Re: How were glasses invented? How were sight deficiencies first detected?

Date: Sun Jul 23 22:06:21 2000
Posted By: Dan Berger, Faculty Chemistry/Science, Bluffton College
Area of science: Science History
ID: 964165174.Sh

Message:

I am interested in the history of glasses.  Were many people able 
to "discover" how to correct vision simultaneously, or is there one clear 
inventor of glasses?  Before the invention of sight correction, were 
people who did not see well "de-selected" by the evolutionary 
process?

A check of an enclyclopedia gave me the answer to the first part of your question:

Ancient Nineveh knew spectacles of a kind. They were magnifying lenses which were made not of glass, but of crystal.
However, it was not until the 13th Century AD that the first real spectacles appeared. It is now assumed that Roger Bacon was one of the first to make them. The credit for inventing them has been given to an Italian, the Florentine Salvina Armato, who died in 1317.
Webster's International Encyclopedia 99, "Origins of Spectacles,"
© Webster Publishing and/or Contributors 1999

The answer to your last question, "were people who did not see well 'de-selected' by the evolutionary process?" is not so easily answered, because I think the answer is both "yes" and "no." I am no anthropologist, but it seems to me that the words put in the mouth of an anthropologist by writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle ring true:

Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have tools for them... [Evolution] ought to be pretty well closed off for an intelligent species. Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye,
New York: Pocket Books (1974), pp. 30-31

It's been reported (sorry, I don't have the reference) that at least one Neandertal adult male specimen has been found whose skeleton showed permanent crippling. This man had survived the mishap, or perhaps a congenital disorder, by many years and died at a ripe old age. The crippled individual was obviously sustained by his/her clan or family beyond the point at which he was useful on the hunt -- if he ever was.

So, even in primitive societies (while too many adults with poor eyesight would have been bad) a few adults with poor eyesight would probably have been taken in stride and supported by their family group, clan or tribe. They may have taken duties as loremasters; the tradition of the blind bard is very old.

Dan Berger

Bluffton College

cs.bluffton.edu/~berger/

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