Allied troops were routinely terrorised by German marksmen who could seemingly defy the laws of physics by killing from so far away. The brand name etched on the side of nearly all these riflescopes was Zeiss and the glass inside them came from a separate, if related, firm: Schott. Otto Schott was a German chemist who spent much of his life experimenting with ways to improve glass, adding elements from the periodic table to a molten mix, one by one, to see what kinds of effects they would elicit.
