Glasses

Eyeglasses were invented in northern Italy in the late thirteenth century, probably in Pisa or Venice, where glassmakers produced lenses from clear glass. The first spectacles had convex lenses that helped older people see small print, mounted in frames that were held in front of the eyes or perched on the nose. A sermon of 1306 by the Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa says they had been invented about twenty years earlier, and the inventor was not named. The scholar Roger Bacon had earlier described the magnifying power of curved glass. Concave lenses to correct short-sightedness appeared in the fifteenth century, and the spread of printing greatly increased demand for reading glasses.

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