Cooke Triplet Lens

Nineteenth-century lens makers flattened the image with a stop placed in front of or behind the lens, at the cost of astigmatism at the edges. Harold Dennis Taylor, optical manager at T. Cooke & Sons of York, dropped that trick entirely. He showed that a negative lens images a flat object onto a surface curved exactly as much as a positive lens of equal power, but the other way - so one can cancel the other. **US 540,122**, "Lens", Taylor, filed 5. February 1894, granted 28. May 1895, puts "a negative lens … between two positive lenses, the focal power of the negative lens being approximately equal to the combined focal powers of the two positive lenses". Three separated elements: the Cooke triplet, still the simplest well-corrected camera lens. **You build one from stock lenses**, and compare how flat its image is with a single lens.