Rochester Paragon

Ancient & honorable is the Society of the Genesee, composed of successful men & women who were born in or near New York's Genesee Valley, or achieved success in the neighborhood.* Once a year they meet & eat in Manhattan to salute a paragon. Meeting & eating last week they saluted President Edward Bausch of Bausch & Lomb Optical Co. The event gave occasion for children with eyeglasses, students with microscopes, astronomers with telescopes, seafarers with binoculars, photographers with cameras, soldiers with range finders to learn what manner of man made their tools.

Edward Bausch, 78, carries himself erect, still golfs and bowls. He founded Rochester's Germania Bowling Club in a brewer's garden, misses few of their meetings. His golf crony for 38 years has been Eastman's President William G. Stuber, 68, who says: "Ed Bausch is the finest type of man I have ever met. His interests are broad, including science, art, music, sports and charitable work./-

Edward Bausch built his first microscope the year (1868) he discovered that he was near-sighted and could not see his German school blackboard. His father, John Jacob Bausch (1830-1926), German immigrant, had founded the firm with $60 borrowed from the late Henry Lomb (1828-1908); had invented the nosepiece and hard rubber frames for spectacles. Young Edward proceeded to build microscopes with other Bausch & Lomb sons, has now produced more than 200,000.

In 1887 Edward Bausch invented the iris diaphragm shutter which made the snapshot camera practical. Later he made a deal with the late great Ernst Abbe, head of the Carl Zeiss Works of Jena, to make Zeiss prism binoculars in the U. S., trading Bausch manufacturing for Zeiss research facilities. The deal held good until the War, when Bausch perforce perfected the U. S. manufacture of fine optical glass, made 3,500 binoculars a week (besides periscopes, range finders, gun sight telescopes, searchlight mirrors). War demands mechanized the manufacture of microscopes. Prices fell from over $1,000 for hand-worked ones to $100 and $200 for machine-made ones.

Past Bausch & Lomb moving picture projection lenses whir about 120,000,000 ft. of film each day. The lenses probably bring Bausch & Lomb more money than any of their other devices. But closest to President Edward Bausch's heart remains the microscope. To him "the microscope has proven perhaps the greatest single aid of science in the combating and prevention of disease." Proud he is that his lenses have led to three major biological advances of 1932. Boasted he last week: "We built for Professor Edmund Newton Harvey of Princeton a centrifugal microscope which allows living cells to be studied while whirling at the ratio of 10,000 revolutions a minute. Dr. John Belling of the Carnegie Institution, using photomicrographic equipment, photographed the gene, the tiny particle which is believed to control heredity. Dr. Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff of the Rockefeller Institute used invisible ultraviolet light to photograph the growth of living cells under the microscope."*

* Among them: Presidents William G. Stuber (Eastman Kodak), Jeremiah G. Hickey (Hickey-Freeman Clothes), John M. Davis (D. L. & W. R. R.), Edward Eugene Loomis (Lehigh Valley R. R.).

/- At 17 Ed Bausch wrote "The Cascadilla Waltz." As a student at Cornell, he arranged (but did not play in) the first Cornell-Michigan football game.

* Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), unlearned Dutch merchant's clerk, was first man to recognize bacteria and protozoa with a microscope. But not until Louis Pasteur did anyone explain the meaning of Leeuwenhoek's "little animals." Last year Clifford Dobell, English protistologist (student of unicellular organisms), nephew of the man who invented Dobell's Solution, after learning 17th Century Dutch to interpret bad contemporary Latin translations of Leeuwenhoek's unscientific Dutch, published a Leeuwenhoek biography (Harcourt, Brace, $7.50). Its Latin dedication translates: "This work of a dead Dutchman the English editor (as an animalcule to an ELEPHANT) gives, devotes & dedicates to his dearest brother, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a Scotsman; and also (as one animalcule to another animalcule) he gives, devotes & dedicates it to his equally dear, bastard little brother, Paul De Kruif, an American."

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