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| Carl Zeiss – How it started |
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| (Original appeared in 1996 in a publication issued by the Regional Center for Political Education, Thuringia. Reproduced here with the kind permission of the authors: Wolfgang Mühlfriedel and Edith Hellmuth.) |
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On 17 November 1846, the 30-year old mechanic CARL ZEISS opened a workshop and a small store in Jena’s Neugasse No. 7. In just a few months, Zeiss, who not only had a solid theoretical basis and good practical experience, but was also well acquainted with scientists and mathematicians at the University of Jena, had already found clientele for whom he repaired scientific instruments or produced them according to the customer’s specifications. In addition, he offered eyeglasses, chemical scales, drawing apparatuses, telescopes, etc. In 1847, his business success encouraged Zeiss to hire an assistant and an apprentice, and to rent two workrooms in Wagnergasse No. 34.
In the summer of 1847, following the advice of his teacher, the botanist MATTIAS JACOB SCHLEIDEN, Zeiss devoted his attention to the building of simple microscopes. In September 1847, he produced the first low-power microscopes. At the beginning of the 1850s, there was an increase in the demand for observation instruments from the Zeiss Workshops, which now enjoyed a good reputation among microscopists due to their meticulous workmanship. At the time, the level of interest shown by scientists and medical professionals in compound microscopes was growing because these were the only instruments that provided the higher magnifications they wanted. The time-consuming trial-and error method required to build optical systems initially kept Zeiss from building such systems, particularly as he was convinced that there must be some scientific way of determining the individual elements of the optical systems. However, the competitive scenario forced him to build compound microscopes in the traditional way from 1857 onwards.
| [Photo: Corporate Archives of Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH] |
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| (1860) | at the gate of his house (1904) |
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In the second half of the 1860s, Zeiss persuaded private lecturer for physics at the University of Jena, ERNST ABBE, to tackle the task of creating a mathematical foundation for designing microscope objectives. The collaboration of the two men started with Abbe suggesting that the lens elements should already be tested during the work process with the measuring instruments he had developed for the purpose. He recommended that the optical and mechanical work processes should be separated in microscope construction.
At the end of the 1860s, Abbe turned his attention to the calculation of optical systems. It took him five years to prove that increasing the size of the aperture perfects the function of the microscope. The physicist saw that the wave nature of light sets natural limits to the recognition of fine structures which are smaller than half the wavelength of light. During these examinations, Abbe found the formula for the sine condition as a criterion for sharp imaging in the area around the optical axis. The extremely complex theoretical work and practical experiments brought the Zeiss Workshop to the limits of its capabilities.
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