TECHNICAL EXHIBITION 
23 
very popular and fashionable machine. It cost £25, which was a lot of money, and it 
was a precision instrument. It was indeed extremely popular. I had one, naturally, and 
I remember very well altering the camera — and it wanted considerable alteration — to 
put in the first lumière colour plate which I had to cut to the right size in the dark room; 
quite a feat. Do you remember? I do not suppose you do. The lumière plate had to be 
exposed with the glass towards the lens, and consequently one had to allow for the 
focus. I thought this would be the most marvellous colour picture in the world, but as a 
matter of fact, to my immense disappointment, it failed due to the starch grains in the 
fabric of the photograph which somehow upset the image altogether. It was nothing 
comparable with the modern Kodachrome or that type of picture. It is funny, but stereo 
photography fell out altogether; it became unfashionable. I have never understood why. 
I rather think it was due to those things you see on the pier where you look through 
something and you see “What the Butler Saw”. It is very mysterious why it did not go 
on, but it disappeared and it was not really until the colour transparency came in that 
it revived. Instead of having our dear old size 45 X 107 mm we had to put up with the 
film of 35 mm breadth because that was the standard cinematograph size. Here indeed 
I think America made a great mistake because they changed the separation from 
63 mm, which is right, to 72 mm in order to facilitate the changing of films where they 
move two films at a time, two separations. That brought about a very narrow vertical 
picture which is unpopular these days because everybody, both in the cinema and every 
where else, wants a long, broad photograph instead of a vertical one. However, the great 
firm of Richard kept on their Veriscope and they moved their film first of all one and 
then three automatically to get over that. At one time such was the popularity of the 
stereophotography in America that thirty-five per cent of all Kodachromes developed 
at Rochester were, in fact, stereos. I do not understand why, unless it is due to the size, 
there has been a falling off lately, but there has. I still consider colour stereo the most 
satisfactory form of snapshot that can ever be taken. Of course, I know it lacks what 
the photographer calls control — that means messing a photograph about after you 
have taken it — but it is still a very satisfactory image. 
On the stereo side in projection, I have done all forms of experiment on that in 
cluding the classical one with black and white, with red and green, and also with 
polarized light. It all ends up not quite worth while, and I think the reason is that when 
you see a moving picture on a screen, unless you in your brain impose a third dimension 
the thing is nonsense; you have to impose a third dimension to make it sense. Conse 
quently, when you put it in artificially you are not so excited and happy about it and 
pleased with it as one would imagine. 
During the first war when the dear old Flying Corps was formed, as General 
Brown mentioned, three of us — Laws, myself and Campbell — were ordered by our 
general to start photography. We were sent down to the 1st Wing which was com 
manded by Colonel Trenchard, and I mast say we were about as welcome as the 
measles. They had plenty to do and they did not want these new-fangled ideas pushed 
on to them. Nor had we any equipment at all except some bellows cameras. We made 
some box cameras with focal-plane shutters. A focal-plane shutter is a grave mistake in 
a hand-held camera because hand-held cameras wave about. I always remember Maps 
GHQ coming to me with two photographs we had taken in which one particular farm 
was shown in a different place in each photograph. This was entirely due to the fact that 
somebody had moved the camera, and the image was piled up on one side and spread 
out on the other. This is a sharp reminder of the troubles you can get into when you are 
a beginner. 
We got quite good, and I suppose it was rather boastful to say it but we were 
always under the impression — I think Laws will agree with me — that we were better 
than any other nation at the time: you know, fiddling along but getting there in the end.