Jenny Benjamin
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
A lot of stores sold them as a side.
Just like today, you walk into a pharmacy or something and you can see a row of eyeglasses and you could pick your readers off of a rack, right?
They were pretty common.
And as...
Also common were sunglasses.
Sunglasses?
Yeah, but not, I shouldn't use sunglasses.
Ooh, I caught myself.
Tinted lenses.
That's correct.
Okay.
So sunglasses, as we know them, and we here at the museum, we love to get precise.
So sunglasses are lenses that have UV protection.
So that, right?
Because that's literally protecting you from the sun.
So that's a sunglass.
The sunglasses were invented in the 1920s.
Oh.
That is when all of those sorts of advances came into the manufacturing industry.
So the earliest known advertisement for eyeglasses with colored lenses is 1561.