An address on the history of the invention and discovery of spectacles : being the inaugural address delivered before the ... Bradford Division of the British Medical Association / [George Henry Oliver].

  • Oliver, George Henry.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An address on the history of the invention and discovery of spectacles : being the inaugural address delivered before the ... Bradford Division of the British Medical Association / [George Henry Oliver]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/94 (page 15)
    clay value, was from £10 to £20. From this circumstance glasses which frequently had costly ornamental fittings were seldom seen, and then in the possession of wealthy people only. They were enumerated among the posses- sions of the owner, and in testamentary dispositions were particularly mentioned—for example, in 1372, in the will of King John of France and in that of Charles V of France, and also in a list of belongings of St. Antonine, Archbishop of Florence (died 1446). They could not always be obtained, even for large amounts of money. The Elector of Saxony in 1570, then in his 48tli year, just about the time when his presbyopia and latent hyper- metropia, if he had any, where rapidly becoming manifest, sent his servant to Augsburg to get him a pair, which, how- ever, he could not there obtain ; he was obliged to go to Venice, where he accomplished his mission. Lenses, too, were made in very few places, and the art of preparing them was very jealously guarded as a valuable secret. This secret was held until the sixteenth century, when it was lost, as was that of the manufacture of artificial eyesr through treachery, and the secret quickly spread to other lands. Venice for a long time was the only place where good glasses were made. The factories were placed at some distance from the town in order to avoid the danger of fire; even here, though the home of the manufacture of this valuable article, it found no favour, probably because the highly developed sense of the beautiful in the Venetians resented such a menace to their pleasing exterior. Treatises on arts and manufactures of the eighteenth century give a prominent place to the making of glasses for spectacles, and, as far as we are able to gather, Germany was the chief country which produced them. The places selected were