Nikkor-H(·C) 5cm f/2

If one lens carried the Nikon rangefinder system, it was this one. The Nikkor-H·C 5cm f/2 was the standard lens sold on the front of Nippon Kogaku’s cameras for the system’s entire life, from the first postwar batch in September 1946 to the end of production in 1962 — serial spans summing to roughly 105,000 units across Leica thread and Nikon S mounts. Its six-element Sonnar design is even older than that: it was finished around 1935 for the Hansa Canon, which makes this the rare lens whose history runs from the dawn of the Japanese 35mm camera to the twilight of the rangefinder era.

The design belongs to Saburo Murakami (村上三郎), who computed it in the mid-1930s era of hand-cranked calculators, when tracing a single ray took five to ten minutes. It is a Sonnar type, six elements in three groups, with a cemented triplet uniting elements 2 through 4. The postwar restart nearly undid it: within about a year of resuming production, Nippon Kogaku’s stock of optical glass ran out, and Murakami had to redesign the lens twice between 1946 and 1948, juggling glass types to match whatever could actually be melted, before stable glass supply let him settle the final recipe in 1948.

The product chronology has three defensible birthdays, and the catalog keeps all three: the ~1935 design for the Hansa Canon, the postwar Leica-thread product of 1946, and its arrival on Nippon Kogaku’s own system with the Nikon I in March 1948. (It was not quite the first postwar Nikkor — the collapsible 5cm f/3.5 of December 1945 holds that title.) The barrel evolved from collapsible (1946) through a curious semi-rigid transition — the November 1948 batch was built with collapsible mechanics but factory-fitted with a blocking sleeve between head and base — to the definitive rigid barrel of August 1950, whose 5008 batch code dates it under the early year-month serial scheme.

For collectors the long run is the richest serial-note territory in the system: “Tokyo” front markings give way to “Japan” mid-way through the chrome run at ~621800; occupation-era lenses lack aperture click stops; the black barrel arrives in a range that overlaps the last chrome block, so serial number alone never dates the finish; and the final black lenses drop the ·C engraving, coating having long since become universal. One negative result worth stating plainly: no MIOJ-engraved 5cm f/2 barrel is documented — “Made in Occupied Japan” appears on the caps and cases of 5cm lenses, never on this barrel.