Voigtländer: the family name behind generations of cameras and lenses

The Voigtländer name is one of the oldest in optics and photography. It all began back in 1756 when Johann Christoph Voigtländer established a business in the Austrian capital Vienna, to make precision instruments such as compasses and sundials.

The son of a carpenter, Johann Christoph was born in the eastern German city of Leipzig in 1732. His engineering skills earned him recognition from Austria’s Empress Maria Therese, enabling him to operate under royal decree and hence largely without any competition.

After Johann Christoph’s death in 1797, his youngest son Johann Friedrich (1778-1857) took the opportunity to tour the leading optical workshops in Germany and England, gathering ideas for new products and acquiring new skills.

In 1808, he established Friedrich Voigtländer, Optik & Mekanik, which made optical products – initially opera glasses and the lenses for spectacles and monocles – proving to be a very successful enterprise.

In 1837, Johann Friedrich handed the business on to his son, Peter Wilhelm Friedrich Ritter von Voigtländer (1812-1878), who moved the company’s optical expertise into making binoculars, field glasses and telescopes.

The third-generation Voigtländer was also keen to become involved in the new medium of photography which, in the early 1840s, was rapidly growing in popularity.

Subsequently, he collaborated with the Hungarian mathematician Josef Petzval to produce the world’s first “computer-designed” lens (meaning an optical design based on mathematical principles).

Petzval’s 4-element 147mm portrait lens had a maximum aperture of f/3.6, which was incredibly fast for 1840, enabling typical exposure times to be reduced by a factor of 10 to around a couple of minutes (although still a long time for a portrait sitter to keep still).

Voigtländer then devised an equally innovative camera to complement it: the 1841 Ganzmetall Kamera. It was the world’s first all-metal design, made from brass with a tube-like body, and employed a rack-and-pinion focusing mechanism.

It was also one of the very first Daguerreotype cameras outside of the famous Louis’ own constructions. The Daguerreotype process was first demonstrated in 1839, so Voigtländer was very quick off the mark.

Focusing On Optics

In 1849, Voigtländer opened a branch in the northern German town of Braunschweig (near the city of Hannover) – then one of the leading centers of technology in Europe – and subsequently relocated entirely there from Vienna, Austria in 1862.

From around 1850, the emphasis at Friedrich Voigtländer & Sohn switched to exclusively making optical products, including cameras and lenses. The company again earned royal recognition in 1866, with Peter Wilhelm Friedrich receiving the Austrian equivalent of a knighthood, bestowed by the Emperor, Franz Joseph I.

Over the following decades, Voigtländer expanded into one of the world’s major manufacturers of cameras and lenses. The range of products was extensive and included ‘folders’ (or bellows-type designs), rigid-bodied models in many configurations, along with stereo cameras.

The famous Bessa name was first used in 1929 on a 6x9cm format self-erecting ‘folder’ model, which could also take 6x4.5cm frames when a supplied mask was inserted – doubling the number of exposures obtainable from a 120 roll.

Extremely portable, but also very capable with a high-quality lens, the Voigtländer Bessa became immensely popular for applications from portraiture to landscapes. Indeed, its zone focusing had three settings – Landscape, Group and Portrait.

Notably, Voigtländer also maintained metal bodies. In 1935 the Bessa RF was introduced with a couple rangefinder for focusing, a choice of 105mm f/3.5 lenses, and a Compur-Rapid shutter with a top speed of 1/400 sec. The Bessa line continued until 1956 and made Voigtländer one of the world’s leading camera makers.

The first Brilliant series 6x6cm model appeared in 1931. It looked a lot like a twin lens reflex (TLR), but was actually essentially just a box camera, albeit again with a metal body.

From 1937, the Brilliant V6 had a Bakelite body – a material briefly popular with a number of camera makers, including Kodak – and in 1938 the Focusing Brilliant was introduced, which was now a proper TLR with a focusing lens coupled to the main lens via a gear wheel. The previous models all used zone focusing ‘guesstimation’.

Vito, Vitessa, Vitrona

The first Voigtländer compact 35mm camera was launched in 1939 and the Vito – now known as the Vito I – featured a collapsible, side-hinged lens mounted on bellows and with a Compur leaf shutter. The Second World War limited production and the Vito I was subsequently reissued in 1947, now with a Prontor shutter.

The Vito III from 1951 was the first model with an integrated rangefinder-viewfinder and had a drop-bed mechanism for the collapsible lens.

Concurrently, there was a line of rigid-lens Vito 35mm models which ran from 1954 to 1968 and were designated either B or C series (from 1959), with the higher-end versions having a rangefinder and built-in metering (initially selenium cell and then, later, CdS).

Other post-war camera lines were the Vitessa (from 1953), Dynamatic (from 1960) and the Vitrona (1964), which was the world’s first 35mm camera with a built-in electronic flash. It was powered by batteries housed in a pistol grip.

Another notable first came in 1959 with the Voigtländer Zoomar 36-82mm f/2.8 – the first commercially available zoom lens for 35mm still cameras.

It employed a 14-element, 11-group optical design and was initially available in the Voigtländer Bessamatic and Exacta mounts, and later with the M42 screwthread fitting. Voigtländer built around 15,000 Zoomars over a period from 1959 to 1968.

The first Bessamatic 35mm SLR was introduced in 1958 and, like the rival Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex, employed a leaf-type shutter located behind the lens in the camera’s mount.

This was a version of the Deckel DKL bayonet fitting also used by Kodak in its Retina Reflex models (which were also made in Germany) and by Braun in the Paxette Reflexes, but small mounting variations made them largely incompatible with each other.

The first Bessamatics had a coupled selenium cell for metering, which was replaced by a TTL CdS meter in the 1965 CS and Ultramatic CS models. The first Ultramatic model, which was introduced in 1961, had shutter priority autoexposure control and also an instant-return reflex mirror, which was dropped on the CS model due to reliability issues.

However, the Voigtländer Ultramatic CS is an important camera in the history of the 35mm SLR, being one of the earliest models with TTL-metered automatic exposure control and also a full-information viewfinder display.

Changing Fortunes

After being listed as a public company in 1925, the majority of Voigtländer’s shares were acquired by the German company Schering – which sold its shareholding to Carl Zeiss in 1956 along with the Zeiss-Ikon business, with the new operation eventually named Zeiss-Ikon / Voigtländer-Vertriebsgesellschaft.

Production of Zeiss Ikon-Voigtländer cameras continued until the start of the 1970s but, with the highly competitive Japanese brands on the rise, sales were steadily declining and the factory at Braunschweig was forced to close in August 1971.

A year or so later, it was sold to a joint venture of Carl Zeiss, Rollei and the state government of Lower Saxony, and then primarily made lenses for Zeiss Ikon and Rollei cameras.

Rollei – which was also based in Braunschweig – took full control of the Voigtländer operation in 1974 and the marque was then used on a range of derivative 35mm SLRs and compact cameras, which were made in Singapore.

When Voigtländer passed fully into the hands of Rollei-Werke Franke & Heidecke GmbH in 1974, it was more than just the completion of a business transaction. In 1920, a German engineer and inventor named Reinhold Heidecke set up a business in the city of Braunschweig with his business partner, Paul Franke.

This operation had the snappy title of Werkstatt für Feinmechanik und Optik, Franke & Heidecke, and its first product was a stereo camera designed by Heidecke. He’d also been working towards a twin lens reflex (TLR) rollfilm camera which finally came to fruition in 1929 as the first Rolleiflex.

In many versions and variants, the Rolleiflex survived for 70 years – the camera of choice for countless amateurs and professionals. Yet it could so nearly have been a Voigtländer product.

Back in 1905, Heidecke joined Voigtländer to start a new camera design department and was keen to pursue some of his design ideas. In 1909, Paul Franke arrived at Voigtländer to work in the sales office and became interested in Heidecke’s concept for a twin-lens camera – initially devised to work upside-down for photographing over the top of a wartime trench.

However, after a couple of years, Franke left Voigtländer to run a camera store – very successfully, as it happens – and, as hard as he tried, Heidecke couldn’t convince management to pursue his design.

At the end of first World War, Heidecke redesigned his TLR for general photography and re-presented the idea to Voigtländer, who again rejected it – this time because of the cost of the new tooling (a major concern in Germany’s shattered post-war economy).

Heidecke decided to manufacture the camera himself and, after his application for a loan was rejected by the bank, he wrote to Paul Franke requesting his help with funding. Franke invested 75,000 marks of his own money and attracted another 200,000 marks from investors, enabling the Rolleiflex to become a reality.

Neither man was alive to see Rollei acquire Voigtländer – Franke died in 1950, aged only 60, and Heidecke died in 1960 aged 79 – but no doubt they would have seen the irony of it.

Rollei went on to fail financially as well, although the venerable Rolleiflex TLR carried on through various company rescues and restructurings and was still available new up until 2014. If Voigtländer had decided to put some faith in Heidecke’s camera, things might have turned out very differently indeed.

In 1982 – after Rollei suffered the first of many financial failures that dogged its last 25 years – the Voigtländer brand disappeared and wasn’t revived until 1997, when it was acquired by Ringfoto GmbH and licensed to the highly prolific Japanese camera-maker Cosina.

Cosina also revived the Bessa name with a series of 35mm rangefinder cameras, firstly with the Leica L39 screw-thread mount and then with the M bayonet. Affordable, but well-made, the Cosina-made Voigtländer Bessa bodies remained in production until 2015.

The company’s Voigtländer-badged L39 and M-mount lenses – considered by some to rival Leica’s – remain in production today along with models for a range of mirrorless mounts, including Nikon Z, Canon RF, Fujifilm X, Sony FE and Micro Four Thirds.

Thus, one of the great names in photography lives on – albeit a long way from its German roots, but still with a nod to the brand’s heritage of precision mechanical engineering and exceptional optical quality.

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