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NYC street scene in 1914

Toronto. In 1914, a young German visited NYC. He brought along a tiny experimental ‘device’ that looked nothing like the cameras of the day.

He took photos like the one at left with the people on the street oblivious to his activity. The man was the son of the German owner of a microscope factory with a branch operation in NYC.

The man was Ernst Leitz II and the strange device was later known as the ‘Ur-Leica’ manufactured by his father’s company just months before his voyage and visit  to the ‘New World’. The design was the ‘brain child’ of a mechanic at Leitz known as Oskar Barnack. Oskar was fascinated by movies and had made a moving picture camera. The process of the day demanded a film strip be exposed at various stops and developed to determine the correct exposure.

According to the 15th edition of the Leica Manual, the device used a fixed shutter speed of 1/40th second, matching the moving picture camera’s speed. Properly exposed, the resulting negatives routinely gave a good image easily enlarged. For many years others  debated whether the tiny gadget was intended to determine a moving picture camera’s ideal aperture or as an alternative camera using the common 35mm movie film of the day.

In any case, the designer of this tiny, precision and utilitarian camera was Barnack. After the great war, Germany sunk into a massive depression and rampaging inflation. In an effort to retain skilled staff, Ernst Leitz II decided to manufacture the Leica in spite of the scepticism of his company board and the changes in the 35mm movie film that traded off resolution for softer contrast and a greater sensitivity.

The Leica was a phenomenal success. The built-in rangefinder was also the brain child of Barnack who decreed its small size (Leitz made rangefinders well before Leicas). Slight magnification compensated for the shortened rangefinder base. As Lipinski hinted in his book, “Miniature and Precision Cameras”, Leitz used and patented all the simpler ways to make a precision camera thus handicapping competitors by forcing greater complexity and  higher manufacturing costs.

It was only after WW2 that the basic design created by Barnack was replaced with the Series-M cameras – so successful that even today the design can be seen in digital Leicas and in lens mounts made by some competitors.