Graphic View - A historical note

The other day a coworker of mine brought an interesting camera to work.
My first impression was that it was a Graphic View, but the design was
rather rough, not like other GVs I've seen. Here's the story he told me
in a nutshell.

This camera was built by his father, a machinist who worked in the Wright
brothers' shop. It was assembled for display at the 1938 World's Fair. Some
folks from the Graflex company saw it there and spent several hours taking
notes and measurements. The Graphic View was introduced the following
year...

He says he has a photo of his dad, with the camera and one of the Wright
brothers (I forget which one) in the shop. This guy is 64 years old, so the
timing is right. I've never known him to lie, and he's had quite a long and
colorful career in electronics. Over the years he's mentioned that his dad
was a machinist, had some connection to the Wrights in the past, etc.
The two lenses he had with the camera were older - a Kodak Anastigmat
in a rimset shutter and some sort of barrel lens (brass) with Waterhouse
stops, sorry but I didn't see the name.

I plan to start working on him to let me put up a web page on this camera,
it must surely be of interest to some historians or collectors. And no, it's
not for sale (I asked).

In case anyone is interested...

Steve

In article , Stephan
Goldstein wrote:

I plan to start working on him to let me put up a web page on this camera,
it must surely be of interest to some historians or collectors. And no, it's
not for sale (I asked).

In case anyone is interested...

I'd be intereted. If/when you have any pictures of it, please put them
up somewhere. I spent some of the happiest hours of my life behind a
Graphic View.

In article ,
Stephan Goldstein wrote:
The other day a coworker of mine brought an interesting camera to work.
My first impression was that it was a Graphic View, but the design was
rather rough, not like other GVs I've seen. Here's the story he told me
in a nutshell.

This camera was built by his father, a machinist who worked in the Wright
brothers' shop. It was assembled for display at the 1938 World's Fair.

1938 sounds wrong, for "the Wright brothers' shop". By 1938, I am pretty
sure there was no longer even an independent Wright company, much less
a small shop run by the Wright brothers. By then, hadn't the Wrights'
company been merged with Curtis, on its way to becoming Curtis-Vought
and, myriad transformations later, LTV?

--
Thor Lancelot Simon

"We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single moral
aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others." - H.L.A. Hart

"Stephan Goldstein" wrote in message
...

He says he has a photo of his dad, with the camera and one of the Wright
brothers (I forget which one) in the shop. [... 1938...]

It was Orville because Wilbur died in 1912.

This guy is 64 years old, so the
timing is right.

He would have been four years old.

The Graflex camera preceeded 1938.

Is this all adding up?

Thor Lancelot Simon spake thus:

In article ,
Stephan Goldstein wrote:

The other day a coworker of mine brought an interesting camera to work.
My first impression was that it was a Graphic View, but the design was
rather rough, not like other GVs I've seen. Here's the story he told me
in a nutshell.

This camera was built by his father, a machinist who worked in the Wright
brothers' shop. It was assembled for display at the 1938 World's Fair.

1938 sounds wrong, for "the Wright brothers' shop". By 1938, I am pretty
sure there was no longer even an independent Wright company, much less
a small shop run by the Wright brothers. By then, hadn't the Wrights'
company been merged with Curtis, on its way to becoming Curtis-Vought
and, myriad transformations later, LTV?

Ah, yes: Ling-Temco-Vought, as I remember, right?


--
Second, Scientologists are like computers trying to run an emulation
of another computer. It can be done, but the performance is awful.
Scientologists are trying to run a bad copy of LRH.

- Keith Henson, from alt.religion.scientology

"Thor Lancelot Simon" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Stephan Goldstein wrote:
The other day a coworker of mine brought an interesting
camera to work.
My first impression was that it was a Graphic View, but
the design was
rather rough, not like other GVs I've seen. Here's the
story he told me
in a nutshell.

This camera was built by his father, a machinist who
worked in the Wright
brothers' shop. It was assembled for display at the 1938
World's Fair.

1938 sounds wrong, for "the Wright brothers' shop". By
1938, I am pretty
sure there was no longer even an independent Wright
company, much less
a small shop run by the Wright brothers. By then, hadn't
the Wrights'
company been merged with Curtis, on its way to becoming
Curtis-Vought
and, myriad transformations later, LTV?

--
Thor Lancelot Simon


Curtis-Wright. Glenn Curtis and the Wright brothers were
serious rivals in the early days. It is ironic that the two
companies eventually merged. Curtis built many fighter
planes for the military including the famous P-40 used by
the Flying Tigers. However, their designs proved wanting and
by WW-2 they were no longer in the airplane business
concentrating on aircraft engines (although they built other
company's designs under contract). Curtis-Wright was one of
the two principle makers of large aircraft engines (Pratt
and Whitney was the other) and made tens of thousands of
them. They also made propellers. By 1938 Curtis-Wright was a
very large company but Orville Wright, the surviving Wright
brother, had nothing to do with it. Orville lived until 1948
and continued researching into aircraft design so he
probably had a private shop of some sort.
Its possible the Graphic View was an outside design but I
am skeptacle of the idea that the design was stolen.


--
---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA

I spoke with my coworker again today to get a few more details about
the Graphic View prototype. But first let me reply to a couple of
specific comments that have been made in this thread.

Someone questioned the "age thing". Please re-read my original post!
My coworker is 64 years old (now). I stated that _his father_ built the
camera. Dad was certainly not 4 years old in 1938!

Milt (his dad's name) worked for Orville Wright in Caldwell, NJ. There
is, or at least was, a "Caldwell Wright Airport" there. My colleague is
not certain of the name of the company at that time. Milt was hired as
an "understudy" machinist for the fellow Orville hired to develop and
build an aluminum-block aircraft engine.

The camera was built for 3-1/4x4-1/4 format and was made specifically
to photograph aircraft under construction inside a hangar, where
space availability dictated the use of a wide-angle lens. The perspective
was terrible with cameras they could obtain, so Milt designed and built
this one. Apparently Orville was impressed with the design and machine
work, and suggested that it be added to the company's display at the
World's Fair. My colleague has a photo of his father Milt, Orville Wright,
and the camera, taken in the shop, from 1938 or 1939. Milt went to
work for Bell Labs in 1939; he died in 1968. [Milt must have been quite
a guy. The well-known photo of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, the
Nobel prize winners who discovered the cosmic microwave background
radiation, is cropped - the original photo shows a third person -- Milt!
He worked on the antennas.]

I believe Graflex introduced the Graphic View in 1940, at least that's
the date I found on the web in a post by Jon Grepstad. BTW, that same
post mentioned that a monorail camera had been introduced by Kodak
in 1936-1939, I have no idea if Milt was aware of this camera before he
built his own.

My colleague has agreed to allow me to post photos and a more detailed
writeup when we both have the time to make it happen. I don't know how
long this will take as we're both up to our eyeballs in different projects,
but I'll try to make it sooner rather than later.

Regards,

Steve

(Stephan Goldstein) writes:

I believe Graflex introduced the Graphic View in 1940, [...]

See URL:http://www.graflex.org/articles/graphic-view/.

-tih
--
Don't ascribe to stupidity what can be adequately explained by ignorance.