Jenny Benjamin
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
We don't.
We don't know who invented eyeglasses.
It's kind of lost to history.
There is a tombstone sitting somewhere in Italy where somebody has claimed
right?
On the, you know, the so-and-so, the inventor of eyeglasses.
But most historians feel that that is inaccurate.
Venice for, you know, years was the center of glass manufacturing.
It's where it's from.
Time's the brakes.
like a Roman emperors may have used magnifiers.
There is some evidence that ancient peoples, we're talking about ancient, ancient, may have used natural lenses.
So it's mostly magnifiers early on.
Readers is what we would call them today.
So starting around in the Renaissance, in the 1500s, books are already being written about the abuse of eyeglasses.
Abuse?
Yes.
That's what they called it actually.
And that's,
The idea that you could overuse eyeglasses and permanently harm your vision was really prevalent between 1580s, 1550s, all the way through the 1800s.