Jozeph Miksa Petzval

Born: 6 th January 1807 in Spisska Bela, Hungary (now in Slovakia).
Died 17 th September 1891 in Vienna, Austria

There are different versions of Petzval's name, and, in addition to the one given here, he is often known as Jozef Maximilian Petzval.
Jozef was the son of a schoolmaster and he attended schools in Levoca and Kosice. In 1826 he entered the University of Pest to study philosophy and mathematics. Later the town of Pest was to join with the town of Buda on the opposite bank of the Danube to form Budapest.
    Petzval became an assistant at the University of Pest in 1835. Then, two years later, he accepted a chair of mathematics at the University of Vienna.
    Petzval worked for much of his life on the Laplace transform. He was influenced by the work of Liouville and wrote both a long paper and a two-volume treatise on the Laplace transform and its application to ordinary linear differential equations. His study is thorough but not entirely satisfactory since he was unable to use contour integration to invert the transform.
    If it wasn’t for a student of Petzval's we might today call the Laplace transform the Petzval transform. Petzval fell out with this student who then accused Petzval of plagiarising Lapface's work. Although this was untrue, Boole and Poincar , influenced no doubt by the quarrel, called the transformation the Laplace transform.
    Petzval is best remembered for his work on optical lenses and lens aberration done in the early 1840's (Petzval curvature is named after him) which allowed the construction of modern cameras. Petzval produced an achromatic portrait fens that was vastly superior to the simple meniscus fens then in use.
    His work in optics is described as follows:
    At the University of Vienna he studied in detail L.M.Daguerre's invention, the so-called daguerreotype, and took on shortening its exposure time from minutes to seconds. In 1840, his extraordinary mathematical talent allowed him to assess and build an anastigmatic with six times greater luminosity. This Petzval highly luminous early form of photo lens was used by the enterprising Viennese optician Voigtl under, who launched its mass production and won a silver medal at the Worlds Exhibition Fair in Paris. Petzval also perfected the telescope and designed the opera glass.

Petzval won many distinctions for his work. In addition to a medal, he was elected a member of the Academy of Science of Vienna, the Union of Czech Mathematics and he received the platinum medal of Chevalier from France. A street in Vienna bears his name, as does a crater on the far side of the moon.  

A Petzval Lens

The Petzval lens is a very old design form (150 years!) that is still a mainstay in lens libraries. The original Petzval Portrait lens used a cemented doublet and air-spaced doublet, but the term Petzval lens is now generally applied to lenses containing two separate groups (usually doublets) in which both groups contribute positive power.
    The Petzval lens is a good design form for high-aperture narrow field applications. Curiously, although invented by Petzval to improve the field coverage of high-aperture systems, it makes no attempt to correct the Petzval curvature. In modern designs, the Petzval lens often incorporates a negative element near the image plane to flatten the field.
    The lens included here is a typical design that can be used as a starting design for specific modification. It is scaled to 50mm focal length.

Last updated on Monday August 30, 2004

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