Man-Made Horrors: September 2024

Man-Made Horrors for Your Pleasure!

Some of you may have noticed this summer’s passion was film photography, and an exploration in optical miniaturization. There’s always been a close relationship between developments in optical technology and breakthroughs in other scientific fields. The microscope opened up a whole new world to biologists, while the telescope has continually pushed our understanding of the universe forward. Fundamentally, the science concerned with seeing allows us to see the world around us in new ways. As such, it’s no coincidence that we spent a lot of time developing (see what I did there?) our skills and learning more about it.

In the spirit of expanding horizons and learning new things, we’re proud to be partners with Nebula. For those who don’t know, it’s a subscription based streaming service and so you can watch all our videos with no paid advertisement. This also means that all our videos can be uploaded there first as there is no need to have them approved by sponsors. Considering this summer’s Cold War theme, might we suggest Paper Skies, also on Youtube, who covers the history of Soviet aviation and shares innumerable stories that have gone unnoticed or unheard outside the Iron Curtain.

From the Cutting Room Floor

As seen in our recent video, We Recreated CIA Technology, It Was Surprisingly Easy (Microdots), the miniaturization of documents with film cameras is surprisingly easy. As a matter of fact, the technology dates back to the 19th century, specifically the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The inventor René Dagron, who first Patented the microfiche in France in 1859 which was mostly used as a novelty item for the rich, proposed to the French government to use his method to send in messages to the besieged city via carrier pigeons. The method in question is very similar to what we did in the video and involves photographing messages and developing the film. He managed a 40 diameter reduction, which could shrink a newspaper page down to 11 by 6 mm. The messages produced this way weighed 0.05g and could be rolled into a tube attached to a carrier pigeon’s tail feathers. Once received the film could be applied to a modified Stanhope lens and projected onto a wall with the aid of a magic lantern. His innovation was mostly focused on the collodion-albumen dry plate process and improving the film chemistry to allow for such miniaturization. The contract with the French government was for 15 Francs per 1000 characters, over the course of the siege he would send 115,000 messages.

This worked wonderfully to transmit military plans, complex messages and even aerial photography throughout the first world war, but the need to set up the documents on a well lit wall limited the use of this technique to prepared messages. What if one wanted to steal documents? This method isn’t well adapted to covertly stealing documents, the thing microdots are generally associated with. Well enter Professor Emanuel Goldberg, with his conference paper entitled “A new process of micro-photography” in the British Journal of Photography in 1925. By photographing the backlit negatives of the documents in question this second film could minimize a page of text to an area less than 0.1mm square. This would become known in parlance as the British method, even though he was a professor in Dresden and the German secret services started using this method extensively in the interwar period. Following a kidnapping by Nazis, he emigrated to France where he continued his work for Zweiss subsidiaries before moving to Palestine in 1937. 

This methodology alone would be very useful for covert work, but another piece of technology was required to make microdots the ubiquitous spy technique. This came in the sleek form factor of the Minox camera, designed and developed by Baltic German Walter Zapp in 1937. His subminiature camera could be easily hidden inside many innocuous objects and with the capability to focus onto objects as close as 8in (200mm) away, it made the surreptitious photographing of sensitive documents a breeze! Though Walter intended this camera to be an easily portable everyman’s camera, something anyone and everyone could have in their pockets, the prohibitively expensive manufacturing limited it to a gizmo for the rich and affluent. The Minox company only sold around 17,000 of its flagship cameras by the end of the production run in 1943. In 1939, as the inevitability of general conflict across Europe became evident to the British secret services, they started a campaign to buy as many of these cameras as they could. The US, having awoken late to the threat ended up paying as high as 400$ a piece, forcing the US to develop a copycat camera. Spies from both Axis and Allied countries would use the Minox camera to take pictures of sensitive documents and installations throughout the war, and then turn the films already a quarter the size of regular 35mm into microdots to be sent via mail hidden in postage stamps, dolls and a slew of other items. On their end the Japanese developed matchbox cameras, which were similar in function but were not as mass produced and couldn’t be explained away as just a vacationing camera. 

With the end of WWII and the start of the Cold War the use of microdots only increased as the need to keep up with the other sides’ dastardly plans was paramount to the survival of the competing Nuclear Superpowers. The CIA and FBI have many examples on display on their websites of intercepted microdots.

Minox B Camera used by John A. Walker, the spy who allowed the Soviets to crack US Naval codes.

A minuscule Microdot Camera.

An example of a Matchbox Camera handed to operatives behind enemy lines.

Microdot Doll used by the Germans in Latin America during WWII.

In The Works

The posters are finally shipping out as we speak, there’s still time to get yours as we’ve made a few extras. This summer has been run on a bit of a skeleton crew, but we’re gearing up to have the whole team back in the lab in September to keep bringing you Man-Made Horrors, within comprehension. We’ve of course been running Jerry through their paces and have prepared the next series of experiments for the Neuron project, all with a dash of radioactivity and radio activities.

But also, have you ever wondered about the expression "Potato Camera"?... Well we have!

Neat Finds

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