Lizars

The J. Lizars company was founded in 1830 by the optician John Lizars (1810-1879) in Glasgow, Scotland. After he died the company was taken over by Michael Ballantine, but continued under the same name, making eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, barometers, thermometers, magic lanterns and slides, cameras, stereo cameras and viewers and binoculars. The company later passed to Robert Ballantine, and then to Michael and Arthur Ballantine, both sons of Michael Ballantine senior. The range of Challenge folding cameras was innovative. Notes on the company at Early Photography state that by the end of the First World War the company had ceased to design and build its own cameras; it continued to sell cameras by other makers under its own brand; however, the Ballantines took out at least three patents relating to design of smaller folding cameras in 1919-20 (see the links below); perhaps none of these patents was exploited. In 1913 the firm had branch offices in Edinburgh, Paisley, Greenock, Aberdeen, Liverpool and Belfast.

Lizars became solely opticians, and merged with C. Jeffrey Black to form Black & Lizars in 1999. That company still operates as a retail chain of opticians.

"Victor" ¼-plate camera c.1890 image by Geoff Harrisson (Image rights)

Links

• Advertisement for Celtic camera at edinphoto.org
• John Lizars at Double Exposure
• Cameras at www.collection-appareils.fr by Sylvain Halgand
• Black and Lizars history; minimal presentation at the company website
• Patents held by Lizars and his successors, at Espacenet, the patent search facility of the European Patent Office:
  • British Patent 4231 of 1911, An Automatic Projecting Lantern, granted to John Lizars and Joe Quiggley, describing an electrically-driven slide-changer for projectors. The changer holds ten slides, and incorporates a shutter to cut off the projector lamp during the changes.
  • British Patent 139246 (submitted 2 July 1919, granted 4 March 1920), Improvements in photographic cameras, granted to Arthur Ballantine, Robert Stanley Ballantine, and William Watson (not Watson of Holborn), describing a set of moveable rollers in a camera back, which allow a loaded roll film to be moved out of the way for insertion of a plate-holder, such that the plane of focus remians the same, whether a roll film or a plate is used. The lens position need not be adjustable, as needed for many film/plate cameras. The patent states that the Ballantines trading as Lizars and William Watson, a scientific instrument maker, both traded from the same Glasgow address.
  • British Patent 140858 (submitted 2 January 1919, granted 6 April 1920), Improvements in photographic cameras, granted to Arthur and Robert Ballantine and William Watson, describing the construction of roll-film camera bodies from aluminium castings covered with light aluminium sheet bodywork.
  • British Patent 144390 (submitted 12 March 1919, granted 14 June 1920), Improvements in and relating to lens adjusting means for folding photographic cameras, granted to Arthur and Robert Ballantine and William Watson, describing a design for the focus mechanism on the folding bed of a camera, which engages with the lens carriage when this is pulled out of the body, automatically giving correct registration with a focus scale (such a mechanism, though not designed to this patent, is provided on the Zeiss Bobette II illustrated in the article on bellows, and on some models of the Ernemann Bob).