Eyeglasses Invented

Sometime in the late thirteenth century, probably in northern Italy, artisans produced the first wearable eyeglasses: two convex lenses mounted in frames and balanced on the nose. The date of 1286 is a convention rather than a certainty, and the inventor is unknown. Still, the device mattered enormously. It corrected farsightedness, which afflicts nearly everyone with age, and so extended the working lives of scribes, scholars, and craftsmen who depended on close vision.

The background lay in centuries of optical knowledge. Ancient writers had noted that glass spheres and water-filled vessels magnified text. In the eleventh century the Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) wrote his influential Book of Optics, which was later translated into Latin and studied across Europe. Medieval monks also used "reading stones," plano-convex pieces of glass or rock crystal laid directly on a page. Meanwhile, Venetian glassmakers, particularly on the island of Murano, were developing clearer glass and refined grinding techniques. Together these threads made the leap to a lens worn before the eye feasible.

The most commonly cited early evidence comes from Italy. A sermon delivered in Florence in 1306 by the Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa says that spectacles had been invented less than twenty years earlier and that he had met the person who made them first. Another friar, Alessandro della Spina, is said to have copied the technique and shared it freely, though that account comes from a later source. Venetian and Florentine records from the following decades show that the trade was well established. Some claims for earlier origins in China or elsewhere have been made, but the evidence is thin, and most historians favor Italy.

Early spectacles were simple. Two rivet-joined frames of wood, bone, or metal held the lenses, and users pinched them onto the nose or held them up by hand. They helped only those with presbyopia, the age-related loss of near focus. Concave lenses for nearsightedness appeared in the fifteenth century, and the invention of the printing press around 1450 sharply increased demand for reading glasses. Temple arms that hook over the ears did not become common until the eighteenth century.

The consequences were wide-ranging. Readers and copyists could keep working into their forties and beyond, so accumulated expertise stayed in use longer. Lens-making also became a refined craft, and the grinding and polishing skills it fostered contributed to the telescope and microscope in the early seventeenth century, which transformed astronomy and biology. Eyeglasses are often considered among the first widely adopted devices to augment a human sense, and they remain one of the most common medical technologies in the world.