Why Hasselblad, Rollei and Kodak All Used the Same Shutter

Friedrich Deckel, a farmer's son from southern Germany, built the Compur shutter inside Hasselblad, Rollei and Kodak Retina cameras, then the FP1 mill toolmakers still use. Born in 1871, Deckel trained as a fine mechanic, then worked under Ernst Abbe at Carl Zeiss in Jena, travelled through Holland and Siemens Brothers in Woolwich, and joined C. A. Steinheil in Munich in 1897. In 1898 he opened his own workshop, and in 1903 he partnered with inventor Christian Bruns. Their Compound shutter used an air piston to time exposures; Bruns then replaced it with clockwork, and the patent, DRP 258,646, was bought by a group including Zeiss and licensed back to Deckel. The Compur arrived in 1911 and became the standard leaf shutter for half a century: the Compur S in 1928, the Compur-Rapid in 1935, the Synchro-Compur in 1951 and the exposure value scale at Photokina 1954. Behind it, Zeiss held about 17 percent of Deckel by 1910, quietly bought a majority of rival Alfred Gauthier in 1931, and finally bought Deckel outright in 1958. To cut the shutter's tiny gears, Deckel built his own machine tools and began selling them around 1920. The FP1 universal tool milling machine appeared between 1932 and 1934. About 4,100 were built by 1945 and roughly 50,000 by 1965, and Alexander of Nottingham built it under licence as the Master Toolmaker, with gears cut to 21 degrees instead of Deckel's 14.5, so the twins' gears never mesh. Every machine's slideways were scraped by hand. In the Second World War the factory made the direct fuel injection pump for the BMW 801 radial engine of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190. One of its fitters, Hans Hutzelmann, co-founded the ADV resistance group with his wife Emma; he was guillotined in January 1945, and she died in hiding in an air raid in 1944. Pump production also moved into the Ofenkaulen tunnels near Königswinter, worked by forced labourers. Deckel died on 10 July 1948, three weeks after the Deutsche Mark arrived. The leaf shutter lost to the Japanese SLR, and Zeiss closed the Compur plant in 1976. Deckel's Dialog CNC controls kept the mills alive, but the 1993 merger with Maho ended in bankruptcy in 1994. Gildemeister took over, and the company became DMG MORI in 2015. Deckel's injection work passed to Georg Schäfer's Kugelfischer in the 1950s and fed the Peugeot 404, more than 38,000 BMW 2002 tii cars, the Porsche 911 Carrera RS and BMW's turbo Formula One engine, and the FP1 still runs in workshops today. Subscribe to Machine Chronicle for more stories of the machines, the companies, and the engineers that built the industrial world. 📖 Chapters: 0:00 Opening: one factory inside every great camera 0:43 The mechanic who learned from Ernst Abbe 3:51 A clock between the lenses 7:46 Compur, and the company behind the company 11:14 The machine behind the machine: the FP1 15:37 Fuel for the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 18:35 The fitter who fought back 23:10 Three weeks short 26:43 Dialog, Maho and the fall 30:05 What survived Sources: Wikipedia. "Friedrich Deckel." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedri... Deutsche Biographie. "Deckel, Friedrich Wilhelm." Neue Deutsche Biographie. https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sf... Camera-wiki.org. "Deckel." https://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Deckel Tony Griffiths. "Deckel FP1." lathes.co.uk. https://lathes.co.uk/deckel Tony Griffiths. "Maho." lathes.co.uk. https://www.lathes.co.uk/maho Wikipedia. "BMW 801." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_801 ju388.de. "BMW 801 Fuel Injection Pump." https://ju388.de/glc9-2106US.html Landeshauptstadt München. "Hans Hutzelmann" (biography). https://stadt.muenchen.de/dam/jcr:736... Erinnerungszeichen München. "Emma Hutzelmann." https://erinnerungszeichen.de/en/biog... KuLaDig / LVR. "Zwangsarbeiterlager Ofenkaule." https://www.kuladig.de/Objektansicht/... 2002FAQ. "The history of Kugelfischer fuel injection." https://www.bmw2002faq.com/articles/t... Wikipedia. "DMG Mori Aktiengesellschaft." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMG_Mor... #machinetools #CameraShutter #industrialhistory #millingmachines #MachineChronicle