Kodak 100 years ago and 99 years ago

100 years ago Kodak brought out the first rangefinder camera in the 3A size. Later that year the 1A Autographic Kodak Special with rangefinder appeared. Since these cameras can still be used with 120 film, I undertook a restoration of the December, 1918 printing of the manual for the 1A camera. this makes it 99 years old to the month. I also have the March 1918 version too. The difference is the December version added two photos of the young man demonstrating how to hold the camera.

The December 1918 manual also came with a separate four page insert of Revised Instructions for using the Optima No. 1 shutter. These were in terrible shape and required a lot of time to restore. I felt they were important and possibly the only surviving example of these instructions. These revised instructions lead off in the PDF for quick access. But just as important, these instructions are probably applicable to the other sizes and models of Kodak cameras that also used the Optima No. 1 shutter.

I was also planning a second posting with those Revised Instructions in a 600a DPI PDF for easier reading.

However, I just found out I cannot post the PDF formats as attachments. It used to be possible to post any file type. So this means I cannot post these for people to download.

CHEERS...Mathew

Hi Chuck,

Actually, no. The current list of uploadable files for a posting does not include the PDF format.

CHEERS...

You can post links to external servers for anything, web page or any file type.

For upload, PDF is not included. PNG is, though, so you can convert to PNG.

PNG is one image per file, so multi-page PDFs will be split up.

JPEG is not a good choice for text images.