A Faster Lens to Freeze Motion

A cutaway diagram of Voigtlander's camera shows the Petzval lens (a) with its two groups of lens elements, each having. a convex and concave part. The photographer looked through a peephole (b) and focused by means of a ground-glass screen (c). Then he unscrewed the rear section of the camera and substituted a round sensitized plate (d) for the screen. 

The first cameras made do with the crude lenses inherited from the camera obscura-lenses that were adequate for the sensitive human eye but too lim­ited in light-gathering power to make photographs easily. Before photogra­phers could take clear pictures of ev­eryday scenes, they needed a lens mathematically designed for use in a camera. In January 1841 a maker of telescopes and other optical equipment, Voigtlander and Son, unveiled a camera-no modified camera obscura but a true photographic instrument -that was fitted with a lens designed by Josef Max Petzval, a 33-year-old professor of mathematics at the Univer­sity of Vienna. The camera, which un­derstandably turned out looking like a small telescope, used circular plates to record the full image projected by the lens. But it was the lens that mattered. It gathered 16 times more light than other types and made possible the re­cording of poorly lighted scenes and moving crowds capturing these difficult shots with remarkable clarity but with strange tints that were due not to the lens but to the crude chemicals then in use. 

The camera, a finely made instrument, was sold disassembled in an elegant wooden case. 

Viennese instrument maker Peter von Voigtlander, alert to photographers' demands for a fast lens and efficient camera, snapped up the new lens design brought to him by a mathematics professor, Josef Max Petzval. Voigtlander's technicians built the lens from Petzval's calculations and planned a camera especially for it.