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Do you know who is the first designer which used to strip down a traditional serif typeface? I know a contemporary example: František Štorm removes the serifs of the XVII th century Jannon Roman.
Jannon Antiqua
http://www.stormtype.com/family-jannon.html
Jannon Sans
http://www.stormtype.com/family-jannon-sans.html

Britannic (Wagner & Schmidt, 1901)

Can you elaborate on Britannic and its 'core' reference?
Thanks in advance.

Clearface/Clearface Gothic, by M. F. Benton?

The way you phrased your question is interesting - "stripping down the serifs" sounds as if one is peeling some vegetable to get rid of some rough texture or hard parts. I think the process with which a traditional type or script turns into a san-serif is fascinating and has occurred in almost all the scripts I have encountered - Arabic, Japanese, Thai, etc etc. In Japanese for example the brush-strokes which have thick and thin could be made mono-width, and the stroke endings which often twist into a tiny this edge are neglected. More than just stripping extra detail, san-serif as it has become to be used means finding the generic essential shape of the letter of a script and presenting it free of the traditional marks left by tools such as a chisel, bamboo pen, quill or brush. I have tried to do that for Arabic 50 years ago and am just now finishing the font!

I wonder if a designer ever tried to strip down the serifs of the traditional era typefaces?
Turn Jenson, Garamond, Kis, Caslon, Fournier, Baskerville, Didot naked and 'sans' and with a satisfying result from readability and design perspectives.
Imagine this superfamily package:
Garamond, Garamond Semi Serif, Garamond Sans, Garamond Semi Sans.
If only Slimbach could do the task.

Well, Martin Majoor has done this type of work. He has written about his particular approach to deriving sans from serif designs on his website: http://www.martinmajoor.com/6_my_philosophy.html

IIRC Syntax was one of the first, if not the first, published sans-serif directly derived from a Renaissance [serif, text] design. There’s also the (unpublished) sans that Van Krimpen made to match his Romulus in the 1930s.

Syntax was *directly* derived from a Renaissance design? Which one?

Um, no, sorry, should have said “model” not design. Not that I’d know of, at least.

"Meier described Syntax as being a sans-serif face modeled on the Renaissance serif typeface, similar to Bembo. The uppercase has a wide proportion, and the terminals not being parallel to the baseline provide a sense of animation. The lowercase a and g follow the old style model of having two storeys. The italics are a combination of humanist italic forms, seen in the lowercase italic q, and realist obliques, seen in the lowercase italic a, which retains two storeys, unlike in other humanist sans-serif typefaces like FF Scala Sans and Gill Sans, where the a has a single storey italic."

And since everything seems to be valid in typography these days, why not add serifs to original sans-serifs ? ;)