Pierre Angénieux (; 14 July 1907 in

Saint-Héand Saint-Héand () is a commune in the Loire department in central France, 12 kilometres from Saint-Étienne. The name ''Héand'' comes from the Latin Eugendus; and was given to the town either by the saint himself when founding a monastery, or by p ...

– 26 June 1998) was a French engineer and optician, one of the inventors of the modern

zoom lens A zoom lens is a mechanical assembly of lens elements for which the focal length (and thus angle of view) can be varied, as opposed to a fixed-focal-length (FFL) lens (see prime lens). A true zoom lens, also called a parfocal lens, is one ...

es, and famous for introducing the

Angénieux retrofocus The Angénieux retrofocus photographic lens is a wide-angle lens design that uses an inverted telephoto configuration. The popularity of this lens design made the name retrofocus synonymous with this type of lens. The Angénieux retrofocus for st ...

Biography

Angénieux graduated from the

École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

in 1928, and from the

École Supérieure d'Optique The Institut d'optique Graduate School ("Institute of optics"), nicknamed SupOptique or IOGS, is one of the most prestigious French Grandes Ecoles and the leading French ''grande école'' in the field of Optics and its industrial and scientific ap ...

the next year. He was a student of

Henri Chrétien Henri Jacques Chrétien (1 February 1879, Paris – 6 February 1956, Washington, D.C.) was a French astronomer and an inventor. Born in Paris, France, his most famous inventions are: - the anamorphic widescreen process, using an anamorphic len ...

. After working for

Pathé Pathé or Pathé Frères (, styled as PATHÉ!) is the name of various French people, French businesses that were founded and originally run by the Pathé Brothers of France starting in 1896. In the early 1900s, Pathé became the world's largest ...

, Angénieux founded a company specialising in cinema equipment in 1935, ''Les Etablissements Pierre Angénieux''. He started using

Geometric optics Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is ca ...

rather than

Physical optics In physics, physical optics, or wave optics, is the branch of optics that studies interference, diffraction, polarization, and other phenomena for which the ray approximation of geometric optics is not valid. This usage tends not to include effec ...

in the design of his lenses, as

Carl Zeiss Carl Zeiss (; 11 September 1816 – 3 December 1888) was a German scientific instrument maker, optician and businessman. In 1846 he founded his workshop, which is still in business as Carl Zeiss AG. Zeiss gathered a group of gifted practica ...

and

Ernst Abbe Ernst Karl Abbe HonFRMS (23 January 1840 – 14 January 1905) was a German physicist, optical scientist, entrepreneur, and social reformer. Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, he developed numerous optical instruments. He was also a co-ow ...

did, and developed computing methods decreasing the time needed to design a lens by an order of magnitude. In 1950, Angénieux introduced the

, which allowed mounting

wide-angle lens In photography and cinematography, a wide-angle lens refers to a lens whose focal length is substantially smaller than the focal length of a normal lens for a given film plane. This type of lens allows more of the scene to be included in the pho ...

es on

Single-lens reflex camera A single-lens reflex camera (SLR) is a camera that typically uses a mirror and prism system (hence "reflex" from the mirror's reflection) that permits the photographer to view through the lens and see exactly what will be captured. With twin le ...

s. In 1953, Angénieux designed the fastest lens of the time, reaching 0.95. The design was used in the

Bell & Howell Bell and Howell LLC is a U.S.-based services organization and former manufacturer of cameras, lenses, and motion picture machinery, founded in 1907 by two projectionists, and originally headquartered in Wheeling, Illinois. The company is now he ...

70 series cameras for 35 years.– In 1956, Angénieux designed a constant aperture 17-68mm zoom lens, and a 12-120mm in 1958. Angénieux' company provided

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

with photographic equipment used in the

Ranger program The Ranger program was a series of unmanned space missions by the United States in the 1960s whose objective was to obtain the first close-up images of the surface of the Moon. The Ranger spacecraft were designed to take images of the lunar sur ...

Project Gemini Project Gemini () was NASA's second human spaceflight program. Conducted between projects Mercury and Apollo, Gemini started in 1961 and concluded in 1966. The Gemini spacecraft carried a two-astronaut crew. Ten Gemini crews and 16 individual ...

, Apollo program, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the

Space Shuttle program The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried out by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011. Its ...

. Notably, the first high-resolution photographs of the Moon, by

Ranger 7 Ranger 7 was the first space probe of the United States to successfully transmit close images of the lunar surface back to Earth. It was also the first completely successful flight of the Ranger program. Launched on July 28, 1964, Ranger 7 was de ...

, were made with a 25 mm 0.95 lens. In 1964, Angénieux received a Scientific or Technical award "for the development of a ten-to-one Zoom Lens for cinematography." He was honoured with the ''Grand Prix des Ingénieurs Civils'' in France in 1973, and with the 1989

Gordon E. Sawyer Award The Gordon E. Sawyer Award is an Honorary Award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry." The award is named in ...

. His company also produced lenses for the

Kodak Retinette Kodak Retinette is the name of a classic series of cameras manufactured by the Eastman Kodak company. They were introduced in 1939 as a less expensive alternative to the Kodak Retina series. The first models were of the folding type using bellows a ...

and Pony cameras. In 1993, Angénieux' eponymous company was acquired by

Thales Group Thales Group () is a French multinational company that designs, develops and manufactures electrical systems as well as devices and equipment for the aerospace, defence, transportation and security sectors. The company is headquartered in Paris' ...

and renamed Thales Angénieux. The company still specializes in optical, electro-optical and optical-mechanic products. Since 2013, Thales Angénieux organizes every year on the occasion of the

Cannes Film Festival The Cannes Festival (; french: link=no, Festival de Cannes), until 2003 called the International Film Festival (') and known in English as the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films o ...

the

Pierre Angénieux Excellens in Cinematography The Pierre Angénieux ExcelLens in Cinematography is an annual award that pays tribute to a prominent international director of photography at the Cannes Film Festival. The award originated in 2013. The name comes from Pierre Angénieux, inventor o ...

ceremony to pay tribute to a prominent Director of Photography for its career.

Reference and notes

External links

Pierre Angénieux

on

Gadzarts Gadz'Arts or Gadzarts is the nickname given to the students and the alumni of Arts et Métiers ParisTech (formerly École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers - ENSAM), a prestigious university (grande ecole) specialised in engineering. Since t ...

.
Angenieux website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angenieux, Pierre 1907 births 1998 deaths Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners Optical engineers Lens designers Recipients of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award Arts et Métiers ParisTech alumni