Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 10:41 AM 11/9/1999 -0000, B. D. Colen wrote: >Leica's giving free cameras to Queen Eliz. proves my point about their >twisted idea of marketing: > BD Someday, you'll check out the facts before opining. It would make your postings a bit more authoritative! Leica has given away a slew of Leicas. The first was to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (a friend of the Leitz family -- and Oscar Barnack did take the first photograph ever shot from an airship, over Wetzlar in the summer of '14, with the UR-Leica) in 1925. Auguste Picard, the aerial trendsetter (and father of the bathyscaphe, as well), received a II in 1932. Dr Gunther Dyhrenfurth, the noted Himalayan explorer, received a III in 1933; his son, Norman, the head of the first American Everest Expedition in 1963, received a IIIf in '53. (Leica had first been taken to Everest in '33 by Larry Wager; I'm still trying to locate his pictures.) The Dalai Lama was gifted a IIIf in '51, and Dr Albert Schweitzer received the same type of camera that same year. Henri Cartier-Bresson received an M3 in '55. Sten Kruckenhauser, Fulvio Roiter, Emil Schulthess, Arthur Rothstein, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Paul Wolff, were all professional photographers gifted with Leicas. The inventors of both the Kodachrome and Agfachrome processes were each given a Leica. Und so weiter. The gifts have been all over the board, with Elizabeth's two cameras being a drop in the bucket. For that matter, Pandit Nehru, Dwight Eisenhower, and Konrad Adenauer seem the only other heads of state to be so honoured. (And, in any event, the Queen's gifts were years back, in '58 and '65.) Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!