Minnesota
Inventors Hall of Fame
Glen M. Dye
(1884 - 1977) An itinerant postcard photographer who revolutionized the entire industry of photo processing, Dye is recognized as an early inventor of mechanized photo finishing equipment and a pioneering leader in photo processing. He conceived and build the first motor-driven photo-finishing machine. It would develop 100 postcards at once. The patent awarded to Dye was the first in that field. Next came the automatic printing machine and another patent. He founded Pako Corporation in Minneapolis and was active in the company for 50 years. Gradually the company expanded its line of products to include processing equipment for the x-ray, graphic arts and photographic industries.
During the second World War, Pako built a machine that made processing of x-ray films completely automatic, from the time they were fed in at one end until the negatives, completely developed and dried, emerged from a rack at the other end. It was used for x-raying vital castings, artillery shells, rocket charges, and airplane propellers, insuring uniformity and safety.
Dye helped to develop a color film processing machine for processing animated cartoon films, the only one of its kind in the world, built specially for Walt Disney Studios. The machine was designed to handle "cells" - individual drawings on celluloid used to assist in creating cartoons by photographic reproduction of the cells, which had been outlined and colored by hand. He also helped to create an x-ray film processing machine designed to automatically process and dry medical x-ray film, which was installed in the Mayo Clinic in 1953. Dye’s machine processed the film so rapidly that doctors could perform certain operations and follow their progress almost simultaneously on X-ray film.
Dye set the standards from which the photographic industry further developed systems for processing film, printing on photographic paper, and the processing of the paper. During his lifetime he was awarded more than 45 United States patents. Through his many inventions Dye built his company into the world’s largest producer of photo processing equipment. From modest beginnings, Pako grew to be a multi-national company manufacturing a complete line of photographic and photo-processing and X-ray processing equipment for commercial, industrial and medical use.