Reichert Brand Guidelines: American Optical’s Refractor Line, Buffalo and the Phoroptor

A refracting line with a long American past.

Reichert Technologies is a maker of eye-care diagnostic instruments based in Buffalo, New York. A January 2022 press release, datelined Buffalo and reprinted by the optical trade magazine INVISION, describes it as a business unit of AMETEK, Inc. and as a company that designs, engineers and manufactures diagnostic devices for eye care.

Its story is older than its name. The same release calls the American Optical Company “the predecessor to Reichert.” English Wikipedia says American Optical was founded in 1833 by William Beecher, and that its original manufacturing site was at Southbridge, Massachusetts, and that by the time Beecher’s partner Robert H. Cole retired in 1891 the company was producing about two million frames a year.

American Optical did more than make spectacles. It built up a line of refracting instruments, the equipment an eye-care practitioner uses to work out a prescription, and much of that line came from a single purchase. In 1925, according to both the 2022 release and English Wikipedia, American Optical bought DeZeng Standard, the Camden, New Jersey firm of the inventor Henry DeZeng.

The refracting business later left American Optical. English Wikipedia’s article on the phoropter, citing a 2008 history of early American refracting instruments by Gary L. Campbell, says American Optical sold its phoroptor division to Reichert in 1982; the same article elsewhere places the purchase more loosely “in 1980s.” English Wikipedia’s American Optical article adds that in 1982 its then owner, Warner-Lambert, sold the vision-care and industrial-safety business, as The New York Times reported in June that year.

Better one, or better two?

Reichert’s signature is the Phoroptor, the refracting head that hangs in front of a patient’s face while the practitioner flips lenses and asks which view is clearer. The 2022 release says Henry DeZeng introduced the Model 570 Phoro-Optometer in 1915 and released the No. 584 Phoroptor, the first instrument to carry that name, in 1922. It says the United States Patent and Trademark Office registered the word “Phoroptor” as a trademark on 10 January 1922; English Wikipedia says DeZeng Standard had filed for it on 25 April 1921.

The name outgrew the brand. English Wikipedia says the term, often spelled “phoropter,” has become a generic trademark for modern vision testers of any make, helped by the fact that Bausch & Lomb, American Optical’s main rival, stopped making its own Greens’ Refractor in the 1970s.

Under American Optical the instrument kept changing shape. English Wikipedia lists the No. 588 AO Wellsworth DeZeng Phoroptor of 1927, the first in the line to hang from a horizontal bar; the No. 589 Additive Effective Power Phoroptor of 1934, which the 2022 release says added Jackson cross-cylinder lenses; a completely redesigned No. 590 in 1948; and the RxMaster of 1956, which the encyclopedia calls the prototype of all modern phoropters. The Ultramatic RxMaster followed, dated to 1967 by English Wikipedia and to the mid-1960s by the release.

Reichert has carried the line forward. The 2022 release says it launched a patented Illuminated Phoroptor, lit by LEDs so that the dials can be read in a dim examination room, in 2003, and in 2015 the Phoroptor VRx Digital Refraction System, run from a computerised controller and able to connect to electronic medical records.

The company also ties the instrument to one place. Phoroptors, the release says, “have been built and tested” at its facility in Buffalo “since the 1930s,” and it describes them as the only refractors designed and assembled in the United States; both are the company’s own claims.

Design and documentation.

Ophthalmic device makers sell to a narrow, expert audience: ophthalmologists, optometrists, opticians and hospital buyers. Their brochures and websites tend to follow a shared visual grammar. The instrument itself is usually the hero, photographed on a plain white or pale grey ground so that every knob, lens and joystick reads clearly, with the maker’s name small on the housing.

A second register places the same equipment in use. Slit lamps, fundus cameras and refraction units appear in clinic rooms, with a practitioner on one side of the chin rest and a patient on the other; surgical microscopes and laser systems are shown in operating theatres, with a surgeon at the console. Screens matter as much as hardware in this category, so many images show scans, maps or software views alongside the machine.

The third register is explanatory. Cross-section diagrams of the eye, showing the cornea, lens and retina, are used to explain what a device measures or treats, and many makers publish training material and webinars for clinicians. Because these are regulated medical products, some product pages note that a model is available only in certain markets.

Much of the category’s public life happens at congresses. Makers launch and demonstrate equipment on exhibition stands at meetings such as the ESCRS congress in Europe and the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, as well as at optical trade fairs, and their news pages often follow that calendar. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now and where it says its products are made.

A Buffalo instrument maker inside AMETEK.

Reichert’s current owner is a large industrial group. English Wikipedia’s list of AMETEK acquisitions records the purchase of Reichert Technologies on 17 October 2011, filed under eye care and citing a report in the trade weekly Optician dated 26 October 2011. AMETEK is an American maker of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices with its headquarters in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, the encyclopedia says, and it runs its many businesses in two operating groups.

Within that group Reichert keeps its own name and its Buffalo base. The 2022 release, issued under the Reichert Technologies name with AMETEK named as the parent, presents the Phoroptor’s centenary as a Reichert anniversary, and the company invited eye-care professionals to follow the celebrations on its own website. Its account of where the instruments are made rests on that release: the Buffalo facility is, by its description, where Phoroptors have been built and tested since the 1930s.

The release frames the brand through that one instrument, saying the Phoroptor has been “synonymous with vision care” ever since its first model, and tracing a line from DeZeng’s No. 584 to the digital VRx of 2015.

For a design guide, Reichert shows how a single product name can carry a company’s identity across owners and decades. Compare Bausch + Lomb, the Rochester optical house whose Greens’ Refractor once competed with the Phoroptor, and Keeler, a British maker of diagnostic instruments. For this guide we use a deep navy, a pale grey and a muted brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Reichert’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.