It began as a film developing supplier and small portrait studio in the family's apartment, catering mainly for Austrian émigrés, but quickly grew into a huge company specialising in the distribution of photo accessories such as filters, lenses and extension rings. After the death of Hans Spira in 1944, his son Fred took over Spiratone. An advertisement in Minicam magazine, as well as others in the following year, reveal that the company was located at 49 West 27th Street, near 6th Avenue. The photo equipment shop can be seen in the network of other photo service suppliers founded by émigrés as Leco, Modernage Photographic Service, Pavelle Laboratories, Photo Service Suppliers and JJK Copy-Art.

Hans Spira, the father of Fred (formerly Siegfried Franz) Spira was an official at the Bodencreditanstalt bank in Vienna and later owned the Photohaus Spira-Ritz. On their arrival in New York, the family were keen to make a fresh start in the same business. As a Jew, Fred Spira had been forced to leave school in 1938 and was sent through a Kindertransport mission to Doncaster, Great Britain, where he was able to continue his schooling. In June 1940 he left Great Britain with his father and emigrated to New York, where his mother, Paula Spira, had already moved in February 1940.

During the 1940s, after Fred Spira took over the shop on his father's death, he began selling new and used cameras and wide-angle and telephoto lenses in his shop and by mail-order. In addition, Spiratone offered services such as refilling 35mm film cartridges and film processing. Orders were placed and shipped by post, and customers were reached through advertisements in trade magazines. Furthermore, Fred Spira discovered the Japanese photo market and under the name Spiratone sold a variety of zoom lenses, low-cost 500mm mirror lenses, fisheye lenses and 400mm f/6.3 lenses, all imported from Japan and distributed in the U.S. (Keppler 2007). In addition, Spiratone's revolutionary extension rings were the first to ensure compatibility between lenses and cameras from different manufacturers.

The level of the company's importance and success, both in the New York and the wider American photo market, can be seen in the full-page advertisements that appeared in such magazines as Minicam, Popular Photography, U.S. Camera, Camera and many more. Popular Photography was an important magazine for émigré photographers, who were able to publish both their images from their previous times in Europe as well as newer photographs from their exile in New York. Among the émigré photographers published were Lucien Aigner, Ruth Bernhard, Erwin Blumenfeld, Josef Breitenbach, Alexey Brodovitch, Rudy Burckhardt, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger, Philippe Halsman, Fritz Henle, Ruth Jacobi, Lilly Joss, Clemens Kalischer, George Karger, André Kértész, Hermann Landshoff, Lisa Larsen, Herbert Matter, Hansel Mieth, Lisette Model, Martin Munkacsi, Fritz Neugass, Walter Sanders, Kurt Safranski, Xanti Schawinsky, Rolf Tietgens, Werner Wolff, Roman Vishniac and Ylla.

During the Spiratone years, Fred Spira also became a photo-theorist and a collector of antique cameras and portraits and left a huge photographic collection. In 2001 The History of Photography as Seen Through The Spira Collection was published, in which Michael Hoffmann, the executive director of the Aperture Foundation, presented a history of photography using images from the Fred Spira Collection for his illustrations.
In 2020 most of the collection was sold at auction to the Qatar Museum in Doha, for a planned photographic museum. It can be guessed that behind the auction was Sheikh Saoud, a Qatari prince and Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage. Today, the Fred Spira Collection is probably held in the Museum of Islamic Art or in the Qatar Museum.