From the City of Optics…
Back in 1849, a mechanic and amateur mathematician Carl Kellner established a small optical company in the German town of Wetzlar to make, firstly, telescopes and, later, microscopes. Known as the ‘City of Optics’, Wetzlar is in the German state of Hesse and about an hour’s drive north of Frankfurt.
In 1865, the company hired a talented optical engineer called Ernst Leitz, who impressed Kellner enough to be quickly made a partner. Just four years later, in 1869, he took over the whole operation, renamed Ernst Leitz Optische Werke. Leitz was just 27, yet his entrepreneurial prowess saw the business expand rapidly, and this continued under his son, Ernst Leitz II, who famously committed the company to building Oskar Barnack’s revolutionary compact camera (pictured). It was Barnack (above) who originally came up with the idea of using 35mm cinema film as a standard for still photography, doubling the single-frame format from 18×24 mm to 24×36 mm. Unfortunately, Leitz senior never saw the prototype of the compact camera reach the production stage, as he died in 1920.
Oskar Barnack at his desk at the Leitz Company, 1933.
As an interesting aside, during the 1930s and 1940s, Ernst Leitz II and his daughter, Dr. Elsie Kuehn-Leitz, both Protestant Christians, arranged for hundreds of Jewish employees and their families to flee Germany and escape the Holocaust.
The company’s facility in the centre of Wetzlar continued to expand, but eventually it was decided to move the camera business to the nearby town of Solms, where it relocated in 1986. In the meantime, what had become the Leica Group subsequently split into three independents: Leica Camera AG (1996), Leica Microsystems and Leica Geosystems (1998). The latter two still operate from separate premises in the centre of Wetzlar, and Leica Camera has also since returned to its home town, in a new business centre on the outskirts called Leitz Park. There is also a Leica Biosystems. While the companies share the Leica name, they are not linked and the red circle logo with white lettering is Leica Camera’s distinctive version of the logo; the others use red lettering on white background.