Although some accounts of Marco Polo’s travels to China 100 years later claim that he said he saw elderly Chinese wearing eyeglasses, these accounts have been discredited as hoaxes, since those who have scrutinized Marco Polo’s notebooks have found no mention of eyeglasses.Īlthough the exact date is in dispute, it is generally agreed upon that the first pair of corrective eyeglasses was invented in Italy sometime between 12. These “reading stones” also allowed monks to continue to read, write, and illuminate manuscripts after they turned 40.Ĭhinese judges of the 12th-century wore a type of sunglasses, made from smoky quartz crystals, held in front of their faces so their expressions couldn’t be discerned by witnesses they interrogated, giving the lie to the “inscrutable” stereotype. This was the introduction of corrective lenses, which was advanced, a bit, in Venice around 1000 C.E., when Seneca’s bowl and water (and possibly goldfish) were replaced by a flat-bottom, convex glass sphere that was laid on top of the reading material, becoming in effect the first magnifying glass and enabling the Sherlock Holmes of medieval Italy to gather numerous clues to solve crimes. There’s no record as to whether a goldfish got in the way. His tutor, Seneca, bragged that he read “all the books in Rome” through a large glass bowl filled with water, which magnified the print. In ancient Rome, the emperor Nero would hold a polished emerald in front of his eyes to reduce the sun’s glare while he watched gladiators fight. Prehistoric Inuits wore flattened walrus ivory in front of their faces to block the sun’s rays. The first improvised eyeglasses were makeshift sunglasses, of a sort.
They either resigned themselves to being unable to see well, or they did what clever people always do. But what did people whose vision wasn’t perfect do before that?
It wasn’t until the late 13th century that corrective lenses were invented and crude, rudimentary things they were. If you were nearsighted, farsighted or had an astigmatism, you were out of luck. That’s because eyeglasses hadn’t been invented yet. In the beginning was the word, and the word was blurry.
0 kommentar(er)
