A Look at CONTACT LENSES: What are CONTACT LENSES?
The contact lens worn today is a tiny, thin, dome-shaped, transparent disc that’s usually made from special types of plastic and sometimes silicone rubber. Most hard lenses are a mere 8 to 10 mm in diameter and .035 to 1 mm thick. (One inch equals 22 mm.) Soft lenses are a bit larger, but most are 11 to 16 mm in diameter or less. Such precision and delicacy weren’t always the case. How something that’s smaller and thinner than your fingernail—sometimes as thin as a single human hair—can take the place of a pair of bulky eyeglasses is a wondrous story of how modern science and technology were put to use by scientists, innovators, and dreamers who stubbornly believed that a good idea can always get better.
The concept of contact lenses has actually been around for nearly five hundred years. As far as we know, the first contact lens was envisioned by the man who seemed to think of everything first: Leonardo da Vinci. His notebooks show that in 1508 he conceived the idea that a “little ampule of glass” could be placed on the eye in order to improve the wearer’s vision. In 1636 Descartes published his own version of the contact lens: a tube filled with water. But the idea remained a gleam in everyone’s eye until technology began to catch up with these two far-reaching thinkers. Read the rest of this entry »
