Joseph Maximilian Petzval, Spišská Belá
Joseph Maximilian Petzval is considered as one of the most important professors of the Viennese university in the field of applied mathematics in the 19th century.
He contributed significantly to invention and construction of objective lenses for astronomic telescopes in decades of 1840’s - 1860’s.
His bust is installed in front of his birth house and musuem in center of Spišská Belá, Slovakia.
In 1840, Joseph Maximilian Petzval completed plans for two different objective lenses, a portrait and a landscape one.
He even filed the glass for these lenses himself. Throughout the 1860s, Petzval’s objective lens remained unparalleled and contributed to the massive development of photography in its first decades.
It wasn’t until 1857 that J.M.Petzval presented his plans for a landscape objective lens to the academy in Vienna.
It was produced in a similar way to the one that he had made in 1840. He called it a dialyt.
This new lens proved useful not just in photography, but also in telescopes, later in cinematography and in astronomic telescopes.
Petzval’s name and his reputation are maybe best remembered in the area of astrophotography.
He was a significant mathematician, inventor, founder of modern optics and photography, a professor of the University of Vienna.
He worked at the university until he was 70 and then retired. He died on September 17, 1891 in Vienna.
Sources: muzeum.sk, own visit and pictures at the site