Tales of Glass and Ceramics, Pt. 1

Japan Exposures... Tales of Glass and Ceramics, Pt. 1. "...When the E. Leitz Company introduced the first 35mm camera in 1925, it was an instant world-wide sensation. The Leitz Camera — Leica –, paved the way for a completely new way of creating photographs. At that time the Carl Zeiss Foundation of Jena, Germany, was already a well-established company with almost 50 years of optical history behind it. It had begun producing camera lenses in 1890, but was not able to respond to the success of the Leica by offering a comparable product. To do so, Zeiss acquired four small camera manufacturers and merged them into the Zeiss Ikon AG, based in Dresden and Stuttgart. Even so, it took several more years to develop and produce a match for the meanwhile dominant Leica camera. This was the Contax, Zeiss Ikon’s top of the line rangefinder camera, presented in 1932."