Olympus History

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I began to develop a new shutter in response to the market demand for a half-size SLR camera.

In the mid-1950s, there was no television in the house where I lived, and so I used to spend my evenings reading novels. In those quiet moments, I began to reflect on the half-size boom, and to wonder if people would want a half-size SLR camera. It wasn't simply a matter of halving the design of a normal 35mm camera. A 35mm camera is wide. The mirror swings up around its long axis, so it's the short side that rises. Of course, it would be disastrous if the mirror hit the lens. Today, retrofocus lenses are commonplace. With a half-size camera, everything is cut in half, so the mirror has to rotate around its short axis. This means that there is greater risk that the mirror will hit the lens. We couldn't allow the long side of the mirror to swivel up, so we created the first SLR camera with a mirror that swiveled sideways. But this created a new problem, since light going to the side no longer reached the eye. While I was thinking about this at home, I came up with the idea of directing the sideways light upwards. The next challenge was the shutter. Flipping the mirror horizontally also lengthened it horizontally, and now it was hitting the shutter. This wouldn't work. Finally I decided to use a rotary focal plane shutter. The concept was so unusual that I was often asked if the camera had a focal plane shutter. Working on puzzles like this is a much more interesting after-dinner activity than reading a mystery novel! Anyway, I thought that if I could develop a focal plane shutter, I could create an SLR camera, even though it would be longer horizontally. I assembled the ideas I had developed to break through the technology barrier and took them into my office, where I put them in my desk drawer. We were still extremely busy with the design and manufacture of the Pen. The Pen was a major hit, with sales in excess of four million units. Some time later Mr. Sakurai, the head of design, told me that people were asking for an SLR camera and asked me for my thoughts. I took the drawings that I had produced while working on the Pen out of my drawer and immediately showed them to my manager. At first he was surprised, because the camera was a different shape from a conventional SLR. I explained each of the features to him, and eventually he told me to go ahead. It occurred to me then that if you wait until someone gives you an order to start work on a project, you lose around half a year. But if you exercise your mind all the time when you're busy, ideas will come into your head, and they will lead you to something new.

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