It was first proposed in 1817 by the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss for a refracting telescope design, but was seldom implemented and is better known as the basis for the Double-Gauss lens first proposed in 1888 by Alvan Graham Clark, which is a four-element, four-group compound lens that uses a symmetric pair of Gauss lenses.

Alvan Clark & Sons built a 9+1⁄2 in (240 mm) telescope for Princeton University in 1877 using a Gauss lens;[2]: 117  although Gauss had designed the optics to eliminate spherical aberration for different wavelengths, the Clarks "found these meniscus components difficult to make [and] disagreed that they gave a more complete achromatism and better definition".

The telescope is now held by the National Museum of American History.

[3]: 27–28, 143 Alvan G. Clark, the son of the founder of the eponymous American optical company, designed a photographic lens using a symmetric arrangement of two Gauss lenses and patented it in 1888;[4] Paul Rudolph introduced the Zeiss Planar as an improved Double-Gauss using cemented doublets in the place of the inner negative meniscus elements,[2]: 121  and Horace William Lee of the Taylor, Taylor and Hobson Company completed the evolution by introducing asymmetry to the Double-Gauss design with the 1920 Opic.

[2]: 122  Derivatives of the Opic have dominated the design of high-speed (large aperture) photographic lenses since then.