Nikkor-S(·C) 5cm f/1.4

Nippon Kogaku’s official chronicle dates the completion of the 5cm f/1.4 to July 1950 — the first serial batch carries the code 5005, which the early-serial decoder reads as May 1950, and the 1951 date found on Japanese Wikipedia reflects market availability rather than design. Whichever month you prefer, the lens moved fast: by December 1950 it had superseded the Nikkor-S·C 5cm f/1.5, itself on sale for under a year, as the system’s fastest standard lens. Optically it was a Sonnar type, seven elements in three groups, in the lineage that ran back through the f/1.5 to the prewar Zeiss original — stretched roughly a fifth of a stop faster.

It became the workhorse of the entire rangefinder era. Production ran from the heavy chrome-over-brass first batches through later, lighter barrels, with the beauty ring changing from “Tokyo” to “Japan” along the way — around 100,000 in total by Pacific Rim Camera’s estimate, spread across serial blocks from 5005001 into the 417xxx range. The S·C engraving gave way to plain S in late 1958 or early 1959, at around serial 396000 per Rotoloni (p.106): the C stood for “coated,” and Nikon dropped it as redundant once coating was universal on every Nikkor regardless of marking. A Leica-screw-mount version is confirmed — surviving examples are documented complete with box and bakelite keeper can — and collector notes record black-barrel examples and a silver-aluminum batch among the serial-range quirks.

In 1964 the name was handed to an entirely different lens. The “Olympic” Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 — the collector nickname; no Olympic symbol appears anywhere on the lens — was designed by Yoshiyuki Shimizu (清水義之), with its mass-production drawing dated April 1964. It abandoned the Sonnar for a seven-element, five-group Double Gauss design (Nikon’s own essay calls it an orthodox Gauss; a four-group figure circulating from Japanese Wikipedia is the outlier), with new lanthanum glass in four of its seven elements, and it is the only S-mount lens engraved 50mm rather than 5cm. How many were made is genuinely unsettled: Mikio Kuno’s 1990 book gives about 2,000, while Roland Vink’s observed serial span (140027–141651) accounts for roughly 1,651 — and no factory figure survives, Rotoloni noting that Nippon Kogaku simply didn’t keep very good records.

The story got one more chapter. In 2000, for the S3-2000 reissue sets, Nikon put the 50mm f/1.4 back into production as the “Millennium” — the camera work went to Sendai Nikon and the lens to Tochigi Nikon — with the same seven-in-five Olympic formula, now with updated glass and multi-coating, nine aperture blades, and a 43mm filter thread. More than 8,000 chrome sets were built, followed by 2,000 black sets in June 2002: a fifty-year arc, from the fastest ambitions of 1950 to a deliberate act of remembrance.