Hans Schulz – The father of the VEF Minox lens?

3 days ago

The Minostigmat lens was a revolutionary optical component for the Minox subminiature camera, defying industry giants who deemed it impossible.
Walter Zapp, designer of the Minox, faced rejection from Agfa and Leitz, but Professor Hans R. Schulz, an optics expert in Berlin, calculated the 'impossible' lens.
The Minostigmat is a Cooke triplet design with a fixed f/3.5 aperture, optimized for high resolution on a tiny 8x11 mm film format, enabling sharp enlargements.
Schulz's design overcame severe constraints: no adjustable aperture, extreme miniaturization, and the need to correct five key optical aberrations manually.
Evidence suggests Schulz's connection to Zapp may have been through the Goerz optical company, with calculations possibly routed via its Vienna branch, explaining the 'Vienna' reference.
The lens calculation in the 1930s was a months-long manual process using logarithm tables, requiring about 1,870 hours of work across multiple iterations.
The Minostigmat's success proved the Minox's viability as a professional tool, laying the foundation for the brand's future and influencing later lens designs like the Complan.

Hasty Briefsbeta