It’s called a Sept (sept is French for seven) because it has seven uses. This was sort of the low-end camera at the time, it was cheap, and you could get this for like 100 bucks when they came out in mass production. […] So this was basically a whole studio.

[…] The cool thing about this is that we’re sort of in this video revolution age. Right now, in the news, there’s this video that got the cops in trouble. Everyone’s got cameras now and you can’t get away with anything, which is troubling in some ways, and not bad in others. But this was from the first video revolution.

These were cheap and lightweight and so news bureaus could buy these and equip all their reporters so they could go take pictures and you start seeing a lot of photos in newspapers and also the film strips, the newsreels that would become popular. […]

This belongs in the Swiss Army Museum

Exhibited by Paul Rettig

Transcript edited by Sarah Crawford