Contact Lenses

 Fick, Kalt and Muller aid vision correction (1887)

"A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love. " Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher

Bad eyesight has likely plagued humans since they first stood upright. Real solutions were not available until the thirteenth century when eye glasses were invented.

Late in the 1880s, two eye doctors and a medical student independently invented contact lenses. Doctors Adolf E. Fick and Eugene Kalt set out to help their patients whereas medical student August Muller wanted to correct his own near-sightedness. 

A brown glass contact lens made by Muller Sohne of
Wiesbaden, Germany, dating from circa 1930.

Early lenses were literally a glass lens in direct contact with the eye. For their comfort and health, users could only were them for brief periods as the lenses caused pain, swelling and cornea hypoxia. Despite these drawbacks. more than 10,000 pairs sold in the United States from 1935 to 1939. By 1949, sales had reached 2,00,000 thanks to the plastic polymethylmethacrylate (HEMA), but these lenses required polishing. Bausch & Lomb introduced their revolutionary SofLens® in 1971. By the twenty- first century, the number of people who wear contact lens surpassed 100 million.