Bing Fita

[photax]

Hi !

I finished this refurbishing project today: A 1931 Fita camera for 4.5x8cm roll-film made by Bing Nuremburg / Germany, which I bought some months ago in poor condition for almost nothing. The Bing Company was world-famous in making all kind of tin-toys, including magic lanterns since 1879. It is unknown, if the camera was really produced by Bing, there is another model, named Feba, made by Mayer, Nuremburg which is pretty similar. I also dont know, if Fita has been a branch of Bing, or simply a product labeling, there are two stereo-viewers, some stereo-cards and a magic lantern with the Fita sign in my collection also.
McKeown mentiones another Bing camera model named Saltex: Never heard of and never seen. The Fita is hard enough to find

MIK

[daveh]

MIK, It looks fitter now than when you bought it!

I note the lens says "made in Germany". Did they mark cameras for their own country like this, or would this have been done for the export market?

Have you "before" photos as well? Looks very nice. Thanks for sharing.

Dave.

[PeterW]

Mik,

Your Fita looks in very nice condition ... now. As Dave said, it would be interesting to see a "before" picture.

I knew that Gebruder Bing (Bing Brothers), later renamed Bing Werke, was a very large toy making company in Nuremburg and among other Bing tin-plate toys in UK toy shops was a magic lantern projector and, I think, a cine projector but I didn't know they made, or marketed, cameras.

The words Made in Germany on the shutter may have been to comply with an import requirement in the 1920s and 1930s which said that all imported goods were to be labelled with the country of origin - except those from countries in the British Empire which just had to have "Empire made" on them.

This would suggest that your Fita was intended for export to the UK, or at least complied with the regulations.

As a boy growing up in the 1930s I remember Bing model railways even though the company failed financially and closed about 1932. Both Basset-Lowke and A. W. Gamage imported Bing trains to the UK and continued to distribute them to toy shops for about a year until stocks ran out.

I was envious of a friend who had a Bing OO gauge layout scaled at 4mm = 1 foot, about 1/76 scale, because he could lay it out with the track fixed down to a portable plywood base. My toy trains were O gauge, twice the size, which meant that I had to dismantle the track after every session of playing with it.

Later, about a year or so before the war, Hornby in the UK adopted the OO scale, registering the name Dublo, and it has remained the most popular UK scale for model railways ever since even though the track width of 16.5mm is out of scale (too narrow).

I have a couple of advertisements for Bing trains in the UK in the 1920s if anyone's interested in seeing them.

PeterW

[photax]

Hi Dave and Peter !

Unfortunately I do not have a "before" picture, but I have some of my Bing Magic Lanterns. The first one is the Fita Optica model from 1915. The others are models from 1895 till 1921. The early ones marked with G.B. ( Brothers Bing ), the later ones with BW ( Bing Works ).

Peter, do you still have your 0 gauge toy train, or pictures of it ? I like these simple made tin-trains. Do you had the electric version, or the wind-up model ? I also would be happy if you show me the mentioned advertisments

MIK

[daveh]

MIK, wonderful - wunderbar.

Because the scale is uncertain, some of them would pass for solid fuel stoves!

Dave.

[PeterW]

Hi Mik,

Lovely examples of Bing projectors. I note that one of them has a film-strip adaptor for 35mm film.

I have a Butcher's catalogue of 1901 which shows some similar lanterns, including one for cine and also an adaptor to show cine film using an ordinary magic lantern.

Butcher imported a lot of their stuff from Germany at this time, and it's possible that some of them may have originated from Bing.

My O gauge toy trains have sadly long gone. They were all clockwork wind-up. I sold them when I changed scale to Hornby OO but those trains were also sold when I thought I had "grown out"of playing with model trains. What a ridiculous thing to have thought!

Here are the two advertisements for Bing trains in the UK, both from 1926. I added the colour to the first one using Photoshop.





PeterW

[daveh]

I had Hornby 3-rail OO. Family friends took it over umpteen years ago. I got the track itself back a few years ago, but unfortunately not the locos, which included Duchess of Athol and a Castle Class whose name escapes me at the moment. Perhaps some day I'll reassemble it.

[photax]

Peter, have many thanks for showing ! "Bing trains always run on time", those were the good old days ! Not comparable to our present day railway system As a child I had a N gauge model railway, but it is got lost also.

MIK