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Eyeglasses 1200s AD |
"Mine eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me..." "Specs" or eyeglasses took a long time to evolve into the "One-Hour" lenses found today. The Chinese first used coloured glasses as a fashion accessory that supposedly gave magical powers but didn't improve sight. Roger Bacon, a medieval inventor, discovered the magnifying properties of lenses in 1262, arguing that glasses could be used to help you see. Twenty years later in Florence, Italy, inventor Alessandro di Spina made the first pair of working, fashionable glasses. While these glasses worked, scientists didn't understand how the glasses helped the eye to see. They thought that the eye sent out light that reflected like a mirror on whatever a person was looking at; then the light came back to the eye and people could see! In 1604, Johannes Kepler figured out how glasses work. He named the parts of the eye and described how the eye actually focuses with the help of lenses. Inventors continued to improve on glasses (and still do today, in the fields of optometry and optics). In 1784 Ben Franklin created the bifocals that sit on his face in his famous portraits. Forty years later, in 1827 George Airy made circle-shaped glasses to correct astigmatism (an eye defect that makes things look blurry). These inventions were a far cry from the lightweight glasses and contact lenses used today. But those are other inventions. |