John Henry Dallmeyer

Who was John Henry Dallmeyer?

John Henry Dallmeyer, Anglo-German optician, was born at Loxten, Westphalia, the son of a landowner.

On leaving school at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an Osnabrück optician, and in 1851 he came to London, where he obtained work with an optician, W Hewitt, who shortly afterwards, with his workmen, entered the employment of Andrew Ross, a lens and telescope manufacturer.

Dallmeyer's position in this workshop appears to have been an unpleasant one, and led him to take, for a time, employment as French and German correspondent for a commercial firm. After a year he was, however, re-engaged by Ross as scientific adviser, and was entrusted with the testing and finishing of the highest class of optical apparatus. This appointment led to his marriage with Ross's second daughter, Hannah, and to the inheritance, at Ross's death, of a third of his employer's large fortune and the telescope manufacturing portion of the business.

Turning from astronomical work to the design and making of photographic lenses, he introduced improvements in both portrait and landscape lenses, in object-glasses for the microscope and in condensers for the optical lantern.