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A BRIEF HISTORY OF MARTIN MICROSCOPE COMPANY 1946 - 2006:
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Bob Martin in Cairo during WWII
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The history of Martin Microscope
Company is inextricably linked to the history of its founder,
Robert H. Martin, Sr. (Bob) (1916-2006).
Bob Martin was a 1937 graduate of Clemson
Agricultural College (Clemson University). He worked at Bausch & Lomb
in Atlanta after college where he got started in the field of optics.
Called into active military duty during WWII in 1941, Bob used his optical
experience to get transferred from the 82nd Airborne Division to Optical
Ordinance. He received extensive optics training at Aberdeen Proving Ground
before being sent to Cairo, Egypt to run optical manufacturing facilities
in Cairo, as well as others in Tel Aviv and Basra, Iraq. While in Egypt,
he was in charge of manufacturing optics for gun sights, levels, etc. He
also became an accomplished marksman during this period of his life,
winning several national and international target-shooting competitions.
More on the war years...
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Bob Martin on camel -
click for larger image
Antique microscopes
(Sorry, not for sale)
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Returning home to Easley, South
Carolina, after the War in December of 1945, he decided not to return to
Bausch & Lomb, but to go into business for himself. Martin Microscope
Company was founded on July 4, 1946. "I wasn’t trying to be
especially patriotic – it just turned out that I finished assembling my
office building that day." Originally called Martin Scientific
Instrument Company (Martin Instrument, for short), the first office was an
Army surplus aluminum building. It was located in his home-town of Easley,
South Carolina.
Initially, the business was
comprised of two endeavors: wholesale eyeglass lenses and retail
microscope sales. The first microscope manufacturer that Martin Instrument
Company represented was American Optical Company headquartered in Buffalo,
New York. Additional dealerships from the Swiss Wild Heerbrugg and the
German E. Leitz Wetzler followed about 1950. In fact, Martin Instrument
Company was the second Wild microscope dealer in the United States, and has outlasted
the first Wild dealership, which closed around 1970. Eventually, the
wholesale eyeglass business was dropped in favor of selling microscopes.
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Bob Martin at the downtown Greenville location
Royal Microscopical Society acceptance letter, Nov. 1968
Signs of the times...
Bob Martin - 2002
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In 1952, Martin Instrument Company
moved to the nearby city of Greenville, South Carolina, to a downtown
address at 19 East North Street (which later became 25 East North Street).
This office was maintained until 1978. During this time, Martin Instrument
Company became well known in the microscopy field in the southeastern
United States. The sales territory extended from Virginia to Florida and
from Mississippi to Bermuda. Exclusive contracts with state universities,
and public and private research facilities, like Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee and Martin Marietta in Florida, saw the Company
grow to become the leading microscope distributor in the Southeast during
this period.
Also during this time, optical
microscopy advanced considerably with the development of techniques like
Phase Contrast, Differential Interference Contrast (Nomarski), and Epi-Fluorescence.
Bob Martin worked extensively with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
in Atlanta, Georgia, in the days preceding and following the development
of Epi-Fluorescence. He was hired to try to develop the technique himself,
but was not successful. Oscar Richards with American Optical developed the
first interference filter. Two of these prototype filters were sent to CDC
for evaluation. "I was offered $10,000.00 by another major microscope
company to steal one of those filters. I turned them down, of course, and
it wasn’t long before they were readily available anyway." Using
interference filter technology, Ploem developed the first dichroic mirror
which made Epi-Fluorescence possible. This invention was first licensed to
Leitz Wetzler, famous for their Ploem-o-pak fluorescence unit.
In 1978, Martin Instrument Company
was forced to move from the downtown Greenville location, and found a home
at the Wade Hampton Mall for the next five years. These were turbulent
times for Martin Instrument Company. Wild and Leitz merged to become one
company, Wild-Leitz. It is often wrongly reported that Leitz bought Wild.
In reality, the Swiss company Wild bought Leitz. Control of the microscopy
side of the business was given to the Germans, however. Under Leitz
control, a new policy was established to govern regional dealerships. The
Wild-Leitz representatives came calling with new franchise agreements
which limited the dealer to a certain geographical area (Martin Instrument
Company was offered the Carolinas only), required a certain sales volume,
a minimum number of sales people, and restricted the dealer to selling
only Wild-Leitz products. Bob Martin, being unwilling to give up so much
control of his business, refused the sign the new dealership agreement,
and parted company with Wild-Leitz.
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However, with the creation of the
Wild-Leitz company, the Wild line of compound microscopes was
discontinued, as were Leitz stereomicroscopes. The US headquarters for
Wild offered Bob Martin, as the oldest operating Wild dealer in the US,
all of their compound microscope inventory at a greatly reduced price.
This, plus Martin Instrument’s own large inventory of Leitz and Wild
equipment, has yet to be exhausted. So, Martin Instrument Company
continues to sell lots of Leitz and Wild products out of stock.
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Bob Martin also began looking for
other brands to carry in addition to American Optical / Reichert for which
he was still a full dealer, though Bob refused to sign any exclusive
franchise agreement with any one company. This led to a dealership for
Seiler Instrument Company, the US importer of Carl Zeiss, Jena microscopes
(known as "aus Jena" in the US). These East German microscopes
were high quality instruments manufactured in the original Carl Zeiss
production facility in Jena, Germany. After World War II, the Zeiss
company was split. Some employees left Jena, which was in the Eastern
Bloc, and went to Switzerland where they joined Wild Heerbrugg, and some
went to Oberkochen in West Germany where they set up the Carl Zeiss
Foundation with the help of the West German government and funded by the
Marshall Plan. The aus Jena microscopes of the early 1980’s were not
very ergonomically designed, but offered excellent optical performance for
a fraction of the price of their West German counterparts. For several
years, Martin Instrument Company was the largest dealer for aus Jena
microscopes in the country. Used microscopes began to play a significant
roll in the business, as well.
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The Martin house - Easley, SC
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In 1983, the five-year lease expired
at the Wade Hampton Mall location, and Bob Martin decided to move back
home – literally. Having acquired his childhood home in Easley from his
mother’s estate, Martin Instrument Company moved back to Easley and into
the old white house built by his parents in 1910. At this time, the
company name was officially changed to Martin Microscope Company. The
house contained offices, display rooms, and shipping and receiving, while
inventory was kept at a three-story warehouse one block away on Main
Street. This arrangement worked well for ten years. In the 1980’s Martin
Microscope Company began selling microscopes from many different
manufacturers, sometimes as an official dealer as in the case of Meiji
Techno and Prior Scientific, and sometimes working with other dealers in
the case of Nikon and Olympus, for example. Bob Martin found that the
restrictive dealership agreements signed by other dealers around the
country often worked to his advantage. Overstocked dealers often would
sell him microscopes at or below their cost just to move them out of
inventory or to maintain their quotas.
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Bob and Bobby Martin
Christmas 2002
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Bob Martin’s son and only child
Robert H. Martin, Jr. (Bobby) worked in the family business most summers
since he was 12, cleaning and organizing, and learning to service classic
old microscopes under the expertise of J. Vernon Piephoff, Bob Martin's
childhood friend and later microscope service man. Bobby joined the firm
full time in 1988 fresh out of
Presbyterian College and began the task of bringing the company into the
computer age. Lately this has meant spending too much time working
on this web-site!
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Also in the late 1980’s, American
Optical / Reichert and Bausch & Lomb were bought by Cambridge
Instruments in Great Britain. Shortly after that, Cambridge and Wild-Leitz
merged to form the current Leica conglomerate. In this way, Martin
Microscope Company once again became an official
dealer for Leica, though not for the full line.
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Current building - Easley, SC
Bob Martin teaching microscopy to the next generation back in 2000
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In 1993, the building next door to
the old house was purchased to become the present Martin Microscope
Company location. Originally a Rhodes Furniture store, this 17,500 square
foot facility now houses all of the Martin Microscope inventory, display
area, and offices. The building is
packed with microscopes!
Bob Martin Sr. passed away at the age of 90 in
his 60th year in business on April 3rd, 2006. Bobby Martin remains
manager and
is enjoying the success of the MM Series
digital camera adapters which he developed. Martin Microscope Company continues to sell new and used
microscopes of all major brands, and also to make
specialty products related to microscopy.
We thank you for your interest in our company!
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