I don't know camera history well enough, but I suspect large film rolls and auto advance weren't available until well after 35mm became the standard.
I can give a bit of a glimpse at why any important event from the 70's on was probably photographed.
A friend of mine worked at a camera shop that had a number of pros as clients. One did semi freelance work for one of the Boston newspapers. They'd give him a list of shots they wanted for articles, plus if anything special happened they'd pay extra.
It seemed like a cool job, but after looking for the photo credits I was amazed at how many nice shots he got. So I asked how.
The answer was that he always brought 3 cameras that had auto advance and worked from either a 1000 or 3000 image roll of film. He often ran two at once, and took somewhere around 10,000 images each home game.
He'd usually have the rolls developed and remove the shots the globe wanted keeping the rest. So if say "Yaz batting" was on the list they'd get every frame he took during his at bats.
When something special and unexpected happened he usually gave the paper the entire rolls of film undeveloped. I forget what it was exactly, but on particular one he actually left the game and brought the film directly to the paper. They developed it and had the picture in the afternoon edition, well before anyone else. yes, he was paid pretty well for that one.
I'd love to find his file of negatives, assuming the weren't tossed out at some point.
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