Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/05/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 04:22 PM 5/10/2001 -0700, Jim Brick wrote: >Leica didn't make film or copiers. Just optics, >cameras, and paraphernalia that supports this line. So the Leica (Leitz) >heritage is sort of all in the same vein. Still doing today, what Oscar >started nearly a century ago. > PUH-LEEZE, Jim! Do not abuse Leica's history so! Oscar Barnack did NOT start Leica! The company was founded by Karl Kellner in 1849, and it was quite a few years before the first Leitz walked through the door. The company were microscope specialists -- STILL an important part of the Leitz line and heritage! Barnack was hired as a mechanical and optical interface, a workman who could capably design the mechanicals around optical systems. His major assignment, early on, was in an effort to produce a cine camera for microscopic use and, on this, he worked with an old friend, Mechau, the person responsible for Barnack's leaving Zeiss-owned ICA to come to work at Leitz. (The ultimate reason, though, seems to have been health insurance: shades of Hillary Clinton, but Barnack had asthma and was so barred fromt he Zeiss Executive Health-Care Plan -- but Leitz put him into THEIR plan. Don't downplay the import of Health-Care Plans to make Employees happy, you reactionaries!) Leitz ALWAYS made far more money from microscopes and the like than from cameras. We are the fans of the tail that wagged the dog, and we tend to neglect this realization. MICROSCOPES! Medical gear. Fancy laboratory stuff. Igor and all that. Doctor Frankenstein. Hollywood missed the ultimate adornment to a Boris Karloff set, that Leitz Model VIIc brass microscope in the background. Leitz DID run out of money, in part, because of cameras but, also, because they could not compete, on the economy of scale, with Carl Zeiss and, even worse for them, Nikon and Pentax, in their medical and microscopy stuff. Viso died NOT because we photographers avoided it, as we, most assuredly, did not -- Viso died because all those doctors were snappin' away with Nikon or Contarex cameras. Shucks. How mundane reality can be. But so it is. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!