Efforts to improve vision date back to the ancient civilizations of India and China. Greek scholars such as Ptolemy and Euclid endeavored to understand the physics of light refraction, the mechanisms of lenses, and how their properties can enhance vision and literacy. The Romans magnified the letters they were looking at by placing reading stones of clear quartz or beryl on top of written texts. Seneca reportedly used a glass globe filled with water for the same purpose, and Nero is said to have looked through an emerald lens to view the gladiator games. The concept of using lenses for magnification remained somewhat static until about the tenth century when the Arab scientist Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) studied extensively the nature of light and vision. His seminal work on the magnification properties of lenses, Book of Optics, greatly influenced future European scholars.

Wearable eyeglasses, according to Roger Bacon (1286) and later to the Friar Giordano da Pisa (1306), were first brought to Venice around 1280 by merchants trading along the Silk Road. These rudimentary eyeglasses looked more like magnifying glasses, had frames made of wood, and as they lacked arms to secure them behind the ears had to be held up to the face. A later improvement, the pince-nez, emerged around the 14th century and allowed wearers to clamp the lenses on their noses using the tension of a spring to hold them in place. The first known portrait to show eyeglasses was that of Hugh of Provence by Tommaso da Modena (1352). In 1480 Domenico Ghirlandaio painted St. Jerome at a desk wearing eyeglasses, leading him to become the patron saint of spectacle-makers.

By the 14th century, Florence had become a center for the production of eyeglasses, and the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz opened up reading to its general public. The innovation of using concave lenses for nearsightedness is often credited to Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). Another advance was the introduction of metal frames, the oldest of which were manufactured in Nuremberg and Regensburg in Germany. The decline of Venice in the mid-1600s pushed some Murano glassmakers to emigrate all over Europe, resulting in improved glassmaking in many countries.

In 1604, Johannes Kepler first explained how concave lenses could correct myopia (nearsightedness) compared to the use of convex lenses for farsightedness. In 1623 the Spanish Friar Benito Daca de Valdes wrote Usa de los Antoios (Use of Spectacles), covering the anatomy of the eye and the different types of lenses (convex, concave, and plano). In 1665 in England, Robert Hook invented a turning lathe to improve the accuracy and speed of grinding lenses. Samuel Pepys has been credited with ordering the first dark glasses, made by English optician John Turlington, but according to his diary used more for ogling women in church than to shield his eyes from sunlight.

The invention of temples (the “arms” on frames) in 1727 by the British optician Edward Scarlett was a game changer for the evolution of eyeglasses in that they could be placed over the ears and nose. They were so named because initially they were short and clamped onto the wearer’s temples but did not rest over the ears. They could be made of wood, lead, copper, or leather, or even of gold, silver, with jewels and other embellishments to make them fashionable. In time the use of eyeglasses spread among the educated elite, contributing to the proliferation of reading and scholarship. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, which combined lenses for distant and near vision into a single pair of glasses.

In 1801, Thomas Young was the first person to spot the uneven curvature of a cornea known as astigmatism. He diagnosed this condition in himself, and in 1827 invented cylindrical lenses to correct his vision. Ernst Abbe and Otto Schott’s Optical Glass in 1885 incorporated new elements into glass to improve its optical properties. In the twentieth century frames and lenses began to be mass produced. They became available for use with lighter, less breakable materials such as plastic and could be made with lens coatings to reduce glare and harmful light. The development of blue light-blocking lenses helped protect eyes from the screens of computers. Progressive lenses were first introduced in 1959 and were followed by many more recent advances in technology that characterize the modern spectacles. These advances are now taken for granted by the millions who use them for work or leisure and have had their lives improved by wearing them.