AH Baird - Equipment - Book Slide

AH Baird

Premises: 37 + 39 Lothian-street

AH Baird moved to new premises in Lothian Street in 1895.

The British Journal of Photography gives an interesting account of these premises:

Mr Baird of 37 and 39 Lothian Street , and 2 and 4, Brighton Street, Edinburgh, writes:-

"You will observe that I have changed my address. In my new premises the accommodation is fully three times as much as I had at No 15.

The workshop is now under the same roof, a great convenience. I have ample floor space, a feature I greatly lacked before.

There are six air-tight show windows (mahogany and plate glass) and a wall fourteen feet long by nine feet high.

The office is screened off, and so situated that those sitting at any of the desks can command a view of all who enter or leave any of the departments.

On the ground floor are the following departments:

    - Photographic materials (dark room, &c.)
    - optical lanterns and accessories
    - general optical goods
    - office
    - wet and dry chemicals
    - educational apparatus
    - workshop.

Downstairs are situated

    - the chemical apparatus department (glass, wood, metal)
    - lantern demonstration rooms
    - bottle stores
    - packing room.

In outside cellars are kept

    - carboys of the mineral acids (H2SO4, HCl, HNO3)
    - Winchester quarts of liq. ammonia
    - glacial acetic acid and suchlike chemicals.

The dark room on the ground floor measures eleven feet six inches by twelve feet and is twelve and a half feet high.

It is lighted both by daylight and gas lamp, which latter is arranged to supply white, orange and ruby light as may be required.

There is ample bench room, and a stoneware developing sink thirty inches by twenty inches and ten inches deep.

The entrance to the dark room is novel and very efficient. The appended sketch (which was not illustrated in BJP) shows that there are no doors, ingress and egress are effected without disturbing those at work inside, and the ventilation is good.

The sides and roof of the entrance are painted dead black. The walls and roof of the dark room itself are of a chocolate brown colour.

For the coming winter season the lantern demonstration room will be ready. The walls and roof are to be the same colour as the dark room, while at one end will be a very white and opaque screen.

Parties purchasing a lantern will have its efficiency demonstrated; amateurs wishing to examine their slides by projection will be accommodated on certain evenings for that purpose.

Scientists interested in the lantern polariscope, lantern microscope, &c. will have them fully explained and demonstrated before purchase."

Source: BJP: 21 June 1895, p.397.

This whole article above was printed as a single paragraph in the bottom corner of a page.

This took up about one sixth of a page. There were 832 pages in the 1895 volume of the BJP!