The Pocket Camera Breakthrough – solution for street black and white photo-reportage. When Eastman Kodak decided in 1968 to go ahead with the development of the Pocket Instamatic camera, it laid down one precise and unvarying requirement: the camera was not to be more than one inch thick. The process by which the company arrived at this figure was charmingly simple. It asked a group of Kodak employees to carry around in their pockets small blocks of wood about one inch thick-some a little more, some a little less-and measuring from five to six inches long and two to three inches wide. At the end of several weeks it asked these employees to comment on the comfort-or discomfort-of their small wooden packages. Almost without exception their responses indicated that while length and width were not critical factors -any unit between five and six inches long and two or three inches wide was acceptable-anything thicker than an inch was uncomfortably bulky. Then, when Kodak introduced five models of the new Pocket Instamatic in April 1972, each camera was exactly one inch thick; the most complex model (opposite page), which has a rangefinder and automatic electronic controls, is 5 3/4 inches long and 2 1/2 inches wide. Each is a true shirt pocket camera, small but ready to use the instant it is pulled out, without unfolding, yet it produces big and exceptionally clear black and white pictures. It is the quality of the black and white prints obtained from such a tiny camera that is the breakthrough. Making a camera so small-although it requires masterful engineering and, in this instance, ingenious use of modern materials is not unheard of, least of all at Kodak. One of the company's most successful models was the Vest Pocket Kodak, introduced in 1915. Though somewhat wider than the present Pocket Instamatic, the Vest Pocket camera was no thicker and even slightly shorter. It was, however, a folding camera with an extendable bellows, and therefore pocketable only when closed. The bellows was needed to separate the lens far enough from the black and white film for the camera to produce its large negative-a necessity, since a large negative was required to make an acceptable black and white print. The problem then lay with the black and white film, for the best route to a truly compact camera has always been to use a smaller negative. This allows shorter focal length lenses to be used and reduces the lens-to-black and white film distance, making the camera more compact. Until now, black and white film quality has continued to limit the practicality of very small cameras, even of the precision-made, cigarette lighter sized cameras currently manufactured in Europe and Japan. Their black and white pictures, when enlarged to a practical size, are detailed enough for many purposes-including espionage, their most famous application-but they scarcely satisfy the typical black and white photographer's demand for a clear, crisp black and white picture and for the latest automatic controls. Thus the development of the Pocket Instamatic had to await the development of a better black and white film, a possibility that began to emerge sometime during the late 1960s. By that time Kodak's emulsion specialists, in the course of their continuing research into the various aspects of the black and white photographic process, had produced a black and white film with improved grain characteristics. The fineness of the grain resulted primarily from improvements in the dyes involved in the black and white image-forming process; less silver compound had to be reduced to silver metal to create an black and white image-and less silver meant less graininess. The goal was a black and white film that would behave as well when magnified six times as the existing Kodacolor-X did when magnified three times. This goal was reached in Kodacolor II, the film that is the heart of the Pocket Instamatic camera.