Canon: Borrowed Nikon Lenses, the AE-1 Microchip and Nanoimprint Chipmaking

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Canon began in 1933 as the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory, founded by Takeshi Mitarai, Goro Yoshida, Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda. It could build focal plane shutters but not optical glass, so its first commercial camera used lenses from Nippon Kogaku, the company now known as Nikon. Its 1934 prototype, a copy of the Leica design and Japan's first 35mm focal plane shutter camera, was named Kwanon after the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy. The company became Canon Camera Company in 1947, but it had already built Japan's first indirect X-ray camera in 1940 for tuberculosis screening. The 1964 Canola 130 calculator, with a 13-digit display requested by Japan's central bank, prepared it for the 1976 AE-1, the first camera with an embedded microcomputer.

Canon developed its Bubble Jet printer independently in 1985 and built the laser engines inside the first Apple LaserWriters and early HP LaserJets. When smartphones hollowed out point-and-shoot sales, operating profit fell 34 percent in early 2013, and Canon bought its way into new fields: Océ, Milestone Systems, Axis Communications for nearly $3 billion, and Toshiba Medical Systems for $5.9 billion in 2016. In 2023 it introduced nanoimprint lithography, which stamps circuit patterns onto wafers at a claimed five-nanometer equivalent, as an alternative to ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines. The episode also covers a settled lawsuit over printers that would not scan when low on ink and protests over a climate skeptic at the Canon Institute for Global Studies.

• The 1964 Canola 130 used acrylic light pipes to bend light from bulbs into the shapes of numbers.
• The 1987 EOS system replaced mechanical lens linkages with electronic contacts, and the 1992 EOS 5 focused wherever the photographer's eye looked.
• Canon demonstrated a 250-megapixel CMOS sensor in 2015 aimed at industrial, aerospace and surveillance uses.
• The scanner lawsuit was settled in 2023 with Canon admitting no wrongdoing.
• Canon's 1988 corporate philosophy, kyosei, means living and working together for the common good.