How it began
Joseph Petzval, a mathematics professor in Vienna, developed the lens in 1840 with technical advice from Peter Wilhelm Friedrich von Voigtlander. Archduke Louis of Austria put eight artillery gunners and three corporals at his disposal to carry out the calculations. The Voigtlander company built the first lens in 1840 on Petzval's behalf.
Before it existed
Optics had until then been ground and polished according to experience. The lens of Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype camera of 1839 gathered little light, so exposures were long. The Smithsonian describes Petzval's design as twenty times faster than earlier daguerreotype lenses.
How it works
The lens consists of two doublets with an aperture stop between them. The front doublet corrects spherical aberration but introduces coma, which the second doublet corrects. It reached an aperture of f/3.6 and had 22 times the light-gathering capacity of Daguerre's lens. The field of view is limited to about 30 degrees, and sharpness drops at the edges.
How it spread
Voigtlander sold the lens worldwide and had made 60,000 by 1862. By 1845 the collaboration between Petzval and Voigtlander was mired in disputes, and Voigtlander moved production outside Austria, beyond the reach of Petzval's patent. Carl Dietzler in Vienna also produced the lens later.
What changed first
The lens drew the attention of the scientific world as the first mathematically calculated precision objective in the history of photography. Under favorable conditions it allowed portraits with exposure times of less than a minute. The loss of sharpness at the edges was later corrected in Hugo Adolph Steinheil's Aplanat lens.
Where it stands today
Petzval designs were used in the cameras of the US CORONA satellite program between 1962 and 1972, and Petzval telescopes are widely used in astrophotography. In 2013 Lomography ran a crowdfunding campaign to produce a new Petzval lens for film and digital cameras, and rehoused versions were used on the 2023 film Poor Things.
