as photography, printing, cinematography, photoengraving, and television. He completed his Ph.D. at Ostwald’s Institute in Leipzig, where he was also influenced by Wilhelm Wundt’s work on the physiology and psychology of perception. Goldberg was a very skilled craftsman and liked to describe himself as “a chemist by learning, a physicist by calling, and a mechanic by birth.” This combination made him very interested in labor-saving equipment and ergonomic design, which is reflected in cameras designed by him or under his direction when he founded Zeiss Ikon in 1926. At the time, it was a leading high-tech company and the world’s largest camera firm. The famous Contax 35mm camera, designed by Goldberg to compete with the Leica, had several ergonomic innovations. It was, for example, the first camera to have the rangefinder aperture within the viewfinder.

Goldberg has had a curious hidden influence on computing. He decided to see the extent to which microfilm could be physically compressed. In 1925 he presented microdots at a resolution equal to the entire Bible 50 times over one square inch of film, yet legible under a microscope. His design, using a microscope backward as a camera, allowed the photographer to watch the image form. The photographer, then, would know when the exposure was complete. But if you could store 800,000 pages on a 3x5 inch sheet, how would you ever find out which ones addressed a topic you were interested in?

In 1927 Goldberg submitted the first of several patents for an electronic search engine. Images of documents were stored on 35mm microfilm, and descriptive indexing was encoded next to each page. The search query was expressed as a pattern of thin light beams shone on to the microfilm as it was passed through a movie gate. Pattern recognition, using a photoelectric cell, sensed when the thin light beams of the query coincided exactly with the index codes on the film. A match was a “hit” and the document was projected to a screen or a hard copy was produced. The query could be entered in the form of a punched card or dialed in using a rotary telephone handset. Dialing a query allowed remote usage of network-accessible search engines.

The search engine, which Goldberg called a Statistical Machine, was widely demonstrated and patented in 1931. Descriptions in English and

Photograph of Emanuel Goldberg courtesy of Mrs. Chava Gichon. Photograph of Suzanne Briet courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France

• Suzanne Briet