05 Nov 2025

Gadget works / Red redemption

David Moore talks Kodak (and war machines) with author Alice Lovejoy; Jack and Ace hit the road

Calutron operators at their panels, in the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, TN during World War II. The calutrons were used to refine uranium ore into fissile material. During the Manhattan Project effort to construct an atomic explosive, workers toiled in secrecy, most having no idea to what end their labors were directed. Gladys Owens, the woman seated in the foreground, didn't understand the exact purpose of her job until seeing this photo in a public tour of the facility fifty years later. (Photo: Public domain, via Wikipedia)

Today: David Moore, co-founder of Sludge; and Jack Pendarvis, an American screenwriter, author, and voice actor.

Issue No. 436

Kodak, for the Wartimes of Your Life
David Moore

Ace Goes to Hollywood: Episode 12
Jack Pendarvis

Kodak, for the Wartimes of Your Life

by David Moore

People standing in front of art deco-looking KODAK WORLD exhibit, a globe flanked by photos and signage. — Eastman Kodak Co. Kodak World exhibit New York World's Fair (1939-1940). Photo via The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Kodak, the company that popularized the “snapshot” and made photography accessible to the world, produced much more than the friendly, once-ubiquitous film rolls sold worldwide in their small, vivid yellow boxes. In the new book, Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War, film and media historian Alice Lovejoy relates how Kodak’s film manufacturing was enmeshed in the global chemical industry, its raw materials diverted into making weapons for the 20th Century’s world wars.

From the forests of East Tennessee to the filmmaking capitals of Europe, Lovejoy traces the role of Kodak and its rival chemical manufacturers, like German company Agfa, in producing weapons. Kodak’s chemical subsidiary Tennesee Eastman, built in a timber-rich region to produce cellulose acetate for film, by 1944 operated one of the largest munitions factories in the world. At nearby Oak Ridge, Tennessee Eastman processed uranium mined from the Congo into fissionable material used in the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

Lovejoy’s new book is rich with fascinating histories of the relentless capitalists of film manufacturing, the industrial logic of mass chemical production, the lasting environmental hazards that leached out of film factories, and the world-altering weapons they helped build. Militant Chemistry carries the thread through to the present-day extraction of the cobalt used in our ever-present smartphone batteries to power a new generation of devices that are still stuffed with snapshots.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.