Horace William Lee

Horace William Lee was an optical designer responsible for developing multiple influential lens designs, including the Opic, an asymmetric large-aperture double Gauss lens, and the inverted telephoto wide-angle lens (1930), while working for the English optics firm Taylor, Taylor & Hobson (TT&H), which manufactured lenses in Leicester under the Cooke brand. Lee's designs helped to develop the modern cinematography industry, with high-speed lenses enabling sound synchronization, and the inverted telephoto providing enough space for a beam-splitter apparatus to capture color.

Early life and education Horace Lee was born in January 1889 and graduated from Cambridge University in 1911 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Career

Lee left TT&H in 1936 and joined a series of companies after that, including Scophony, Pullin, and Aldis, publishing scientific articles on lenses and optics until 1945; Burrows and Lee moved to Warsash near Southampton in their later years. He died in 1976 and is buried in Warsash.