 |
| What a 16mm projector might look like. |
If anyone knows where one might be acquired, they are willing to beg, borrow, buy or steal!
The museum has acquired three reels of old county logging operations that no one has recently seen, because they don't have a 16mm film projector, a device once as common as the manual typewriter and the mimeograph machine.
Once upon a time, in days of old (probably up until about the year 2000), these antiques were used to project a series of images captured by a "video camera," a device that clicked and clacked and took a series of "photographs" and saved them on a cellulite film which the projector could then project upon a flat, white screen, called a "screen," often operated in local schools by trusted students in upper grades.
Instead of discs, dvd-rws or thumb drives, this film was stored on "reels."
While many of the reels the images were stored on were of interest, such as "The Life Cycle of the Common Garden Spider" and "Gone With the Wind," the most excitement at these movies, uploaded onto a complex series of cogs, sprockets and wheels onto the projector, came when the film got stuck in the machine, and the exceedingly hot light bulb behind the "film" now locked onto a "cell," melted the image into a kaliedoscope of colors on the "screen." Often, this was the best part of the movie, and it may have presaged and inspired the psychedelic era of the '60s.
Another great thing about the 16mm projector was that at the end of the "movie," a term coined because the projected image seemed to move, came when the tail end of the film ran out and the gears, sprockets and wheels of the projector sped up due to decreased drag, and the "fap, fap, fap!" of the film spinning on the take-up reel woke everyone who'd fallen asleep in class before the teacher could turn up the lights.
It was a truly marvelous machine.
While few today are aware of it, the analog media stored on 16mm film could be stretched between fingers and held up to any light, revealing "stills," or single images, in a series of photographs that, when projected through the 16mm projector at precisely the right speed, gave the illusion of motion ... an amazing advent developed in the late 1800s by a man named Thomas Alva Edison, who also invented the "light bulb."
His invention bought still images to life.
And that's why the folks at the Museum want to acquire, by nefarious means or fair, a 16mm projector ... the stills they see are interesting, and ready to be brought to life ... they provide a rare glimpse into part of our county's past recorded on the most advanced media of the day.
It's the hope of museum officials that if they can obtain the equipment to properly display the media, they can then record and save it to all the more modern media ... microfiche, 5 1/4-inch floppy disc, hard-shelled 3-1/4 discs, COBAL, DOS, the Inernet, CD-ROM, DVD.
If you have or know of a working16mm film projector available for purchase or theft, call (208) 267-7720 or email bcmuseum@meadowcreek.com.
You might also be able to reach them by telegraph, walkie-talkie or rotary-dial "telephone," or even etched on "paper" with such out-dated implements as "pencil," "pen" or "typewriter" (an archaic and noisy device that students once slaved over that didn't feature automatic return, auto-correct or spell check) ... but it's doubtful.
While they have much of the equipment on display, not much of it is hooked up to the telegraph, and most of it is not Interweb compatible.
And they don't have a 16mm film projector.