The Craft of Glassmaking (Pre-1886) - Text 2
Fifty years later, in 1886, Zeiss’ instruments and their role in developing new types of optical glass resulted in profound changes to the scientific and commercial field of lens production. In order to understand why Zeiss’ lenses were so significant, though, it is necessary to understand how impossible of an idea it was that lenses could depict the physical world consistently and reliably in the first place.
The history of glassmaking written by European opticians is, perhaps unsurprisingly, European in its lineage. A great deal of optical historicization occurred in the years following the first world war, which followed from tremendous wartime growth in glass industries in America, France, Germany, and Great Britain. But the history of glassmaking and optics has a long history of invention in the work of Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, whose translated works would go on to influence the visual experiments of Giambattista della Porta and Christiaan Huygens.
This parcours traces these particular histories of Zeiss not to assert its “firsts” or origins, but to better understand how Zeiss’ nineteenth century infrastructures sought to manufacture and distribute a stable relationship between optical technologies and vision – a relationship that cinema regularly defied, played with, and subverted.
Lens as Craft
Until the 1880s, the majority of precision lens production in Europe was an artisanal practice. Nearly all workers engaged in the production of optical instruments in the early and middle nineteenth century were “tradesmen with training in metalwork and the construction of small machines who had picked up their optical skills after gaining employment in a shop engaged in building and selling optical instruments.”[3] Even the best microscopes of the period were “not scientific achievements but the results of hundred-fold trials.”[4]
