Who Invented Contacts?

Contact lenses have multiple uses--fashion, therapeutic and cosmetic--and have become very inexpensive. Contact lenses can serve the same purpose as glasses and are more visually pleasing and undetectable. Early contact lenses were limited as to comfort and the amount of time they could be worn; over time, with improvements in lens material, lenses can now be worn for long periods of time without compromising eye health or vision.

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 time; in 1888, the German physiologist Adolf Eugen Fick also described the process of creating and fitting contact lenses. August Mueller was the first to create a contact lens with power that was able to correct vision. Over the next 50 or so years, there was not much advancement in the development of contact lenses.

Hard Plastic Lenses

• In 1936, the Rohm and Haas company created a transparent plastic, and later that year William Feinbloom used this plastic in a contact lens; the center of the lens was made of clear glass and the outer rim was made of plastic. In 1948, Kevin Tuohy created a lens made of just plastic. This lens was not easy to wear, and over the next few years researchers refined the design to make the lens thinner and more comfortable.

Soft Contact Lenses

• In 1959, Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim published an article, "Hydrophilic gels for biological use," in the journal Nature. Used in other countries first, the information in this article led to the launches of the first soft contact lenses; the first one was approved in the U.S. in 1971. Soft contact lenses were soon more popular because of the comfort. Plastic polymers used in lenses underwent many improvements due to increases in oxygen permeability; using these new polymers makes the contact lenses more comfortable and tolerable.

Disposable Contact Lenses

• As the soft contact lenses would eventually become uncomfortable to wear, Klas Nilsson--a practitioner in Sweden--began to persuade his patients to replace their contact lenses regularly. However, the expense of the lenses made this a difficult prospect. A group of Danish clinicians developed a manufacturing process that could mass-produce soft lenses inexpensively and this lens, called "Danalens," was released in 1987. In 1988, Johnson & Johnson purchased the technology and released the Acuvue lens---the first inexpensive, extended wear lens. The success of this product led to other companies following suit; now most soft lenses are meant to be regularly replaced in a month or less.

Further Advances

• There have been more advances in contact lenses with lenses for daily disposal, disposable toric lenses for people with astigmatism and colored contact lenses. Bifocal soft lenses were developed in 1999. The materials that contact lenses are made of are still being perfected and improved to increase comfort and acuity. However, some feel that with the popularity of refractive surgery, the number of people wearing contact lenses will decrease.