Page 24 - 2015-06

must be regarded as hyperbole; with valve am- Company had to turn its attention to much more
plifiers of that era working at full output some- urgent wartime production.
thing like five per cent harmonic distortion
would have been about the best achievable with It can now he seen that clever as it was the
iron-cored output transformers and output Harper system was the product of misplaced
valves like the ubiquitous 6L6G. ingenuity and effort. It suffered from a number
of short comings including: a) the layout of the
The most powerful lamps of the day for porta- film format allowed no provision for edge run-
ble 16 mm projectors were 1,000 watts with a ners to hold the film flat in the projector gate.
biplane filament used with conventional con- Over the long term this would lead to either the
denser optics and uncoated projection lenses. A sound track or edge of picture frame becoming
long throw for an audience in excess of 500 scratched. Whilst this could be minimised by
would have needed at least a 3 inch projection using a curved gate with edge guides as in the
lens of probably f/2.5 aperture. This with the old wartime L516 projector there is no claim
relatively inefficient light source/condenser for this in the literature; this also still leaves the
system and the slow pull down of the Maltese problem of sprocket cheeks.
cross intermittent would have resulted in a very
dim picture. Probably a sensible maximum au- b) The introduction of a non-standard format
dience would be eighty to one hundred. when the SMPE specification had become, or
was becoming, an internationally accepted
There have been a few short and sometimes standard, and the market was well supplied
inaccurate accounts/mentions of the Harper with a wide variety of 16mm projectors from
system in magazines since 1948. E.g. Refs 5, 6 such established firms as RCA, Bell & Howell,
and 7, and even in The Miles magazine, Ref. 4, BTH and Gaumont British.
this latter states:- "With these alterations the
speed of the film through the camera remained c) Film librarians would have needed special
the same...." editing and splicing equipment to handle this
format and normally libraries instruct borrow-
There was never any intention to produce a ers not to rewind films before return to allow
camera for the Harper system and none were them to examine for damage and carry out
ever designed or made. The sole function of the necessary repairs without the necessity for a
printer and projectors was to reproduce existing double rewind which in itself can cause accu-
35 mm films onto the 16 mm gauge with en- mulative damage due to electrostatic attraction
hanced quality of sound reproduction. of dust and possible cinching.
Ref. 5 states - "alternate frames are upside d) If giving a continuous show the necessity to
down to each other and alternate frames only stop to change a reel from take up to feed arms
are projected". As read, a series of upright and and rethread the machine would be an unwant-
inverted images would be superimposed on ed break in the programme. Even if two ma-
each other, alternately, clearly not correct. chines were used it would mean that when
printing long films alternate reels would need
It is not known how many Harper projectors to be printed on the same 16mm reel; a ready
were made or what happened to them. The fate source of confusion?
of the special film perforator and the dual pur-
pose special printer is also unknown. By the The Miles Aircraft Company was taken over by
time that the system was completed and dem- Handley Page in the early 1950s which in turn
onstrated W.W.2 was about to commence. Im- was dissolved in later years. All of the build-
provements in normal 16mm S.O.F. had been ings at Reading were dismantled and the origi-
rapid and sound reproduction was quite accept- nal airfield has been developed as an industrial
able and in widespread use. The Miles Aircraft estate and for housing. It is only remembered in

24 REEL DEALS June 2015