Film Service Scored Bullseye With Navy's Target Practice Equipment

When new men and returning veterans were given sales talks by the head men in the various and sundry undergraduate organizations at Phillips Brooks House during the pre-studying stages of this semester, they were also treated to a film showing scenes of the last two Commencements and other Yard activities. This film was, logically enough, produced by the Harvard Film Service which, one would judge by its modest quarters in the basement of the Germanic Museum, probably photographed pastoral views of the University in all its splendor, and very little else.

And yet this unpretentious and little publicized feature of the University, in addition to its run-of-the-mill films, such as that exhibited at P.B.H., also makes many of the recordings for the collection in the poetry room, produces the movies for the remedial reading course, and during the war, aided the Navy in its search for superior equipment when it successfully completed a job that Western Electric and R.C.A. admittedly could not do.

Intramural Film Shown

Among the films that the service has turned out are commencement pictures, a short on the synthesis of quinine, one on W.R.U.L., a University radio station that broadcasts to Europe, a basic English feature, and a movie on intramural sports, which was shown around the country to all the Harvard clubs, demonstrating to the members what else is done here in the way of athletics besides football. The service is presently working on a film for Dr. Carl W. Walter, of the Medical School, on the postoperative sterilization of an operating room.

The remedial reading films are now in the process of being improved. But James F. Barclay, director of the Film Service, acknowledges that he has temporarily struck a snag. To carry out his present plan in bettering the film, Barclay faces the task of superimposing three pictures on a single frame. A triple exposure, he claims, means far too great a margin of error, and he is afraid that if he put what he wanted on celluloid, lined up the three desired simultaneous images, and fired away, that the bottom picture would be obliterated by the top two and the total result would be confusion.

The probability is that Barclay will overcome his problem with the same finesse with which he developed equipment for the Special Devices Division of the Navy during the war. His task then was to devise sound tracks that would record accurately to the tenth of a cycle per second, to be used for scoring gunners in target practice. With this film, they could record the hits made in proportion to the probability of hitting. The Navy first took its problem to Western Electric and R.C.A., both of whom said they couldn't come closer than a cycle per second and were willing to bet no one else could either.

Present when the Navy conferred with the representatives of the two firms was Phillip J. Rulon, Acting Dean of the School of Education, who suggested that the job be given the film service. Together, Roulon and Barclay framed the equipment with which they were able to produce the extremely accurate track. Since they had no priority on materials, their resourcefulness was occasionally called upon as a substitute, such as the time they had to convert an old projector into a camera or make their own counter when they were unable to buy a hand counter.

Wave Forms Depicted

The equipment finished, the Navy's mathematics division in New York made out tables for photographing wave forms of the proper size. The photographing was a long tedious job, that involved thousands of separate photographs. One track needed as many as 12,000 separate exposures.

"Devising the equipment was fun," Barclay stated, "but making the sound tracks was enough to drive a man to drink."

The final result were sound tracks accurate to the one hundredth of a cycle per second. The film service had scored a bullseye.

Barclay would make no predictions on the amount of film he thought the service would consume this year. Two years ago it shot 500 feet, last year 5000. On the recent commencement alone, 1200 feet were expended.

Another war service performed was that of making recordings for the Overseas Administration Civil Affairs Training School here. These recordings, made at various intervals of the student's training, were used as a check-up on his progress in the language he was learning. "By the end they got good enough to tell jokes," said Barclay, "but I never knew what they were talking about."