Flash Bantam on the Front Page

My favorite little American-made folding camera, the Kodak Flash Bantam, has been featured on The Guardian.

The Guardian -- 12-12-14

The picture was illustrating a brief history of time capsules, and the camera is part of a stash in a capsule buried under the site of the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing, New York.  The capsule is scheduled for opening in the year 6939.  Given humanity's current trajectory, it seems rather optimistic to imagine that anyone will be around to dig up the treasure.  Clearly, however, a high degree of optimism about the future is the whole point of such exercises.

There is an interesting fact about the camera and the date of the capsule's burial which was not noted in the Guardian article.  The Bantam model actually in production at the time of the 1939 World's Fair was not the Flash Bantam, but rather the Bantam 4.5.  The Flash Bantam was not marketed until 1947.  Given the similarity of the two cameras, it is certainly not unlikely that the company had a pre-production example ready to go into the capsule, but I have not seen any evidence of that before.