Carl Zeiss was born on this day in 1816. His upwardly mobile family sent him to college at the University of Jena, in what’s now Germany. He became a precision machinist and worked on all sorts of projects, including a few instruments for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Zeiss ended up working with the talented botanist Matthias Jacob Schleiden, who stressed the importance of high-quality microscopes in experimentation.
He opened his first workshop in Jena in 1846 to work on precision mechanics and optics. The company took off immediately, selling its thousandth microscope in 1861. Zeiss then hired physicist Ernst Abbe, which allowed for scientific research to inform the creation of lenses instead of trial and error.
Zeiss died in 1888; his company remains a mainstay brand in photography, glasses lenses, and research and development around optics more generally.
You can read more about him on the Zeiss corporate website.
