Wild complexity allied with reliability.

Mechanical carburetors provided the right air/fuel mixture to internal combustion motors for most of the 20th century. With few exceptions, they are now obsolete, replaced by computer controlled fuel injection devices.

While not as complex as, say, a mechanical watch, these devices are nonetheless exercises in complexity that a Rube Goldberg could revel in.

My 1975 BMW motorcycle uses two Bing carburetors and every decade or so I have to dismantle these to replace worn or rotted rubber seals to ensure that the air/fuel ratio delivered to the combustion chambers of the horizontally opposed, air cooled twin motor is more or less correct. I say “more or less“ because the nature of the mechanical complexity of the device means that precision has to yield to accuracy. Approximately right beats completely wrong in this instance. The penalty for this approximation compared with modern fuel injection systems is maybe a couple of miles per gallon lost in fuel efficiency. The reward is the parts will remain available for the next century, whereas the fuel injection system’s computers will all be unavailable by then. You can read about Bing’s long history here.

Here’s an exploded diagram of a typical Bing mechanical carburetor:

Bing carb for a Rotax motor.

The late 1950s Leica M2, which I would argue was the best 35mm film rangefinder camera ever made, was even more complex, yet every bit as capable. Just like that Bing carb, disassembly, cleaning, lubrication, replacement of rubber parts and adjustment were simply rituals one put up with in exchange for using the best. You happily succumbed to these requirements in exchange for the sensual joy of using the finest analog machines invented by man:

Leica M2 parts diagram.

My M2 was sold many years ago when better digital cameras came along. The Bings, however, soldier on after over three decades in my care. And that’s because the BMW Airhead has yet to be improved upon.

Small and complex.

German being an ugly tongue, I quote one of my favorite jokes about the Master Race in French:

That’s not quite right as the original translated to “Why make things simple when complex works just as well?” but it’s close enough. And French makes it beautiful.

Never was a camera more deserving of this appellation than the 1930’s Nagel Pupille. Ostensibly a roll film camera taking 16 3x4cm images on 127 size film, it was distinguished by a fine choice of optics from Leitz, Zeiss and Cooke. ‘Pupille’ is French for the eye’s pupil, and the Germans had the good sense not to use the functional but ugly German “Schüler”.

Twin Lens Reflex, if you please.

The stock camera was an eye level finder design, but you could go Full Monty and go nuts at the same time with the twin lens reflex adapter shown above.

Putting aside that piece of lunacy, it was a great camera with fine lenses, ideally suited to the 127 film format, a far more compact version of the larger 120 size, offering 33% of the film area and delivering excellent quality. For those concerned about accurate focusing, Leitz offered a clip-on rangefinder which added little to the ergonomics of the twin lens reflex converter.

With Leitz rangefinder and Leitz Elmar fitted.

The rangefinder is uncoupled. After determining the subject’s distance, the reading on the circular dial had to be manually transferred to the lens. Naturally.

August Nagel, the Pupille’s designer, went on to design Kodak’s line of 35mm Retina folding cameras.

Severe and beautiful.

The German Bauhaus movement (1919-33), headed by architect Walter Gropius, gave the world unrelieved ugliness when it came to buildings. If ever there was a model for the bleakness of the Nazi concentration camps, the humorless, colorless and severe Bauhaus style was it.

But when it comes to cameras many good things came about, perhaps the most famous being the Leica M2. Eschewing the embossed finder frames of the M3, the M2 was a study in severity and cleanliness of line and arguably the acme of rangefinder camera design with its uncluttered ‘one frame at a time’ finder which displayed 35, 50 and 90mm frames when the related lens was bayonetted to the beautiful body.

But there’s another design which takes the Bauhaus aesthetic far further and it’s that of the East German Werra.

The Werra I of the mid-1950s.

What is especially noteworthy is that the camera was designed within the Soviet block, not one known for its originality, commies generally preferring to steal designs appropriated from Zeiss Ikon and, when it comes to motorcycles, BMW. Indeed the Russkie copy of the BMW airhead bike, which goes under the name of Ural, remains in production to this day and yes, it’s genuinely awful.

But the Werra was special, with its clean lines and integrated design. While later designs added rangefinders and exposure meters, spoiling the lines, the original Werra I was gorgeous to behold. The only function on the top plate is the shutter release. Film was advanced by rotating the collar at the rear of the lens. Indeed, I recall selling these as a kid and thinking that the grinding noise accompanying this act did not predict longevity. I was right. Apertures, focus and shutter speeds were adjusted with concentric rings on the lens and the baseplate housed the exposure counter and rewind knob. And that was it. The provided hood reversed to protect the lens, along with a screw-on cap. The leatherette trim was standard black or, far better, olive green.

A beautiful design, one which was last made in the late 1960s. Examples can be had for a song, which is about what they are worth, for many were made and you probably need two or three just to get one working example.

A quirky, miniature 35mm camera.

If the spy camera special, the Minox, had a focused target audience, it’s harder to say what the purpose of the Tessina was.

A wrist-sized twin lens reflex.

Made between 1957 and 1996, the Tessina used regular 35mm sprocketed film stock, but this had to be loaded in special cassettes. The camera was just 2.5″ x 2″ x 1″ in size. The image was 14mm x 21mm (compare with the 8mm x 11mm of the Minox) making the area more than three times the size, and 34% that of the full 24mm x 36mm regular 35mm film frame. A cassette was good for some 24 exposures.

Accessories included a wrist strap, minuscule selenium cell exposure meter and a pentaprism for eye level viewing, the default being waist (wrist?) level through the composing lens. The taking lens is off to the side – like a miniature Rolleiflex TLR turned through 90 degrees. Film advance was by spring, good for 8 exposures, wound like a watch, testifying to the Tessina’s Swiss heritage.

There’s no arguing with the quality of the machine, and I recall selling a couple when working a summer job at Dixon’s in London in the late 1960s. But why you would buy one of these costly pieces of jewelry beats me to this day.

Spy special.

Spying is not what it used to be. Today’s Russkie steals data after hacking your cloud server or uses his cell phone. The images are perfect, sent by encrypted cellular mail and infinitely enlargeable.

Ponder then the pre-war and cold war spy’s challenges. He had to make images of those stolen military secrets in poor lighting, had a limited number of snaps on a roll and the chances are that his exposures were off, his shutter speeds too slow and the result a grainy mess. Then along came the Minox camera in 1936 and his life was made considerably easier. For the first time a truly pocketable, high quality camera could make half decent images and the minuscule 50 shot film cartridge was not that hard to secrete away. The original Minox measured just 3.1″ x 1.1″ x 0.6″, and weighed but 4.6 ozs. The cartridge was smaller still. The 8 x 11mm negative, just 10% the area of a 35mm film original, was useable in the right hands.

Small and stealthy. Shown extended and ready for action.

Appropriately enough the first Minoxes were made in Latvia, one of the three Baltic states sharing a border with Comrade Ivan and forever looking over its shoulder at the gathering Russkie hordes on its border, waiting to invade. They used AK47s, not Minoxes, to do their thing. So production was moved to – where else? – Germany after the war, and the Russkie spies were no longer home grown but came from Cambridge (Burgess, McLean, Philby, Blunt) or Los Alamos (Klaus Fuchs). But nationality notwithstanding, the Minox soldiered err, spied, on.

The Model B shown above included a selenium exposure meter and the neat metal lanyard provided just the right distance measure for a sheet of A4 with nuclear trigger drawings. A complete subsystem grew up around the camera including an enlarger and projector (to better enjoy your holiday snaps from Chernobyl) and there was even a binocular attachment for when you needed a real close up of Comrade Stalin’s murderous mustache.

Once the Cold War faded the Minox faded with it, later attempts at compact 35mm cameras a flop. At one point Leica bought the maker, proving that German financial acumen was not bred at Harvard Business School. But it was the spy camera of choice for some 50 years and is quite beautiful to operate and behold.