On February 6, 1992 at the ESO Headquarters in Garching the FORS instrument project for the ESO Very Large Telescope was publicly started with a kickoff meeting. FORS, the FOcal Reducer/low dispersion Spectrograph, will be the first instrument built outside ESO to be installed at the VLT observatory.
The idea for a set of general purpose focal reducers for the VLT can be traced back to the recommendations of the ESO Working Group on Imaging and Low Resolution Spectroscopy, published in VLT report No. 52 (1986).
The experience gained with EFOSC-type instruments at the 3.6-m telescope and at the NTT then led ESO to propose in the VLT Instrumentation Plan of June 1989 the construction of two dioptric focal reducer/low dispersion spectrographs for deep imaging, low resolution and multi object spectroscopy. The Cassegrain foci were chosen for the instruments because of their high throughput, to minimize the amount of scattered light and to make them suitable for polarimetric observations.
Following a Call for Proposals issued in 1990 a consortium composed of three German astronomical institutes (the Landessternwarte in Heidelberg and the University Observatories of Göttingen and München) was chosen in 1991 for the realization of the project.