Bausch & Lomb
From Camerapedia.org
| photography related industry in Rochester (New York) |
| American Camera | Bausch & Lomb | Blair | Century | Crown Optical Co. | Folmer & Schwing | Gassner and Marx | Graflex | Gundlach | Ilex | JML | Kodak | Monroe | PMC | Ray | Reichenbach, Morey and Will | Rochester Camera and Supply Co. | Rochester Optical Co. | Seneca | Sunart | Walker | Wollensak |
| and in Rochester (Minnesota) |
| Conley |
| external links |
| graflex.org - Rudolf Kingslake's "Optical industry in Rochester (N.Y.)" |
Bausch & Lomb is a manufacturer of contact lenses and eyecare products. It began in 1853 as a little optical shop in Rochester, New York, founded by the German immigrants John Jacob Bausch (from Württemberg) and Henry Lomb (from Hesse). First they produced prince-nezes. When Bausch's son Edward finished his engineering studies in 1875 he convinced the father to start making microscopes. In 1883 the company started making camera lenses, mainly lens types of Carl Zeiss. In 1888 it produced the lenses for the legendary roll film camera Kodak No. 1 of George Eastman and Frank A. Brownell. Bausch & Lomb was also a respectable maker of leaf shutters. Bausch & Lomb's "Unicum" shutter was one of the best shutters of its time. First the company cooperated a lot with German optics and glass makers. Since 1913 the company started making its own optical glass. A lot of optical instruments and other optical goods were already in the company's portfolio. Still camera lenses were made until the 1930s, especially for Kodak. Later photo-optical products got out of the company's focus, except movie projector lenses and movie camera lenses. Special lenses for the broad format "Cinemascope" film were made by B&L. A late highlight of the company's still camera optics were the lenses for the cameras of a "Surveyor" moon-flight space satellite in 1965.
Shutters
- Automat
- Victor
- Unicum
Links
- company's official about-page
- company history in German, in a report about a temporary exhibition of the Fotomuseum Uhingen, on a website of Bausch&Lomb
