Hackman Collection

THE HACKMAN COLLECTION

Bob Andrews, Mikael Barnard and I visited Willem Hackman to view and photograph his collection of Babies. Most of the following pictures are Mikael's, tho' I have photo-shopped them.

We start with that rarest of beasts, the Pathé Baby Printer. It has something of an air of being cobbled together - note two separate cylindrical resistances in the base - but, on the other hand, the base itself seems pukka. I wonder if one could make one from old Baby bits........

We now move on to Dynamo models, starting with a very rare version mounted directly on a special base, rather than added on later. The size of the bracing for the rear-mounted model give some idea of the level of cranking effort needed to get a high enough speed for power generation - it must have needed a lot of holding down. Maybe the side-mounted version was more stable.

The rest of the projectors are in a series of images in largely random order and with repetitions, I suspect - I don't know enough to sort them all out and label them. Shall have to go to the horse's mouth if we can both spare the time.

This last section I do know a bit about. The first one is just a part of a continuous loop mechanism. Second is a type or resistance I have never seen before. Some of the Pathex material is, of course, very rare, but we see many Pathex-branded items in the UK. I believe the Pathex brand was also used in Germany, but I don't know why so much Pathex appears here. The  actual American Pathex (pic 3 below, pix 1&2 the next row) is vanishingly rare. The history of Pathex 9.5 in the US was brief, but in that time it produced and saw marketed sound versions of the Baby, which never reached the UK or, I suspect, le Continong, and I have never actually heard of one - has anyone ever had a sighting?