Page 41 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Benjamin Dancer: Microphotographic Daguerreotypes 1839.
Although Dancer was inventing these daguerreotypes (micrographs - that could only be viewed properly with a microscope) as early as 1839, and although he developed his technique during the 1840s, and adopted the Scott Archer Wet Collodion plate instead of the Daguerreotype after 1851, his discovery of the 160:1 size-reduction ratios (that he achieved back then) was not applicably (or commercially) relevant in 1839. Despite this, the real value of the microphotograph - or microfilm as it became known - was not realised until the 20th century, in the face of the massive increase in the amount of business and governmental paperwork or documentation and the resulting document- processing as the mechanisation of industry and banking progressed. Microfilm and sheets of related micro-photographs called micro-fiche where still in use in the late 20th century - as catalogues of car spares for example, or as a stills catalogue in a film-museum.
(In 1859, Rene Dagron had patented an application of microfilm that was used as a method of compressing military correspondence during the Franco Prussian War 1870-1871). The next big breakthrough came in 1925 when the banker George McCarthy patented the Checkograph - a microfilm- based technology that recorded and archived bank records, cheques and receipts. After this Emmanuel Goldberg (then boss of the lens company Zeiss Ikon) invents his Statistical Machine - a photo-electric automatic sorter for microfilm/microfiche (plate of related microfilms), and the gradual integration of image-based micro-storage and information processing and retrieval technology began.
In 1945 the American scientist and computing pioneer Vannevar Bush in an article in Atlantic Monthly entitled As We May Think, outlined a description of a device he called the Memex - a ‘memory-extension’ machine that used microfilm to store documents, papers, photographs, diagrams etc and a form of opto-electric tagging for Memex users to link microfilm documents together and create associative knowledge trails for other Memex users to follow - in order to publish and present a scientific or academic argument - this was a direct hint at ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’ systems....and it inspired modern computing pioneers like Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart some twenty years later...