All rights reserved © Thomas Allgeier This page was last modified on 8/5/20

The Project

 

What we are talking about is scanning of several thousand 35 mm slides, several more thousand 6 x 7 cm and 9 x 12 cm slides and negatives, as well as many hundred pages of written information that accompanied the images which let one find / identify what one is looking for.

 

 

The large-format “slides” as one would imagine provide superb quality and definition, so much so that we thought you would like to see some – see the slideshow on the homepage.

 

We should also add that over a period of years Ritzo had already compiled a significant amount of the published papers of Hans Jenemann, and scanned them for posterity.

 

We have taken the liberty of registering the domain www.jenemann.org on which you can see a few more pictures as well the beginning of what we eventually intend to achieve:

 

A searchable archive of images and documents, taken/written by Hans Jenemann, or connected to his researches in some way.

 

While this may seem as an almost unmanageable task it is clear to us that it is worth the effort:

You must appreciate that Hans Jenemann went to extraordinary lengths to acquire some of these images: He used in parts a Linhof large-format camera and much auxiliary equipment, and after some trials had more or less perfected the art of taking pictures of antique balances.

Picture the scene: The man drives from his home in Mainz (Germany) to a monastery in Kremsmünster (Austria), unloads a car-boot full of professional photographic kit, sets it all up and patiently proceeds to take pictures of the earliest known precision balances of Florenz, Krusche, Ekling, Seyss, Rueprecht and Nemetz for posterity and research.

 

We could not bring ourselves to let these treasures slumber unnoticed. When finished this will be the largest computerised image database of balance-related material of all times, anywhere in the known universe!

 

We will not make the papers themselves downloadable (to avoid copyright infringements), but indicate which we have and that we are prepared to share them with known individuals on a non-commercial basis for the purposes of research and access to detail information. Similarly we will not upload high-resolution images, but again would make them individually available to persons who have a genuine interest.

 

 

In so doing we feel we perform a very useful social function: More people have walked on the moon than have been able to view this collection of pictures in their entirety before we started digitising them.

The balance collection of Hans Jenemann was dispersed after his death and is also not viewable in its entirety. If you wanted to have a look at this all it would take a lot of travelling around the world (mostly Germany actually) and trying to gain access to some storerooms at balance manufacturers and chemical institutes. So to save you all of this time our project will allow you to browse the great man’s legacy in the virtual world from your armchair.

 

It also should convey some sense of discovery: When I saw those pictures for the first time I knew how Carter and Lord Carnarvon must have felt when they peered into King Tut’s tomb 3000 years after it was sealed. We sincerely hope that people who eventually click through the website (once finished of course) get a similar sense of discovering a lost treasure.