Wollensak

Wollensak — history

Wollensak began in Rochester, New York, at the close of the nineteenth century, when that city was becoming one of the world's great centers of photographic and optical manufacture. On July 1, 1899, Stephan Rauber and brothers Andrew and John Wollensak formed the Rauber & Wollensak Optical Company to make photographic shutters. Their first workshop was scarcely grand: a rented patch of an old barn measuring about 250 square feet. Andrew, an experienced machinist who had spent years in Bausch & Lomb's shutter department, reportedly carried finished batches to customers in a market basket. The little firm incorporated in 1900, moved into larger quarters, and in 1902 became the Wollensak Optical Company.

Shutters were the beginning, but lenses quickly became the company's second great craft. John Wollensak organized an optical department in 1902 with three grinding and polishing spindles, one assistant, and the practical knowledge needed to turn raw glass into repeatable photographic tools. The first Wollensak lens was completed that September. Early catalogs show a maker eager to provide the whole front end of a camera: lens cells, iris diaphragms, and shutters sized for everything from hand cameras to studio work. Andrew continued to refine shutter mechanisms, and his substantial 1909 application, patented in 1910, gives a vivid sense of how seriously the company approached precise, adjustable timing.

A decisive expansion came in 1906 with the purchase of Rochester Lens Company. Wollensak acquired the Royal Anastigmat and Royal Portrait designs, which developed into the Velostigmat and Vitax families. The Velostigmat name would span many focal lengths, speeds, and photographic formats, becoming one of the firm's central identities. In 1911 Wollensak also collaborated with photographer H. Oliver Bodine, manufacturing his Pictorial Lens as the Verito. Its intentionally softened rendering answered the needs of pictorial and portrait photographers who wanted atmosphere rather than clinical sharpness. Here was a company comfortable at both ends of photographic taste: correction and definition on one hand, controlled diffusion on the other.

Growth followed the catalog. Wollensak moved through successively larger Rochester premises before opening a dedicated Clinton Avenue factory in 1914. War soon redirected that capacity. During the First World War, the company devoted most of its production to trench periscopes, battery-command telescopes, aerial cameras, and other military optical equipment. A large addition in 1918 doubled the factory's floor space, and employment passed 600 by 1920. This military work widened the company's experience beyond ordinary photography and established a pattern that would recur: when cameras had to operate under unusual speed, distance, or environmental demands, Wollensak's combination of optical and mechanical manufacture was valuable.

The return to peace brought a business shock. Eastman Kodak stopped buying Wollensak's Optimo shutter in 1920 as it pursued greater self-sufficiency. Wollensak responded by diversifying into binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, movie accessories, and other instruments while continuing its lens and shutter lines. In 1925 lensmaking moved to 872 Hudson Avenue, a 100,000-square-foot former hosiery-equipment factory whose broad windows and open floors suited precision production. The catalog of the later 1920s ranged from compact shutters to studio portrait optics. One especially unusual collaboration paired Wollensak with Buffalo photographer Howard D. Beach on a multi-focal lens whose components could be rearranged for different portrait effects.

The Second World War again turned the Rochester works toward military production. Wollensak supplied aerial-camera shutters, binoculars, gunsights, and optical components associated with the Norden bombsight, and it accelerated the high-speed Rapax shutter for armed-forces work. Peace brought one of the company's most memorable changes of name. In 1945 Wollensak invited the public to name its new postwar lens line; the winning suggestion, Raptar, evoked the keen vision of birds of prey. Introduced in 1947, Raptar replaced Velostigmat across much of the catalog. Many familiar designs continued, now with Wollensak's hard anti-reflection treatment, Wocote, which improved transmission and reduced flare at the many air-to-glass surfaces of a photographic lens.

Wollensak's influence was often hidden behind somebody else's badge. Beginning during the 1940s, it supplied Graflex with Optar lenses for Graphic and Graflex cameras. Optar was Graflex's trade identity, while Wollensak manufactured many of the lenses and shared designs with its own Velostigmat and Raptar offerings. That relationship placed Rochester glass on the working press cameras of a generation. Wollensak also made cine lenses for camera manufacturers, projection lenses, enlarging lenses, television optics, and specialized assemblies. A photographer could know the company through a Raptar on a view camera, a Verito in a portrait studio, an Optar on a Speed Graphic, or a Cine Raptar on a movie camera without encountering a single unified system.

High-speed photography showed the company's range particularly well. In 1950 Wollensak acquired rights to the Fastax camera developed by Western Electric and Bell Laboratories, a machine built to slow violent, fleeting events into analyzable motion. Fastax cameras and specially designed optics served scientific laboratories, industry, and military testing; Wollensak cine lenses had already recorded the 1946 Operation Crossroads atomic tests. In 1952 the company introduced the Mirrotel and Fototel, compact long-focus lenses using concentric mirrors rather than an ordinary long barrel of refracting elements. These products belonged to the same engineering culture as the company's shutters: practical solutions for exposures that conventional equipment could not easily make.

Revere Camera Company, one of Wollensak's largest customers, purchased a controlling interest in 1953. The Rochester company initially retained its identity and reached a peak workforce of about 1,200. Revere then used the Wollensak name on premium still, stereo, and movie cameras, usually combining established Revere bodies with upgraded Rochester optics. When 3M acquired Revere in 1960, Wollensak entered a much larger corporate structure. Its optical work still reached remarkable places. Special 25 mm Raptar lenses helped record Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight in 1961, while heavy-duty Alphax shutters served reconnaissance-camera systems. Yet employment and photographic-lens sales declined through the decade, losses grew, and 3M sold the Fastax line in 1968.

An attempt at independence followed in 1969, when new owners formed Wollensak, Inc. They acquired Polan Industries, sought more government optical work, and struggled with debt and late deliveries. In 1971 the company asked the U.S. Tariff Commission for relief from import competition, but the commission found that imports were not the major cause of its injury. Manufacturing left Rochester early in 1972, equipment went to auction, and in October the directors voted to file for bankruptcy. The original operating company closed with debts far exceeding its assets. For collectors, 1972 is therefore the firm boundary between historic Wollensak production and any later use of the name.

The name nevertheless had an afterlife rooted in real objects. Rudolph Novak, a former employee, bought the old Hudson Avenue lens plant in 1973 and acquired the Wollensak name, drawings, and technical information in 1975. He produced lenses as Wollensak Optical, Inc., although the surviving public record does not yet support a confident catalog of that output. Virginville Lens Company, known through Surplus Shed, acquired the building and its contents in 2003, including optical assemblies, equipment, and original drawings, and later registered the trademark. The old factory itself was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and adapted as housing, preserving the shell of a place where generations of Rochester workers turned metal and glass into images.

From a barn workshop in 1899 to the Hudson Avenue factory, Wollensak's enduring thread was the close partnership of lensmaking and precision mechanics. Optimo, Alphax, Betax, and Rapax shutters timed exposures; Velostigmat, Verito, Raptar, and Optar lenses shaped them; Fastax cameras revealed events too rapid for the eye. Those products linked portrait studios, press cameras, home movies, military instruments, laboratories, atomic tests, and early spaceflight. The original company did not survive the upheavals of the 1970s, but its long Rochester identity, its broad manufacturing reach, and the continued survival of its tools and drawings keep the Wollensak name meaningful to photographers, filmmakers, collectors, and optical historians.