Emanuel Goldberg - Early Inventions

Early Inventions

Goldberg patented improved methods for electroplating zinc on iron in 1902 and published numerous technical papers on improved printing techniques, reducing moiré effects in half-tone printing, photoengraving and other topics. In 1910 he became well known for an improved method for making neutral gelatin wedges (“Goldberg wedge”) that was widely used in sensitometry and the Densograph (de), an instrument that greatly reduced the labor required to measure the characteristic curves of photographic emulsions.

At Ica, foreseeing a growing market in amateur and semi-professional movies, he designed an extremely compact 35 mm movie camera, the Kinamo, introduced in 1921 with a spring motor attachment added in 1923 to allow flexible handheld filming. Goldberg made films of himself and his family as promotional shorts and, in 1927, a skiing drama, “Ein Sprung . . . Ein Traum.” The Kinamo was used by Joris Ivens and other avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1925 Goldberg demonstrated and published a technique for making microdot (Mikrat nach Goldberg) at a resolution equivalent to the text 50 complete Bibles per square inch. This invention has been widely attributed to a mythical “Professor Zapp” based on J. Edgar Hoover’s erroneous article in the April 1946 Readers Digest, probably a confusion with Kurt Zapp who trained German spies in microdot photography during the Second World War. In 1937, Goldberg presented a paper at the World Congress of Universal Documentation on an early copying camera he had invented.

At Ica and Zeiss Ikon Goldberg was involved in many innovations and led the design of famous Contax 35 mm still camera.

Goldberg was best known for his extensive studies in sensitometry summarized in his book Der Aufbau des photographisches Bildes (1922) and the “Goldberg Condition” (Goldberg Bedingung), a design principle for high quality reproduction in two stage, negative-positive photographic processes better known in English as “the gamma rule.”

Goldberg and his former teacher and collaborator Robert Luther (de) were instrumental in the acceptance at the International Congress of Photography in Dresden in 1931 of the widely adopted German national film speed standard DIN 4512. At the same Congress Goldberg introduced his “Statistical Machine,” a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition to search the metadata on rolls of microfilmed documents (US patent 1,838,389, 29 December 1931). This technology was used in a variant form in 1938 by Vannevar Bush in his “microfilm rapid selector,” his “comparator” (for cryptanalysis), and was the technological basis for the imaginary Memex in Bush’s influential 1945 essay “As we may think.”