Spectacles

Nobody knows who invented spectacles

Roman tragedian Seneca is said to have read "all the books in Rome" by peering through a glass globe of water. A thousand years later, presbyopic monks used segments of glass spheres that could be laid against reading material to magnify the letters, basically a magnifying glass, called a "reading stone." Venetian glass blowers, who had learned how to produce glass for reading stones, later constructed lenses that could be held in a frame in front of the eyes instead of directly on the reading material.

The first mention of actual glasses is found in a 1289 manuscript when a member of the Popozo family wrote: "I am so debilitated by age that without the glasses known as spectacles, I would no longer be able to read or write." In 1306, a monk of Pisa mentioned in a sermon: "It is not yet 20 years since the art of making spectacles, one of the most useful arts on earth, was discovered." But nobody mentioned the inventor... except those who claimed to have invented it, putting the time to around 1285 (although some sources claim the date to be 1269).

The patron saint of spectacle makers is the religious teacher Sofronius Eusebius Hieronymus, who lived from 340 to 420 AD. On numerous paintings he is portrayed with a lion, a skull and a pair of glasses. It actually is true that eating carrots can help you see better. Carrots contain Vitamin A, which feeds the chemicals that the eye shafts and cones are made of. The shafts capture black and white vision. The cones capture colour images.

The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colours. There currently is no machine that can achieve this remarkable feat.

Now we dint need colored lens for that now… did we…