Frank Mellberg of Bell & Howell designed the lens system for the highly successful Surveyor television cameras.

In a June 2010 letter, Frank Mellberg’s son, air and space historian Bill Mellberg wrote,

“This is a copy of my Dad’s original 1961 sketch for the Surveyor zoom lens assembly – drawn in his hotel room the night before he submitted Bell & Howell's proposal to Hughes Aircraft.

Other than you and me and my Dad, no one else has seen this sketch in close to 50 years!”

Bill Mellberg also wrote this essay on the Surveyor Program.

With thanks to Bill Mellberg. Scan by Colin Mackellar.

In this (circa June) 1966 photo, Frank Mellberg is indicating the Bell & Howell TV lens assembly on a scale model of Surveyor A (i.e. Surveyor 1) which he had built.

Photo courtesy William Mellberg. See also Bill’s essay.

Bill Mellberg provided this excerpt from the Consolidated Engineering Corporation’s magazine. CEC was a subsidiary of Bell & Howell.

“With Surveyor I successfully transmitting more than 11,000 detailed photographs of the moon, the time-honored maxim about one picture being worth a thousand words seems aptly up to date, if not an understatement. For it goes without saying that the Surveyor television photographs of the lunar surface, taken from as close as four feet, are vital to determining the suitability of proposed landing sites for the U.S. manned Apollo flight to the moon.

The eye of the Surveyor was designed and built by CEC’s parent company, Bell & Howell, for Hughes Aircraft Company, builders of the spacecraft as subcontractor to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.…”

Download the 4-page 6MB PDF file. Scanned by Colin Mackellar.