Article on Upcoming Wetzlar Camera Auction 7th October 2023

[willeica]

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https://www.macfilos.com/2023/09/06/highlights-of-the-october-wetzlar-camera-auctions/

The highlight is obviously 0 Series No 121. I have included photos of some of the items in Wilhelm Albert's diary which also appear in the auction, such as the flip up rear door on an LTM Leica, work on which started some 20 years before a similar door appeared on the Leica M3 of 1954. There is a link in this article which will lead to the catalogue which contains many other interesting items.

William 

[Al Brown]

A very cool article. Jo is a great guy, he knows his business. I really enjoy doing business with him.

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[willeica]

13 hours ago, Al Brown said:

A very cool article. Jo is a great guy, he knows his business. I really enjoy doing business with him.

I have met Jo a few times, but I know Lars better as he is always there when I visit Wetzlar. There are a lot of interesting items in this auction, relevant to the history of Leica cameras and their accessories. Reading the catalogue itself is a real education and it should be of interest to anyone who follows this section of the Leica Forum.

William 

[qqphot]

The screwmount Leica with a flip up rear door looks delightful - I wonder how the product line would have proceeded had that ended up in production in the 1930s.

[willeica]

4 hours ago, qqphot said:

The screwmount Leica with a flip up rear door looks delightful - I wonder how the product line would have proceeded had that ended up in production in the 1930s.

Wilhelm Albert's diary shows other 'post war' features being trialled in the 1930s, such as the combined viewfinder and rangefinder (Leica IV), bayonet mount and lever wind. The company would have had two main concerns (1) how easy to make and (2) how costly to make. The company was also in survival mode in the Germany of the late 1930s and the 1940s. It managed to survive World War II and reintroduce itself after the war. The presence of occupying troops with pay packets to spend helped in no little way with the survival and recovery of the company. It is not surprising that it took so long to finally produce the M3 with many features which had been in prototypes from the 1930s. On the other hand there were some prototypes for the M3 with knob wind, so the company was also looking back at the same time. Ultimately the M3 was just right when it hit the market in 1954. What is probably even more astonishing is that cameras with a lot of the same features are being produced in 2023, almost 70 years later.

William 

[jpattison]

I believe these "new features" (ie Designs leading toward the IIIG and subsequently the M3) were hidden from the Allied Occupation of the Leitz factory at the end of WW2 in Europe. When patents were "confiscated" from Leitz.

Hence why the British post war Leica copies were based on the older patents. There is an article on line explaining this (which I can't find at the moment).

These other articles are worth a look if you don't know them...

http://leica-users.org/v29/msg15270.html

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

http://v1.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/leica/index.html

John

[willeica]

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6 hours ago, jpattison said:

I believe these "new features" (ie Designs leading toward the IIIG and subsequently the M3) were hidden from the Allied Occupation of the Leitz factory at the end of WW2 in Europe. When patents were "confiscated" from Leitz.

Hence why the British post war Leica copies were based on the older patents. There is an article on line explaining this (which I can't find at the moment).

These other articles are worth a look if you don't know them...

http://leica-users.org/v29/msg15270.html

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

http://v1.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/leica/index.html

John

There are taped interviews (a friend of mine has these) with former Reid and Sigrist staff which indicate that some of the so-called British Intelligence staff who visited Wetzlar after the war were, in fact, Reid and Sigrist staff wearing borrowed military uniforms. It also emerged that Major Reid was, in fact, just Flight Lieutenant Reid. I have a couple of Reids which are nice at first glance, but if any of them go wrong, they are a nightmare to repair. There were issues with imperial screw sizes as well as the fact that parts are hard to come by. I was offered a tray of Reid parts some years ago, but declined the offer as I only needed a few bits and pieces. My CLA man used a Leica IIIa slow speed mechanism to fix my Reid IIIa, but this left holes in the body which I had to plug. My other Reid,  a I Model, is a Royal Navy camera. In my view the whole Reid Leica copy exercise was doomed to failure from the outset. Britain had a camera industry in the early postwar years but it relied too much on various protections and 'sweetheart deals'. I'm not sure that Reid would have survived even if the so-called 'intelligence ' people had got the the later patent information.

William 

Edited September 27, 2023 by willeica

[Pyrogallol]

There were plenty of 111c cameras around in 1945 so you would have thought that they would be looking for the 111c blueprints rather than the 111b they came back with?

My Leica repair man says that towards the end of the Reid time the cameras were thrown together quickly as the owners were in need of money.

My Reid 111 has a Leica 111b pressure plate as a replacement.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Pyrogallol

[jpattison]

10 hours ago, Pyrogallol said:

There were plenty of 111c cameras around in 1945 so you would have thought that they would be looking for the 111c blueprints rather than the 111b they came back with?

My Leica repair man says that towards the end of the Reid time the cameras were thrown together quickly as the owners were in need of money.

My Reid 111 has a Leica 111b pressure plate as a replacement.

I believe they hid the latest "blueprints" ( as you would !!!) somehow.

[willeica]

16 hours ago, Pyrogallol said:

There were plenty of 111c cameras around in 1945 so you would have thought that they would be looking for the 111c blueprints rather than the 111b they came back with?

My Leica repair man says that towards the end of the Reid time the cameras were thrown together quickly as the owners were in need of money.

My Reid 111 has a Leica 111b pressure plate as a replacement.

Well, if the British could 'cheat', the Germans could do the same😇. I upset a British friend who only collected British cameras some years ago by saying that my favourite Leica copy was a Japanese Leotax and not a British Reid. I have since converted him a bit to Leica and he has recently acquired a I Model A. I agree that Reid cameras could flatter to deceive. The Taylor Hobson 2 inch f2 lens is, however, very good. 

 

6 hours ago, jpattison said:

I believe they hid the latest "blueprints" ( as you would !!!) somehow.

I agree. It was an extraordinary 'to the victor the spoils' event, which had more than a hint of subterfuge to it. I note that no one ever tried to make a British VW, though.

William 

[Pyrogallol]

3 hours ago, willeica said:

Well, if the British could 'cheat', the Germans could do the same😇. I upset a British friend who only collected British cameras some years ago by saying that my favourite Leica copy was a Japanese Leotax and not a British Reid. I have since converted him a bit to Leica and he has recently acquired a I Model A. I agree that Reid cameras could flatter to deceive. The Taylor Hobson 2 inch f2 lens is, however, very good. 

 

I agree. It was an extraordinary 'to the victor the spoils' event, which had more than a hint of subterfuge to it. I note that no one ever tried to make a British VW, though.

William 

The Morris Minor?

[Anbaric]

It does seem curious that Reid decided to copy the IIIb rather than the IIIc, especially as the BIOS team (report part 1, part 2) were apparently 'authorised to remove copies of the drawings for the Leica III B and III C' and actually observed only the assembly of the IIIc, since the IIIb had already been discontinued. They also noted that 'there is no doubt that as an engineering job [the IIIc] is far superior'. But there is no hint that Leitz had created any obstacles to their investigation; rather, the report mentions that they 'received every help and courtesy' from the Chairman, Directors and technical staff, the drawing office was 'well organised and was scrupulously clean' and the 'filing systems for finished drawings was excellent'. It would be difficult to pretend that the drawings for the current production camera had been 'mislaid' in these circumstances. Perhaps the team simply concluded that copying the IIIb was an easier task? They noted that the 'III C takes longer to assemble than its predecessor, 33 hours as compared with 29 hours' and that the die castings for the later model were not made by Leitz, but were bought in from Mahle of Stuttgart (the Mahle factory was the subject of another investigation, which described it as 'the most important Die Casting plant in Germany'). Maybe Reid wanted to keep as much as possible in-house, or had already begun the process of reverse-engineering the earlier model, before they had access to the drawings?

Edited September 29, 2023 by Anbaric

[willeica]

7 hours ago, Anbaric said:

It does seem curious that Reid decided to copy the IIIb rather than the IIIc, especially as the BIOS team (report part 1, part 2) were apparently 'authorised to remove copies of the drawings for the Leica III B and III C' and actually observed only the assembly of the IIIc, since the IIIb had already been discontinued. They also noted that 'there is no doubt that as an engineering job [the IIIc] is far superior'. But there is no hint that Leitz had created any obstacles to their investigation; rather, the report mentions that they 'received every help and courtesy' from the Chairman, Directors and technical staff, the drawing office was 'well organised and was scrupulously clean' and the 'filing systems for finished drawings was excellent'. It would be difficult to pretend that the drawings for the current production camera had been 'mislaid' in these circumstances. Perhaps the team simply concluded that copying the IIIb was an easier task? They noted that the 'III C takes longer to assemble than its predecessor, 33 hours as compared with 29 hours' and that the die castings for the later model were not made by Leitz, but were bought in from Mahle of Stuttgart (the Mahle factory was the subject of another investigation, which described it as 'the most important Die Casting plant in Germany'). Maybe Reid wanted to keep as much as possible in-house, or had already begun the process of reverse-engineering the earlier model, before they had access to the drawings?

The Reid is clearly based on the prewar models and that was a decision taken by Reid. The whole concept was, however, badly thought out and was doomed from the outset. The Leitz people had been working on a combined rangefinder and viewfinder, rear door and lever wind well before WWII. Wilhelm Albert, who was still there, would have worked on these concepts as far back as 1934. The Reid concept was based on an old design and hoped to succeed under import restrictions. But when those ended and with the introduction of the M3 in 1954, the game was up. Someone I know in the UK has extensive tapes of interviews with former Reid and Sigrist staff which tell the whole story. They are part of the John Vincent Archive. ‘Major’ Reid was a true Walter Mitty type.

William 

[Studienkamera]

(not important)

Edited October 7, 2023 by Studienkamera

[willeica]

Some of the top results are here.

https://www.macfilos.com/2023/10/11/wetzlar-camera-auctions-over-three-million-for-leica-null/

William