Life
In 1847 Carl Zeiss started making microscopes full-time. His first innovation was simpler single-lens microscopes intended for dissecting work. He sold 23 of them during the first year of production. Zeiss decided he needed a new challenge, so he began making compound microscopes. He created the Stand I which went to market in 1857.
In 1861 he was awarded a gold medal at the Thuringian Industrial Exhibition for his designs. They were considered to be among the best scientific instruments in Germany. By this point, he had about twenty people working for him and an expanding business. In 1866 the Zeiss workshop sold their thousandth microscope.
In 1872, he joined up with physicist Ernst Abbe. Their combined efforts lead to the discovery of the Abbe sine condition. Theoretically, the Abbe sine condition could greatly improve how well lenses could be made. However, a form of glass strong enough to fully test the theory did not exist at the time. Abbe then met Otto Schott, a thirty-year-old glass chemist who had just received his doctorate. They collaborated and in 1886, produced a new type of glass that could fully use the Abbe sine condition. This new type of glass made possible a new class of microscope objective, the apochromatic (often abbreviated 'apo'). Zeiss used water immersion to form a compensating eyepiece which produced images with little or no color distortion.
Zeiss's son had entered the business with him, but retired soon after Zeiss's death of natural causes on 3 December 1888. The business was incorporated as the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung in 1889. It gained an international reputation for the manufacture of optical instruments of all kinds, and remains in business to this day, where the company might be most known for its broad selection of optical scopes and binoculars.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“In this lucid and flexible pattern only one thing remained always stationary, but this fallacy went unnoticed by Martha. The blind spot was the victim. The victim showed no signs of life before being deprived of it. If anything, the corpse which had to be moved and handled before burial seemed more active than its biological predecessor.”
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“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)