Detective work with “Extra” Engravings!

[Steven Tribe]

I have a number of Jamin and Jamin/Darlot small size CdeV petzval lenses. The earliest of these is from around 1857 - with the very simple block letters JAMIN PARIS engraving and with no mention of the address or patents etc.
Underneath was a very neat copperplate signature “J.A.L.Pool”. An uncommon UK name, so perhaps traceable? Dealer, Chemist, Photographer or Instrument maker? No candidates found although there were a lot of “Pools” in New England. Perhaps someone has some better ideas?

There was a third line with a light scratching rather than engraving. This was “Jackson Bros Jumbo”. Jumbo sounded neither 19th century or English. But google provided lots of hits. Jackson Brothers were a very large photography business who had expanded from their original location known as Jumbo near a Railway Station close to Manchester (UK). They left Jumbo in the 1860’s so this Jamin had come to them quite early.

This area of the UK was in fantastic growth from the middle of the 18th century with great demands for the new captains of industry, civic leaders etc. The best known photo made by the Jackson bros. is the group portrait of the very first founders of the Cooperative movement in nearby Rochdale (at least in countries with a Social Democrat party!).

Who else has fun engravings?

[Steven Tribe]

This is early Voigtlander Petzval sold recently.
It has a nice engraving around the brass lens hood - not quite kosher for Voigtlander. The style of the engraving is absolutely correct and is, perhaps, more attractive than usual due to the extra space that could be utilized by the engraver.
The lens has a well made Waterhouse cut out in the brass sleeve where the “Voigtlander” engraving would have been and the serial number tells us that this would have originally not had this feature.
So logic tells us that Voigtlander must have offered to adapter older lenses to accept aperture control through the Waterhouse system at the factory in Braunschweig where the original engraver could redo his artwork around the lens hood.
We already know that Voigtlander had lens adaption scheme to swap (regrind and polish) lenses to get rid of the original Petzval design limitation of visual/chemical focus difference.

[pgk]

Whist not an engraving, I have a Howard Grubb Patent Doublet, which I can fairly confidently date to the early 1890s, which has been modified with an aperture diaphragm fitted and the retailer's engraving has been totally disfigured by doing so. Its date means that it could potentially have been supplied with a diaphragm had a customer wanted one as diaphragms were available in many lenses by then, but I don't think that Grubb offered this modification. Equally a retailer would have been loath to destroy their name on a lens, which suggests that an owner must have valued it sufficiently to have an expensive modification carried out. I had a Wray lens from the 1880s similarly modified. Personally I like such lenses because it indicates that they were used and valued for their abilities. I would post a photo but my browser won't do so until I sort it out!