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Eye Glasses And Their Development Over The Years

Posted by Adam Webster in Health on 12 8th, 2009 | no responses

Eye glasses and their development over the years shows us how things that we assume to be much more modern than they really are can trace their lineage back to the ancient world, in some cases. This is the actual case with glasses or spectacles, which has been with us in some fashion going back to when the Egyptian pharaohs and their civilization was the dominant power in the world.

The technical definition of “spectacles, ” or “glasses” today are that they are frames that hold lenses which are then placed in front of a person’s eyes to aid in correcting vision, in protecting the eyes from harm or to guard against ultraviolet radiation or all three at once. Given the development of fashion, it should all be said that some are worn strictly for fashion purposes nowadays.

Eye glass development has occurred down through the centuries in a number of ways. There had also been different types of spectacles that have come and gone over the years. This includes the once-popular monocle and the French scissors-glasses, which were in high style in the 1700s in France and which were used to help correct distance vision problems.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics make the first mention of the magnifying properties of glass from nearly 2800 years ago. These magnifying properties were first put down in writing during the Roman empire of Nero, when a tutor of his mentioned how a glass of water could be looked through to magnify letters and writing. Nero often used an emerald to look through to improve his far vision.

The Arab scholar and inventor Abbas Ibn Firnas, who lived in the 9th century, is credited with producing what are thought to be the first corrective lenses. He’d worked to develop extremely clear glass and put these glass stones to work in viewing objects and writings. An actual shaped convex lens was discussed in a book on optics dating from the year 1021.

Much of the development of eyeglasses seems to have occurred at various points in the 13th century. There are books from the year 1235 that discussed how to produce shaped glass that could be used to improve vision, while the Chinese seem to have made fashion sunglasses that were useful in cutting down on glare, though they did not contain any vision-corrective properties.

As far as when real eyeglasses came into being, some scholars maintain that the actual year was 1284. At any rate, just about every scholar agrees that they made their appearance in the late 13th century at some period between 1280 and 1300. All also agree that they appeared in Italy. Benjamin Franklin invented the first pair of bifocals. Also, corrective lenses appeared in 1825.

Since then, eye glasses have been a part of our lives in ways both big and small. People of all ages where them nowadays almost without a second thought and, in many instances, life would not be bearable without them, especially when considering the vision problems that many people are either born with or develop. They have had a long life with us, as a matter of fact.

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