The First Camera Lens

The first camera lens was produced by French optician and instrument maker Charles Chevalier‘s optical firm. Chevalier produced lenses for photographic pioneers Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre, who both used his lenses for their ground-breaking work in photography.

I researched this story because two of the earliest cameras in my small collection, the Kodak No 2 Folding Autographic Brownie and the Kodak No 2 Folding Pocket Brownie Model B, both used the same design as the very first lens and I wanted to understand its origin.

To tell the story of that first camera lens we need go back to earlier in the nineteenth century. Please note that this is the story of the first lens designed for use with a camera, not the first lens, which was created much earlier. Experiments with lenses go back to the 10th century Arabian scientist Abu Ali Hasan!

Foundations – The Meniscus Lens

Lenses used in the camera’s ancestor, the Camera Obscura, were simple biconvex lenses. This is a glass element that curves outwards on each side, like those in magnifying glasses. In 1812, the eminent English Scientist William Hyde Wollaston found that a meniscus shaped lens was a significant improvement to lens performance.

A meniscus is a curve in the surface of a molecular substance (such as water) when it touches another material. This shape provided a much flatter field and eliminated much of the distortion compared to the simple biconvex lenses.

The First Effective Camera Lens – The Achromatic Meniscus

In 1829, Chevalier created an achromatic version of the meniscus lens – a two-element lens made from crown glass and flint glass which have compensating optical properties. An achromatic lens addresses the problem of achromatic aberration.

Early Photography timeline first camera lens — The Susse Frére Daguerreotype of 1839

An achromatic aberration is one of many possible optical aberrations in lenses. These are performance deviations from a perfect, mathematical model. They are not caused by manufacturing flaws but are inherent in lens design and are due to the properties of light such as diffraction and refraction. Other examples include spherical aberration, astigmatic aberrations and field curvature.

Chevalier’s lens had addressed one of the biggest challenges of early lens design which is reducing achromatic aberration – getting red and blue wavelengths of light to focus on the same plane.

This what an achromatic lens does, and it is necessary because the colours of light with shorter wavelengths, like blue, travel more slowly through most transparent materials than colours with longer wavelengths like red – resulting in different focal lengths – resulting in focusing problems.

George Eastman of Kodak fame said of Chevalier’s lens of 1839 “as he was accustomed to achromatizing all of his lenses, Chevalier naturally thought of achromatizing the Wollaston lens too.” This was unsurprising as Chevalier came from an optical dynasty whose founder (Charles’ grandfather) had invented the achromatic microscope.

Chevalier’s lens also reduced field curvature and produced a much flatter image plane. Field Curvature causes a flat object to appear sharp only in a certain part(s) of the frame, instead of being uniformly sharp across the frame.

An Unfortunate Side Effect

Chevalier’s design however, had an unfortunate side effect – spherical aberration. This means the outer parts of a lens do not bring light rays into the same focus as the central part.

Chevalier had effectively reduced one problem that caused blurring whilst accentuating another! However, while both spherical aberration and field curvature lead to image blur, there are visual differences.

Those differences lie in the distribution of sharpness across the image. Spherical aberration tends to cause a general reduction in sharpness, especially towards the edges, while field curvature results in different parts of the image being in focus at different distances.

Stopping it

There is relatively simple workaround to spherical aberration, which is to put a narrow aperture stop in front of the lens. Whilst significantly reducing the aberration, the stop lets in less light it, making it ‘slower’. F14 was the fastest of the two apertures offered!

The Landscape Lens

A slow lens produced exposure lengths that were rather long for portraits, but Chevalier’s lens was much better suited to landscapes and became known as the “French landscape lens” or “landscape lens”. It sold with almost every early Daguerreotype camera.

The Portrait Lens

Chevalier worked on a faster lens design but it was the Petzval lens that provided the first portrait lens. It was also the first mathematically calculated precision objective in the history of photography. Previously optics had been ground and polished based on experience. The lens was developed by the Hungarian mathematics professor Joseph Petzval in 1840, who had the assistance of a team of artillery gunners and 3 corporals at his disposal. This was one of the few professions in which mathematical calculations were made. The lens was extremely fast, offering an f3.6 aperture and was produced by the Voigtländer company.

Kodak Autographic first camera lens — Kodak No 2 Folding Autographic Brownie

The Legacy of the First Camera Lens Design

The Landscape lens was selected by George Eastman as the optics for the Brownie camera due to its simplicity, and price/performance. A well-corrected design at the Brownie’s f/16 or f/22 or so, was quite sufficient for sharp-looking images for the contact prints of the time.

Accordingly, many of Kodak’s early low cost cameras typically came with either simple meniscus lenses, dual meniscus lenses (the ‘periscopic’ type) or achromatic meniscus lenses.

Some offered a choice a better lenses from third parties, such as Bausch and Lomb’s Rapid Rectilinear. The Kodak No 2 Folding Autographic Brownie shown here offered this as an option. Here are some of the Kodak cameras fitted with these lens types:

The Kodak (periscopic meniscus)
No 1 and No 2 Kodak (periscopic meniscus)
The Brownie (meniscus)
No 1 Brownie (meniscus)
No 2, 2A, 2B, No 2 C Brownie (meniscus)
No 3 Brownie – Meniscus achromatic

Source: Kodak Camera, The First Hundred Years by Brian Coe

Despite an antique design, its low cost and ease of manufacturing kept the meniscus lens going in the the Kodak stable for many years. A late examples is the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash, an all plastic box camera produced between 1950 and 1961, with an f/15 single element meniscus lens. Another is the Brownie Fiesta of 1962-1966 with an f/11 meniscus lens.