the Berek designed 5cm Elmar lens in a Barnack designed lens mount
Toronto. As you know, a camera needs a lens to capture an image. Leitz had just such a lens designer. In 1912 according to Dr Kingslake in his 1989 book, “A History of the Photographic Lens“, a young Dr Max Berek joined the Leitz microscope company in Wetzlar. Max was “…devoted almost entirely to the theory of the microscope, in particularly the polarizing microscope used in mineralogy.”.
A rather highly corrected sub-stage microscope condenser was named after Berek. In the photographic world, Berek was of assistance to Oskar Barnack as the designer of the 5cm f/3.5 Elmar. According to Kingslake, “When the Leica camera was being developed by Oskar Barnack in the early 1920s, Berek designed several suitable lenses, including the Elmar, Summar, Summitar, and Hektor series.”
The patent sheet above is for the lens mount designed by Barnack to house the lens designed by Berek. Some attribute the Elmar design to a variation of the Zeiss Tessar, but others note that at the time the Tessar design could not cover the inch by 1.5 inch (24 x 36mm) field of the Leica at f/3.5 and suggest the Elmar is based on another fundamental lens design.
Note: The title of this post is a riff on Paul Simon’s song, “You Can Call Me Al” from his 1986 Graceland album (I have the CD).
