Early years

New York headquarters of the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company in 1891

In 1853, John Bausch and Henry Lomb, both German immigrants, established a small but ambitious workshop producing monocles in Rochester, New York.^[12][13] By 1861, their operation had expanded to manufacturing vulcanite rubber eyeglass frames and other precision vision products.^[14]

Early growth of the company

During the American Civil War, the Union blockade caused the price of gold and European horn to rise dramatically. This resulted in a growing demand for the Bausch + Lomb spectacles made from vulcanite.^[15]

In 1876, Ernst Gundlach joined the company as it began to manufacture microscopes. Later that year, the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company won a distinction at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The company also produced photographic lenses (1883), spectacle lenses (1889), microtomes (1890), binoculars and telescopes (1893).^[16] From 1892 in cooperation with Zeiss in Germany, the company produced optical lenses. In this manner, at the end of the 19th century, the product range included eyeglasses, microscopes and binoculars, as well as projectors, camera lenses and camera diaphragms.

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  Microscope 1883
• 
  Universal Microscope, Bausch and Lomb, c. 1890
• 
  Bausch & Lomb Convertible Balopticon projector, circa 1913

Expansion of production at the beginning of the 20th century

With the growth of the US army, under President Theodore Roosevelt and the buildup of the naval fleet, Bausch & Lomb received the commission, through the supplier Saegmuller, to manufacture high-precision lenses for optical measurement and founded a joint venture with Saegmuller. At the same time as this new expansion, a research department with five members was started to develop new products and improve old ones. A new alliance with the Zeiss company in Germany ensured competitive advantages for the three participants, Bausch & Lomb, Saegmuller and Zeiss, in terms of patent use and opening new markets. In 1902, William Bausch, the son of the founder, developed a process to create the desired lens shape directly by casting molten glass. Previously, the glass parts for the lenses had to be separated, ground and polished in a complicated process, and this brought significant savings in time and materials.

The company produced the first optical-quality glass in America during the early to mid-1900s. By the year 1903 the company began manufacturing microscopes, binoculars, and camera shutters.

The First and Second World Wars

The further development of the firm was affected by political events. Because of the World Wars and the consequent need for optical instruments such as field glasses, range finders, camera lenses, binocular telescopes, searchlight mirrors, torpedo tube sights, and periscopes, the product range could be considerably broadened. Until World War I, optical glass and the instruments made from it (including many military instruments) were often imported into most European and North American countries from Germany. The same was also true of chemical products and laboratory equipment. The outbreak of the war, with Germany's new enemy status, created a scramble to rapidly enhance the domestic industries.^[17] In 1933, Bausch + Lomb started to honor outstanding high school science students with the Bausch+Lomb Honorary Science Award. In the 1930s, military products represented 70% of total production. The Ray-Ban brand of sunglasses was developed for pilots in 1936.

After 1945

At a time when the cinema was being superseded by television, Bausch & Lomb developed improved optics for the CinemaScope process, which popularized the film-based anamorphic format and led most cinemas to double the widths of their screens.

In 1965 Bausch & Lomb acquired the patent for the hydrogel contact lenses created by Czech scientists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lím. In 1971, after three years of development work, two years for the medical approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration and an investment of three million USD, Bausch + Lomb launched contact lenses made of Poly-HEMA. In contrast to the contact lenses previously available, made of glass and Lucite (acrylic glass),^[18] the new lenses were softer. They were marketed under the brand name "Soflens".

In the 1970s, the company was a major producer of spectrophotometers for the dye and chemical business, such as the Spectronic 20.

A massive restructuring of the company began in the mid-1980s. What had been the core divisions, the production of lenses for various purposes, were sold off. The sunglasses division was continued as Ray-Ban and kept selling well due to effective product placement. By the planned acquisition of other firms, such as Polymer Technology Corporation and Dr. Mann Pharma, existing business areas such as contact lens production were strengthened and new ones were initiated.

In 1997, as a result of a series of company acquisitions, the division for the manufacture of surgical products was established. The Ray-Ban brand was sold in 1999 to the Italian Luxottica Group.

Company developments in recent years

Since then, Bausch & Lomb has developed into a globally operating company which is one of the largest producers of contact lenses. As of 2022, about 12,900 employees in approximately 100 countries work for the firm.^[1]

Competitors in the international eye care products market are Johnson & Johnson, Allergan, Alcon, MSD-Chibret, CooperVision, Menicon Co., Hoya Corporation, EssilorLuxottica and Carl Zeiss Meditec.^[4]

In 2023, Bausch + Lomb Corp announced it would it would buy Xiidra from Novartis for $1.75 billion and pay additional $750 million in linked to future sales for Xiidra as well as two pipeline asset.^[19][20]

PureVision

Bausch + Lomb was in a lawsuit with Novartis which claimed to have patents on a Bausch + Lomb product called PureVision. On June 26, 2002, a federal judge ruled that Bausch & Lomb did infringe on Ciba Vision (a subsidiary of Alcon) patents.^[25]

On July 2, 2004, the company announced that it had licensed the intellectual property of Novartis.^[26] Bausch & Lomb will pay the Ciba Vision unit of Novartis a royalty on net U.S. sales of its PureVision brand contact lenses until 2014 and on net sales outside the U.S. until 2016. But as of now, the brand FreshLook comes under Bausch and Lomb and Ciba manufacturers it.

ReNu product recalls

Main article: ReNu

On April 11, 2006, Bausch & Lomb stopped shipments of its ReNu with MoistureLoc contact lens solution when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced there was a high correlation between use of the product and cases of suspected fungal keratitis.^[27] The Centers for Disease Control found that "nearly all of the company's ReNu with MoistureLoc eye care products were linked to severe fungal eye infections".^[28] Two class action lawsuits have been filed against Bausch & Lomb in relation to the eye fungus problems.^[29]

Diversity

Bausch & Lomb received a 100% rating on the Corporate Equality Index released by the Human Rights Campaign starting in 2003, the second year of the report.^[30]