The rise and fall of the flashbulb
Our photographer illustrates the evolution of technology through something once ubiquitous, now obsolete.
Our photographer writes:
Photography is about light. And often it’s about not having enough of it. The earliest processes were restricted to full daylight; even well into the twentieth century, pictures indoors or in twilight presented difficulties.
In the beginning, there were two ways to add artificial light to your scene. You could add light bulbs until the scene was as bright as day, but this was expensive and cumbersome, only really practical for a large operation. Or you could set fire to a length of magnesium ribbon, which burns with a bright white flame (powder form was also an option). No, I’m not old enough to have resorted to this myself! But I can imagine the difficulties and danger involved. In practice, very few amateur photographers would have used either method.
A later stage is found in a Kodak book from the Five Colors Historical Photography Library, How to make Good Pictures. This title went through many editions over decades, but we have a very early edition. It’s undated; I’d place it around 1918. It gives two options: Kodak Flash Sheets, which you light with a match; or Photoflood Lamps, a sort of very bright light bulb. The latter get very hot in use and don’t last nearly as long as regular light bulbs, but you can use regular light bulb sockets. They were particularly effective in simulating a normally-lit indoor scene: you could just replace your normal bulbs with Photofloods. But I doubt either method saw much use among the majority of picture-makers.
By mid-century, both of these had been replaced (for almost all photographers) by the flashbulb. These have the glass globe and electrical contacts of a light bulb, but instead of a long-lasting filament they contain finely-shredded magnesium wire in an oxygen atmosphere. You could think of them as following either line of evolution: a convenient package of quickly-burning material in a safe container; or the most extreme of the high-output, short-lifespan light bulbs. They are the simplest (successful) device ever invented to add artificial light to a photograph.
They were far more convenient than what they replaced: you didn’t have to have light bulb sockets in the right place and of the right kind, which means you could carry your lighting around with you; and the standard sizes meant you had much more control of how much light you added. Much better than estimating how much magnesium ribbon you’d need! And almost any photographer could use them. I suspect there are few who could, but never did.
That doesn’t mean that they were actually convenient. Since each bulb could be flashed only once, you needed as many bulbs as pictures you intended to take. If you wanted to shoot more than a single 12-picture roll of Brownie-sized film, just carrying along enough of these bulky and breakable things would get cumbersome. But working out the proper camera settings (using mysterious figures called “guide numbers”) would slow you down considerably, so maybe a dozen flash pictures is all you’d manage anyway.
Well, flashbulbs are gone now, relegated to antique shops and garage sales. They were replaced by the flash gun, a much more complicated device. The flash tube at its heart requires a high voltage to fire, plus the circuitry to manage power. At the beginning only professional photographers could justify the cost of such a thing. But you can re-use a flash gun thousands of times, and since you’ve already got circuits controlling the charging cycle you might as well add some to control the output. The flashgun was obviously so much more flexible and convenient to use that the problems of making it reliable and making it cheaply were overcome. Just about every camera built in the last couple of decades has had one built in. There’s one on your smartphone.
I draw a couple of lessons from this story of technical evolution. First, something has to reach a certain level of ease of use and convenience before it will be taken up in large numbers. Second, even a very complicated and expensive device may prove useful enough to replace something much simpler.
No, I have no feelings of nostalgia for flashbulbs, no intention to scour garage sales and flea markets for those that remain. But I find them interesting as the simplest form of adding light to a photograph.
