Carl Zeiss (11 September 1816 – 3 December 1888) was a German maker of optical instruments commonly known for the company he founded in 1846 in a small town of Jena in Germany. The company Carl Zeiss Jena (now: Carl Zeiss AG) started to design microscopes. Later he and Ernst Abbe co-operated in manufacturing optical lenses with less colour and spherical distortion than the other lenses of this time.
After many efforts Zeiss and Abbe produced in 1886 an apochromatic lens, consisted of ten lenses. As a result there was no color distorion. Soon the factory started to produce anastigmatic photography lenses and after 1890 the first eyepieces and objectives for telescopes were produced.

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