JENA, Germany—Zeiss threw a birthday party here for Carl Zeiss, its founder and namesake, on Sept. 11, 2016, 200 years after he was born in the town of Weimar. The mechanic opened a small workshop for precision mechanics and optics in Jena in 1846, laying the foundation for today’s global technology player Zeiss.

The celebration, Carl Zeiss Day, drew more than 50,000 visitors. Zeiss, the University of Jena, the Carl Zeiss Planetarium, research institutes and companies, as well as the city of Jena offered a wide variety of exhibitions, music concerts, join-in-activities, lectures and other activities.

To commemorate Zeiss’s achievements, the company is sponsoring the establishment of a German Optical Museum in Jena, with the support of partners from industry, science and the city of Jena. The initiators are the Ernst Abbe Foundation, the Carl Zeiss Foundation, the city of Jena, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and the Zeiss company.

The current optical museum in Jena run by the Ernst Abbe Foundation will be completely redesigned and re-established as the German Optical Museum and will serve as a leading museum in the national and international museum community. In addition to putting on display the scientific history of optics and the history of optical instrument construction, the German Optical Museum will also be a place where the public and experts can meet via many different educational programs.

In honor of the Carl Zeiss 200th birthday, a public symposium on economy and science will take place at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena from Oct. 27 to 28, 2016.

More information on the life and heritage of Carl Zeiss can be found at www.zeiss.com/carlzeiss200.

This optics device attracted the attention of a young science enthusiast who attended Carl Zeiss’s 200th birthday celebration in Jena, German. A girl tries out a Zeiss microscope that was part of a display of optics technology. The Zeiss company was one of the party’s hosts.