THIS IS A ORIGINAL CINEMSSCOPE ® PROJECTION LENS BY
BAUSCH & LOMB.



B&L Cinemascope Projection Attachment Projector Lens 35 movie theatre projection lens. There are 2 pieces-one is a projection attachment and the other is a lens, both are by Bausch & Lomb. I think this might have been used for projection at a drive in movie theatre, but I'm not sure. The attachment is Cinemascope Projector Attachment II DE954 with adjustments from 50-450. It measures 17" tall, is 5 1/4" across the wider end and 4" across the smaller end. It weighs about 15 pounds. Peering into an anamorphic lens shows that it magnifies (projection lenses), or compresses (camera lenses) the image only in one direction. While all the elements in this Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope projection lens are round, they appear more and more elliptical as light passes through one element to the next. CinemaScope was a widescreen movie format used from 1953 to 1967. Anamorphic lenses allowed the process to project film up to a 2.66:1 aspect ratio, twice as wide as the conventional format of 1.33:1. Although CinemaScope was shortly made obsolete by new technological developments, the anamorphic presentation of films initiated by CinemaScope in the 1950s has continued to this day.

A French professor named Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called Anamorphoscope in the late 1920s. It was this process that would later form the basis for CinemaScope. Chrétien's process was based on lenses that employed an optical "trick" which produced an image twice as wide as that produced with conventional lenses. In New York, a premiere of Chrétien's new process impressed the major Hollywood film studios of the time, who were eager to win back lost audiences from televisions allure. Twentieth Century Fox won the rights of the Anamorphoscope. However, the format needed more development before it would be ready to use. The first of Chrétien's lenses were quickly transported to Hollywood where they were further analyzed. From this analysis the basis of CinemaScope was formed. Fox's pre-production of The Robe was halted so that the film could be changed to CinemaScope, what Fox President Spyros Skouras envisioned as the future of film making. Twentieth Century Fox's famous advertising slogan, Movies are Better than Ever, gained credibility with the ground breaking 1953 film The Robe . With the introduction of CinemaScope, the movie industry was able to re-assert its distinction from its new competitor television.