Tripods from Tiltall

The Marchioni family emigrated from the Italian Alps to the United States back in the early 1900s. The two Marchioni brothers, Caesar and Mark, were experienced engineers with a growing interest in photography. They decided to develop a practical tripod for their own use, and in 1946 the brothers decided to produce and sell their first lightweight, solid and versatile Tiltall.

From 1946 to 1973, Tiltall's fame spread worldwide because of its design, quality and superior performance. In 1973, the Leitz Company in Rockleigh, New Jersey, a US subsidiary of the inventors of the famous Leica 35mm system, persuaded the brothers to move all manufacturing operations to Rockleigh. Here, the Marchioni brothers personally trained the employees so that the unique design and quality standard could be manufactured there as well. The tradition of Tiltall thus continues today.

Do you need excellent support for your hobby? Then why not an excellent tripod from Tiltall?

In the past, a tripod from Tiltall was jokingly dubbed "the tripod from the ice cream vendor". And the term is not entirely inaccurate. After Italo Marchioni emigrated from Italy to overseas at the end of the 19th century, he sold homemade lemon ice cream in his small sales van in News York. To redirect the loss of his glass bowls in which he sold his ice cream, he soon sold the ice cream in paper cones and then got the idea to bake these cones out of wafer dough and applied for a patent for this invention in the state of New York on 22 September 1903.

His two sons Caesar and Mark Marchioni soon devoted themselves to other interests. Caesar became an avid amateur photographer and Mark was involved in industrial design. Caesar soon became increasingly dissatisfied with his tripod, which was actually very stable. It was too heavy for him and what he lacked above all was a tripod head with which he could precisely align his cameras. So the brothers soon began to develop their own tripod head, which made it possible to tilt the cameras on a tripod in all directions as desired. This created a small but fine workshop in which they produced their own development.

After the two sold the company to E. Leitz in 1973, the production of tiltall tripods continued in Rockleigh until the early 1980s. At the time of the beginning of digitalisation in the USA, none of the responsible managers was interested in such a niche production of high-quality mechanical-analogue precision parts, and this product line was obviously too exotic for the European parent company.

The Tiltall tripods were thus sold on to Star D. The company Star D had already been producing tripods for a long time. Star D already had a Tiltall replica in its product range under its own name and was now able to offer not only the copy but also the original from its own production.

Later, the remaining tools and construction drawings as well as the trademark were sold to a manufacturer from Taiwan.

Each Tiltall tripod comes with a padded tripod bag. For each tripod size, Foto Erhardt also offers an appropriately sized ball head from the Tiltall range.

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