19th century The development of the microfilm reader began when
John Benjamin Dancer produced one of the first recorded microphotographs in 1839. Dancer, an English
optical instrument maker, was experimenting with the newly announced
Daguerreotype photography process when he placed a microscope lens in a camera, then produced a photograph with a 160:1 reduction ratio. Dancer continued experimenting with microphotography over the next decade, but it was not until 1853 that he captured text onto a microphotograph for the first time: 680 letters inscribed on a monument tablet, which he mounted onto 3 × 1 inch slides that could be read with his 100× microscopes, which became the first predecessor of the microfilm reader. which was in turn eventually replaced by
George Eastman's
nitrocellulose film towards the end of the century. In the winter of 1870–71, during
Prussia's siege of Paris, the French businessman and photographer
René Dagron traveled to French-held territories behind enemy lines, where he was contracted to copy documents and personal messages from French officials onto microphotographs, which he dispatched to Paris using carrier pigeons; and if the messages were received, the microphotographs were projected by a "
magic lantern", another early form of the microfilm reader. The magic lantern is a type of projector that has been around since at least the 17th century, using candles, then oil as the source of light, and was used primarily for entertainment.
20th century Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, roll film went through much development and improvement by making cellulose less flammable. which contributed to the growth of the motion picture industry. Designed as a way for banks to detect fraud and store records permanently, the Checkograph snapped photographs of several checks simultaneously then printed the micro images onto Kodak 16 mm film, which was viewed with a handheld magnifier or a Kodak projector such as the
Kodascope, a new form of the microfilm reader. Filing eleven patents from 1920-1935, Admiral Fiske's earlier designs resembled a two-eyepiece
lorgnette but were later built with a single-eye viewing scope. All of his designs included a roller that shifted the eyepiece along the reading material, which at first were printed on long sheets of paper, then later film. While Admiral Fiske's reading machine, the "Fiskeoscope," never became a commercial success, it did influence the designs of handheld film readers that were produced decades later. In 1930, the writer and impresario
Robert Carlton Brown published an essay titled "The Readies" in the international journal
transition, proposing an electric, portable reading machine that used a 4-5 inch
magnifying glass to view microfilms of books. However, he adjusted the medium in his 1931 book, "Readies for Bob Brown's Machine," when he stated that books would be printed "on a ribbon of tough impressionable material," implying
ticker tape, and that words would move in a single stream across the screen as opposed to viewing paragraphs or pages at one time, the speed of which could be controlled by the user with the press of a button. A prototype was built and featured in his book, but Brown was never able to acquire the capital to put his prototype into production. In 1949, Wesleyan University Librarian
Fremont Rider produced the first
microcard, Microcards were designed to be used with a standard 3" x 5" card catalogue system, saving space for libraries and repositories by combining records and content of published works. Microcard readers were more difficult to develop than film readers since light had to be reflected back from opaque paper as opposed to being transmitted through a transparent medium, but a small and large-sized portable reader were released the following year. then built into film readers in the mid-1960s. to distribute and store technical reports, then the
Department of Defense and
Atomic Energy Commission soon followed, which marked the precedence of major organizations using film as the primary storage method and ending the demand for microcards. Microfilm was used in a new way when data from computer tape was printed onto roll film instead of paper, a process known as computer output microfilming (COM). First developed by the military in the 1940s, On the consumer side, readers became smaller and could be transported in a suitcase, sit on the lap, or held in the hand.
21st century Personal computers were introduced to consumers in the late 1970s, and over time replaced COM as the primary way to store and view data, ==Gallery==