Nikkor-Q(·C) 13.5cm f/4

Nippon Kogaku’s first telephoto for the 35mm frame was calculated in the rubble year of 1946: Saburo Murakami (村上三郎) of the optical research section completed the design that autumn, and production began in October — making the Nikkor-Q·C 13.5cm f/4 one of the postwar “original six” with which the company entered consumer photography. It is a telephoto Sonnar, four elements in three groups, closely modeled on the Zeiss Sonnar 13.5cm f/4 — though Nikon’s 1001 Nights retrospective is at pains to point out that Japanese optical glass of the day was far below German grade, forcing an independent recomputation rather than a straight copy. The same retrospective hands the lens its best story: when David Douglas Duncan projection-tested Nikkors in 1950 — he had come for the 8.5cm he’d already fallen for — it was this telephoto’s performance against the German competition that convinced him, and Nikkors went with him when the Korean War broke out months later.

The mount history mirrors the company’s own: when the lens appeared there was no Nikon camera to put it on. The earliest examples were Leica-screw, sold from 1947; the native S-mount version followed alongside the Nikon I in 1948, and the lens was being advertised by October 1949. It rangefinder-couples in both fits — and the S-mount coupling cam is where “Made in Occupied Japan” hides, engraved on a part no owner ever sees without a teardown. Roland Vink’s serial data catches three blocks: 6111–611232, S-mount, from November 1948; 9041–904766 from December 1949, where Leica-screw examples join the record; and a final 523711–524028 spanning December 1950 into 1951 — roughly 1,300 lenses all told, every block ringed “Tokyo.”

That final block marks the ending. In January 1951 Murakami’s own recalculation, the Nikkor-Q·C 13.5cm f/3.5, took over — a third of a stop faster, vastly more numerous, and destined to carry the design through the whole S-mount era and onward into the F-mount 135mm f/3.5 Auto. The f/4 was left as something genuinely scarce: the root of the entire medium-telephoto Nikkor line, produced for only a few years, and by modern accounts a startlingly good performer for its circumstances — sharp from wide open, at every distance, from a factory working with scarce materials and war-worn machinery.

The designation then had a strange afterlife. In 1959 Nippon Kogaku issued a second 13.5cm f/4 Nikkor that shares nothing with the first but the name: a Tessar-type four-in-three short-mount head with no helicoid at all, its rear threaded Leica-screw, built for the Nikon S bellows attachment — itself a roughly 200-unit accessory — and the only route below 180mm in the S system’s close-up arsenal, since the reflex housings took nothing shorter. The short-mount lens far outlived both the bellows unit and the rangefinder system: about 2,600 were made through 1968, the engraving shifting from 13.5cm to 135mm along the way, until an F-mount bellows version with built-in tube closed the line in 1968–69. Two optical designs, one catalog name — and an open question of whether they are really one lens at all.