Bausch & Lomb in it’s finest incarnation was based in a large upstate New York city on the shores of Lake Ontario called Rochester. At the time it was The Flour City, so named for the many mills along the Genesee river which ground the wheat towed into the city by that turn superhighway of historic New York, the Erie Canal. Now, The Flower City is remembered less for the great optical firm of B&L and more for the once mighty company of another golden age optical company, Kodak. Even today the George Eastman house is at once one of the most well appointed and well respected museums of photography in the world, host every year to dozens of programs and feature presentations.

It should be no surprise that microscopy and photography should intersect. That two of the greater names in each field should call the same city home is surprising, but perhaps less so when one considers that the two would have been attracted by the same resources. B&L made optical instruments and components of all sorts, and no small variety of microscopes. The Eastman dry-plate Co. (later Kodak) made dry photographic plates and film, together with the low-cost cameras which would create a demand and market for their more profitable consumable products. With the two companies calling the same city home one could expect that the Kodak cameras and film would be sure to see use at the eyepiece of B&L microscopes.

That B&L should have published a manual specifically treating with one of the early Kodak box cameras is only natural. It’s this manual we’ll be looking at in the next few posts. Chances are good anyone in the United States of America knows someone who has an old Kodak box camera laying around they’d be happy to make a present of. Otherwise pick up a Kodak Brownie No. 0 to work with the B&L model R and follow along with the manual or pick up the larger Kodak Brownie No. 2a to work with a full size B&L microscope.

B&L Model R and Eastman Kodak Brownie No. 0