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| The Optical Industry Continues To Flourish |
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With the results obtained from the opto-physical computations and the know-how of the glass laboratory, a promising future lay ahead of the optical industry. Without the types of glass developed by Schott, modern optics and the microscope and telescope technologies with improved performance and enhanced color rendition created by Zeiss and Abbe would not have been possible. The collaboration of Zeiss, Abbe and Schott also resulted in numerous ophthalmic products and new instruments for medical optics, in particular for diagnosis in ophthalmology.
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| Zeiss microscope from 1878. | Gullstrand slit lamp (from 1911). The version shown with a corneal microscope was built at Carl Zeiss from ca. 1916 onwards. |
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Strictly speaking, it was not until the second half of the 19th century that Fraunhofer’s lifework was continued and brought to industrial fruition by the optical company Carl Zeiss and the Schott & Genossen glassworks in Jena. Today, Schott is a multinational group of companies managed by SCHOTT AG, Mainz, the sister company of Carl Zeiss AG in the Carl Zeiss Foundation, and numbers among the world’s leading suppliers of customer-oriented solutions in the field of special glass and glass-ceramic materials.
Carl Zeiss, now headquartered in Oberkochen, is a global player in the fields of microscopy, industrial metrology, high performance lenses for the fabrication of microchips, and surgical microscopes and instruments for diagnosis and therapy in ophthalmology. The glass used in the past for astronomical instruments and subsequently for space systems has now been replaced by, for example, the glass-ceramic material Zerodur® from Schott which has a thermal expansion coefficient approaching zero.
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