[rollei_list] OT: Zeiss Agencies
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:16:33 -0400
At 05:43 PM 6/15/2009, Richard Knoppow wrote:
>
> I am not familiar with Huet although the name is
>familiar, however, Krauss was a well known French optician
>and held the license to make Zeiss camera lenses (and maybe
>binoculars) in France in the same way that Bausch & Lomb did
>in the USA. One occasionally seens Krauss-Zeiss Tessars.
>
In the 1880's, Carl Zeiss Jena was rapidly
expanding but still was not the mega-corporation
it is today. Thus, they opened branch offices
when they could do so cheaply -- Vienna, London,
St Petersburg, and Bucharest come to mind. Then,
for the harder markets, they sought local
agents. Krauss in Paris got the French agency
and B&L got a "split" arrangement -- Carl Zeiss
USA had its main office in New York City, but all
domestic production was done by Bausch &
Lomb. So, there are all sorts of pre-WWI "Zeiss"
products actually made in, say, Romania or the US.
All of the agencies located in nations at war
with the German Empire in the Erstes Weltkrieg
seized these agencies under their versions of the
Alien Properties Act. Thus, Krauss obtained full
rights to all Zeiss intellectual properties and
did not have to pay any royalties after 1 AUG
1914, and Bausch & Lomb got a similar deal in the
US in APR 1917 when Wilson got Congress to break
bad and declare war on Germany and
Austria-Hungary. Zeiss came out of the First
World War in better shape than most German
industries -- Zeiss and IG Farbinindustrie and
Krupp and a few shipyards were towering rocks of
fiscal stability in a German economy gone
west. Zeiss repurchased their agencies in the UK
and US and continued the arrangement, somewhat
modified, with B&L -- for instance, CZJ refused
to share some of its cutting-edge work with B&L
after 1921, though it did encourage that firm to manufacture Micro-Tessars.
One amusing side-note to this was the resolution
of lawsuits filed by Mauser against the British
and American mlitaries for theft of intellectual
properties. The British case was complex, as it
involved artillery shells based on Mauser patents
which the British had designed but not produced
when the two nations went to war, and the British
courts ruled in favor of Mauser. The US case was
simpler, as the US had "borrowed" the action from
the 1898K rifle for the estimable, and a bit
superior, M1903 Springfield, so the US government
simply rolled over and settled out of Court.
The exact same situation occurred again during
and after World War II. There are Carl Zeiss
binoculars produced in Vienna in the 1950's which
bear a distinct logo and which bear, I recall, a
"W" (for Wien) in their serial numbers. Today,
of course, the less expensive Carl Zeiss
binoculars are made in Romania or Czechia.
I do not know what became of Krauss after World
War I. Huet survived to be bought out by another
works around 1929, that firm eventually being
nationalized by the Blum excuse for a responsible government.
Again, the Binocular Historical Society is the
discussion list where most scholars of the breed
can be found. It is free and their are a number
of famous names from the camera world there, such as Charlie Barringer.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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