Est. 1917 · Tokyo, Japan · 48 lenses
Nippon Kogaku Kōgyō K.K. — later renamed Nikon Corporation — was established in July 1917 in Tokyo through the merger of the optical division of Tokyo Keiki Seisaku-sho, the Iwaki Glass Manufacturing Co., and the optical-instrument arm of Fujii Lens Manufacturing, with the explicit goal of producing military-grade optics domestically. German optical engineers including Heinrich Acht and Hermann Dillmann were retained as consultants in the 1920s, and the company's early output focused on binoculars, periscopes, microscopes, and aerial-photography lenses. The 'Nikkor' brand first appeared in 1933 on the Aero-Nikkor 18 cm f/4.5 aerial-survey lens.
Postwar, Nikon pivoted decisively to civilian cameras and lenses. The Nikon I rangefinder (1948) and the improved Nikon S (1951) earned international recognition when David Douglas Duncan, Horace Bristol, and other photojournalists covering the Korean War carried the Nippon Kogaku-built Nikkor 50 mm f/1.5 and 85 mm f/2 — recognized in Western press as optically superior to contemporary Zeiss and Leitz glass — and praised them in print. The Nikon F SLR system (1959) established the F-mount, a lens interface that would remain mechanically compatible across more than sixty years of manual-focus, autofocus, and digital-SLR cameras.
Nikon's lens line evolved through several distinct generations of mount and metering compatibility. The original non-AI lenses (1959–1977) used external 'rabbit-ears' aperture coupling; the AI (Automatic maximum-Indexing) revision of 1977 added a bayonet-coupled aperture ring readable by the camera, and AI-S (1981) tightened the linear-aperture-control specification for shutter-priority and program AE. Autofocus arrived with the F3AF (1983, a first attempt with two specialized AF lenses), then matured with the F-501 / N2020 (1986). Through the 1990s and early 2000s the AF, AF-D (Distance-encoded), AF-I (in-lens motor), AF-S (Silent Wave Motor), and G (no aperture ring) revisions extended the F-mount feature set. The Nikon D1 (1999) and the full-frame Nikon D3 (2007) brought the system into the digital era while preserving back-compatibility with virtually every F-mount lens ever made.
Nikon's optical design philosophy evolved from adapted double-Gauss and Sonnar derivatives in the manual-focus era — the Noct-Nikkor 58 mm f/1.2 (1977), with its hand-ground aspherical front element, was the first production photographic lens with an aspherical surface for non-night use — to increasingly complex aspherical and ED-glass designs in the AF and digital periods. The transition to the Z-mount mirrorless system (2018, with the Z 6 and Z 7) shortened the flange focal distance from 46.5 mm (F-mount) to 16 mm and widened the throat from 44 mm to 55 mm — the largest mount throat of any current 35 mm-format mirrorless system. The new design envelope is visible in flagship S-line lenses like the Z 50 mm f/1.2 S, the Z 58 mm f/0.95 S Noct (manual-focus, no AF gearing required at the f/0.95 aperture), the Z 14-24 mm f/2.8 S, and the Z 135 mm f/1.8 S Plena — the latter named for its uniformly bright, undimmed image plane edge-to-edge, a defining characteristic of the wide-throat mount.
Notable designs: Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2, Nikkor 13mm f/5.6, AI Nikkor 105mm f/2.5, AF-S 14-24mm f/2.8G, Nikkor Z 58mm f/0.95 S Noct