Potted histories of lens manufacturers, including timelines and serial number guides.
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, the “Optisch-Mechanische Industrie-Anstalt Hugo Meyer & Co.” was founded in 1896 by the optician Hugo Meyer and the merchant Heinrich Schätze. The maker, in co-operation with Paul Rudolph, was an early pioneer (from 1918) of Plasmat lens manufacture, and rapidly expanded between 1920-1942, largely …
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, …
For over a century the Steinheil name was synonymous with elite German optical engineering but it’s probably unfamiliar those whose interest in photography extends no further than recent decades. Steinheil’s American advertising of the 1950s and 1960s claimed ‘a century and a quarter’ of experience for the company – and it’s true that in 1826 …
Enlarger lenses and other photographic accessories bearing the AICO brand are common in the UK market. The name has been mistaken for ‘Alco’ (as in Alco-Pop), and confused with both Aico (the ‘European market leader for home safety’ named in 1990 after its founder Ken Ainsworth) and www.aico-lenses.com (the Hangzhou-based purveyor of CCTV and industrial …