WI: Greeks invent eyeglasses

Eyeglasses were one of the most important inventions of all time. It allowed older people with declining visions to continue to contribute to society. With it elders were able to prolong their productive life and put their experience to use. Later when lenses were invented to correct near-sightedness, a whole segment of the young population was given the opportunity to do more meaningful work than manual labour. No longer would a youngman who became nearsighted through studying manuscripts by candlelight have to give up a career he was well suited for.

But what if this all came about much earlier? What if both types of eyeglasses were invented by Aristotle's time? Perhaps civilization itself would be advanced by centuries.
 

Rockingham

Banned
Eyeglasses were one of the most important inventions of all time. It allowed older people with declining visions to continue to contribute to society. With it elders were able to prolong their productive life and put their experience to use. Later when lenses were invented to correct near-sightedness, a whole segment of the young population was given the opportunity to do more meaningful work than manual labour. No longer would a youngman who became nearsighted through studying manuscripts by candlelight have to give up a career he was well suited for.

But what if this all came about much earlier? What if both types of eyeglasses were invented by Aristotle's time? Perhaps civilization itself would be advanced by centuries.
I think this would evern need or lead to a greater understanding of the nature of light...... which in itself probably needs some advancement elsewhere...

That is, unless some Greek genius stumbles across the practical application but fails to understand the theory, which is essentially ignored by other Greeks as well.

But if we want a tech wank, we could see vast advances in telescopes...and microscopes. Which could in turn lead in to greater understanding of both the cosmos and micro-world(and thus advances in medicine, due to an earlier understanding of microbes).....

I don't really know, but this probably has a snowball effect, as theory and technology commonly build upon themselves and each other.
 

Hendryk

Banned
I find it surprising that the discovery wasn't made sooner in OTL. After all, once you have reasonably transparent glass, all you have to do is look through it to see that it distorts vision; then it's just a question of trial and error to discover that a convex shape magnifies what you look at through it.
 

Rockingham

Banned
I find it surprising that the discovery wasn't made sooner in OTL. After all, once you have reasonably transparent glass, all you have to do is look through it to see that it distorts vision; then it's just a question of trial and error to discover that a convex shape magnifies what you look at through it.
Perhaps it was more a problem of making them cost-affordable.....were "primitive" societies such as the Greeks capable of manafacturing them?
 

ninebucks

Banned
Due to the costs involved, they would be restricted to only the most wealthy and powerful. However, so long as the wearing of glasses remains unusual, they will be seen as a physical advertisement of the wearer's weakness. If the Emperor were to wear glasses, his subjects would see that there is at least one field in which the Emperor is their inferior, sight, and this leads the way to all sorts of questions about whether there may be more inferioties...

Besides, before the modern age, societies didn't really view the maximisation of peoples' potential as a priority - indeed, it made populaces more governable if you deliberately denied them from fulfilling their full potential.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Due to the costs involved, they would be restricted to only the most wealthy and powerful. However, so long as the wearing of glasses remains unusual, they will be seen as a physical advertisement of the wearer's weakness. If the Emperor were to wear glasses, his subjects would see that there is at least one field in which the Emperor is their inferior, sight, and this leads the way to all sorts of questions about whether there may be more inferioties...
If the Greeks invent eyeglasses in the age of Athenian hegemony, the point about the Emperor is a moot one. Besides, all a short-sighted leader would need to do is not wear his glasses in public--not that I think it would be an issue anyway.

Besides, before the modern age, societies didn't really view the maximisation of peoples' potential as a priority - indeed, it made populaces more governable if you deliberately denied them from fulfilling their full potential.
It depends which people you're talking about. In classical Greece, the Demos, i.e. the native freeborn males, very much cared about fulfilling their potential.
 

MrP

Banned
If the Greeks invent eyeglasses in the age of Athenian hegemony, the point about the Emperor is a moot one. Besides, all a short-sighted leader would need to do is not wear his glasses in public--not that I think it would be an issue anyway.


It depends which people you're talking about. In classical Greece, the Demos, i.e. the native freeborn males, very much cared about fulfilling their potential.

Given that initially it'd be only for the well-off, it might be taken up by the Oligarchic faction at Athens, and scorned by the masses, and thus the Democratic leaders on grounds of populism. However, if Pericles picks up the habit in his glory days, for instance, everyone might jump on the bandwagon early on, and if/when he screws up big time they've already got a foothold. I should imagine we could get Persia or somewhere else interested, too. When did the Chinese come up with 'em, d'ye know, old man?
 

Hendryk

Banned
When did the Chinese come up with 'em, d'ye know, old man?
Nope, this isn't something I'm familiar with. I know that glasses were known in China by the 15th century, but I don't know for how long the concept had been around at that point.
 

MrP

Banned
Nope, this isn't something I'm familiar with. I know that glasses were known in China by the 15th century, but I don't know for how long the concept had been around at that point.

To the infallibleWikipediamobile! Aha! The Chinese invented sunglasses! :D

The first suspected recorded use of a corrective lens may have been by the emperor Nero in the 1st century, who was known to watch the gladiatorial games using an emerald.[3]

Corrective lenses were said to be used by Abbas Ibn Firnas in the 9th century.[4] He had devised a way to finish sand into glass; which until this time, was secret to the Egyptians. These glasses could be shaped and polished into round rocks used for viewing - known as reading stones. Sunglasses, in the form of flat panes of smoky quartz, protected the eyes from glare and were used in China in the 12th century or possibly earlier. However, they did not offer any corrective powers.[5]

[edit] Invention of eyeglasses

Around 1284 in Italy, Salvino D'Armate is credited with inventing the first wearable eye glasses.[6] The earliest pictorial evidence for the use of eyeglasses, however, is Tomaso da Modena's 1352 portrait of the cardinal Hugh de Provence reading in a scriptorium. Another early example would be a depiction of eyeglasses found north of the Alpes in an altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany, in 1403.

Many theories abound for to whom the credit for the invention of traditional eyeglasses belong. In 1676, Francesco Redi, a professor of medicine at the University of Pisa, wrote that he possessed a 1289 manuscript whose author complains that he would be unable to read or write were it not for the recent invention of glasses. He also produced a record of a sermon given in 1305, in which the speaker, a Dominican monk named Fra Giordano da Rivalto, remarked that glasses had been invented less than twenty years previously, and that he had met the inventor. Based on this evidence, Redi credited another Dominican monk, Fra Alessandro da Spina of Pisa, with the re-invention of glasses after their original inventor kept them a secret, a claim contained in da Spina's obituary record.[7]

Other stories, possibly legendary, credit Roger Bacon with the invention. Bacon is known to have made the first recorded reference to the magnifying properties of lenses in 1262.[8] His treatise De iride ("On the Rainbow"), which was written while he was a student of Robert Grosseteste, no later than 1235, mentions using optics to "read the smallest letters at incredible distances". While the exact date and inventor may be forever disputed, it is almost certainly clear that spectacles were invented between 1280 and 1300 in Italy.[1]

These early spectacles had convex lenses that could correct the presbyopia (farsightedness) that commonly develops as a symptom of aging. Nicholas of Cusa is believed to have discovered the benefits of concave lens in the treatment of myopia (nearsightedness). However, it was not until 1604 that Johannes Kepler published in his treatise on optics and astronomy, the first correct explanation as to why convex and concave lenses could correct presbyopia and myopia.
 
Ah... so it was Nero that had the emerald...

I've also read somewhere that Chinese judges wore sunglasses (or close to them) so that the people in the courts couldn't see their eyes, and so would have a harder time gauging their emotions.
 
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