Emanuel Goldberg

Emanuel Goldberg (1881-1970), a Russian-born inventor active in Germany and Israel.

Life

Emanuel Goldberg was born in Moscow on 31 August 1881 (19 August 1881. Old Style). Denied admission to the Imperial Technical School because of the limitation on Jewish students, he graduated in chemistry from the University of Moscow following studies at Germany universities, then left Russia permanently. Returning to Germany he studied the effect of light on chemical reactions and completed a Ph.D. in 1906 at the Institute for Physical Chemistry led by Wilhelm Ostwald at the University of Leipzig in 1906

From 1907 to 1917 Goldberg taught photography and reprography at the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookcraft (Königliche Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe, later the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) in Leipzig. In 1917, after serving as a consultant for the Carl Zeiss Stiftung in Jena, he was appointed to the Zeiss photographic equipment subsidiary Ica (Internationale Camera Aktien Gesellschaft) in Dresden and charged to modernize production methods and to develop new products. In 1926 Ica merged with three other firms to form Zeiss Ikon under Goldberg’s leadership.

In 1933 he was kidnapped by Nazis thugs. Released, he moved to Paris, France, where he worked for Zeiss subsidiaries until 1937 when he resigned and moved to Palestine. In Tel Aviv he established Professor Goldberg’s Laboratory for Precision Instruments (later Goldberg Instruments) which engaged in the manufacture and repair of equipment and in research and development for the Israeli government. Goldberg retired in 1960 and died on 13 September 1970. His firm became Electro-Optical Industry Ltd (El Op) in Rehovot and later merged into Elbit Systems Ltd.

Goldberg married Sophie Posniak (1886 – 1968) in 1907. They had a son, Herbert Goldberg (born 1914) and a daughter Renate Eva (1922-2015), who changed her name to Chava and married Mordechai Gichon (1922-2016) in 1948. Emanuel Goldberg died on September 13, 1970.

Contribution

Goldberg described himself as “a chemist by learning, a physicist by calling, and a mechanic by birth” He was a designer, always seeking to develop new or improved equipment with an emphasis on miniaturization and ease of use. It helped that he was also a skilled and versatile craftsman. Goldberg liked to boast that he was very lazy because of the time devoted to improving ease of use. He was recruited to Ica to to modernize production methods and to improve and expand the range of photographic equipment produced. Restrictions imposed under the Treaty of Versailles prevented a planned diversification into military equipment so Goldberg focused on equipment for amateur and scientific cinematography. His Kinamo movie camera used a clock spring mechanism to avoid the need for skilled hand cranking or dependence on electrical power and was small enough to be hand-held, avoiding the need for a tripod. The Kinamo camera used cassettes of 25 meters of standard 35 mm film but was extremely compact measuring only 6 inches high, 5½ inches wide and 4 inches deep (15 x 14 x 10 cm). It was widely used for home movies, in scientific laboratories, and by avantgarde movie makers, notably by Joris Ivens.

Much of Goldberg's work was concerned with sensitometry. He first became widely known in 1910 for an improved method for making neutral gelatin wedges ("Goldberg wedge") that were widely used in sensitometry before photoelectric light meters became affordable. His “densograph” greatly reduced the labor required to measure the characteristic curves of photographic emulsions. Other work clarified the optimal rotation of half tone printing plates to minimize moiré effects. The Goldberg Condition, now better known as the Gamma rule, expressed how an imperfect analog recording gradient (e.g., a “weak” photographic negative) can be corrected by a second process with an imperfect gradient that is complementary (e.g., printing on “hard” printing paper). This also had application in analog film sound tracks. Goldberg’s research on the resolution of photographic images included experimenting with extreme reduction microphotography and in 1925 he produced his "Goldberg microdot" (Mikrat nach Goldberg). Using a microscope in reverse as a camera and a largely grainless collodion emulsion, he produced legible photographs of text reduced to 1-2 microns (thousandths of a millimeter), equivalent to the entire text of the Bible fifty times over on one square inch. Although Goldberg documented his technique in multiple publications, a widely read and widely cited article by J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, inexplicably attributed the invention of Goldberg’s microdot to a non-existent Professor Zapp.

Such extreme reduction is of little practical use, but raised the question of how to search among microfilmed images too small to read. His solution was an electronic search engine that predated digital computers. Documents were microfilmed on standard 35 mm film with a pattern of opaque dots next to each page representing encoded metadata. The resulting film could then be run through the movie gate of an adapted 35 mm projector. A perforated card with holes expressing a search query was inserted between the projector lamp and the film gate and a photoelectric cell was placed beyond the film. The search card blocked the light from the projector lamp except where the holes allowed very thin beams, which a lens focused on to the metadata portion of each frame of film. Whenever the light beams defined by the search card were all blocked by opaque metadata dots on the film, no light could reach the photoelectric cell, a ”hit” was detected and the document detected. This system was demonstrated at the Eighth International Congress of Photography (Dresden, 1931). At least two working prototypes were constructed but neither has survived. It was called a Statistical Machine in its US patent 1,838,389, 29 December 1931. The imaginary Memex in Vannevar Bush’s famous essay, “As we may think,” extrapolated the capabilities of Bush’s Microfilm Rapid Selector design, which was an unacknowledged variation of Goldberg’s already patented Statistical Machine. In 1925 the Leitz company introduced the Leica high precision 35 camera and Goldberg led the development of a competitive Zeiss Ikon product, the Contax, introduced 1932. After Goldberg left Zeiss Ikon, his successor, Heinz Küppenbender, took credit for the design of the Contax.

Awards

Peligot Medal, Société française de photographie et de cinématographie, 1931.
Honorary Doctor of Science in Technology, The Technion, Haifa, 1957.
Israel Prize, in exact science, 1968.
An Emanuel Goldberg Prize for outstanding doctoral dissertations is awarded by the Robert Luther Foundation, Dresden, Germany.

Works

Inventions (Selected)

The Goldberg wedge was a simple gelatin wedge widely used in sensitometry, 1910.
Densograph for plotting sensitometric characteristic curves, 1914.
Numerous improvements to photographic equipment while at Ica and Zeiss Ikon, 1917-1933.
Kinamo movie camera, 1921.
Microdot (“Mikrat nach Goldberg”), 1925.
Search engine (Statistical Machine), 1927.
With Robert Luther proposed first national film speed standard, DIN 4512, 1931.
Contax 35 camera, 1932.

Publications (Selected)

Farbenphotographie und Farbendruck. Leipzig: Verlag des deutscher Buchgewerbevereins, 1908.
Die Grundlagen der Reproduktionstechnik: In gemeindverständlicher Darstellung. Halle: Knapp, 1912; 2 nd ed., 1923.
Der Aufbau des photographischen Bildes. Teil I: Helligkeitsdetails. Halle: Knapp, 1922.
"A new process of micro-photography" British Journal of Photography 73, no. 3458 (August 13, 1926): 462-465.
Kampmann, Carl. Die graphische Kunste. Vierte Auflage. Neubearbeitet von Prof. Dr. E. Goldberg. Berlin und Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1927. (Sammlung Goschen, Bd. 75)
"Das Registrierproblem in der Photographie". In International Congress of Photography (8th: 1931: Dresden), pp. 317-320. English translation: "The retrieval problem in photography (1932)" Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43, no. 4 (May 1992):295-298.

Archival sources

The Technische Sammlungen museum, Dresden, has Goldberg’s surviving papers and memorabilia and material collected for his biography (Buckland Collection). The corporate records of Ica and Zeiss Ikon were destroyed, but copies of many significant documents survive in the Ernemann / Zeiss Ikon series in the Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden. The Betriebsarchiv Carl Zeiss in Jena has material on Zeiss Ikon and on Goldberg. The Sächisches Staatsarchiv in Leipzig has material on the Academy for Graphic Arts and on Goldberg.