Who/what was Wratten?

[Bill_1856]

Reading through Ansel Adams "Examples" for the unptheenth time, I finally noticed that he used "Wratten Panchromatic Glass Plates" when he made the famous Half-Dome picture in 1927.
Of course I've heard of Wratten Filters for years, but it suddenly occured to me that I knew nothing about Wratten. Was it a company who made glass plates and filters? Was it a tradename of Eastman Kodak?
A Google revealed only that he was an English inventor who sold his company to Eastman before WW1.
Any additional information...?

[SocalAstro]

Named after Fredrick Wratten

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Wratten

-Leon

Reading through Ansel Adams "Examples" for the unptheenth time, I finally noticed that he used "Wratten Panchromatic Glass Plates" when he made the famous Half-Dome picture in 1927.
Of course I've heard of Wratten Filters for years, but it suddenly occured to me that I knew nothing about Wratten. Was it a company who made glass plates and filters? Was it a tradename of Eastman Kodak?
A Google revealed only that he was an English inventor who sold his company to Eastman before WW1.
Any additional information...?

[Mark Sampson]

It's a little more interesting than that. George Eastman wanted to hire C.E. Kenneth Mees to found the Kodak Research Labs (the first pure research organization started by an American corporation). Mees was working for Wratten & Wainwright, and one condition of his employment with Kodak was that Eastman should buy W&W. Which Eastman promptly did; Mees moved to Rochester, and thus 90 years later, Kodak gel filters are still branded 'Wratten'.

[Drew Wiley]

In other words, when AA to pictues on Wratten plates, it would have been a brand
name of Eastman Kodak.

[Mark Sampson]

So it seems. I don't know exactly when Eastman bought W&W but I thought that it was the early 1920s. There was a Kodak book about the Research Labs, published in the early 1980s when RL was thriving and before Kodak strangled it, and that may be where i got the story from (I don't have a copy). Kodak may very well have continued making Wratten plates in England after the takeover; I have no idea how they might have differed from a Rochester-made product. Of course I'm no authority, I only worked for EK for nineteen years. It just occurred to me that Wratten filters might always have been (and still may be) made in England.

[jeroldharter]

Wratten was a cryptologist in WWI who later devised a system for naming filters that has been indecipherable ever since.

[Drew Wiley]

What I love about the Wratten system, at least in its present form, is that Kodak has
mfg these fairly precisely for quite awhile, and for each one you can compare spectral characteristics, and even compare fade characteristics which will affect
ongoing use. While I don't like gels over a camera lens, and greater prefer the
superior optical properties of multicoated glass filters, I do use Wratten filters for
surgical spectral modifications to the lightsources I employ for color contact masking, color separation negatives, etc. But gels aren't cheap anymore either!

[Drew Wiley]

Jerold - I think the cryptologist you mentioned intended it this way: how many throbs of pain you experience if you crease or dent a gel filter and find out how
much it costs to replace! The formula would have originally described the agony
when a box Wratten glass plate was dropped.

[John Berry]

Wratten was a cryptologist in WWI who later devised a system for naming filters that has been indecipherable ever since.

ROFLMAO

[Frank Petronio]

Jeez these bring back memories... of when they cost $3 each. Just checked B&W and a 3x3 is $27.50!

To be a real architectural photographer ~1985 you had to have a box of 20-50 of them plus a $1000 Minolta color meter.

And in the studio, the anal would hang a 025Y or M just to clean up the inconsistent film. By the 1990s film got so consistent that you rarely had to.