When it comes to vision, history has been full of visionaries. Many people think contact lenses are a 20th century invention. In fact, people have been trying to find a way to ditch their glasses for centuries. Leonardo da Vinci had the idea in the 1500s. As he did with so many of his ideas, he made sketches of corrective lenses that would fit directly over a person’s eye.
More than 130 years later in the 1600s, Rene Descartes wrote a book called Dioptric in which he explained his idea for a corneal contact lens. Later in the same century, Philippe de la Hire did some drawings of concave lenses placed on the eye.
However, it wasn’t until 1801 that somebody actually put these ideas into practice. Working from the writings of Descartes, 28-year old English doctor and all-around genius Thomas Young created the first corneal contact lens and tried it in his own eye.
In the late 1800s, a German glassblower created the first glass contact lens. He fitted German soldiers with them during WWII because Nazi soldiers were not allowed to wear glasses. After the war, the demand for contact lenses grew around the world. Plastic became the new material of choice rather than glass.
From the post-war period, contact lens development really took off. Hard lenses were sold commercially beginning in the 1940s. In the early 1970s, the first soft contact lenses were put on the market by Bausch & Lomb.
For the next 30 years, there was an explosion in the popularity of contact lenses. Today, we can buy disposable lenses, colored lenses, and lenses with UV filters in them. It remains to be seen what developments in contact lenses and vision correction will occur in the 21st century. Will we all throw away our lenses in favor of laser eye surgery one day? Will something entirely different be developed to improve vision? Perhaps there is a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci sketching his ideas for a new way of seeing.
Amanda Shaw is a contributing writer for Twoop, where you can read a full timeline of the history of contact lenses