Looking through the Reading Glass

They make us look suave; they make us look nerdy; sometimes mature and often funny. The wearer knows where they pinch and also the stress of forgetting them somewhere. But heavy frames or rimless, reading glasses commonly known as spectacles are a saviour for many reading addicts.

Today the terms are used interchangeably, but at the turn of the last century, there was a clear demarcation: “eyeglasses” was the word used to describe eyewear with no sidebar, while “spectacles” referred to frames with sidebars.

1200-1600

Surprisingly, the inventor of the eyeglasses is unknown. These were believed to be invented sometime between 1268 and 1289 in Italy. Roman tragedian Seneca (4 BC -65AD) is said to have used a glass globe of water as a magnifier to read ”all the books of Rome”. It’s been reported that monks in the middle ages used glass spheres as magnifying glasses to read.

The 13th century Venetians glass blowers are known to have produced reading stones made of solid glass that was put into hand-held, single lens-type frames made of horn or wood. These reading stones were similar to hand-held magnifying lenses of today.

Most historians believe that the first form of eyeglasses was produced in Italy by monks or craftsmen in Pisa (or perhaps Venice) around 1285-1289. These magnifying lenses for reading were shaped like two small magnifying glasses and set into bone, metal, or leather mountings that could be balanced on the bridge of nose.

The first eyeglass frame temples were made by Spanish craftsmen in 1600’s. They affixed ribbons of silk or strings to the frame and loop them over the user’s ears. The new types of eyeglasses were carried out to China by Spanish and Italian missionaries. Instead of making loops, the Chinese attached small metal weights to the strings. In 1730 Optician Edward Scarlett designed rigid temples that rest atop the wearer’s ears.

Salvino D’ Armate is often credited with inventing the first recognized pair of eyeglasses around 1285, in Italy, but there is no evidence to conclude this. The earliest lenses were produced from quartz and were usually mounted on frames of bone, metal or leather.

1700s

In the 1700s, eyeglasses were made by hand. The century’s most important contributions to eyeglasses were the invention of side or temple pieces that rest over the ear and bifocals, invented by Benjamin Franklin, in 1784.

Although most sources routinely credit the invention of bifocals to Benjamin Franklin, an article on the website of the College of Optometrists interrogates this claim by examining all the evidence available. It tentatively concludes that it is more likely that bifocals were invented in England in the 1760s, and that Franklin saw them there and ordered a pair for himself.

1800s

In the 1800s eyeglasses were considered evidence of old age and infirmity. As a result, people preferred to wear spectacles only when they were needed. This was especially true for women. Those who could afford it found hand-held designs such as the lorgnette to avoid having glasses on their faces.

Lorgnettes were developed around 1780 from scissor spectacles. Early lorgnette designs consisted of a pair of eyeglasses with a single, long handle. In 1830, a French manufacturer designed a hinged bridge with a spring, which allowed the eyeglasses to be folded.

1900s

The 1900s saw eyeglasses become an industry of their own, complete with manufacturing and distribution networks. Styles quickly changed in this century as Hollywood and celebrities began to influence fashion and new materials became available, especially plastics.

1900-1920

As the 19th Century came to a close, more and more people wore their eyeglasses every day. A popular style of inexpensive, everyday spectacles was the pince-nez. French for “pinch nose,” the pince-nez was first developed in France around 1840 and began to be imported to America after the 1850s.

Pince-nez have no temples, but are fit snugly on the bridge of the nose. Pince- nez could be uncomfortable to wear and broke often from falling off the nose. The popularity of pince-nez was helped by political figures such as U.S. Presidents Teddy Roosevelt who wore them regularly.

Sherlock Holmes definitely used these in his disguises!

1920 to 1960

Although pince-nez were still widely popular in the 1920s, they began to be seen as stuffy and old-fashioned. A Hollywood actor named Harold Lloyd was known for wearing tortoiseshell spectacles with large, round lenses. His photos and Hollywood movies started a fashion craze for temple spectacles.

Fused bifocals, improving on the Franklin-style design by fusing the distance- and near-vision lenses together, were introduced in 1908. Sunglasses became popular in the 1930s, in part because the filter to polarize sunlight was invented in 1929, enabling sunglasses to absorb ultraviolet and infrared light. Another reason for the popularity of sunglasses is because glamorous movie stars were photographed wearing them.

By the 1940s, advances in the manufacture of plastics made a large variety of spectacles available in every colour of the rainbow. Women wore frames characterized by an upsweep on the top rim, a style that was very popular until the end of the 1950s, while men tended to sport gold wire frames.

The need to adapt sunglasses for the needs of World War II pilots led to the popular aviator style of sunglasses. Advances in plastics enabled frames to be made in various colours, and the new style of glasses for women, called cat-eye because of the pointy top edges of the frame, turned eyeglasses into a feminine fashion statement.

Contact lenses quickly earned their way as the discreet eye aid of choice when a New York optometrist named William Feinbloom made the lenses out of plastic in 1936 and they finally became comfortable to wear.

First conceived and sketched by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508, contact lens technology did not begin to come together until 1827, when English astronomer Sir John Herschel suggested grinding a contact lens to conform exactly to the eye’s surface. A German glassblower named F. E. Muller produced the first eye covering designed to be seen through and tolerated in 1887, and within a year, both a Swiss physician and a French optician reported using contacts to correct optical defects. Still, until the method for taking moulds from living eyes was perfected in 1929, contacts were uncomfortable and consequently, unpopular.

1960 to Today

By the latter half of the 20th century, spectacles were considered part of a person’s wardrobe. Similar to clothes, eyeglasses needed to be continually updated or a person could be perceived as old-fashioned. More and more celebrities were influencing spectacle fashion. Starting in the 1980s technical innovations produced higher quality, plastic lenses. These were lighter and safer to wear.

From the glass globe of water to contact lenses used today, reading glasses have come a really long way. We might only have to wait a few more years to see the next big invention in modern eyewear.