Canon's brand name comes from Kannon, a Buddhist bodhisattva
Canon's first camera, a 1934 prototype, was called the Kwanon after Kannon, the Buddhist bodhisattva known in China as Guanyin. The spelling was later anglicised into Canon. Oddly, the fledgling company could not make its own glass, so its earliest cameras used lenses from the firm that became Nikon.
Four men, including Takeshi Mitarai and Goro Yoshida, founded the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory in Japan in 1933. The Kwanon, developed between 1933 and 1936 and modelled on the Leica, was Japan's first 35mm camera with a focal-plane shutter. The company became Canon Camera in 1947 and plain Canon Inc. in 1969. Along the way it made Japan's first indirect X-ray camera in 1940.
The firm has a habit of firsts. In 1964 it released the Canola 130, Japan's first ten-key calculator, with 13 digits because the central bank needed that many to handle yen sums. The AE-1 of 1976 was the first camera with a built-in microcomputer, the EOS 5 of 1992 could focus where the photographer looked, and in 1995 Canon sold the first SLR lens with built-in image stabilisation. The EOS system, launched in 1987, is named after the goddess of the dawn.
Much of the money comes from office machines. Canon's engines powered the first Apple LaserWriter and matching HP printers, and copiers are its biggest division by revenue. A run of acquisitions widened the business: Dutch printer maker Océ, Swedish security-camera firm Axis for $2.83 billion in 2015, and Toshiba Medical Systems for $5.9 billion in 2016. It also bought the .canon internet domain.
Smartphones hurt the compact camera trade, cutting first-quarter operating profit by 34 per cent in 2013, and the pandemic brought the first quarterly loss in its history in 2020. Canon has since pushed into semiconductors, unveiling in 2023 a nanoimprint lithography system it says can pattern circuits equivalent to 5 nanometres more cheaply than ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines.
Source: Canon Inc.
