Amazing shutter speed

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Blueblood,

Thanks, that was a great high speed video cam shot.

Here is a story about me re high speed cams. You remind me about my first
job after graduation from Michigan State University.  It was June, 1959 and
I got a job at Parke Davis & Company (Pharmaceuticals) in the Industrial
Engineering department (IE).  While there I introduced and started a movie
sub-department within IE.  Parke Davis bought the movie equipment and here
is what I did.

1.  I took movies of high speed packaging machinery.  For example when a
bottle filling or capping machine would run fine at, let's say, 80-90
Bottles Per Minute (BPM) but it would fail (break the bottle) when cranked
up to it's rated speed of 166 I took a high speed movie.  I took them at, as
I remember, 5000 Pictures Per Second (PPS) so a Mechanical Engineer could
see how to modify the machinery to stop breaking the bottles at the higher
speed.  The camera just pulled the 16 MM movie film past the shutter at a
very high speed.  Actually there was not a shutter as you might picture one.
The shutter was an optical piece of glass made into an octagon (eight
sides).  In other words each revolution of the octagon would produce 4
frames and if it were spinning at 1,000 RPMs you would get 4,000 pictures in
one minute.  It was really fun and oh boy was I the hero who could quickly
diagnose problems with high speed packaging machinery.

2.  Then we bought an introvolameter (bad spelling) so I could slow my movie
camera so it would only take one frame every 7-8 seconds.  As I remember
this would mean that a roll of 16 MM film would last about 7-1/2 hours.  I
used this on conveyor belts to study why boxes of pharmaceuticals would jam
up every once in a while.  The only alternative would be for someone to sit
there all day and probably the jam up would happen when they were looking
away.  It worked great to realign rolling conveyors to reduce jam ups that
sometimes caused stuff to fall off the conveyors.  With this one I had to
guarantee that NO union worker would be in the background of the movie.

3.  This was the most fun.  In 1959-60 Chloromycetin was the WORLDS most
powerful last resort antibiotic and Parke Davis owned the patent spelled
PROFIT.  Parke Davis decided to move its manufacture from Detroit to Puerto
Rico and their big problem was training Puerto Ricans to manufacture it.
The big problem was that  Chloromycetin must be manufactured in a VERY
STERILE environment.  It cannot be sterilized after it is in its container.
Another problem was language, everything must be in both Spanish and
English.  I suggested a Hollywood style movie and they said do it.  For this
I took 30,000 feet of 16 MM movies and made two complete movies.  One showed
how to strip down and put on the gown, booties, hood, and gloves.  Your body
is completely covered.  The second movie followed the manufacturing through
EVERY step so the complete process could be duplicated in Puerto Rico.  As
with professional movies there were titles, fades and dissolves between
scenes, cuts  between scenes, and all sorts of cute shots where you might be
looking at something and then  go to a close up.  After splicing all this
together I wrote an English sound track which Parke Davis had translated
into Spanish.  They then hired professionals to record the sound track in
both English and Spanish and they had movies one in English and one in
Spanish.

That was really fun and definitely the most fun part of my time at Parke
Davis Industrial engineering department.  Some time after that they were
bought out by a larger pharmaceutical firm, they closed the Detroit plant,
and today they are nothing, just a small division of a bigger drug company
in Ann Arbor Michigan.

JerryF
 
Hey, Jerry, neat story! It's fun to look back into the past and remember that sort of thing.  ;D

And then, there's my problem that I don't remember that sor - - - -- -  ::)

Oh, well - -  :-\

Old Ray  :D
 
JerryF

What a co-incidence. In 1959, I was moving manufacture of electrical components from Philadelphia to Puerto Rico and had same problem of language,etc. I designed storyboards but not movies to do the training. It worked very well with one exception. One of the components failed in installation in US and we couldn't figure out why since we were doing them exactly (we thought) as they were done in Philly. I finally took the device to a person who had assembled them in past and asked her to check. She said it was fine except it hadn't been tweaked. No one in management knew that for decades the assemblers were using a pair of tweezers to bend the contacts every so slightly to get the proper holding force. No more failures after we trained the folks in PR to tweak the product.  ;D
 
Many times folks have said to me, "just tweak it a bit."  Also, after fixing something and someone says "how'd you do that" the two least challenged answers are either it's magic or I just tweaked it.

JerryF
 
Blueblood,

Your story reminds me of my co-op job as a mechanical engineer (U of M) back in the early 60's.  That is The University of Michigan.  The company I worked for had 10-20 engineering students cycling through at any one point in time.  Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue, University of Detroit, and other Midwest schools.  After getting to work one of my first mornings someone ask me what school I went to.  Puffing out my chest I said I (with a very large capital I was attending the U of M.  The person looked me straight in the face and with all sincerity said: 'Oh, you mean the University of Minnesota'.  I was deflated...you could hear the hot air coming out...oh well.

Anyway,  a project I was working on was a high speed impact machine that would SLAM hardened electronics into a steel anvil at up to 150 ft/sec.  It was a very fun project.  I was told we were getting electronics hardened for a moon impact.  No retro rockets, just send it in and have it work.  That was the 'story'.  What we had put together was an inverted 15 food draw sling shoot make out of 1 inch bunge cords.  We could get the speed we wanted but the cords always broke on test sample impact.  We had a photo department that had a high speed camera.  I it got up to 5000 frames per second.  They would focus on the impact point (steel anvil) and start the camera a few tenths of a second prior to releasing the test load for impact.  The camera would be up to speed at impact and then into OVERSPEED.  The last 100 of feet of the film would be turned to confetti and spray all over the room like snow.
 
Len, great story!  Thanks for a chuckle....

ArdraF
 
Len,

I forgot about that.  I, too, would find that the last few feet of film would end up as small chips and/or powder in the film magazine on every high speed run.

JerryF
 
Hi Jerry,

A neat story. I remember the move. At the time, I was trying to sell them some special ion exchange resins for the process.

Now they don't use film for those high speed movies, but special CCD's that can capture up to 30,000 frames/sec. The problem is getting the high amount of data in such a short time  from the chip to storage.

Chet18013
 
Chet,

WOW...1959 with film at 5,000 frames/minute to 2008 with Charged Coupled Devices at 30,000 frames/second!

JerryF
 
I agree.  Maybe they got tired of all the hits and shut it down. Too bad for us!

JerryF
 
Although not the quality of the pro high speed cameras, Casio now sells a 6 megapixel camera (the EX-F1) that shoots at 60 frames per second at full resolution, & as high as 1200 fps at reduced resolution. There is a review of the camera in this month's (April 2008) Popular Photography. Casio's link is at Casio EX-F1
 
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