[Leica] Voigtlander and Petzval

[Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>]

Johann Christoph Voigtlander founded a small optical shop in Vienna in
1756.  As was the case with most such enterprises, this shop produced
anything optical from eyeglasses to fieldglasses, mainly for the carriage
trade.  Because of this customer base, the Voigtlander concern had
developed some solid relations with the Habsburg court circles by the
middle of the 19th century.

Joseph Max Petzval was the Professor of Higher Mathematics at the
University of Vienna when a colleague suggested he design a new camera lens
to compete in a prize competition.  Petzval initially resisted (precisely
as Ernst Abbe was to resist Carl Zeiss's similar suggestion a generation
later) but soon relented and began work.  Petzval obtained the assistance
of three corporals and eight gunners from the Austrian army at the
direction of Archduke Ludwig, then Director-General of Artillery, to aid in
his calculations.  Within six months, the design was completed and took the
photographic world by storm.  Petzval knew Peter Wilhelm Frederich
Voigtlander, then head of the firm, who began producing the lens in 1840.
(And, yes, the Petzval lens was awarded a Silver Medal in the competition,
the second-highest grade.  The competition was won by a forgotten French
designer, Chevalier, whose lens, the "Photographe a Verres Combines", is
equally forgotten today.)

Voigtlander refused to render an accounting to Petzval, and the two men had
a falling out in 1845.  Petzval began grumbling about having been cheated,
so Voigtlander opened a branch operation in Braunschweig, in the Germanies,
in 1849, where the Petzval lens was produced in great quantity, some 60,000
lenses being made in the first twenty years of production.  Petzval then
turned to another optical house, that of Dietzler, in 1854.  Voigtlander
only held an Austrian patent, so the Petzval Portrait Lens was made
simultaneously in Vienna by Dietzler and by Voigtlander in Braunschweig;
Habsburg law did not run into the Germanies by this date, so Voigtlander
could operate with some immunity in Braunschweig.  Deitzler failed in 1862,
and Petzval seems to have threatened to take the matter to law, so
Voigtlander closed his Austrian operations in 1866, clearly in great favour
with the Habsburg court, as he was accorded the "von" moniker in that same
year.

The end result was that Petzval lived until 1891, an embittered and
impoverished man who had completely turned his back on optics;  PWF
Voigtlander retired in 1876 and, like Mithridates, died old and rich two
years later, having seen his firm expand from a small optical shop to a
major industrial enterprise upon the grand success of the Petzval lens.
His son, Friedrich Ritter von Voigtlander, was the last family member to
run the business;  when he died in 1924, his five daughters became the
owners and sold the concern to the Schering drug company, who, in turn,
sold it to Zeiss in 1950.  Several descendants of the family work at the
Rollei works and one of the heirs married the daughter of either Franke or
Heidecke.

A few interesting bits of trivia about Voigtlander.  Precisely as
astronomers commemorate Leitz by their use of the Kellner ocular (Kellner
having founded the firm which would later become our present Leica company)
and Zeiss by the use of the Abbe Orthoscopic eyepiece, so also do they
honour Voigtlander by using the Plossl eyepiece, developed by that fine
optician during his years in Vienna with that company early in the 19th
century.  And Voigtlander produced a slew of superb designers from that
time unto our own, including Hans Harting, the designer of the true Heliar,
and Robert Richter, who later went to Zeiss by way of Goerz;  while at
Zeiss he produced the Topogon and Pleogon designs.  To my fairly certain
knowledge, the last of the optical designers brought over to Zeiss from
Voigtlander retired around ten years back.

And, of course, the Rolleiflex concern was another off-shoot of Voigtlander.

Marc

msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!