Jerald and Sandra Tanner, critics of the Church, obtained an unauthorized copy of a microfilm strip containing images of the documents in 1966, and published them as " Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar ".
2.
Prior to that, a similar system was deployed during the Franco-Prussian War which used carrier pigeons to send primitive microfilm strips across German lines, developed from French optician Ren?Dagron's first patent granted for microfilm in 1859 . Dagron's microfilm patent was additionally based on British scientist John Benjamin Dancer, who created microfilm in 1839.