F. Schwabe: Our History of the Firm, Rewritten and Expanded
A complete rewrite, now told as one continuous story from the 1830s to today — built on the firm's own catalogues rather than on the usual recycled sources.
Our page on Fyodor Schwabe and his Moscow instrument works has been rebuilt from scratch.
Most of what circulates online about the firm traces back to one piece of research, copied and recopied. We went to the primary sources instead: the company's catalogues of 1867 and 1903. They yield real detail — the 1867 edition lists about 2,440 items across eleven fields, from optics and surgery to natural-history collections; the 1903 edition gives prices and engineering reasoning, down to the 165-rouble theodolite approved for the Land Survey Department.
The awkward questions are left in rather than tidied away. Schwabe's origins are disputed — Zerbst or Switzerland — and both versions are set out. So is the founding date: officially 1837, though Schwabe's own 1867 preface points to 1847.
The story ends with Vzor, the instrument made by his successor works, through which Gagarin looked down at the Earth in 1961.