GERMAN PRESENTATION Mr.

JOHN JACOB

BAUSCH

ABOUT BAUSCH AND LOMB

John Jacob Bausch, a German immigrant, came to the United States in 1849 and, in 1853, started one of the first optical companies in Rochester, New York. This company became the international company Bausch & Lomb Incorporated, a maker of contact lenses and related products. Bausch stocked his first store with $62.00 he borrowed from his friend, Henry Lomb, who later became his partner

ABOUT HIS EARLY LIFE

John Jacob Bausch was born July 25, 1830, in Gross Suessin, Wurttemberg, Germany. His father George Bausch, a baker, and his mother Annie Schmidt. John had 3 sons , Edward, Henry, and William from his first wife Barbara Zimmerman.

HIS CAREER.

At the age of 18 working in an optical shop in Berne, Switzerland at the salary of $.36 a day. Bausch decided to go to America and immigrated in April of 1849,on landing in New York City the ships passengers were told New York was overcrowded. Bausch then went to Buffalo. He did many odd jobs for months.

When he was working as a wood tuner he hurt his hand and was incapacitated for four months and was unable to go back to wood turning. It was then that he decided to start his own optical business. In 1853 Bausch established a modest optical shop in the Reynolds Arcade in Rochester. After a year of struggling, Bausch borrowed $62 from his friend, Henry Lomb, with the promise of taking him on as a partner if the business took off

The partners struggled for seven years, during which time Lomb lived at Bauschs home by this time Bausch owed Lomb $1000. A turning point was reached when Bausch noticed a piece of vulcanized rubber while walking down the street. He had an idea that this was good material for making frames. He began to make frames out of the new material. These frames became so popular that Bausch and his two sons had to work seven days a week, often into the night, to make enough frames to meet the demand.

Bausch paid off his debts to Lomb and had a bank balance of $800. Bausch now bought power equipment for grinding and polishing lenses From the India Rubber Comb Company, he secured the exclusive rights to manufacture optical instruments out of vulcanite and thus formed the Vulcanite Optical Instrument Company, incorporated in 1866. Later he changed the name to Bausch & Lomb Optical Company.

HIS ACHIEVEMENTS.

In 1893, the Zeiss Works of Jena developed a new type of binoculars, and Bausch & Lomb acquired the American rights to these patents. The Bausch & Lomb instruments became the standard for the United States Army and Navy The company continued to expand, opening offices in Chicago in 1896; Boston in 1903; San Francisco in 1904; and London in 1908

1915 Bausch introduced motion picture lenses for the new movie industry. In 1918 at the end of the war, the company had 6,000 employees and sales of more than $14 million. John Jacob Bausch lived to the age of 96 long enough to see the business he had started from scratch as a poor immigrant grow to be the largest optical company in the world. Bausch died in 1908

One of its most successful products was Ray-Ban sunglasses Won an Oscar for its Cinemascope lens in the 1950s, and made it onto the Fortune 500 list in 1975. Since the 1970s it has been a leader in contact lenses, medical products, and research, having acquired several other companies in the 1960s through the 1990s