HF The History of Photography 600pág

404 The gelatine period
that has taken place in mass-production photographic prmtmg. Eighty years ago
Valentine's gave employment to forty workers, who turned out approximately
18,000 albumen prints weekly. In 1952 a staff of thirty-five in the photographic
department produced half a million prints weekly at peak production for six months
of the year, with a total annual output of fifteen million.15
The forerunner of the modern machinery just referred to was the steam-driven
'automatic exposure, developing and fixing machine' invented in 1860 by CHARLES
FONT A YNE of Cincinnati, Ohio. With this, prints could be made from one negative
at the rate of 2,500 an hour. By concentrating sunlight through a 7 in. condenser, as
many as 12,000 prints an hour could be made, but this reduced the circle of illumination
to 1-t in. diameter, restricting output to tiny pictures. The paper was passed in
a continuous band under the negative in the printing box, and was then developed.
It would be supposed that such machines would have been used by wholesale producers
of photographic prints everywhere, particularly during the carte-de-visite
craze, but the only time we hear of its use was for the production, by the inventor,
of 100,000 portraits of President Lincoln immediately after his election in November
1860.