Carl Zeiss has been around for more than one century, and made a name for itself as a world-renowned optics supplier. The founder, Mr. Carl Zeiss, started out as a workshop employee at the university of Jena (Thuringia, Germany), where he would, in collaboration with Physics faculty member Dr. Ernst Abbe, for the first time develop optical microscopes in accordance with physical theory. Prior to this, microscopes had been built in an inefficient trial-and-error fashion, but from then onward it was possible to reliably manufacture them in larger quantities. The duo was later joined by chemist Dr. Otto Schott, who did seminal work on improving the quality of the glass that was used for the microscopes' lenses. This fruitful collaboration became a successful business, when Zeiss and Schott started their own companies, Carl Zeiss AG and SCHOTT AG, which till the present day continue the original shared work of making glass at the latter and shaping it into optical devices at the former. - Abbe did not have a company of his own, but later became the head of Carl Zeiss AG, and an as prominent as important figure for the Carl Zeiss foundation, which is still the owner of both aforementioned businesses.
With time Carl Zeiss AG has started to occupy other fields of optical applications, including the proximate manufacturing of glasses, but also of instrumentation for medical applications, electron microscopes (which employ electrons instead of light for higher resolution), photo cameras and related accessories, and of lasers for special applications. This last activity is carried out by a subsidiary called Carl Zeiss Laser Optics GmbH, which I am joining now.
However, today the headquarters of Carl Zeiss AG are no longer in Jena, due to (very unfortunate) historical events. As it is widely known, Germany started, and lost, World War II, leaving it occupied by the allied forces: France, the United Kingdom and the United States in the western part, and the Soviet Union in the eastern part. The American-British-French "trizone" eventually evolved into the western "Federal Republic of Germany" (FRG). A not-so-well-known fact is that a part of what would later become the Eastern "German Democratic Republic" (GDR), namely Thuringia (German: Thüringen), was originally occupied by the Americans, but was traded in for one sector of each of the three western allies in Berlin. Thus, the Soviets withdrew from West-Berlin (where I pursued my doctorate!), which prior to 1990, when Germany was reunified, belonged to the FRG, but gained control over Thuringia. In anticipation of the emerging Cold War, the U.S. dismantled many, if not all, Thuringian high-tech sites, including those of Carl Zeiss in Jena, which were relocated to the state of Baden-Württemberg, which was in their part of the FRG. From the onward, Carl Zeiss AG has been headquartered in Oberkochen, near Aalen, 70 km east of Baden-Württemberg's capital Stuttgart, and 50 km north of Ulm. The new site is very close to the German state of Bavaria, which is adjacent to Baden-Württemberg to the east. (Funny enough, the surface area of Bavaria is about as large as that of Lake Michigan, and Oberkochen / Aalen are almost as close to the inter-state border as Chicago is to the lakefront ...)
As mentioned at the outset of this post, Carl Zeiss AG is an optics supplier. Their photography division used to be renowned for the Zeiss Ikon model, which became defunct, but was revived in 2005. My mother had once been presented such a camera as a gift from her father, and she passed it on to me on the occasion of my being hired. Please join me in marveling at this beautiful piece of vintage technology, encased in a no less beautiful leather hull, as depicted in the left photograph. (The inset shows the Zeiss Ikon logo.) - Coincidentally, my current camera was produced by Jenoptik, another pre-WWII subsidiary Carl Zeiss AG subsidiary. It is depicted to the right, photographed with the camera of my father. (I bought the Jenoptik in 2006, when I was visiting Glasgow, which had been my home for 3.5 months in 2002, and at the time of the visit was where my sister was doing one semester abroad, just like myself. - If you click on the image and then enhance it to its actual size, you can see a reflection of me taking the picture on the tiny metal knob between the flash and the objective.) Since I am thinking about buying a more sophisticated D-SLR camera, now that I am about to earn good money, I will probably give the Jenoptik to my mother, who currently doesn't own any camera at all.
So much for a synopsis on my new employer and the related history; a term that is of course etymologically related to optics, the Carl Zeiss AG's core business.
1 Kommentar:
Here is to cameras all around,
and to pictures yet to be taken
of a future soon to begin . . .
Kommentar veröffentlichen