Laubman & Pank's team in 1950s Adelaide makes design improvements from rocket cameras to road marker guide
Laubman & Pank's instrument department under Don Schultz made technologies from catadioptric cameras for Blue Streak missile tests at Woomera rocket range to an optical device for road marking.
Don Schultz, nephew of company founder Carl Laubman, continued bringing a stream of design innovations to Adelaide optometry company Laubman & Park, after 1947 when, with David Pank, the son of Harold Pank, he bought a controlling interest in the practice.
While Pank looked after management, Schultz started the company’s instrument construction department to continue the wartime defence work and extending optic technologies. Besides doing binocular and camera repairs, the department made an optical range finder, an aerial photostereoscope, a low f-number Cassegrain telescope with a hyperbolic figure on the primary mirror, Schmidt camera corrector plates and signal lamps for the navy.
In 1952, it made catadioptric cameras for Blue Streak missile tests by the Weapons Research Establishment at the Woomera Rocket Range. It made a toolmaker’s profile projector and an optical device for road marking. An biocular catadioptric magnifier for low-vision patients, a visual field screener, a Greens-type refractor head and vision screeners for industry and for children’s vision were other designs.
In 1953, it was the first laboratory in Australia to use high-vacuum coating technology for optical surfaces. In 1956, it patented a concept for making one-piece industrial eye protectors.
Schultz, with his brother Ross, developed lens processing machines including a lens edging machine and a diamond generator. Schultz became known for his painstaking optical design calculations carried out using seven-figure logarithmic tables in a book the size of a large novel for an optical design that would take thousands of lines of handwritten calculations and sometimes weeks.
In the l950s, Schultz saw possibilities for CR39, a plastic material used during World War II to line aircraft fuel tanks. He used the material to create a major industrial offshoot of Laubman & Park called Sola International.