Bausch & Lomb Perfecting vision, enhancing life for 150 years A ...

war ended in 1945, the company had already embarked on plans for
reconversion to peacetime activities – and a new age for Bausch & Lomb.
Captions
Page 27: An early-1900s worker breaks cooled optical glass using a hammer
and chisel.
Page 28: In Bausch & Lomb’s St. Paul Street factory, dozens of employees
crafted eyeglass lenses and frames.
Page 29: For several years, the Bausch & Lomb plant housed a small grocery
store for the convenience of its employees, including founder J.J. Bausch, shown
here.
Page 31: 1914 Bausch & Lomb’s lines of precision optical measuring devices –
range finders (below), gunsights, periscopes (left) and spotting scopes (opposite)
– grew out of the Triple Alliance formed in 1907 among Bausch & Lomb,
Saegmuller and the Zeiss Company.
Page 32: 1915 Bausch & Lomb’s glass plant produces its first samples of
optical glass. The company’s production of this critical material would help U.S.
and allied military personnel see through two world wars. Here, a 1940s-era
worker inspects a piece of optical glass for faults and impurities.
Page 33: 1917 Optical glass was fired in large clay pots in the glass plant’s gas
furnaces. Once the glass cooled, the clay pots were broken open and the glass
was chiseled into smaller chunks, like the one pictured here. Later, it would be
ground and shaped to make lenses and prisms for Bausch & Lomb’s many
optical products.
Page 35: 1920S Employees in Bausch & Lomb’s lens testing laboratory
(opposite) inspected camera lenses for imperfections. The charts on the wall
were photographed through the lenses, and flaws in the prints would reveal any
potential defect in the lens.
1917 Photographic and cinematographic lenses, originally developed
for commercial use, were utilized in the war effort as well.
Page 36: 1930s The U.S. military began requiring vision testing for pilots and
enlisted personnel, and Bausch & Lomb supplied the armed forces with a range
of ophthalmic instruments. Many of these instruments found their way into
doctors’ offices in the United States and around the world after World War II, as
regular eye examinations became a part of routine health care for children and
adults. Pictured left to right are: the Ferree-Rand Perimeter, used to measure
visual efficiency in the indirect field; the Ortho-Rater vision tester, used to
measure overall visual acuity; the Universal Slit Lamp, a microscope for studying