TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Because the Allied nations were so heavily dependent on German supply, the war created an immediate shortage of glass with no domestic industry capable of immediately satisfying that deficit on either a national or international scale. The dominance of German glass supply at an international scale was not due to a fundamental lack of resources for optical glass creation or some abstract German production superiority. For example, the fuel, clay, and sand necessary for the manufacture of precision optical glass were all present in the United States – but, at the turn of the war, it would take two to three years before precision optical glass could be made with consistent results.

One problem was that, prior to the war, manufacturers and inventors were chiefly concerned with increasing production volume and lowering labor costs rather than maintaining precise control over the production process. According to Colonel F. E. Wright’s 1921 report The Manufacture of Optical Glass and of Optical Systems: A Wartime Problem, one of the biggest problems facing optical production during the war was “precision and factory control.”^[6] The primary difficulty for the Geophysical Laboratory, which coordinated the American initiatives to scale up domestic glass production, was establishing methods of high precision with sand manufacturers to obtain the desired chemical purity.^[7] As F. E. Wright observed in his report:

the making of modern optical glasses does not consist solely in the mixing together of a secret batch, handed down from father to son, in melting this down in a furnace, and in allowing the melt to cool properly... The problem is essentially one of precision and factory control; and although the glassmaker’s experience is not to be disregarded, optical glass of high quality can not be produced by it alone.^[8]

In addition to the problems described above, although international industries had invested heavily in machinery improvements, “a knowledge of the glass itself, its behavior, the ingredients that go to make up the batch [of glass]” had been neglected in industrial development outside of Germany.^[9] The problem was not a fundamental lack of resources, but rather, an integrated investment in refinement and quality control.

A lack of both material and professional optical glass infrastructure, combined with increasing needs for military applications, led to American, English, French, and German companies cutting production of optical needs for any other reason than military applications. The material shortages of the war shifted the balance of what constituted a quality lens from a question of pure science to a question of national industry. A photographic lens typically doesn’t contain inscriptions about its materials; we don’t see markers of Michigan quarries or the silica of Fontainebleau if we look at a lens. Lenses prominently display inscriptions of corporate management and scientific standardization: the Bausch & Lomb logo, the Kodak logo, the f-stop, a particular brand name like the Tessar or the Heliar. Lenses had long carried engravings of their creators, but during the war, what these names and technical specifications meant began to shift.

Faced with a crisis of production, a lens’ quality was increasingly constituted not by physics or natural laws of light, but by industrial reputation. In many ways, this was a return to form of the earlier decades of faith and belief in a particular artisan, but now at the scale of a corporation. While many nineteenth century lenses were named after their utility or physical design – the Anastigmat, the Triplet, the Petzval Portrait lens – a number of competitors, notably Cooke in the 1920s, would give their lenses names based on series or a particular line of lenses. While not a dominant rule, the variation in naming conventions does suggest a broader shift away from an exclusively scientific approach to marketing and circulating understandings of lens design in product literature (particularly as this function would be taken up by the many optical societies and educational programs for optics that were established in and after the Great War).

While Zeiss’ lenses maintained their prestigious reputation, they did not hold the same exclusive place in the international optical landscape in the 1920s. And, due to the armament restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, Zeiss transitioned its efforts from wartime applications to (among other things) lighting, specialized photography, and precision metrology for fine measurement.^[10]

In many of these corporate narratives, Zeiss’ success is narrated in one of two ways: for innovating and advancing the field of optics, or overcoming a particular challenge in a unique way. Both often narrate over the shared complexities of what constitutes invention or progress. For example, without financial support from the government, it is unlikely that Abbe and Schott would have been able to build the Glass Works. Or: simply because Zeiss produced excellent lenses did not mean that these lenses were the only or “best” way to capture images. Rather than dismissing the corporate rhetoric as poor history, the progress rhetoric was itself a cultural technology: a way to link optics to broader ideas of scientific progress within industrial capitalism.

But, in these corporate narratives, we can also see that the development of functions that we often take for granted in cinema – lenses that can focus, lenses that can work with different kinds of recording mediums, precision lenses produced for a mass market – were informed by research and development that were not necessarily concerned with what we often think of as “cinema.” These narratives also reveal that the industrialization of lenses was driven not solely by clarity and authenticity, but also by distortion and what were often labelled as “inferior” lenses. This is not to say that cinema emerges from one place or another – but, to remember that the industrial production of lenses has its own set of historically specific determinants that were not simply marching towards an inevitable and fully formed idea of microscopy, photography, or cinema.