| Founded: | c. 1935 â Chicago, USA |
| Â | Â |
| Currently: | defunct |
Spartus was an American camera brand founded during the Great Depression by Chicago jazz drummer and entrepreneur Jack Galter. The company originally produced household products such as clocks, lighters, flashlights, and electric razors but then began to slowly expand into the photography market by the late 1930s as Galter filed for several camera design patents.
Camera production accelerated as Galter purchased the Utility Manufacturing Company and moved it to Chicago from New York in 1941. With the acquisition of Utility, Galter released a myriad of models and sold them under several different brand names including Falcon, which Utility had used before the buyout. This was the beginning of what would commonly be known as “The Chicago Cluster.”
By 1951, Jack Galter had left and started another camera company called Galter Products while Spartus was sold to its sales manager Harold Rubin and rechristened as the Herold Manufacturing Company. While Galter Products went out of business just a few years later, Herold flourished. The company continued to sell cameras under the Spartus name and eventually changed the company name back to Spartus Corporation in 1960.
Spartus ceased camera production sometime after the early 1960s and returned to its roots by shifting its focus back to clocks. It appears that Spartus continued manufacturing clocks until the company was absorbed by the General Time Corporation in 1996.
McKeown, James M. and Joan C. McKeown’s Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras, 2001-2002. (Grantsburg, WI, USA: Centennial Photo Service, 2001), p 239-240, 273-275, 618-619, 649-650.
“Jack Galter, 89, Musician, Developer, Philanthropist,” Chicago Tribune, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-05-07/news/9305070102
“GENERAL TIME CORPORATION ANNOUNCES ACQUISITION OF SPARTUS,” PR Newswire, http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/general-time-corporation-announces-acquisition-of-spartus-156619255.html
“Patent Search: Jack Galter,” Google, https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Jack+Galter%22&btnG=Search+Patents&tbm=pts
“Jack Galter,” Camera Wiki, http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Jack_Galter
The Spartus Box 120 is just one in a series of no-frills box cameras introduced by Spartus in the early 1940s (not to be confused with the similarly named but clearly different Spartus 120 of the 1950s). Designed to accommodate 116, 120, 616, or 620 roll films, these models are virtually identical outside of the designated film format and faceplate design.
The Spartus Press Flash (also sold as the Falcon Press Flash, the Galter Press Flash, and the Regal Flash Master) is an unusually designed box camera introduced by the Spartus Camera Corporation in 1939. It is widely believed to be the very first camera of any kind to feature a built-in flash unit.
The Spartus 35 is the direct successor to the original Spartus 35F. After Herold bought out Spartus in 1951, it decided to update the 35 (which was modeled after the Argus A), creating the design you see above which was probably based loosely on the Kodak Pony.
The Spartus Six Twenty is a box camera dressed up as a TLR introduced in 1940 by the Spartus Camera Corporation of Chicago. The Six Twentyâso named because it takes 620 format filmâis whatâs called a âpsuedo TLRâ which means that it looks like legitimate TLR at a glance but is technically a box camera because the lenses do not focus in tandem (unlike its cousin, the Spartus Spartaflex which has a coupled focusing system). In fact, the lenses on the Six Twenty canât really be focused at all.
The Spartus Spartaflex is a medium format twin lens reflex manufactured by the Spartus Camera Corporation of Chicago. Although I found a print ad from the 1940s pricing this camera outfit at an incredulous $47.91 (well over $800 in todayâs money), the Spartaflex is by no means a serious answer to the high-quality German TLRs (such as the Rolleicord IId) that had been dominating the market since the late â20s.
The Spartus 120 is a simple box camera made of an early type of plastic called Bakelite. At the time of the 120âs introduction, a great multitude of relatively inexpensive cameras (including the Spartus 35F) were being manufactured in Chicago by the same factories but sold under a puzzlingly broad range of different but related brands with Spartus being the cornerstone of it all. It should come as no surprise then that this very same camera was also sold as the Sunbeam 120 and that a brown-colored but otherwise identical variant was sold under the name âSpartus 120 Flash Camera.â
The Spartus 35F and its twin, the Spartus 35 are simple 35mm cameras made of Bakelite, an early plastic. Modeled after the highly successful and massively influential Argus A, the 35F features a classic shape very common to 35mm cameras of its era. The 35F was manufactured in Chicago by the aptly named Spartus Corp. before it became the Herold Manufacturing Co. which is why the lens of this particular specimen bears the Herold name. Spartus Corp. and its incarnations produced a great multitude of Bakelite cameras (many of which are practically identical to each other) under a wide variety of different brand names such as Utility, Falcon, Monarch and, of course, Spartus.
