High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Bernhard Woldemar Schmidt (March 30, 1879 – December 1, 1935) was a German optician. In 1930 he invented the Schmidt telescope which corrected for the optical errors of spherical aberration, coma, and astigmatism, making possible for the first time the construction of very large, wide-angled reflective cameras of short exposure time for astronomical research.