The Cradle Head Patent
Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention…The Cradle Head Patent
The Fearless Camera Company and RCA had a good thing going… Fearless (later, Houston Fearless) built the support equipment and RCA’s built the cameras and distributed for Fearless. As you can see in the photo on the right, the first experimental TK40 color cameras used the Fearless friction type pan head. The camera was just to heavy for it though, so Bruce Dalton (one of the creators of the TD 1 pedestal) and Edward Lewis came up with the now famous Cradle Head design. Although RCA built 239 TK40/41s, only 215 of these wide bodied cradle heads were made and distributed with the cameras as of 1964, when regular production stopped. In 1966, 24 more were made and all were shipped with the new Houston Fearless Cam style pan heads which you see under most of ABC’s TK41s as they bought 12 of the last 24 made. By late in 54 there was also a narrower cradle head available that fit under RCA’s black and white cameras like the TK11/31. The photo on the right shows one of the first production models of the TK40 being tested at the Colonial Theater.
The cradle design is pure genius. Very clever how it maintains the center of gravity of the camera throughout tilting. Years later, Vinten came up with a way to maintain center of gravity through the use of cams: As the camera was tilted, the cams forced the mechanism in the opposite direction of the tilt, thereby offsetting the center of gravity. But the Vinten cam head was much more mechanically complex than the HF cradle head. The HF head was as simple as it could be, yet it worked like magic. A brilliantly elegant design.
The image on the right was taken at the Colonial Theatre in New York.