The Strange History of Microfilm, Which Will Be With Us for Centuries

(via Atlas Obscura)  Microfiche, the plasticky film used to archive old print content,  has a surprisingly diverse history—one that starts with a guy named John Benjamin Dancer. In 1839, Dancer combined his family’s optical goods firm with the then-new daguerreotype process of photography, and started tinkering. Playing around, he figured out a way to shrink pictures of large objects by a ratio of 160 to 1—and as a result, created the first piece of microfilm.  Atlas Obscura has more of this interesting history.