Otto Schott, the father of modern glass material science, is actually a junior in front of Zeiss. In the 1840s, Carl Zeiss had become a famous lens maker, and Schott was not born in this period. Schott and Zeiss, who were born in 1851, are a generation away. How they developed from a year-long handover to a business partner in the optical field has to start with the older brother Carl Zeiss.
On September 11, 1816, Carl Zeiss was born in Weimar, not far from Jena. From 1838 to 1845, Zeiss moved to many cities, studying while working, expanding his knowledge of physics, mathematics and machinery. In 1845 he returned to Jena and opened a mechanical workshop to make lenses, which is the predecessor of today’s Zeiss company.
Zeiss did not produce a simple microscope with only a single lens until 1847, but this batch of microscopes did not sell very well. After all, Mr. Zeiss was in his 30s, and he wanted to buy a house, a car, and raise a family. So Zeiss started to move. Brainstorm new products. In 1857, Zeiss developed a new product, the Stand I compound microscope, which was put on the market and won the gold medal at the Thuringia Industrial Exhibition. It is considered the best scientific instrument in Germany. The Stand I model is selling well, and Zeiss has accumulated funds. At this time, Zeiss believes that in order to continue to make breakthroughs in products, it is necessary to start from the basic scientific research of microscopy to eliminate optical defects such as spherical aberration, astigmatism and field curvature.
As early as the 18th century, Chester Moor Hall discovered that the dispersion of flint glass was significantly greater than that of crown glass. Crown glass was used as a convex lens, flint glass as a concave lens, and the two lenses were put together. . Crown and flint glass have different refractive index ratios to the light of different wavelengths (A, B, and C correspond to red, green, and blue respectively). By choosing a proper splicing angle, the red and blue edge dispersion lights of the crown glass can be completely converged again. This kind of compound lens can eliminate chromatic aberration to a large extent. This is the early achromatic lens technology.
By the time the 1870s, Professor Ernst Abbe had been working as a partner with Zeiss to solve the problem of eliminating chromatic aberration and secondary spectrum (apochromat) in the microscopic imaging system. According to Dr. Abbe’s theoretical research, the “secondary spectrum” can be eliminated only when two types of glass with different dispersions but the same relative dispersion ratios (A:B:C) are obtained. During this period, Zeiss was able to produce the best lens system at the time, but the bottleneck to overcome the secondary spectrum problem (apochromat) was that there was no matching optical glass material.
Fortunately, Dr. Abbe knew Schott, yes! It is the father of modern glass material science mentioned above. SCHOTT’s important breakthrough was the first to invent borosilicate glass. It was discovered that after boric acid was introduced into flint glass, the spectrum in the blue-violet region shrank, making the relative dispersion ratio (A:B:C) match the crown glass. This new type of glass The emergence of Pave the way to high-performance microscopes. In 1886, Zeiss released a new series of objective lenses-apochromatic objective (apochromatic objective), laid a reliable foundation for modern high-performance optical imaging, a milestone. This kind of apochromatic objective lens has broad application scenarios in microscopy applications.