“[Petzval] took on shortening [the Daguerreotype's] exposure time from minutes to seconds."
Slovakia Today
In 1839 portrait photographs took an age using simple meniscus lenses. 'All that changed when Hungarian mathematician Jozef Petzval (1807-1891) designed the first compound camera lens. The Petzval lens dramatically cut exposure times, boosted camera performance, and revolutionized photography.
The "daguerreotype system," developed by Frenchman Louis Daguerre, was the forerunner to the Petzval lens. Requiring around half an hour of exposure time, this was still an improvement over existing techniques that needed several hours for successful exposure. However, this was still too long for taking portrait shots, which inevitably blurred with the slightest movement of the subject.
Working with Friedrich Voigtlander at the University of Vienna, Petzval performed calculations that led him to create an achromatic portrait lens with four lenses arranged in two groups, providing six times the luminosity and an undistorted image for the first time. Crucially, the lens allowed photographs to be taken at around twenty time? the speed of the daguerreotype lens. Petzval won many accolades for his invention, but his success was clouded by a dispute with Voigtlander over the right to supply the new lens. Voigtlander went on to mass-produce the invention, but it is Petzval who pioneered the modern camera lens.
