Carl Zeiss

Zeiss opened a precision workshop in Jena in 1846 and found that good microscopes were made by trial and error, with many lenses thrown away. In 1866 he hired the physicist Ernst Abbe to work out lens design mathematically, and later the glass chemist Otto Schott to make the special glass the calculations required. Scientists and doctors paid for instruments whose performance was predictable. Abbe went on to put the firm in the hands of a foundation after Zeiss's death.