What were glasses like in early history?

Question

When watching historical programmes, anything playing before let's say 1900, there are sometimes characters wearing glasses. One example coming to mind is Mary in 1995's Pride and Prejudice. I'm wondering how corrected the vision was? They didn't have finely tuned machines like nowadays or is there a manual technique they used? Did glasses back then (19th century and earlier) really give good vision or simply allow the wearer some slight improvement? What if you had really bad eyesight, the -6 and over? What sort of vision did early glasses allow?

Answer 1

Glasses have been around for a long time and haven't changed very much in their construction. The lens's used to be polished by hand and this would take one man weeks of work and hence glasses were very expensive and only afforded by the very rich. The frames were often made of solid gold as it added little to the huge cost in percentage terms. A modern lens polishing machine looks like a human arm with an elbow. I have some Georgian reading glasses made of gold and they seem very good although the lens are very small

Answer 2

Lenses were discovered by a few kids playing with some glass before Galileo. Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals when the country was not even started, so glasses were pretty developed early on. However, if you were blind, you were stuck being blind and there was not lasic surgery. Some smiths could grind glass or gems into lenses. The early glasses did help a lot.

Answer 3

Certainly by the late 19th. Century spectacles were relatively common. They appear to have been invented in about 1450, but the use of lenses goes back much further, possibly to about 650 B.C., these being single Rock crystal lenses.

Answer 4

It was basically just roughly shaped glass. They had a simple idea of shape, but it was basically a simple improvement to vision. Back then it must have seemed like a great improvement, but compared to today it wasn't anything great.

Answer 5

early specs were handheld, two lenses openning like scissors in a V shape. probably for reading only.

or one lens monocle style early ones might be as old as a thousand years ago.

Answer 6

I'm thinking early glasses would have been little more than magnifying lenses.

Answer 7

Glasses were invinted in the Renaissance age