Horace William Lee

Horace Lee was born in January 1889 and graduated from Cambridge University in 1911 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.[1]^{: 250–251} He married Grace Burrows (1893–1981) in March 1919 and the couple had three sons. Burrows was an accomplished violinist and teacher who helped to organize the Leicester Symphony Orchestra.[2]

Asymmetric double Gauss lens design by Lee (1920); GB 157,040[3]

Lee started at TT&H in 1913 as the assistant to prolific designer Arthur Warmisham.[4] He developed the first f/2.0 lens in 1920,[3] which subsequently was marketed as the OPIC (1924) and Speed Panchro (1930).[5] Lee's 1920 patent traces the development of the Gauss lens and subsequent double-Gauss type through the 1896 patent by Paul Rudolph, which improved the aperture to f/4; in comparison, Lee's lens gathered four times as much light by introducing an asymmetry to the lens geometry.[3] Rudolf Kingslake said Lee's design influenced "other designers [who] began to realize the virtues of this type of construction", including German designers Tronnier (Schneider Xenon, 1925), Merté (Zeiss Biotar, 1927), and Berek (Leitz Summar, 1933)[1]^{: 122–123} The Jazz Singer (1927) was filmed using OPIC lenses; as the first feature-length fully sound-synchronized motion picture, the fast OPIC lenses were needed to compensate for the increased frame rate and decreased illumination.[5] The OPIC lenses were rebranded as Speed Panchro and offered in a variety of focal lengths, ranging from 24 to 108 mm, starting from 1930.[5]

Inverted telephoto lens design by Lee (1930); GB 355,452[6]

That year, Lee also patented the inverted telephoto lens design, which allowed color reproduction for the motion picture industry.[6] In Lee's design, the inverted telephoto arrangement creates a flange focal distance that exceeds the focal length, giving the camera designer more room to insert mechanical equipment. Lee's invention allowed the insertion of a beamsplitter between the lens and film, which separated light into three color components which were recorded simultaneously and recombined in the Technicolor process.[5] This was developed later after World War II by Pierre Angénieux, which he marketed as the Retrofocus lens. Inverted telephoto designs became predominant for wide angle lenses used on single-lens reflex cameras, which required a longer flange focal distance to clear the bulky moving mirror that relays the image to the viewfinder.[1]^{: 141–144}

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;[1]^: 251 Burrows and Lee moved to Warsash near Southampton in their later years. He died in 1976 and is buried in Warsash.[2]