The Leica I (Model A) of 1925 was the first Leica sold to the public and it created a sensation when it debuted at the Leipzig Spring Fair in May of that year. Considering its hefty initial price of $75.00 (the equivalent of $1,370.57 in 2025 dollars) it sold respectably well to an intrepid and well-heeled coterie of early adopters. However, production and sales of the Leica I (Model A) didn’t really take off until 1928, and according to Leica Wiki, nearly 53,000 of the 58,486 total assigned serial numbers for that landmark model were produced from 1928 to 1930! Undoubtedly part of this late surge in the Leica’s popularity was due to publicity, including testimonials from such luminaries as Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who used a Leica I (Model A) on his Antarctic expeditions, and Hugo Eckner, the well-known commander of the Graf Zeppelin and a lifelong Leica fan who shot some of the first aerial photos ever taken with an Ur-Leica, furnished by Oskar Barnack himself. However, there was another huge reason that Leica sales didn’t really rev up until the late ‘20s. Prior to about 1927 the only way to get film into your Leica was to buy a 100 ft. roll of 35mm cine film (typically blue-sensitive orthochromatic black & white film with a speed of around ASA 8!), open the can in the darkroom, cut the film to size (about 5-1/4 feet for 36 exposures), trim the leader, roll it by hand onto the spool, and insert the loaded spool into a Leica Cassette A (the original FILCA magazine). This all had to be done in a darkroom or a changing bag, the only consolation being that ortho film isn’t sensitive to red light, so you could use a low output red safelight to see what you were doing. Things began to get a bit easier for Leica fans starting in 1927, and while there’s no precise timeline for the following developments, all made loading the landmark Leica I (Model A) (and the Compur shutter Leica B announced in 1926) successively quicker and less cumbersome. First, film manufacturers including Agfa and Perutz began offering pre-cut lengths of 35mm film (typically in 36-exposure lengths, complete with trimmed leaders) in light-tight metal tins. Available in 3-roll or 1-roll sizes and specifically marketed to Leica users, they eliminated tedious film cutting and trimming, but the film still had to be manually rolled onto Leica cassette spools in the darkroom. Then, boxed pre-loaded film spools for the Leica and Contax appeared, with the loaded spools protected in a foil wrapper. This speeded up the process considerably since all you had to do in the darkroom was unwrap the loaded spool, remove the original spool from the Leica Cassette A, slide in the spool, loaded with film, and close the cassette. Once this was done, the cassette could be loaded into the camera in daylight. Finally, around 1928, some genius got the idea of adding a protective paper leader about 2 inches long to the preloaded film spools, creating (you guessed it) the daylight loading 35mm film spool! Offered alongside non-daylight-loading spools at slight extra cost, daylight loading spools let you load a Leica or Contax cassette in daylight, and then cut off the paper leader before loading it into the camera. Daylight loading film spools were offered by Agfa, Perutz, Kodak, Ilford, and others until about 1940. All this ingenuity was essentially rendered obsolete by the invention of the pre-loaded, felt-lipped 35mm film cartridge, which was introduced in conjunction with the Kodak Retina I in 1934. Both the camera and the cartridge were designed by Dr. August Nagel who sold the company he founded (Nagel-Werke Stuttgart), to Eastman Kodak Co. in 1932. August Dr. Nagel designed such masterpieces as the Pupille and Vollenda cameras, also marketed by Kodak, and much of the Retina line, is considered one of the greatest camera designers of the 20th century. But his lasting legacy may well be the humble 35mm film cartridge, which transformed the Leica legend, and helped to create the most successful film format of all time, one that still lives on in both analog and digital form today, more than 90 years later. Profuse thanks to noted Leica historian James Lager and Todd Gustavson, curator of the George Eastman Museum technology collection in Rochester, NY. for providing all the images and much of the historical data for this post. #TBT #LeicaSociety (fb)

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