Kodak Beacon Enlarger

[Mark J]

This one may be of technical interest to some of you. Maybe there is even someone on this forum who worked with some of this kit ?

35 years ago when I started work, I remember being fascinated by a conference proceedings ( SPIE ) from the early-1980's on the subject of High-Altitude Standoff Reconnaissance.
This was just at the very advent of electronic sensors. hence many of the papers were still talking about the current high-end limits of film reconnaissance. There was a very interesting paper by Frank Gorman entitled 'The Hurdles to ... ( as above ) '. In it he documented many aspects of the process, a listing of some of the films used, camera pods, film magazines, focusing, gamma curves, ground resolution results from different distances etc.
There was a sentence that intrigued me, which I was not able to follow-up at that time, before the internet :
"With the exception of the very elegant Kodak Beacon Enlarger, there are few systems capable of handling enlargements from large, truly high-resolution negatives "
In this context, he was talking about 9" wide roll film, of emulsions like 3414, or SO(special Order)-415 , which in the latter case could resolve 440 cycles/mm at 1.6/1 contrast !

Just today, I re-read that paper and went looking, and hit a great link.
I haven't by any means read this whole document about Project 'Bridgehead', but it looks fascinating.
There is a small chapter on the Kodak Beacon Enlarger on page 118 of the document :

https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/docum...%20Company.pdf

Gorman obviously loved his job. He took relish in pointing out that a 9" frame of SO-415 could record information at the rate of 1 Tera-bit per second !

[djdister]

We had Beacon Precision Enlargers at the Defense Intelligence Agency in the early '90s. With the liquid gate, they could enlarge up to 150x and were pretty cool to work with.

[Mark Sampson]

Well, this is interesting. I worked for Eastman Kodak (and later, ITT Space Systems) on these programs from 1984-2010. I used the Beacon Precision Enlarger, and trained US gov't personnel how to operate it, during most of that time. I made the first two photographs on the cover of that pdf... and helped assemble an early version of it in 2009. I have an early edition, and look forward to reading this expanded version. Thanks for digging it up!

[Erik Larsen]

Well, this is interesting. I worked for Eastman Kodak (and later, ITT Space Systems) on these programs from 1984-2010. I used the Beacon Precision Enlarger, and trained US gov't personnel how to operate it, during most of that time. I made the first two photographs on the cover of that pdf... and helped assemble an early version of it in 2009. I have an early edition, and look forward to reading this expanded version. Thanks for digging it up!

I find this old stuff incredibly interesting. In the credits I noticed a Mark Sampson in there!

[Mark Sampson]

Well, that would be me. It's possible that I taught our own djdister back in the day... Of course most of this stuff was extremely secret at the time. What we see here has been declassified. It's a bit odd, but enjoyable, to see published what could never be mentioned before.

[Mark J]

It's so cool to get some connection to this subject, thanks for your replies, fellas.
I will start reading the report in earnest tomorrow.
I wonder who designed the enlarging lenses ? ( my pet subject ... )

[djdister]

We had a lot of the equipment shown in that booklet, right in DC. Aside from the BEEP (as we called 'em) I recall the viscous Fultron long-roll processor, which used developer that was like 10W40 motor oil.

And then digital imaging changed the scene...

[Erik Larsen]

What was the liquid gate?

[Vaughn]

I was hoping for a bacon enlarger...

[djdister]

What was the liquid gate?

See numbered page 43 in the referenced document.