I'm wearing my contact lenses for the first time since I got that series of colds that lasted, I kid you not, 70 days. Actually, I put the lenses in once when I thought I was getting better but I had to take them out after a couple of hours when the eye boogies took over. What a relief to take off those glasses! Soft contact lenses are definitely one of the blessings of our modern age.
The concept of the contact lens was first proposed by none other than Leonardo da Vinci. (What a great mind!) Hard glass lenses were in use in the late 19th century, but I'm not sure by whom - it must have been torture to wear them. It was in the 1940's that all-plastic lenses were invented, but they were still very uncomfortable. The men we have to thank for today's modern lenses are Czechoslovakian chemist Otto Wichterle and his assistant, Dr. Drahoslav Lim. They invented the lenses in the late fifties and some countries were using the product in the sixties, but of course, the FDA did not approve the hydrogel or "Softlens" material for use in the U.S. until 1971, when Bausch & Lomb introduced the first commercially available soft contact lens here. Dr. Lim actually invented the soft, water absorbing plastic they used, hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA). Another great leap forward thanks to materials innovation! (Summarized from this, this and this.)
I'm sure many of you are thinking that the contact lens is old news and I should be writing about vision correction surgery. But I write about the Little Things that are important to me, and I'm not a good candidate for LASIK or other corrective surgery since I only have one working eye and so no room for error. Besides, I thought it was an interesting history.
Hooray for all the myriad forms of sight correction!
ReplyDeleteI'm even further behind the times than you: Contact lenses are inhuman devices of torture for me. I tried them a few years ago for a few months. Invariably, my eyes would feel like hot coals after about six hours. That was less than pleasant. Perhaps Colorado's dry climate was to blame, but my father also finds contacts unbearable, so perhaps its something in the construction of my eye.
I love my ultralight rimless tinting glasses, however. I don't notice them much -- unlike the contacts, which I noticed with every blink.
I find the history interesting, too, so thanks. I wore "hard" contacts when I was a teenager and blinked every 2.1 seconds. I moved onto soft lenses 10 years later and to one torroid lens (for the astigmatism) more recently. Each time I found that my eyes rejected the change at first (broken blood vessels, excessive blinking), but adjusted over time.
ReplyDeleteThings just keep getting better!
Even with these improvements, I tend to wear my glasses on a daily basis because I can see really up close with my contacts on. Any future plans for bifocal lenses (yes, I'm that old).