Jeepers, creepers--I can't see out my peepers. It's a wonder I don't have more bruises from running into things (which I tend to do regularly). I envy the bats with their fancy-pants echolocation. I'm more like a mole, with my pseudo-eyes serving as a set of photoreceptors. So, I remedy this with plastic contact lenses and my plastic/glass spectacles.Reportedly, da Vinci is credited with the first concept sketches of contact lenses in the early 1500's--he was interested in how the cornea acts when you stick your head in water. Anyway, long story short--folks experimented with liquid tubes & horse collagen capsules... surely poking a lot of eyes out in the process. Then almost 400 years later, a German glassblower named Muller and a physiologist named Fick made the first glass contact lenses (they were brown, ick). Fick tried them out on rabbits and then on himself and put some dextrose in between the glass & the cornea. Polymethyl methacrylate (Plexigas) comes along on the 1930's and by 1949, the first lenses were developed that you could wear for 16 hours at a time. The FDA approved the first soft lenses in 1971. In 1987, disposable contact lenses became available, and around that same year, I realized that it wasn't normal to keep asking my friend in history class what was written on the blackboard.
It's hard to believe that I have been inserting plastic in my eyes for 21 years. Granted, my plastic lenses don't take up too much room on this earth, but I did some rough caluclations on collective contact lens use and it's a little disturbing.
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