Miscellaneous ramblings and opinions

It has become fashionable to have a blog site and to use it to express personal opinions that may or may not have much intrinsic value.  I'm no different and this site has become my place to express my thoughts as well as exhibit my old cameras and photographs.  What follows here is, therefore, an expression of my personal opinion.

After having published somewhere around 150 papers, the vast majority being peer reviewed, I find that I am a bit uncomfortable writing these pages and commenting on cameras and designs.  This is simply because much of the information that I have gathered regarding the history of any particular camera, company, or design from sources on the Internet.  However, when I have attempted to authenticate the Internet information by going to older publications, I have often found that the Internet information is faulty and frequently wrong.  There apparently is a tendency for the Internet to replicate and self-authenticate faulty information and the original sources, books and manuals that may have been published more than half a century ago, are largely ignored.  This is not a problem unique to the internet because it is often the case that young scientists will cite recent publications which themselves cite older original publications and sometimes inaccurately.  

When it is possible, I try to obtain historically relevant information regarding classic cameras from old manuals and textbooks.  Among the most valuable old publications that I have found particularly valuable include J. Lipinski's 1955 textbook, Miniature and Precision Cameras, and Lahue and Bailey's Glass, Brass, & Chrome from 1972.  However, I have even found that Lahue and Bailey occasionally contribute to the perpetuation of minor historical errors.  Those errors that may have been minor in 1972 (e.g. the origin of the red shutter curtain material in some wartime Leica cameras) because they did not anticipate that some 35 years later the true origin of the red curtain had become important to classic camera collectors.  Of course, Lahue and Bailey were not optical system designers or engineers who intended to produce academic textbooks.  Rather, they intended to produce a popular book on old cameras and in the interest of space and the need to hold the reader's attention many historically important design and engineering details were glossed over, over simplified, or occasionally misstated entirely.

Another type of historical error is the unjust attribution of particular technological designs to particular individuals.  For instance, Walter Dorwin Teague has been credited with the design of many cameras produced by Kodak in the late 1920's through 1930's.  In reality, Teague and his studio were charged with designing the "look" of the cameras.  The optical design and performance of the cameras were the responsibility of the optical designers and ultimately the engineers who make them actually work well.  The final product was therefore the result of close collaborations and credit is too often given to the biggest names.  At Kodak, Chester Crumrine and Joseph Milhalyi are often given short shrift.  Similarly, John E. Woodbury is rarely recognized as having produced one of the most important designs for cameras, the rangefinder originally used by Kodak in 1916.  Hubert Nerwin's work at Zeiss Ikon from the early 1930's through the 1950's resulted in many of the most successful camera designs of those decades.  He was responsible for the salvaging of the initially very poor Contax design and performance as well as later creating the very successful Contax II and III systems and other historically important models such as the remarkable Contaflex of 1935.  Even so, his name is not encountered when reading an often cited book by D.B. Tubbs, Zeiss Ikon Cameras 1926-39 published in 1977 (most recently reprinted in 2001).  This and many other "popular" books on classic cameras have become major sources of information yet they were never intended to be anything other than superficial discussions about products, and not detailed presentations of the optical designs and the engineers who devoted their lives to making them work.

On the other hand, textbooks such as Lipinski's from 1955 address the optical designs and engineering.  For those who casually comment that the Contax II rangefinder performance was superior to that of the Leica may not be aware of the fact that rotating or sliding prisms introduce other optical errors that Leitz's design did not.  Of course these errors may be considered to be relatively minor given the fact that the camera ragnefinders were never intended to be analytical instruments and focusing the frame on uncle Joe eating a hotdog will not often reveal the shortcomings of even rudimentary rangefinder designs.  Personally, comments on the superiority of Contax II over a Leica IIIa (for instance) reflect preferences that are not based upon optical designs and basic engineering principles.