Taylor

Taylor — history

Taylor Hobson's photographic story begins in Leicester in 1886, when the brothers William and Thomas Smithies Taylor formed T. S. and W. Taylor to make lenses and precision optical equipment. William Smithies Hobson joined the next year and became the commercial force in the partnership. The firm soon took the name Taylor, Taylor & Hobson, a useful reminder that the familiar Cooke engraving did not originally name the factory. The Taylors and Hobson built the lenses in Leicester; Cooke entered the story through a design and a licensing agreement.

Harold Dennis Taylor, optical manager at the telescope maker T. Cooke & Sons of York, patented his three-element anastigmat in 1893. His employer did not want to manufacture a photographic lens, so he approached the Leicester firm. Taylor, Taylor & Hobson agreed to make it, while the licensing arrangement kept the Cooke name on the finished product. The first examples followed in 1894. This distinction is central to the history: Cooke was a celebrated product name tied to T. Cooke & Sons, but the workshop knowledge, manufacturing discipline, and later optical designs belonged to Taylor, Taylor & Hobson.

The Cooke Triplet made an intricate problem look simple. A positive front element, a negative middle element, and a positive rear element could be balanced to control the major aberrations while leaving only six air-to-glass surfaces. That brought good correction, useful speed, relatively light transmission losses, and a compact barrel. Taylor, Taylor & Hobson catalogs turned the principle into a remarkably varied trade. By 1906 the company offered Series II portrait lenses, Series III general-purpose anastigmats, faster Series IV lenses, and Series V process optics in focal lengths suited to hand cameras, studio plates, commercial copying, and large process cameras.

These early catalogs also show that a lens was more than its glass formula. Cooke cells could be supplied in barrels, sunk mounts, shutters, or focusing mounts, and some were adjusted to fit a customer's Kodak or another camera. Extension elements altered focal length by replacing a front or rear component, but they did not turn every Cooke barrel into a universally interchangeable system. The company repeatedly warned that cell spacing and shutter fitting had to be set at the factory. Gauge bars could be supplied to establish the correct film-to-flange distance, and paired lenses could be adjusted to identical focus for stereoscopic work. These practical services reveal a workshop selling calibrated optical assemblies rather than loose glass. For collectors today, identical series names can therefore hide different interfaces, focal rosters, and generations, while an innocent-looking shutter replacement may change the spacing on which the original correction depended.

Portraiture became one of the most inventive branches. Series II, IIa, IIb, IId, IIe, VI, and VIa designs combined anastigmatic correction with controlled diffusion. Some early barrels changed the spacing of an element; later photographers turned a conspicuous finger grip, giving rise to the nickname “Knuckler.” The mechanism could move from crisp definition to a repeatable softness without resorting to gauze or an improvised screen. Shorter Series II lenses were also sold for press and reflex cameras, so the word portrait on one engraving does not safely identify every fast Cooke triplet.

The First World War pushed the company into aerial and military optics. The four-element Aviar, associated with Arthur Warmisham, answered the need for speed, definition, and dependable performance in reconnaissance. After the war it moved into civilian catalogs for press, landscape, architectural, and aerial work. Cooke telephotos travelled even farther: long-focus examples accompanied Shackleton and Everest expeditions. These uses were not incidental publicity alone. They demonstrated how Leicester's optical and mechanical work could survive temperature, vibration, and field handling far from a studio.

Motion pictures changed the scale of the business. Taylor, Taylor & Hobson offered purpose-built cinematograph lenses before the First World War, then Horace W. Lee developed the Series O Opic, a fast six-element design that opened to f/2. As sound production replaced noisy arc lighting with dimmer lamps and standardized filming at twenty-four frames per second, the Opic evolved into the Speed Panchro. By 1930 the line reached from wide 24mm optics to 108mm, and Hollywood studios adopted it widely. Lee's inverse-telephoto work also created the extra back-focus needed by Technicolor's beam-splitting camera.

Corporate names changed while the lenses kept coming. The company shortened its name to Taylor Hobson around 1924. Bell & Howell took control in 1930, giving the Leicester maker a powerful route into American motion-picture production, and the Rank Organisation acquired it in the mid-1940s. Coating entered regular lens production in 1947. Gordon Cook, who joined in 1948, redesigned Speed Panchros for larger image areas and newer glasses, created Kinetals for professional 16mm work, Telepanchros for distant close-ups, and a succession of zoom lenses.

Zoom design became a second great cine tradition. Arthur Warmisham's 40-120mm Cooke Varo of 1932 was an early commercial variable-focus lens, though it required a cradle and careful alignment. Gordon Cook's television Varotals of the 1950s and 1960s solved the demanding mechanics of live broadcast, where a lens had to hold focus while moving rapidly through a long range. The 1971 20-100mm Varotal brought a sealed front section and stable professional performance to 35mm cinema. Varokinetal, Super Cine Varotal, Varopanchro, and later wide-angle zooms extended the idea across 16mm, Super 16, and 35mm production.

Lensmaking also helped create another Taylor Hobson business. The precision needed to grind and verify optical surfaces encouraged William Taylor and his colleagues to develop instruments for measuring texture and roundness. Talysurf and Talyrond instruments grew into a major metrology line after the Second World War. Photography and measurement shared the same habit of making tolerances visible, but the two activities eventually followed different corporate paths. Taylor Hobson remained a metrology manufacturer and became part of AMETEK in 2004.

The lens branch took its own path in 1998. Les Zellan led a buyout of the optical division and established Cooke Optics Limited as an independent Leicester manufacturer. The legal company was new, but it retained people, machinery, designs, and a manufacturing tradition from the Taylor Hobson lens operation. Companies House records Cooke Optics as active, and the company continues to make cinematography lenses at its Leicester factory. This continuity belongs to the lensmaking branch, while the modern Taylor Hobson name belongs to AMETEK's precision-metrology business.

Serial numbers help only when their limits are respected. Cooke states that the production books for lenses made before 1947 no longer survive. Its Compendium therefore publishes observed serials and engravings as comparison points, not a complete decoder. Later examples can sometimes be linked to surviving delivery information, but a lens serial dates the engraved optical unit, not the camera, shutter, sale, or later recoating. Wartime National Optical Company production and military markings may also follow separate sequences.

From an 1886 Leicester workshop came the Cooke Triplet, Aviar reconnaissance lenses, portrait “Knucklers,” Speed Panchros, Kinetals, and Varotal zooms. The legal and commercial structure shifted from Taylor, Taylor & Hobson to Taylor Hobson, through Bell & Howell and Rank, and finally into separate metrology and Cooke lens companies. The enduring thread has been precision lensmaking: a tradition that shaped still photography, reconnaissance, Technicolor, documentary film, studio cinema, and live television, and that remains meaningful wherever photographers and filmmakers care about how glass turns light into an image.