Eyeglasses are not just magnifying glasses. The simple act of looking through a lens to enlarge its image is probably as old as man. The history of eyeglasses is the history of corrective lenses, not lenses that were referred to by the ancients as “burning glasses.” By the second half of the 20th century, new materials, including organic plastics for contact lenses and eyeglasses, are supplanting glass much the same way that glass replaced rock crystal during the Enlightenment.
Friar Bacon in the 13th century
The first written prescription of true eyeglasses (for nearsightedness) was made by Friar Roger Bacon of the Franciscan Order in 1268, after he was transferred from Oxford to Paris. By the year 1290, when Bacon was already in his 70s, such “lorgnons” were probably being used by other Franciscan as well as Dominican monks. Bacon wrote to other “scientists” all over Europe, and at the University of Paris his fellow scholars included many influential Catholic leaders, including Thomas Aquinas. Did St. Thomas take a pair of “Bacon’s Eyeglasses” with him in his travels to Italian university towns?
“Bacon’s glasses” gain respect
In 1352 the artist Tommaso da Modena painted a portrait of Hugh de Provence holding his eyeglasses. Over the decades to follow, a nobleman, a future saint, and even a pope allowed a pair of spectacles to figure in their portrait. Only in the 19th century, however, did the naturalism of photography permit the subject to place his spectacles on the bridge of the nose.
Eyeglasses were not a symbol of wealth and power as much as a mark of learning and of patronage to the artisan-optician and the science of their craft.
An awakening to Greek Alexandrian science was required to grind these early corrective lenses. But the frames remained relatively primitive. Some looked like little masks while others were goggles. Bacon had studied the refractive characteristics of rock crystals and glass, and the theologian-philosophers of English Oxford and the Continental universities had become familiar with the optics of Euclid and Hero of Alexander. Matters like comfort and cosmetics could not have been further from such thinkers.
To meet the high standards required of corrective lenses, the majority of eyeglasses ground before the 16th century were probably made of naturally-occurring crystal (sometimes called rhinestone) of the highest purity.
The invention of the first moveable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1448 has been compared to the caveman discovering fire. Gutenberg was credited with driving up the demand for reading glasses in Europe. Within 50 years of the first printing press, there were print shops established in 14 European countries, and over 8 million printed books were in circulation.
Whether or not corrective eyewear spread with the printed word is open to debate. But print undoubtedly increased the demand for magnifying glasses made of crown glass. Optical-quality glass probably became the lens material in greatest demand for literate merchants and the educated.
Clear “white” grissaile glass figured prominently in European architecture, not only in churches, but in universities as well. The 16th century teaching monks were often depicted in paintings as living in small “cells,” or chambers, but there was inevitably a large leaded-glass window with bright sunlight streaming in over the books and instruments covering the scholar’s desk.
Europe’s cathedrals
The glass of the famous cathedrals of Europe of the 13th and 14th century was probably molded at or near the site of construction by itinerant artisans who traveled across Europe. The glaziers who constructed these stained-glass windows painted their motifs onto the white glass, since painted glass let more light into cathedrals than colored glass would have.
By the time that typography and printing had revolutionized communications throughout the Western world, improved techniques for firing and “spinning” crown glass were required to meet the demand for lenses.
Glass, lens-grinding and optics
Glass craftsmen (including lens grinders) began to settle near the European glassworks that produced crown glass. Commercially, crown glass and new pressing techniques became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Netherlands, parts of Germany, and probably Venice (Murano) became early exporters of the glass used in these early eyeglasses, competing with smaller centers that served local markets.
The age of the scope, but not the Pope
In the history of ideas and inventions, the 17th century belongs to the telescope and the microscope and not to eyewear and spectacles. The telescope was invented by the lens grinder Hans Lippershey in 1600 and the microscope by another Dutch lens grinder, Anton Leeuwenhoek. Galileo immediately adapted Lippershey’s telescope in his famous observations of Jupiter, the Moon and the Sun, as soon as the Italian learned of the invention. It is noteworthy that Baruch Spinoza, himself a Dutch lens grinder and a follower of Descartes, “invented” rationalist Biblical Criticism while Leeuwenhoek and Lippershey were in a more practical frame of mind.
In the early 1600s, aristocratic ladies in European capitals showed a great fondness for all manner of decorative eyewear and fanciful viewing gadgets. It was sort of the optical equivalent of the masked ball. The “Prospect Glass,” a miniature telescope held on a ribbon, became an endearing fashion accessory of no visual utility.
The Quizzer was one of the most fanciful of optical accoutrements. It was little more than a magnifying glass (like stamp collectors use today) held to the blouse or jacket by a fancy ribbon or chain. The nobleman stared through it as if taking aim at the person or thing he was examining. Optics were more in the service of flamboyance and social intimidation than aids to vision.
Today, the term “fob” means a watch-pocket. But a Quizzer or a Prospect Glass, and the ribbon or chain used to attach it, are the 16th to 18th century equivalent of fobs. With such fobs as the Prospect Glass or the Quizzer, is it any wonder that the verb “to fob off” means to trick, cheat or deceive someone? Do you think lens grinders got rid of bad lenses (rejects) by working them into trinkets for the rich?
For a century or more the symbol of the aristocrat turned statesman, at least in eyewear, was the pince-nez, rivaled only by the monocle. (As late as 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt wore a pince-nez in his official photograph.) But by the mid to late 1700s, the temple frame came to be regarded as both more comfortable and as a more useful form of eyewear. And it didn’t have to be held on with the hands!
While the Parisians exhibited boundless fancy in eyewear, the invention of spring-wire frames was a boon to all those who needed correction for visual defects. Advances in lens technology continued in the 18th century. And with the biological basis of vision well established by scientist-physicians, those who needed eyeglasses could and did purchase them.
In Spain during the Enlightenment, the nobility adopted the temple spectacle as a mark of status as well as an aid to vision. The lenses and frames Spanish nobility wore in public
grew in size out of all proportion to their needs — to say nothing of their vision.
In 1774, on the eve of the American War of Independence and five years before the French Revolution, Ben Franklin was already an elderly man. It was the eighth year of his diplomatic mission from the American Colonies to France to find financial support (secretly or openly) for independence from England. Franklin negotiated with Louis XVI while also making an enormous impression in the streets of Paris on men and women from all walks of European life. He privately raised an undisclosed fortune to purchase firearms on the Continent for the struggle against King George III and English rule in the Colonies. Franklin even inspired the Marquis de Lafayette to seek revolutionary adventure in America, though the two never met.
Franklin still had the irrepressible inventor spirit in him despite his age and his responsibilities in revolutionary times. And he was a presbyope. The colonial diplomat wrote to his Philadelphia optician, George Whatley, and expressed the all-too-common complaint of many other presbyopes, that he had to continually switch between his two pairs of spectacles when he went from reading to activity requiring “the proper convexivity of glass through which a man sees clearest and best... for greater distances.”
But Ben did not write simply to complain. Franklin offered Whatley the single best solution that was feasible in 1784, the bifocal spectacle:
“I therefore, had formerly 2 pairs of glasses, which I shifted occasionally . . . I had the glass cut, and half of each associated in the same circle. By this means I have only to move my eyes up or down, the proper glasses always being ready.”
The former publisher of “Poor Richard’s Almanack” had invented the bifocal lens.
In the 19th century, not a single decade went by without at least one significant discovery, advance or invention which improved the field of corrective vision-wear. By the 20th century both Europe and America embarked on the modern pattern of wearing glasses for correcting vision defects as well as for fashion.
By the second half of the 20th century, new materials, including organic plastics for contact lenses and eyeglasses, are supplanting glass much the same way that glass replaced rock crystal during the Enlightenment.
Source
http://www.britannica.com
For more information
Burckhardt JC. The civilization of the renaissance in Italy. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1935; p 460
Burlingame R Benjamin Franklin: the first Mr. American. New York: Signet Key Books, 1955; p 116
Guinagh K. Inspired amateurs. New York: Longmans-Green, 1937; p 83–98
Malaval C, ed. Essilor, 1972–1997, seeing the world past. Paris: Creapress, 1997
Menzel D. Astronomy. New York: Random House, 1970; p 84–85
