Mandel-ette courtesy of Jason Penney on Flickr via Camera–Wiki
Toronto. Do you remember street photographers? They were itinerant photographers who snapped people as they walked along city streets and sold their work accordingly. Sometimes the photo was a ferrotype (tintype) and the finished photo was ready in a minute or two. Other times the subject was given a number to call next day to pick up the photo.
Those who took tintypes may have used the Mandel-ette made by the Chicago Ferrotype Co. (CFC), described in McKeown’s as, “Founded by Louis & Mandel Mandel, the Chicago Ferrotype Co. was the United States’ leading producer of direct positive ‘street’ cameras for tintypes, button tintypes, paper prints, and post cards.”
A Mandel-ette today is worth about 8x its original cost. An ad from 1924 offers about 10,000 cameras for a free 10-day trial. Budding businessmen could pay just fifty cents US a week for twenty weeks to buy the $10 camera if they kept it. CFC also sold supplies by mail. Interestingly, the camera seemed to be a basic box camera (fixed focus, small aperture) but offered prints in a minute long before Polaroid’s famous “pictures in a minute” system that was offered shortly after the second war ended.
Click here to see the manual or visit Camera-Wiki and after reading the material, follow the link at the bottom of the page (same manual). My thanks to George Dunbar for sharing this 1924 ad he unearthed recently.
