Edward Bausch was an American engineer and businessman, who served as president of Bausch & Lomb Company from 1926 to 1935.
Background
Edward Bausch was born on September 26, 1854, at Rochester, New York, the first of six children of German Lutheran parents, John Jacob and Barbara (Zimmerman) Bausch. His father, a migrant in 1849 from Suessen, Wurttemberg, where he had served an apprenticeship to his elder brother, an optician, had opened an optical shop at Rochester in 1853. Starting as a distributor of his brother's products, John Jacob Bausch soon began to carve horn-rim spectacle frames and to grind lenses himself. In 1866, with Henry Lomb as a partner, he formed the Vulcanite Optical Instrument Company and acquired an exclusive franchise to make optical instruments from hard rubber.
Education
Young Edward Bausch attended the Rochester Realschule and Rochester High School and worked after school at the shop. One job was to rush the heated sheets of vulcanite from his mother's cookstove to his father's newly improvised hand press in an expanded shop opened nearby. In order to fit himself for the business, Edward won a scholarship in engineering at Cornell University, where he studied from 1871 until 1874.
Career
After graduation Edward Bausch returned to assist in the layout of the new factory of the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company. With the opening of the new building, Edward Bausch focused his attention on the design and production of the company's first microscopes. Under the tutelage of Ernest Gundlach, a skilled optician recently arrived from Germany, he built several microscopes in time to exhibit them at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. As the company's representative in charge of that exhibit for three months, Bausch eagerly examined the machine tools and other new products of American and foreign production and met numerous scientists who were interested in optical equipment. He returned to Rochester determined to produce quality instruments in sufficient quantity to permit their sale at moderate prices.
With several of his new scientific friends Bausch became a charter member of the American Society of Microscopists (later the American Microscopical Society), formed in 1878. On his trip to Boston he visited Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose enthusiastic endorsement of the Bausch & Lomb microscope had made that city the company's best market. While in Boston, Bausch received a franchise to manufacture some of the objectives and other optical instruments designed by Robert B. Tolles and Alvan G. Clark, the leading lens makers in the country, and on his return he visited and made a similar arrangement with the aging Charles A. Spencer, America's pioneer microscopist, in nearby Geneva, and persuaded Spencer's son Clarence to join the Rochester firm as an instrument maker. Bausch secured his first patent in 1882 on a Trichinoscope, a microscope designed for use in detecting contaminated meat. The next year he patented a microscope illuminator, and a year later a binocular microscope.
As one of the founders in January 1879 of the Rochester Microscopical Society, Bausch played an active role in its transformation two years later into the Rochester Academy of Science and participated in its programs and exhibits. The Microscopical Section remained the Academy's most active branch. With sixty members, each equipped with his own microscope, it was ready in 1884 to entertain the seventh annual convention of the American Society of Microscopists, which met in Rochester. Bausch seized this occasion to lead the visiting scientists, including two members of the Royal Microscopical Society of London, on a tour of his optical factory. In order to promote a more effective use of the microscope by amateurs as well as by scientists, he published in 1885 the first edition of his 96-page book, The Manipulations of the Microscope.
Although his work in microscopy continued, Bausch's interests were already shifting into the field of photography. He had assumed charge of the production of photographic lenses at the plant in 1883, and this new responsibility brought him into collaboration with another ingenious Rochesterian, George Eastman. Bausch probably supplied the lens but not the shutter used in the first Kodak, which Eastman patented in 1888. Three years later Bausch patented the iris diaphragm shutter, developed to supply Eastman's needs, and the Kodak manufacturer continued until 1912 to rely heavily on Bausch & Lomb for lenses and shutters for his expanding output.
When Bausch made his first trip to Europe in 1888, he visited all the principal optical centers and developed friendly relations with several microscopists in England and France, as well as with Roderich Zeiss and Prof. Ernst Abbe at Jena in Germany. He quickly recognized the scholarly leadership which that center enjoyed, and on later trips to Jena in 1890 and 1893 he negotiated working agreements with the Zeiss Optical Company which granted Bausch & Lomb the exclusive franchise in the American markets for the manufacture of its anastigmatic lenses, binoculars, and range finders. To strengthen the company's productive capacity, particularly in the instrument field, Bausch negotiated an alliance with Saegmuller & Company of Washington, D. C. , which resulted in its absorption by Bausch & Lomb in 1905.
Three other Bausch brothers had early joined the family firm: Henry, John, and William. The youngest, William (1861 - 1944), affable and gregarious, developed a cordial relationship between the company's management and its expanding force of workmen. William Bausch also directed the company's optical glass plant, started experimentally in 1912 and brought into operation in 1915 in time to supply the needs of America and its allies in World War I. His ability to harmonize the joint efforts of the scientists assigned to the company by the National Defense Council and the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution with the local production force soon boosted output from 2, 000 pounds a month to 2, 000 pounds a day and won praise for Bausch & Lomb.
For more than half a century Edward Bausch was the firm's responsible head. He became vice-president in 1899 and on the death of his father in 1926 succeeded to the presidency, a post he held until 1935, when he became chairman of the board. Though he continued to explore new fields of development and took out some additional patents, his major contribution was in industrial management.
The administrative skills he displayed prompted his election as an officer and director of four Rochester banks and five local industries. He also served as an officer and director of three local charities and of the Bureau of Municipal Research. A local benefactor, he provided, with other members of the Bausch and Lomb families, for the erection (1930) of the John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb Memorial building at the new river campus of the University of Rochester. He was so impressed by the scientific displays of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which he visited on frequent trips to Germany, that he gave a site adjoining his home on East Avenue and a fund for the erection of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences, completed in 1942. Two years later, at the age of eighty-nine, Bausch died in Rochester of bronchopneumonia. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester.
Edward Bausch was a charter member of the American Society of Microscopists (later the American Microscopical Society), a founding member of the Rochester Microscopical (later transformation into the Rochester Academy of Science).
Connections
On October 31, 1878, Edward Bausch married Matilda G. Morrell of Syracuse; they had no children.