Who Invented Contacts?
Contacts: An Idea The idea for the contact lens was first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508. In the essay “Codex of the Eye, Manual D,” da Vinci introduced the optical principle behind the contact lens. Da Vinci was not interested in the concept of correcting vision; he was more interested in the mechanisms of accommodation of the eye. Rene Descartes then described a fluid-filled glass tube that would be placed on the cornea in 1636. Other researchers developed different concepts over the next 200 years but no one actually created a model to be worn on the eye for vision correction until the late 1800s. Glass Contact Lenses During this period, there was a significant amount of research into contact lens development and there is some debate about who actually created the first contact lenses. The first lenses did not always correct vision. In 1887, F.E. Muller, a German glassblower, created a glass corneal shell that was fitted on a patient’s eye although it was reported at a later
