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An October, 1942 article on a microfilm reader

Toronto. We usually think of photography as synonymous with pictures. But it also had a very practical side as a means of record keeping – even before digital technology and EXIF el al file data. In the 1960s, when I was in our Dorval Quebec data centre, we recorded and stored many files not as paper copies, but as negatives on ‘microfiche‘ cards. A reader was used to view each tiny negative blown up to viewing size. A mechanical device in the reader allowed the fiche to be moved around so  every tiny negative could be placed under the viewing lens as needed.

Two decades later, when I researched our census records in the 1980s, I went to the Ontario Archives (then on Bay street and in reach of millions of people, now days away in Thunder Bay readily accessible by about 0.oo1 percent of the population …).  You called up a reel of negative film to see the census records for a particular year and town, then scrolled through the records to find your ancestors. The actual paper records were long gone, having been destroyed since the negative rolls took up so much less space. If you didn’t know your ancestors by name, town and street, you were out of luck.

Today with Ancestry these film records finally have an index by name – the way one would expect to search. The ‘indexers’ took a stab at translating names and hand writing – sometimes with hilarious and rather opaque results.

Another valuable use of the technology was to allow newspapers to be archived in a much smaller space yet still be read many years later.

This article from the October, 1942 issue of Popular Mechanics shows a new ‘microfilm’ reader. My thanks to George Dunbar for sharing this bit of nostalgia with us. Books like the Leica manuals show documents being copied to negatives. The use of readers doesn’t seem to be illustrated as much. Rendering documents to a far smaller physical space is just another way we could benefit from photography back when film was king.