Originally posted by MBike74 Thank you for all the trivia, especially coming from someone who is an insider. I could read stuff like that all day long. Please add more occasionally as you think of it, I am sure we would all find it fascinating. For instance, I heard that at times Kodak would clean the floors to reclaim all the silver dust and end up with a rather large "bar" of silver at the end. Any truth to that? Again, thank you for the interesting facts.
At one time Kodak was the largest commercial consumer of silver in the world. In the early 80,s 20% of the weight of a piece of x-ray film was silver. They had a pretty good silver recovery operation. 90% of the silver that they used was recovered from commercial photofinishing operations. Special canisters were placed in the fixer drain sysem to reclaim silver. These were then collected by Kodak and burned to recover te silver. After assay a check would be sent to the customer who sent them it.
Kodak had loooooooooooong term contracts with silver producers that averaged the price they paid over several months so that they were somewhat insulated from short term price fluctuations.
Kodak Park was a city unto itself. It had it's own security and fire department. The fire department was highly skilled in dealing with chemical spills and often worked with local fire departments when these occured outside the plant. It had it's own waste water treatment facility stocked with trout as they were very sensitive to pollutants. It had it's own railroad and power plant. They had trucks that never left the property and because of all the people walking around they rigidly enforced speed limits. You could get fired for breaking the 15mph speed limit if you were in an accident. There were two water systems flowing through the plant. One with potable water the other without that was used for cooling systems etc.
The building where film is coated operated in total darkness. You learned to count steps to figure out where you were. When you approached an intersection you shouted out beep beep to warn anyone else who was walking near there. It was pretty noisy so you could not hear others walking around. For those of you who have run high speed web presses imaging working on one in total darkness. The safety systems were incredible.
It cost $7,000,000 to shut down the coating lines and restart them. If a machine broke down it was given a total maintenace makeover. If it broke down again the next week, you repeated the whole process. The techs who maintained these made very good money but worked their tails off. If the person who was to follow you on the next shift could not show up for work, you had to stay and work their shift. No questions asked. The only day they would shut down operation with no breakdown was Christmas Day. Even that was not guaranteed.
All of the equipment was custom designed and made by their own personnel.