UTSUNOMIYA, Tochigi Pref. -- The delicate hands and intuitive judgment of Yoshimasa Katori enable him do what no precision machine has ever accomplished -- polish glass into perfectly curved lenses.
He can distinguish between 0.03 micron and 0.04 micron and can manually polish a lens with an irregularity of less than 0.06 micron. One micron is equal to one-thousandth of a millimeter.
"We tried several times to mechanize the (lens-polishing) process (of Newton gauges), but we didn't succeed," Katori said at Canon Inc.'s lens production factory here.