September 24, 2024 • 50 mins
Glasses as we know them have only been around for a few hundred years. So what did people do before this? And how did things change once spectacles were on the scene? Listen in to find out.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and it's just the three of
us with three pairs of eyes. And that's all I did.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We all wear glasses.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, I guess all three of us do. Now, Huh
you didn't for a really long time. You were the
holdout who kept crashing your car.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yeah, yeah, I wore And I think I've told this story,
but I was sort of the typical story of always
had really great vision and then it's been more longer
than you think. Then sometime in my mid forties, I
was like, Huh, this thing I'm reading isn't so clear.
And I went to the doctor and they're like, yeah, yeah,
(00:53):
you're reading. Vision is failing, so just get some glasses.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Did I ever tell you the story of when I
found out I needed glasses?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Now? How old were you?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I was in fourth grade and we went in for
like a lyfe check and a like an eye exam
that just an eye test, just one of those things
where it's like, obviously the state requires this, so it
doesn't actually it's not actually a.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Thing scoliosis too while they're at it.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Probably, so I was like totally flabbergasted when they were like,
you need glasses, Like I was just expecting not that
at all. Yeah, And sure enough, when I went in
for an eye exam, I was like, oh, I can
actually see things now. I hadn't really noticed. And so yeah,
since fourth grade I had to wear glasses or contact lenses,
(01:42):
and I'll never forget my first pair of glasses. I
think I was kind of bummed that I had to
wear glasses at all. So my mom made sure that
we went and got like the coolest glasses we could find,
that's sweet, which were in Elton John Special. They were
totally clear, an electric blue wire going through the whole thing,
and I would wear those today if I could find them.
(02:03):
They were pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, I mean the time where we grew up glasses
was definitely like kind of super not cool, but then
I remember by the time we got to high school,
it was I can't believe I'm admitting this. I'm actually
one of those people who bought the fake glasses and
were a little while Oh yeah, yeah, because it was
(02:26):
you know, international mail, the whole GQ thing. I thought
I was a preppy kid, and I thought they'd make
me look cooler and more preppy, and so I did
that tortoise shells yeah for a while. But yeah, glasses,
And as we'll see in this, in this great, great
article that Livia put together for us, that has long
(02:47):
been a push pull since kind of the beginning of
glasses was do they make it seem like you're deficient
as a person or do they make you look like smarter?
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah? Yeah, No, it's it's a tension that's as old
as glasses, basically. Yeah, And it's sad that it still
kind of goes on. But I think that's really kind
of gone the way of the dinosaur thanks to people
like you stepping up and wearing glasses when you didn't
need them, thanks to Huey Lewis stepping up and teaching
everyone it's hip to be square. I really think that
(03:19):
was probably the transition point right there.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, And I also want to point out I would
love to see pictures of you with those glasses, if
you have any, because to me, there's nothing cuter than
a kid wearing glasses. Well, I don't.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Know if I can, if I can put my finger
on any of those and even if I could, I'm
pretty sure the glasses were my best feature back then.
So you talked about, you know, this tension from the
beginning of glasses. Let's talk about the beginning of glasses.
Because the concept of glasses as we understand them today,
like these things that you wear that contain corrective lenses
(03:54):
that you can put on your on your face and
they typically won't fall off. That's only a few hundred
years old. But people have needed corrective lenses for long
before that. So there's a really great question that I've
always kind of wondered that I've never bothered to look up,
Like what about people who needed glasses before glasses were invented?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah? So, uh again, Lyvia helped us with this, and
I think I'm going to use her title because it
was really another Lvia special.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
I didn't get it.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Four eyes good. You didn't get it?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
No, I still don't.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Well, four eyes means you wear glasses, right, and so
you know four eyes is good? Okay, So they're like
helps you see better.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
There's no there's no deeper meaning or pun or reference
to it.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Oh I don't think so, cause I mean.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Why why didn't she include r like, four eyes are good.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
I just took it. I may be wrong. We'll have
to ask Livia as just four eyes good, like TikTok would.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Say, yeah, okay, all right maybe, so yeah, we have
to ask Olivia.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I may be staring at an obvious pun though that
I'm not overlooking so who knows.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well, we're both overlooking it if we are.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
So let me put on my pun glasses.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
You need to break those things, all right.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So anyway, I agree, you know, Olivia kind of points
out like as reading came along, people needed glasses more
and more because a lot of like myself, if I
never read anything, I would be just fine. Like I
might look at something close to me and be like,
well it might look a little fuzzy, but it's not
like reading something that's fuzzy. So for before reading became
(05:33):
a big, big thing, not as many people noticed, I think.
And then I think people who had which is it
nearsighted or far sighted When you can't see something far away.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
You're nearsighted, like you're sighted to see things nearby.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Okay, So I think those people were just kind of
sol and just was like, oh, well, I guess just
one of the things that happens to people.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yes, there is such a thing as hereditary myopia, where
you can be myopic because you were born that way.
But the larger point here is that there were far,
far fewer people who were myopic than there are today
because of the advent of reading. And there's studies that
show that the more students read, the more myopic they become.
(06:19):
And it's just as sounding to me. I didn't ever
think of it that way, but it's totally true. From reading.
Glasses came as a necessity.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, and the people that may have been had you
not great close focus back in the day, may have
done things like engraving or these skills where they were
doing something kind of like reading, right right.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So, and we've had lenses, just not corrective lenses for
a very long time. About almost five thousand years ago,
people were grinding things like quartz into lenses, but they
were basically like little six year old kids. They would
use them to start fires with that's what their purpose was.
And they were developed independently in different parts of the world,
(07:02):
like Assyria and Greece had them about five thousand years ago,
and about two thousand years ago they developed them in Peru,
which is pretty cool too. But I mean, a good
idea is a good idea, and I think things like
that proved that.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, for sure, it was archimedes deathway was that a lens?
Speaker 1 (07:19):
It was a mirror a right, Yeah, I thought of
that too.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Oh, we did a great podcast on mirrors a long time,
you remember that one.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
That was a good one. My brain is still broken
from that. Like it was one of those things where
I just assumed it would be pretty easy, and it's
not at all easy. It's really hard to comprehend mirrors
and how they work.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah, totally, all right, So, yeah, they were polishing lenses
and I think the reading stone was the first kind
of use of a lens to help you read something.
And those were the little round things that you would
sit literally sit on a book and push along rather
than hold it out like a magnifying glass. And there
(07:58):
was a lot of monk, a lot of monks doing
a lot of this because I think they were doing
more like text work than a lot of most people
back then.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, because you didn't have a way to copy anything
except for by hand, so that was a huge role
of monks. So yeah, they definitely needed those and then
translating things into other languages. There's a really good example
of an important development in the field of like classes
or corrective lenses that happened because somebody translated the writing
(08:29):
of an Arab scholar named Abu Ali al Hassan Ibn
al Hatham, who was born in nine sixty five CE,
and he actually figured out that we see because our
eyes sense beams of light, and in other parts of
the world, like for example, Greece, they thought it was
(08:51):
the opposite, that we shot laser beams out of our eyes.
And I know we've talked about that before, Yeah, because
it's so preposterous that I just love it. But I
don't remember what episode, but but I a'l Hatham figured
this out. But he was writing in Arabic. Luckily, there
was a monk who was also a physicist, a Polish
(09:12):
monk named Vitelo, who in the twelve hundreds translated al
Haitham from Arabic to Latin, which gave a chance for
another monk in English, monk named Roger Bacon, to read
it in Latin and then build on al Haatham's findings
about vision and optics.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Is it weird to me that I thought the monk
being named Roger Bacon was funny sounding.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
No it is. It's really funny. Oh okay, yeah, no
it's I mean, it's just such a modern name but
also a silly modern name. Yeah, yeah, okay, good, I'm
with you. No offense to Kevin, No, no, he knows.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, if we're talking about glasses, like you know, the
glasses that we think of today, still not you know,
you'll note there's some key things missing here still. But
if we're talking about a convex lens to help someone
who is far sighted read text or a book, you
got to go to Italy in the late thirteenth century,
(10:09):
Italy with a little bit of Germany mixed in here
and there. But it seems like Italy really drove the
glasses industry forward, using crown glass at the time, like
you know, real glass for their lenses. And we'll get
to that switch later on too. But they speculate that
you know, they were grinding me and you know, they
(10:30):
were making mirrors and polishing stones and stuff, so they
probably wasn't a big leap to start doing the same
kind of things with the same kind of tools to
make glass lenses.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, and so like you said there were convex lenses
to help magnify things for people who are far sighted,
and that is far far easier to make than a
concave lens, as we'll see. So those convex lenses were
around for centuries before corrective lenses for people with myopia
came along.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, And another thing I don't want to do, maybe
is if you're in a place to look things up
for image searches, these are all fun to look at,
these antique glasses. If you look up Rivet spectacles Rivet,
these were sort of the first glasses that were held
together by a little you know, Rivet. It looks like
a hinge. I couldn't tell it. It looks like they
(11:20):
might move and like fold upon each other.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Is that true.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I don't know, but it looked like that to me too,
I would guess.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
So they're kind of cool looking. But one thing you
notice is that even with the Rivet spectacles, they're not
you don't hang that Rivet on your nose. It's still
just a hinge to hold them together.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, you had to hold classes or spectacles with your
hand for centuries after they were invented. Basically. Yeah, And
like we said, with the advent of reading. Thanks to
things like the Gutenberg printing Press in the fourteen hundreds
or later in the sixteen hundreds, when Europe started to
publish newspapers all over the place, reading became much more widespread,
(11:59):
and so the need four glasses became much more widespread
thanks to the development of myopia from reading and especially
reading by candle light.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, I guess that would really put a strain on
your eyes, right.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Totally for sure. And so this is also about the
time in medieval I think medieval Europe where the whole
thing kind of became like, all right, is this a
fashion statement? Are you showing everybody that you're correcting a disability?
What's the deal here with classes? This is around the
(12:34):
time where it really kind of started to take hold,
and in fact, Olivia turned up something I thought was
pretty interesting. Depending on the painter and depending on how
you wanted to depict the person, especially during the Renaissance,
you might show somebody who was born before glasses were
(12:54):
invented wearing glasses to get across how studious and scholarly
they were, or if you wanted to show how cool
somebody was if they were known to wear glasses you
might have you might leave the glasses out altogether.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah. Yeah, it's that that weird pushbull that we were
talking about. And I guess it just depended on maybe
just the time and place and what the culture was
like in that particular time and place, right right.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
They were also a way to depict wealth. Remember it
had a painting called the Parable of the Rich Fool,
which is a Bible story. So of course it's took
place long before there was such a thing as glasses,
but he included glasses on the Rich Fool to show
how rich he was.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah, and in China, because he's spread via the Silk
Road to Asia, some of their judiciary committees they were like,
here's your uniform, and part of it was glasses, whether
you needed them or not. Like you like me? That
nice work.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
You want to take a break, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I mean, since we literally just chinxed each other, I
think it should take break.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
That's right. You owe me a coke?
Speaker 3 (14:02):
All right, be right back, so chuck before we.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Get started again. I want to say something every time
I say glasses, or hear glasses, or even read glasses
in my head, Velma goes my glasses. It's been happening constantly,
and I think what's most significant about it is that
hasn't gotten old yet.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
So Velma from Scooby Doo would she lose her glasses?
Speaker 1 (14:46):
She invariably said, my glasses, and I just got it
in my head.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
And you've been doing that like for two days.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, over and over and over and over. It's going
on right now as we speak. As a matter of fact.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
And by the sounds of it, you were also practicing
that Arabic name.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I actually did not out loud.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, you busted that thing out, man.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I just have a silver tongue for Arabic.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Apparently that was really good.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Thanks. Okay, so let's get started. We talked about how
the lenses for far sightedness or around for centuries before nearsightedness,
but we eventually got to those, I guess in like
the fifteenth century the fourteen hundreds, again not coincidentally with
the spread of reading, we finally figured out how to
(15:34):
make lenses that are concave that correct vision for people
who can see things nearby but not far away.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
That's right, and the other way around, like you mentioned
in Act one, a lot harder to do. There was
a cardinal named Nicholas of Kusa, And this is where
the Germany part comes in, because that's where Germany is now.
He's given a lot of credit to developing the convex lens.
But once again, it was really Italy where a lot
(16:01):
of this was taking place, specifically Florence, where they were
really crafting excellent lenses for the time. And I think
they were pretty darn good at it, even like compared
to today. I've read that it's like kind of remarkable
how good they were at this.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean I always equate venue
with glass because of Venetian glass, but sure, why not
Florence too.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
So there are a couple of innovations that came along
in the seventeenth century to the sixteen hundreds that really
kind of helped push things forward. So we've been making
glass for centuries by then. But as they were trying
to figure out how to make these things refract light.
That's how lenses correct. They refract light at different angles
(16:51):
depending on what you need to see in focus. They
figured out that not only you know, could you use
traditional glass and then shape it in certain ways, you
could add certain things to glass that would help with
their refractiveness. So they figured out that if they add
low iron, potash or lead oxide, it will give it
(17:12):
a higher refractive index. But you need less glass to
do that. So all of a sudden, glasses became immediately
less clunky and a little more comfortable.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Yeah, for sure. And you know you mentioned paintings in
that in the first part. But I thought the encyclopedia
brownness of this next bit was really pretty great because
there is actual evidence of concave lens use in Raphael's
painting portrait of Pope Leo ten and two cardinals and
(17:45):
they say ten. Huh, what do you say? X?
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah, I know it's ten, but it just sounds cooler
as Poplo X.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
So Poplio was part of the Medici family, which had
genetic my iopia, as was well known back then. And
you can see, and this is where it gets encyclopedia brown.
You can see in the painting behind the lens, his
thumb is smaller, showing that it's a distance lens, and
(18:14):
that is just that little detail. For someone to paint
that and then other people to notice is pretty great.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
I mean, that's so raphe yel you know. Yeah, And
then there was some other advances too that weren't exactly
corrective lenses, but people figured out, especially the Dutch, were
super into this that if you took corrective lenses that
could bend light in different ways, you could see things
that were really small, or you could see things that
were really far away, and so they were really helpful
(18:41):
in developing the microscope and the telescope too.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
That's right. But I know everyone's chomping at the bit saying,
these glasses that you can hold up to your face
are fine. But guys, when did people start wearing glasses?
We can go to the seventeenth century finally, when we
got the bow spectacle or is it boo?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
I wonder that myself. I think bow like a bow
and arrow bow. It's like the shape of a bow
without the string. I think that's what it is.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Okay, that's what I think it is too. But those
are the glasses that still didn't have what do you
call the things on the side.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
The temples or the arms now.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
No arms, yeah, no arms yet. But they had a
little a little thing where you could slip it over
your nose and it would, you know, if you had
a good fit, it would sit there. Otherwise you probably
still needed to assist it with your fingies.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah, exactly the same thing that's still around now. It
sits on the bridge of your nose and rests and helps,
you know, hold your glasses up right. Yeah, so that
was a huge advance. It's funny when you look back
at this stuff, You're just like, this is all just
such low hanging fruit glasses. Guys, why didn't you just
put them together immediately? Yeah, And that's just not how
(19:54):
it went. I mean, this person contributed this, this person
contributed that, and they took millennia to develop, which I
just find astounding. It's like a miracle that we have
glasses today based on how long and plotting their development was.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Well. Yeah, And what's the funniest thing to me about
all of this as I was reading each little development
was the whole time, the ears are sitting there on
the side of your head, just like, hey, guys, we
have two literal anchor points sticking out of the side
of everybody's head and still no one I think. In Spain,
Lvia found that some people would tie a string and
(20:30):
then tie it around their ear, like if they were
playing you know, soccer or something. I guess but no
one still was like, hey, maybe we should make something
to sit on those ears.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
So to be fair, there was a guy named Edward
Scarlett who was an optician in London in the seventeen twenties,
and he saw what you're talking about, m M. But
at the time, so he invented temples those sides those arms,
but they didn't curve downward to take advantage of those
natural anchor points the backs of the ears like the
(21:02):
US today. But there was a good reason why, and
that was at the time, anyone who is wealthy enough
to afford glasses also wore powdered wigs and those things
were giant and covered the ears. You couldn't use the
back of the ears like that because they were covered up,
but you could use the temples as pressure points for
those those arms that they he came up with.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
So those were just like little squeezes essentially.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, they would give you a migraine in like three minutes.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Okay, because I did also see that. Olivia found rather
that they some people would it would attach a ribbon,
but they still wouldn't time around the ear. They would
just tie it around the back of their head. A
harlequin yeah, yeah, to those squeeze temples. Finally we get
a guy that gets closer. In seven fifty two, an
(21:50):
English optician named James ice Coff, I guess had a
double hinge side and well, actually I don't think he
invented the turnpin template. That was about twenty five years
after that, because the turnpin template from or temple, from
what I can tell, it goes straight back and then
(22:11):
has a hinge and then goes straight down behind the
ear ninety degrees. But it doesn't like curve around the ear.
It was just a big ninety degree drop that sat
down a couple of inches even below the ear right.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
But it finally started to take advantage of the back
of the ear right.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yeah, in a clunky way.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
But at the same time, with these guys putting hinges
in there, now you have these arms that can number one,
fold away for convenience, but also number two. If they're
double spring, they can also bend kind of outwards. So
now you could just put glasses on and they would
fit to your giant head or your tiny head, depending
on the size. Immediately thanks to the spring and those hinges.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, I remember seeing those for the first time, and
that seemed like a very modern invention in like the eighties,
But that's not true.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
At all, No, I don't. I think it took a
little while for it to become ubiquitous, but it was
older than that for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, well I only use you know, I found a
number of years ago that the ray Ban Wayfairer is
kind of the only sunglass that I look okay in Okay,
So I've only worn those, and then I just buy
those frames to get my readers made because it's the
only only shape that I've ever found works for my face.
(23:29):
And so I'm a wayfair purist.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I guess I can do wayfarers and I can do
aviators too.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
I can't pull those off.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
The ones that I can't pull off that I really
wish I could are the I want to say, carreras,
but they're not. You know what I'm talking about, those
Italian ones that are super sleek looking that you basically
have to wear a speedo with.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I think I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, those, I wish I could rock those, and they
just do not look right on me. And I think
we should include a little PSA here for everybody that
wears those giant multi colored reflective visor sunglasses. Now nobody
looks good in those, which ones the giant visor sunglasses
that are super in right now.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
What is visor? Would you mean like a hat visor?
Speaker 1 (24:16):
No, like like ski goggles, but without the goggle part.
They're just sunglasses. But they're that massive and colorfully reflective.
How have you not seen these? I don't know, like
Oakley's kind of Yeah, I'm sure, please make them. Yes, bigger,
just imagine bigger.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I'm gonna have to look up a picture of these
because I have not known. Also, I don't, you know,
get around in the world too much, So.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
I mean I'm surprised you at least haven't seen like
a delivery person wearing them.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Oh, well, you know it's funny. I just did a
rare inshow look up and I see exactly what you're
talking about. H I do not like those. I did
not know people were wearing those. Oh yeah, they're huge now,
but they also when you type indvisors glasses, they make
sunglasses with the little visor over them.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Oh that's neat, like the Wane little flip up sunglasses.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Well, it's those are individual for each side. This is
I'm sending a picture of this dude right now, because
he's rocking pretty hard.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Anyway, where I started with the whole ray ban thing
is though they don't make the spring ones where they
you know, have a pretty fat head, then luckily they
fit my face. But they don't, you know, bend outward,
flex outward.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
They have what you called barrel hinges in there. No
they don't. They stop it like I guess ninety degrees
to the frame. But you can go in and get
those little parts of the barrel hinges adjusted to fit
your head if they don't automatically fit your head.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Man, you know a lot about this stuff.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Well you know, I've been wearing them since fourth grade.
And you just pick up facts here or there.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
All right. Just to cite a further example of the
push and pull of cool versus not cool, Napoleon needed glasses,
thought they make him look weak, so did not wear them,
and as a result, I think, like tripped over stuff
and people thought he was clumsy.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I mean, he rode a horse and he couldn't see.
That's kind of dangerous totally. There's another kind of big
splash that happened with glasses that made them fashionable. But
it was one of those things where something that's ugly
and utilitarian becomes fashionable. And it was a type of
glasses invented by Benjamin Martin. They ended up being called
(26:27):
Martin's margins because they're hugely thick frames. And the reason
that Martin invented them like that is because they block
light coming in from different directions rather than looking forward,
and that can obscure your vision a little bit. And
he's absolutely right, that totally is true. If you're just
outside looking wearing say, contacts, and you put on glasses,
(26:51):
there's a huge difference between the two because the frames
block some of the light coming downward into your eyes.
And everybody made fun of these because they were just
so ugly, but people started wearing them, and so everybody
who were making fun of them started making and selling
them too.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, and they're kind of crazy looking when you look
at them now. I have seen some that people that
kind of emulated this style. But it was noteworthy too
because it was one of the first ones that had
any kind of noticeable rim. Usually it was just the
lens and kind of the smallest piece of whalebone or
wire or something that could host that lens.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Right for sure, Yeah, so the sixteen hundreds I think
saw some technical advances, but the nineteenth century was just
a boom century for especially using corrective lenses, right, not
just fashion or the way that they were made, or
getting around and putting arms that reach behind the back
of the ear, but like the actual function of glasses
(27:51):
became exponentially better in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, because you know, previous to this, the way you
got glasses well as the glasses manufacturer would make a
bunch of them and then they would send a salesperson
around and a wagon or I guess eventually a car
and they would travel around and kind of do like
the over the counter readers that what was it, like
thirty four percent of Americans actually use those these days.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Thirty four million, I think, oh.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah, thirty a lot, Yeah, thirty four million. But it
was on the you know, on the road. Basically, you
just didn't have a prescription specific to your eye. Someone
just came around. You're like, well, these will do I guess.
But now all of a sudden, you got a real
you know, vision test, so they could dial in a
(28:41):
prescription for you for the first time.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, And that was thanks to people who started inventing
tools that are still kind of in use today evolved versions.
In particular is a guy named Herman von Helmholtz who
goes without saying was German. He invented the ophthalmoscope and
the ops a opthalometer uphthalmometer, sorry, and the ophthalmoscope lets
(29:06):
you see the back of a patient's eyeball, so when
they look at your eye and they're shining a light
and they're like, don't look into the light, look in
my ear or something like that. That's essentially an opthalmoscope
that Herman von Helmholtz invented in the eighteen fifties. And
then the ophthalmometer. You can assess the essentially the curvature
(29:27):
of the back of the retina while you're looking at
the retina through an opthalmoscope. And what you have now
is basically the the invention of the ability to figure
out what kind of corrective lenses you needed. Ophthalmology it
was born at this time, and so now they could
really take exact measurements and then create the glasses for
(29:50):
you specifically, and they just worked so much better.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, and I'm glad you took all those words.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
We should we mention that we had to edit out
at least one attempt of ophthalmology.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Yeah. I mean that was the easiest one, I think,
because that's a word people commonly say. But there's something
about the optal being at the beginning that just makes
it a little brain breaking.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
So horrendous.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
What did you say for the second.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Machine, ophthalmom opthalmometer. I tried to add an extra syllable,
as per.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
My usual opthalmometer. Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, that's what meter.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Upthalmometer.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Oh boy, are we going to talk about the diopter?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
I think we should just mention it because it was
a huge breakthrough. We don't have to go into the formula.
But there were a pair of French ophthalmologists who in
the eighteen seventies figured out that you could quantify just
how much vision correction you needed. And it's mind bending
that it's called the diopter and it's a really simple formula,
(31:01):
but it's really hard to understand. But just take for
granted that ophthalmologists understand how to use that. And so
if you look at your prescription, whether for glasses or
for context, the thing that's labeled power, that number is
in diopters, and that just means how much of a
refraction correction you need to focus stuff far away or
(31:24):
nearby at your retina rather than in front of you
or behind you as you naturally would be with your
near sightedness or far sidedness.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah, is the key to all this that machine that
you look through with the lenses that they flip down
during the eye test.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I think that's almost like a like they're zeroing in
on their observations of what your eye looks like, and
now they've got it narrowed down to like a couple
of different diopters. Okay, And it's almost to me like
that those traveling salesmen who'd be like, try this pair on,
try this pair on, but they're doing it with the
cool machine that has slides instead. Right, that's my take.
(32:04):
I could be wrong. I probably am wrong.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Well, I'd like to hear from optomologists because I know,
I know there's a lot more to it than like
just sitting down in front of this machine and we'll
punch the numbers into the whatever and it'll spit out
your prescription. Like there is actual expertise involved.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they have to like observe and
make guesses based on their observation from what I can understand.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
How about that little eyepuff, the little air puff you.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Get it takes some time to get used to. Do
you like that?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
No? I don't like it, but it's definitely I mean
all this was brand new to me a decade ago ish. So,
like you said, you've been doing it since you were
what like twelve eleven?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Yeah, however old you are in fourth grade, ken, I
don't know, but yes, around that time. To me, those
things are like the same experience as pulling a nose
hair out, you know, like you just it's in some
weird mass of kit stick way like enjoyable, but it's
not really.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, all right, so we're having too much fun here.
Let's take a break and get serious and we'll talk
a little bit more about plastics and bifocals and monocles
and sunglasses and everything else right after this. All right,
(33:38):
So we promised talks of plastic. After World War One,
plastics became a big thing, and resin specifically c R
thirty nine became the first big kind of popular plastic
used for lenses, which is still a pretty popular choice today.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Yeah, so that was a huge advancement in lenses, but
people were still making glass lenses for a long time
until nineteen seventy two in the United States, the FDA said, Hey,
walking around with two glass lenses on your eyes, like
so close to your eyes is probably kind of scary.
So now all lenses need to be shatterproof. So a
(34:18):
lot of glasses makers just turned to plastics at that point.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Yeah, and plastic worked. You know, it was much better
in a lot of ways because they were you know,
turned out to be more durable. Once they figured out
the scratch resistance, they wouldn't shatter, you know, near eye.
Obviously you could have a lot more kinds of styles.
You could have rimless glasses. Yeah, Obviously plastics in the
(34:42):
frames created a boom in fashion eyewear, like in the
fifties with cat eye glasses and horn rim glasses and
tortoiseshell and like the glasses you talked about in the
seventies and eighties, the big giant ron know if you
mentioned them, the big giant like neuro worn at the
end of Casino.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yeah, I love those, man.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Jesse Thorn has some of those. I'm so jealous whenever
I see those.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Those seem to be based on a military issue type
of glasses, which we didn't say. The Two World Wars
helped make glasses normal in the United States because so
many soldiers needed them that the government started issuing them
like two million plus pairs. But the standard issue military
glasses were called were so ugly. They were called informally,
(35:29):
of course, birth controlled glasses or bcgs. And if you
look them up, they are that ugly. They're terrible.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Did they look like the Denier ones? Are they just giant?
Speaker 1 (35:40):
They weren't nearly as cool as the DeNiro ones. They
were an uglier version of the DeNiro ones.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Got it. I'm going to look those up too.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, they're tough to look at.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, giglasses that they're sometimes called as well.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
It's like thanks a lot.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Army exactly. So that was a huge advance, but just
kind of dialing it back a little bit time wise.
There's like an old story that Ben Franklin invented the bifocals,
and that seems to actually be correct, based on a
letter that he wrote to one of his friends in
the late seventeen hundreds where he basically described creating bifocals
(36:15):
but by having a glassmaker cut his two different sets
of glasses in half. Right.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Did the letter say, for instance, I'm reading what I'm writing,
and now I'm looking across the room, And now I'm
reading what I'm writing, and now I'm looking across the room.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yeah, it had a lot of that, a couple of paragraphs.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, but you know, it seems like he did. He
said that he could, you know, see his food and
look at people at the dinner party. At the same time,
progressive lenses came along. This sort of shocks me. I
thought they were newer too, but they came along in
nineteen fifty nine. And isn't the idea there that it's
sort of like a bifocal that's just sort of blended
in and less harsh.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
It's actually a trifocal. There's distant, mid, and near all
mixed together, and it just depends, I guess, on where
your eye focuses. I think it's magic. Basically. They're also
called multifocal lenses.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah. I think they offered me those just so I
could wear glasses all the time. Yeah, And I was like,
I don't want to wear glasses all the time. If
I don't have to, I don't putting them on to read.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
There's a theory that you should use glasses as little
as possible and use the lowest power, say, contacts as
possible because your eyes can get dependent on the stronger
prescription or wearing them all the time. I don't know
if that's a folk tale or something, but it definitely
intuitively makes sense.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah, I think it totally makes sense.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Okay, well, then you made the right choice.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Can we talk about monocles?
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yes, let's please. I think this is the high point
of this episode.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, monocles are kind of fun. If you don't know
what a monocle is, I guess I'm assuming is the
single round lens that would you would just sort of
made to fit your eye as you were wealthy if
you had one, and you would just sort of stick
it in there and sort of squint around it a
bit to hold it in. But from the very beginning,
it seems like the monocle was it kind of just
(38:11):
said one thing, which is, look at me, I'm a pompous,
rich person who wants you to know that I'm pompous
and rich.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, which is that's the reason why Eustace Tilly, the
mascot for the New Yorker has a monocle, right, yeah,
or the Monopoly Man, Yeah, has a monocle. It can
also be exotic, like the count from Sesame Street. Where's
a monocle? Yeah? I looked this up. By the way,
this isn't off the top of my head. The Penguin,
(38:39):
the Burgess Meredith Penguin from the k sixties, Batman monocle,
Colonel Clink. Yeah, Actually, what the point was of his monocle?
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Maybe it's sort of evil villain.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah. It made him eat more evil, didn't it. I
think so, But I'm not quite sure how. But there's
a long history of people wearing monocles. But one thing
that I had noticed before that I never really kind
of sat down and put together is that they were
also used in the early twentieth century by women who
were eschewing traditional gender roles.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah, think so. Have you ever seen Madonna wearing like
a tuxedo and a monocle. She's basically making a nod
to like Weimar Republic German women, probably lesbians of the era,
who were basically dressing like men in One of the
big fashion accessories for that was the monocle.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Oh, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yeah, I think it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Dietrich Intomaggio exactly what a great song. God so good?
All right. Should we talk a little bit about sunglasses, yes,
take it away. Yeah, this is I mean, sunglasses have
been around a long time as far as something to
wear on your face to shield your eyes from the sun,
not necessarily like darker lenses, but or dark lenses. But
(39:58):
Inuit people, you know, one thousand years ago, were wearing
sun goggles, which essentially, you know, because of the bright
sun and the snow was either like wood or ivory
or something that fit around your eyes and had a
little little slits cut almost almost like sort of the
old tanning bed goggles that you would wear exactly if
(40:20):
you were into that in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
And again like those big frames that kind of blocked
some light. They did that, but the slits also narrowed
your vision too, so it actually focused further away too.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
It's pretty But what about lenses. They started darkening those
a while ago, too, didn't they.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Yeah, I think as far back as Samuel Peeps in
the seventeenth century, the famous diarist whose name I finally
pronounced correctly. He tended I think his class is green
to protect his eyes from candle light when he was
riding late at night. So they've been around a really
long time, and even before that, Like, I think there's
(40:57):
a legend that Emperor Nero used ground emeralds as basically
sunglasses when he hung out at the coliseum.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
You know, this is not a look that looks good
on me at all. But when I was just in
La I went to dinner with friends of the show,
David Reese, oh cool, and Paula Tompkins and his great
wife Janey. They all say hello, by the way, nice hello,
paul You know, mister fashion wore vision glasses that were
(41:29):
tinted blue, and they looked really really sharp on him.
I could never pull it off, but they looked really good.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Paula Tompkins can pull off basically anything. He knows exactly
what he can wear, and if there's a wide range
and he does it really well.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Guess what color shirt was.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I'm gonna guess a different shade of blue.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yeah, it went perfectly.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Did he wear a thick plaid like not The coat
was thick, but the plaid was thick. The pattern of
the plaid was a very thick, prominent plaid blue out jacket.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
It was actually a white suit with white Chuka boots
and a solid blue shirt with the blue glasses. Very
very sharp.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
I very rarely say the word wow, but that run
was well learned.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
But you found I think, as we're just blue blue,
but you found some good information on to me magic
that happens when you were inside with clear glasses and
you walk outside and they turn into sunglasses.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, transition lenses, which it turns out transitions is a
proprietary eponym basically like Kleenex. Because it's so successful, everybody
calls any what are called photochromic lenses transition lenses. So
transition lenses are photochromic, but not all photochromic lenses are
transition essentially, is what I'm saying. Yeah, the thing that
(42:48):
strikes me, Chuck, is like they've been around since the
nineteen sixties, because I definitely identify them with late eighties,
early nineties.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, but I mean you found the stuff on how
it were, and I still don't understand how that's not
just black magic.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Well, there's basically there's certain kinds of dyes called photochromic dyes,
and the more they're exposed to UV light, the darker
they get because the more light they absorb. And so
they've actually figured out how to include these in the lenses.
So when there's not UV light, say you're inside the
photochromic dyes are arranged as certain kinds of molecules, and
(43:27):
that's they're transparent. But when they're exposed to UV they
break apart and form different molecules which absorb light much more,
which darkens them. And since there's a bunch of them
in the lenses, the lenses turn dark and you effectively
have sunglasses. And then when you go back out of
the UV light exposure, they go back to their normal
molecular configuration.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Just incredible, I thought so too.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Hats off to Warby Parker by the way, for explaining
that understandably.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
I think, thank you, mister Warby.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
What about scratch resistant lenses? Ca these to me are
this is the story of the show.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of great facts of
the show in here. The proprietary eponym of progressive certainly
one of them. But you know, ground Lindsay you said,
you know, in nineteen seventy two, this one the FDA
said you can't have glass breaking right in front of
your eyeball. So the plastics came around and they were
great for not shattering, but they were very scratchy or
(44:26):
scratch a bole, I guess, And NASA actually developed technology
to try and make you know, astronaut helmet face advisors
not scratchy. And so this is one of those NASA
inventions that made it to the regular world. When Foster
Grant in nineteen eighty three, who I don't think we
mentioned they were sort of the first big sunglasses company.
(44:50):
They weren't the biggest in the eighties, just because they had,
you know, the coolest commercials. They had been around since
the nineteen twenties selling sunglasses. So they said, hey, NASA,
we want to license that technology to make our lenses
scratch resistant. And you know, all of a sudden, that's
just sort of the I mean, I think you can't
even get them that aren't scratch resistant these days.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Right, No, there's no point you would go through glasses
every couple months. Basically, why would you do that save
a couple of bucks? Yeah, basically yeah, and you'd end
up buying way more glasses and spending way more money probably,
But those scratch resistant lenses just out of the gate.
They made glasses last ten times longer, which even went
beyond glass, like how good glass lenses could last too.
(45:35):
So yeah, that was a huge advancement as well.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
All right, well if you want to look at today,
I mean, we're not going to talk about context too much.
That may be its own episode at some point.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
But they did debut in eighteen eighty seven, which to
me is a startling thing that people were inserting a
glass lens from eighteen eighty seven onto their eyeball because
that's what it had to be.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Even in nineteen sixty when they were like the soft
contacts were invented, Uh huh, they were still pretty hard
and you would not want to have worn them.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Do you do the disposable ones?
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah? Multifocal?
Speaker 2 (46:13):
So what does that mean?
Speaker 1 (46:14):
It means that I can see far away in the
middle ground and nearby basically how based on how my
iris focuses.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
And then you use those for a day and then
they go away and then you use another.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Yeah, you're supposed to use them for a day, but
I use them for three to five days until they
get uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
It's just set the waste.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Can you can you sleep in those?
Speaker 1 (46:38):
No, you're not supposed to. I used to all the
time because I hated taking them out and putting them in,
And then I grew up and I'm like, yeah, I
should not do that because it's really bad for your eyes.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Yeah. It just seems like a lost sort of time
when hey, don't anyone move, I'd lost a contact, right,
or the little the little cases and washing them out
night and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Yeah, yeah, because there weren't disposables. It was all of
those contexts. It was basically like your retainer, You do
not lose your retainer, right, you know, same thing with
your contacts.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
Oh goodness, we lift through a great era, I think.
All right, So today, if you look at some stats,
the one hundred and sixty six US adults where prescription eyeglasses.
That's about sixty four percent of people, Like you mentioned earlier,
thirty four and a half million people where the over
the counter readers. About forty five million wear contacts, and
(47:35):
that is that's a lot of people with That feels
like most adults have some sort of eye correction going on.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Because all of us went through school and had to
read books all the time.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
I guess so, it's not many people that are in
their fifties and up that don't need any sort of
glasses or lenses at all.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Right, you can thank your public school for that. I guess,
so you got anything else about glasses?
Speaker 2 (48:00):
No, that was a fun one. I like these histories,
like the dentistry when these are fun for me.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
Yeah, I thought of the dentistry one when I was
researching this too. Well, thanks again Olivia for helping us
with this one, and thank you for listening. And since
Chuck said he doesn't have anything else right now, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
I'm gonna call this just a little shout out, you know,
when it comes to talking about stuff on the show,
like any sort of you know, the latest words that
people should use in terms of like gender and things
like that. Like we always try and stay on top
of things, while we always also try and speak to
like a wide audience and make sure things are super
(48:40):
clear to everybody. And it's a delicate balance for us,
so we try. And this was just a letter of
thanks from someone from Canada. Hey, guys, just listening to
the Share episode and I wanted to stop and say
thank you the way you talked about her son, Chaz,
who is transgender, was perfect. You gendered him correctly, even
in referring to him pre trans when you mentioned when
(49:01):
he was born. I know it might sound silly, but
it made me glassy eyed to hear. As a trans person.
It was so hard to be in a world that
seems determined to hate us or make it harder for
us to exist as the normal humans that we are.
So hearing you talk about Chaz and not make his
transness a bigger deal than it needed to be. And
here you talk about him in a way we trans
people advocate that we should be talked about. Really move me.
(49:24):
Thank you for working so hard to get it right.
I know it hasn't always gone perfectly, but I know
you care a lot and want to get it right
every time. This is part of why after fifteen years,
I've been listening every week. Thanks for all you do
and for keeping me learning new things, making me laugh
while I do. I hope you have an amazing weekend, friends,
And that is Lucy from Canada.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
Awesome. Thanks Lucy. We appreciate that big time. That was
a good one, Chuck, thanks for picking that.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah, we do our best folks.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
If you want to do a hat tip to us
like Lucy did, we'd love those. We'll take those any
day of the week, and you can send them to
us via email at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and it's just the three of
us with three pairs of eyes. And that's all I did.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We all wear glasses.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, I guess all three of us do. Now, Huh
you didn't for a really long time. You were the
holdout who kept crashing your car.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yeah, yeah, I wore And I think I've told this story,
but I was sort of the typical story of always
had really great vision and then it's been more longer
than you think. Then sometime in my mid forties, I
was like, Huh, this thing I'm reading isn't so clear.
And I went to the doctor and they're like, yeah, yeah,
(00:53):
you're reading. Vision is failing, so just get some glasses.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Did I ever tell you the story of when I
found out I needed glasses?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Now? How old were you?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I was in fourth grade and we went in for
like a lyfe check and a like an eye exam
that just an eye test, just one of those things
where it's like, obviously the state requires this, so it
doesn't actually it's not actually a.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Thing scoliosis too while they're at it.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Probably, so I was like totally flabbergasted when they were like,
you need glasses, Like I was just expecting not that
at all. Yeah, And sure enough, when I went in
for an eye exam, I was like, oh, I can
actually see things now. I hadn't really noticed. And so yeah,
since fourth grade I had to wear glasses or contact lenses,
(01:42):
and I'll never forget my first pair of glasses. I
think I was kind of bummed that I had to
wear glasses at all. So my mom made sure that
we went and got like the coolest glasses we could find,
that's sweet, which were in Elton John Special. They were
totally clear, an electric blue wire going through the whole thing,
and I would wear those today if I could find them.
(02:03):
They were pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, I mean the time where we grew up glasses
was definitely like kind of super not cool, but then
I remember by the time we got to high school,
it was I can't believe I'm admitting this. I'm actually
one of those people who bought the fake glasses and
were a little while Oh yeah, yeah, because it was
(02:26):
you know, international mail, the whole GQ thing. I thought
I was a preppy kid, and I thought they'd make
me look cooler and more preppy, and so I did
that tortoise shells yeah for a while. But yeah, glasses,
And as we'll see in this, in this great, great
article that Livia put together for us, that has long
(02:47):
been a push pull since kind of the beginning of
glasses was do they make it seem like you're deficient
as a person or do they make you look like smarter?
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah? Yeah, No, it's it's a tension that's as old
as glasses, basically. Yeah, And it's sad that it still
kind of goes on. But I think that's really kind
of gone the way of the dinosaur thanks to people
like you stepping up and wearing glasses when you didn't
need them, thanks to Huey Lewis stepping up and teaching
everyone it's hip to be square. I really think that
(03:19):
was probably the transition point right there.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, And I also want to point out I would
love to see pictures of you with those glasses, if
you have any, because to me, there's nothing cuter than
a kid wearing glasses. Well, I don't.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Know if I can, if I can put my finger
on any of those and even if I could, I'm
pretty sure the glasses were my best feature back then.
So you talked about, you know, this tension from the
beginning of glasses. Let's talk about the beginning of glasses.
Because the concept of glasses as we understand them today,
like these things that you wear that contain corrective lenses
(03:54):
that you can put on your on your face and
they typically won't fall off. That's only a few hundred
years old. But people have needed corrective lenses for long
before that. So there's a really great question that I've
always kind of wondered that I've never bothered to look up,
Like what about people who needed glasses before glasses were invented?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah? So, uh again, Lyvia helped us with this, and
I think I'm going to use her title because it
was really another Lvia special.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
I didn't get it.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Four eyes good. You didn't get it?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
No, I still don't.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Well, four eyes means you wear glasses, right, and so
you know four eyes is good? Okay, So they're like
helps you see better.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
There's no there's no deeper meaning or pun or reference
to it.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Oh I don't think so, cause I mean.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Why why didn't she include r like, four eyes are good.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
I just took it. I may be wrong. We'll have
to ask Livia as just four eyes good, like TikTok would.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Say, yeah, okay, all right maybe, so yeah, we have
to ask Olivia.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I may be staring at an obvious pun though that
I'm not overlooking so who knows.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well, we're both overlooking it if we are.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
So let me put on my pun glasses.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
You need to break those things, all right.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So anyway, I agree, you know, Olivia kind of points
out like as reading came along, people needed glasses more
and more because a lot of like myself, if I
never read anything, I would be just fine. Like I
might look at something close to me and be like,
well it might look a little fuzzy, but it's not
like reading something that's fuzzy. So for before reading became
(05:33):
a big, big thing, not as many people noticed, I think.
And then I think people who had which is it
nearsighted or far sighted When you can't see something far away.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
You're nearsighted, like you're sighted to see things nearby.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Okay, So I think those people were just kind of
sol and just was like, oh, well, I guess just
one of the things that happens to people.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yes, there is such a thing as hereditary myopia, where
you can be myopic because you were born that way.
But the larger point here is that there were far,
far fewer people who were myopic than there are today
because of the advent of reading. And there's studies that
show that the more students read, the more myopic they become.
(06:19):
And it's just as sounding to me. I didn't ever
think of it that way, but it's totally true. From reading.
Glasses came as a necessity.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, and the people that may have been had you
not great close focus back in the day, may have
done things like engraving or these skills where they were
doing something kind of like reading, right right.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So, and we've had lenses, just not corrective lenses for
a very long time. About almost five thousand years ago,
people were grinding things like quartz into lenses, but they
were basically like little six year old kids. They would
use them to start fires with that's what their purpose was.
And they were developed independently in different parts of the world,
(07:02):
like Assyria and Greece had them about five thousand years ago,
and about two thousand years ago they developed them in Peru,
which is pretty cool too. But I mean, a good
idea is a good idea, and I think things like
that proved that.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, for sure, it was archimedes deathway was that a lens?
Speaker 1 (07:19):
It was a mirror a right, Yeah, I thought of
that too.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Oh, we did a great podcast on mirrors a long time,
you remember that one.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
That was a good one. My brain is still broken
from that. Like it was one of those things where
I just assumed it would be pretty easy, and it's
not at all easy. It's really hard to comprehend mirrors
and how they work.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah, totally, all right, So, yeah, they were polishing lenses
and I think the reading stone was the first kind
of use of a lens to help you read something.
And those were the little round things that you would
sit literally sit on a book and push along rather
than hold it out like a magnifying glass. And there
(07:58):
was a lot of monk, a lot of monks doing
a lot of this because I think they were doing
more like text work than a lot of most people
back then.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, because you didn't have a way to copy anything
except for by hand, so that was a huge role
of monks. So yeah, they definitely needed those and then
translating things into other languages. There's a really good example
of an important development in the field of like classes
or corrective lenses that happened because somebody translated the writing
(08:29):
of an Arab scholar named Abu Ali al Hassan Ibn
al Hatham, who was born in nine sixty five CE,
and he actually figured out that we see because our
eyes sense beams of light, and in other parts of
the world, like for example, Greece, they thought it was
(08:51):
the opposite, that we shot laser beams out of our eyes.
And I know we've talked about that before, Yeah, because
it's so preposterous that I just love it. But I
don't remember what episode, but but I a'l Hatham figured
this out. But he was writing in Arabic. Luckily, there
was a monk who was also a physicist, a Polish
(09:12):
monk named Vitelo, who in the twelve hundreds translated al
Haitham from Arabic to Latin, which gave a chance for
another monk in English, monk named Roger Bacon, to read
it in Latin and then build on al Haatham's findings
about vision and optics.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Is it weird to me that I thought the monk
being named Roger Bacon was funny sounding.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
No it is. It's really funny. Oh okay, yeah, no
it's I mean, it's just such a modern name but
also a silly modern name. Yeah, yeah, okay, good, I'm
with you. No offense to Kevin, No, no, he knows.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, if we're talking about glasses, like you know, the
glasses that we think of today, still not you know,
you'll note there's some key things missing here still. But
if we're talking about a convex lens to help someone
who is far sighted read text or a book, you
got to go to Italy in the late thirteenth century,
(10:09):
Italy with a little bit of Germany mixed in here
and there. But it seems like Italy really drove the
glasses industry forward, using crown glass at the time, like
you know, real glass for their lenses. And we'll get
to that switch later on too. But they speculate that
you know, they were grinding me and you know, they
(10:30):
were making mirrors and polishing stones and stuff, so they
probably wasn't a big leap to start doing the same
kind of things with the same kind of tools to
make glass lenses.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, and so like you said there were convex lenses
to help magnify things for people who are far sighted,
and that is far far easier to make than a
concave lens, as we'll see. So those convex lenses were
around for centuries before corrective lenses for people with myopia
came along.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, And another thing I don't want to do, maybe
is if you're in a place to look things up
for image searches, these are all fun to look at,
these antique glasses. If you look up Rivet spectacles Rivet,
these were sort of the first glasses that were held
together by a little you know, Rivet. It looks like
a hinge. I couldn't tell it. It looks like they
(11:20):
might move and like fold upon each other.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Is that true.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I don't know, but it looked like that to me too,
I would guess.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
So they're kind of cool looking. But one thing you
notice is that even with the Rivet spectacles, they're not
you don't hang that Rivet on your nose. It's still
just a hinge to hold them together.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, you had to hold classes or spectacles with your
hand for centuries after they were invented. Basically. Yeah, And
like we said, with the advent of reading. Thanks to
things like the Gutenberg printing Press in the fourteen hundreds
or later in the sixteen hundreds, when Europe started to
publish newspapers all over the place, reading became much more widespread,
(11:59):
and so the need four glasses became much more widespread
thanks to the development of myopia from reading and especially
reading by candle light.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, I guess that would really put a strain on
your eyes, right.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Totally for sure. And so this is also about the
time in medieval I think medieval Europe where the whole
thing kind of became like, all right, is this a
fashion statement? Are you showing everybody that you're correcting a disability?
What's the deal here with classes? This is around the
(12:34):
time where it really kind of started to take hold,
and in fact, Olivia turned up something I thought was
pretty interesting. Depending on the painter and depending on how
you wanted to depict the person, especially during the Renaissance,
you might show somebody who was born before glasses were
(12:54):
invented wearing glasses to get across how studious and scholarly
they were, or if you wanted to show how cool
somebody was if they were known to wear glasses you
might have you might leave the glasses out altogether.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah. Yeah, it's that that weird pushbull that we were
talking about. And I guess it just depended on maybe
just the time and place and what the culture was
like in that particular time and place, right right.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
They were also a way to depict wealth. Remember it
had a painting called the Parable of the Rich Fool,
which is a Bible story. So of course it's took
place long before there was such a thing as glasses,
but he included glasses on the Rich Fool to show
how rich he was.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah, and in China, because he's spread via the Silk
Road to Asia, some of their judiciary committees they were like,
here's your uniform, and part of it was glasses, whether
you needed them or not. Like you like me? That
nice work.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
You want to take a break, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I mean, since we literally just chinxed each other, I
think it should take break.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
That's right. You owe me a coke?
Speaker 3 (14:02):
All right, be right back, so chuck before we.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Get started again. I want to say something every time
I say glasses, or hear glasses, or even read glasses
in my head, Velma goes my glasses. It's been happening constantly,
and I think what's most significant about it is that
hasn't gotten old yet.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
So Velma from Scooby Doo would she lose her glasses?
Speaker 1 (14:46):
She invariably said, my glasses, and I just got it
in my head.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
And you've been doing that like for two days.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, over and over and over and over. It's going
on right now as we speak. As a matter of fact.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
And by the sounds of it, you were also practicing
that Arabic name.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I actually did not out loud.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, you busted that thing out, man.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I just have a silver tongue for Arabic.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Apparently that was really good.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Thanks. Okay, so let's get started. We talked about how
the lenses for far sightedness or around for centuries before nearsightedness,
but we eventually got to those, I guess in like
the fifteenth century the fourteen hundreds, again not coincidentally with
the spread of reading, we finally figured out how to
(15:34):
make lenses that are concave that correct vision for people
who can see things nearby but not far away.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
That's right, and the other way around, like you mentioned
in Act one, a lot harder to do. There was
a cardinal named Nicholas of Kusa, And this is where
the Germany part comes in, because that's where Germany is now.
He's given a lot of credit to developing the convex lens.
But once again, it was really Italy where a lot
(16:01):
of this was taking place, specifically Florence, where they were
really crafting excellent lenses for the time. And I think
they were pretty darn good at it, even like compared
to today. I've read that it's like kind of remarkable
how good they were at this.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean I always equate venue
with glass because of Venetian glass, but sure, why not
Florence too.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
So there are a couple of innovations that came along
in the seventeenth century to the sixteen hundreds that really
kind of helped push things forward. So we've been making
glass for centuries by then. But as they were trying
to figure out how to make these things refract light.
That's how lenses correct. They refract light at different angles
(16:51):
depending on what you need to see in focus. They
figured out that not only you know, could you use
traditional glass and then shape it in certain ways, you
could add certain things to glass that would help with
their refractiveness. So they figured out that if they add
low iron, potash or lead oxide, it will give it
(17:12):
a higher refractive index. But you need less glass to
do that. So all of a sudden, glasses became immediately
less clunky and a little more comfortable.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Yeah, for sure. And you know you mentioned paintings in
that in the first part. But I thought the encyclopedia
brownness of this next bit was really pretty great because
there is actual evidence of concave lens use in Raphael's
painting portrait of Pope Leo ten and two cardinals and
(17:45):
they say ten. Huh, what do you say? X?
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah, I know it's ten, but it just sounds cooler
as Poplo X.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
So Poplio was part of the Medici family, which had
genetic my iopia, as was well known back then. And
you can see, and this is where it gets encyclopedia brown.
You can see in the painting behind the lens, his
thumb is smaller, showing that it's a distance lens, and
(18:14):
that is just that little detail. For someone to paint
that and then other people to notice is pretty great.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
I mean, that's so raphe yel you know. Yeah, And
then there was some other advances too that weren't exactly
corrective lenses, but people figured out, especially the Dutch, were
super into this that if you took corrective lenses that
could bend light in different ways, you could see things
that were really small, or you could see things that
were really far away, and so they were really helpful
(18:41):
in developing the microscope and the telescope too.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
That's right. But I know everyone's chomping at the bit saying,
these glasses that you can hold up to your face
are fine. But guys, when did people start wearing glasses?
We can go to the seventeenth century finally, when we
got the bow spectacle or is it boo?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
I wonder that myself. I think bow like a bow
and arrow bow. It's like the shape of a bow
without the string. I think that's what it is.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Okay, that's what I think it is too. But those
are the glasses that still didn't have what do you
call the things on the side.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
The temples or the arms now.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
No arms, yeah, no arms yet. But they had a
little a little thing where you could slip it over
your nose and it would, you know, if you had
a good fit, it would sit there. Otherwise you probably
still needed to assist it with your fingies.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah, exactly the same thing that's still around now. It
sits on the bridge of your nose and rests and helps,
you know, hold your glasses up right. Yeah, so that
was a huge advance. It's funny when you look back
at this stuff, You're just like, this is all just
such low hanging fruit glasses. Guys, why didn't you just
put them together immediately? Yeah, And that's just not how
(19:54):
it went. I mean, this person contributed this, this person
contributed that, and they took millennia to develop, which I
just find astounding. It's like a miracle that we have
glasses today based on how long and plotting their development was.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Well. Yeah, And what's the funniest thing to me about
all of this as I was reading each little development
was the whole time, the ears are sitting there on
the side of your head, just like, hey, guys, we
have two literal anchor points sticking out of the side
of everybody's head and still no one I think. In Spain,
Lvia found that some people would tie a string and
(20:30):
then tie it around their ear, like if they were
playing you know, soccer or something. I guess but no
one still was like, hey, maybe we should make something
to sit on those ears.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
So to be fair, there was a guy named Edward
Scarlett who was an optician in London in the seventeen twenties,
and he saw what you're talking about, m M. But
at the time, so he invented temples those sides those arms,
but they didn't curve downward to take advantage of those
natural anchor points the backs of the ears like the
(21:02):
US today. But there was a good reason why, and
that was at the time, anyone who is wealthy enough
to afford glasses also wore powdered wigs and those things
were giant and covered the ears. You couldn't use the
back of the ears like that because they were covered up,
but you could use the temples as pressure points for
those those arms that they he came up with.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
So those were just like little squeezes essentially.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, they would give you a migraine in like three minutes.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Okay, because I did also see that. Olivia found rather
that they some people would it would attach a ribbon,
but they still wouldn't time around the ear. They would
just tie it around the back of their head. A
harlequin yeah, yeah, to those squeeze temples. Finally we get
a guy that gets closer. In seven fifty two, an
(21:50):
English optician named James ice Coff, I guess had a
double hinge side and well, actually I don't think he
invented the turnpin template. That was about twenty five years
after that, because the turnpin template from or temple, from
what I can tell, it goes straight back and then
(22:11):
has a hinge and then goes straight down behind the
ear ninety degrees. But it doesn't like curve around the ear.
It was just a big ninety degree drop that sat
down a couple of inches even below the ear right.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
But it finally started to take advantage of the back
of the ear right.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yeah, in a clunky way.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
But at the same time, with these guys putting hinges
in there, now you have these arms that can number one,
fold away for convenience, but also number two. If they're
double spring, they can also bend kind of outwards. So
now you could just put glasses on and they would
fit to your giant head or your tiny head, depending
on the size. Immediately thanks to the spring and those hinges.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, I remember seeing those for the first time, and
that seemed like a very modern invention in like the eighties,
But that's not true.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
At all, No, I don't. I think it took a
little while for it to become ubiquitous, but it was
older than that for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, well I only use you know, I found a
number of years ago that the ray Ban Wayfairer is
kind of the only sunglass that I look okay in Okay,
So I've only worn those, and then I just buy
those frames to get my readers made because it's the
only only shape that I've ever found works for my face.
(23:29):
And so I'm a wayfair purist.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I guess I can do wayfarers and I can do
aviators too.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
I can't pull those off.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
The ones that I can't pull off that I really
wish I could are the I want to say, carreras,
but they're not. You know what I'm talking about, those
Italian ones that are super sleek looking that you basically
have to wear a speedo with.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I think I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, those, I wish I could rock those, and they
just do not look right on me. And I think
we should include a little PSA here for everybody that
wears those giant multi colored reflective visor sunglasses. Now nobody
looks good in those, which ones the giant visor sunglasses
that are super in right now.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
What is visor? Would you mean like a hat visor?
Speaker 1 (24:16):
No, like like ski goggles, but without the goggle part.
They're just sunglasses. But they're that massive and colorfully reflective.
How have you not seen these? I don't know, like
Oakley's kind of Yeah, I'm sure, please make them. Yes, bigger,
just imagine bigger.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I'm gonna have to look up a picture of these
because I have not known. Also, I don't, you know,
get around in the world too much, So.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
I mean I'm surprised you at least haven't seen like
a delivery person wearing them.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Oh, well, you know it's funny. I just did a
rare inshow look up and I see exactly what you're
talking about. H I do not like those. I did
not know people were wearing those. Oh yeah, they're huge now,
but they also when you type indvisors glasses, they make
sunglasses with the little visor over them.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Oh that's neat, like the Wane little flip up sunglasses.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Well, it's those are individual for each side. This is
I'm sending a picture of this dude right now, because
he's rocking pretty hard.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Anyway, where I started with the whole ray ban thing
is though they don't make the spring ones where they
you know, have a pretty fat head, then luckily they
fit my face. But they don't, you know, bend outward,
flex outward.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
They have what you called barrel hinges in there. No
they don't. They stop it like I guess ninety degrees
to the frame. But you can go in and get
those little parts of the barrel hinges adjusted to fit
your head if they don't automatically fit your head.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Man, you know a lot about this stuff.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Well you know, I've been wearing them since fourth grade.
And you just pick up facts here or there.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
All right. Just to cite a further example of the
push and pull of cool versus not cool, Napoleon needed glasses,
thought they make him look weak, so did not wear them,
and as a result, I think, like tripped over stuff
and people thought he was clumsy.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I mean, he rode a horse and he couldn't see.
That's kind of dangerous totally. There's another kind of big
splash that happened with glasses that made them fashionable. But
it was one of those things where something that's ugly
and utilitarian becomes fashionable. And it was a type of
glasses invented by Benjamin Martin. They ended up being called
(26:27):
Martin's margins because they're hugely thick frames. And the reason
that Martin invented them like that is because they block
light coming in from different directions rather than looking forward,
and that can obscure your vision a little bit. And
he's absolutely right, that totally is true. If you're just
outside looking wearing say, contacts, and you put on glasses,
(26:51):
there's a huge difference between the two because the frames
block some of the light coming downward into your eyes.
And everybody made fun of these because they were just
so ugly, but people started wearing them, and so everybody
who were making fun of them started making and selling
them too.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, and they're kind of crazy looking when you look
at them now. I have seen some that people that
kind of emulated this style. But it was noteworthy too
because it was one of the first ones that had
any kind of noticeable rim. Usually it was just the
lens and kind of the smallest piece of whalebone or
wire or something that could host that lens.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Right for sure, Yeah, so the sixteen hundreds I think
saw some technical advances, but the nineteenth century was just
a boom century for especially using corrective lenses, right, not
just fashion or the way that they were made, or
getting around and putting arms that reach behind the back
of the ear, but like the actual function of glasses
(27:51):
became exponentially better in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, because you know, previous to this, the way you
got glasses well as the glasses manufacturer would make a
bunch of them and then they would send a salesperson
around and a wagon or I guess eventually a car
and they would travel around and kind of do like
the over the counter readers that what was it, like
thirty four percent of Americans actually use those these days.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Thirty four million, I think, oh.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah, thirty a lot, Yeah, thirty four million. But it
was on the you know, on the road. Basically, you
just didn't have a prescription specific to your eye. Someone
just came around. You're like, well, these will do I guess.
But now all of a sudden, you got a real
you know, vision test, so they could dial in a
(28:41):
prescription for you for the first time.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, And that was thanks to people who started inventing
tools that are still kind of in use today evolved versions.
In particular is a guy named Herman von Helmholtz who
goes without saying was German. He invented the ophthalmoscope and
the ops a opthalometer uphthalmometer, sorry, and the ophthalmoscope lets
(29:06):
you see the back of a patient's eyeball, so when
they look at your eye and they're shining a light
and they're like, don't look into the light, look in
my ear or something like that. That's essentially an opthalmoscope
that Herman von Helmholtz invented in the eighteen fifties. And
then the ophthalmometer. You can assess the essentially the curvature
(29:27):
of the back of the retina while you're looking at
the retina through an opthalmoscope. And what you have now
is basically the the invention of the ability to figure
out what kind of corrective lenses you needed. Ophthalmology it
was born at this time, and so now they could
really take exact measurements and then create the glasses for
(29:50):
you specifically, and they just worked so much better.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, and I'm glad you took all those words.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
We should we mention that we had to edit out
at least one attempt of ophthalmology.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Yeah. I mean that was the easiest one, I think,
because that's a word people commonly say. But there's something
about the optal being at the beginning that just makes
it a little brain breaking.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
So horrendous.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
What did you say for the second.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Machine, ophthalmom opthalmometer. I tried to add an extra syllable,
as per.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
My usual opthalmometer. Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, that's what meter.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Upthalmometer.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Oh boy, are we going to talk about the diopter?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
I think we should just mention it because it was
a huge breakthrough. We don't have to go into the formula.
But there were a pair of French ophthalmologists who in
the eighteen seventies figured out that you could quantify just
how much vision correction you needed. And it's mind bending
that it's called the diopter and it's a really simple formula,
(31:01):
but it's really hard to understand. But just take for
granted that ophthalmologists understand how to use that. And so
if you look at your prescription, whether for glasses or
for context, the thing that's labeled power, that number is
in diopters, and that just means how much of a
refraction correction you need to focus stuff far away or
(31:24):
nearby at your retina rather than in front of you
or behind you as you naturally would be with your
near sightedness or far sidedness.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah, is the key to all this that machine that
you look through with the lenses that they flip down
during the eye test.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I think that's almost like a like they're zeroing in
on their observations of what your eye looks like, and
now they've got it narrowed down to like a couple
of different diopters. Okay, And it's almost to me like
that those traveling salesmen who'd be like, try this pair on,
try this pair on, but they're doing it with the
cool machine that has slides instead. Right, that's my take.
(32:04):
I could be wrong. I probably am wrong.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Well, I'd like to hear from optomologists because I know,
I know there's a lot more to it than like
just sitting down in front of this machine and we'll
punch the numbers into the whatever and it'll spit out
your prescription. Like there is actual expertise involved.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they have to like observe and
make guesses based on their observation from what I can understand.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
How about that little eyepuff, the little air puff you.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Get it takes some time to get used to. Do
you like that?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
No? I don't like it, but it's definitely I mean
all this was brand new to me a decade ago ish. So,
like you said, you've been doing it since you were
what like twelve eleven?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Yeah, however old you are in fourth grade, ken, I
don't know, but yes, around that time. To me, those
things are like the same experience as pulling a nose
hair out, you know, like you just it's in some
weird mass of kit stick way like enjoyable, but it's
not really.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, all right, so we're having too much fun here.
Let's take a break and get serious and we'll talk
a little bit more about plastics and bifocals and monocles
and sunglasses and everything else right after this. All right,
(33:38):
So we promised talks of plastic. After World War One,
plastics became a big thing, and resin specifically c R
thirty nine became the first big kind of popular plastic
used for lenses, which is still a pretty popular choice today.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Yeah, so that was a huge advancement in lenses, but
people were still making glass lenses for a long time
until nineteen seventy two in the United States, the FDA said, Hey,
walking around with two glass lenses on your eyes, like
so close to your eyes is probably kind of scary.
So now all lenses need to be shatterproof. So a
(34:18):
lot of glasses makers just turned to plastics at that point.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Yeah, and plastic worked. You know, it was much better
in a lot of ways because they were you know,
turned out to be more durable. Once they figured out
the scratch resistance, they wouldn't shatter, you know, near eye.
Obviously you could have a lot more kinds of styles.
You could have rimless glasses. Yeah, Obviously plastics in the
(34:42):
frames created a boom in fashion eyewear, like in the
fifties with cat eye glasses and horn rim glasses and
tortoiseshell and like the glasses you talked about in the
seventies and eighties, the big giant ron know if you
mentioned them, the big giant like neuro worn at the
end of Casino.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yeah, I love those, man.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Jesse Thorn has some of those. I'm so jealous whenever
I see those.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Those seem to be based on a military issue type
of glasses, which we didn't say. The Two World Wars
helped make glasses normal in the United States because so
many soldiers needed them that the government started issuing them
like two million plus pairs. But the standard issue military
glasses were called were so ugly. They were called informally,
(35:29):
of course, birth controlled glasses or bcgs. And if you
look them up, they are that ugly. They're terrible.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Did they look like the Denier ones? Are they just giant?
Speaker 1 (35:40):
They weren't nearly as cool as the DeNiro ones. They
were an uglier version of the DeNiro ones.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Got it. I'm going to look those up too.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, they're tough to look at.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, giglasses that they're sometimes called as well.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
It's like thanks a lot.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Army exactly. So that was a huge advance, but just
kind of dialing it back a little bit time wise.
There's like an old story that Ben Franklin invented the bifocals,
and that seems to actually be correct, based on a
letter that he wrote to one of his friends in
the late seventeen hundreds where he basically described creating bifocals
(36:15):
but by having a glassmaker cut his two different sets
of glasses in half. Right.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Did the letter say, for instance, I'm reading what I'm writing,
and now I'm looking across the room, And now I'm
reading what I'm writing, and now I'm looking across the room.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yeah, it had a lot of that, a couple of paragraphs.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, but you know, it seems like he did. He
said that he could, you know, see his food and
look at people at the dinner party. At the same time,
progressive lenses came along. This sort of shocks me. I
thought they were newer too, but they came along in
nineteen fifty nine. And isn't the idea there that it's
sort of like a bifocal that's just sort of blended
in and less harsh.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
It's actually a trifocal. There's distant, mid, and near all
mixed together, and it just depends, I guess, on where
your eye focuses. I think it's magic. Basically. They're also
called multifocal lenses.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah. I think they offered me those just so I
could wear glasses all the time. Yeah, And I was like,
I don't want to wear glasses all the time. If
I don't have to, I don't putting them on to read.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
There's a theory that you should use glasses as little
as possible and use the lowest power, say, contacts as
possible because your eyes can get dependent on the stronger
prescription or wearing them all the time. I don't know
if that's a folk tale or something, but it definitely
intuitively makes sense.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah, I think it totally makes sense.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Okay, well, then you made the right choice.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Can we talk about monocles?
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yes, let's please. I think this is the high point
of this episode.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, monocles are kind of fun. If you don't know
what a monocle is, I guess I'm assuming is the
single round lens that would you would just sort of
made to fit your eye as you were wealthy if
you had one, and you would just sort of stick
it in there and sort of squint around it a
bit to hold it in. But from the very beginning,
it seems like the monocle was it kind of just
(38:11):
said one thing, which is, look at me, I'm a pompous,
rich person who wants you to know that I'm pompous
and rich.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, which is that's the reason why Eustace Tilly, the
mascot for the New Yorker has a monocle, right, yeah,
or the Monopoly Man, Yeah, has a monocle. It can
also be exotic, like the count from Sesame Street. Where's
a monocle? Yeah? I looked this up. By the way,
this isn't off the top of my head. The Penguin,
(38:39):
the Burgess Meredith Penguin from the k sixties, Batman monocle,
Colonel Clink. Yeah, Actually, what the point was of his monocle?
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Maybe it's sort of evil villain.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah. It made him eat more evil, didn't it. I
think so, But I'm not quite sure how. But there's
a long history of people wearing monocles. But one thing
that I had noticed before that I never really kind
of sat down and put together is that they were
also used in the early twentieth century by women who
were eschewing traditional gender roles.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah, think so. Have you ever seen Madonna wearing like
a tuxedo and a monocle. She's basically making a nod
to like Weimar Republic German women, probably lesbians of the era,
who were basically dressing like men in One of the
big fashion accessories for that was the monocle.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Oh, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yeah, I think it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Dietrich Intomaggio exactly what a great song. God so good?
All right. Should we talk a little bit about sunglasses, yes,
take it away. Yeah, this is I mean, sunglasses have
been around a long time as far as something to
wear on your face to shield your eyes from the sun,
not necessarily like darker lenses, but or dark lenses. But
(39:58):
Inuit people, you know, one thousand years ago, were wearing
sun goggles, which essentially, you know, because of the bright
sun and the snow was either like wood or ivory
or something that fit around your eyes and had a
little little slits cut almost almost like sort of the
old tanning bed goggles that you would wear exactly if
(40:20):
you were into that in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
And again like those big frames that kind of blocked
some light. They did that, but the slits also narrowed
your vision too, so it actually focused further away too.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
It's pretty But what about lenses. They started darkening those
a while ago, too, didn't they.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Yeah, I think as far back as Samuel Peeps in
the seventeenth century, the famous diarist whose name I finally
pronounced correctly. He tended I think his class is green
to protect his eyes from candle light when he was
riding late at night. So they've been around a really
long time, and even before that, Like, I think there's
(40:57):
a legend that Emperor Nero used ground emeralds as basically
sunglasses when he hung out at the coliseum.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
You know, this is not a look that looks good
on me at all. But when I was just in
La I went to dinner with friends of the show,
David Reese, oh cool, and Paula Tompkins and his great
wife Janey. They all say hello, by the way, nice hello,
paul You know, mister fashion wore vision glasses that were
(41:29):
tinted blue, and they looked really really sharp on him.
I could never pull it off, but they looked really good.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Paula Tompkins can pull off basically anything. He knows exactly
what he can wear, and if there's a wide range
and he does it really well.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Guess what color shirt was.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I'm gonna guess a different shade of blue.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yeah, it went perfectly.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Did he wear a thick plaid like not The coat
was thick, but the plaid was thick. The pattern of
the plaid was a very thick, prominent plaid blue out jacket.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
It was actually a white suit with white Chuka boots
and a solid blue shirt with the blue glasses. Very
very sharp.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
I very rarely say the word wow, but that run
was well learned.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
But you found I think, as we're just blue blue,
but you found some good information on to me magic
that happens when you were inside with clear glasses and
you walk outside and they turn into sunglasses.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, transition lenses, which it turns out transitions is a
proprietary eponym basically like Kleenex. Because it's so successful, everybody
calls any what are called photochromic lenses transition lenses. So
transition lenses are photochromic, but not all photochromic lenses are
transition essentially, is what I'm saying. Yeah, the thing that
(42:48):
strikes me, Chuck, is like they've been around since the
nineteen sixties, because I definitely identify them with late eighties,
early nineties.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, but I mean you found the stuff on how
it were, and I still don't understand how that's not
just black magic.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Well, there's basically there's certain kinds of dyes called photochromic dyes,
and the more they're exposed to UV light, the darker
they get because the more light they absorb. And so
they've actually figured out how to include these in the lenses.
So when there's not UV light, say you're inside the
photochromic dyes are arranged as certain kinds of molecules, and
(43:27):
that's they're transparent. But when they're exposed to UV they
break apart and form different molecules which absorb light much more,
which darkens them. And since there's a bunch of them
in the lenses, the lenses turn dark and you effectively
have sunglasses. And then when you go back out of
the UV light exposure, they go back to their normal
molecular configuration.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Just incredible, I thought so too.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Hats off to Warby Parker by the way, for explaining
that understandably.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
I think, thank you, mister Warby.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
What about scratch resistant lenses? Ca these to me are
this is the story of the show.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of great facts of
the show in here. The proprietary eponym of progressive certainly
one of them. But you know, ground Lindsay you said,
you know, in nineteen seventy two, this one the FDA
said you can't have glass breaking right in front of
your eyeball. So the plastics came around and they were
great for not shattering, but they were very scratchy or
(44:26):
scratch a bole, I guess, And NASA actually developed technology
to try and make you know, astronaut helmet face advisors
not scratchy. And so this is one of those NASA
inventions that made it to the regular world. When Foster
Grant in nineteen eighty three, who I don't think we
mentioned they were sort of the first big sunglasses company.
(44:50):
They weren't the biggest in the eighties, just because they had,
you know, the coolest commercials. They had been around since
the nineteen twenties selling sunglasses. So they said, hey, NASA,
we want to license that technology to make our lenses
scratch resistant. And you know, all of a sudden, that's
just sort of the I mean, I think you can't
even get them that aren't scratch resistant these days.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Right, No, there's no point you would go through glasses
every couple months. Basically, why would you do that save
a couple of bucks? Yeah, basically yeah, and you'd end
up buying way more glasses and spending way more money probably,
But those scratch resistant lenses just out of the gate.
They made glasses last ten times longer, which even went
beyond glass, like how good glass lenses could last too.
(45:35):
So yeah, that was a huge advancement as well.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
All right, well if you want to look at today,
I mean, we're not going to talk about context too much.
That may be its own episode at some point.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
But they did debut in eighteen eighty seven, which to
me is a startling thing that people were inserting a
glass lens from eighteen eighty seven onto their eyeball because
that's what it had to be.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Even in nineteen sixty when they were like the soft
contacts were invented, Uh huh, they were still pretty hard
and you would not want to have worn them.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Do you do the disposable ones?
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah? Multifocal?
Speaker 2 (46:13):
So what does that mean?
Speaker 1 (46:14):
It means that I can see far away in the
middle ground and nearby basically how based on how my
iris focuses.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
And then you use those for a day and then
they go away and then you use another.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Yeah, you're supposed to use them for a day, but
I use them for three to five days until they
get uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
It's just set the waste.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Can you can you sleep in those?
Speaker 1 (46:38):
No, you're not supposed to. I used to all the
time because I hated taking them out and putting them in,
And then I grew up and I'm like, yeah, I
should not do that because it's really bad for your eyes.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Yeah. It just seems like a lost sort of time
when hey, don't anyone move, I'd lost a contact, right,
or the little the little cases and washing them out
night and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Yeah, yeah, because there weren't disposables. It was all of
those contexts. It was basically like your retainer, You do
not lose your retainer, right, you know, same thing with
your contacts.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
Oh goodness, we lift through a great era, I think.
All right, So today, if you look at some stats,
the one hundred and sixty six US adults where prescription eyeglasses.
That's about sixty four percent of people, Like you mentioned earlier,
thirty four and a half million people where the over
the counter readers. About forty five million wear contacts, and
(47:35):
that is that's a lot of people with That feels
like most adults have some sort of eye correction going on.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Because all of us went through school and had to
read books all the time.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
I guess so, it's not many people that are in
their fifties and up that don't need any sort of
glasses or lenses at all.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Right, you can thank your public school for that. I guess,
so you got anything else about glasses?
Speaker 2 (48:00):
No, that was a fun one. I like these histories,
like the dentistry when these are fun for me.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
Yeah, I thought of the dentistry one when I was
researching this too. Well, thanks again Olivia for helping us
with this one, and thank you for listening. And since
Chuck said he doesn't have anything else right now, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
I'm gonna call this just a little shout out, you know,
when it comes to talking about stuff on the show,
like any sort of you know, the latest words that
people should use in terms of like gender and things
like that. Like we always try and stay on top
of things, while we always also try and speak to
like a wide audience and make sure things are super
(48:40):
clear to everybody. And it's a delicate balance for us,
so we try. And this was just a letter of
thanks from someone from Canada. Hey, guys, just listening to
the Share episode and I wanted to stop and say
thank you the way you talked about her son, Chaz,
who is transgender, was perfect. You gendered him correctly, even
in referring to him pre trans when you mentioned when
(49:01):
he was born. I know it might sound silly, but
it made me glassy eyed to hear. As a trans person.
It was so hard to be in a world that
seems determined to hate us or make it harder for
us to exist as the normal humans that we are.
So hearing you talk about Chaz and not make his
transness a bigger deal than it needed to be. And
here you talk about him in a way we trans
people advocate that we should be talked about. Really move me.
(49:24):
Thank you for working so hard to get it right.
I know it hasn't always gone perfectly, but I know
you care a lot and want to get it right
every time. This is part of why after fifteen years,
I've been listening every week. Thanks for all you do
and for keeping me learning new things, making me laugh
while I do. I hope you have an amazing weekend, friends,
And that is Lucy from Canada.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
Awesome. Thanks Lucy. We appreciate that big time. That was
a good one, Chuck, thanks for picking that.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah, we do our best folks.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
If you want to do a hat tip to us
like Lucy did, we'd love those. We'll take those any
day of the week, and you can send them to
us via email at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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