Eyeglasses and Spectacles

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Reading spectacles appeared at the end of the 13th century in Italy and were first depicted in a painting by Tommaso da Modena in 1352. His frescoes show two brothers reading and copying text, one with a magnifying glass and the other with...
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Reading spectacles appeared at the end of the 13th century in Italy and were first depicted in a painting by Tommaso da Modena in 1352. His frescoes show two brothers reading and copying text, one with a magnifying glass and the other with spectacles on his nose. Made in Venice, early spectacles had quartz lenses, as optical glass had not been invented, and were framed with bone, metal, or leather. This useful Italian invention soon spread to Germany, Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries. It wasn't until the 15th century, soon after the advent of the movable-type printing press, that concave lenses were developed in Florence. Florentine spectacle makers were so advanced, they had lenses graded for every five years of eye-sight loss for the age 30 and onward, plus two different strengths of lenses for the near-sighted. In the 16th century, Spanish spectacle makers introduced the idea of securing glasses to the face by the ears. They added two silk ribbons with loops at the end to the outside of the frames. After European missionaries wore such glasses on trips to China, the local spectacle-wearers improved upon the design by adding ceramic or metal weights to the ribbons, thus making the frames easy to adjust. Back in Europe, English, Germany, French, and Dutch spectacle makers tried to catch up with the Italians. Spectacles were cheap and plentiful, needed not just by artisans, monks, and scholars, but just about everyone over the age of 40. Glasses were sold on the street—people would dig through baskets of spectacles until they found a pair that corrected their vision. In 1629, the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers was established in England, bearing a coat of arms with three pairs of spectacles and a logo that read, "a blessing to the aged." The introduction of the first newspaper, the London Gazette in 1665, only increased the demand. The 18th century was a time of great experimentation with optometry and types of spectacles. In...
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