Today, we think nothing of sticking thousands of pages of documents on a tiny SD card, or just pushing it out to some cloud service. But for decades, this wasn’t possible. Yet companies still generated huge piles of paper. What could be done? The short answer is: microfilm.

However, the long answer is quite a bit more complicated. Microfilm is, technically, a common case of the more generic microform. A microform is a photographically reduced document on film. A bunch of pages on a reel of film is microfilm. If it is on a flat card — usually the size of an index card — that’s microfiche. On top of that, there were a few other incidental formats. Aperture cards were computer punch cards with a bit of microfilm included. Microcards were like microfiche, but printed on cardboard instead of film.

In its heyday, people used specialized cameras, some made to read fanfold computer printer paper, to create microfilm. There were also computer output devices that could create microfilm directly.

How Did That Happen?

Although microfilm really caught on in the mid-20th century, it is much older than that. John Benjamin Dancer appears to have been the first to reduce documents by about 160:1 using daguerreotypes in 1839. He also used wet collodion plates later, but didn’t see any real point to the work.

However, two astronomers, James Glaisher and John Herschel, did see the value of the technology in the early 1850s. By 1870, carrier pigeons were carrying newspaper pages by microfilm into blockaded Paris during the Franco-Prussian War’s Siege of Paris, thanks to René Dagron. During the relatively short conflict, about 115,000 messages had flown by pigeon.

The technology languished for a while, although Reginald A. Fessenden did suggest in 1896 that engineering documents would be a good thing to microfilm, proposing 150 million words in a square inch of film. In fact, nearly a century later, many electronic vendors made their databooks and application notes available on microfiche.

However, it would be 1920 before we see “modern” microfilm usage. The Checkograph, a device patented in 1925 by George McCarthy (with a US Patent in 1930), let banks store cancelled checks on film. Kodak acquired the device in 1928 and rebranded it Recordak.

As you might expect, big libraries jumped right in. Starting in the late 1920s, libraries including the British Library and the Library of Congress adopted microforms. Kodak started filming The New York Times for distribution, while Harvard University Library started filming foreign newspapers in 1938.

While most uses of microfilm are made to save storage space, it can also help save space for carrying mail, as the military did during World War II.

Alternatives

There were many less-than-successful attempts to bring microfilm into the hands of readers. Retired Navy Admiral Bradley Allen Fiske created the Fiske-O-Scope. The earliest designs had two eyepieces, but they eventually evolved into a single-eye viewing scope. A roller shifted the eyepiece along the reading material, which, initially, were long sheets of paper. Eventually, the Fiske-O-Scope changed to film.

You can see the Admiral using his device, along with some reading material in the accompanying figure. Although the experience of reading with the Fiske-O-Scope may have left something to be desired, the concept itself was clearly well ahead of its time. Ultimately, it promised to let the user carry their personal library around with them — an idea that arguably wouldn’t truly be realized until the birth of the modern e-reader.

Like many great ideas, there wasn’t a single point where the perfect machine appeared. It was more of a slow ooze. There was clearly a need to compress stored documents. It just needed the right equipment.

Equipment and Film

Early microforms were projected with conventional equipment like a magic lantern or eyeballed with a magnifier. However, modern readers generally project onto the rear of a glass screen. More expensive ones could even print what was on the screen using a photocopier-like mechanism.

The University of Arizona has a video showing how to use a classic reader, which you can watch below. Their fancy reader can handle both microfilm and microfiche.

The Hoover Institution Library has a moderately recent video about using their super-modern microfilm reader if you would like to have a peek at how to use one. Note this one uses a computer, so the experience isn’t as authentic as using an old 1960s reader.

Film reels tend to be either 16 mm or 35 mm, and some machines could do either. Typically, 35 mm microfilm was the order of the day for large-format scans. Letter-sized material commonly went on 16 mm film. Sometimes the film was on an open reel. Other times, it would be in a cartridge. There were M-type cartridges and ANSI cartridges (and probably others).

Either way, the film could have a single image per frame (simplex) or two images, such as the front and back of a document, per frame. That’s a duplex microfilm.

Some systems used “blips” at the edge of the film to mark when an image starts so that all the pages don’t have to be the same size. Nice machines could count the blips so if someone told you look on “roll 295, frame 952,” you could load the right roll, set the counter to 952, and let the machine fast forward, counting blips, until the counter went to zero and the machine stopped.

Super fancy machines used a double blip to mark the start of a document. This allows you to refer to “roll 295, document 3, frame 80” or — more commonly — to tell the machine to skip to the next document.

Microfiche cards varied somewhat, but were normally very close to 4×6 inches. Jacket versions held strips of film, but specially-made microfiche cards might be just a single sheet of film.

Computer Output Microfilm

The easiest way to create microforms, though, was to have the computer do it directly. Early models displayed data on a CRT, so a camera could snap a picture. By 1977, though, you could get machines that used a laser to directly write on the output medium. COM — Computer Output Microfilm (or Microform) — was widely used, although some mainframe computers sent tapes to service companies to actually make the microfilm.

Oddly enough, although most mainframes of the era were IBM, they didn’t produce a COM machine. They did make two attempts. In the late 1950s, they developed a tube-based device based on several specialized CRTs. They didn’t market it, but a single unit made it to the Social Security Administration.

IBM’s second attempt at COM was the IBM 1360, but it ultimately didn’t take off, either. It wasn’t exactly a COM output device but a way to store a whopping 128 GB on photographic film cards. There were only six made.

The biggest producer of COM output devices was probably Stromberg Carlson. Kodak was another big name. The Komstar series was made to connect to IBM computers as if they were actual printers. There was also a model made to connect to a magnetic tape drive. These were made well into the 1990s.

Microfilm Today

Most things today are in digital form and a great deal of old microform records are now in digital form, too. However, there was such a flood of microforms that there are still records that you need to find a reader to see them. The Internet Archive, as you might expect, digitizes a lot of microform documents and, if you are watching at the right time, you can look over their shoulder while they do it.

Of course, in addition to military mail, extreme microfilm works for spies, too. If you find a cache of microfiche cards, you can always build your own reader.