1273
Richard Beck (1827–1866) as an apprentice and they
commenced a formal partnership in 1847 which contin-
ued until 1857 when they were joined by Beck’s brother
Joseph Beck (1829–1891), who had been apprenticed
to the important optician and instrument maker Wil-
liam Sims.
The Smith, Beck, and Beck company was primarily
an optician and optical instrument maker with micro-
scopes being a particular speciality. As Smith and Beck
the fi rm introduced stereoscopes to the range of goods
it produced including a top-loading hand-held model.
The fi rm’s most successful viewer was based on Joseph
Beck’s patent number 2112 of 15 September 1859 which
described a viewer designed for viewing paper stereo
pairs either mounted on card or in books. The open-body
viewer was sold as the Patent Mirror Stereoscope.
A refi ned version was produced with solid sides
which inverted into it’s own box and was sold as the
Achromatic Stereoscope in either walnut or mahogany.
Various designs of cabinets to hold the viewer in its box
and stereographs were produced. The viewer was very
effective and consequently became very popular with
over 3000 being produced. It was still being advertised
in 1890.
Alongside the stereoscopes Smith, Beck and Beck
was also publishers and retailers of photographs in-
cluding cartes-de-visite portraits and they claimed to
keep in stock ‘some thousands’ of stereoscopic views
with others readily obtainable. The most notable of the
stereographs published by the fi rm was Warren de la
Rue’s celebrated series of lunar photographs taken on
his refl ecting telescope and enlarged by Robert Howlett.
These were sold as both paper and glass stereographs.
Smith retired from the partnership in 1865 and c1867
the fi rm began trading as R and J Beck, becoming a
limited company in 1895. Joseph’s son, Conrad, was
apprenticed to the fi rm in 1879 and later ran the com-
pany and published several books on optics. Thomas
Smithies Taylor was also apprenticed to the company in
1879 and in 1886 he founded his own fi rm which was to
become Taylor, Taylor and Hobson of Leicester, another
successful photographic lens manufacturer.
By the 1880s R. and J. Beck’s photographic lenses
were mainly being exported to the United States and by
the end of the decade they had doubled manufacturing
capacity to meet the demands of the home market. The
company was the fi rst to fi t an iris diaphragm on a regu-
lar basis to its rectilinear lenses from 1887. Although
the fi rm manufactured some Voigtländer lenses under
licence and a limited range of its own quality lenses it
increasingly produced lenses directly for camera mak-
ers such as W Butcher & Sons, Newman and Guardia
and others.
The company made several distinctive cameras. The
fi rst true twin lens refl ex camera was made by R. and J.
Beck for G. M. Whipple (1842–1893), superintendent
of the Kew Observatory to his own design, in 1880.
It was designed for cloud photography. A later cloud
camera was made by Becks to Robin Hill’s patent in- From 1892 Beck introduced a successful range
of cameras under the Frena name with the third thou-
sand being supplied in 1894. The camera was based on
Joseph Thacher Clarke’s patents and held one or two
packs of twenty cut-fi lms, specially made for them by
Ilford Ltd, which were changed by rotating a handle on
the outside of the camera. Further models were made
through to the early 1900s.
During the twentieth century, the fi rm increasingly
focused on supplying lenses and specialist optical instru-
ments before moving away from photographic optics.
It underwent several mergers but remains in existence
as Coherent Ealing (Europe) Ltd producing specialised
high precision opto-mechanical assemblies.
Michael Pritchard
Further Reading
Channing, Norman, and Mike Dunn, British Camera Makers. An
A-Z Guide to Companies and Products, Claygate: Parkland
Designs, 1996.
Clifton, Gloria, Directory of British Scientifi c Instrument Makers
1550–1851. London: Zwemmer, 1995.
Coe, Brian, Cameras. From Daguerreotype to Instant Pictures,
London: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 1978.
Wing, Paul, Stereoscopes. The First One Hundred Years. New
Hampshire: Transition Publishing, 1996.SMITH, JOHN SHAW (1811–1873)
Irish amateur calotypist
John Shaw Smith belonged to the Anglo-Irish landed
gentry, born in Clonmuth, County Cork, South Ireland,
on October 18, 1811, the fi fth of eight sons of John
and Mary Richardson Smith. He settled in the family’s
house of Fairy Hill in Blackrock, on the seaside north
of Dublin, and in 1839 he married his fi rst cousin, Mary
Louisa Richardson, from whom he had two children,
John Augustus (born in 1840) and Florence (born in
1844). His life ended tragically on January 29, 1873,
when he shot himself.
His work with the calotype process stands out in the
early history of photography in Ireland for the extensive
photographic tour that he took along the Mediterranean
shores, between December 1850 and September 1852.
Before taking this trip, he practiced the calotype process
in Ireland, documenting the ruined landscape scenery of
his surroundings—the Celtic Graveyard at Blackrock,
the monastic settlement at Glendalough—and taking a
short trip to Paris, in August 1849. It is not documented
whether he had any personal contacts with the French
calotypists, but his Parisian views reveal his awareness