Zeiss and the Industrialization of Vision (1886-1900) - Text 2
Industrial Lens Manufacturing
For all that Zeiss maintained significant interests in developing its industry for the pursuit of science and knowledge, this was not necessarily with the intent or aim of improving the lenses. As Cahan suggests, in abandoning trial-and-error for scientific predictions about light and lens systems, Abbe and Zeiss created a manufacturing process that was “less about improving lenses per se than ensuring that their craftsmen properly executed the instructions given to them on the basis of Abbe’s theory and calculations.”[2]
Industrial optics still relied on a great number of people, and was not solely a product of machines as is often imagined in relationship to the broader industrial transformations wrought in agriculture and manufacturing. As Cahan writes,
An essential part of the Zeiss culture, perhaps its essence, was the creation of an atmosphere in which the social relations between skilled technicians and (more) theoretically oriented scientists could work to their mutual advantage.[3]
Labor and training were a significant part of this change, and it is in lens production that we also see a version of Taylorism contributing to the rising scale and scope of lens production.
While the history of optics and optical manufacturing is dominated by the names and faces of European men, it is worth noting the role that women testers and workers held at Zeiss. On the face of its commercial efforts, women often appear as testers or quality assurance – drawing on ambivalently “positive” representations of feminine sensitivity alongside its scientific rigor. And Zeiss did make provisions for women as “protected” workers as part of their more progressive work benefits (which included things like vacation and shorter working hours). Zeiss contended that “apprentices, young workers and women should never be employed to obtain cheap labor” and that women should be employed only in tasks where women were more suited to the work than men.[4] However, as Eva Chen writes in Beruf: Frau, these provisions were uneven in their actual advancement of women’s standing in the professional workplace. Chen notes that over time, the paternalist nature of these divisions were often used to strengthen a gendered gap of inequality under the guise of efficiency.[5]
Zeiss’ industrialization of optical glass production encouraged these industrial logics of precision lens production in other nations like France, England, and the United States. The industrialization of vision was both a belief in scientific progress and a belief in a particularly German model of socially-oriented industry. By implementing scientific practices in the predominantly artisanal practice of lens construction, Zeiss pioneered a global model of industrial lens production that circulated lenses and broader systems of expectations about lens features.
While Zeiss’ business started in the manufacture of microscopes, the firm expanded to include a wide range of instruments and optical products. As Zeiss grew in scale and size, the desire to create “a large industry independent of the fluctuating demand for a particular class of instruments” caused the firm to open a department for the manufacture of photographic lenses in 1890.[6]
Its photographic department, which was more commercial and public-facing than some of Zeiss’ other instrument departments, became a significant part of Zeiss’ business. By 1895-6, “one-fourth of the total value of the instruments made by the firm consisted of photographic lenses.”[7]
The Anastigmat
Perhaps the most significant lens design to follow from the production of new glass was the “anastigmat,” a standard type of lens used in both photography and cinematography. Karl Brown, a writer for American Cinematographer in the 1920s, dedicates the third of a five-part series on modern lenses to the anastigmat. He dramatically emphasizes the historical significance of this lens, claiming that “Nothing in the history of science, not even the airplane, or the radio, is a greater monument to human invention than the anastigmat.”[8]
Anastigmat was originally the brand name for Zeiss’ lens released in 1890. Paul Rudolph, a physicist who worked on microscope and telescope calculations, began to work as Abbe’s assistant in 1886 and came to design the Anastigmat. The anastigmatic design enabled sharpness at both center and edges while the lens was wide open.
