Universal Mercury II (1946-1952)

The Mercury II was a half-frame 35 mm camera with a unique rotary shutter. About 150,000 were made by Universal Camera Corporation from 1946 through 1952. The list price was $82.90 for the version with an f/2.7 lens.

Front

Rear

Top

Bottom

Film Chamber

There was a similar Mercury made before WWII. The pre-war Mercury used a proprietary film load made for Universal by Gevaert in Belgium. Film supplies for the original Mercury were interrupted by the German invasion of Belgium in 1940, and the post-war version was redesigned to use the standard 35 mm film cartridges that are readily available from many sources.

The camera body is made from an aluminum-magnesium alloy and has a black synthetic rubber trim. The film winding knob, the shutter speed knob and the advance-rewind switch are on the front. The shutter button, a cable release socket and the film rewind knob are on the top. The top of the camera also has an accessory shoe and a flash shoe. A matching extinction exposure meter and a flash attachment were available. A film reminder and a very complex exposure calculator are on the back. The shutter housing is decorated with depth of field tables. The bottom of the camera has a tripod socket and the button to unlatch the back. The Mercury did not have the advantage of compact size that the Japanese half-frame 35 mm cameras did, the body being nearly the same size as the full frame 35 mm Argus model 21 that came out about the same time.

The lens on my camera is a scale focusing Universal Tricor f/3.5, 35 mm focal length lens that focuses to 1'-9". The lens stops down to f/22. An f/2.0 and an f/2.7 lens also were available. A 1-1/16" push-on Series V filter adapter fits the lens on my camera.

Shutter speeds were 1/1000, 1/300, 1/200, 1/100, 1/60, 1/40, 1/30, 1/20, B (bulb) and T (time). The shutter is synchronized for flash. The shutter is a rotary shutter that works like the shutter on a Hollywood motion picture camera. It has a slit in a rotating disk that spins to let the slit sweep over the film when you press the shutter button. The slit is variable in width, and with the shutter rotating at a fixed speed the size of the slit determines the duration of the exposure. The parking meter hump on the top of the camera is a cover for the shutter. One of the selling points of the Mercury was that the Harvard observatory used a Universal Mercury shutter in a coronagraph because the shutter made more uniform exposures than the other shutters being made at the time. The camera makes a half frame (24 mm x 19 mm) instead of a full frame picture mostly because the shutter would have to be much larger for a full 24 mm by 36 mm picture, making the camera too big. A roll of film that would make 36 pictures in a regular 35 mm camera will make 65 pictures in a Mercury. Winding the shutter advances the film, preventing missed frames and accidental double exposures. It is not possible to make a deliberate double exposure,

The Mercury has a reverse galilean finder that is small and a little hard to use compared to viewfinders in more modern cameras.

The finish on my camera is showing its age, and the shutter speeds have dropped by about half due to age (for example the 1/1000 setting is closer to 1/500), although it will still take a picture. I'd wanted one of these for years, ever since seeing a picture of one, because they are just so odd looking.

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