For most of history, if your eyes got blurry, you just lived with it. That changed in northern Italy in the late 1200s. Glassmakers in Venice and craftsmen in Pisa figured out that small, polished discs of clear quartz or glass could bend light enough to bring close things back into focus. The earliest known mention of “spectacles” comes from a sermon given in Florence in 1306.
The first glasses had no arms. You either held them up to your face or balanced them on your nose. Hooks over the ears didn’t arrive until 1727. Round wire frames became standard in the 1800s.
Benjamin Franklin had a great little invention in the 1780s: he couldn’t be bothered swapping between his reading and distance glasses, so he sawed two pairs in half and glued together the top of one and the bottom of the other. We still call them bifocals. Today around 4 billion people on Earth wear glasses or contact lenses.
