Making Contact (Lenses)

Who was the first person to think, "I should put a piece of glass in my eye."?

As you get older, you start to think a lot more about the past than you do about the future

For one thing, there’s a lot more past to think about, and it’s not all “Wow, that was a bad decision.”

Most of it is, but not all.

You probably did things when you were younger that you can’t imagine being brave/stupid enough to do now. Like getting married. Or like climbing up on your roof (many, many times). Or like driving across five states alone before cell phones were invented.

Or like getting contact lenses.

When I was 11 years old, I begged, and I begged, and I begged, and I begged, and I begged. And finally, my mom let me get contact lenses.

I am very, very nearsighted, so my glasses were a horror show that singled me out for even more abuse than I was already receiving for the rest of my general appearance.

And it was the ‘70s, so I leaned toward dark, gradient-lensed aviators. You know, like potheads wore.

My friend Heather had hard contact lenses which were the size of a pencil eraser and only covered her pupil.

She’d pop one out, suck on it, and then pop it back into her eye.

That way seemed madness to me, so I got soft contact lenses, which back in the day lasted a year before you had to buy a new pair (unless you lost one, which, well, these things happen).

And compared to today’s models, contact lenses in the 1970s probably had the consistency of little Frisbees. I remember feeling like I had an eyelash stuck in my eye for weeks until apparently a callous formed (?) on the inside (??) of my eyelid (???).

My life didn’t get noticeably better, but at least I could wear sunglasses.

The Invention of Contact Lenses

Leonardo da Vinci, massive overachiever that he was, is credited with first conceiving the idea that vision could be altered by something, like water, coming into direct contact with the eye.

Like this:

Source

This was not helpful.

It was another few hundred years before German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick fabricated the first successful contact lens in 1888. It was heavy, it was made of blown glass, and it covered the entire visible portion of the eye.

My eyes are watering just thinking about it.

By the 1940s, technology had sufficiently advanced so that lenses could be made from a cast (!) of the eyeball (!!), as demonstrated in this video. (A brief, somewhat stomach-churning history of contact lenses can be found in this Smithsonian Magazine article.)

I can’t even watch this. Somebody tell me how bad it is….

Of course, this miracle of modern science is brought to you by one word:

Of course, as one might expect, a lot of things can go wrong when you’re wearing a piece of plastic on your eyeball. It’s fairly easy to get an infection, abrade your sclera, or wear 27 contact lenses at once (WTF).

“The woman said she had worn disposable lenses for 35 years and had not complained of any irritation. But after they were removed, she said her eyes felt a lot more comfortable.”

Ya think?

Today we have 30-day lenses, lenses you can sleep in, and daily disposables which are probably choking a sea turtle somewhere as we speak. Next up are augmented lenses that will allow you to interact with virtual reality.

What can possibly go wrong?

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End of transmission.