As a company, Nikon – or Nippon Kogaku as it was known then – can trace its roots back to 1917 as one of Japan’s foremost suppliers of optical goods for scientific and military uses. In this capacity they produced just about everything having to do with optics – periscopes, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, you name it. But because of the type of products they made, they weren’t very well-known outside of Japan.
During WWII, however, they were chosen as the primary supplier of optical equipment for the military. This saw the company grow to over 20 factories and over 23,000 employees. Prior to the War, they had made some photographic lenses in addition to everything else, it just wasn’t their main thing. After the war, however, they were reorganized for civilian production, and the company was reduced to one factory and only 1400 employees. An interesting bit of trivia here is that they actually supplied the lenses for the Hansa Canon rangefinder way back in 1935. And they continued to make lenses for Canon up to 1947.
Sometime around 1945 they decided to get into the camera business themselves. And since the lenses they’d been producing so far had been for 35mm rangefinders, it made good sense for them to build cameras that would make use of those same lenses. So, by 1948, their first rangefinder camera – the Nikon I was released. The company decided to name the camera NIKON since it was a combination of the NI of Nippon and KO of Kogaku.
Over the next decade and a half, Nikon continued to innovate and released one successful rangefinder after another, culminating in the Nikon SP of 1957. The SP was notable for being Nikon’s first camera that would accept a motor drive – which was the second most important thing that would help the company dominate professional photography for the next thirty years. The first most important thing, though, was this camera that hit the market in 1959 – the Nikon F SLR.
Check out the video for a lot more info and a photoshoot with the Nikon F!
Vintage Camera Digest 