Day 245

245/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

I spent all day doing research for a film history paper. Specifically, I spent the day going over all of Technicolor's patents trying to figure out how their system worked.  


Reading patents sucks. They're super technical, really confusing, and with something like this camera, you need to be a chemist, an engineer and a physicist to understand it. And these diagrams, while totally necessary, took forever to decipher. The guys who started Technicolor were MIT professors, so I guess the complexity should be expected. Thankfully, I find Technicolor fascinating, and this camera design (by Joseph A. Ball) is absolute genius. Plus, now I can confidently say I actually understand the system, which is pretty sweet.


If anyone is interested, the entire patent can be read online here. Google, in their quest to take over the world, is digitizing U.S. patents, which is awesome. You can find some cool stuff in there, like the patent for Monopoly or anti-gravity shoes patented by Michael Jackson.