Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/10/21

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Subject: [Leica] Errors? Moi?
From: Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 21:13:53 +0000

Marc James Small: >>>A number of houses were actively researching
multi-coating
technologies in the 1960's<<<

Right, and the inventor of the method that is used for multicoating
consumer camera lenses was Optical Coating Laboratories, Inc., which
developed the method for coating space suits and the Lunar Lander for
the space program. Pentax and Zeiss licensed the technology from OCL and
Pentax beat Zeiss to market by a couple of months with the first
multi-coated consumer camera lenses in 1971. Multicoating was used
earlier for technical applications, but with methods that weren't
practical / economical for consumer lenses.

I don't have time for chapter and verse on this; I'll just say that I've
been wrong before and I'll be wrong again, and if you want to cite your
sources I'm willing to listen. Better yet, write an article on it for
me, and educate me and all my readers!

- --Mike (whose dad happened to be Director for Space Applications at NASA
during the Ford administration)