UNBREAKABLE LENSES

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 125, 12 June 1937, Page 11

UNBREAKABLE LENSES

de Gooreynd, J British musician, composer, airman and inventor, arrived in New York recently from London with an idea which may cut the high price of fine camcras to within a fraction of their present cost, Mr. Gooreynd is managing director of one of Britain's largest music publishing liouses and chairman of the Combined Optical Industries Ltd., a firm now marketing a variety of optical lenses made from a plastic material which tbe inventor feels can replace glass for this purpose at very much less cost. The* new plastic material is already being produced in the United States by the firm of E. du Pont de Memours to whom Mr. de Gooreynd hopes to introduce his discovery tliat lenses can be moulded from it. The invention consists of a molding process which delivers specially designed machined lenses already polishcd and ready for mounting into cameras, binoculaxs, opera glasses, telescopes, spectacles; range finders, periscopes, natural ecientific instruinents, television apparatus, etc. The lenses are

made for their particular purposes from a combination of the new plastic materials. For all praetical. purposes I they are unbreakable and about half the weigbt of glass. Tt is'also claimed. that such lenses have certain ' optical' properties wliich make them superior to glass. ' Som© idea of the dift'erence in. price . may be gained from the fact that a good quality camera of which the glass lens cost about £10 might be fitted with this lens costing about £1 12/-. Complicated aspherical lenses marketedl at £7 could be sold for £1 it is claimed. Opera glasses with these lenses have already been made in England to sell at 12/-, which compare with those with glass lenses selling at £3 and over. • . .. * ; Mr. de Gooreynd is a Belgian by" birth, though brought up and educated in England. Soon after leaving Oxford he designcd and built a model airplane which. won tlie "Wakefield International Cupi He. also invented a piano attachmeiit for reeording on paper what is being played on >the instruxnent. - '