Re: Wirgin/Edixa names for Patrick ( digest 1592)

[P3D Bob Howard <bobh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

RE: Patrick has Wirgin Stereo but can find no name of Edixa Camera Co.
on it?

As I mentined I know a lot about Edixa and Wirgin Bros. having met Henry
in NYC once. But I have not held or seen the Wirgin stereo. I mentioned
Wirgin was famous for cheap German 35's like ARGUS in America but got
better with the Edixa line. So here is the scoop form "The Register" by
Rudolf Lea (1993 Wittig Books-Germany):
"Wirgin Kamerawerk, Wiesbaden, Germany
The German firm of Wirgin began camera manufacturing in 1923. Because of
Nazi persecution, the Wirgin brothers emigrated in 1938, but one of
them, Henry Wirgin, returned to Wiesbaden in 1948 and reopened the firm.
Four years later he asked Heinz Waaske, the firm's inventive engineer,
to design a single lens reflex model and the basic Edixa was the
result..." The rest of the story tells of the innovations in SLRs by
Waaske, but because the firm was small did not get the market success of
the big markers and only the features of the 1962 Electronica got
patented. I think we can assume that the Edixa names were for the SLRs
and their one stereo bore the WIRGIN name of the company! Perhaps the
stereo is also the genius of their crack engineer who made the company
go from shoddy to snazzy. BobH
( I was in a little hole in the wall Jewish camera shop in NYC and the
only propritor introduced me to a white haired gentleman with a cane and
said meet Dr. Henry Wirgin, and I did get to shake his hand. They had
probably been friends in Germany?? At that shop I bought a used Leica
IIIc and later found it was the one used to illistrate the Leica manual
in many places, until superseded by the IIIf. So that little shop had
magic or connections!)


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