TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

World War I resulted in the United States, France, Britain, and other nations investing heavily in their domestic production of precision lenses. Two major effects came of this industrial expansion: many optical companies expanded as a consequence of national investments in wartime infrastructure, and after the war, these optical manufacturing companies would go on to pursue commercial applications for their work. Without the same level and volume of national support, optical companies sought different markets for the applications advanced during war. One such market that precision optical suppliers sought to redirect their manufacturing capacities towards was in the newly growing market of cinema. While lenses were advertised for use in the capture of motion pictures since the early 1900s, the categorization and advertising of lenses specifically for the purpose of cinema was largely a phenomenon of the 1920s.

A key idea this parcours has sought to emphasize is that the lenses were not primitive or inevitable predecessors to what we might now, or have, conceptualize of as “cinema lenses.” Faster lenses did not inherently mean better pictures. As Kristin Thompson writes, we should dismiss the notion that “the silent period used only a crude, unintentional deep focus resulting from ‘contrasty’ orthochromatic film or from crude, slow lenses.”^[1] The commercial and technological distinctions of cinema lenses formed in the 1920s largely as a consequence of the marketing and engineering efforts that sought to meet the rise of Hollywood and cinema’s formation as an industry.

As a brief note: this is where this parcours diverges somewhat from the history and story of Zeiss. Zeiss remained a force in the 1920s, but some of the dominant figures – at least in regards to the Hollywood film industry – were companies like Taylor-Hobson (Cooke) and Bausch & Lomb. Again, this parcours does largely limit itself to the dominant commercial and dominant forms of technology, and this section in particular does take the Hollywood film industry as its point of reference. The definition of a cinema lens depends on how we define the traditions and assemblages of what we call cinema. But, the information below sketches some broad forces behind how, and why, certain lenses became commercially categorized as cinema lenses in the 1920s.

Kinds of Cinema Lenses

Cinematography

On a practical level, a cinema lens fulfilled a certain minimum expectation of image capture quality in the emerging studio spaces of the film industry. A cinema lens was a fast lens that maintained reliably sharp image registration across the entire surface of a flexible film recording surface. Entangled with the supply needs emerging from the film industry, the definition of a cinema lens transformed alongside changes in lighting (such as the shift from arc lighting to incandescent lighting), film stock (from orthochromatic stock to panchromatic stock) and aesthetic trends (such as the emergence of the soft-focus style). Speed and sharpness were the initial characteristics, and other qualities like build quality, precise focus control, and consistent color reproduction followed as cinematography emerged as a professional role.

Certain lenses were regularly advertised as being suitable to the purpose of motion picture recording, even in the early 1900s. The question of who made the “first” cinema lens is something of a bad question, but we could broadly point to the English optical company Taylor-Hobson (Cooke) as one of the dominant manufacturers of lenses made specifically for the purpose of motion picture recording. If we frame cinema lenses as products of a historically specific Hollywood industrial context, the Cooke Speed Panchro might be described as one of the most emblematic cinema lenses.

Designed by the British optical company Taylor, Taylor, and Hobson (later named Taylor-Hobson, and then eventually Cooke), the lens was first introduced to cinema studios as the f/2 Opic lens in 1924 and formally branded as the Speed Panchro in 1930.^[2] According to R. Fawn Mitchell, Technical Service Manager for Bell & Howell, while cinematographers had “preliminary hesitation” about using lenses of such wide aperture, “the superior definition and quality of these lenses won acceptance under the most rigid tests and the use of really fast lenses came into general use in the studios for the first time.”^[3] Cooke’s fast lenses were used extensively in the 1920s film industry – particularly by the Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Corporation. In 1926, Kinematograph Weekly reported that over a hundred Cooke lenses were in use by the photographic department of the Famous Players-Lasky studios.^[4] In 1928, The Kinematograph Year Book reported that Paramount had standardized the use of Cooke’s f/2 lenses on all of their cinema cameras.^[5]

Projection

While the first lens that comes to mind when we think of a cinema lens is a camera lens, the 1920s also saw a tremendous expansion in the field of cinema projection lenses. Both Taylor-Hobson and Bausch & Lomb, an American producer and former affiliate of Zeiss, began to market higher-quality projection lenses in the 1920s. The primary qualities of these projector lenses were that they could sufficiently maintain the definition ad sharpness of a picture projected while also providing the most efficient amount of light. In part, higher-quality projection lenses emerged from the interests of professional trade societies, who sought to improve projection quality from 1920 to 1924, and their sales helped meet a growing desire on the part of studios to help align the quality of picture taking and picture projection.

Although Taylor-Hobson began to sell camera lenses to the film industry, their reputation for quality lenses first grew in the field of cinema projection. In 1922, Taylor-Hobson also received a fête for their lens being chosen as the projector lens for the London premiere of D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921). The Taylor-Hobson lens apparently won after a competitive test, and a note in the Exhibitors Trade Review remarked on how the new lens gives “52 % more light than others and saves 50 % on current bills.”^[6] A July 1922 advertisement for Taylor-Hobson projection lenses similarly promoted the lenses’ greater efficiency rather than the lack of distortion that was classically advertised in lens advertisements.^[7]