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International Exakta MeetingLeiden, The Netherlands,
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The meeting was held in the university city of Leiden, The Netherlands, from 3 to 5 November.
About 40 people attended altogether, mostly from Germany, the Netherlands and the UK,
and two each from Belgium, France and Spain. We were sorry not to see anyone from outside
Western Europe. The organisation had been carried out by our members Hugo Ruys and Harry Körmeling
and by their close associate Martin Kroon.  The 17 Exakta Circle members were: from the UK: Tom Ackermann, Don Baldwin,
Terry Calvert, Alan Hopwood,
Peter Longden, John Richardson, Peter Snow (with his wife Jenny), and Elizabeth and Michael Spencer;
from the Netherlands: Harry Körmeling, Hugo Ruys, Joep Verbeek, Roland Zwiers. Hein Ehrhardt and
Nanke Meute-Dikkers also attended the Saturday dinner; from France: Michel Rouah, with his wife
Chantal; and from Spain, Valentin Sama with his wife Emilia Martin. 
 The “nice thing” that Hugo had warned us was to be done by the Steenbergen Foundation was that they gave us dinner on the Saturday night. Besides our members Hein and Nanke, the Foundation brought three of its own guests to a very convivial evening. Back to Top Friday
Elizabeth and I flew in from Edinburgh to Amsterdam two hours late about 2.30 local time, having
had nothing but a KLM black-bread cheese butty and six coffees in the last eight hours, and got the
train down to Leiden, which was comfortable and quick. The hotel was three minutes’ walk away, and
after getting our breath back and about thirty seconds’ zonk, we joined the meeting. The rest of the
afternoon was spent largely in meeting Circle members who till then had just been names, and trying
to pretend we understood spoken French. Saturday
 Saturday began with a visit to the Boerhaave Museum, the National Museum of the History of Science
and Medicine, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the hotel. Your poor, unfit old Editor needed a rest
half-way, and spent some time idly watching a great crested grebe that seemed to own a stretch of the
canal. It was really rotten to a quite innocent coot. The museum itself was splendid: anyone within
fifty miles would be well-advised to make a detour to see what may be the finest collection of
seventeenth-century instruments and devices anywhere. Leiden was the site of the first university
in the Netherlands, and names connected with it include those of Christiaan Huyghens, who founded
the wave theory of light and invented the pendulum clock, and whose mathematics helped Newton with
his ideas; Joseph Plantin, who was typographer to the University when Dutch printing led the world;
and from more modern days Jacob Van t’Hoff, who was the first recipient of the Nobel prize for
chemistry and who founded the science of stereochemistry. 
 Saturday evening’s dinner in the hotel was very generously paid for by the Steenbergen Foundation, whose Committee, led by the Chairman Hein Ehrhardt, was present in force. After dinner Hugo made some presentations to Hein and Nanke, and made a special point of personally thanking Marlena Arnhardt for her efforts at multi-lingual translations. Nanke got into this act, too, and delivered a pretty speech in Spanish. The Steenbergen Stifting then presented everyone with a Delft blue faience tile with the dates 1912-1918-1942, commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of Ihagee. It shows the names of six of the seven founding partners in Ihagee Kamerawerk Steenbergen & Co. 
There followed the second slide show, some pictures taken by Martin Kroon’s father on a Kine-Exakta before the war, many of them still bright with colour; and then the second highlight talk of the weekend, a short dissertation by Hartmut Thiele on the subject of his research. This was simultaneously put into English by Klaus Rademaker. Hartmut reckoned he has input the data for about seven million lenses into his computer, and thinks there are maybe only about thirty million to go. As for Peter’s talk, members will find at the end of this report what they can do to help Hartmut’s ongoing research. Back to Top Sunday
On Sunday morning we were forced out of our beds by a whip-cracking Hugo for the 30-mile trip
along the motorway to Houten, a suburb of Utrecht, where we had to be at the Fair before 9 am
in order to get in free. The fair was huge, with plenty of Exaktas for sale, and plenty of
everything else too. People soon got separated from one another, and your non-collecting Editor
found it quite easy not to buy any of the expensive SLRs and folding cameras that were on every
table. Elizabeth bought a couple of quite splendid books, though. 
A couple of hours of this was enough for us and, so he insisted, for our driver Koen Visser, who took us back to the hotel and left us to while away the 24 hours before our plane was due to leave. We had planned to spend the next morning in the Rembrandt Museum, but practically every public avenue of culture is closed in the Netherlands on a Monday. So we spent the day in the shops at the airport instead. Back to Top Research Notes
+ Faites-vous s’il vous plaît une liste (a) pour Peter Longden, de tous vos imprimés à propos
de l’Ihagee, avec auteur, titre, date, langage et numéro de référence, et
l’envoyez par e-mail à Michael Spencer le rédacteur;
et (b) pour Hartmut Thiele, de tous vos objectifs selon la liste en dessous, et
l’envoyez par la poste à Hartmut a l’addresse en dessous. 
 1. For Peter Longden’s Ihagee BibliographyPlease look at every printed item you have, in any language, of Ihagee-related information (unless you got it from Peter in the first place!): books, instruction manuals, brochures, leaflets, magazines and so on, and make a list showing type (that is book, manual, etc), author, title, date and, vitally if published by Ihagee, the Ihagee reference number, which will be a long string of characters looking a bit like 768/40/2612. Add your name and e-mail the information to Michael Spencer the Editor. I will weed out the duplicates and send the useful data on to Peter, and he may ask for a photocopy of the whole thing, or the original, if you can bear to part with it. 2. For Hartmut Thiele’s lists of lensesPlease make a list of all the lenses you have, showing name of lens, maximum aperture, focal length, serial number, method of diaphragm operation and type of mount. Hartmut is interested in all lenses, not merely Exakta-mount ones, so they might be for folding 120 or 127 format as well as for SLRs. In particular, he wants to hear about:
Post the data to Hartmut Thiele, Herterichstrasse 83, D-81477 München, Germany. Back to Peter Back to Hartmut Back to Top  |