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From 1342, this is the earliest known image of a monk with glasses. These early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, “disks for the eyes.” Thanks to their resemblance to lentils—lentes in Latin—the disks came to be called “lenses.”
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, monks in European monasteries labored over religious manuscripts. The pages were intricately lettered and drawn, and the monks often worked in flickering candlelight. Many of them started using curved chunks of glass as reading aids. The glass worked as a bulky magnifier over the page.
No one is sure exactly when or where it happened, but in Northern Italy, medieval glassmakers took that innovation another step forward. They shaped glass into two small disks that bulged in the center, placed each disk in a frame, and joined the frames together at the top. Behold, the world's first spectacles!
For several generations, this ingenious device was used almost exclusively by monks and scholars. At the time, the vast majority of people were illiterate; they had pretty much no need to decipher tiny shapes like letters as part of their daily routine. Spectacles remained rare and expensive.
A German metalworker changed all that.
Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s, modeling it after a wooden screw press used to crush grapes for wine. He produced reusable individual letters made of metal (movable type) and started printing. Gutenberg's famous printing press is a great example of adapting an existing technology for a whole new outcome in a totally different field.
Thanks to him, for the first time printed books were relatively cheap and portable. This triggered a surge of literacy that opened people's eyes—in more ways than one. A massive number of people became aware that they were farsighted; they couldn't see things up close—like a printed page—very clearly. They needed glasses.
The Gutenberg Bible, published in the 1440s, was the first major book printed with movable type. This volume belongs to the New York Public Library's collection.
This print (circa 1600) shows a market with a spectacles seller (left) and a bookseller (right) and several people wearing glasses.
Within a hundred years of Gutenberg's invention, thousands of spectacle makers around Europe were thriving. Glasses were the first piece of advanced technology that ordinary people regularly wore on their bodies since the invention of clothing way back in Neolithic times.
Europe was not just awash in lenses, but also in ideas about lenses. For the first time, the properties of silicon dioxide were about to be harnessed not just to improve what we could see with our own eyes, but to see things that transcended the natural limits of human vision.