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A Rembrandt Of The Lens Making Age - Aspherical from the 1850s


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Here is my recent article about the 19th Dublin lens and telescope maker Grubb and its association with the Parsons family which also got involved in making lenses and telescopes in the 1840s. Both families got together in the 1920s to form the Newcastle based lens and telescope making firm of Grubb and Parsons. Some UK members may be familiar with the firm.

 

http://macfilos.com/photo/2017/4/9/grubb-and-parsons-optical-and-engineering-giants

 

My writing of this article was brought about by my recent acquisition at auction of a Grubb Aplanatic (form of aspherical) Landscape lens, for large format cameras, made in Dublin around 1855. It is shown here for size comparison with a Leica 35mm Summicron lens from over 150 years later. What they both have in common are aspherical features in the lenses.

 

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Carleton Watkins, the famous American landscape photographer is said to have used a Grubb Aplanatic lens to take photographs of Yosemite in the 1860s, long before the time of Ansel Adams.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_Watkins

 

My article goes on to deal with some aspects of the development of lens design in the mid 19th century as well as telescopes, astronomy and the development of the steam turbine. The 19th century gave us some truly remarkable inventors, scientists and engineers, whose work still benefits us today, particularly in the field of optics.

 

William

 

 

 

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Fascinating. Many of us are so used to thinking of seminal developments in technical fields as being of recent times rather than back when the horse and buggy reigned.

 

You can, in fact, go back a thousand years to the early Arabic pioneers, such as Ibn Sahl and Ibn-al Haytham, to find the discovery of refraction laws, which can be used to determine lens shapes with no geometric aberrations, in order to find the origins of the wonderful aspherical lenses which we have today.

 

William

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You can, in fact, go back a thousand years to the early Arabic pioneers, such as Ibn Sahl and Ibn-al Haytham, to find the discovery of refraction laws [...]

 

If it were not for the Arabic pioneers who translated Greek science we might be in the steam age.

 

Speaking now of early lens technology, in the 1800's correction of aberration took two paths: those designers of the first camp who modulated aberrations to achieve different looks, and another camp who chose to make sharpness an issue, taking it as far across the field as possible and thus counter the other camp.

 

Who won? The sharpness freaks, and IMHO because their effort appealed to insecure consumers who were lost in the morass of aesthetics and begging for something to believe other than their eyes. Lens manufacturers came to their rescue with math metrics, for better or worse. Your choice.

 

The study and practice of early lenses  was akin to literature. Modern lens designs are the opposite - an effort to ignore aesthetics, to achieve acceptance based upon anything other than the grace of aesthetics which exists outside of hard mathematical optics.

Edited by pico
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HCB said something like 'sharpness is a bourgeois concept'. I am not sure about the class politics elements of photographic images, but I know that on this forum lens sharpness is 'deified' by many members. How often do we see posts about 'which of the following two lenses is the sharpest' or something like that ? For a lot of (probably most) people a sharp image is a first step towards producing an aesthetically pleasing image. I am probably in the minority camp when I value the 'look' produced by a lens more than its sharpness. I imagine that I am in a very small percentage of Leica users when I say that the Summar is one of my favourite Leica lenses. Contrary to popular opinion, it can actually produce quite sharp images, but that is not the aspect of the lens which appeals to me the most.

 

Reading Rudolf Kingslake's ' A History of the Photographic Lens' (available on Kindle) it appears that lens designers in the 19th Century had a lot of issues to address in order to produce usable images. They had to deal with rapidly developing technologies as Calotype and Daguerreotype gave way to Wet-Collodion etc. This affected possible exposure times and working apertures and a lot of other factors. There may have been an appreciation at that time that some so-called lens faults could produce a more aesthetically pleasing result, but the main drive was to produce clear images with a minimum of distortion. Even then issues arose. For example Kingslake says that while Grubb's Aplanat (of which my lens pictured above is an early example) could reduce spherical aberration, it still had inherent coma, but in spite of this 'many hundreds of these Grubb lenses were sold during the next forty years, and a similar type of construction has been used in some recent soft-focus portrait lenses'. Reading Grubb's own presentation (a difficult read that may be just a series of speaking notes) in March 1858 to the Royal Dublin Society about his new lens design, there is very little concern about aesthetics, but rather it mainly addresses his concerns about producing sharp and undistorted images and the lens construction needed to meet such ends. This is not surprising, given the extent to which almost everyone involved in photographic lens design at that time was a pioneer of some kind. Patents were jealously guarded and Grubb was said to have been disappointed when Dallmeyer patented the Rapid Rectilinear lens. Indeed, Kingslake wonders whether Dallmeyer might have assembled the Rapid Rectilinear from two of Grubb's objectives about a central stop. But this was all very new then and who could say what was a new creation and what was a copy?

 

Anyone interested in the development of lens design in the 19th Century would find Kingslake's book very interesting. Also very useful is the Lens Collector's Vademecum, which is referenced in my article, and which is available for download here http://www.antiquecameras.net/lensvademecum.html . I have no connection with the publication or the website on which it is available for download.

 

William

Edited by willeica
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