Visit the Science Museum in London, England, and you'll be mesmerized by the amount of historically important machines and inventions on show. One particular display is sure to transfix.
Sit by the little glass cabinet and stare at one of the most famous and heart-wrenching photographs in history. The image is of nine-year-old Kim Phuc and her family fleeing from Trang Bang in Vietnam. The U.S. Army suspected the village of being a Viet Cong stronghold and had it napalmed. Phuc survived by tearing off her burning clothes and running away with her brothers. The shot was taken on June 8, 1972. The photographer was Nick Ut. The camera was a Leica.
Inside the cabinet are a few pages telling the story of how this chilling picture changed many people's perceptions of the horrors of war. There's the Muirhead transmitter that served as a primitive fax machine, enabling the image to reach the world's news desks. Then there's the actual camera used-a Leica M2 with a 35mm Summicron lens. It's enough to send shivers down the spine.
Napalm Girl, as it came to be known, won Ut the 1973 Pulitzer Prize, but it also reinforced how important Leica was to the world of photojournalism. Before Leica, there wasn't really such a thing.
In 1905, Oscar Barnack, a former engineer at Carl Zeiss (famous German lens-makers) devised what was to become the Leica I, only the design stayed firmly inside his head for another five years. In 1910, Barnack was poached by Ernst Leitz (a rival with a formidable reputation for producing the finest lenses for precision microscopes and scientific instruments) and set about building prototypes of his imagined camera. By 1914, he developed what became known as the Ur-Leica.
It was a tough, rectangular metal box incorporating a retractable brass lens. With rounded corners, it was easy to hold. What made it so revolutionary was that cameras of the time were huge, cumbersome things that required the loading of heavy glass slides. Photography was a labored affair where images were composed with a great deal of time and perseverance. You couldn't exactly snap away. Barnack liked to walk in the mountains and needed a more usable camera to capture moments, a compact unit that could hold a roll of film.