The company was then and still remains a leader in the field of optical manufacturing. Photography buffs will recognize the name Zeiss from the lenses it makes, which reliable sources tell me are of very high quality. But the company was founded by a man who knew nothing, at the time, of photography. Carl Zeiss was born in 1816 in Weimar. He moved to Jena in 1834 to apprentice with a fine machinist called Friedrich Körner, a craftsman at the university who made instruments for Goethe. There, under very highbrow auspices, Zeiss studied the manufacture of experimental scientific tools. After some years traveling and adventuring through the engineering scene of midcentury Germany, Zeiss returned to Jena to found a machinist’s atelier in 1846.

Engraving of Carl Zeiss, as published in Felix Auerbach’s book “Das Zeisswerk und die Carl-Zeiss-Stifftung” in Jena, 1907. Public domain — 1923.

Zeiss started out making the kind of apparatus that scientists need, like loupes (a kind of early magnifying device) and thermometers, eyeglasses, telescopes. In 1857, his workshop produced the first compound microscope, meaning that the instrument used an eyepiece and an objective. The objective produces the base magnification, delivering an image of the thing under the microscope to the eyepiece. Then the eyepiece magnifies that image of the thing. This is what makes a microscope a microscope, and Zeiss did it first.

Carl Zeiss in part produced such fine microscopes because he was an obsessive. When an apprentice made a microscope that he found unsatisfactory, Zeiss would place the instrument on an anvil and hammer it into pieces. But his methods were effective, and by the time Zeiss died, in 1888, his company was working with glass chemists to produce new types of optical glass. Their great breakthrough was in what they called the “apochromat,” a new kind of objective that greatly improved the resolving power of the microscope and made it crucially useful to researchers observing extremely tiny things like bacteria.

The Zeiss optical works continued to break ground in the 20th century. The things it produced have beautiful names: The LeChatelier-style metallograph with infinity-corrected optics. Parocalizing objectives. Prototype phase contrast microscopes. (These were used to film the first-ever time-lapse recording of cells dividing.) Advances in Nomarski interference contrast microscopy.

The photo-optics sector of Carl Zeiss was founded in 1890, and in 1902, the company launched its Tessar universal camera lens. During World War I, the optical works began producing military materials, but after the Treaty of Versailles limited armaments engineering in Germany, the company found itself focusing on metrology — the science of exact measurement. In the Nazi era, however, Zeiss returned to producing scopes, gun sights, periscopes, and weapons for the German military. See, for example, these WWII-era Kriegsmarine Zeiss binoculars:

When that war ended with Germany’s surrender, the company split. In punishment for producing German armaments, the U.S. forces occupying Thuringia (the province containing Jena) deported 84 Zeiss personnel to the West, where they formed a new company in 1946 called Optische Werke Oberkochen, and later ZEISS. Meanwhile, the Zeiss that remained in Jena was now under USSR occupation. Operation Osoaviakhim was the USSR’s plan, executed in October 1946, to recruit leading scientists at gunpoint from Soviet-occupied Germany to Russia. One German engineer remembered later that he was woken at 3 a.m. by Russians saying, “Get up! You are being mobilized to work in Russia,” while pointing machine guns at him. By the time they were done with the Zeiss factory, there were only about 600 machines left of the original 10,000. Dismantled and moved far away, the seized Zeiss factory became the Kiev camera works. Deportation split the company in two directions.

There were now two Carl Zeisses. The two enterprises labeled their products differently when they reached each other’s markets. The Western items were sold as Opton in the East and the Eastern products as Zeiss Jena.

The fall of the Berlin Wall changed everything again. Two years after reunification, the two companies approached each other, but tentatively. The people at work in the two Zeisses were deeply hostile to one another throughout their long breach, so lawyers initiated contact. In 1990, individuals from each faction met each other privately and began talks. As the East’s Dr. Klaus-Dieter Gattnar describes his meeting with the West’s CEO, Dr. Horst Skoludek, the pair “literally went into an enclave until we were able to send up white smoke.”

On the Carl Zeiss AG website, several employees recount their memories of 1989. Anita Tobisch, of the personnel department in the East German Zeiss, recalls her great joy at the fall of the wall, but then fear: “What would happen at Carl Zeiss in Jena? Who would keep their jobs?” Some people did lose their jobs and became “almost hostile” to their former colleagues. “That was very disappointing,” Tobisch remembers. “I had always thought that the East and West would integrate much more quickly, but that will apparently take a while after all.”