Nitrate Film

35MM film stock before 1951 was made with Nitrate. It is a highly flammable film stock that requires special storage and handling. There is a huge collection of this film at the Library of Congress facility in Culpeper Virginia. As part of the ARSC tour last week, we had the privilege of seeing some of the original work done with this type of film. In the Fall of 1984, WKL Dickson of the Edison Manufacturing Company (later known as Thomas A. Edison, Inc.) created the Dickson Experimental Sound Film. There is no sound with this but you can click on the link and see the two men dancing while presumably Dickson plays the violin into a horn. Early films such as this were viewed in a Kinetoscope, which was a precurser to the projector. The photograph shows the original Dickson film which is part of the Library of Congress moving picture collection.
The space where the Nitrate film is housed is deep in a bunker in the side of Mt. Pony. NAVCC was built using part of the old Federal Reserve facility that housed computers handling electronic funds transfers across the country and, until 1988, held cash reserves in case of a nuclear attack for banks East of the Mississippi River.

The Library of Congress not only preserves the original film at the right temperatures it is also copying these films to new media. This will allow more access to these fragile and valuable resources for the future.