Mondo Knows Facts
Film stock was slit from 70mm rolls
Eastman Kodak cut Edison's wide roll in half to make the standard gauge William Kennedy Dickson, working for Thomas Edison, needed a flexible film base for the Kinetoscope. Eastman Kodak supplied roll film 70mm wide, which was slit down the middle to give two strips 35mm across, each perforated along both edges. That gauge became the industry standard and is still in use. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Kodak's 16mm film was launched for amateursKodak launched the smaller gauge in 1923 for hobbyists and schoolsSuper 8 made home movies cheap and simpleKodak launched the cartridge format in 1965 with cameras to matchEdison's first film studio had a roof that openedThe Black Maria in New Jersey was built to turn with the sunKinetoscope parlours let one viewer watch at a timeThe first opened in New York in 1894 with rows of peep-show machinesAn IMAX frame is about ten times largerThe format runs film sideways through the camera at 15 perforations a frameSafety film replaced nitrate in the 1950sAcetate stock burned slowly, though it decayed into vinegar over time
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Tags: film-formats, edison, kodak
Film stock was slit from 70mm rolls: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Eastman Kodak cut Edison's wide roll in half to make the standard gauge. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.