David King Dunaway

They were sold by eyeglass peddlers out of a box and you told the peddler how old you were and he then gave you what he thought would be the right kind of glasses.

Well, people have been using lenses for magnification for, oh gosh, about 5,000 years.

What's new is about holding two of these magnifiers up together and getting binocular vision and then rigging up something that would take two magnifying lenses and join them together with a wooden frame and a rivet and bang,

one of humanity's most useful inventions, generally considered to have happened in 1286, although the development spans the second half of the 13th century in Italy.

Well, first of all, these were two quarter-sized pieces of crystal or glass and not very clear glass.

And they were only about four inches wide.

You couldn't wear them as you walked down the street.

And they were essentially magnifying glasses or reading glasses.

We don't know exactly.

It's a mystery.

Who actually invented glasses?

And we don't even know where.

We know it was in Italy.

Maybe Pisa, maybe Venice, maybe Florence.

These were the cities where glasses first appeared among monks and later nuns desperate to find something to help their ailing eyes.

Let's see.

In the beginning, each pair of glasses was handmade.

Again, they were not for nearsighted vision or for farsighted vision.

They were reading glasses, the kind today we can find in a supermarket or drugstore.

It took till really about the 15th or 16th century when glasses became popular and they were sold by eyeglass peddlers out of a box and you told the peddler how old you were and he then gave you what he thought would be the right kind of glasses.