History of a Camera

The earliest experiments on what would become the modern-day photographic lens are attributed to Arab scientist Abu Ali Hasan Ibn-al-Haitham (Alhazen) (965-1040), who detailed looking through portions of a glass sphere in Thesaurus Optica, first published in Latin in 1572. More than two centuries later, in 1803, William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) described the effects of light on paper treated with guiacum resin, which reportedly inspired Nicephore Niepce to experiment with early photographic processes. After Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1789-1851) officially invented photography in 1839, the first camera lens was developed by his colleague Charles L. Chevalier (1804-1859). This achromatic landscape lens paid homage to Mr. Wollaston by utilizing the meniscus form he perfected. However, with an aperture of f/14 or f/15, there was considerable astigmatism associated with the lens, requiring an extremely long exposure time. The variable focus portrait lens Mr. Chevalier developed in 1840, with an aperture of f/6, was essentially free of spherical distortion. When German physicist Andreas von Ettingshausen (1796-1878) was introduced to the daguerreotype process and Mr. Chevalier's portrait lens, he shared the information with his friend Joseph (Josef) Max Petzval (1807-1891), who developed a far superior portrait lens that was manufactured by Friedrich Voigtlander (1812-1878) in 1840. Subsequent attempts to produce symmetrical lenses that eliminated the common problem of distortion appeared in the forms of the panoramic lens of Thomas Sutton (1819-1875), the Periskop lens of Carl August von Steinheil (1801-1870), and the Globe lens of Charles "C.C." Harrision (?-1864) and his young protege Joseph Schnitzer (? - ?). Mr. Petzval's Orthoskop lens boldly promised to be "the solution for all the photographer's problems," but when it was revealed that it did not remove distortion completely, the Orthoskop quickly faded into obscurity. By the late 1850s, John Henry Dallmeyer (1830-1883) had established a reputation as an innovative rapid lens pioneer, having produced a Pistolgrafe lens for an early instant camera, and a Petzval type rapid lens that had three focus sizes (3-inch, 6-inch, and 8-inch). Because it was used primarily for photographing children, it was referred to by industry professionals as "the baby lens." In 1866, the Dallmeyer Rapid Rectilinear and the similarly constructed Aplanat lens by Hugo Adolph Steinheil (1832-1893) were produced. However, they significantly overcorrected astigmatism, which adversely affected high aperture lenses. Barium crown glasses developed by Ernst Abbe (1840-1905) and Otto Schott (1851-1935) finally eliminated astigmatism from lenses permanently.