← all shorts

Person

Carl Zeiss

A portrait of Carl Zeiss, a German instrument maker, dressed in formal attire with a white beard and gray hair, set against a dark background.

German instrument maker, 1816–1888. Trained as a mechanic in Weimar, he opened his Jena workshop in 1846 producing simple microscopes for university botanists. By the 1860s his firm was Europe's leading microscope manufacturer, but Zeiss himself was frustrated by the irreproducibility of craft methods and hired Ernst Abbe to find the underlying physics. He bequeathed his half of the firm to Abbe.

Mentioned in 2 articles