Word: leicas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first production models of the Contaflex were shipped to the U.S.A precision instrument with watchwork-size screws and springs as delicate as a snail's antenna, the 35-mm. Contaflex weighs only 18 oz.. v. 34½-oz. for the Rolleiflex and 29^ oz. for the Leica. It combines the simplicity of operation of the Contax with the easy focusing and accurate view finding of a reflex camera. Price of the new camera with f/2.8 lens...
Moreover, two standout photographers now strongly for realism made their first fame as "pictorial" artists. Alfred Eisenstaedt-the master of the sharp, meaningful portrait and the photographer who stirred U.S. enthusiasm for the Leica and other 35-mm. cameras-contributed an early picture of a ballet rehearsal that owes its mothlike softness and radiance to Degas' influence. Irving Penn's evocation of a midsummer nap harks back to a 15th century Venetian, Carlo Crivelli, who also used sharply focused flies to achieve a greater illusion of depth...
When the Justice Department's Office of Alien Property got ready this year to sell Manhattan's E. Leitz, Inc., the U.S. distributors of Leica cameras, it took pains to see that E. Leitz did not fall back into the hands of its German parent, Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar (TIME, June 16). The Justice Department remembered what had happened after World War I. Then Alfred Traeger, the former manager of the U.S. branch of Leitz (also seized by the Government in World War I), bought the company from the Government's alien property division...
...last week began uncrating $100,000 worth of optical machinery in a rented curling rink. The workers, from Leitz's famed optical works at Wetzlar, began setting up lens-grinders, buffers, drills, in preparation for moving into a new $200,000 factory near by. There they will assemble Leica cameras, photo accessories, special lenses, and aim for a share of rearmament's precision optical orders...
Candid Cameras. Until the Leica (a compound of Leitz and camera) was invented in 1914 by Oskar Barnack, a Leitz employee, the company was one of the world's leading makers of microscopes.* Its founder, Ernst Leitz, a German who had worked with a Swiss watchmaker before settling in Wetzlar, introduced the watch industry's mass-production technique to microscopy. When the Leica was added as a sideline, the tail began wagging the dog. As a worldwide craze for miniature cameras and candid photography grew, so did Leitz. By World War II, the company had 3,000 employees...