Leica (Ernst Leitz Wetzlar)

Leica’s history starts with the Optical Institute founded in Wetzlar in 1849. Ernst Leitz took it over in 1869 and built microscopes and scientific optics. In about 1913 one of his engineers, Oskar Barnack, built a small camera for short ends of 35mm cine film. Leitz sold it from 1925 as the Leica: Leitz Camera.

The Leica I and its successors established the 35mm still format, and the Leica M3 (1954) is often called the finest mechanical rangefinder ever made. Leica’s small, quiet cameras were the tools of a generation of photojournalists and street photographers.