Scientific lens design (Abbe, Zeiss and Schott)
1872–1886, Jena
In Jena, Ernst Abbe’s optical theory, Carl Zeiss’s workshop and Otto Schott’s new glasses turned lens making from trial and error into calculated design.
How it began
Carl Zeiss made microscopes in Jena from 1846, but good lenses still came from trial and error. In 1866 he hired the young physicist Ernst Abbe to put the work on a scientific basis. Abbe needed glasses that did not exist, and from 1879 the chemist Otto Schott made them; their glassworks opened in 1884.
How it works
Abbe showed that the wave nature of light limits how much detail a lens can resolve, and worked out how to calculate designs in advance. Schott’s barium and other glasses gave designers new combinations of refractive index and colour spread, which let them cancel aberrations that older glass could not.
Why it mattered
The method spread from microscopes to camera lenses. Zeiss lenses such as the Protar (1890) and the tessar (1902), and the whole German optical industry, rested on it. Lens design became a profession.
Limits and what replaced it
Calculations by hand took months. Mechanical calculators, then computers from the 1950s, made far more complex designs possible; the method is the same.
Today
Lenses are still designed from theory and made from catalogued glasses; Zeiss and Schott both remain in business.