A Victorian aid to vision.

                 Victorian Britain was an age of medical marvels with each being more fantastical than the last, but who would have thought that contact lenses were one of them. As with a lot of Victorian inventions and fascinations they were ahead of their time and maybe have been more problematic than their counterparts, but they worked.

                The correction of the cornea shape has been a problem that has been questioned for centuries with the introduction of Da Vinci’s codex of the eye. He theorised that water would refract the vision to correct the problems in vision this was as early as 1508 and although it was not specifically thinking about the creation of contact lenses for medical purposes it gave the beginning idea for 300 years later when they focused the idea down to the lenses.

                Through the evolution of Da Vinci’s original idea Decartes came up with a design that although impractical would change the shape of the cornea to positively affect eyesight but they were test tubes attached to the eyes filled water which although would work meant you couldn’t blink which would not be good for the eyes clearly. But he adapted the idea so that you could have a lens attached to the cornea directly and this was 1633.

                Once the 19^th Century hit these ideas were narrowed again and again by Scientist like Young in 1801 who suggested a water filled lens fixed to the eye with wax which allowed people to blink and changed the shape of the eye but affixing them with wax and again although they worked they were far from ready to be introduced and experimented with. In 1854 the eye condition Keratoconus was defined and diagnosed by doctors and as this was a condition that meant there was a deformity in the shape of the cornea this sped up the research. Then in the 1870s Herschel a British Astronomer used the new glass blowing and lens grinding techniques he suggested you could make thinner lenses that would fit closer to the eye. However, by the end of the 19^th Century and solidly in the Victorian era using the works of British Scientists, a German scientist called Muller created the first contact lens.

                Although, there are some arguments as to the first created contact lens whether it was Muller in 1887 who made glass eyes creating the scleral lens which covered the whole eye or the Swiss scientist Flick who created something very similar but in 1888. So, although there is argument over the creator they are still solidly within the Victorian period and assisted drastically by British scientists.  The contact lenses that were created were made of thin glass which caused significant problems not only because having glass that close to the eye always gave a risk of smash either whilst in the eye or via the removal, glass is also not permeable and as the eyes need oxygen the glass meant that was a problem. This also meant that the lenses were only able to be worn for a couple of hours at most because they were potentially dangerous and uncomfortable which is why they needed to be inserted with cocaine eye-drops.

                Although this was the case, they still corrected the vision and helped protect diseased eyes from further issues. Contact lenses were not invented to be a mass-produced product or a cosmetic item until significantly later with the introduction of plastic and later hydro-gel. The advent of the beauty industry and increase in narcissism in the 1960s meant that the new easy and cheap way of creating contact lens was a marketable attraction for the youth of the day. This also sped up the creation of more durable and even daily disposable lens’ and by the 1980s they were mass produced and easily accessible to the mass population.