Turns out Kodak had a whole factory in Rochester just for making shutter springs

I was digging through an old 1970s repair manual I found at an estate sale near Buffalo, and it mentioned that Kodak was making over 2 million tiny shutter springs per year at their Elmgrove plant. Never really thought about how many specialized parts went into a single camera before that. Anyone else run into wild production numbers like that for old camera components?

3 comments

3 Comments

claire_gibson29d ago

Okay but are we sure 2 million a year was a lot? I mean, those old Kodak cameras were selling like crazy, and a little spring like that probably cost pennies to make and took a fraction of a second to stamp out. It sounds impressive but in my experience with manufacturing, that's not really a crazy number for a high volume part. Your mileage may vary.

mila_campbell2529d ago

Haha, right? I can barely keep track of which leggings I wore yesterday, so 2 million of anything sounds like a magic trick to me. My brain short-circuits trying to picture that many springs, probably because I lose my car keys in a two-bedroom apartment on the regular. So yeah, I'll take your word on the manufacturing math, but 2 million still feels like a ton of tiny metal coils to me. I'm just impressed they didn't lose count!

sarah_patel2528d ago

Oh man, @mila_campbell25 hits the nail on the head with the lost car keys thing (I once found mine in the fridge, so I get it). Honestly, my brain's still stuck on the whole "2 million a year" thing too. I can't wrap my head around numbers that big - my idea of a huge quantity is when I buy three bags of chips for a party and still eat most of them alone. So yeah, I'm with you on being impressed they kept count. Like, forget the manufacturing math, I'd be the person on the assembly line who gets distracted and accidentally adds an extra zero one day. Then suddenly it's 20 million springs and everyone's like "wait, what happened?

-1