Emanuel Goldberg
Encyclopedia
Emanuel Goldberg (born: 31 August 1881; died: 13 September 1970) was born in Moscow
and moved first to Germany
and later to Israel
. He described himself as “a chemist by learning, physicist by calling, and a mechanic by birth.” He contributed a wide range of theoretic and practical advances relating to light and media and was the founding head of Zeiss Ikon, the famous photographic products company in Dresden
, Germany. His inventions include microdot
s, the Kinamo movie camera
, the Contax
35 mm camera, a very early search engine
, and equipment for sensitometry
.
’s military medical corps and his wife Olga Moiseevna Grodsenka. Earlier interested in engineering, he studied Chemistry
at the University of Moscow and at several German universities, and remained in Germany after 1904 to avoid antisemitism in Russia. In 1906 he received a Ph.D from the University of Leipzig
for research at the Institute for Physical Chemistry, led by Wilhelm Ostwald
on the kinetics of photochemical reactions. After a year as assistant to in the Photochemistry Laboratory at the Technical University in Charlottenburg
, Berlin, he became head of the photographic department of the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookcraft, in Leipzig from 1907 to 1917.
In 1917 Goldberg was recruited by the Carl Zeiss
Stiftung to become a director of its photographic products subsidiary Ica (Internationale Camera Aktien Gesellschaft) in Dresden where he introduced the spring-driven Kinamo movie camera. In 1926 a “Fusion” of four leading photographic firms (Contessa, Ernemann, Ica and Goerz) formed Zeiss Ikon under Goldberg’s leadership until he was kidnapped by Nazi thugs in 1933 and fled to Paris. After four years working for Zeiss subsidiaries in France, Goldberg moved to Palestine in 1937 where he established a laboratory, later called Goldberg Instruments, which became the Electro-Optical Industries (“El-Op”) in Rehovot
. A photograph taken 1943 by John Phillips
for Life Magazine
shows Goldberg in his work shop in Palestine. He retired in 1960 but continued his research and died in Tel Aviv
on 13 September 1970.
zinc on iron in 1902 and published numerous technical papers on improved printing techniques, reducing moiré effects in half-tone printing, photoengraving
and other topics. In 1910 he became well-known for an improved method for making neutral gelatin wedges (“Goldberg wedge”) that was widely used in sensitometry
and the , an instrument that greatly reduced the labor required to measure the characteristic curves of photographic emulsion
s.
At Ica, foreseeing a growing market in amateur and semi-professional movies, he designed an extremely compact 35 mm movie camera, the Kinamo, introduced in 1921 with a spring motor attachment added in 1923 to allow flexible handheld filming. Goldberg made films of himself and his family as promotional shorts and, in 1927, a skiing drama, “Ein Sprung . . . Ein Traum.” The Kinamo was used by Joris Ivens
and other avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In 1925 Goldberg demonstrated and published a technique for making microdot
(Mikrat nach Goldberg) at a resolution equivalent to the text 50 complete Bible
s per square inch. This invention has been widely attributed to a mythical “Professor Zapp” based on J. Edgar Hoover
’s erroneous article in the April 1946 Readers Digest, probably a confusion with Kurt Zapp who trained German spies in microdot photography during the Second World War. In 1937, Goldberg presented a paper at the World Congress of Universal Documentation
on an early copying camera he had invented.
At Ica and Zeiss Ikon Goldberg was involved in many innovations and led the design of famous Contax
35 mm still camera.
Goldberg was best known for his extensive studies in sensitometry summarized in his book Der Aufbau des photographisches Bildes (1922) and the “Goldberg Condition” (Goldberg Bedingung), a design principle for high quality reproduction in two stage, negative-positive photographic processes better known in English as “the gamma rule.”
Goldberg and his former teacher and collaborator were instrumental in the acceptance at the International Congress of Photography in Dresden in 1931 of the widely adopted German national film speed
standard DIN 4512. At the same Congress Goldberg introduced his “Statistical Machine,” a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition
to search the metadata
on rolls of microfilmed documents (US patent 1,838,389, 29 December 1931). This technology was used in a variant form in 1938 by Vannevar Bush
in his “microfilm rapid selector,” his “comparator” (for cryptanalysis), and was the technological basis for the imaginary Memex
in Bush’s influential 1945 essay “As we may think.”
in the First World War, and was a consultant to the Carl Zeiss firm in Jena. In Palestine and later Israel he was deeply engaged as an advisory to both civilian and military spheres. The apprenticeship scheme that he introduced in Tel Aviv provided advanced technical skills to many who went on to develop the Israeli high tech industry.
In 1990 Chava Gichon (Tel-Aviv) requested restitution of the property in the Oeserstraße 5 in Dresden, which Goldberg as director of Zeiss-Ikon had bought in 1927, but the real estate office did not approve an intended agreement with the owner at that time in August 1995.
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
and moved first to Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and later to Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
. He described himself as “a chemist by learning, physicist by calling, and a mechanic by birth.” He contributed a wide range of theoretic and practical advances relating to light and media and was the founding head of Zeiss Ikon, the famous photographic products company in Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
, Germany. His inventions include microdot
Microdot
A microdot is text or an image substantially reduced in size onto a 1mm disc to prevent detection by unintended recipients. Microdots are normally circular around one millimetre in diameter but can be made into different shapes and sizes and made from various materials such as polyester...
s, the Kinamo movie camera
Movie camera
The movie camera is a type of photographic camera which takes a rapid sequence of photographs on strips of film which was very popular for private use in the last century until its successor, the video camera, replaced it...
, the Contax
Contax
Contax was a camera brand noted for its unique technical innovation and a wide range of Zeiss lenses, noted for their high optical quality. Its final incarnation was a line of 35 mm, medium format and digital cameras engineered and manufactured by Kyocera, and featuring modern Zeiss optics...
35 mm camera, a very early search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
, and equipment for sensitometry
Sensitometry
Sensitometry is the scientific study of light-sensitive materials, especially photographic film. The study has its origins in the work by Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield with early black-and-white emulsions...
.
Biography
Goldberg was born in Moscow on 31 August 1881 (19 August 1881 in the Old Style, Julian calendar, sometimes given in error as 1 September) the son of Grigorii Ignat’evich Goldberg, a distinguished Colonel (Polkovnik) in the TsarTsar
Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...
’s military medical corps and his wife Olga Moiseevna Grodsenka. Earlier interested in engineering, he studied Chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
at the University of Moscow and at several German universities, and remained in Germany after 1904 to avoid antisemitism in Russia. In 1906 he received a Ph.D from the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig
The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...
for research at the Institute for Physical Chemistry, led by Wilhelm Ostwald
Wilhelm Ostwald
Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was a Baltic German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities...
on the kinetics of photochemical reactions. After a year as assistant to in the Photochemistry Laboratory at the Technical University in Charlottenburg
Technical University of Berlin
The Technische Universität Berlin is a research university located in Berlin, Germany. Translating the name into English is discouraged by the university, however paraphrasing as Berlin Institute of Technology is recommended by the university if necessary .The TU Berlin was founded...
, Berlin, he became head of the photographic department of the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookcraft, in Leipzig from 1907 to 1917.
In 1917 Goldberg was recruited by the Carl Zeiss
Carl Zeiss
Carl Zeiss was a German maker of optical instruments commonly known for the company he founded, Carl Zeiss Jena . Zeiss made contributions to lens manufacturing that have aided the modern production of lenses...
Stiftung to become a director of its photographic products subsidiary Ica (Internationale Camera Aktien Gesellschaft) in Dresden where he introduced the spring-driven Kinamo movie camera. In 1926 a “Fusion” of four leading photographic firms (Contessa, Ernemann, Ica and Goerz) formed Zeiss Ikon under Goldberg’s leadership until he was kidnapped by Nazi thugs in 1933 and fled to Paris. After four years working for Zeiss subsidiaries in France, Goldberg moved to Palestine in 1937 where he established a laboratory, later called Goldberg Instruments, which became the Electro-Optical Industries (“El-Op”) in Rehovot
Rehovot
Rehovot is a city in the Center District of Israel, about south of Tel Aviv. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics , at the end of 2009 the city had a total population of 112,700. Rehovot's official website estimates the population at 114,000.Rehovot was built on the site of Doron,...
. A photograph taken 1943 by John Phillips
John Phillips (photographer)
John Phillips was a photographer for Life magazine from the 1930s to the 1950s who was known for his war photographs....
for Life Magazine
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
shows Goldberg in his work shop in Palestine. He retired in 1960 but continued his research and died in Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
on 13 September 1970.
Early inventions
Goldberg patented improved methods for electroplatingElectroplating
Electroplating is a plating process in which metal ions in a solution are moved by an electric field to coat an electrode. The process uses electrical current to reduce cations of a desired material from a solution and coat a conductive object with a thin layer of the material, such as a metal...
zinc on iron in 1902 and published numerous technical papers on improved printing techniques, reducing moiré effects in half-tone printing, photoengraving
Photoengraving
Photoengraving also known as photo-chemical milling is a process of engraving using photographic processing techniques. The full form of photoengraving is photo mechanical process in the graphic arts, used principally for reproducing illustrations. The subject is photographed, and the image is...
and other topics. In 1910 he became well-known for an improved method for making neutral gelatin wedges (“Goldberg wedge”) that was widely used in sensitometry
Sensitometry
Sensitometry is the scientific study of light-sensitive materials, especially photographic film. The study has its origins in the work by Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield with early black-and-white emulsions...
and the , an instrument that greatly reduced the labor required to measure the characteristic curves of photographic emulsion
Photographic emulsion
Photographic emulsion is a light-sensitive colloid, such as gelatin, coated onto a substrate. In silver-gelatin photography, the emulsion consists of silver halide crystals suspended in gelatin, and the substrate may be glass, plastic film, paper or fabric....
s.
At Ica, foreseeing a growing market in amateur and semi-professional movies, he designed an extremely compact 35 mm movie camera, the Kinamo, introduced in 1921 with a spring motor attachment added in 1923 to allow flexible handheld filming. Goldberg made films of himself and his family as promotional shorts and, in 1927, a skiing drama, “Ein Sprung . . . Ein Traum.” The Kinamo was used by Joris Ivens
Joris Ivens
Joris Ivens was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and committed communist.-Early life and career:...
and other avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In 1925 Goldberg demonstrated and published a technique for making microdot
Microdot
A microdot is text or an image substantially reduced in size onto a 1mm disc to prevent detection by unintended recipients. Microdots are normally circular around one millimetre in diameter but can be made into different shapes and sizes and made from various materials such as polyester...
(Mikrat nach Goldberg) at a resolution equivalent to the text 50 complete Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
s per square inch. This invention has been widely attributed to a mythical “Professor Zapp” based on J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
’s erroneous article in the April 1946 Readers Digest, probably a confusion with Kurt Zapp who trained German spies in microdot photography during the Second World War. In 1937, Goldberg presented a paper at the World Congress of Universal Documentation
World Congress of Universal Documentation
The World Congress of Universal Documentation was held August 16–21, 1937, in Paris, France. Delegates from 45 countries met to discuss means by which all of the world's information, in print, in manuscript, and in other forms, could be efficiently organized and made accessible.-The Congress...
on an early copying camera he had invented.
At Ica and Zeiss Ikon Goldberg was involved in many innovations and led the design of famous Contax
Contax
Contax was a camera brand noted for its unique technical innovation and a wide range of Zeiss lenses, noted for their high optical quality. Its final incarnation was a line of 35 mm, medium format and digital cameras engineered and manufactured by Kyocera, and featuring modern Zeiss optics...
35 mm still camera.
Goldberg was best known for his extensive studies in sensitometry summarized in his book Der Aufbau des photographisches Bildes (1922) and the “Goldberg Condition” (Goldberg Bedingung), a design principle for high quality reproduction in two stage, negative-positive photographic processes better known in English as “the gamma rule.”
Goldberg and his former teacher and collaborator were instrumental in the acceptance at the International Congress of Photography in Dresden in 1931 of the widely adopted German national film speed
Film speed
Film speed is the measure of a photographic film's sensitivity to light, determined by sensitometry and measured on various numerical scales, the most recent being the ISO system....
standard DIN 4512. At the same Congress Goldberg introduced his “Statistical Machine,” a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition
Pattern recognition
In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...
to search the metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
on rolls of microfilmed documents (US patent 1,838,389, 29 December 1931). This technology was used in a variant form in 1938 by Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
in his “microfilm rapid selector,” his “comparator” (for cryptanalysis), and was the technological basis for the imaginary Memex
Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
in Bush’s influential 1945 essay “As we may think.”
Educational and service activities
In Germany Goldberg was noted for his educational displays at exhibitions, served as consultant on aerial photographyAerial photography
Aerial photography is the taking of photographs of the ground from an elevated position. The term usually refers to images in which the camera is not supported by a ground-based structure. Cameras may be hand held or mounted, and photographs may be taken by a photographer, triggered remotely or...
in the First World War, and was a consultant to the Carl Zeiss firm in Jena. In Palestine and later Israel he was deeply engaged as an advisory to both civilian and military spheres. The apprenticeship scheme that he introduced in Tel Aviv provided advanced technical skills to many who went on to develop the Israeli high tech industry.
Personal life
On 28 June 1907 Goldberg married Sophie Posniak (28 August 1886 - 10 December 1968). They had a son, Herbert Goldberg (b. 20 November 1914) and a daughter Renate Eva, now Chava Gichon (b. 19 September 1922).In 1990 Chava Gichon (Tel-Aviv) requested restitution of the property in the Oeserstraße 5 in Dresden, which Goldberg as director of Zeiss-Ikon had bought in 1927, but the real estate office did not approve an intended agreement with the owner at that time in August 1995.
Selected publications
- Goldberg, E. (1910). The Densograph. British Journal of Photography 57 (26 Aug 1910): 649-51.
- Goldberg, E. (1922). Die Aufbau des photographisches Bildes. (Halle: Knapp). 2nd ed., 1925.
- Goldberg, E. (1925). A new process of micro-photography. British Journal of Photography 73 (13 August 1910): 462-65.
- Goldberg, E. (1931). U.S. Patent 1,838,389, 29 December 1931. Statistical machine.
- Goldberg, E. (1992). The retrieval problem in photography (1932). Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43 (4): 295-298.
Patents
- US Patents
- Statistical machine: United States Patent 1838389
- Photographic camera for flexible materials sensitive to light
- Improved apparatus for determining the oxygen saturation of blood?
- Improvements in or relating to refractometers
- Improvements in or relating to adding, sorting, statistical and like machines
Further reading
- Buckland, MichaelMichael BucklandMichael Keeble Buckland is an Emeritus Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and Co-Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative....
. “Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43, no. 4 (May 1992): 284–294. - Buckland, Michael. “The Kinamo camera, Emanuel Goldberg, and Joris Ivens.” Film History 20 (1) (2008): 49-58. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/film_history/v020/20.1.buckland.pdf
- Burke, Colin. Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra and the other Memex. Scarecrow Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8108-2783-2.
- Hoover, J. Edgar. “The Enemy’s Masterpiece of Espionage.” Reader’s Digest 48 (April 1946): 1-6.
- Mauersberger, Klaus. Von der Photographie zur Photophysik: 100 Jahre Jahre Wissenschaftlich-Photographisches Institut 1908-2008. Technische Univ. Dresden. ISBN 978-386780-086-0.
- Neumann, S. (1957). “Prof. Emanuel Goldberg.” Bulletin of the Research Council of Israel 5C(no 4): i,iii-v. Special issue in honor of Goldberg.
- Shaw, Ralph R. “The Rapid Selector.” Journal of Documentation. 5: 164-71.
- White, William. The Microdot: History and Application. Phillips Publications, 1992. ISBN 1-932572-20-0.
See also
- List of Israel Prize recipients