One hundred years ago this month, at a trade fair in Germany, an optical-instrument company from a small town near Frankfurt quietly launched a novel little product that one of its engineers, Oskar Barnack, had been working on for more than a decade.
E. Leitz and Co. gave the Leica miniature camera barely any space at its booth alongside its range of serious microscopes and the like. It had become the pet product of the 54-year-old second-generation head of the family company, Ernst Leitz II, but was regarded skeptically by many of the older men on the board.
