When Japanese camera designer Yoshihisa Maitani was still a student, he designed and patented his first camera. Olympus was looking for talent and, when its head designer came across the patent in 1956, he insisted the young Maitani work for them.
Years later, Maitani told his version of the story. "In those days, a student who refused to work for the first company to offer him a position was regarded as a disgrace to his university. I had received a job offer from an automobile manufacturer, but I pretended that I hadn’t and went to work for Olympus, instead."
Upon starting at Olympus, he was sent to the factory for practical training, where he was rotated through different departments every six months. After two years of this front-line training, he returned to the design department and was given a deceptively simple task: try designing something.
Believing that the lens is the soul of the camera, he asked his lens designers to make a lens as good the lens on his Leica IIIF without any concern for cost. They did, but it consumed his entire budget!
Eventually he came up with a design both he and his managers thought would sell and, in 1959, the Olympus PEN was born.
The PEN was Olympus' first and best-known half-frame camera and became a huge market success. Gifted with an excellent lens, robust construction and low cost, over 17 million PEN series cameras were produced during the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1963, Maitani and his team produced the world’s first half-frame SLR, the PEN F. Beautifully made, with a rotary shutter and a porro-mirror finder, it is absolutely tiny, with lenses to match.
But, unlike the PEN series of point-and-shoot cameras, SLR users demand more. And although the camera was wonderful and the lenses superb, it proved very difficult to get a decent 11x14-inch print from the very small negative. Your scribe purchased a PEN F but sold it soon after for that very reason.
Over a 40-year career, Maitani and his teams went on to produce the legendary Trip 35, the Olympus XA and Stylus series of rangefinder cameras, along with the OM series of 35mm SLRs.
His legacy was detailed in a handwritten document that he wrote to himself. In his notebook, Maitani set out a philosophy of compactness, light weight and "ultimate reliability" for Olympus cameras. It is a direction that both Olympus and its successor, OM System, have followed ever since.
Find out more about photography's past in David Young's book, A Brief History of Photography.
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Take a look at the best film cameras you can buy today – or read other articles in David Young's Classic Cameras series. You should also check out our reviews of the PEN's descendents, the Olympus PEN F and Olympus PEN E-P7, and see the best Olympus and OM System cameras available today.
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