Now let’s look at the process of making and punching and selecting Filmsort cards.
I’ve modeled some of Filmsort’s patents and reused some of my old McBee animations, subbing a Filmsort McBee card for a non-image McBee card.
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Polistra is an office manager tasked with turning a company’s film into categorized cards. She has lots of 35mm film already exposed and developed. The images are a mix of microfilm and normal camera pix.
The first stage is mounting the film in the aperture card. This machine was patented by Filmsort. I can’t tell if anyone actually used it; Dexter Folder was also making a large industrial-scale mounter, which was more likely used by the industrial-scale customers for aperture cards.
The roll of film starts from the top. I’m showing it with multi-colored frames. The card inserts behind the lens. There was also a roll of transparent adhesive plastic, starting from the bottom. The film doesn’t have a takeup reel because each frame ends up as part of a card.
The mechanism is clever and simple. The lever pushes a hollow square plunger through a square die, mashing the film and the adhesive against the hole in the card.
After the push, one entire frame of the film is in the hole, held in place by one inner frame of adhesive.
Looking through the viewer, Polistra lines up the film and adhesive with the hole in the card, using the two knobs.
In the same view without the films, you can see the little light bulb mounted inside the plunger box. The light shines through the film and adhesive sandwich so you can align them.
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Now each card needs to be categorized by punching out the slots corresponding to the relevant categories.
This McBee punching machine was pictured in one source, and I followed the picture when I modeled it originally. Since then I’ve found the patent, which makes the functions clear.
You would set up the numbers for one category area using the 8 columns of buttons for up to 8 numerical fields on one side of the card, then hit the big button on the right to punch these. The long side of a typical card contained 6 or 7 fields, so the 8 columns would usually handle one side of a card. The 8 buttons on top erased or zeroed the column under each button. The two white buttons on left were the memory or repeat. Hit the top white button to keep the current set of 8 fields active for several punches in a row, then hit the bottom white button to clear the memory.
The process would have felt like an adding machine except that you were consciously forming the 1247 pattern for each field.
Mr McBee has just punched in 1309, so the card would look like this after turning it over:
Now Polistra will demonstrate the first step of the selecting process. Assume she’s looking for cards with 1309. She begins by finding cards with a 1 in the thousands place.
McBee selection is inverse to the usual way of thinking. It’s more like the military volunteer method, where the soldiers who are NOT volunteering to check out the minefield are asked to step back, leaving the volunteers and the sleepers in the original row.
The poker was called a tumbler for some unknown reason. (It should have been a stinger.) Polistra inserts the tumbler into the 1 hole of the thousands field. Cards that were NOT punched in this slot can be pulled up, while the cards with a PUNCH in this digit stay down. She then places the UNWANTED cards in the red box, leaving only the few WANTED cards in the original blue box.
She would then tumble a 1 and a 2 in the hundreds field, to complete the 3; then do nothing for the zero in the tens field; then tumble the 2 and 7 in the ones field.
All remaining cards in the original blue box would then be 1309.
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McBee also patented a portable self-contained Kit for manual punching and sorting. I doubt that it was ever built or sold; like most inventions it tries to pack in every possible feature. I have a soft spot for Kits or Equipments that include everything you need for a task. Armies were major developers and consumers of Kits; professional travelers also enjoyed them. This Kit would have been useful for an itinerant Medical Records Librarian, serving many small practices or hospitals who didn’t need a fulltime librarian.
Here the kit is closed up for carrying like a suitcase.
Polistra is using one of the foldout areas to select some large-size cards, with other stacks held by the other straps and flaps. The left cover held Tumblers and Punches.
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Then the card is stored or filed until you need to find one with the desired category. A file clerk or researcher could view cards one at a time in this viewer, which is just a regular microfilm viewer adapted to hold Filmsort cards instead of a roll of film.
The viewer contained a lamp, focused by a reflector, shining through the film itself.
The image bounced off three mirrors in a complicated way, widening out to reach the screen.
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Conclusion:
Filmsort’s vision of a bright future was already clouded in 1966. Digital storage was evolving fast as tapes (dead storage) were replaced by hard disks (live storage), first commercialized in ’57. In fact the aperture card is exactly the hard disk version of microfilm. Instead of a roll that you had to skim through to reach the desired item, you could immediately sort the cards to find all cards matching the desired search.
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Happy ending: Filmsort faded but aperture cards are still being sold and categorized.
Polistra's Mill 