Merry Christmas 2020

May I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.. I received a link from Nick Godano who used to work for Polychrome HQ centarl laboratory and is now a member of a Capela chorus group, Mad Hatters. This link is for the group's first vertual concert which is the season appropriate and hope you will enjoy it as I did immensely. The Link is HERE

50th anniversary cap

Polychrome Caps

Another find from Erica Bonime.     Thank you again Erica!

The one on the left has a special logo created for our 50th anniversary.     The one on the right was the subsequent design used until the formation of Kodak Polychrome Graphics.

Polychrome Tie

Erica Bonime found a Polychrome tie.       Judging from the rectangular logo shape this appears to be from 1980-90 period.      Thank you Erica.

I am currently marooned in Tokyo unable to get back to NY due to the outbreak of Covid-19.       Hope everyone is staying away from the Corona!      Ken

Chrome-Glo

One of the subsidiaries Poychrome had was a paper coating company in Philadelphia called Speidel.

In late 1960 I frequented Speidel to use a coating machine equipped to handle solvent.     Speidel's major product was at that moment a photosensitive paper  used then for a diazo-printing machine.      It is a product long forgotten now but was being used widely at that time for copying large documents such as engineering and architectural documents.        However by then newer copying technologies started to erode such application.       Electrostatic copying paper was one of the technologies we were interested in as an alternative product, but we were unable to produce one  on the water based coating machines we had at Speidel.       This Chrome-Glo paper had fluorescent pigment coating which the Speidel coating machine was able to handle.      We hoped these paper would be widely used for window display advertisement but it was not successful enough to rescue Speidel diazo business.        Soon after Polychrome closed this plant.         This booklet contains several color  samples still brilliant to this day.

Thank you Erica for digging this out from your shelf.      

Seth Cross, Mr. Irie, Erica Bonime early 1980'

Erica Bonime found this photo of her with Seth Cross and Mr. Irie of DIC at a party.     Mr. Irie was sent from DIC to head the DIC America which at that time held Polychrome, Sun Chemical, Kohl & Madden, etc.    Mr. Irie was running DIC's European operation just before his arrival to NY. and was regarded as one of the most able and accomplished within DIC.       Earlier Joe Piot was appointed as the head of DIC America soon after the purchase of Polychrome by DIC but there were much discord among employees within a few years and Mr. Irie was sent in to rescue the huge investment DIC made in US.     Mr. Irie charmed everyone soon after his arrival with his sense of humor but was decisive in making his decision on future investment in Katzenstein and others.
Thank you Erica for your contribution.

Simon Chu revisit China 2FF factory

Jenchi Huang and I had chance to have lunch this week with Simon Chu and learned a bit more on his one day trip to Nanyang.         As Jenchi commented Nanyang is no longer country town with unpaved road he used to know but is transformed to an industrial town.        Since the most of the young workers there do not know the history of 2FF the management wanted to have an interview session with Simon to give them a bit of history.(see earlier post)
On the day we had lunch, there was an announcement by Kodak that its Xiamen plant is being sold to 2FF ( sorry I am too used to call them 2FF while it is now well known as HuaGuang)
Although only a speculation on my part, Kodak must have found it difficult to compete in China.     I can see from the Alibaba (equivalent of Amazon here in US) that all sort of offset plates are available on line at an unbelievable $2-3 / sqm for thermal plate along with all variety of plates.

Simon being interviewed by local press,

Mr. Wong ... old time friend acting as translator.

Simon with old and new friend at 2FF

Saying hello to old acquaintance, the production line.