History of Glasses

Glasses, which are one of the most important accessories in our daily lives for all of us, men and women, and which are absolutely necessary for many people of all ages to continue their daily lives comfortably, are undoubtedly a very important invention for us.

For many people before eyeglasses were invented, the world and words were very blurry. If you had near and far vision impairment and astigmatism, you were considered very unfortunate in society.

This field has come a long way since eyeglasses were invented. In fact, no one is sure exactly when glasses were invented. According to the findings, the oldest lens, a polished rock crystal, is from the time of ancient Nineveh. Lenses were used in ancient times to poke holes in parchment, burn wounds, and erase letters from wax tablets. The first use of lenses to magnify writing was seen after 1000 AD. These lenses, known as reading stones and used by placing them on the writings to enlarge the letters, became the forerunners of modern magnifying glasses.

A few hundred years later, between 1268 and 1289 (in the 13th century), the first pair of wearable eyeglasses were developed in Italy. The first glasses were a simple pair of convex quartz stone or crystal surrounded by a frame, a handle for each stone, the handles connected by a rivet, and the glasses balanced on the nose or held in front of the face. The name of this inventor was lost, but the idea was successful and a crystal worker guild in Italy developed arrangements for making crystal eye lenses by 1300. Thus, although it is known that Salvino D'Armate invented glasses around 1285, various sources point to an earlier origin for the invention of glasses.

Invented in Spain after the 1600s, the temples were in the form of strings or wires attached to frames that went around the ears. The Chinese modified this version of the frames by attaching weights to the strings, thus balancing the section behind the ears. The rigid frame arms and temples used today were invented in 1730 by English optician Edward Scarlett.

Benjamin Franklin carried two pairs of glasses for near vision and far vision for a while. He was annoyed that he had to constantly change his glasses, and he finally cut the lenses of each pair in half and combined the two halves of each into one frame. Thus, bifocal (bifocal) glasses were invented in the 1780s, and trifocal (trifocal) glasses followed.

 

Invention of Sunglasses

It is claimed that even in prehistoric times, ivory glasses were used to protect the eyes from the harmful reflections of the sun. The earliest reference to sunglasses dates back to ancient China and Rome.

Today's sunglasses are thought to have been first used in China in the 12th century or earlier. These sunglasses are made of lenses with flat glasses of smoky quartz. Ancient documents explain that these crystal sunglasses were used by judges in ancient Chinese courts to hide facial expressions when they questioned witnesses.

James Ayscough began experimenting with tinted lenses in eyeglasses around 1752. Ayscough believed that blue or green tinted lenses could correct certain visual impairments. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, spectacles with yellow-amber and brown-tinted lenses began to be prescribed to light-sensitive patients. In the 1900s, the use of sunglasses became common, especially among Hollywood movie stars. Polarized sunglasses were first invented by Edwin H. Land in 1936. It originated with the use of the patented polaroid filter to manufacture the sunglasses.