Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 13:45:50 :
In Reply to: Re: I thought that ws warantee related? posted by Gary Troxel on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 13:19:04 :
Karl Zeiss made the world's best optics, and probably still does. Zeiss, of course, is a German company and during WWII, trade with Germany was prohibited. Fighting a war, however, requires good optics, from binoculars and rifle scopes to spy cameras and bomb sights. Therefore, Zeiss was quietly urged to set up a legally-separate US-based company in order to provide optics to the Allies, while the original German company made optics for the Nazis. After the war, when German wages were still low, they made some incredible cameras for civilian use. Nowadays, their top-quality optics are way too expensive for most people, though I see they're coming out with some lower-end scopes and binoculars. They might be OEMing them from China for all I know. They still pretty much make all of the optics for applications where the cost of the lenses is small compared to the entire machine, such as satellites and photolithography equipment for making computer chips.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting how one German company managed to sell to both sides during the war, and how the US government set them up to do so.
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