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DALLMEYER, JOHN HENRY (1830–1883)
& THOMAS ROSS (1859–1906)
J. H. Dallmeyer Limited was founded in 1859 at 19
Bloomsbury Street, London.
About 1888 the company moved to 25 Newman Street,
London, and from about 1907 kept a sales offi ce at 31
Mortimer Street, London, and a works in Willesden, in
north west London.
A naturalised British subject, John Henry Dallmeyer
(1830–1883) was born in Loxten, in Westphalia and,
having shown a talent for science and mathematics,
was apprenticed to an optician. He came to England in
1851 and joined the optical fi rm of Andrew Ross, sub-
sequently marrying a daughter of his employer. Ross, on
his death in 1859, left Dallmeyer a third of his private
fortune and a substantial part of the company’s machin-
ery and equipment, thus allowing Dallmeyer to set up
his own company, supplying initially the astronomical
telescopes for which Ross had gained a high reputation
and which had been made by Dallmeyer during the six
years prior to Ross’s death.
As a company, J. H. Dallmeyer produced lenses
and other optical and photographic equipment, includ-
ing lenses for microscopes. Dallmeyer was a skilled
and inventive lens designer, fully aware of the latest
scientifi c developments and maintaining close contact
with prominent scientists of the day, notably Sir John
Herschel. In 1861 he was elected a fellow of the Royal
Astronomical Society. From the early 1860s he began
to design and manufacture camera lenses, to the same
high quality as his telescopes. He gradually relinquished
to his employees, whom he had trained, the manufac-
ture of many of the company’s products, and devoted
his time to improvements in photographic optics and
associated equipment. Notable early designs included
the Triple Achromatic lens and the Patent Portrait, the
latter being a modifi cation of the well-known Petzval
formula, and with a further modifi cation that allowed
a variable diffusion of focus. This lens was extensively
used by portrait photographers during the second half
of the nineteenth century.
Dallmeyer also designed lenses at this time that
worked at very large relative apertures, including a por-
trait lens of the Petzval type with a maximum aperture
of f/2.2—much used for photographing children, due to
the shorter exposures that it allowed—and, for a small
camera called the Pistolgraph, a Petzval-type lens of
approximately f/1. During the 1860s he also produced
lenses designed for astronomical photography. In 1866
the Wide Angle Rectilinear and Rapid Rectilinear were
produced. The latter, for which Dallmeyer made use
of a special type of glass made by Chance Brothers of
Birmingham, was a long-lived design that lasted well
into the following century.
A high profi le was maintained by advertising and
also by exhibiting the company’s products. Dallmeyer
lenses gained the highest awards in London in 1862,
Dublin & Berlin in 1865, Paris in 1867 and 1878, and
Philadelphia in 1876. J.H. Dallmeyer also wrote an
informative pamphlet ‘Photographic Lenses: On Their
Choice and Use,’ that ran to six editions and was a
valuable addition to the company’s advertising. It was
re-issued in 1892, with much additional material, by T.R.
Dallmeyer. The company had a substantial export trade,
supported by a reputation for high quality and consis-
tency. Exports to the USA were especially important,
the New York company E.& H.T. Anthony acting as
Dallmeyer’s sole agents. Dallmeyer lenses also found
their way to most parts of the British Empire, not least
as part of that process of documentation of the empire
undertaken by British photographers. In 1878 John
Henry Dallmeyer was awarded the Legion of Honour by
the French Government. He also received the Russian
Order of St. Stanislaus.
From about 1880, as J.H. Dallmeyer’s health dete-
riorated, his son Thomas Ross Dallmeyer (1859–1906)
progressively took over management of the business,
which he retained until 1892 when the fi rm became a
limited company. T.R. Dallmeyer was, like his father, a
prolifi c and talented lens designer, gaining his B.Sc. at
King’s College, London. In the 1880s, at a time when
other makers were attempting to take advantage of the
company’s reputation by producing copies of Dallmeyer
lenses, he maintained the commercial advantage by
continuing to produce new lenses, notably the Rapid
Long Focus Landscape Lens in 1884, and the Rectilinear
Landscape Lens in 1888.
With the arrival of the new anastigmat lenses from
Zeiss of Germany, using the latest types of glass devel-
oped at Jena, and with a performance superior to the
Rapid Rectilinears, it was imperative that Dallmeyer
should produce a comparable lens. The new design
was called the Stigmatic, designed by H.L. Aldis and
announced by Dallmeyer in 1896. These lenses, with
periodic modifi cations, continued in production into
the 1920s.
Dallmeyer was also prominent in the development
of the telephoto lens, being, in 1891, the fi rst company
to produce a practical lens of this type. T.R.Dallmeyer
remained an active lens designer despite delegating
much of the work to others. In 1890, at the request of
his friend the photographer P.H. Emerson, he designed
a lens that was intended to replicate the characteristics
of the eye. In 1893 he designed, at the request of J.H.
Bergheim, a soft-focus portrait lens, the Dallmeyer-
Bergheim, that went into production in 1896.
The company’s Lens Books show that Dallmeyer
lenses were purchased by many of the most prominent
photographers of the mid- and late nineteenth century.