Nikkor 5cm f/3.5 (Hansa Canon)

Nippon Kogaku had been making optics for thirty years before any of it reached a shop counter. The company was assembled in 1917 out of three smaller firms at the government’s urging, and it spent the interwar decades on rangefinders, periscopes and binoculars for the navy. The Nikkor 5cm f/3.5 of 1936 is the point at which that work turned outward: the first Nippon Kogaku lens sold on a camera anyone could buy, more than ten years before the company made a camera of its own.

It was not sold on its own terms. The Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory — Canon, in all but name — could build a body and a focal-plane shutter but had no optical division, and the arrangement the two firms reached gave Nippon Kogaku the whole optical half of the Hansa Canon: this lens, the bayonet mount it sits in, the focusing helix inside that mount, the rangefinder mechanism and the viewfinder optics. Canon’s own museum sets out the division of labour without embarrassment. It is why the camera’s focusing wheel is on the body rather than the lens, and why a Hansa Canon carries two unrelated serial numbers.

The optics are four elements in three groups — a Tessar arrangement, and described as Tessar-like in every account consulted, though no cross-section has been published and Nippon Kogaku’s design papers for it have not surfaced. It is uncoated, as everything of its date is; Nippon Kogaku’s coating work belongs to the following decade. Collectors who use one report it as sharp, which is the extent of what the record says about how it draws.

Only the 5cm was ever offered for the mount. A 3.5cm f/3.5 Nikkor was prototyped for the Hansa Canon and never went into production, so an owner of one of these cameras had a fixed choice of one lens, and the lens and camera are found together almost by definition. About 1,100 Hansa Canons were built between roughly October 1935 and June 1940, and since each left with a lens, that number stands in for a production figure nobody has published.

Two cautions for anyone shopping. The mount fits nothing else — it resembles the Contax internal bayonet from the outside and is interchangeable with neither Contax nor the Leica-thread mount Canon adopted in 1947 — so this lens is useful only on the camera it was made for, or on a modern body through a purpose-made adapter. And the name it shares with a later, commoner lens has caused real confusion in the trade: Nippon Kogaku made a collapsible Nikkor-Q·C 5cm f/3.5 for the Nikon rangefinder and Leica-thread systems from 1945, a different design with its own page here, and prewar Hansa Canon lenses are periodically listed as though they were that lens or the reverse. The mount settles it, and the coating settles it: this one has none.