Before Paillard - Text 4
It was not in Geneva that the industry dreamt of by Jean Choux would spread in all its breadth. Like the artisan clock-makers who, a century earlier, had left Geneva for the Joux Valley, the Swiss amateur cinema industry migrated to Sainte-Croix, a small town in the canton of Vaud situated at an altitude of 1,000 m. In 1930, Boolsky and his partner Charles Haccius sold the entire Bolex business to the small mechanical company E. Paillard & Cie., established in 1814. Paillard came out of the clock-making and music box tradition for which the region was famous, and at the time was best known for its gramophones, which it sold worldwide. Dissatisfied with the returns on its typewriters and fearing the fallout from the economic crisis, its president, Alfred Paillard, saw in the acquisition of Bolex S.A. an opportunity to position itself quickly in a new field. The purchase was bumpy, however, and a variety of economic and technical problems precipitated a break between Alfred Paillard and Boolsky, who left the company in 1932, before the end of his contract. It then fell to Marc Renaud, a recently-hired twenty-six-year-old engineer, to design a new Bolex camera which would meet the company’s quality and industrial production standards.
