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Contributions to the history of English opticians in the first half of the nineteenth century (with special reference to spectacle history)

1926; IOP Publishing; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1088/1475-4878/28/3/301

1747-3853

Moritz von Rohr,

Historical Philosophy and Science

Although London opticians during the 18th century had carried out really splendid work as craftsmen, they were not very quick at adopting new ideas. This was a great drawback, especially as about 1818 Fraunhofer succeeded in raising the standard of his factory to quite an unrivalled height. Although Fraunhofer's innovations do not seem to have had any direct influence on English opticians, they were acknowledged by English scientists. Strenuous endeavours were made between 1826 and 1829 by Sir John Herschel and Michael Faraday to produce optical glass, and splendid theoretical work was carried out by Airy, Coddington, and Hamilton. London opticians, however, did not derive the same amount of help from such scientific innovations as the Vienna school did from Stampfer and Prechtl, who were then professors at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. There it was possible, from 1826 onwards, to raise the standard of the best craftsmen to a very respectable height, nearly to that of the Benediktbeurn-Munich craftsmen, and the good fortune of securing Petzval's help gave, in 1840, the leading position in the manufacture of photographic lenses of high aperture to the Viennese firm of Voigtländer. The great inventions of stereoscopy and photography presented opticians with quite new problems, and English amateurs were the first to understand photographs as perspectives of the depicted object. At the end of the period discussed in this paper a well directed optical glass factory was established in England.