Nagel-Werke was a short-lived German camera maker. But its owner and chief camera designer, Dr August Nagel, would change the photographic world forever.
Born in 1882, the young August Nagel was constructing cameras even when he was a boy. By 1908, at just 26, he and his friend Carl Drexler had started Drexler & Nagel in Stuttgart to produce their Contessa No 1 – a well-made, compact camera that used 127 film.
It became such a success that, the next year, the company was renamed Contessa Camera Works Stuttgart. In all it developed 23 models that were exported worldwide and, in 1918, the University of Freiburg awarded the 36-year-old inventor the honorary title of Doktor.
In 1926, Nagel merged Contessa-Nettel with three other firms – Ernemann, Goerz and Ica – and with financial backing from Zeiss formed Zeiss Ikon. But, just two years later, he left to form Dr August Nagel-Factory, and produced the Librette, Recomar, Vollenda and Pupille cameras among others – another success story.
Then, in 1931, Kodak made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he sold his company to Eastman Kodak, forming Kodak AG. With this new backing, Nagel began to develop a high-quality yet affordable 35mm camera to compete with Leica and Contax. And that’s where this story gets really interesting.
Up to this point, the giants in 35mm photography were Contax and Leica; each one required the use of its own special film cassette and they were not interchangeable.
Other makers simply made their 35mm cameras to use one or the other system. Photographers would load their cassettes from bulk rolls in a darkroom or dark bag – which, while doable, was less than convenient. Now, with Kodak’s funding, Nagel set out to solve this dilemma.
His brilliance was in developing a simple film cartridge that would fit both the Contax and Leica cameras. It was marketed as Kodak size 135 film, meaning 1 roll of 35mm film. It was the first pre-rolled 35mm film cartridge and it quickly became the 35mm standard that is still used today.
Dr Nagel’s most popular camera, the Vollenda 48, had been launched in 1929 before Kodak acquired the company in 1931. A well-made and compact folder, it produced 16 exposures of 3x4cm on 127 roll film, with either Schneider Radionar or Zeiss Tessar lenses in Compur shutters.
He quickly modified his Vollenda to use this new 135mm film, thereby creating the Kodak Retina – which begat a long line of successful Retina cameras. In 1934, both the new Kodak Retina and its matching film cassette were released and quickly became almost the only way to buy 35mm film.
Removing the need for photographers to load their own film cassettes gave the 35mm format a boost as big as the invention of the Leica camera itself. Photography was finally convenient!
Originally Kodak offered 18 and 36-exposure rolls, but in the 1950s that slowly shifted to 20 and 36 exposures. In the 1980s, it became 12, 24 and 36 exposures – though the 12-exposure rolls were not well received by the public and soon faded away.
There were other, rival, daylight-loading systems, but none were particularly successful. One of the more prominent ones was Agfa’s Karat system, which was introduced in 1936 and produced until 1950. It used two cassettes, eliminating the need to rewind the film.
In 1964, Agfa revived the Karat 35mm cartridge system, calling it the Rapid to compete with 135 film's mightiest rival: Kodak’s own 126 Kodapak cartridge.
The 126 film system, with its plastic cartridge and convenient drop-in loading, boosted the market for beginner cameras for nearly two decades. But it could not compete with the image quality delivered by regular 35mm cameras. Agfa’s Rapid cameras were gone by 1971, and its film by 1980. Kodak’s 126 film fared better, but was discontinued in 1999.
The frugal photographer can still buy black-and-white 35mm emulsions in 100-foot lengths and spool his or her own cassettes.
This involves putting the roll of film into a bulk loader in complete darkness. Re-loadable cassettes are then filled with film using a crank on the loader. The film is then cut and a leader cut into the tail of the loaded cassette. All this can be done in daylight.
Today, Dr Nagel’s 35mm film cartridge remains the dominant – in fact, the only remaining – pre-loaded film cassette.
But there remains one problem – a problem that neither Dr Nagel, nor Kodak, nor anyone else has ever managed to solve: the flocked-felt light traps at the film gate forever remain the most expensive part of the 35mm film cassette, costing more than the metal canister, its printing, the cardboard box or even the film itself!
Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras.
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