A Community of Engineers
In the motion picture industry, large East Coast manufacturers such as Kodak, GE, DuPont, and Bausch & Lomb produced materials such as lights, film stock, and lenses for production. Beginning with a brief history of the motion picture technology field before 1915, this chapter describes how the industry increasingly became reliant on these American industrial concerns. Beginning around 1916, the manufacturing side of the business was professionalized and unified by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), while continuing to isolate itself from the production side of the industry for another decade. SMPE emphasized standardization across companies in the manufacturing of motion picture tools, creating a stable industry and a community for knowledge sharing that had little contact with the production center in the west.