Edmund Optics Brand Guidelines: War-Surplus Lenses, Barrington & a Family Catalogue

War-surplus lenses sold by mail.

Edmund Optics began as a mail-order trade in war-surplus lenses. English Wikipedia says Norman W. Edmund, an amateur photographer who found it hard to get the lenses he wanted, began buying optics the military was selling off and reselling them through advertisements in photography magazines; in 1942 he founded the Edmund Salvage Corporation. The business ran at first from a card table in his home, and Wikipedia says its stock soon filled more than 30 rented garages. Sky & Telescope, writing in January 2012, placed that home in Audubon, New Jersey, and said the company’s first advertisement in the magazine appeared in September 1945 under the headline “Unusual War Bargains in Lenses and Prisms,” offering colour filters, reticles and mirrors from tank periscopes.

In 1948 the company moved to a larger building in nearby Barrington, New Jersey, with a retail store at the front. Sky & Telescope dates the change of name to Edmund Scientific Co. to the same year. The core of the business in that era was still surplus single-element lenses, sold in paper coin envelopes with the approximate diameter and focal length stencilled on the front, Wikipedia says. Barrington is still the company’s home today.

Edmund Scientific grew into a catalogue that reached hobbyists, students and teachers. Its advertisements ran in Scientific American, and its pamphlets on building telescopes were collected in 1967 as the book All About Telescopes, according to Wikipedia. Sky & Telescope recalled a 3-inch reflector sold as a kit with a cardboard tube and wooden legs, and the Astroscan, a bright red tabletop reflector introduced in 1976. Wikipedia adds that the company sold out of telescopes in 1973, when Comet Kohoutek approached Earth, and that the shortage made national news.

From a hobby catalogue to industrial optics.

The company passed down the family. Wikipedia says Norman Edmund retired in 1975 and left the business to his son, Robert Edmund; Sky & Telescope says Robert took the helm in the mid-1970s. In 1984 Robert split the company in two: Edmund Scientific, the consumer catalogue, and Edmund Industrial Optics, a business-to-business seller of optics for industry.

The consumer side was let go. Wikipedia says the factory store closed in 2001 and the “Scientifics” catalogue of educational science products was sold to Science Kit and Boreal Laboratories, a science supply company in Tonawanda, New York; that catalogue business stopped selling online in 2025. In the same year, 2001, Edmund Industrial Optics was renamed Edmund Optics. It has no public storefront and keeps its fulfilment operation at the Barrington site, Wikipedia says.

The catalogue habit carried over into the professional business. In May 2008 Laser Focus World quoted the company’s vice-president of global sales saying that “most people know Edmund as a catalog company,” but that custom optics had become its fastest-growing business, built especially for biomedical and defence-related customers. Its own optics are sold under the TECHSPEC name; in 2021 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe reported new TECHSPEC calcium fluoride aspheric lenses alongside zinc selenide windows for infrared work.

Today the company describes two businesses. Its Marketplace, it says, offers more than 34,000 off-the-shelf products drawn from its own factories and from more than 40 other brands, shipped from nine distribution centres; Advanced Manufacturing handles custom design, first-article work and volume production, which the company says runs through four design centres and nine factories. Edmund Optics says it employs more than 1,300 people across 19 locations.

Light, made into products.

Photonics companies sell things most people never see. Their lasers sit inside machine tools, their transceivers inside data-centre racks, and their detectors inside instruments, telescopes and physics experiments. So the way they present themselves leans on a small set of images that make light visible: a laser beam crossing a dark optical table, the glowing end of a fibre, a row of pluggable transceiver modules lined up for a switch, or a photomultiplier tube and a sensor chip photographed under studio light against black.

The catalogue matters as much as the advertisement. Many makers of optics and components publish long product catalogues of lenses, mirrors, mounts, filters, tubes and diodes, each part with a drawing, a part number and a page of specifications. That catalogue habit gives much of the sector a shared look: clean technical photography, plenty of white or black space, careful diagrams and an engineering sans or a restrained serif, with colour used sparingly, often for a single accent.

The trade shows are where the industry gathers in person. Photonics West, LASER World of PHOTONICS and OFC, the optical fibre communication conference, are among the events where companies show new lasers, modules and detectors, and their stands and press releases often borrow the same visual language of beams, fibres and glowing chips. Company histories also lean on science: makers of detectors and light sources often point to the research projects and observatories that have used their parts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, what it has bought or sold and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Pending deals are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

A family company in Barrington, making optics in several countries.

Edmund Optics makes its products in several countries, and the record shows how that grew. In 2008 Laser Focus World listed manufacturing in Akita, Japan, for spherical optics; Shenzhen, China, for lens assemblies; Singapore, for flats, prisms, coatings and spherical optics; and Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, for aspheres and larger optical assemblies. In May 2012 the same magazine reported that the company had opened a 77,000-square-foot manufacturing, customer support and distribution building in Woodlands, Singapore. In February 2021 the company announced an Assembly and Advanced Design Facility in Tucson, Arizona, its second site in that state, with cleanroom assembly and testing. Its current list of locations also names a precision optics and assembly centre in Malaysia.

It has also grown by purchase. In January 2025 Wiley Industry News reported that Edmund Optics had acquired son-x of Aachen, Germany, a Fraunhofer spin-off that uses ultrasound-assisted machining to make precision optics, adding the ability to work complex surfaces on several axes.

Ownership has stayed in the family. In 2021 the company’s announcements named Robert Edmund as chief executive and chairman; its leadership page now names Marisa Edmund, the founder’s granddaughter, as chairman and chief executive, and calls her the third generation of the family to lead the company. It describes Edmund Optics as family-owned, guided by a board of directors and a family council.

For a design guide, Edmund Optics shows how a mail-order catalogue can carry one family name from war-surplus lenses to precision components. Compare Thorlabs and Excelitas, two other photonics companies in this series. For this guide we use a deep navy, a clear lens blue and a warm signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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