⌛🪶 Seeing The Spectacles' Story
More than 6 in 10 people wear glasses or contact lenses. These everyday spectacles have a very beautiful history. Let's begin with the early days…
The journey starts with a stone...
It all started with a rock crystal made of Beryl. Called the "Reading Stone", Abbas ibn Firnas is often credited for this invention in the 9th century.
From here, it took around 300 years to have "wearable" eyeglasses.
The first eyeglasses were estimated to have been made in central Italy, most likely in Pisa, by about 1290. They lacked a proper system to hold the glasses, which required the user to hold it by hands or meticulously balance it on the nose bridge.
The earliest pictorial evidence for the use of eyeglasses is Tommaso da Modena's 1352 portrait of the cardinal Hugh de Provence reading in a scriptorium.
These early glasses had convex lenses mainly designed to help with farsightedness (hyperopia) which assisted in activities like reading and writing.
Meanwhile in China
While on one side humans were developing optical lenses to enhance their vision, on the other side of the world protective glasses were being developed without any corrective properties.
Snow goggles: a type of traditional eyewear got developed by Intuit — a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions.
These goggles were made primarily to prevent snow blindness, a painful eye condition caused by exposure to sunlight reflected from ice and snow, particularly at an elevation. (Fresh snow reflects about 80% of the UV radiation compared to a dry, sandy beach (15%))
Historically, these glasses were made from seashore grass, bone, walrus ivory, or driftwood. One or more thin horizontal slots are carved into the front and sculpted to fit tightly on the wearer's face. Soot is occasionally put to the interior of the goggles to reduce glare.
The slits are deliberately thin to increase visual acuity while also reducing the amount of light entering. The field of view expands as the slits' width increases.
Sunglasses: Flat panes of smoky quartz were used in 12th-century China to make sunglasses. These were called Ai Tai, meaning ‘dark clouds.
Smoky quartz is a brownish-grey, translucent variety of quartz that ranges in clarity from almost complete transparency to an almost-opaque brownish-gray or black crystal.
Fun fact: dark glasses made of smoky quartz were worn by Chinese judges to hide their facial expressions during court proceedings. Yes, in the 12th century!
Back to optical lenses
Venice quickly became an important center of manufacture of reading eyeglasses, especially due to using the high-quality glass made at Murano. By 1301, there were guild regulations in Venice governing the sale of eyeglasses. and a separate guild of Venetian spectacle makers was formed in 1320. In the fourteenth century they were very common objects.
With the invention of printing and once books became available to everyone, the demand and subsequent popularity of spectacles rose exponentially.
In the second half of the fifteenth century the glasses for the nearsighted are already mounted with biconcave lenses.
However, these early glasses were still not fitted to the face, and the wearer had to hold them in place to use them. But around this time, a nose bridge and temples were added to keep the eyeglasses in place so they wouldn’t fall off the face.
In next newsletter…
We will continue from here and see how (and who) contributed to making our spectacles a simple and an easy-to-wear-all-day object. Contact lenses, Bifocals, and much more!
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