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    A look at an amazing old lens by Herb Parker

As a long time Voigtländer collector I have always been fascinated by the wonderful achievement of Professor Dr. Joseph Petzval and Peter Friedrich Wilhelm Voigtländer, who designed and produced the world’s first mathematically computed photographic lens way back in 1840, with the then sensational relative aperture of 1:3.7, some 16 times faster than any other photographic lens before. The lens was fitted to the equally legendary Voigtländer 1840 Metallkamera. Regular readers will know that story from Brian Hatfield’s wonderful article in Back Focus No. 62 (August 2006).

Unfortunately only around 600 Metallkameras were made, and of those only four are definitely known to have survived. Voigtländer has made several series of genuine replicas of the famous camera, always in small runs on special occasions in the company history. But it would be almost impossible to find one, and even if I could it would be well beyond my budget. But with a bit of luck I thought I might at least find an early Voigtländer brass lens, which seemed a bit more realistic. And then Brian mentioned that he was selling some of his Voigtländer gear. Did he have any spare brass lenses? He sure did, sent me a list, and after a bit of friendly negotiation I became the proud owner of an 1866 Petzval brass lens, Serial No. 12317, optically excellent and cosmetically pretty good for its age. Of course I had a good look at it, polished it and duly admired it. It so happens that 1866 is the year in which PWF von Voigtländer was raised to the hereditary Austrian nobility (which explains the “von” before his name). According to reliable sources PWF personally inspected every lens before it left the works (if 12317 lenses were made in 26 years that averages less than 500 a year or 10 per week, so such personal attention was then entirely feasible). It seems almost certain therefore that the great man personally checked this particular lens, and to me at least that makes it just that little bit more special.

1866 to most of us is just a number. OK, it was 140 odd years ago, but 1866 was in fact a turning point in European history. Britain, France and Belgium led the world in science and technology. Germany and Italy were still conglomerates of individual states, but in 1866 the Seven Weeks War between Austria and Prussia, won by the latter, set the stage for later German unification under the leadership of Prussia. 1866 also saw a war between parts of what is now Italy and Austria. Revolution and change were everywhere. Bismarck in Prussia and Garibaldi in Italy were working hard to bring about German and Italian unification respectively. In Vienna a young Franz Josef I tried to rule over the diversified nations of Austria Hungary. In London Queen Victoria, still in mourning over the death of her beloved Albert, ruled through Parliament over the Empire on which the sun never set. In Paris Napoleon III was trying to revive the glories of the Napoleonic era. In Bavaria “mad” King Ludwig II was building fairytale castles, while his protégée Richard Wagner was writing “Tristan und Isolde”, and the future Kaiser Wilhelm II was just seven years old. In Istanbul a Sultan still ruled over a crumbling Ottoman Empire, and a young USA was recovering from the Civil War. Japan had just opened her doors to the rest of the world, and a humiliated China was yielding concessions to various European powers, following her defeat in the “Second Opium War” a few years earlier. And in Australia the Gold Rush was in full swing.           

The population of Europe was increasing rapidly, mainly due to declining infant mortality and better health care. Large numbers of people were moving from the land into towns and cities in search of employment, and urbanism, as we know it was just beginning. It was the age of steam. The advent of steam ships gave a huge impetus to international trade, but sailing ships still ruled the seas and graceful giant clippers still carried Australian wool to English mills. The Suez Canal was under construction and railways were spreading through Europe, but local transport was still by horse and cart. The Industrial revolution was under way. Men, women and children worked long hours in smoke belching factories, often under appalling conditions. Slavery was by now largely illegal, but still existed. Great advances were being made in the sciences, but gas lighting was still the norm, the incandescent light globe and alternating current had not been invented, and the world’s first power station was still sixteen years in the future. The telegraph was very new, and radio still some 30 years away. Very few homes had bathrooms but there were public baths. Public sanitation was still primitive but improving. Personal hygiene and dental health were generally poor (poor teeth is one reason why people did not smile in early photographs). Lister was trying to convince surgeons of the need for cleanliness, and typhoid and cholera were still major killers in Europe. Trade unionism was in its infancy, and Karl Marx was writing “Das Kapital”. That is the age in which this lens was made, in technology terms a long, long time ago.                

But back to the lens itself, which differs from the original 1840 lens in that it is somewhat larger and has a slot for Waterhouse stops. It is large (150 mm long by 82 mm diameter) and heavy (just over 1 Kg), and inscribed “Voigtländer & Sohn in Wien und Braunschweig”. Like the original 1840 lens it has rack and pinion focusing. I determined the focal length by focusing the rays of the sun through the lens, taking the Waterhouse stops slot as the optical centre of the lens. I came up with 174 mm focal length (which agrees with one of the published focal lengths in the literature), against 150 mm for the original 1840 lens. Maximum relative aperture is about the same (1:3.9 by my measurements and calculation).
But just how good were those very early lenses really? The original Petzval lens reputedly had excellent central sharpness, but with noticeable softening away from the centre, which gave a pleasing effect for portraits, for which of course the lens was intended. The lens was not corrected for astigmatism. Of course there was no colour film in those days, but it seems to have been well corrected for chromatic aberration.

I decided that the only way to find out how well the lens performed was to try and use it. But how? To start with I made a Waterhouse stop out of black cardboard, so I could stop the lens down to F11 as a fairly typical working aperture. The only way I could think of to try it was on one of my trusty Spotmatics. This particular lens has one flat side on its circular mount, so I placed the lens on a high table (actually a projector stand) flat side down, and raised the front slightly (with a couple of paddlepop sticks) so that it was horizontal. I then made a tube out of black cardboard to fit snugly over the rear of the lens barrel, put a 30 mm extension tube on my Spotmatic, and added a doughnut shaped black cardboard ring to fit snugly over the extension tube and inside the cardboard tube, to keep out as much stray light as I could. Finally I placed the camera on a tripod and located it behind the brass lens, and lined everything up to a common optical axis.
Since this lens was originally designed as a portrait lens that seemed to be the obvious way to try it. So I loaded my usual Fuji Superia 100 ISO film in the camera, and my wife Rosetta kindly consented to act as my model. I turned the rack and pinion focusing on the lens to about its midpoint, moved the lens back and forth by hand until it was approximately in focus, checked again that everything was lined up just right, and then did my critical focusing with the rack and pinion on the lens itself. I then took four shots at full aperture (F 3.9) and another four at F11. With the setup I had it was not easy to move the camera to follow the subject, so I included more image than I normally would, on the basis that I could crop later, which is why each of the images shown here was enlarged from only about a quarter of a 35 mm negative.   

When the film came back I was very pleasantly surprised at just how good the images were. Certainly by using the lens on a 35 mm camera I was only using the centre of the image, but even so the images were sharp, and colour rendition excellent with no sign of colour fringing that I could pick. I then scanned the negatives as B&W negatives and printed them, with no manipulation of the image other than cropping and increasing brightness. The result is what you see below. I also enlarged one of the images to A4 size, and it was still acceptably sharp, even though it was enlarged almost twenty times. If we assume that the lens was originally intended for a half plate camera that is equivalent to blowing up a half plate negative to about 4 metres wide.

I don’t know about other readers, but I think that the old lens performs remarkably well, even by today’s standards (my model was not so sure – to please women one needs a lens which doesn’t resolve wrinkles).

Is it any wonder that PWF von Voigtländer and Petzval were both so highly acclaimed in their day for their lenses? Not only was the original 1840 Petzval lens a revolutionary breakthrough in its day, but for more than a century after that historic achievement Voigtländer went on to make a range of lenses which rank among the finest ever made,

including such famous names as Collinear, Euryscope, Heliar, Ultron, Nokton, Apo Lanthar and Septon, many of which are still in use. But it all started with Professor Dr. Joseph Petzval’s and PWF Voigtländer’s famous lens, and by the way I am told that Petzval’s original design is still used to this day for projection lenses in cinemas.

 Voigtländer lens 12317 now occupies a prominent spot on my collector’s shelves, and I plan to try it with slide film next.