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.

Where this comes from

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

Go further

More facts like this

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.