How the world got its glasses
Sometime in the 1280s, a craftsman in northern Italy did something that would change how people worked for the next seven centuries. He ground two small discs of glass into gentle curves, set them in frames and joined the frames with a rivet. For the first time, someone whose close vision was fading could read again.
We know roughly when this happened because of a sermon. In 1306, a friar in Florence named Giordano da Pisa told his listeners that the art of making eyeglasses, which he called one of the most useful arts in the world, had been discovered less than twenty years earlier. He added that he had met and spoken with the man who first made them.
The earliest glasses were magnifiers, made for farsighted scholars, monks and merchants who had to read small handwriting in dim rooms. Lenses for nearsighted people, which curve inward instead of outward, were harder to make well and only appeared in the 1400s.
The first known painting of someone wearing glasses dates from 1352. On a wall in Treviso, the artist Tommaso da Modena painted a cardinal bent over a manuscript with a pair of riveted spectacles perched on his nose. The cardinal had died decades before glasses were invented, but the painter gave him a pair anyway, as a symbol of learning.
For hundreds of years, frames had no arms. People balanced them on the nose, held them up by hand or tied them on with ribbon. Arms that rest on the ears only caught on in the 1700s. Around the same time, Benjamin Franklin grew tired of swapping between two pairs and had his lenses cut in half and joined, an early version of the bifocal.
Today, glasses are so ordinary that we barely think about them. For most of history, though, losing your close vision in middle age simply meant the end of reading. A few curved pieces of glass changed that for good.
Keep reading, or rest your eyes on the page, until the timer ends.