"A" Ordinary Kodak

Format

darkroom-loaded roll film, 24 exposures

System

Kodak Ordinary / Daylight

Shutter

sector, string-cocked, time and instantaneous

Focusing

fixed universal

Metering

none

Spec Notes

*** THE ONLY ONE OF THE THREE DAYLIGHT/ORDINARY PAIRS THAT FOLDS. *** The pivot is a block Kodak prints verbatim in 1892, 1894 and 1895: 'A Daylight and A Ordinary Kodaks have single lenses with fixed stops. B Ordinary and C Ordinary have single lenses and revolving stops. B Daylight and C Daylight Kodaks have double lenses and revolving stops. A and B Kodaks have fixed universal focus. C Kodaks have focusing lever and index and adjustable speed for shutter.' At the A size the pair differ by LOADING ALONE - one dimension - because they share the lens. Leather against natural wood is FINISH and does no work. The Daylight and Ordinary lines were introduced together in December 1891. NO PICTURE SIZE IS RECORDED: five catalogue reads give five different fractions and never repeat, and the museum figure of 2-3/4 x 3-1/4 in is refuted as an outlier in both axes - its supporting argument, that a 3-3/4 in image cannot fit on 3-1/4 in film, is invalid, because film width constrains only the SHORT side of a negative and Kodak demonstrably rotated negatives on the roll. Kodak's fraction-free 'length of focus of lens, 4 inches' is carried instead. Watch a corrupt secondary here: historiccamera's 'Ordinary B' datasheet is the DAYLIGHT B text pasted under the Ordinary heading, and must not be cited for anything distinguishing the two lines. A DIMENSION IS DELIBERATELY ABSENT HERE. Kodak's catalogue scans corrupt vulgar fractions specifically: repeat reads of the same page return different fractions while prose, model names, shutter names, dollar figures and INTEGER measurements stay stable. Where Kodak's own years disagree with each other the value is omitted rather than picked. Integers are trusted - the 1890 volume gives cubic-inch figures reliably in the same sentence whose fraction reads as the impossible '2 3/2 inches in diameter'. NO PRICE IS RECORDED ON THIS ROW. AA-13's 'ORIGINAL LIST PRICE' column is not a list price - established in slice 7 and sharpened in slice 8. In this era Kodak's own catalogues give the real figures anyway, and where they matter to a row-shape decision they are quoted in these notes instead of stored as data. DATES ARE MARKET DATES, NOT PRODUCTION. AA-13 heads its columns 'ON THE MARKET FROM / TO'. Where Kodak's own catalogues place a model outside AA-13's span the conflict is recorded on the row rather than resolved. DATING: NONE EXISTS, AND THAT IS A POSITIVE FINDING RATHER THAN A GAP. No serial-to-year mapping was ever published for any Kodak of this era and there is no date code; Kodak's own catalogues print no serial anywhere. AA-13 records only two ceilings - the highest known serial on The Kodak as 5192 and on the No. 1 as 15,559 - and gives no serial note at all for any other model. A serial here establishes only that a camera falls below a known ceiling. What DOES date these cameras is Kodak's own vocabulary and hardware sequence: the body address marking ('Eastman Co. Rochester' runs 1889-1892) and the shutter succession, sector 1890 to Barker 1892 to Bausch & Lomb iris diaphragm 1893.

Fitted Lens

single lens with fixed stops, 4 in focus

Rangefinder

No

Alternate Names

—

Introduced

1891