Ansco Autoset John Glenn Advertisement Slides

Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. took the first human-captured, color still photographs of the Earth during his three-orbit mission on February 20, 1962, with an Ansco Autoset model camera. This collection consists of a packet of four 35mm color slides produced from color photographs taken by Glenn during his space flight, which Ansco included with each purchase of its Ansco Autoset 35mm camera as an advertising promotion.

Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. took the first human-captured, color still photographs of the Earth during his three-orbit mission on February 20, 1962, with an Ansco Autoset camera. The fully automatic Ansco Autoset model was manufactured for Ansco by the Japanese camera company Minolta, being essentially the same design as the Minolta Hi-Matic. For ease of use by Glenn, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) technicians attached a pistol grip handle and trigger to this commercial 35 mm camera, as well as a large viewfinder on top as Glenn, wearing a spacesuit helmet, could not get his eye close to a built-in viewfinder. The Ansco brand name dates from the merger in 1901 of two American photography firms, E. & H. T. Anthony & Co. and Scovill Manufacturing. In 1907, the company now known as the Anthony & Scovill Co., producers of photographic films, papers, and cameras, officially changed their name to Ansco. In 1928, Ansco (based in Binghamton, New York) merged with the German photographic company Agfa to form the Agfa-Ansco Corporation which soon came under the control of the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben; the following year Agfa-Ansco's holding company name was changed to American IG Chemical Corporation, although their products retained the Agfa-Ansco brand name. In 1939, American IG was merged with General Aniline to form General Aniline & Film (GAF) with Agfa-Ansco becoming a subsidiary of GAF. Agfa-Ansco's German connections became an issue with the entrance of the United States into World War II, and in 1941 the US government seized GAF's American interests (including Agfa-Ansco) as enemy property. In 1944, "Agfa" was dropped from the name to become the Ansco Division of GAF. The US government continued to run the company for the next twenty years, with GAF not becoming a public firm until 1965. By the late 1970s the Ansco company had ceased the manufacture of film and was effectively dead; in 1978 GAF sold the rights to the Ansco trademark name to a Hong Kong firm which produced the last Ansco brand cameras in the early 1990s.