Meet Bernt Mannesson, one of our founders and the man behind the first Swedish CCTV
Published on April 17, 2025
At the beginning of the week, one of our four founders and former CEO, Bernt Mannesson, came to visit our headquarters in Sweden. Bernt was involved in designing Sweden's first CCTV (video magnifier), MagniVision 01, back in 1972. A monitor from ASA, which was a converted TV, was connected to this. This system became the basis for LVI's operations a few years later. Read the full story behind it below.
Bernt Mannesson is pointing out 1972, the first year at our History wall in our headquarters.
The first video magnifier in Sweden
During the visit to LVI, our staff took out a MagniVision 01 from its hiding place in our storage area, the video magnifier that Bernt and his colleagues designed in 1972, and Bernt expertly takes the system out of its box, unfolds the camera arm, and shows us how it works.
Bernt standing next to a MagniVision 01, that still is stored in our headquarters.
Bernt Mannesson then tells us about how it all came about when MagniVision 01, the first reading camera in Sweden, was developed: The origin was that a man named Jan-Ingvar Lindström, who worked at the Swedish Institute for the Disabled in the early 1970s, had made a trip to the USA. During a visit to Santa Monica Hospital in Los Angeles, he had seen a CCTV (video magnifier) with standard zoom optics, which had been developed by a man who himself had suffered from visual impairment. Lindström went home and could not let go of the fantastic machine. He commissioned Chalmers University in Gothenburg to carry out a project to develop such a video magnifier and this led to an advanced solution for the optics, with built-in prisms to be able to scan a text. Telub, a Swedish company mainly focusing on the Defense area, was asked if they were interested in manufacturing it, but it soon became clear that the optics would be too expensive and therefore Telub continued working with a conventional zoom optic.
At this time, Bernt was working in Telub's technical design department and was the Project Manager for the company's production of tactile products for the completely blind and was assigned to develop a solution, together with three other colleagues; Erling Bergmark, Kaj Ekberg and Kenneth Johansson.
In 1972, Magnivision 01, Sweden's first video magnifier, had been developed. The project was continued and after a few years, in 1978, Bernt and his colleagues wanted to form a self-governing organization within Telub. When they were not heard, they presented a proposal to run the project under their own management and this lead up to the foundation of LVI.
LVI is founded
Together, the four colleagues formed the company Växjö Elektronoptik, which later changed its name to LVI Low Vision International. However, Telub wanted to keep the production, and so it did. In the early years, Telub was responsible for production under a contract that was renewed annually, while the newly formed company would handle sales, design and marketing. A few years later, Telub wanted to increase the price of production and Bernt and his colleagues turned to the Swedish Development Fund for help. In order to bring the price down, they began to compare prices with other manufacturing companies in the area. This eventually led to a joint production company with another company, Micropower, from nearby Tävelsås, a few miles south of Växjö in Sweden.
Initially, the same conventional zoom optics were used as in the first reading cameras, but later LVI switched to ordering optics from Japan for its reading camera systems. A few years after the start, in the mid-1980s, Bernt visited the man who had designed the reading camera that had been in a hospital in Los Angeles and showed the company's then latest product, a MagniVision 04, and remembered how the man had been very impressed by how far they had come in Sweden.
- It was a nice feather in the cap, Bernt laughed.
Bernt then told us about how LVI became a successful company in the industry and soon expanded with various subsidiaries, first in Norway and Denmark and later on in more countries in Europe and even a little later in the USA. LVI was also the first company to introduce innovations such as color systems, autofocus, HD systems and computer-connected, portable reading cameras for schools (MagniLink Student, later MagniLink S).
Same company with the same vision, but with new technique
During his visit in our newly renovated headquarters, Bernt was shown around and thought it was fun to see the nice premises and was above all pleased that the company he co-founded is still alive and well. The basics are still the same, Bernt noted, it's still about enlarging and amplifying printed text so that those with poor eyesight can read it. But the cameras have of course become better, the resolution of the image higher and the products have become significantly smaller and lighter.
Our current CEO Henrik Blomdahl took the opportunity to show the company's latest products with built-in AI technology. Henrik demonstrated how our MagniLink iTAB can not only read out the text in a brochure with a simple voice command, but also summarize and present its content, in different languages, and interpret and read out handwritten text. Bernt was very impressed by how great the technical development of the products has been and how much can be done with today's technology.
LVIs CEO, Henrik Blomdahl, demonstrating a MagniLink iTAB with built-in AI technology.
The one thing Mannesson missed most from his time at LVI was the construction part. But his ability to draw and construct things has been very useful to him in other areas since then, and he revealed that he still sits and draws things in CAD programs. Among other things, he has made a lot of furniture that he designed himself.
Bernt also brought coffee for the entire staff, who enjoyed it a lot. We thank you for the celebratory visit and for the history lesson we were able to take part in, which we are now sharing.
Bernt brought some Swedish fika to our staff.