History | Argus Camera ARGUS A2 specs

2 History

The concept of a compact 35mm camera was born in the early 1920s. It was then that Oscar Barnack of E. Leitz, Inc. developed a portable and accurate camera based on readily available 35mm film, then the standard for the movie industry. This camera, the Leica, took the world of amateur photography by storm from the day of its introduction in 1925 at the Leipzig Fair. Encrusted with knobs, dials, levers, and buttons, and not at all resembling any camera that came before it, the Leica was the ultimate gadget for the rich and stylish. Cameras were once large obtrusive objects that required considerable technical knowledge to operate, but with the Leica, amateurs could easily take high- quality, candid photos, then slip their cameras back into their jacket pockets. Still, the Leica’s exorbitant price, running up to $200, prevented it from finding its way into the common man’s hands.

In the early 1930s, the Leica drew the attention of Charles A. Verschoor during a trip to Europe. Verschoor was an American businessman who, along with other local businessmen, established a radio manufacturing business in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1931. International Radio Corporation (IRC) was responsible for the Kadette, the first AC/DC mantle radio on the market.

Radio first began to mature in the late 1920s, and was considered a sound investment during the Depression era. For a one-time payment, your radio would play news, music, or entertainment daily for free! Using a relatively new plastic called Bakelite to mold the cases, IRC could cheaply produce radios and sell them for a decent profit.

The problem with radio manufacturing, however, was its reliance on the seasons. Customers, driven stir-crazy during the winter, would rush outside to meet the spring and, as a result, radio sales would dwindle until autumn forced consumers indoors again. Before the advent of air conditioning, people’s behavior was still tied to the weather, and their spending habits followed. To keep his factory and salesmen working all year, Verschoor searched for a product that could be cheaply manufactured and sold during the warmer half of the year. Amateur photography was starting to take hold in America, but was generally restricted to box-type cameras like the Kodak Brownie and the UniveX A. Verschoor decided to market an inexpensive Leica-inspired model and set his engineers to design one.

The Argus was designed to use the new Kodak 35mm daylight loading cartridge. This film cassette entered the market in late 1934 with the first camera designed to use it, the Kodak Retina. The new cartridge could be reloaded in a darkroom with surplus 35mm movie film, which was often plentiful and cheap. When Kodak introduced Kodachrome, the first color film, it was only available as rollfilm in the Kodak 35mm film cartridge, boosting this film format’s popularity. This cartridge was also the first that could easily be loaded into a camera in daylight. Such simplicity played a factor in the success of the Argus. The symbiotic relationship between Argus cameras and Kodak’s 35mm film cartridges boosted the popularity of both. The Argus A, and its more famous successor, the Argus C/C2/C3, are the primary reasons that the 35mm film format was established as firmly as it was, despite the plethora of similar formats that have been introduced and forced upon photographers in the last seventy years (UniveX 00, Kodak 828, 127, 126, 110, Disc, APS, etc…).

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