History of microfilm

It isn't one of those things you tend to think of, but microfilm (I mentioned in yesterday's post that we're moving our microfilm collection) has a history like anything else. One early use of microfilm was in 1871, when Paris was besiged by the Prussian army. A Parisian photographer, Rene Dagron, had the idea of photographing records and messages, and then attaching them to carrier pigeons to communicate with the rest of France. (See this site.) In the 20th century microfilm became the way to save space and cost of many library materials, like back runs of newspapers. That's changing now, with the advent of digital archives like that of the NY Times Historical, but microfilm will still be with us for a while yet! (The photo here is from the AP Mulitmedia Archive we have, of a modern homing pigeon fancier training his birds.)