Auricon

Auricon cameras were 16 mm film Single System sound-on-film motion picture cameras manufactured in the 1940s through the early 1980s. Auricon cameras are notable because they record sound directly onto an optical or magnetic track on the same film as the image is photographed on, thus eliminating the need for a separate audio recorder. The camera preceded ENG video cameras as the main AV tool of television news gathering due to its portability–and relatively quick production turn-around–where processed negative film image could be broadcast by electronically creating a positive image. Additionally, the Auricon found studio use as a 'kinescope' camera of live video off of a TV screen, but only on early pre-NTSC line-locked monochrome systems.

The History of Auricon begins in New York City. Some of this history is inferred from the collection of patents filed by the trio in the 1930s. John Maurer worked at RCA Labs in New Jersey on sound recording technology in the early 1930s. Eric Berndt was a camera designer in NYC whose business card read: “Specialist in the Design and Building of Special Motion Picture Equipment” and “Formerly with RCA Photophone Research Dept.”

The first 16mm sound-on-film camera was built by Eric Berndt around 1932.

In 1934 Maurer left RCA and joined Eric Berndt to form the Berndt-Maurer Corporation. By 1939, Berndt and Walter Bach moved from NYC to Los Angeles to join up with Maurer.

The December 1939 American Cinematographer has an ad for a Berndt-Maurer synchronous motor drive for the Kodak Cine Special. Later, a blimp was offered, and which mounted the Cine Special camera, the synchronous motor (and a follow-focus mechanism for use with the later Cine Special II). The blimp accommodated 100 or 200 foot film magazines.

A 1939 Berndt-Maurer catalog shows the B-M Sound-Pro camera: 16mm, single or double system, four-lens turret and ground glass focusing. Their target market was industrial films and employee training films.

In 1940 Berndt left the partnership, which then became J.A. Maurer Inc. The first camera labeled as an E. M. Berndt Auricon was the 1941 S16MM SB-CT, a wooden-box single-system sound camera.

In later years, John Maurer designed cameras for NASA, including a 70mm camera used in the space Gemini XI mission in 1966, and in the first moon landing.

The reason why there was so much interest in modifying CineVoices was because they had a very accurate frame registration for a noiseless sound camera having such a low price. It made little sense to design and build a whole camera when Auricon would sell a CineVoice camera body to whoever wanted to buy them. Auricon changed their ways very slowly and failed to give 16mm photographers what they wanted, so it fell upon other entrepreneurs (CECo, Yoder, et al.) to fill the demand with "chopped off" (converted) CineVoices that were offered to filmmakers. Auricon failed to provide the industry with a mirror-reflex 16mm camera, leaving only "reflexed" Angenieux zoom lenses as a reflex option.

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