Potted histories of lens manufacturers, including timelines and serial number guides.
NB: This is a draft article with a number of omissions and content to be added. If you have any in-depth information, or original manufacturer manuals, catalogues or period advertisements that might be relevant, please email Mark here. Peer review and contributors welcome, and will be credited. Similarly, if you have any memorable images shot …
A quartet of German powerhouses stands tall among car manufacturers: Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Porsche. Among lens makers, Leica, Rodenstock, Schneider and Zeiss have similar stature – but perhaps Leica above all embodies the purest ideals of Teutonic modernism most diligently executed – and valued accordingly by the market. However, only relatively recently have Leica …
NB: This is a draft article with a number of omissions and content to be added. If you have any in-depth information, or original manufacturer manuals, catalogues or period advertisements that might be relevant, please email Mark here. Peer review and contributors welcome, and will be credited. Similarly, if you have any memorable images shot …
The Bender Optical Works in Strawberry House, Leazes Park (Newcastle Upon Tyne) is noted in the 1960 edition of ‘The Instrument Manual’* as the operating premises of the company formerly known as M. Bender (Northern) Ltd – makers of analytical instruments. Several 1963 catalogues show B.O.W (Bender Optical Works Ltd) as the manufacturer of at …
Colour and Collaboration The Agfa story begins in 1867 in Rummelsburger See, on the outskirts of Berlin, when chemists Paul Mendelssohn Bartoldy and Carl Alexander von Martius founded the Gesellschaft Für Anilin-Fabrikation mbH. For the next 120 years, this expertise cast the die for Agfa’s successes and failures: aniline is a base ingredient in dyes, …
The family tree planted by Bausch & Lomb in 1874?, that bifurcated and recombined across over a century of American optics production, has been well documented elsewhere (notably Rudolf Kingslake and Dan Fromm, but it is worth preçis here, with added information relevant to the identification and dating of enlarger, projector and industrial lenses. However, …
NB: This is a draft article with a number of omissions and content to be added. If you have any in-depth information, or original manufacturer manuals, catalogues or period advertisements that might be relevant, please email Mark here. Peer review and contributors welcome, and will be credited. Similarly, if you have any memorable images shot …
Almost a century and a half of optical engineering: from taking lenses to sunglasses; from Rodenstock to Linos to Qioptiq to Excelitas. Rodenstock lenses and lens cells can be dated as follows: 50 000 1910 200 000 1920 400 000 1930 700 000 1935 900 000 1938 950 000 1940 2 000 000 1945 2 …
Based in Görlitz, a designation that often appears on their lenses, Hugo Meyer & Co was founded in 1896. The maker was an early pioneer (from 1918) of Plasmat lens manufacture and successfully rebuilt its production facility after the war to continue manufacture until 1960. Meyer’s enlarger lenses – labelled Helioplan – were redeployments of …
Jos. Schneider Optische Werke has been a major player in global lens manufacture during our lifetime; it’s therefore strange to think of the company as a relative newcomer: ‘only’ being established in 1913 – almost forty years younger than their rivals Rodenstock. And yet within twelve months, Schneider released the first of many Symmar lenses, …