[rollei_list] Kingslake and the Planar: Long
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:53:10 -0400
At 06:29 PM 10/7/2009, Richard Knoppow wrote:
> Well, Planar is used as a generic name for lenses
>similar to the original one designed by Paul Rudolph of
>Zeiss. Rudolph's lens was a advancement on the double-Gauss
>lens using thick negative meniscus elements next to the
>diaphragm. These elements were composed of two cemented
>lenses to obtain better chromatic correction than could be
>had with the glass types available at the time. Rudolph's
>lens was symmetrical. It was found later than making it
>somwhat unsymmetrical by shifting some power from one side
>of the stop to the other would improve its correction for
>distant objects. The designer responsible for this was
>Horace W. Lee, of Taylor, Taylor, and Hobson who designed a
>lens called the Opic. Most modern six or more element lenss
>of the general double-Gauss type are based, however
>distantly, on the Opic. Shortly thereafter Zeiss designed a
>similar lens called the Biotar. Kingslake points out that
>the Opic was sold as just another lens in the TT&H catalogue
>while the Biotar was sold as part of a camera system so it
>became recognized where the Opic was not.
I am nulli secundus in my admiration for Rudolph
Kingslake and for his scholarship. He was
trained by his pa-in-law, A E Conrady, who was
the fellow who developed lens analysis. Until
Conrady started breaking the system open, lens
design had been sharply divided between the
academic side -- theory and maths and the like --
and corporate practicalities of trade secrets and
in-house tricks. Bear in mind that the
apprenticeship system, under which optical
designers learned their craft at the hands of
mentors, only slowly died at the end of the
nineteenth century, and it died slowly, like a
western gunslinger who gets his in a Hollywood
oater. Ernst Abbe, a straight-theory physics
prof who was hauled against his wishes into the
clutches of Carl Zeiss Jens -- Zeiss had to bribe
the University of Jena to order him to start
working for him -- established the requirement
for scientific and technical training for lens
designers. Max Berek, Chief of Optical Design at
Leitz from WWI until his death in 1949, was a
product of the apprenticeship system, as was the
younger Ludwig Bertele. But Abbe set the system
in play which established that to be hired as a
lens designer, you had to have an advanced
academic degree. The customary practice was for
a person to arrange future employment with a
given company but to spend an internship with a
different company while completing their PhD
dissertation -- Bauer, for instance, who brought
together all of the elements for lens coating,
did so while completing his PhD work while at
intern at Pohl, though, once he had the degree,
he went to work at Zeiss and, eventually, got
into management after handing over his file to an
even younger worker, Alexander Smakula, to
complete the work on vacuum-depostion.
Conrady busted this open by working to get these
in-house trade secrets combined with theoretical
optical physics to make a complete package
available to the public, and his two volume work
on applied optical design from the 1930's --
still available in an English translation from
Dover, I believe -- was a ground-breaker. He
trained Kingslake to follow in his
footsteps. Kingslake's books are also
milestones, especially his magnum opus, A HISTORY
OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LENS, a work which I doubt
will be equaled in my lifetime. But the book has
problems as do all human endeavours. In the end,
I suspect that Dr Kingslake was too clever by
half and I also suspect that he and Dr Sauer must
have had words at some point. In any event, we
know that Sauer tried to set Kingslake write in a
series of letters, but that Kingslake never
responded. It was unlike Kingslake to act in
such a way, and Sauer was a likable cuss from all
reports, but even the best of people can rub each other the wrong way.
Kingslake's account of the evolution of the
Planar seems to be just plain wrong. I know what
he says about Lee, and I really admire Lee and I
admire the Opic but, at that time, I doubt that
Zeiss knew a lot about the Opic as it did not
compete directly with their products and as this
was still produced in the era of trade secrets
and the like, so Zeiss would only have known the
details of the Opic had they bought several
lenses and tested them extensively, including
melting down the elements of one to find out
which optical glasses were used. They did this
with some of the Ektars but I am unaware that any
Opic was ever examined by either Jena or
Oberkochen. It certainly has no significance in
the records of CZJ or Oberkochen and certainly is
completely lacking from the notes of Drs Wandersleb and Sauer.
Dr Rudolph designed the six-element symmetrical
Planar in 1896. The lens was a magnificent
performer but the number of elements caused
flair. So, Rudolph then spent six years working
on the Tessar. In 1902, the f/4.5 Tessar was
introduced, the senior lens design still in
quantity production. Rudolph then spent 17 years
working with his assistant, Dr Ernst Wandersleb,
to open the design, and they eventually produced
the f/3.5 and f/2.8 versions before Rudolph
retired in 1919, with his final comments being
about how dissatisfied he was with the
performance of the f/2.8 version. Wandersleb was
then promoted to Rudolph's old position of Chief
of Photographic Lens Design at Jena, while
Rudolph went off to lose his shirt in the market
and to be forced to go back to work a decade
later, when he made even more epic designs in his last years.
Wandersleb didn't worry about the Tessar or the
Planar in the Post-WWI years as he had a lot of
other involvements. But, with the advent of
medium- and miniature-format cameras in the
later 1920's attention returned to fast
lenses. And the f/2 Ernostar produced by that
upstart Bertele really turned the world upside
down, as it was, and is, a most enjoyable
lens. When Zeiss Ikon insisted on fast lenses
for their world-beater, the Contax rangefinder,
Wandersleb hired Bertele, actually a Zeiss Ikon
employee, to produce the Sonnar and Biogon
line. Wandersleb got a new assistant in 1935 in
the person of Dr Hans Sauer, and assigned him the
task of revisiting the f/2.8 Tessar. A year
later, Sauer advised Wandersleb that with the
glasses available, only marginal improvements
were possible. Wandersleb then let that project
sleep and told Sauer to revisit the 1896 Planar
design and see if lens coatings would solve its flair problem.
The tale is long, but that was Dr Sauer's main
task from 1935 until 1945. New optical glasses
were on hand from Schott, and he kept reworking
the details -- yes, the Zuse Computer was
available, but no one thought of that for lens
computation until Dr Mandler did so at Leitz in
1951. So the calculations were done by actual
"computers", people at desks, with analog
calculators. By 1942, Wandersleb had been laid
aside -- his wife was Jewish, and was in a camp,
and he refused to divorce her, so even
Küppenbender had to let him go, albeit he was
paid his full salary, and Sauer was promoted to
the job. He still worked on the Planar
design: he seems to have had lunch with
Wandersleb twice a week to discuss this. By
1945, Sauer had developed several alternate
five-element designs which had the optical
performance of the original Planar without the flair.
When the War ended, Sauer was ordered west to
Oberkochen. He took a complete set of his notes
with him, and left a complete set behind. He
worked with Schott und Genossen, Mainz, the
revamped Schott Jena glasswerke, on the
production of optical glasses -- this was a
problem, as Schott Jena had access to some
magnificently pure sand beds in Czechoslovakia
now denied to the West. But, after time, Sauer
produced the five-element Planar for the
Rolleiflex and Hasselblad and, shortly
thereafter, the six-element Planar for the
Hasselblad. The nameless guys at Jena took an
alternate fork to produce the lenses used on the
2.8B and the later Praktisix line. But the basic
research for both was Hans Sauer, all the way.
I have often thought that those not chosen by the
US Army for relocation to Oberkochen must have
had a chip on their shoulder, which would explain
why they rose above themselves to produce the
excellent East German lenses. I have been
reminded that, in 1945, no one saw the split as
permanent: some guys were going to the US Zone,
other guys would stay in the Soviet Zone. I find
that approach silly -- when the official party
left the Jena Station headed for Oberkochen in
JUL 1945, there were hundreds of folks begging
for a spot on the train. Some went on their own
power, most notably Nerwin, the head of Zeiss
Ikon, who travelled on his own resources to the
Western Zone to be picked up by Operation
Paperclip and shipped off to design US
cameras. Long before Obama, these guys KNEW that
a "socialist paradise" is just a world from hell.
To finish a circle -- my 27-year-old son accuses
me of taking far too long to finish a story but
acknowledges that if he can just twiddle his
thumbs for a couple of hours, I get back to the
point -- I doubt that Lee or the Opic design had
anything to do with the design of the later Planar. I can find no link.
And Lee does not seem to have published, the
Brits lingering longer than the Germans on the trade-secret line.
Kingslake is just plain wrong on this. I am
unaware of any similar lapsus menti on his
part. And, again, I suspect that he just plain did not get along with Sauer.
Marc
Richard, I believe that the Biotar and the
Biotessar are both products of Willi Merte, but
that is from memory and, for once, Wikipedia is
empty of knowledge. <sigh> I have set Wikipedia
right on the details of Douglas MacArthur's
life. Maybe it is time when I started entries on
the various Zeiss and Leitz lens designs ... The
Biotar is a really superb critter: I own one of
the 8 or 9 known 1.5/7.5cm CZJ Biotar T's in LTM,
and it is a wonderful lens. (Yes, folks, this
lens IS worth a bit, as the collectors spent
twenty years trying to find one: Charlie got his
one month, and three months later, I got mine for
peanuts, as I had done a fine fellow a favor, and
he no longer needed the lens. Others have
surfaced over the next fifteen years, but not many.)
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
---
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