Telescope Reviews: World’s biggest binoculars made in the 1940s

Your servant found that Zeiss 25 & 40 x 200 specimen in 1967. " Come on in here boy, to see the largest binocular you have ever seen !" said my escort, whose specialty was sunken treasure Caribbean nautical archaeology. He had just noticed the 25&40 x 200 in a darkened warehouse . A forklift took them outside, where I photographed them ( I have the dated B&W negatives and prints), and viewed through them.

The bodies are welded steel . They were called FRG 44 . FRG = Flakrichtgeraet. FRG 44 may refer to the entire apparatus, which was two of these binoculars , L & R, and their mount and readouts.

Leitz , Busch, and Zeiss were asked to develop large Flak binoculars. Leitz was FRG 43, as I recall. I have its plans, and the optical design calculations in the old-style cursive German handwriting. It looks like a large, opened binocular trench periscope or Scherenfernrohr= scissors telescope. It was 30(IIRC) x 180( 200mm? I do not want to dig in microfilm copies today), with an integral finder (12 x 70? from memory). There was a 150mm. version also? Pics of those on the Leitz rooftop are in the Hans Seeger book.

I had already done archival research which found a report by Irvine C. Gardner of the National Bureau of Standards, who had been one of the Allied team which explored the Jena works between the end of the war and the Soviet takeover which dismantled the CZJ factory. I met Gardner at his home that summer. He was the USA rangefinder expert in WW I. See the biography in the ATM books edited by Ingalls, available re-arranged , with additions, from Willmann-Bell, Richmond, Virginia.

Dr. Gardner ( RIP in very early 1970's) showed his photo of this 25 & 40 x 200 on its mount, together with its mate, which was damaged in a pointless April 1945( or thereabouts) US bombing raid. A US bomb probably caused the dent which is or was in the specimen here discussed. In the Gardner photos, each of the two 25 &40 x 200 were mounted on the left and right sides of a rectangular column.

Later, I told George Morris (RIP) what I had seen. Morris then owned the periscope-style 1932 Japanese Naval Technical Institute 40 x 200, which went from Long Beach to Escondido to Rockford, Illinois, to Whidbey Island in Washington State to Kevin Kuhne after Morris' stroke,to another New Englander to ??. There is a picture of David Bushnell posing with them in an early 1950's Popular Mechanics or Popular Science : "World's Largest Binocular" . I have forgotten or lost track where the 40 x 200 1932 JNTI was recently.
Collectors chase it. It is uncoated, bronze, very heavy, perhaps 300-400 pounds.

There is a 250 mm WW II binocular telescope in the Tokyo Science Museum, IIRC.

There is a Zeiss 25 & 40 x 200 mm. specimen in a museum or military depot in the UK. I do not have the details in memory.

Total production of the 25&40 x 200 (or of the FRG 44 as a pair?), was something under 12 , IIRC. I do not know if any reached active Flak service.

In 1970, the 200mm Zeiss was in the inventory of the Smithsonian department headed by Alvan Clark & Sons expert and author Deborah Jean Warner. She told me that it was on loan from the US Navy. There was nothing naval about it that I ever saw in archival records. I did further archival research in 1970, finding 25&40 x 200 original Zeiss records. I know that it had been at USAF Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio soon after the war. Senior staff in 1970: "Yes, I remember that big binocular" . How it came from Wright Field to be in Naval Historical custody is a mystery.

Zeiss records which were extracted from Jena pre-Soviet takeover were also at Wright Field shortly after the war. Edward Kaprelian (RIP) might have been the man with whom to speak, but he was RIP when I realized that.

Morris told Kevin Kuhne (RIP)about what I had found. Kuhne phoned me repeatedly in the late 1970s or early 1980's about this topic. He accumulated enough information from Morris , and some from me, to eventually find and convince a staff member at the Naval Historical Center to let him have the 25 & 40 x 200 on what Kuhne called a "long term" loan, in return for fixing some problems it had.

Kuhne never told me how or when the Navy decided to repossess it. Kuhne had suffered some strokes before we last spoke. Perhaps someone can fill in the details about how it found its way from the Navy to its present home in a museum in Germany. I thought that the Naval Oservatory station in Flagstaff, Arizona, would have been a suitable home. In a phone conversation, Dr. Seeger said that it was "government to government" . No surprise there. Was it quid pro quo? Would the ESO house it in an accessible small observatory near their facilties in ideal Chilean locations?

It is noteworthy that in the Kuhne section of the Seeger book there is not one mention of my archival digging for the CZJ 25&40 x 200 records, nor of my "discovery" of it,with lots of dust on it, in 1967.