841
Within a year of starting their new American venture
however, Leggo’s and Desbarats close professional ties
were severed when Desbarats encountered fi nancial
diffi culties which left him insolvent. Leggo himself
remained with the Daily Graphic as publisher and con-
tinued his research with photomechanical processes for
some years. By 1879 however, Leggo had returned to
the Montreal, where he appears to have remained in the
area the rest of his life.
Beyond directing his considerable creative talents
to the development of new photomechanical pro-
cesses, Leggo also obtained patents for a variety of
other interests, including telegraphy and photographic
equipment. For example, in 1869 Leggo developed a
camera to photograph architectural subjects which
eliminated a problem other cameras then experienced
of distorted perpendicular lines in the resulting photo-
graph. A valuable improvement, in general, to outdoor
photography, its improved picture taking capabili-
ties were actively demonstrated to all in leggotyped
half-tone within the Canadian Illustrated News and
L’Opinion publique.
Terresa McIntosh
LEITZ, ERNST (1843–1920)
Ernst Leitz (I) was the fi rst in the father-son-grandson
sequence of men with that name who succeeded one
another as leaders of the renowned family-owned Ger-
man fi rm of Ernst Leitz Wetzlar GmbH. He was born
on the 26 April 1843 in Sulzburg (not Salzburg) in the
southwestern German province of Baden. Ernst was the
youngest of three children born to Christina Elizabeth
Leitz (née Doebelin) and Ernst August Leitz, both of
whom were teachers at the high school of Sulzburg. The
parents were very religious and wanted young Ernst
to study theology, but the latter had a very practical
disposition and he was able to persuade his father to let
him pursue a career in mechanical craftsmanship. The
father arranged for Ernst to embark on an apprenticeship
with the instrument maker Christian Ludwig Oechsle
in Pforzheim, also in Baden, a town known for its jew-
elry makers and goldsmiths. Oechsle’s establishment
had the impressive name “Workshop for Physical and
Chemical Instruments and Apparatus and Machines of
the Mechanic Oechsle, Gold Controller for the Grand
Duke of Baden.” The shop produced a great variety of
physical equipment, as shown in its 1855 catalog, which
had 24 sections with a total of 553 items, including a few
optical devices. Under the tutorship of the exceptionally
competent Oechsle, Ernst Leitz was able to acquire a
wealth of knowledge and skills that would ultimately
stand him well as a solid foundation for his trade. But it
appears that he realized early on that excessive versatil-
ity that did not yield a top performance in any particular
fi eld might lead him to become a jack-of-all-trades. This
portended his eventual career.
As was the custom at that time, after completing
his apprenticeship, Ernst Leitz (I) began traveling as a
journeyman. He visited one of his sisters in Vevey in
Switzerland and after a brief time in Zurich, he found
a job as an assistant to Mathäus Hipp, a prominent
manufacturer of electric clocks in Neuchâtel. It is there
that he fi rst became acquainted with the process of mass
production of precision parts for world-famous Swiss
watches that was already routine in Swiss factories. This
manufacturing process was of fundamental signifi cance
later on when he became the sole owner of a precision
manufacturing enterprise. The aforementioned Oechsle
also produced precision instruments, but they were made
individually, which required more time, so that their
prices were signifi cantly higher.
While working for Hipp, Ernst Leitz (I) met Karl
Junker from Giessen, a university town north of Frank-
furt, Germany. Junker was on his way to Paris after
having worked for Friedrich Belthle, who in 1855 had
taken over the Optical Institute, a small microscope
manufacturing enterprise founded in nearby Wetzlar in
1849 by Carl Kellner (1826–1855). Junker encouraged
Ernst Leitz (I) to visit that institute because it was in
serious need of competent instrument makers. Heed-
ing that advice, Leitz joined that small fi rm in Wetzlar
in early 1864 and only one year later, on 7^ October
1865 he became Belthle’s partner. Belthle was not an
effi cient manager, he was in poor health, and he did
not cultivate adequate connections with the world of
science, so that the demand for his microscopes was
quite limited. When Belthle passed away in 1869,
Ernst Leitz (I) became the sole owner of the company
and named it “Optisches Institut von Ernst Leitz,” a
name that prevailed in various mutations for 119 years
thereafter.
A memorable event in the career of Ernst Leitz (I)
occurred on 21 September 1864 during the 39th Con-
gress of German Natural Scientists and Physicians in
Giessen, where Ernst Leitz (I) demonstrated Belthle’s
microscopes and where Philip Reis (1834–1874) suc-
cessfully demonstrated a telephone that he had invented.
Reis had demonstrated it before, but the construction
was faulty until Ernst Leitz (I) became interested in it
and helped Reis to build a properly functioning model,
based on the knowledge of electricity, electro-magne-
tism and instrument making that he acquired during his
journeyman years. Reis’ telephone was acclaimed at
that congress, but it was only promoted to institutes of
physics and Reis did not possess the foresight and know-
how for marketing it to business users and to the public.
Only one year after Reis’ death of tuberculosis on 14
January 1874, 11 years after his successful demonstra-
tion, the American Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922)