The company name (Bausch and Lomb) and the US Patent number (2031792) are prominently inscribed on the front of the lens barrel.

[3] For this reason, it is believed the Metrogon lenses marked with this patent are a licensed version of the popular and very similar (if not identical) Topogon design.

An aerial camera fitted with a Metrogon lens deployed by the United States Army Air Corps was featured in a 1941 article in Popular Science, which noted the lens gave the camera a 93° field of view, doubling the area that could be captured in a single photograph.

[4] By 1944, the military had charted 3,000,000 sq mi (7,800,000 km2) in a single year using the tri-Metrogon, a triple aerial camera system fitted to the noses of aircraft including the P-38 Lightning and B-25 Mitchell.

The introduction of faster lenses with equivalent coverage including the Wild Aviotar and Zeiss Biogon in the 1950s rendered the Metrogon obsolete,[9]: 151  and Metrogon lenses were sold to the public as surplus starting in the early 1960s.