Noobie Question No. 8: When were the lenses of the 10.5cm & 13.5cm Elmars first made?

[David.Boettcher]

Noobie Question No. 8: When were the lenses of the 10.5cm & 13.5cm Elmars first made?

When interchangeable lenses were introduced for the Leica in 1931, Leitz needed to offer some new lenses.

The 3.5cm and 9cm Elmars were new designs, which were needed to get short focus lenses that would cover the 24x36mm negative.

But lens design at the time was difficult and slow, and as Leitz already had some longer focal length lenses which had been designed for medium format, 6x9cm or 9x12cm, cameras, they simply put these in screw mounts to fit the Leica.

The 10.5cm lens which was used in the "Mountain" Elmar had been supplied to Nagel with an f4.5 maximum aperture. This had to be restricted to f6.3 for the Leica because the performance at wider apertures was considered inadequate. The lens which became the 13.5cm Elmar, and father of all 35mm-camera 135mm lenses, was also supplied to Nagel as a medium format lens.

The books that I have looked at so far simply say that these lenses had been "designed in the 1920s". Does anyone know any more about the history of these lenses before they became Leica lenses?

Regards - David

(As an aside, and with thanks to Erwin Puts, I thought that using a larger format lens on a 35mm camera would naturally provide good performance. But large negatives were not enlarged much, if at all; sometimes they were just contact printed. So although the coverage of the 24x36mm negative by such lenses was more than adequate, because only the middle part of the field was used, the degree of correction of lenses for medium formats was not as high as that required for the Leica. In consequence both the 10.5cm and 13.5cm Elmars had fairly short lives.)

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

I can't comment on the Alpine or Mountain lens but the 13,5cm one is described like a new lens in the catalogues I have from 1937; they talk about "specially" high resolution and "should be used where subjects of fine structure are present". Plus they mention its "extremely good colour correction (just as the Summar of 5cm)... ", which suggests a little more than a 20's MF/LF lens would give.

Trying to track down all these asides thrown everywhere about Leicas will keep you out of mischief for a while. I speak from bitter experience, having wasted hours trying to find what the "Mikro-Summar" was (for their microscopes).

Regards, David

 

[David.Boettcher]

Hi,

I can't comment on the Alpine or Mountain lens but the 13,5cm one is described like a new lens in the catalogues I have from 1937; they talk about "specially" high resolution and "should be used where subjects of fine structure are present". Plus they mention its "extremely good colour correction (just as the Summar of 5cm)... ", which suggests a little more than a 20's MF/LF lens would give.

Trying to track down all these asides thrown everywhere about Leicas will keep you out of mischief for a while. I speak from bitter experience, having wasted hours trying to find what the "Mikro-Summar" was (for their microscopes).

Regards, David

Hi David,

The 13.5cm Elmar which I was talking about was discontinued in 1936, so the one in your 1937 catalogue would presumably be the 13.5cm Hektor?

The 13.5cm Hektor, introduced in 1933, would have been specifically designed for the Leica, and of course have higher resolution and better colour correction than the medium format 1920s lenses used in the 13.5cm Elmar.

The funny thing about the 10.5cm and 13.5cm Elmars, and the 3.5cm and 9cm Elmars too come to that, is that they use the same configuration as the 5cm Elmar of four elements in three groups, the rear group being a cemented pair, but unlike the 5cm Elmar as described in the 1920 DRP patent 343086, all the other Elmars have the diaphragm in the second air space.

If the lenses used in the 10.5cm and 13.5cm Elmars were designed around the same time as the 5cm Elmar, mid 1920s, with the same configuration of glass elements as the 5cm Elmar, one wonders why only the 5cm lens had the diaphragm in the first air space as per the 1920 patent, and the others had it in the second air space? Which reminds me, do you have a copy of the 1933 article in "Die Leica" where Leitz explain how the Elmar is not a Tessar?

Yes, I can spend as much time as I want ferreting about on obscure questions like this. At least it gets me away from wasting time on even earlier wrist watches . . .

Regards - David

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

Yes, I was quoting the Hektor (HEFAR) speil. I didn't notice the dates (apart from the booklet one) as my reference book goes out of sequence for them at the critical point and I'd not noticed.

Kodak's patents may have a lot to do with the positioning of the diaphragm, I vaguely remember a lot of talk about it in their 20's stuff but have cleared that part of the collection.

But "No" I've not got or seen the 1933 article in "Die Leica". My view of 4 in 3's and 3 in 3's is that it's like trying to patent a wheelbarrow. The Dollond/Hall farce of earlier years puts me off too much looking at lenses.

Wrist watches are OK but I prefer the waistcoat pocket versions with keys; so much fun at boring meetings to take them out and open the back etc. Of course, I'm not that old fashioned now I'm retired. I've even one of these new fangled automatic watches...

Regards, David

 

[David Hughes]

Hi (again),

I thought I'd seen it somewhere; "All Leica lenses are high class Leitz Anastigmats... " and that was from the July 1935 instructions. So another layer to add to the heap.

Regards, David

 

[David.Boettcher]

Hi (again),

I thought I'd seen it somewhere; "All Leica lenses are high class Leitz Anastigmats... " and that was from the July 1935 instructions. So another layer to add to the heap.

Regards, David

Hi David,

I don't think your observation does add any problems. The name anastigmat was invented by Paul Rudolph of Zeiss in 1890. It is a double negative of the Greek word "stigma", which means "point". So a-stigmatism means no-point or imperfect definition, and An-a-stigmat means no-no-point, and hence good definition.

In "A history of the photographic lens" Kingslake describes how Paul Rudolph designed a lens which improved on the achromatic Ross Concentric by adding an abberation corrector in front of the diaphragm, correcting the residual spherical aberration of the Ross design which severly limited its maximum aperture. Rudolph called this lens the Anastigmat, and the design was patented by Carl Zeiss, German patent No. 56,109, 3rd April 1890. It appears that although they patented the design, Zeiss did not register the name Anastigmat (patents protect designs, not trade marks or names) and Zeiss lost their copyright on the name Anastigmat when other companies began calling their lenses anastigmats, so in 1900 Zeiss changed the name of the lens to Protar. After this, anastigmat was widely used for, or as part of, the name of any lens corrected for spherical aberration, coma and astigmatism.

The lens fitted to very early Leica cameras was at first called the Leitz Anastigmat, then the Leitz Elmax Anastigmat, then just the Leitz Elmax. In the book "Leica & Leicaflex Lenses" Gianni Rogliatti says that "The name Anastigmat was given to this lens because the basic design was covered by patents that forced this even if the lens design was completely the work of the Leitz technicians". I have puzzled about this statement, which is repeated in the "Leica Collectors Guide" and by Van Hasbroeck, and I have concluded that Rogliatti is just simply wrong because the name Anastigmat could not be protected by a patent, and by 1900 was in such wide circulation that Zeiss had given up any claim to it, and anyone could use it with impunity.

I think a more likely explanation for the name change is that the lens was first called the Leitz Anastigmat because that is exactly what it was, a Leitz version of an anastigmat. However, when the camera was launched, with its snappy "Leica" name, the name "Leitz Anastigmat" seemed a bit old fashioned, and didn't distinguish the lens from the many other anastigmat lenses available. Most likely the marketing department at Leitz, or whatever the equivalent was then, wanted a more distinct name for the lens to go alongside the unique name of the camera, and so "Elmax" was born.

Regards - David

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

Interesting, thanks.

The nuisance with all this is that you have to go back to the originals. Often that means a visit somewhere and the original document being dug out and put into you grubby hands (protected with white gloves of course) and that can cost serious money.

Worse still, people add their tuppence worth on the internet. I do regular sweeps for copies of my books that have been scanned and posted for people to download and often find that someone has added something that they thought would be useful (often a page or two or three and even an appendix!).

These days a standardised threat usually gets it cleared from the web and so I don't have access to a lawyer who doesn't mind me asking silly little questions. So I'll add little more than that copyright is a very confused area; much better these days with international copyright laws. (They say thanks to Walt Disney but I dunno!) During the late 19th century it was very confused, lots of countries had no laws and those that did were all different.

So I'll wish you luck; I can remember the fun and games I had trying to get to the bottom of the mystery over why Kodak talked of them (Anastigmats) with and without the words "Kodak" in front and with and without capitalisation.

Regards, David