What if Kodak introduced Super 8 in 1932?

[Ed Gordon]

It occured to me that if Kodak had done 8mm with the superior design that came with Super 8, what would have happened?

Since magnetic tape recording was invented in 1928, Super 8 sound could have been part of the introduction of 8mm.

All those projectors in schools would have been Super 8. All those films produced for schools would have been distributed on Super 8.

Commercial movies distributed on 16mm would have been on Super 8

The Television News tag line, "film at 11" would be talking about Super 8 film.

Video stores would have been selling/renting Super 8 movies, not tapes or discs.

Maybe Kodachrome would have prevented the introduction of the infamous Kodak Eastman color film.

What else might have happened?

[Dominique De Bast]

What if Kodak have not existed at all, so that Pathé could fill the world with 9.5? 😉

[Osi Osgood]

Kodachrome almost came out at the same time as three strip Technicolor. Three strip Technicolor came out in 1932, Kodachrome was in the late 30's. Occasionally, you'll find these late 30's Kodachrome home movies on ebay, and the color looks just as good as when it was processed

[Steve Klare]

That's a "Chicken and Egg" discussion, Dominique!

Kodak patented roll film in 1888, and without it there could be no 9.5mm. (...or 8mm, 16mm, or 35mm or 70mm, 110, 126, etc. ...)

Kodak had proposed the idea of Super-8 sound being used by news crews after they introduced S8 sound. It's part of the reason they designed the 200 foot cartridge. It never gained any traction.

I remember 16mm in schools up into my college years and to be honest I never saw them do anything with it I haven't seen done with Super-8 too. It was a middling screen size in a darkened room. The screen in my living room is bigger than any classroom screen I ever saw.

-but for one thing, in both cases 16mm got there first and also the gear was by and large pretty bullet proof. 16mm managed to survive WWII and a lot more!

Could 8mm have been ruggedized? Sure, but probably not with the cartridge system.

[Dominique De Bast]

That's a "Chicken and Egg" discussion, Dominique!

Indeed, Steve, you cannot change History, anyway (is that good or bad ?, I don't know)

[Steve Klare]

Ohhhh....

The world would be an been an even bigger mess than it is now if we could go back and change the past!

You'd drop by a friend's house to say hello and halfway there forget he existed! Then on the drive home pass what should have been his house and see some stranger living there.

What happened? -while you where driving over there, somebody traveled back in time and killed his Grandpa!

Unfortunately your now non-existent friend's now non-existent infant daughter was 25 years away from inventing a cure for blindness...

(Star Trek got a lot of mileage out of this idea!)

[Mike Newell]

There would be a lot more home movies for sale on eBay.

[Ed Gordon]

What if Kodak have not existed at all, so that Pathé could fill the world with 9.5?

Timing is everything. The Germans invented magnetic tape in 1928.

Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark.

9.5 could have be designed to use the technology to add sound to movies. The problem would be the perf being between the frames instead of along the edge.

The width of 9.5 mm was chosen because three strips of film could be made from one strip of unperforated 28 mm film. This was useful when duplicating films, because only one strip of 28 mm had to be processed. When discontinued in 1927, 9.5 mm strips were cut from 35 mm film.

Inventions are often based on things already invented. If that were not the case, perhaps Pathe could have designed something to replace both 8mm and 16mm. For example:

The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is four feet, eight and a half inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the U.S. railroads. Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the prerailroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used. Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long-distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads? The first long-distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of its legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman war chariots made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, the standard U.S. railroad gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches derives from the specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses.

Source

Kodachrome almost came out at the same time as three strip Technicolor. Three strip Technicolor came out in 1932, Kodachrome was in the late 30's.

Kodak also invented the digital camera, which ultimately lead to their bankruptcy.

There would be a lot more home movies for sale on eBay.

Yes indeed! And a lot more feature films.

[Steve Klare]

The story goes that Standard Gauge was originally 4'8", but George Stephenson had trouble with the wheels binding going around curves, so he shoved one rail outwards a half-inch! This is how we wound up with four feet, eight and a half inches. The 56 inches may have been from Roman horse-butts, but that half inch is all George Stephenson!

(Maybe it's just me, but shoving the wheels inwards a half inch sounds easier!)

There were once two US standard gauges: 56.5" was up North, but down South was an even 5 feet. Following the end of the Civil War the South's railroads were in pretty bad shape, and during Reconstruction the Northern standard was applied everywhere.

-except when the Tsar wanted railroads built in Russia, he hired an American engineer to consult, a Southern American engineer, and to this day the Russian standard gauge is 5 feet.

[Ed Gordon]

The story goes that Standard Gauge was originally 4'8", but George Stephenson had trouble with the wheels binding going around curves, so he shoved one rail outwards a half-inch! This is how we wound up with four feet, eight and a half inches. The 56 inches may have been from Roman horse-butts, but that half inch is all George Stephenson!

(Maybe it's just me, but shoving the wheels inwards a half inch sounds easier!)

There were once two US standard gauges: 56.5" was up North, but down South was an even 5 feet. Following the end of the Civil War the South's railroads were in pretty bad shape, and during Reconstruction the Northern standard was applied everywhere.

-except when the Tsar wanted railroads built in Russia, he hired an American engineer to consult, a Southern American engineer, and to this day the Russian standard gauge is 5 feet.

So film gauges and train gauges are subject to vagaries of the place they will be used. The only trains I know much about are American Flyer, and Lionell.

I still own the American Flyer train set I got for Christmas many decades ago. In Washington state we have (or had) four narrow gauge railroads (36" or less). Here is a list.

[Rob Young]

Ed, when I was a kid aged 9 or 10, a shop in a near by town in the North East of England was selling super 8 and video but also hiring out super 8 movies along with VHS; so this isn't all just pipe dream, it really did happen!

[Brian Fretwell]

I would say that of Kodak introduced it in 1938 all Super 8 would have been Double Super 8 as with the 8mm format they introdueced then on reels, not plastic cartridges.

I believe I know the reason for Super 8 not gaining favour in news reporting. I knew a BBC film editor (Derel Bottle, not Keith Wilton) in the 1970's, he said that the switch from 35mm to 16mm meant they could still "eyeball" edit pictures - that is directly looking at the film, not with an editor/viewer if the repost was realy late. He said that once the start of an item went into the tlecine as they were just finishing the editing of the tail end. Try doing that with Super 8!

[Dominique De Bast]

9.5 could have be designed to use the technology to add sound to movies. The problem would be the perf being between the frames instead of along the edge.

Sound is not a problem for 9.5 😉

[Ed Gordon]

9.5 magnetic sound as early as 1951. I am impressed! Kodak seemed to behind Pathe in so many ways.

[Brian Harrington]

As I just mentioned in another thread, we (or at least I) would be happier today if Super 8 was never invented, and they stuck with Standard 8mm. A lot was discussed in the pet peeve thread, too.

The blunder was not in creating a gauge that allowed a larger image; the blunder was keeping it the same width, so the suits could twist the arms of the engineers to design projectors that would run both gauges. How about a VCR that played both Beta and VHS? Never happened, thankfully. I'm surprised they didn't force the engineers to design a camera that took both Super 8 and Standard 8mm!!!

This led to the sprocketless machines folks, which were/are pure crap.

I'd bet not one engineer agreed a dual-8 projector was a good idea. But they got paid, and did what they were told to do. The unintended consequence was that in the year 2024, most of us are forced to use a dual-8 projector to watch Standard 8mm films with the same brightness and overall picture quality of the best Super 8 machines. (Yes, I know there are a handful of Standard 8mm machines that take halogen lamps, yada yada yada, and we've dicussed them before. And you can convert them to halogen, etc, but the planets need to align to get the light properly focused onto the 8mm aperture.)

Those smaller sprocket holes made tight tolerances too important, and to this day I run films whose tolerance is just off a bit for a given projector. At least I have the option to run it in a different projector -- something many of us didn't have in the late 60s into the 70s.

I guess if it happened in 1928, 8mm would have been 8mm. And there eventually was 8mm sound so we know Super 8 wasn't needed for the mag sound stripe.

I think 16mm would still have been used for what 16mm was used for, though.

Again, Super 8 was a modification of standard 8mm, which introduced compromises. So if they wanted a gauge smaller than what they already had, but with a bigger image than what 8mm wound up with, the width of the film would have been larger than 8mm. (Since there would have been no Standard 8mm at all, hypothetically, there wouldn't have been an already Standard 8mm image size to compare to!) No way they would have made those sprocket holes that small.

That's why they came up with 8mm as it was -- half the width of 16mm. Early on, they decided they wanted to make things easy, and just be able to cut from the film they already produced - 16mm. Cut it in half. Use 2/3s of it -- wasted film -- lost money. Money makes the world go 'round.

Super 8 -- still can cut 16mm in half. Just punch smaller sprocket holes. Problem solved! (Though not in my book!)

I guess it all comes down to what you collect. About 20 years ago, I vowed not to buy any more Standard 8mm films. But because I am a silent afficionado, I've had to buy 8mm prints since they are much easier to get in 8mm and often were never released in Super 8, or if they were, are very rare in Super 8. And I am still not 100% happy with the machines I am forced to run them on, even when something like my Elmo GP runs them beautifully. I still see my all metal, heavy B&H 8mm machines sitting on the shelf with burnt-out lamps and it drives me crazy.

Seems most people here are into STAR WARS and all those Derann features in Super 8 so I'm in the minority, I guess.


Forget producing new projectors -- I wish someone would make a fairly reasonably-priced long-play unit for 8mm reels (which of course with an adapter would take Super 8) to add some oomph to my Standard 8mm machines (albeit dual-8 ones.) All but one are limited to 400'!!!

Much easier than designing and building a new projector -- don't even need to know anything about a projector or film -- just one side with a motor to spin the reel, with a clutch that allows it to slow down a bit with resistance, and another side to just let a reel rotate freely with some resistance so the film doesn't spill off. No critical tolerance to run 8mm film smoothly or anything like that. Shouldn't be that hard. And yes I know you can fashion one like Chip did with a 16mm projector, but you do need a lot of room for that, and I did an on-the-fly one recently with a "rewind" for the feed reel and my Elmo ST-1200HD for takeup, and it worked with a Bolex 18-5. But one false move and I almost knocked the thing over! Plus I stacked the feed reel "rewind" on boxes to get the right height and not block the lens. I'm still surpised it worked for a full 2 hour movie on 1200 foot reels!

If you use a 16mm projector, it would probably only work with your projector running at 24fps, and the 16mm one running at 18fps. My Bolex ran at 18fps, so the pull of the 16mm would be too strong I'd imagine. I set the Elmo ST-1200HD at 18fps, of course, which was perfect. It was a silent film from the teens, a drama to boot, so 18fps was required. Not a Keystone Kops where you want it fast!