Amateur night OLD fogies often bemoan technological advance . For some audiobuffs the johnny - come - lately transistor will never replace the purity of the valve , nor the compact disc the long - playing record . And in photography it is generally agreed that nothing recent has been as good a colour film as Kodachrome - - which turns 62 this year . The thinner gel , tighter grain structure and purity of the emulsion used in Kodachrome makes for sharper detail and richer colour than either the rival E - 6slide films , such as Ektachrome and Fujichrome , or any colour - print film .

But in a world that prizes immediacy ( another thing that fogies despise ) Kodachrome has a problem: it is a nightmare to develop . Bringing out those perfect images requires 18 different photochemical processes . As a result , the machines used to develop Kodachrome are huge , expensive and rare . Most people have to send the stuff away by post and will probably not see the results for a week or more . Not surprisingly , many prefer to use a lesser film that the local chemist can develop and return in an hour .

Now , though , the Kodachrome process has been revamped into something that corner - shop developers can afford . And , since many old fogies also believe that a gifted amateur is worth a dozen slogging professionals , they will probably be pleased to learn that the job was done not by Kodak 's own engineers but by a dilettante chemist ( albeit one who is also a professional photographer ) .

In making his invention , Richard Mackson is merely following tradition . Kodachrome itself was devised by two gifted amateurs - - Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky . Their day jobs were as classical musicians , and they timed the steps in the development process by whistling the final movement of Brahms 's C Minor Symphony . But the method they came up with - - though a big advance on the multiple lenses and filters that had previously been required to take colour photographs - - was still fiendishly complicated .

Even a modern Kodachrome processor is a behemoth . It is 33 metres ( 100 feet ) long , costs $1m, occupies 1,000 square metres of floor space and needs to be served by a staff of ten , including an analytical chemist to formulate fresh solutions . Moreover , it uses thousands of litres of chemicals a day , and must run the film through high - pressure sprays at speeds in excess of 100 metres a minute in order to produce a sufficiently strong chemical reaction .

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Mr Mackson had his idea in 1988, after returning to America from photographing the Seoul Olympics . Kodak had set up a temporary Kodachrome - processing centre in South Korea to allow him and his colleagues to turn their film round quickly . Back home , he was unwilling to go back to the original level of service .

Like the two Leos half a century before him , Mr Mackson worked on his ideas alone before he approached Kodak . The main problem he had to overcome was the build up of waste products from the development process on the surface of the emulsion . These have to be swept away quickly enough to allow fresh chemicals to do their work . After a number of false starts he realised that he could do this by enclosing the film in a small container instead of an enormous vat . That would let him reduce the speed at which the film had to pass through the reaction vessel , and he could therefore shrink the whole apparatus .

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The heart of Mr Mackson 's innovation is a series of metre - long plastic tubes - within - tubes . The chemical developers are pumped into the space between the tubes and out through holes in the inner tube into the central chamber . Here , the turbulence created by the spray forces an intimate contact between the film and the developer . As a consequence , the film need move at a mere two metres a minute .

The result is a machine that , in all relevant departments , beats the old one by a factor of ten . It costs a tenth of the price , requires only one technician to operate it ( the chemicals are pre - mixed by Kodak , and their concentration is monitored by computer ) and can fit into a 60 - square - metre room . A film can be processed in under 40 minutes . The result , Kodak hopes , will soon be in a high - street developer near you . Fogies should cheer .

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