The Bizarre Evolution of Contact Lenses
How Centuries of Painful Invention Paved the Way for Your Morning Routine.
📝 396 words. ⏳ Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.In 1508, Leonardo da Vinci had an idea: fix someone’s vision by walking around with a water-filled glass hemisphere stuch to their eye. A recipe for disaster, many would think. Not Leonardo. And he’s one of the Renaissance geniuses we remember, isn’t he?
Three centuries after him, René Descartes (you might remember his name if you studied a bit of philosophy) decided to build upon Leonardo’s, ahem, brilliant idea. He thought about a glass tube filled with liquid, put directly on someone’s cornea. Not so comfy, I’m afraid.
Descartes’ design prevented blinking. I’m not a physician, but as far as I know, blinking is kind of important for eye health.
“Hey, Adélard, how’s it going?”
“Oh, Adrien, just great, thanks! I've had a glass tube stuck in my eye for hours.”
At least Descartes coined the term “contact lens”! And I think about him every morning when I wear mine.
And guess who created the first successful wearable lenses? The history can surprise us! It was a German ophthalmologist, Adolf Fick, and it was in 1888. He called them “sclearal lenses,” made from blown glass and covering the entire visible part of the eye.
Better than a glass tube filled with liquid, but still uncortable, I believe. It was possible to wear Fick’s sclearal lenses only for short periods. Otherwise, the subjects wearing them were subject to a thing called the Fick's phenomenon (yes, that’s a real thing, it seems). Once again, I’m not a doctor, so I can describe the Fick’s phenomenon only as “your eyes are going to get really, really irritated.”
What is all of this about?
The journey from Renaissance concepts to practical contact lenses was a long and winding road. It took centuries of trial and error (and some pretty ridiculous ideas, let’s say so!) to get to the comfortable, affordable contact lenses we know today. And let’s not forget the countless people who had to suffer through the early prototypes—we salute you, brave pioneers of contact lens history!
So next time you pop in your contacts, remember the wild history behind them—and be grateful you don’t have to walk around with a water-filled glass hemisphere stuck to your eye. Or a glass tube filled with liquid. Or a pair of blown glass lenses that make your eyes go haywire. Yeah, let’s just stick with the modern contact lenses, shall we?
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