Museum of Joseph Maximilian Petzval
Museum of Joseph Maximilian Petzval belongs under the administration of the Slovak Technical Museum in Košice, established in 1964 in the house where Joseph Maximilian Petzval (1807 - 1891) was born.
Historians consider him one of the most important professors of the Viennese university in the field of applied mathematics in the 19th century.
In 1840, Joseph Maximilian Petzval completed plans for two different objective lenses, a portrait and a landscape one.
He even filed the glass for these lenses himself. Throughout the 1860s, Petzval’s objective lens remained unparalleled and contributed to the massive development of photography in its first decades.
It wasn’t until 1857 that J.M.Petzval presented his plans for a landscape objective lens to the academy in Vienna.
It was produced in a similar way to the one that he had made in 1840. He called it a dialyt.
This new lens proved useful not just in photography, but also in telescopes, later in cinematography and in astronomic telescopes.
Petzval’s name and his reputation are maybe best remembered in the area of astrophotography.
He was a significant mathematician, inventor, founder of modern optics and photography, a professor of the University of Vienna.
He worked at the university until he was 70 and then retired. He died on September 17, 1891 in Vienna.
The exposition of the museum visitor chronologically presents diverse types of apparates and tools from Petzval times to the latest photographic technology demonstrations.
There are examples of today's telephoto lens, wide angle lens and lenses for aerial photographs.
Then there is the modern optics for different projection instruments and darkrooms.
Special attention deserve so called Detective wooden chambers with a mechanism for the exchange of rings.
Unique is the Krügener pocket detective chamber in the form of book.
There are examples of the first reporter and travel equipment and apparatus for the first stereography.
In this exposition we can see a large studio cameras - a development chain of studio instruments belongs to the oldest ones.
In 1888 replaced G.Eastman, founder of Kodak, stack plates by roll film devices and since then film devices almost entirely supplanted previoully used plate apparates.
Among exhibits are several types of Kodak cameras, including popular Vest-Pocket Kodak (Kodak Pocket).
Sources: muzeum.sk, own visit and pictures at the site