On 2nd September 1870 it was proposed that the pigeons of Paris should be transported out of the city in hot-air balloons, on the assumption that – equipped with messages – they would fly back into the city.
The messages were initially written in very small writing on very thin paper, so that the starting weight of the homing pigeons was not unnecessarily increased on take-off and yet the largest possible amount of information could be conveyed. Until René Dagron recommended the use of his new method to the French Postmaster, General Germaine Rampont-Lechin: miniature images of documents on film material, also known today as microfilm.
Together they travelled to Tours, where the chemist Charles Barreswil had already miniaturised documents photographically. Here Dagron optimised his technique in such a way that one pigeon could transport 20 of his tiny prints. The animal airmail was able to fly more than 150,000 reels of microfilm into Paris - at least until the Prussians became aware of the pigeons and used falcons and hawks to fetch the birds out of the sky. It was not a good time to be a homing pigeon.
A short history of microfilm and how it facilitated communication in Paris
The history of microfilm is also the history of some very heroic homing pigeons, whose working environment was not exactly one of the most attractive during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. During this war Paris was besieged by the Prussians for four and a half months; postal and telegraphic communication channels were disrupted.
Dancer, Dagron and Belgian information scientists
Although René Dagron had the microfilm patented in 1859, the actual inventor of the “microphotograph” was a Briton named John Benjamin Dancer (1812 – 1887). In 1835 Dancer took over his father’s optical company in Manchester. Four years later he had found out how to shrink large images in a ratio of 160:1 and the microfilm was born. The Frenchman René Dagron (1819 – 1900), a photographer and inventor by trade, developed Dancer’s invention further and contributed to the standardisation of the production processes. When the question arose as to what this new technique could be used for, the Franco-Prussian War came just at the right time for Dagron.
Not everyone was convinced about the invention. In the “Dictionary of Photography” of 1858 the process of microphotography was still referred to as “insignificant and childish”. After the airmail success it was more than three decades later, in 1906, until the invention was identified by the Belgians Paul Otlet and Robert Goldschmidt for storing information in a space-saving way. Otlet is also regarded in this way as a “father of information science” – he invented the Universal Decimal Classification, a library classification which is still used today for indexing library holdings. In addition he was also responsible for introducing the American index card into Europe for library catalogues.
In 1906 Goldschmidt and Otlet published an essay together: “Sur une forme nouvelle du livre: le livre microphotographique”. They emphasis that, from a scientific perspective, books are not the best option for storing information, since access to libraries is not always easy. Therefore one needs a “new type of book” which simplifies access: the microphotograph (later re-named as microfilm or microfiche).
Otlet’s und Goldschmidt’s plea for the microfilm met with a slow response. Between 1927 and 1935, however, the American Library of Congress began to microfilm more than three million pages of books and manuscripts. Likewise, in 1935, Kodak’s “Recordak division” began storing the New York Times on 35 millimetre reels – the era of preserving newspapers on film had begun.
The microfilm does not produce dead links (404 not found)
Nowadays the internet frequently takes over the function of microfilms and microfiches. And yet the microfilm has one decisive advantage over digital archiving: the contents stored can be made visible with simple means – even over 500 years later when technology will have progressed much further and the retrieval of information, which was stored digitally with today’s technologies, will have become much more difficult. And that is also an advantage of microfilm: its storage life. With the right storage it can still be read in hundreds of years’ time – with a magnifying glass and some light.
There are many and varied projects for the long-term archiving of the contents of our archives, libraries, museums and, in general, of our cultural and intellectual heritage. One project, which is working with microfilm, is the “Zentrale Bergungsort der Bundesrepublik Deutschland“ (Central Storage Site of the Federal Republic of Germany) in the Barbarastollen underground archive near Freiburg, where more than 900 million records from archives and museums are stored on microfilm. The tunnel is more than 400 metres deep and should withstand both man-made and natural disasters. The cultural heritage of Germany should be able to survive here for at least 500 years.
More than 180,000 objects, which were recorded on microfilm, are available in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library) – sheet music, graphic works, newspapers and books. It is not only the long-term archiving of our cultural heritage which is important, but also the possibility to provide access to these holdings today.
