The 90-year history of the binoculars bolted to scenic overlooks

“There are two push-pin maps at headquarters that are pretty outdated now, but they were used to track all the different sites, color-coded by location. Beyond that, we have a physical card for every single machine detailing its maintenance and whereabouts. I scanned thousands of these cards with a high-speed scanner to digitize the company’s historical records.” Looking at one of these cards can be like a walk through history, Rice tells us. “If someone’s interested in the history of a machine, we’ll look at the maintenance cards… For example, machine #507 was manufactured in the 1950s. Our records show it went to the Staten Island Ferry in 1961, Battery Park in New York City in the ’80s, the North Carolina Zoo in the ’90s, and, most recently, Coit Tower in San Francisco.” One thing the company isn’t doing today is building new units, and the original manufacturing process may be lost to time. “I’ve tried to understand the original manufacturing process, but no one is really left who knows how they were originally made. In our warehouse, there’s about 5,000 square feet of space filled with lathes and grinders from the ’30s and ’40s with overhead shafts to operate the pulleys. Our machinist estimated that if you had to make one of these domestically today, it would probably cost $15,000 to $20,000. The viewer heads are cast bronze and chrome-plated, and the rest of the components are iron.” The glass inside has a pedigree of its own. “Interestingly, the metal plates on the viewers used to say ‘Bausch & Lomb Optical Viewer,'” he continues, “because the internal binoculars were manufactured by Bausch & Lomb. Many units still have the original Bausch & Lomb optics inside. At one point, they had a partnership where if binoculars needed to be serviced or replaced, we would send them directly to Bausch & Lomb, and they would fix them.”