Eyeglasses

Embrace the profound impact that spectacles alone have had on the human experience over the past 730 years. Website includes a timeline with artistic depictions and extant examples of eyeglasses and spectacles.

A series of engravings that bring to us the very clear representation of the crafts and technology of his time, and the relative importance which these discoveries and inventions had in the mind of a well-informed layman of the 16th century.

New Discoveries includes illustrations of: The Lodestone, The Magnet; The Astrolabe; America; Gunpowder; Printing Books; Iron Clocks; Guaiacum (a New World remedy for syphilis); Distillation; Silk, or the Silkworm; Stirrups, or Foot Rests; the Watermill; the Winged Mill (windmills); Olive Oil; Sugar; Oil Colors (oil-painting); Spectacles (eyeglasses); Longitudes of the Earth Found from the Deviation of the Magnet from the Pole; Polishing Armor; Engraving on Copper; and the travels & discoveries of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan.

With a picture of the first rendered pair worn in a illumination

A history of the development of eyeglasses and their treatment of vision.