Watson Kintner papers

Watson Kintner, CH.E. '16 (1890-1979), was a 1916 University of Pennsylvania graduate in Chemical Engineering. He worked as a chemical engineer with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) until his retirement, where he was an early pioneer in the standardization of the vacuum tube. A man of means, he traveled to more than 30 individual nations over a period of 36 years, from 1933 until 1969. Kintner visited places such as Mexico (where he filmed painter Diego Rivera), Guatemala, Ecuador, Morocco, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Australia, Iran, Ethiopia, and many more. Presumably Kintner's travels were planned for pleasure, though he chose to document each of them on 16mm film.

On his travels Kintner largely avoided the obvious tourist destinations. He instead recorded the daily life and work among the peoples visited, including handicrafts, home industries, dwellings, household arrangements, dress and adornments, agricultural techniques and equipment, local commerce, museums, as well as sites of archaeological interest. For the first three years of his travels he photographed in black-and-white film, and when, in 1936, Eastman Kodak introduced the color stock Kodachrome (a highly stable and color-accurate film) he began to photograph exclusively in color. Kintner also took notes and kept material related to his trips, including financial records, correspondence, and maps.

Kintner took photography very seriously as a discipline that should be applied to field work, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s he funded weekend seminars for University of Pennsylvania Museum graduate students, taught by Life Magazine photographers. Upon his death, Kintner also left an endowment towards various Museum activities and programs.

Watson Kintner's travel records consist of 3 linear feet of journals, film notes, bills, correspondence, and preparatory notes on the culture, geography and history of the countries he visited (and some that he didn't) between 1951 and 1969. He kept documents relating to his trips and took all his notes in triplicate, resulting in a large number of redundant pages, which were discarded. The original order was predominantly chronological, which has been maintained. Folders are arranged by year and country visited.

Photographs have been placed together into a second series at the end of the collection. These photographs are poorly documented but offer further visual information from several of Kintner's trips, beginning with his 1933 visit to Mexico and ending with his 1969 visit to Cyprus. Extraneous personal materials consisting of one Pan-American Airways frequent flyer certificate and two RCA achievement certificates, were removed and donated to the Watson Kintner collection at the University of Pennsylvania Archives.

Additional records of Watson Kintner may be found at the Lancaster County Historical Society (MG-144 The Watson Kintner Collection, 1930-1954) and the University of Pennsylvania Archives (Coll. No. UPT 50, K 51).

Publication Information: University of Pennsylvania: Penn Museum Archives,

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Corporate Name(s)

• University of Pennsylvania. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Form(s)/Genre(s)

• Photographs
• Photographic prints
• travelog (performed works genre)
• Travel photography

Personal Name(s)

• Kintner, Watson