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two hours north of Berlin, was seen as a typical Ger-
man enterpriser of the late 19th century. He installed
fi nancial framework, erected production lines, secured
transport and trading facilities, and fi nally, found the
right products to sell. Accoriding to him, anything else
was a matter of expertise for which one could hire
specialists. However, Goerz had the touch of King
Midas, and nearly any optical or photographic good
his eye fell upon often became, under his infl uence, a
necessity for the industry.
Carl Paul Goerz was born in the small town of
Brandenburg north of Berlin where he grew up. Around
1870, after middle school, he became an apprentice in
merchandising with the optical company of Emil Busch
in Rathenow, then one of the best known companies in
this fi eld. During the four years of his apprenticeship
in Rathenow, Goerz learned everything he needed for
setting up his own business. From the mid 1870s to the
mid 1880s Carl Paul Goerz worked throughout Europe,
mainly in Paris, as a sales agent for a number of German
companies including Busch. The latter part of this time,
he held shares of Eugen Kraus’ agency, then well known
for its distribution of optical instruments in astronomy
and industrial use. In 1886 he returned to Berlin and
opened up his fi rst wholesale venue for optical instru-
ments, presumably mostly selling Busch’s products.
When Emil Busch passed away in 1888, Goerz saw his
chance for establishing his own ventures of production
and assembly of pre-fabricated goods.
From the beginning his partnerhsip was with a friend,
the photographer and inventor Ottomar Anschuetz, who
not only provided Goerz with the economic use of his
patent for a focal-plane shutter but with numerous ad-
vices as well for building easy-to-handle and simple-to-
use cameras. In September 1888, Goerz worked with the
Swiss theoretical optician Carl Moser who calculated the
famous ‘Lynkeioskop’ lens shortly before his untimely
death in 1891. He was followed bei Emil von Höegh,
the inventor of the even more successful ‘Dagor’ lens
and ‘Hypergon’ mentioned above. Anschuetz and Moser
/ Höegh each were the fi rst of a long line of inventors,
engineers, and physicists to work for Goerz; some of the
best renowned theoretical opticians in Germany had at
least been involved with this company as an important
part of their career.
Goerz’s cameras and lenses were part of every major
development in photography between the 1890s and
World War I. The miniaturisation of plate and fi lm
formats, from 9 × 12 cm in 1890 to 4.5 × 6 cm in 1908,
was accompanied with both acclaim from photographic
amateurs and fi erce rejection by the critics in the papers.
Easily transportable and designed for hand-held use, fol-
ding cameras were a special item of the Goerz company,
and in 1910 it released the fi rst type of camera with a
lens pre-focused on it. Similar developments were en-
couraged by Goerz in the construction of lenses; from
1890 onwards a-planatic lense like the ’Lynkeioskop’
were severe competitors to Voigtlaender’s, Dallmeyer’s,
and Busch’s similar products. The Daguerreotype lens
was introduced in 1893 and became an instant success:
30,000 units sold in three years, and by 1911 the output
increased to 300.000 pieces. In 1900, the Goerz compa-
ny brought out the Hypergon lens which is sometimes
remembered as one of the most remarkable construc-
tions in photographic history consisting of an a-planatic
lens with a wide angle of 110°, without any distortion
or spherical aberration. At the same time, Goerz found
world-wide acclaim and success for its large scale re-
fl ectors, projection devices, and panoramic binoculars
which were mainly used for military purposes.
The company was open to any invention dealing with
photography. From its earliest days in 1888, it produced
exposure meters. From 1890 onwards, it was the fi rst
supplier of the Anschuetz type focal-plane shutter and,
of course, there was a full production line of cameras
furnished with this device; its brand name was Ango,
made of Anschuetz and Goerz. In 1905 the fi rst colour
slide projector after Adolf Miethe’s three plate system
was built and sold, succeeded by a long line of similar
devices. In 1907, Goerz launched the fi rst industrially
produced yellow glass plate as fi lter for landscape
photography. By 1908 and the start of the company’s
partnership with Joseph Arthur Berson, a long line of
balloon cameras started to be produced, to be followed
by a number of air survey cameras after 1913. And in
1910, Goerz built one of the earliest so-called ‘night
cameras’ with especially designed lenses and shutters
for journalistic uses. Considering all of these successes
and novelties in one company history, it is remarkable
to note that its founder and all-time leader was neither
a chemist nor a physicist, and by no means a scientist
but instead an entrepreneur par excellence.
Goerz knew what he owed to his workers and em-
ployees, and he gained a certain fame with the early
introduction of social benefi ts for them. In 1894, the
company inaugurated the average working week of 48
hours; and in 1897, all of his company men received two
weeks of fully paid holidays each year. The company
later moved to new buildings in 1898, which had a sta-
tue fi ve meters height in front of the building, honoring
photography. By this time, the name Goerz incorporated
glass and fi lm production as well as cameras, lenses,
and binoculars. With the launch of several products for
military use after 1905, the necessity arose for opening
a number of branches in Europe, the United Kingdom,
and the United States which included production lines as
well as distribution offi ces. In 1917, the company was at
its largest size with more than 10.000 employees, and it
even survived both the German revolution of 1918 and
the depression of the early 1920s.