Introduction

The famous Fresnel lens

During the course of the 18^th century, European nations built up vast colonial empires trading in sugar, coffee and cocoa beans from the Americas, tea, spices and silk from Asia, and manufactured products from Europe. This trade fueled the development of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, making the effectiveness of lighthouses a matter of some importance to safety at sea. In June 1819, François Arago, an astronomer, physicist and man of state, put forward the name of Augustin Fresnel, the great discoverer of the wave theory of light, to France’s Lighthouse Commission. Fresnel was subsequently tasked with improving lighthouses in the English Channel and Atlantic. Some months later, he came up with a design for a stepped lens able to produce a much more powerful beam to light the seas. He asked Jean-Baptiste François Soleil, an optical engineer whose name—soleil means ‘sun’ in French—seemingly predestined him for what would follow, to fabricate this lens. So began an industrial and human adventure that is still continuing 200 years later through HORIBA France SAS and Jobin Yvon, whose reputation in the world of science persists to this day.

Jobin Yvon - From family business to industrial saga

In 1892, Amédée Jobin, an alumnus of France’s Ecole Polytechnique engineering school (1881) and an artillery officer, took over the workshop of Léon Laurent, Jean-Baptiste François Soleil’s son-in-law, on the advice of Alfred Cornu, the great physicist famous for his work on the diffraction of light. Like his predecessor, Jobin modernized production tooling and worked very closely with the most eminent scientists of his time, such as Alfred Pérot, Charles Fabry and Henri Chrétien. Another alumnus of the Ecole Polytechnique (1903), Amédée Jobin’s son-in-law Gustave Yvon, joined the company in 1911. Gustave Yvon focused especially on achieving the quality required to transform an artisan workshop into a modern production facility. As result of his efforts, the name Jobin Yvon is still synonymous in the world of optics today with excellence and quality.

Jobin Yvon becomes part of the HORIBA group

With the acquisition of its fellow instrument manufacturer Jobin Yvon in 1997, HORIBA rounded out its range of scientific instruments. The HORIBA Group of worldwide companies supplies an extensive array of instruments and systems for applications ranging from automotive R&D, process and environmental monitoring, in-vitro medical diagnostics, semiconductor manufacturing and metrology to a broad range of scientific R&D and quality control measurements for industry.