What’s in a Name? Where Camera Companies Got Their Names

I love my cameras. I love my Pentax ME. I love my Leica M2.

These camera companies have been around for decades, and certainly before I was born. I wonder, where do these camera company names came from? It turns out the established names in the industry, the names on the cameras we learned to shoot with, the companies that make lenses we fawn over, all have their own stories. Some are practical, and some are poetic, and honestly, some are just plain weird. In an earlier post, we went down the rabbit hole of optical terminology: lentils, fireplaces, painter’s brushes, and the surprising poetry hiding inside the words we use every day. I wonder if there is a similar poetry to camera company names?

A list like this can never be complete, but I tried to compile it with companies I am familiar with or have a good back story in the name. I will take all the blame for any omissions in camera companies that you, dear reader, cannot believe I left out, or either object to being on this (very incomplete) list. Please send your love in the comments section. Let’s get into it.

1. Nikon

The most straightforward on this list, and the one closest to home for me, because my photography-loving grandfather swore by this camera company.

Nikon is a contraction of Nippon Kogaku, 日本光学, which translates simply as “Japan Optical.” The company was founded in 1917, merged from three optical manufacturers, and spent its early decades making binoculars, microscopes, and surveying instruments for the Japanese military and government. Specifically, Nikon is famous for making the massive 15-meter-long rangefinder used on the battleship Yamato, the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The cameras came later.

There’s something I like about the directness of this name. No mythology, no marketing wordplay. Just: we are Japanese, and we do optics. The name Nikon was introduced in 1946 for the company’s cameras specifically, as a shorter, more internationally pronounceable version of the parent company name. It also echoed Zeiss Ikon, itself a German camera brand formed from the merger of four companies (Contessa-Nettel, Ernemann, Goerz, and Ica, backed by Carl Zeiss), which tells you something about who they were benchmarking against. Some of the early Nikon I, M, and S cameras looked a lot like Contax cameras.

Zenji Wakimoto, whom we met in the Eras series, spent his career at Nippon Kogaku. When you hold a Nikkor lens, you are holding the output of that tradition.

On a personal note, my grandfather passed away when I was ten. He would be so proud of me with the career I have now. He would definitely brag that Nikon engineers ask his grandson about lens design.

2. Canon

I’ll admit a bias toward Japanese companies here. I just have more information, first-hand accounts, and stories. This one always surprises people.

Canon was originally called Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory, 精密光学研究所, not a very original name. The Laboratory’s first camera, produced in 1934, was called the Kwanon, named after Kannon (観音), the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy and compassion. The early prototypes even carried an image of the thousand-armed Kannon on the shutter. Legend has it that the first lens was going to be called Kasyapa, one of the principal disciples of Buddha. That would have been something. Apparently the engineer who made the Kwanon was religious.

When the company began exporting internationally, Kwanon was adapted to Canon: close enough in sound to preserve the reference, but accessible to Western markets who might struggle with the original. The word canon also carries its own meaning in English, an authoritative standard, a body of rules, something established and trusted. Whether that was intentional double meaning or happy accident, I can’t say for certain. But one can wonder.

Canon was incorporated as a company name in 1947. Keizo Yamaji, who we also met in the Eras series, joined Canon in the early 1950s, solved the zoom lens problem, and eventually became its president. Not bad for a company named after a bodhisattva.

3. Olympus

Named after Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece, and in Greek mythology, the home of the gods.

The company was founded in 1919 as Takachiho Seisakusho, named after a mountain in Miyazaki Prefecture that features prominently in Japanese mythology as the place where the gods descended to earth. When they began selling microscopes internationally in 1921, they needed a name that would resonate with Western customers, and landed on Olympus, the Western equivalent, in a sense, of a mythological mountain. Sacred high ground, divine associations, aspirational altitude.

What I find interesting here is the deliberate translation of one mythology into another. The founding vision was Japanese and Shinto; the export brand was Greek and Olympic. Same idea, different cultural register. It’s a very practical kind of poetry.

4. Fujifilm

Named after Mount Fuji (富士山), Japan’s most iconic peak and one of the most recognized natural symbols in the world.

The Fuji Photo Film Co. was founded in 1934, and the name was chosen partly for its association with Japan’s national symbol, and partly because the company was located in Ashigara, at the foot of Mount Fuji. There’s a pleasing literalness to it: we make film, we are from the shadow of Fuji, therefore we are Fuji Film.

Mount Fuji is also, of course, an almost perfectly symmetrical cone, which, as a lens designer, I find pleasing. An aspherical mountain, you might say. Beautifully corrected for coma, haha.

5. Pentax

A portmanteau, and a clever one.

Pentax also had a different earlier name, Asahi Optical Joint Stock Co. (旭光学工業株式会社). Asahi is the word for the rising sun, and also carries meanings of hope and development. Kogaku is optics, as we saw with Nikon. Kind of fitting, since the sun is also a light source.

The name Pentax combines pentaprism and reflex. The pentaprism was the key innovation that made single-lens reflex cameras practical, routing the image from the mirror up through a five-sided prism to deliver a bright, correctly oriented viewfinder image. When the Asahi Optical Company introduced their SLR in 1957 with this prism, they named it the Asahiflex Pentax to highlight the feature. Eventually Pentax became the brand name, and Asahi Optical became Pentax Corporation.

Interestingly, in the modern camera landscape, Pentax is one of the few companies that still use the Penta prism in their cameras, as most have gone to mirrorless. It seems like they are still saying: we make SLRs with pentaprisms, and we strive to be the best.

On a personal note, the camera my grandfather bought for my mom when I was born was the Pentax ME (please don’t do the math). No autofocus, but it had autoexposure, which was new at the time. She had one lens, a 50mm, and I took the dust off of the camera when I got interested in photography. As a student with no money, I bought an M42-to-K mount adapter and picked up a lot of old, cheap lenses to play with. I am a Pentaxer by circumstance, but a happy one, because I love my 77mm Limited lens. There is nothing like it from other lens makers.

6. Ricoh

This is a little confusing, because Ricoh now owns the Pentax brand, but Ricoh has its own separate camera history. Ricoh is one of those names that sounds clean and modern and gives no hint of where it came from, which is actually a scientific research institute.

Ricoh has its roots in the Rikagaku Kenkyusho (better known as RIKEN, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), which in 1936 decided to commercialize the fruits of its R&D by founding a separate company. That company was initially called Riken Kankoshi, the Riken Sensitized Paper Company, and started out making photographic paper, not cameras. In 1938, after deciding to produce cameras as well, founder Kiyoshi Ichimura changed the company’s name to Riken Optical Co., Ltd. The camera business grew from there.

The company finally took the name of its products, becoming Ricoh Company, Ltd. in 1963. The name Ricoh is simply a westernized contraction of Riken Kogaku (Riken Optical), run together and smoothed out for international readability.

What I find interesting here is the origin point: a pure research institute that decided to make things. RIKEN still exists today as one of Japan’s most prestigious scientific research organizations. Ricoh, the camera and office equipment company, is one of its commercial descendants. There’s something a little unexpected about that lineage, which is perhaps why the name was cleaned up and the research-institute connection quietly backgrounded as the company grew.

Ricoh may not be as popular in the camera history index as others, but the Ricohflex, Ricoh 35, and Ricoh Half were massive consumer hits, and Ricoh was a camera giant in the 1950s.

My current favourite digital camera is the Ricoh GR series. I had the older Ricoh GR Digital 2 (before APS-C), the GR Limited Edition (the photos of my children are mostly taken by this camera), the GR IIIx Urban Edition (I love the 40mm focal length), and now the GR IV Monochrome (I had to). I can use these cameras blindfolded. I could probably use the settings if they were written in Czech. That’s how much the camera has become an extension of myself.

7. Konica, Minolta, and Konica Minolta

This one requires a bit of unpacking, because Konica had three different names before it became Konica, and each one tells a different part of the story.

The company traces its history back to 1873, when pharmacist Rokusaburō Sugiura began selling photographic materials at his shop in Konishiya Rokubē, the biggest pharmacy trader in Tokyo at that time. Sugiura eventually left his family’s pharmacy business and set up a dedicated photography shop called Konishi Honten (literally “Konishi Main Shop”) in the Nihonbashi district. The name Konishi is just his family shop name; nishi means west in Japanese, and ko is small. A small western shop. Not poetic, but honest.

The company grew, modernized, and eventually became known as Konishiroku, written 小西六 in Japanese, meaning “Konishi Six.” The roku (六, six) referred to Rokuemon, the hereditary name that the Sugiura family head had adopted. So the company name was essentially: small western shop, sixth generation. A direct trace of family lineage baked into the corporate name. Six is also hexa in Greek. We’ll come back to that later.

After the war, Konishiroku had developed a camera prototype called the Rubikon, but decided to rename it: the old name was too much like the Rubicon, the river Caesar crossed on his march to seize Rome, which felt unsuitable in a time so recently removed from war. The new name, Konica, was derived from “Konishiroku” and “camera.” Same logic as Leica: take the company name, add camera, compress. The Konica I rangefinder was introduced in 1947.

The company formally took the name Konica Corporation in 1987, and merged with Minolta in 2003. But the original 小西六 (six generations of a pharmacy family that pivoted to photography in the 1870s) is still in there if you know where to look.

Minolta was founded in 1928 by Kazuo Tashima under the name Nichi-Doku Shashinki Shōten, which literally translates to Japan-German Camera Company. The name “Minolta” was coined in 1933, serving as a backronym for “Mechanism, Instruments, Optics, and Lenses by Tashima.”

Minolta has two etymologies, which is either charming or confusing depending on your tolerance for backronyms. There’s a second reading, which may or may not have been constructed after the fact. The name sounds like the Japanese words minoru ta (稔る田), meaning ripening rice field. The term reminded Tashima of a proverb his mother frequently used: “The ripest ears of rice bow their heads lowest,” meaning that the more successful one becomes, the more humble one must be.

Which came first, the proverb or the acronym? I couldn’t tell you. The trademark was registered in 1933, and camera historians have been arguing about it ever since. Personally, I find the proverb more interesting than the acronym. “Mechanism, Instruments, Optics and Lenses by Tashima” is a description. “The ripest rice bows lowest” is a philosophy. I like to think Tashima had both in mind simultaneously, one for the engineers, one for himself.

Minolta made some remarkable cameras. The first camera in space was a Minolta, carried by John Glenn on Friendship 7 in 1962. The Maxxum 7000 in 1985 was the world’s first commercially successful integrated autofocus SLR.

Konica and Minolta merged in 2003, and the combined camera legacy was later acquired by Sony.

I always wanted the Minolta CLE. It was lighter and smaller than the Leica M series cameras, while still having an M mount. Minolta manufactured the Leica CL in the 1970s: Leica, the company Minolta had spent decades studying, needed them. The lenses were superb. Minolta and Leica would continue their partnership; the Leica R4 through R7 cameras and the Minolta XD share the same chassis. The ripest rice does indeed bow its head.

8. Kyocera and Yashica

Now we are really getting into the weeds. These are certainly obscure camera company names, but I own a Yashinon M42 lens from when I had no money for my Pentax, and it is surprisingly good.

Kyocera has no photographic roots, so I’ll make it quick. It’s short for Kyoto Ceramics.

Yashica used to be called Yashima Seiki (八洲精機) at its 1949 founding, and they were a precision camera parts maker. They started making cameras in the 1950s. Their TLR, the Yashicaflex, was the camera that put them on the map.

They changed their name to Yashica in 1958, and I suspect the logic is similar to the Leica and Konica naming.

In 1975, Yashica started working with Carl Zeiss, and played a part in the revitalized Contax RTS. In 1983, Yashica was acquired by Kyocera, but the Contax branding was passed on.

Kyocera was a unique Japanese camera maker in the 1980s and 90s, since it carried the full Zeiss branding on its lenses. Planar, Distagon, Tessar, Sonnar, you name it. In my opinion, the Contax G series cameras and the compact Contax T series are some of the most elegant cameras produced, with sublime lenses.

9. Leica

Short for Leitz Camera, named after Ernst Leitz, the founder of the optical instrument company in Wetzlar, Germany.

Ernst Leitz II introduced the first Leica camera prototype in 1913 (the Ur-Leica, designed by Oskar Barnack), and the production model in 1925. The name was a practical contraction: Leitz + Camera = Leica. Clean, simple, Germanic.

What happened after the name was established is, of course, something else entirely. Leica became synonymous with a particular philosophy of photography, qualities such as being small, precise, unobtrusive, and built to last decades. Walter Mandler’s lenses are legendary, and some of my favourites, since I own both the M and R Summicron 50s. Peter Karbe’s modern APO lenses make no compromise on quality. The red dot signifies the brand. A contraction of a founder’s name turned into one of the most powerful identities in imaging.

The Leitz family also has a remarkable humanitarian footnote. During the Nazi era, Ernst Leitz II used the company’s international offices as cover to help Jewish employees, dealers, and their families emigrate to safety: what historians have called the “Leica Freedom Train.” A name that carries more weight than most.

(yes, I let my son hold my Leica M2 when he was three)

10. Kodak

And now for something completely different, the origin of the name Kodak.

Surprisingly, it’s an invented name, with no apparent meaning, no founder’s name, no mythology. George Eastmansimply decided that he wanted a word that was short, easy to pronounce in any language, impossible to misspell, and started and ended with the letter K, which he considered strong and incisive. He tried combinations until he and his mother arrived at Kodak in 1888, and then trademarked it.

This is actually a remarkable piece of branding insight for 1888. Eastman understood that a global company needed a global name, one that didn’t carry cultural baggage, didn’t mean something unfortunate in another language, and could be shouted across a marketplace anywhere in the world and understood as a proper noun. He was inventing what we would now call a brand strategy.

Kodak also produced the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories, where Rudolf Kingslake ran the lens design department for over three decades. So a made-up word became the institutional home of one of the most important lens design programs in American history. Names are strange things.

11. Zeiss

Simply named after its founder, Carl Zeiss, who established his optical workshop in Jena in 1846.

Carl Zeiss himself was a skilled craftsman and businessman, but the optical theory that made the company legendary came from Ernst Abbe, and the glass that made the designs achievable came from Otto Schott. Three people, one name on the door. The Zeiss brand carries all three of their legacies, but only one of their names.

What the Zeiss name represents now, legendary lens forms like the Tessar, the Planar, the Sonnar, and the Biogon, along with figures like Bertele and Rudolph, essentially the entire vocabulary of photographic lens design, grew from a single optical workshop in a mid-sized German city. Carl Zeiss died in 1888, before most of it happened. The name outlasted the man by about a century and a half, and is still going.

12. Hasselblad

Named after its founder, Victor Hasselblad, a Swedish naturalist and ornithologist who was commissioned by the Swedish government during the Second World War to reverse-engineer a German aerial camera, and ended up building a better one.

The Hasselblad 500C is the camera that went to the moon: selected by NASA for the Apollo missions and used to take the photographs that defined how we see the 20th century. Buzz Aldrin left his Hasselblad on the lunar surface to save weight on the return journey. Those cameras are still up there.

A naturalist’s name on a camera that documented the moon landing. I think Victor would have been pleased.

13. Rollei

Back to Germany for one of the most storied names in the whole list.

Rollei started as Franke & Heidecke, named after its two founders, Paul Franke and Reinhold Heidecke, who set up their workshop in Braunschweig in 1920. Their first camera was called the Heidoscop, a stereo camera. They followed that up with a roll-film version they called the Rolleidoscop, and that is where the name “Rollei” was eventually derived, as a shortened combination of “roll film” and Heidecke’s name.

The Rolleiflex, their twin-lens reflex camera, appeared in 1929 and changed photography. Cameras with mirrors were historically called reflex cameras, so they called their camera the Rolleiflex: roll film, reflex. It was a hit almost immediately. By the 1950s, virtually every newspaper photographer in the world had one. Photographers like Diane Arbus, Helmut Newton, and David Bailey worked with Rolleiflex. The square format, the waist-level viewfinder, and the quality of the Zeiss or Schneider lenses all defined a particular look and feel in photography that still has devoted practitioners today.

The Rollei name eventually overtook the Franke & Heidecke name completely: the company didn’t officially rename itself Rollei-Werke until 1962, by which point the cameras had been called Rollei by everyone for three decades.

One detail I find particularly interesting: Reinhold Heidecke apparently got the idea for the twin-lens reflex design while looking over the top of a trench with a periscope during the First World War, and thought of a camera that used a similar principle, with one lens for taking the photo and one for the photographer to look through. A battlefield periscope became one of the most beloved camera designs in history. Optics gets into everything, eventually.

14. Agfa

An acronym, but not a tidy one.

Agfa stands for Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation, which translates roughly as “Joint-Stock Corporation for Aniline Production.” Aniline is a chemical compound used in dye manufacturing. Agfa was founded in Berlin in 1867 by chemists Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Carl Alexander von Martius, and for its first few decades had nothing to do with photography at all. It made dyes and stains for the textile industry and for microscopy.

The pivot to photography came in the 1890s, first with photographic chemicals and plates, then with film, then eventually with cameras. The Agfa name only tells you what the company was at its founding, not what it became. By the time Agfa was producing the Optima, the first mass-produced camera with automatic exposure, in 1959, it was about as far from aniline dye manufacturing as you can get.

One dark chapter worth noting: Agfa was absorbed into IG Farben in 1925, the giant German chemical conglomerate that supplied Zyklon B during the war. Several Agfa directors were indicted at Nuremberg. The company was reconstituted as a Bayer subsidiary in 1952 and eventually became Agfa-Gevaert through a merger with Belgian firm Gevaert in 1964. The Agfa of APX darkroom nostalgia has complicated roots.

15. Polaroid

Named after the product, not the company, which is unusual, and says something about Edwin Land‘s priorities.

The original company was Land-Wheelwright Laboratories, founded by Edwin Land and his Harvard physics professor in 1932. Their first product was a polarizing filter, a thin synthetic film that aligned light waves to reduce glare. Land had been obsessed with the headlight problem since nearly being involved in a car accident as a teenager. He called the filter “Polaroid,” and the name was so much better than “Land-Wheelwright” that the company eventually renamed itself after it.

The camera came later, and in a characteristically dramatic way: in 1944, Land’s three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn’t see the photograph he’d just taken of her. Within an hour, he had mentally worked out the core principles of instant photography. The first Polaroid camera sold out in minutes at a Boston department store in 1948. All fifty-seven units were gone on the first day.

Land himself held 535 US patents, second only to Thomas Edison. Steve Jobs reportedly called him a “national treasure.” The Polaroid name outlasted the company, and is still in use today on cameras made by others. Sometimes the product becomes the brand, and the brand becomes the idea.

16. Balda

The name is an abbreviation of the founder’s surname, but with a story behind the split.

Max Baldeweg founded his company in Dresden in 1908, initially making shutters, vignetting devices, and film-pack cassettes. In 1913, he registered “Balda” as a trademark, a contraction of Baldeweg, and the company became Balda-Werk Max Baldeweg. Dresden was Germany’s camera-making capital in the early 20th century, and Balda was one of its steadiest contributors: medium-priced folders, box cameras, and a healthy OEM business supplying cameras to other companies for rebadging.

The war changed everything. Dresden was bombed heavily in February 1945, and when the Soviet occupation began, Baldeweg fled west. His factory was nationalized in 1946. He rebuilt in Bünde, West Germany, in 1948, starting over under the same Balda name, which he won back through litigation from the East German state that had taken over his old factory.

For a while there were two Baldas: the nationalized East German version (which eventually became Belca-Werk, then was absorbed into Pentacon) and Max Baldeweg’s West German company. The West German Balda went on to manufacture the entire Minox 35 series, as well as cameras for Voigtländer and Minox under contract. The Minox 35s were some of the most elegant compact cameras ever made. The name that started as an abbreviation of a mechanic’s surname ended up on some genuinely fine postwar optics.

17. Alpa

Switzerland applied its watchmaking obsession to cameras, and the result was Alpa.

The story starts with Pignons SA, a company founded in 1918 in Ballaigues, in the Swiss Jura mountains, the same region that houses the workshops of Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and the rest of the haute horlogerie world. Pignon is French for pinion (a gear wheel), and that’s exactly what Pignons made: precision pinion gears for Swiss watch movements. When the Great Depression forced diversification, cameras were a natural step. As the ALPA website puts it: watches measure time, cameras preserve it.

Pignons commissioned engineer Jacques Bogopolsky, who was also the designer of the Bolex cine camera, to design a still camera. The first prototypes appeared in 1939 under various names (Bolca, Teleflex, Viteflex), and in 1944 the camera was presented publicly under the name ALPA. The name was chosen because the camera was light, pocketable, and seemed suited to the Alps, the mountains that define the Swiss landscape and identity.

So: a pinion gear company, in the shadow of the Alps, making cameras with watchmaking tolerances. ALPA is all three of those things at once. Total production of the original 35mm cameras over forty years was estimated at around 40,000 units, a number that a single Nikon factory would have produced in a week. Each one was hand-assembled to tolerances that would make an aerospace engineer nod approvingly.

18. Ilford

Named after a town in Essex, despite the town’s objections.

Alfred Harman founded the company in 1879 in the basement of his house in Cranbrook Road, Ilford, making gelatin dry plates. He called it Britannia Works. After a legal dispute with his distributor prevented him from using the Britannia name, he renamed his products after the town where he lived. The company tried to formally change its name to Ilford Limited in 1900, but the local Urban District Council objected to a commercial company using the town’s name. After two years of negotiation, they relented, on condition that a comma be inserted after “Ilford” and that “Limited” be spelled in full. The company officially became Ilford, Limited in 1902, comma and all. The comma was dropped from advertising around 1935 and officially retired in 1951.

Ilford is now primarily a film and paper company (the home of HP5 Plus, FP4, Delta, and the rest of the black-and-white canon), but it entered cameras briefly in the postwar years, including the Witness and the Advocate, and had Agilux manufacture several cameras under its name. The founding Harman name lives on today in Harman Technology Ltd, which trades as Ilford Photo after a management buyout in 2005.

19. Linhof

The oldest camera manufacturer still in operation. Full stop.

Valentin Linhof was a master mechanic who opened his optical-mechanical workshop in Munich in 1887. His first product was a metal circular leaf shutter, and it won a gold medal in Paris the same year. From shutters, he moved to cameras, and from cameras to an uncompromising philosophy that he printed directly in his catalog: quality instead of mass production.

The name is the founder’s name, and it has passed through his family, then through his family’s descendants by marriage. His daughter Clara took over on his death in 1929. Her granddaughter’s husband, Nikolaus Karpf, entered the company in 1933 and became chief engineer, then owner. In 1934, he designed the Technika, the world’s first all-metal folding field camera with fully adjustable front and rear standards. Revised versions of the Technika are still in production today. NASA astronauts photographed Earth from the Discovery shuttle with a Linhof Aero camera in 1983.

Valentin Linhof also sold his shutter business to his partner Friedrich Deckel, who went on to develop the Compur shutter, the standard shutter for precision cameras through most of the 20th century. The shutter business and the camera business went their separate ways, and both became foundational. Linhof stayed in Munich, stayed in the family tradition, and is still making cameras there today, over 130 years later.

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Note: two glaring omissions from a modern standpoint are Sony and Panasonic, both great camera companies today. But Sony bought Konica Minolta’s camera business in 2006, and Panasonic got into the camera game well into the digital era. I don’t consider either a historical camera company, as great as their cameras are today.

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The Pattern

Looking at this list as a whole, a few things jump out.

Japanese companies almost universally reached for something aspirational: a sacred mountain, a divine figure, a national symbol, sometimes a research pedigree or a family name. There’s a philosophical generosity in this. These weren’t just products; they were meant to represent something larger. Canon invokes mercy and a Buddhist stillness. Olympus invokes the dwelling place of gods. Fujifilm invokes Japan itself. Minolta bows its head like ripening rice. Pentax is a portmanteau of a technology, honest to a fault. Ricoh, Konica, and Yashica read a little more sterile on the surface, but each carries a family or institutional story worth knowing.

Western companies, by contrast, mostly went with founders’ names or invented words, and carried an evident respect for the German standard they often measured themselves against. Leica is Leitz. Zeiss is Zeiss. Hasselblad is Hasselblad. Balda is Baldeweg, and Linhof is Linhof. Kodak is nothing and everything. The identity sits in the engineering reputation rather than the symbolism.

What strikes me most, though, is how much weight these names now carry, weight that has nothing to do with etymology or branding intent. Leica means a certain philosophy of photography. Zeiss means a certain standard of optical quality. Kodak means an entire era of analog photography that has now passed. Hasselblad means the moon, at least to me.

Names start as labels. Over time, on both sides of the world, they become containers for everything that happened under them.