Eyeglasses appear in Italy

Eyeglasses, or spectacles, appeared in northern Italy in the last years of the thirteenth century. The first pairs were simply two convex magnifying lenses, each set in a rim of wood or bone with a short handle; the two handles were joined by a rivet, and the wearer clamped them on the nose or held them up by hand. They helped people who could no longer read small letters as they grew older, the long sight that comes with age. Nobody knows who made the first pair. The best evidence is a sermon that the Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa preached in Florence on 23 February 1306: it was 'not yet twenty years' since the art of making eyeglasses had been found, he said, and he had seen and talked with the man who first made them. Hence the usual date, about 1286.

The idea had a long history. People had long read with a lens laid on the page or held in the hand, and early in the eleventh century the scholar Ibn al-Haytham wrote his great Book of Optics in Cairo; in Latin it became the reference book of the thirteenth-century European scholars of 'perspective', the science of seeing. In 1266 and 1267 the English Franciscan Roger Bacon, writing for Pope Clement IV, explained how a lens could help old people with weak eyes. But historians doubt that the inventor read such books. Spectacles came out of the workshop, and the glassmakers of Venice, who were learning to make an unusually clear glass called crystal, were crucial to them: Venetian rules of 1300 and 1301 already speak of 'roidi da ogli', discs for the eyes, and of glass 'for the eyes, for reading'.

The new art spread fast through a world of friars, scholars and merchants. In Pisa the chronicle of the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina praised friar Alessandro della Spina, who died in 1313: when the first maker kept his method to himself, Alessandro made spectacles on his own and shared the art with everyone. By 1316 a pair with its case had a price, and in 1329 a merchant complained that the spectacles he had bought in Florence had been stolen. In 1352 Tommaso da Modena painted the oldest known picture of them, on the nose of Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher, in the chapter house of a Dominican convent at Treviso, near Venice. The oldest frames that survive, of wood, were found in 1953 under the floor of the nuns' choir at Wienhausen in northern Germany. Doctors were slower: in 1363 the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac still offered spectacles only when eye lotions had failed.

In the fifteenth century Florence became a great centre of the trade, with nearly fifty spectacle makers known by name between 1413 and 1562, and its craftsmen learned to grind concave lenses for the short-sighted: in 1462 the Duke of Milan ordered three dozen pairs from Florence, one dozen of them 'for distant vision, that is for the young'. Printing, from the 1450s, multiplied the need. Florence also produced the best-known myth. In 1684 the antiquarian Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore wrote that a lost tombstone in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore had named one Salvino degli Armati, who died in 1317, as 'inventor of eyeglasses'. A monument went up in 1841, but in the 1920s scholars showed that the inscription was a forgery; the plaque is still there, hidden in a corner of a chapel.

Spectacles changed working lives. A scholar, a scribe, a merchant or a craftsman whose eyes were failing in his forties could go on reading and doing fine work for many more years, with his hands free. The spectacle makers' lenses also opened new worlds: around 1600 craftsmen who made spectacles put two lenses in a tube and made the microscope and the telescope. More than seven hundred years after that unknown craftsman, spectacles are still the most common way to correct the defects of the eye.