The Clerk's Compromise: On the First Microfilm and the Limits of Access
We often imagine the digital revolution as a clean break from the analog past, a sudden leap into a world of perfect, frictionless copies. But the anxieties and compromises of preservation are much older. Long before the first web crawler, a man named George McCarthy was trying to solve a very modern problem: how to stop valuable information from being lost to the ravages of time and space. His story, and the technology he pioneered, reveal that the trade-offs we debate today—access versus fidelity, completeness versus practicality—have been with us all along.
In the 1920s, McCarthy, a bank clerk, was frustrated. He watched important documents, especially checks, be sent away by train to central clearinghouses, a process that was slow and risked loss or damage. His ingenious solution was to miniaturize them. He developed a machine, later acquired by Eastman Kodak and rebranded as the Recordak, that could photograph checks onto 16mm microfilm. This wasn't merely for storage; it was about creating a secure, compact, and transportable record. The original could travel by rail, but its perfect, tiny replica could be kept safe at home.
This was a monumental achievement, a genuine preservation victory. But it came with what we would now call a significant 'accessibility tax.' To read the microfilmed check, you needed a specific machine—a reader—to magnify the tiny image back to a readable size. The information was preserved, but it was no longer directly legible to the human eye. It was, in essence, a form of very early data encoding, locking content behind a requirement for proprietary hardware.
This is the clerk's compromise. McCarthy prioritized the security and compactness of the record over immediate, universal readability. He made a conscious choice about the format's limitations to achieve its primary goal. We see this echoed in every digital preservation choice we make today. When we archive a website as a WARC file, we preserve its complete structure and content, but you can't simply open it in a browser; it requires a specific tool, a replay system, to make it live again. We choose formats for their longevity and fidelity, knowing they may not be the most convenient for every user.
McCarthy’s story reminds us that preservation is rarely, if ever, about creating a perfect, unmediated copy of the past. It is a series of strategic compromises. We decide what to keep, in what form, and for whom. The microfilm roll, sitting in its cool, dark vault, is both a triumph and a testament to loss. It saved the data from oblivion, but it also placed a pane of glass and a whirring motor between the researcher and the record. As we build our own digital granaries, we must ask ourselves: what are the unavoidable compromises in our own systems, and who might they unintentionally shut out?
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: