Optical design at kodak

The persons and the methods they employed for designing Kodak camera lenses are recalled, from the earliest, almost symmetrical four-element air spaced lenses, designed by hand, through the large lenses made for aerial cameras during World War II and the introduction of rare-earth glasses and then plastics, to very high resolution modern lenses for microfilm cameras and high quality zoom lenses for Super-8-mm motion picture equipment, designed almost completely automatically by electronic computers. The most modern and powerful methods of evaluating optical-image quality, including the role of the humaneye, and the use of those methods for lens design and system and production engineering are described.