[rollei_list] Re: OT: Post-War T coated Sonnar 2/50 lens
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2010 01:15:26 -0400
At 07:51 PM 9/4/2010, CarlosMFreaza wrote:
> Good detail the s/n for the Sonnar in your book cover,
>however my point was that CZ Jena did not coat every lens initially
>and then it could cause some doubts, if you follow Contax II and III
>auctions in eBay for some months verifying the serial numbers, you can
>see some Sonnar 1,5/5cm and 2/5cm lenses are coated and others are not
>coated, there are non coated Sonnar lenses with higher serial number
>than coated ones, it looks like CZ -before and during the war- applied
>the new coating process for some batches only. The fact that 800 T
>coated lenses were made in March 1947 as you wrote, only reinforce the
>known fact that CZ was applying the process to commercial lenses
>despite the process was not applied for all the pre-war and war time
>lenses.
>
>In 1946/47 Contax II cameras known like the "Jena Contax" were made in
>Zeiss Saalfeld/Saale works; since the Zeiss Ikon was almost completely
>destroyed with the city on 13 February 1945 during the Dresden
>bombing, the Soviets ordered to rebuild the draws and machinery to
>restart the Contax production in East Germany and at the Arsenal
>factory in Kiev. Zeiss Ikon technicians under Russian control worked
>to make three production lines, two of them for the Soviet Union and
>one for Zeiss Saalfeld/Saale works. The "Jena Contax" (Contax II) was
>made there and they have engraved "ZEISS JENA" in the camera body or
>in the accesories shoe. The Saalfeld/Saale Contax production line
>after to produce cameras for some months was sent to the Soviet Union
>too in 1947; there is a relationship between these "Zeiss Jena"
>Contax II cameras and the coated 1947 T lenses.
Hysteron Proteron, Carlos. The Jena Contax was
made at Jena: we have NY TIMES photographs of
its production there -- we even have one picture
of a Zeiss employee assembling one with a KIEV
nameplate. There was a small lens run at
Saalfeld -- some of which are in a grey finish --
but a lot of lens production, and perhaps some
camera production, was at Coburg. (Saalfeld and
Coburg and Eisfeld and Munich and a few others
were all branch factories of the main CZJ works.)
Dresden held two Zeiss Ikon works. One was the
Ernemann Tower, which was undamaged and which
survives to this day -- the top floors include
the Saxony Technical Museum with some fine
collections of cameras, while the first floor,
until recently, was the location for a sex
shop. The other factory was the old ICA works,
which was pretty well flattened by the Fire
Bombing. Up to 1945, the four primary Zeiss
factories divided up production: TLR's and box
cameras were made at the CP Goerz works in
Berlin, miniature-format cameras were made at the
old ICA works, medium-format folders were made at
the former Contessa-Nettel works in Stuttgart,
and the Ernemann Tower served as the corporate
headquarters and also produced most of the
miscellaneous Zeiss Ikon devices (weather gauges,
film viewers, and a lot of accessories). Note
that only one factory was destroyed but, along
with the loss of the machinery at the ICA works,
the working design drawings were lost, which is
one reason it took the renovated Zeiss Ikon in
Stuttgart until 1951 to produce the BD Contax IIa.
Up to SEP 1939, the Zeiss Foundation was a huge
economic force in the world market. By 1945,
Zeiss had lost almost all of its value and it is
a true miracle that it survived. CZJ ended up
doing all right and, eventually, as Pentacon, was
a large duck in the very small pond of the DDR
economy. Carl Zeiss at Oberkochen just bled red
on the balance sheets until around 1950, when it
became increasingly profitable -- Canon and Zeiss
to this day are the two largest optical concerns
in the world. But the Postwar Zeiss Ikon had
only two profitable years, 1953 and 1954, and
then the development of the Monster, the
Contarex, began to take its toll, and the firm
just bled red all the way to '72.
We probably will never sort out the proper
chronology of lens coating by Zeiss as the
factory records do not generally indicate whether
all or a part of a batch of lenses were
coated. The process was "geheimgehalten"
(restricted on security grounds) until 1940, so
the records of coated lenses before that date are
cleared of all reference to coating. We do know
that a few coated lenses were commercially
marketed in 1939, almost all, apparently, in the
US, but the outbreak of the War brought an abrupt
halt to the intended advertising campaign.
I would propose, as a working hypothesis, that
almost all lens production was coated and marked
after 1942. A few small batches of unimportant
lenses were not coated or marked -- I have a
2,83x,xxx 4.5/13.5cm Triotar converted to LTM in
that range which is uncoated -- but the thousands
of lenses produced after 1941 seem coated for the
far greatest part. I certainly have never seen a
Postwar CZJ lens which is uncoated. (Which, of
course, is no guarantee that such do not exist!)
During the War, surveillance lenses were not
coated to enhance night vision, and that is an
exception to the above. And, to my rather
certain knowledge, wartime Periscopes were not
coated though Zeiss at Oberkochen coated all
periscopes produced after they began production of such in 1953.
You are correct about no real apparent method in
the production of coated lenses from 1938 to
1942. Again, from 1942 onwards, almost all
lenses seem to have been coated. Not all are
marked -- it cost money, after all to engrave
that red "T"! (Zeiss began hurting for workers
and materials after 1941, though the head of
Zeiss, Dr Heinz Küppenbender, sheltered 10,000 or
so foreign workers by declaring them "vital to
the German War Effort". (Küppenbender was hauled
before a Nazi tribunal for this until the charges
were quashed by Speer, the German Minister of
Munitions. Küppenbender was later hauled before
a US Denazification Court. He is the only person
of whom I am aware to face prosecution by the
wartime and postwar authorities. He beat all the
charges, of course, and went on to run the Zeiss Foundation until 1972.)
It is instructive to recall that CZJ lenses
produced through 1939 had nifty leather lens caps
complete with gold-leaf markings of "Carl Zeiss
Jena". By 1942, the lens caps had become stamped
aluminium with a block printing of ZEISS on
them. From 1944, the lens caps bear no writing
at all. This marks the increasing desperation at
Zeiss to just get product out of the factory doors.
(We have talked, and will probably talk again,
about those batches of 2.8/8cm CZJ Tessars which
were made before the War but were only to appear on the 1949 Rolleiflex 2.8.)
Carlos, you probably ought to join the Zeiss
Historica Society and subscribe to the Zeiss Ikon
Collectors' Group at Yahoo! Groups, as we
discuss these issues frequently. I do have a
CD-ROM with the entire run of the ZEISS HISTORICA
JOURNAL up to 2008 or so, and I probably ought to
send you a copy as this has a lot of articles on
the matters you are researching. Unfortunately,
the expert on this topic, Charlie Barringer, died
some months back: I am part of the committee
working to translate his extensive Zeiss Lens
List to the Internet. The Leica Historical
Society of America has had numerous articles
dealing with this in its VIEWFINDER over the
decades, as has the German LEICA HISTORICA in its VIDOM.
The British were far kinder to Franke & Heidecke
and Volkswagen than the Soviets were to Carl Zeiss Jena or Zeiss Ikon Dresden.
Marc'
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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