Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/06/13
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 02:19 AM 6/13/99 -0400, Javier Perez wrote: >How did Leitz come up with names for lenses originally. >It's clear enough that the name is almost always indicative of the >lens's max aperture but going beyond that. where does the summ and the >elma come from. Did leitz have a daughter named Elma? I can understand >Hektor but not much else. Who's Thambar, Thumper's little brother? The tale is a bit complex, but, in a nutshell, the first version of the Elmar was the "Anastigmat", a name mandated by Zeiss, who still held the patent on the Tessar design (and that name comes from its having four elements, from the Greek "tesser - ", meaning four, as in "tesseract" or "tessera"). When the Zeiss patent expired in 1922, the lens was renamed "ELMAX", for "Ernst Leitz MAX Berek". Several years later, newer glasses allowed a redesign, and the lens was renamed "Elmar". The "Summ - " element in "Summitar", "Summarit", "Summicron", and "Summilux" comes from "the best", as in "lex populi summa lex". "Noctilux" means "night light". "Thambar" comes from the Greek word for "wonder". Hektor and "SummaREX" come from the names for Max Berek's dogs. "Telyt" comes from "tele - ", or "far". "Xenon" is a JSK name coming, I would guess, from the Greek root for "foreign" as in "xenophobic", though why Schneider used this name escapes me, unless the use of TTH research in the design of the lens prompted them in that direction. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!