Silverbased

I was looking over some creaky old folding cameras recently—probably about 90 years old—and was amused by a curious fact: A couple of them used a film size you can still buy today.

Now, perforated 35mm film has existed ever since it emerged from Thomas Edison’s lab as a movie stock in 1892. (William Dickson is credited with the actual invention.) But only in the 1920s, after the Leica camera, did 35mm gain wide acceptance as a still-camera film.

Even then, bulk cine film had to be re-wound into special film cassettes that were proprietary to particular camera brands. Finally, in 1934 Eastman Kodak introduced the Retina camera, along with a new disposable metal film cassette preloaded with 35mm film. In keeping with Kodak’s other three-digit film designations, the new format was called “135.”

My father’s 1937 Retina: 3rd version, three years after the introduction of 135 film

Cleverly, Kodak’s German division (the former August Nagel cameraworks) designed the cassette to be backwards-compatible with Leica and Contax cameras, as well as the new Retina line. Thanks to the popularity of the Leica and the Retina—and perhaps even more so, the affordable Argus—the 135 cassette was a success. Today, it’s the universally-known way to shoot 35mm film (ignoring oddities like 250-exposure backs for motor-drive cameras).

Yet this is not the oldest still-camera format we continue to use today. That distinction belongs to 120 film.

Kodak introduced the “No. 2 Brownie Camera” in 1901, a simple $2.00 box camera designed to shoot images 2-1/4″x 3-1/4″*. And for this camera, Kodak introduced a new film size, 120.

The earliest spools had wooden cores (this one is from Ansco, who used the designations 4A or B2 for the size), later metal, and finally plastic. But the dimensions of these three spools are the same.

As time went on, 120 was adopted by a wide range of camera styles: From simple snapshooters to the fine Rolleiflex (introduced 1929) and Hasselblad (introduced 1948). Its use in these professional-level cameras helped keep demand for the format strong; so today it remains the most widely-available film size after 35mm.

I need to get on my soapbox for one brief rant: Please, please, please, don’t mistakenly call this size “120mm.” Even B&H’s online store has been known to get this wrong. The film is actually about 63mm wide, and the 120 is just an arbitrary number from the dim mists of Kodak history.

Originally Kodak’s three-digit size designations were supposed to have some meaning: but the rationales were rather obscure, and soon became unworkable as new sizes appeared. In any case, Kodak continued to give new film formats various three-digit monikers, like 127 for “Vest Pocket” camera rollfilm or 828 for “Bantam” size—right up through 110, the drop-in plastic cartridges introduced with the Pocket Instamatic series in 1972.

Today, the roadside of photo history is littered with the carcasses of extinct film formats. The once-common 116 and 616 sizes are gone, and so are 620 and 828. “Vest Pocket” 127 limps along with a single Croatian emulsion still available. Users of 126 Instamatics must scour the internet for the last sources of film.

Yet even at 107 years old, the 120 film format still seems to be going strong.

*Today we might call this “6×9 cm,” although that’s only approximate: the actual negative is more like 5.6 x 8.2 cm.