and images in the center and categories around the edges, you’d go for the McBee type. If you needed a card with categories in the center and text around the edges, you’d go for Hollerith. Foy puts human muscles and vision in the center, Tech puts mechanical categories in the center.
Filmsort wasn’t making a profit as part of Dexter Folder, especially after Dexter was merged into Miehle, maker of printing presses.
Around 1960, 3M took over Filmsort as an addition to its existing microfilm business. Success! In the ’60s many companies and agencies were using Filmsort to store microfilmed data, especially visual data like blueprints and maps and X-rays.
Langan himself resurfaced around 1960 and formed Langan Aperture Cards, with a burst of new patents through 1972. I can’t tell if his new company succeeded; the Delaware corporation commission still has an ‘inactive’ listing, but it’s not mentioned in the 3M history, written by the victors as always.
Author DW McDonald had a wise overview of filing systems:
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Uses of microfilm were thus basically passive. Microfilm records were designed neither for easy nor active use. Access and reference were, of course, possible through the use of simple microfilm readers of the time. But no information was stored on microfilm if it were known in advance that the data would frequently have to be looked up.
Secondly, documents were microfilmed collectively on a roll. This meant that a whole roll might have to be searched to find a particular document’s microfilm image. This was time consuming. It is no wonder that many operations utilizing microfilm during these years were referred to as record destruction programs.
The major reason for the aperture card was to develop a system for using microfilm as an active tool of information management rather than simply as a passive “dead storage” device. The use of microfilm as an active tool of information management has continued to be the reason for the aperture card’s growth and success. In fact, active use has progressed to the point where today the microfilm aperture card, in many cases, is eliminating the intermediate paper step in managing information and is becoming a replacement for paper itself.
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In next item I’ll animate the techniques and devices developed by Filmsort, plus some McBee devices that were also applicable to Filmsort.
Polistra's Mill 