Four Eyes Good: The History of Glasses
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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. And we all wear glasses.

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. Yeah, yeah, I wore, and I think I've told this story, but that was sort of the typical story of always had really great vision, and then it's been longer than you think. Then sometime in my mid-40s, I was like, huh, this thing...

I'm reading. Is it so clear? And I went to the doctor and they were like, yeah, yeah, you're reading. Vision is failing. So just get some glasses. Did I ever tell you the story of when

When I found out I needed glasses. Now, how old were you? I was in fourth grade and we went in for like a lice check and like a eye exam that just 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 thing.

Scoliosis too while they're at it. Probably. So I was like totally flabbergasted when they were like, you need glasses. Like I was just expecting not that at all. 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 anything.

And so, yeah, since fourth grade, I had to wear glasses or contact lenses. 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 an Elton John special. They were totally clear with an electric blue wire going through the whole thing. And I would wear those today if I could find them. They were pretty awesome. Wow.

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 fake glasses and wore a little while. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because it was, you know, international mail, the whole GQ thing.

I thought I was a preppy kid and I thought they make me look cooler and more preppy. And so I did that tortoise shells for a while. But yeah, glasses. And as we'll see in this great, great article that Livia put together for us, that has long 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? Yeah.

Yeah, no, 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 was probably the transition point right there. 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 know 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 that you can put 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? Yeah. So, again, Livia helped us with this. And I think I'm going to use her title because it was really another Livia special. I didn't get it.

Four eyes good. You didn't get it. No, I still don't. Well, four eyes means you wear glasses. Right. And so, you know, four eyes is good. OK, so that helps you see better. There's no there's no deeper meaning or pun or reference to it. Oh, I don't think so. Because, I mean, why why didn't she include are like four eyes are good?

I just took it. I may be wrong. We'll have to ask Livia. It's just four eyes good, like Tuk Tuk would say. Yeah. Okay. All right. Maybe so. Yeah, we have to ask Livia. I may be staring at an obvious pun, though, that I'm not overlooking. So who knows? Well, we're both overlooking it if we are. So don't let me put on my pun glasses. You need to break those things.

All right. 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 a big, big thing, not as many people noticed, I think. And then I think people who had read

Which is it, nearsighted or farsighted, when you can't see something far away? You're nearsighted. Like, you're sighted to see things nearby. Okay. So I think those people were just kind of SOL and just was like, oh, well, I guess it's one of the things that happens to people. Yes. There is such a thing as hereditary myopia where you can be myopic because you were born that way. Yeah. 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.

And it's just astounding to me. I didn't ever think of it that way, but it's totally true. From reading, glasses came as a necessity. Yeah. And the people that may have been had, you know, 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. So and we've had lenses, just not corrective lenses for a very long time about glasses.

Almost 5,000 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. Like Assyria and Greece had them about 5,000 years ago. And about 2,000 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 prove that. Yeah, for sure. Was Archimedes' death ray, was that a lens? It was a mirror. Oh, right. Yeah. Close. I thought of that too.

Oh, we did a great podcast on mirrors a long time ago. Remember that one? 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. 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 that

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 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. 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 glasses or corrective lenses that happened because somebody translated the writing of an Arab scholar named Abu Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham, who was born in 965 C.E.,

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 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 Al-Haytham figured this out.

But he was writing in Arabic. Luckily, there was a monk who was also a physicist, a Polish monk named Witalo, who in the 1200s translated Al-Haytham from Arabic to Latin, which gave a chance for another monk, an English monk named Roger Bacon, to read it in Latin and then build on Al-Haytham's findings about vision and optics. Is it weird to me that I thought a monk

Being named Roger Bacon was funny sounding? 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.

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 farsighted read text or a book, you got to go to Italy in the late 13th century. Italy, with a little bit of Germany mixed in here and there, but it seems like Italy really drove the glasses industry forward.

Yeah. 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.

They were grinding and, you know, they were making mirrors and polishing stones and stuff. So they probably it probably wasn't a big leap to start doing the same kind of things with the same kind of tools to make glass lenses. Yeah. And so, like you said, they were convex lenses to help magnify things for people who are farsighted. And that is far, far easier to make than the concave lens, as we'll see. So those convex lenses were around for centuries before corrective lenses for people with myopia came along.

Yeah, and another thing you're going to 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, R-I-V-E-T, 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 looks like they might move and, like, fold upon each other. Is that true? I don't know, but it looked like that to me, too. I would guess 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. Yeah, you had to hold classes or spectacles with your hand for centuries after they were invented, basically. And like we said, with the advent of reading, thanks to things like the Gutenberg printing press in the 1400s,

or later in the 1600s when Europe started to publish newspapers all over the place, reading became much more widespread. And so the need for glasses became much more widespread thanks to the development of myopia from reading and especially reading by candlelight. Yeah, I guess that would really put a strain on your eyes, right? Totally, for sure. And so this is also about the time in medieval Europe

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 glasses? This is around the 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 era,

You might show somebody who was born before glasses were 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 leave the glasses out altogether. Yeah.

Yeah, it's that weird push-pull 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. 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, this 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.

Yeah. And in China, because these 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. Yeah. Like you. Like me. Nice work. You want to take a break? Yeah. I mean, since we literally just jinxed each other, I think we should take a break. That's right. You owe me a Coke. All right. Be right back. We'll be right back.

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Grammarly, enterprise-ready AI. So Chuck, before we 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 it hasn't gotten old yet.

So Velma from Scooby-Doo, would she lose her glasses? Mm-hmm. She invariably said, my glasses. Mm-hmm. And I just got it in my head. And you've been doing that, like, for two days? Yeah, over and over and over and over. It's going on right now as we speak, as a matter of fact. And by the sounds of it, you were also practicing that Arabic name. I actually did not out loud. Yeah.

You busted that thing out, man. I just have a silver tongue for Arabic, apparently. That was really good. Thanks. Okay, so let's get started. We talked about how the lenses for farsightedness were around for centuries before nearsightedness. But we eventually got to those, I guess in like the 15th century, the 1400s. Again, not coincidentally with the spread of reading.

We finally figured out how to make lenses that are concave, that correct vision for people who can see things nearby but not far away. 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 Cusa. 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 of this was taking place, specifically Florence, where they were really crafting excellent lenses for the time. And I think they were pretty, 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.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I always equate Venice with glass because of Venetian glass, but sure. Why not Florence too? Yeah.

So there are a couple of innovations that came along in the 17th century, the 1600s, 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 differently.

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 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. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, you mentioned paintings 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 X and Two Cardinals.

You say 10, huh? What do you say, X? Yeah. I know it's 10, but it just sounds cooler as Popplio X. Okay. So Popplio was part of the Medici family, which had genetic myopia, 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 than

showing that it's a distance lens. And that is just that little detail for someone to paint that and then other people to notice is pretty great. I mean, that's so Raphael, you know? Yeah. And then there were 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 in developing the microscope and the telescope too. That's right. But I know everyone's chomping at the bit and saying these glasses that you can hold up to your face are fine. But guys, when did people start wearing glasses today?

We can go to the 17th century finally when we got the bow spectacle. Or is it bow? 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. 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 sides? Threads.

The temples or the arms now. 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. 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. Yeah.

You're just like, this is all just such low hanging fruit glasses, guys. Why didn't you just put them together immediately? And that's just not how 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. Well, yeah. And what's the funniest thing to me about all of this is I was reading each little development was the whole time the ears are sitting there on the side of your head, just like,

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, Livia found that some people would tie a string and 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.

So to be fair, there was a guy named Edward Scarlett who was an optician in London in the 1720s. And he saw what you're talking about. 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 we use today. Yeah.

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. Good point. So 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 arms that he came up with. So those were just like little squeezes? Essentially, yeah. They would give you a migraine in like three minutes, I'm guessing. Okay.

Well, because I did also see that, or Olivia found rather, that some people would attach a ribbon, but they still wouldn't tie it around the ear. They would just tie it around the back of their head. Like a harlequin mask. Yeah, yeah, to those squeezy temples. Finally, we get a guy that gets closer. In 752, an English optician named James Icecoff, I guess, had a double-hinged side,

Uh, and well, actually, I don't think he invented the, the turn pin template. That was about 25 years after that. Cause the turn pin template from our temple, from what I can tell, it goes straight back and then has a hinge and then goes straight down behind the ear 90 degrees, but it doesn't like curve around the ear. It was just a big 90 degree drop that sat down a couple of inches, even below the ear. Yeah.

Right. But it finally started to take advantage of the back of the ear, right? Yeah, in a clunky way. 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. Right.

depending on the size, immediately thanks to the spring in those hinges. Yeah, I remember seeing those for the first time, and that seemed like a very modern invention in like the 80s, but that's not true at all. No, and I don't, I think it took a little while for it to become ubiquitous, but it was older than that for sure. Yeah. Well, I only use, you know, I found...

a number of years ago that the Ray-Ban Wayfarer 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 shape that I've ever found works for my face. And so I'm a Wayfarer purist, I guess. I can do Wayfarers and I can do Aviators too. I can't pull those off. 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. Yeah.

I think I know exactly what you're talking about. 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 multicolored reflective visor sunglasses now, nobody looks good in those. Which ones? The giant visor sunglasses that are super in right now.

What is visor? What do you mean, like a hat visor? No, 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 Oakley's makes them. Yes, bigger. Just imagine bigger. I'm going to 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...

I mean, I'm surprised you at least haven't seen like a delivery person wearing them. Oh, well, you know, it's funny. I just did a rare in-show lookup and I see exactly what you're talking about. 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 in visor sunglasses, they make sunglasses with a little visor over them. Oh, that's neat. Like the Dwayne Wayne little flip up sunglasses. 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 it pretty hard.

Nice. Anyway, where I started with the whole Ray-Ban thing is they don't make the spring ones where they, you know, because I have a pretty fat head, and luckily they fit my face, but they don't, you know, bend outward, flex outward. They have what are called barrel hinges in there. No, they don't. They stop at, like, I guess 90 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. Man, you know a lot about this stuff.

Well, you know, I've been wearing them since fourth grade and you just pick up facts here or there.

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. 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 happened.

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 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, um, you put on glasses, there's a huge difference between the two because the frames block some of the light coming downward into your eyes. Um, and everybody made fun of these cause they were just so ugly, but people started wearing them. And so everybody who were making fun of them started making and selling them to you. Yeah. I mean, they're kind of crazy looking when you look at them now, uh,

I have seen some 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. Right, for sure. Yeah.

So the 1600s, I think, saw some technical advances, but the 19th 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 to putting arms that reach behind the back of the ear, but like the actual function of glasses became exponentially better in the 19th century.

Yeah, because, you know, previous to this, the way you got glasses was the glasses manufacturer would make a bunch of them and then they would send a salesperson around in 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 34% of Americans actually use those these days? 34 million, I think. Oh, yeah. It's a lot. Yeah, 34 million. But it was on the road. Basically, you just didn't have a prescription specific to your eye. Someone just came around. You were like, well, these will do, I guess. Mm-hmm.

But now all of a sudden you got a real, you know, vision test so they could dial in a prescription for you for the first time. Yeah. And that was thanks to people who started inventing prescriptions.

tools that are still kind of in use today, evolved versions. In particular, there's a guy named Hermann von Helmholtz, who goes without saying was German. He invented the ophthalmoscope and the ophthalometer. Sorry.

And the ophthalmoscope lets 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 ophthalmoscope that Hermann von Helmholtz invented in the 1850s.

And then the ophthalmometer, you can assess essentially the curvature of the back of the retina while you're looking at the retina through an ophthalmoscope. And what you have now is basically 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 you specifically. And they just worked so much better. Yeah. And I'm glad you took all those words. Those are hard. Should we mention that we had to edit out at least one attempt of ophthalmology?

Yeah, I mean, that was the easiest one, I think, because that's a word people commonly say. But there's something about the opthal being at the beginning that just makes it a little brain-breaking. It's horrendous. Opthal, opthal, what did you say for the second machine? Ophthalmometer. I tried to add an extra syllable as per my usual. Ophthalmometer, yeah? Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's way better than meter. Ophthalmometer.

Oh, boy. Are we going to talk about the diopter? 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 1870s figured out that you could quantify just how much vision correction you needed. And it's mind bending. It's called the diopter. And

It's a really simple formula, 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 contacts, the thing that's labeled power, that number is in diopters. And that just means how much of a refraction is.

correction you need to focus stuff far away or nearby at your retina rather than in front of you or behind you as you naturally would be with your nearsightedness or farsightedness. Yeah. Is the key to all this that machine that you look through with the lenses that they flip down?

During the eye test? I think that's almost 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. 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 a cool machine that has slides instead. Right.

That's my take. I could be wrong. I probably am wrong. Well, I'd like to hear from ophthalmologists because I know I know there's a lot more to it than like just sit 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. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. They have to like observe and make guesses based on their observation from what I can understand.

How about that little eye puff, the little air puff you get? It takes some time to get used to. Do you like that? 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 12, 11? Yeah, however old you are in fourth grade. 10? 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 masochistic way, like enjoyable, but it's not really. 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. Music.

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Right.

Hey everyone, host Nora McInerney is back for season two of The Head Start.

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Join the Head Start, embracing the journey as they learn a little bit more about life with chronic migraine. All right, so we promised talks of plastic. After World War I, plastics became a big thing, and resin, specifically CR39, became the first big kind of popular plastic used for lenses, which is still a pretty popular choice today. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so that was a huge advancement in lenses. But people were still making glass lenses for a long time. Until 1972, 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 lot of glasses makers just turned to plastics at that point. Yeah, and plastic worked, you know, it was...

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 frames created a boom in fashion eyewear, like in the 50s with cat eye glasses and horned glasses.

Horn rim glasses and tortoiseshell and like the glasses you talked about in the 70s and 80s, the big giant. I don't know if you mentioned them, the big giant like De Niro worn at the end of Casino. Yeah, I love those, man. Jesse Thorne has some of those. I'm so jealous whenever I see those.

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 so ugly, they were called informally, of course, birth control glasses or BCGs. Yeah.

And if you look them up, they are that ugly. They're terrible. Did they look like the De Niro ones or are they just giant? They weren't nearly as cool as the De Niro ones. They were an uglier version of the De Niro ones. Got it. I'm going to look those up too. Yeah, they're tough to look at. Yeah, GI glasses, they're sometimes called as well. It's like, thanks a lot, Army. Exactly. 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 1700s where he basically described creating bifocals by having a glassmaker cut his two different sets of glasses in half, right? 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. Right. Yeah. It had a lot of that. A couple of paragraphs. Yeah. But, you know, it seems like he did. He said that he could see his food and look at people at the dinner party at the same time. Progressive lenses came along. This is sort of shocks me. I thought they were newer, too, but they came along in 1959. Right.

And isn't the idea there that it's sort of like a bifocal that's just sort of blended in and less harsh? 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.

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 mind putting them on to read. 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.

Yeah, I think it totally makes sense. Okay. Well, then you made the right choice, Chuck. Can we talk about monocles? Yes, let's please. I think this is the high point of this episode. 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 you would just sort of, you know, made to fit your eye because 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 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. Yeah, which is that's the reason why Eustace Tilly, the mascot for the New Yorker, has a monocle. 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, the Burgess Meredith penguin from the 60s Batman monocle. Colonel Clink. Yeah. I'm not sure what the point was of his monocle.

Oh, maybe it's sort of evil villain. 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 20th century by women who were eschewing traditional gender roles. I didn't know that.

Yeah. Think of so you 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. And one of the big fashion accessories for that was the monocle. Oh, OK. That makes sense. Yeah, I think it's pretty cool.

dietrich and dimaggio exactly what a great song oh god so good um all right should we talk a little bit about sunglasses yes take it away yeah this is uh 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 um not necessarily like darker lenses but or dark lenses but uh inuit people you know a couple of thousand years ago were wearing sun goggles

which essentially, you know, it's 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 slits cut, almost like sort of the old...

Tanning bed goggles that you would wear. Exactly. If you were into that in the 80s. And again, like those big frames that kind of block some light, they did that. But the slits also narrowed your vision too. So it actually focused further away too. But what about lenses? They started darkening those a while ago too, didn't they? Yeah, I think as far back as Samuel Pepys in the 17th century, the famous diarist whose name I finally pronounced correctly,

he tinted, I think, his glasses green to protect his eyes from candlelight when he was writing late at night. So they've been around a really long time. And even before that, like, I think there's a legend that Emperor Nero used ground emeralds as basically sunglasses when he hung out at the Coliseum. You know, this is not a look that looks good on me at all, but when I was just in L.A.,

I went to dinner with friends of the show, David Reese, by the way, and Paula Tompkins and his great wife, Janie. They all say hello, by the way. Nice. Hello. Paul, you know, Mr. Fashion, wore vision glasses that were tinted blue, and they looked really, really sharp on him. I could never pull it off, but they looked really good.

Paul F. Tompkins can pull off basically anything. He knows exactly what he can wear and there's a wide range and he does it really well. Guess what color his shirt was?

I'm going to guess a different shade of blue. Yeah, it went perfectly. 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 jacket. It was actually a white suit with white chukka boots and a solid blue shirt with blue glasses. Very, very sharp. I very rarely say the word wow, but that one was well-earned.

But you found, I think his were just blue, blue, but you found some good information on the, to me, magic that happens when you are inside with clear glasses and you walk outside and they turn into sunglasses. 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, and

So transition lenses are photochromic, but not all photochromic lenses are transition, essentially, is what I'm saying. Yeah. The thing that strikes me, Chuck, is like they've been around since the 1960s because I definitely identify them with late 80s, early 90s.

Yeah, but I mean, you found the stuff on how it works, and I still don't understand how that's not just black magic. 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. Wow. So when there's not UV light, say you're inside...

The photochromic dyes are arranged as certain kinds of molecules, and 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. Yeah.

Just incredible. I thought so, too. Hats off to Warby Parker, by the way, for explaining that understandably, I think. Thank you, Mr. Warby. Mm-hmm. What about scratch-resistant lenses? Because these, to me, are—this is the story of the show. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of great facts of the show in here. The proprietary epitome of progressive, certainly one of them. Mm-hmm.

But, you know, ground lenses, you said, you know, in 1972, 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 scratchable, I guess.

And NASA actually developed technology to try and make, you know, astronaut helmet face visors not scratchy. And so this is one of those NASA inventions that made it to the regular world when Foster Grant in 1983, who I don't think we mentioned, died.

they were sort of the first big sunglasses company. They weren't the biggest in the 80s just because they had, you know, the coolest commercials. They had been around since the 1920s 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, right? No, there's no point. You would go through glasses every couple of 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 10 times longer, which even went beyond glass, like how good glass lenses could last too. So there was a huge advancement as well.

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. Oh, yeah. But they did debut in 1887, which to me is a...

A startling thing that people were inserting a glass lens from 1887 onto their eyeball because that's what it had to be. Even in 1961 when they were like the soft contacts were invented, they were still pretty hard and you would not want to have worn them. Do you do the disposable ones? Yeah. Multifocal. So what does that mean?

It means that I can see far away in the middle ground and nearby, basically, based on how my iris focuses.

And then you use those for a day and then they go away and then you use another? Yeah, you're supposed to use them for a day, but I use them for three to five days until they get uncomfortable. It just seems like a waste, you know? And can you sleep in those? 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. Yeah, it just seems like a lost sort of time when...

Hey, don't anyone move? I'd lost a contact or the little the little cases and washing them out every night and that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Because there weren't disposables. It was those contacts. It was basically like your retainer. You do not lose your retainer. Right. You know, same thing with your contacts. Oh, goodness. We lived through a great era, I think.

All right. So today, if you look at some stats, the 166 U.S. adults wear prescription eyeglasses. That's about 64 percent of people. Like you mentioned earlier, 34 and a half million people wear the over-the-counter readers, about 45 million wear contacts.

And that is that's a lot of people with that feels like most adults have some sort of eye correction going on. Because all of us went through school and had to read books all the time. I guess so. It's not many people that are in their 50s and up that don't need any sort of glasses or lenses at all. Right. You can thank your public school for that. I guess so. You got anything else about glasses?

No, that was a fun one. I like these histories, like the dentistry one. These are fun for me. 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. I'm going to 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 also try and speak to like a wide audience and make sure things are super 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 Cher 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-transition when you mentioned when 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 hear you talk about him in a way we trans people advocate that we should be talked about really moved me. 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 15 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. Awesome. Thanks, Lucy. We appreciate that big time. That was a good one, Chuck. Thanks for picking that. Yeah, we do our best, folks. 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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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