Bausch

Bausch — history

Bausch & Lomb began in Rochester in 1853, small enough for a sixty-dollar loan to matter. John Jacob Bausch, a German immigrant trained in optical work, opened the shop; Henry Lomb, another immigrant, supplied the loan and soon the partnership. At first they sold imported spectacles and optical goods. The decisive early product was not a camera lens but a material. When wartime shortages made imported horn scarce, Bausch adapted vulcanite hard rubber to eyeglass frames in 1861. That practical response turned a modest workshop into a manufacturer and established a habit that would define the company: solve an optical problem by controlling materials, mechanics, and production together.

The firm moved into microscopes in the mid-1870s and photographic lenses in 1883. That order is revealing. Bausch & Lomb did not enter photography as a wooden-camera maker looking for glass; it came from scientific instruments, where precision, alignment, and repeatability were already everyday demands. Edward Bausch's 1887 patent for a between-the-lens iris diaphragm and shutter expanded the photographic role further. By the end of the decade the Rochester works could supply the image-forming lens and the timing mechanism around it. A circa-1895 folding stereo plate camera in the Science Museum collection shows that the company also sold at least some complete cameras, with paired seven-inch f/8 lenses, a pneumatic shutter, rack focusing, and front movements. Even so, lenses and shutters—not camera bodies—became the durable photographic identity.

The defining business relationship arrived in 1892, when Bausch & Lomb became the American manufacturer for important Carl Zeiss anastigmat designs. Planar, Unar, Tessar, and Protar names entered Rochester catalogs beside the company's own Plastigmat and Universal lines. This was more than a licensing footnote. American photographers could buy advanced corrected optics from a domestic factory, while Bausch & Lomb gained designs and prestige that broadened its catalog rapidly. The original contractual setting changed around the First World War, but the product names did not vanish on a convenient date. Tessars and Protars still appear in the 1928 catalog, so the careful historical wording is that the licensed era began the relationship and later American use must be read edition by edition.

Scale followed. Rudolf Kingslake's Rochester history records company claims that by 1903 it had produced about 500,000 photographic lenses and 550,000 shutters. The 1904 semi-centennial catalog is equally useful because it shows breadth rather than just totals. It offered still-camera anastigmats, convertible Protars, portrait lenses, wide-angle designs, shutters, and accessories, with the factory presenting itself as a complete optical works. The 1920 and 1928 catalogs stretch the picture further. Bausch & Lomb recommended lenses for landscapes, architecture, portraiture, copying, projection, photomicrography, metallurgy, newspaper work, and photoengraving. Photography here was not one consumer market. It was a web of technical practices, each with its own demands for coverage, speed, flatness, working distance, and mechanical fitting.

The 1928 catalog makes the motion-picture branch especially vivid. Its cine Tessar Ic list included 32 mm f/4.5, 50 mm f/3.5, and 75 mm f/3.5 lenses in barrel or focusing mounts. The new 50 mm f/2.7 Ultra Rapid Anastigmat was promoted for dark interiors, motion analysis, and early color photography, where additional speed had immediate practical value. Portrait photographers could choose four f/5.6 Plastigmats from nine to eighteen inches, while process departments could order f/10 Anastigmats from thirteen to twenty-five inches. The names may sound like a collector's taxonomy today, but the catalog organized them by jobs. It expected a buyer to understand the negative size, the camera, and the work before choosing a lens.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Bausch & Lomb optics became increasingly important in cinema and aerial photography. Baltar motion-picture lenses emerged before the better-known Super Baltars, although a complete period Baltar price list remains an important research gap. In aerial work, the Metrogon family served mapping cameras that needed wide coverage with controlled distortion. A 1941 technical article from the company discusses multiple focal lengths and their relationship to large aerial negatives, while a Harvard museum specimen preserves a six-inch, roughly 154.5 mm, f/6.3 Metrogon associated with the K-22 camera. These were calibrated parts of larger imaging systems, not ordinary barrel lenses that could be moved casually from one camera to another.

CinemaScope brought the company into one of postwar cinema's most public technical changes. Bausch & Lomb collaborated with 20th Century-Fox on combination lenses for the wide-screen process introduced commercially in 1953. The Academy's technical awards record later recognized the two organizations for that lens work. The achievement was as much about a working production system as a single piece of glass: taking optics, anamorphic components, alignment, and projection all had to cooperate. That systems experience sits naturally beside the firm's older work in microscopes and aerial cameras, even though the audience encountered it as spectacle rather than instrumentation.

Super Baltars became the most enduring collector name from Bausch & Lomb cinema optics. A 1967 brochure lists eight fixed-focus barrel lenses from 20 mm to nine inches. The shorter members opened to f/2, while the six- and nine-inch lenses were slower. Their barrels were meant to be adapted to production cameras, which is why modern rehousings should never be mistaken for original factory mounts. One member also traveled far beyond a studio. A NASA technical report identifies a 76 mm f/2 Bausch & Lomb Super Baltar in the Ranger imaging system. The familiar three-inch nominal focal class had become part of the machinery used to examine the Moon before crewed landings.

Photography was only one current in a much larger company, and eventually it ceased to be the main one. SofLens contact lenses appeared in 1971, and eye care expanded through contact-lens solutions, pharmaceuticals, and surgical products. Ownership changed dramatically in the twenty-first century. Warburg Pincus completed a take-private acquisition in 2007, and Valeant acquired the business in 2013. Bausch + Lomb returned to public trading in 2022, although Bausch Health remained the controlling shareholder. The current company describes itself as a global eye-health business, not a photographic-lens manufacturer. That distinction keeps present corporate continuity from being used to imply present production of vintage optical families. It also explains why the photographic catalog has a real endpoint even though the corporate name remains familiar. Continuity of place and organization does not mean continuity of product, and a modern trademark should never be read backward as proof that a particular vintage barrel was made in a particular year.

Rochester nevertheless remains more than a name on old brass barrels. The 2025 annual filing records substantial owned office, research, and manufacturing space there, within a company of about 13,000 employees and roughly 400 products. For photo-history enthusiasts, that continuity makes the older lenses easier to place: they came from an industrial culture broad enough to move between spectacles, microscopes, shutters, cinema, aerial mapping, and lunar imaging. The safest way to identify them is equally broad-minded. Read the full engraving, separate optical design names from maker names, record focal length and aperture, and treat mounts and camera packages as their own evidence. A Kodak camera fitted with Bausch & Lomb optics remains a Kodak camera; the lens and shutter tell a parallel supplier story. Bausch & Lomb's photographic legacy is richest when those identities stay connected without being collapsed.