W-Nikkor·C 3.5cm f/3.5

When Nippon Kogaku’s first camera, the Nikon I, went on sale in March 1948, the W-Nikkor·C 3.5cm f/3.5 was the wide-angle beside it — one of the company’s original consumer lenses, in customers’ hands less than three years after the surrender. It is a Tessar type, four elements in three groups, the slowest and plainest member of what became a three-lens family of S-mount 35s, and the one with the longest run: more than 19,000 were built across roughly a decade, beginning with a first batch — the 612-prefix lenses — whose aperture scale runs in the opposite direction of every other Nikkor produced.

Japanese sources — the Japanese Wikipedia lens genealogy, echoed by old-lens blogs — credit the design to Saburō Murakami (村上三郎), working in the immediate postwar years when the Allied voiding of German patents outside Germany let Japanese makers rework Zeiss recipes freely; the result is a modified Tessar that brought a distinctly Zeiss-flavored drawing to Nikon’s own bayonet and, in identical optics, to Leica-thread bodies. Coating was a genuine selling point in 1948 — the red C on the name ring advertised it — and the company’s coatings of this era have proven notably durable on surviving examples.

The production run reads like a chronicle of Nikon’s postwar decade written in engravings. Occupation-era lenses carry MIOJ on the rear; Made in Japan takes over at around serial 426380, and the Tokyo front marking gives way to Nippon Kogaku Japan around 427810. The minimum aperture stretched from f/16 to f/22 near serial 430000, and in 1954 the barrel was redesigned to match its newer siblings, with a narrower front ring and a usable filter thread. Black 100-gram barrels overlap the chrome late in the run, and a switch to light-alloy construction in December 1956 is the last documented change. When it ended is genuinely unknown: no published source records a discontinuation date, and the final serial block — plain W-NIKKOR, the ·C at last dropped — carries no dates at all.

The Leica-screw version is not a separate lens. It shares the S-mount serial blocks outright — Nikon treated the two mounts as a single model — with LTM examples recorded from the 1949 second batch through the old-style blocks, while the first batch and the post-facelift blocks record S-mount only. Most screw-mount examples left the factory as kit lenses on Japanese Barnack copies such as the Nicca, which is how many reached the American market. Today the f/3.5 remains the cheapest door into the S-mount 35s: reviewers find it sharp centrally even wide open, heavily vignetted, happiest in daylight — a lens whose appeal is inseparable from the moment that produced it.