Sylvania Blue Dot Flashcubes, General Telephone & Electronics, November 1965

Digital cameras and smartphones of recent years have made hobbyist photography virtually effortless, with everything from the exposure, zoom and lighting being automatically controlled. That was not the case prior to the mid 1960s, when each aspect of photo-taking involved often cumbersome manual adjustments. One of those adjustments was changing the flashbulb, which provided optimum lighting of the subject by dispersing the light from the bulb via a reflector placed around it. The earliest flashbulbs were intended for one use only, and needed to be changed between exposures. They also got quite hot, due to the gases in the bulb being burned during the flash. These qualities weren't very conducive to taking multiple photos in a short period of time, such as in capturing sports action, and were somewhat cumbersome even for photographing more stationary subjects.

Enter the Sylvania Blue Dot Flashcube, made by GTE. In contrast to the single exposure of traditional flashbulbs, the Flashcube contained four miniature bulbs and reflectors within a small cube that automatically rotated to an unused side in approximately one second after a photo was taken. Compared to the burst mode of today's digital cameras, that's not particularly impressive, but at the time it was a huge improvement over the old technology. The Flashcubes had the added perk of not getting as hot after use as the single-use flashbulbs did, so no more burned hands for the photographer.

I remember Flashcubes well. My parents had a Kodak Instamatic 124 when I was a kid, and for all but the sunniest outdoor shots, the Flashcube would be swiveling around on top of the camera. It was a bit of a pain to have to buy the Flashcubes along with the film cartridges (and $1.95 suggested retail for three cubes was the equivalent of nearly $15 in today's currency, so they were not exactly inexpensive), and there were the occasional duds in which one or more of the sides wouldn't flash, resulting in underexposed prints. In general, however the technology worked reasonably well. Gradually more and more cameras began including a built-in flash, eventually rendering the Flashcube mostly obsolete. But in 1965, and for quite a few years after that, the Flashcube shone brightly.