ICA Trona1912

History

ICA was founded in 1909 and almost immediately began producing a broad catalog of folding cameras for the German and export market. The Trona appeared around 1912 as one of the company's folding strut designs, sized for the standard glass plate formats of the era -- 9x12 cm being the most common, alongside 6.5x9 cm variants.

Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, ICA iterated on the Trona through incremental lens and shutter upgrades. The move from Dominar to Tessar glass significantly improved optical performance; the Tessar's four-element three-group design was already considered among the sharpest lenses available for amateur work.

When Carl Zeiss AG, JENA reorganized German camera manufacturing in 1926, ICA was merged with Contessa-Nettel, Ernemann, and Goerz to form Zeiss Ikon AG. Production of the Trona under the ICA name effectively ceased at that point, with successor models continuing under the Zeiss Ikon brand. Working examples of the Trona today are genuinely antique objects -- over a century old -- and are collected as much for their historical significance as for practical use.

Why It Matters

The ICA Trona sits at the root of the German folding camera tradition. Understanding the Trona is understanding the design vocabulary that produced the Ikonta, the Super Ikonta, the Zeiss Ikon Nettar, and eventually the Voigtlander Bessa line. The self-erecting strut-fold mechanism, the Tessar optic on a leaf shutter, the compact body that unfolds to a rigid shooting platform -- all of these elements were present in the Trona before the Zeiss Ikon merger rationalized and refined them.

Industrially, ICA's camera output during the 1910s cemented Dresden as the center of German precision optics manufacturing. The discipline of building cameras to sub-millimetre tolerances in high volume, which ICA practiced, established the production culture that made Zeiss Ikon's postwar equipment so technically reliable.

For collectors, the Trona is a rare window into the pre-standardization era, when plate formats coexisted with early roll film and shutters were still being standardized by the Deckel and Compur workshops.

Sample Photographers / Notable Use

• German press and portrait photographers of the 1910s routinely used ICA equipment for studio and field work.
• The Trona and related ICA folders were standard professional tools in the German-speaking world during World War I -- plate cameras of this type documented the conflict on both the home front and (by freelance photographers) in the field.
• Collectors and photographic historians reference the Trona as a primary example of pre-Zeiss Ikon Dresden camera craft.

References

• Camera-Wiki: ICA Trona -- model identification and variant list.
• Wikipedia: ICA (company) -- corporate history and the 1926 Zeiss Ikon merger.