1207
Spencer and Athur James Melhuish. They described a
camera attachment called a roller slide or rollholder
containing a band made by gumming together sheets
of sensitized paper. The paper was attached at each end
to a pair of rollers and could be wound from one roller
to another in order to take several exposures in succes-
sion. Several similar devices were patented during the
1850s and 1860s, including one designed by the famous
portrait photographer Camille Silvy, in 1867. None of
these early devices, however, were widely used. The
fi rst rollholder to enjoy a modest degree of commercial
success was designed in 1875 by Leon Warneke, a Rus-
sian living in England. Warneke’s rollholder contained a
one hundred exposure roll of tissue coated with a fi lm of
gelatine or dry collodion emulsion that could be stripped
from the paper for processing. Warneke’s design was
the inspiration for the fi rst commercially successful
rollholder, designed by George Eastman and William
H Walker in 1884. The Eastman-Walker rollholder
used strips of sensitised paper or stripping fi lm, sold
under the name “Eastman’s American Film.” Such was
Eastman’s faith in the future of fi lm photography that
he changed the name of his company from The Eastman
Dry Plate Company to The Eastman Dry Plate and Film
Company. At this time, ‘fi lm’ effectively meant “paper,”
used either as a negative material in its own right or as a
support from which a negative-bearing emulsion layer
could be stripped during processing. Eastman was not
alone in realising the disadvantages associated with
paper and the need to develop an alternative support
for fi lm photography. However, any substitute would
have to fulfi l a number of criteria—it would have to
be light, tough, fl exible and transparent. Many fl exible
fi lm supports were tried in the 1880s, including the idea
of using several layers of collodion emulsion, but the
answer was eventually found in one of the most impor-
tant synthetic materials developed during the nineteenth
century—celluloid.
Celluloid has its origins in the work of an English-
man, Alexander Parkes. In 1855, Parkes was granted
a patent for a substance which he called Parkesine
produced using a mixture of oils and gums as a solvent
for nitrocellulose. In America, brothers John and Isiah
Hyatt discovered that camphor under heat and pressure
acts as a nitrocellulose solvent. They called their new
material celluloid and in 1872 they founded the Cel-
luloid Manufacturing Company which made a range of
products from celluloid, such as dominoes and billiard
balls. As celluloid became better known, its qualities
recognised and its use as a substitute for other materials
widened, photographic experimenters became increas-
ingly interested in its possibilities. A number of people
attempted, unsuccessfully, to promote the use of sheets
of celluloid as a substitute for glass plates, including
David and Fortier in France and Waterhouse in England.
The breakthrough came in 1888 when John Carbutt, an
Englishman born in Sheffi eld who had emigrated to
America as a young man, put on the market the very
fi rst commercially produced gelatin emulsion-coated
celluloid sheet fi lm. Although marketed as “fl exible
negative fi lm,” Carbutt’s celluloid sheets were, in fact,
relatively stiff and unsuitable for production in long
strips for use in rollholders.
In 1887 Hannibal Goodwin, a relatively unknown
clergyman and amateur photographer in Newark, New
Jersey, fi led an application in the U.S. Patent Offi ce
for a ‘transparent sensitive pellicle better adapted for
photographic purposes, especially in connection with
roller-cameras.’ Goodwin was a self-taught chemist
and his patent application was broad and somewhat
ambiguous in its wording. For two years, the application
remained unissued, undergoing several amendments, but
by this time other inventors, most notably George East-
man and his chemist Henry Reichenbach had entered
the fi eld. In 1888, the year that he introduced the Kodak
camera, George Eastman began to seriously explore the
possibility of manufacturing fl exible rolls of sensitised
celluloid. He set his young research chemist, Henry
Reichenbach on the task and the following year both
Eastman and Reichenbach fi led patent applications for
fl exible celluloid fi lm. These interfered with Goodwin’s
application, fi led two years earlier, setting in motion a
legal battle that would drag on for over twenty years.
Eastman’s celluloid fi lm went on sale in the autumn
of 1889 and was available in a range of sizes to fi t the
various rollholders and the growing range of Kodak
cameras (four different models by this time). The com-
mercial potential for rollfi lm was enormous, as Eastman
quickly realised. In March 1889 he had written to his
business partner William Walker: “The fi eld for it is
immense... If we can fully control it, I would not trade
it for the telephone.”
Eastman did not enjoy a monopoly of fi lm manufac-
ture but his company did come to dominate the market.
Throughout the 1890s, boosted by the rapid growth of
amateur photography and its use in cinematography,
transparent celluloid rollfi lm was produced in ever
increasing quantities. All this time, Goodwin’s patent
application remained under consideration. It was not
until 1898, eleven years after his original application
had been fi led, that Goodwin was fi nally granted a
patent. After his death in 1900, Goodwin’s patent was
sold to the American fi rm of Anthony and Scovill, who
took out a suit against Kodak for patent infringement
in 1902. The case dragged on for over ten years and,
fi nally, in August 1913 it was ruled that Goodwin’s
patent had indeed been infringed, “not on the ground
that Eastman had copied the process, but that Eastman’s
process, though an improvement, came within the Good-
win patent claims.” The following year, Eastman paid