Magnifiers: a closer look (XIX)
Optical beginnings: The Taming of the Shrew!

Fig. 1 is showing the most common magnifier - as it looks like nowadays. A very simple device, made up of a big convex lens, with a long cylindrical handle, used as a reading glass, from a distance. Nothing to talk about?

Fig. 1: The classical reading glass magnifier, as commonly used throughout the 20th century. It is characterized by a big, biconvex lens and a long handle. In contrast to botanical, gemmological etc. magnifiers it is used far off from the user's eye, simply held directly above the respective text to decipher. Lens diameter 9.5 cm, weight 208 g.
Merely as an aside: The design of this one is a little bit special in so far as it is smoothly camouflaging the loose ends of the lens fitting metal ring in position 6 o'clock!

We would like to point out that this type of instrument might be considered as the most primitive access to modest magnification - but there is a catch: big glass lenses are difficult to control and do not easily fit into a slim housing. As a consequence virtually all ancient magnifiers tended to be comparatively small. Low weight precision metal housings were not readily available, and wooden housings tended to be rather bulky, sometimes not durable enough. Horn couldn't be easily managed in king size formats.

About 250 years ago the craftsmen of the city of Nuremberg (Germany) found an equally elegant and slim solution for bigger lenses - based on a special kind of copper wire. Just have a look at what they did:

Fig. 2: A so-called Nürnberger Lupe (i.e.: Nuremberg magnifier). The lens is mounted by means of copper wire, ca. 2 mm in width, fixed by a much thinner silver colored wire (ca. 0.3 mm in diameter), as well made of copper, probably tin-coated.
Overall length 130 mm, lens diameter 6.5 cm, weight 37.6 g. Glass without noticeable color but containing tiny air bubbles visible with the naked eye. The lens edges look kind of rough, not cleanly polished. 365 nm UV light results in a brownish fluorescence of the glass. We measured 4.5 diopters (equivalent to a rather weak magnification of ca. 1.4x).
Magnifiers of this type were made already in the 18th century, roughly between 1760 and 1805 [Poulet 1978]. Very similar instruments as the one shown here are depicted in Poulet's book, volume I, with best similarity of the items Z195 ("ca. 1760") and Z200 ("1805").

The Nuremberg metal workers used a rolled copper wire with a concave inner side for the framework. Thus the lens could be fixed and held in position:

Fig. 3: Detail of the Nuremberg magnifier shown in fig. 2. The cross section of the wire is a kind of kettle type (like the letter U). The lens fitting is tightened by means of the thinner silver-colored wire as shown above.

The copper wire is serving as a handle, too, again fixed by means of the thinner, silver-colored copper wire:

Fig. 4: Detail of the Nuremberg magnifier shown in fig. 2. The copper wire is fixed by numerous windings of the thinner silver-colored wire. And no, this is by no means a repair of later times: virtually all of the Nuremberg magnifiers shown in Poulet's book are made in exactly the same manner.

From a present-day perspective the Nuremberg solution might look slightly funny, possibly even ridiculous. But we should accept that large numbers of those magnifiers appear to have been produced in the 18th century and that they might have been among the very first handheld reading glasses with really big lenses.

Disclaimer: it goes without saying that this issue of our magazine is only scratching at the surface of a complex magnifiers' history. In parallel to the Nuremberg magnifiers British wooden magnifiers (see fig. 5) and - probably a few decades later - British 'quizzing glass' magnifiers were produced in large quantities. Besides, there are more scarce examples of heavily decorated magnifiers, some of them equipped with gold and silver fittings [Giordano 2006].

Fig. 5: A British "Library Magnifier" - this type of magnifier probably was used as a reading glass as well but allegedly also for the study of paintings, sculptures and other art objects. The housing is made of an extremely durable exotic wood with little or no tendency to unwanted deformation or cracking. The lens is fixed by a top-notch precision wooden ring.

The problem with most of those historic magnifiers is that only few of them are bearing inscriptions which might help in order to assess the date of production. In any case magnifiers dating back to the time before 1750 have to be considered as extremely rare.

Literature

In general: the internet is providing a wealth of informations about spectacles. As an example just have a look at The Newsletter of the Ophthalmic Antiques international Collector's Club.
https://oaicc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/OA-2005-2009-PRIMO-low-res-1.pdf
In contrast the history of magnifiers looks like a scientific desert. As a consequence we have to refer to neighboring or secondary information sources, in particular museum databases and historic catalogues. Some websites dealing with historic microscopes do have chapters about magnifiers as well.

The catalogue illustrating the collection of Raymond Giordano is mostly dealing with more precious, more scientific magnifiers (no reading glasses). But it is still ranging among the best printed sources in the neighborhood to our more humble, popular magnifiers and thus can be very helpful, e.g. for stylistic comparisons.
Raymond V. Giordano: Singular Beauty. 2006. 64 p.

William Poulet: Die Brille (in German). Three king-size volumes with more than 2,000 (!) illustrations. Bonn 1978.
[Annotation: even though the title "Die Brille" (German for "The Spectacles") is clearly referring to spectacles there are many photographs of antique magnifiers included as well, most of them with rough estimations of the production dates, some even based on precise dates on the casings.]

Last but not least - don't laugh! - ChatGPT is well able to discuss magnifier production dates on the basis of photographs. E.g. a late 18th century magnifier was classified and date-referenced by ChatGPT as "late-Rococo (about 1800)" by means of the style of its silver fittings. We had this confirmed by an art-historian specializing in this era.

© Text, images and video clips by  Martin Mach  (webmaster@baertierchen.de).
The Water Bear web base is a licensed and revised version of the German language monthly magazine  Bärtierchen-Journal . Style and grammar amendments by native speakers are warmly welcomed.

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