Walter Zapp
Walter Zapp was a Baltic German inventor. His best-known creation was the Minox subminiature camera. Over the course of his life, he was granted over 60 patents.
Biography
Zapp was born in Riga, Governorate of Livonia to a Baltic German mother and a British father. In 1932, while living in Estonia, he began developing the then subminiature camera by first creating wooden models, which led to the first prototype in 1936. It was introduced to the market in 1938. Minox cameras were made by VEF in Latvia. VEF made 17,000 Minox cameras.During the Spring 1941 Resettlement of Baltic Germans, Zapp moved to Germany. From 1941 to 1945, he worked on the development of electron microscopy at AEG in Berlin.
After World War II, in 1945, he founded the Minox GmbH in Wetzlar, Germany. The company still exists.
In 2001, when he went to Latvia for the last time, he said that he had gone to celebrate his 100th birthday in Latvia. He died aged 97, in Binningen near Basel, Switzerland.