a couple of very old wide angle lenses for field cameras
Toronto. In issue 27-5 of our journal, Bill Belier in his column “A Treasure From My Collection”, featured my small collection of Protars which I had obtained from Bill some time earlier.
My part of Bill’s article begins, “In September 1986, I bought a small brass lens with a black enamel face from Bill Belier. It was a c1910 Protar made by Carl Zeiss Jena.
“The next month, I bought five more of the little lenses from Bill, these all made under licence by Bausch & Lomb in Rochester, NY.
“Then a year later in October, 1987 Bill sold me the oldest of the group –a Zeiss Anastigmat made by Bausch & Lomb.
“I was intrigued to find out the history and manufacturing sequence of the lenses. They all have an f/18 aperture and are extreme wide-angle of various focal lengths. Anastigmat turned out to be the early name for the Protar lenses which were the first commercially successful lenses to conquer astigmatism. These wide angle versions were made for over half a century.
“As the fiftieth anniversary of photography (1889) approached, the lenses designed for cameras were still slow and suffered from a variety of aberrations. Astigmatism was a particularly annoying flaw, causing an image to become increasingly blurred moving towards the edge of the plate.
“To minimize this flaw, lenses were made with relatively long focal lengths and small apertures. A solution to the problem came, not from the photographic industry, but from the world of microscopes.” ….
Members read all of Bill’s column and enjoyed the illustrations in the pdf file for issue 27-5 (March 2002) on the free members-only thumb drive. See ‘Membership’ at right and above to join or renew. Questions may be emailed to member@phsc.ca.
