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.
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 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, you're reading. Vision is failing, so just get some glasses.
Did I ever tell you the story of when I found out I needed glasses?
Now? How old were you?
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.
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. 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, 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. They were pretty awesome.
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 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 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 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, 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 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, uh again, Lyvia helped us with this, and I think I'm going to use her title because it was really another Lvia 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? Okay, So they're like helps you see better.
There's no there's no deeper meaning or pun or reference to it.
Oh I don't think so, cause I mean.
Why why didn't she include r like, four eyes are good.
I just took it. I may be wrong. We'll have to ask Livia as just four eyes good, like TikTok would.
Say, yeah, okay, all right maybe, so yeah, we have to ask Olivia.
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 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 which is it nearsighted or far sighted 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 just 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. 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 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.
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.
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, 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.
Yeah, for sure, it was archimedes deathway was that a lens?
It was a mirror a right, Yeah, I thought of that too.
Oh, we did a great podcast on mirrors a long time, you 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 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 classes or corrective lenses that happened because somebody translated the writing 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
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 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.
Is it weird to me that I thought the 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.
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, 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 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.
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.
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 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. 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, and so the need four glasses became much more widespread thanks to the development of myopia from reading and especially reading by candle light.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
You want to take a break, Yeah.
I mean, since we literally just chinxed each other, I think it should take break.
That's right. You owe me a coke?
All right, be right back, 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 that hasn't gotten old yet.
So Velma from Scooby Doo would she lose her glasses?
She invariably said, my glasses, 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 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 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 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 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.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean I always equate venue 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 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
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 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 they say ten. Huh, what do you say? X?
Yeah, I know it's ten, but it just sounds cooler as Poplo X.
Okay.
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 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 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 in developing the microscope and the telescope too.
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?
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 side.
The temples or the arms now.
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.
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
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 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 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 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 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.
So those were just like little squeezes essentially.
Yeah, they would give you a migraine in like three minutes.
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 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 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.
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, depending on the size. Immediately thanks to the spring and those hinges.
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.
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.
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. And so I'm a wayfair 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.
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 multi colored reflective visor sunglasses. Now nobody looks good in those, which ones the giant visor sunglasses that are super in right now.
What is visor? Would you mean like a hat visor?
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.
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.
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 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.
Oh that's neat, like the Wane 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 pretty hard.
Nice.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 became exponentially better in the nineteenth century.
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.
Thirty four million, I think, oh.
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 prescription for you for the first time.
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 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 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 you specifically, and they just worked so much better.
Yeah, and I'm glad you took all those words.
We 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 optal being at the beginning that just makes it a little brain breaking.
So horrendous.
What did you say for the second.
Machine, ophthalmom opthalmometer. I tried to add an extra syllable, as per.
My usual opthalmometer. Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, that's what meter.
Upthalmometer.
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 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, 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 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.
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 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. I could be wrong. I probably am wrong.
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.
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 eyepuff, 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 twelve eleven?
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.
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, 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.
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 lot of glasses makers just turned to plastics at that point.
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 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.
Yeah, I love those, man.
Jesse Thorn 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 called were so ugly. They were called informally, of course, birth controlled glasses or bcgs. And if you look them up, they are that ugly. They're terrible.
Did they look like the Denier ones? Are they just giant?
They weren't nearly as cool as the DeNiro ones. They were an uglier version of the DeNiro ones.
Got it. I'm going to look those up too.
Yeah, they're tough to look at.
Yeah, giglasses that they're sometimes called as well.
Mm hmm.
It's like thanks a lot.
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 but 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, 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.
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 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.
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 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 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, 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, the Burgess Meredith Penguin from the k sixties, Batman monocle, Colonel Clink. Yeah, Actually, 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 twentieth century by women who were eschewing traditional gender roles.
I didn't know that.
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.
Oh, okay, that makes sense.
Yeah, I think it's pretty cool.
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 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 you were into that in the eighties.
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.
It's pretty But what about lenses. They started darkening those a while ago, too, didn't they.
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 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 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 tinted blue, and they looked really really sharp on him. I could never pull it off, but they looked really good.
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.
Guess what color shirt was.
I'm gonna 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 out jacket.
It was actually a white suit with white Chuka boots and a solid blue shirt with the blue glasses. Very very sharp.
I very rarely say the word wow, but that run was well learned.
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.
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 strikes me, Chuck, is like they've been around since the nineteen sixties, because I definitely identify them with late eighties, early nineties.
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.
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
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.
Just incredible, I thought so too.
Hats off to Warby Parker by the way, for explaining that understandably.
I think, thank you, mister Warby.
What about scratch resistant lenses? Ca 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 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 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.
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.
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. So yeah, that 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 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.
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.
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 how 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's just set the waste.
Can you 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, right, or the little the little cases and washing them out night and that kind of thing.
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.
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 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 fifties 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 when 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 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 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 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. 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.
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 stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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