BIC Museum of Microscopy – Reichert

Reichert

The Reichert company was founded by Carl Reichert in 1876 in Vienna. Carl Reichert was a son in law of Ernst Leitz. He learned microscopy business from Leitz in Wetzlar (Germany) and then moved to Vienna to establish his own company. His company was successful and by 1930 the 100000th microscope was produced. However in 1962, the family Reichert sold the business to the company American Optical (AO). American Optical, in turn, was taken over in 1968 by the worldwide pharmaceutical company Warner Lambert.

Later, within Warner Lambert, Reichert company was merged with Jung, another microscopy company established by Rudolf Jung in Heidelberg in 1872. In 1986 Warner Lambert sold all non-pharmaceutical companies to Cambridge Instruments (the optical company established in 1881 by the son of Charles Darwin, Horace). And finally, in 1990 Cambridge Instruments merged with the Wild Leitz to form Leica group. In 1999 Reichert stopped microscope production, concentrating to instruments for sample preparations for transmission electron microscopy.

We have three microscopes made by Reichert Austria:

The large research microscope Zetopan                               The stereomicroscope MAK

The projection microscope Visopan