Who Created The First Usable Contact Lens?

When visiting an optician, people have a lot of options to help correct their eyesight and make everyday life more comfortable, from a wide range of prescription glasses to contact lenses.

It is a telling sign of just how much the field of optometry has progressed that contact lenses are an affordable, available option for everyday vision correction. That a pair of reusable or daily disposable lenses are such an accessible option shows the future is bright for helping people’s eyesight.

This is particularly true given that for hundreds of years, contact lenses were seen as all but impossible.

The concept originates, as many forward-thinking ideas do, from Leonardo da Vinci, although it must be noted that he did not believe it was applicable for eyesight correction.

In Manual D of his Codex of the Eye, Mr da Vinci found that a person who submerged their head underwater or wore a water-filled orb over their eye could affect the power of their cornea.

This was quite obviously impractical, but it wasn’t ever meant to be used for correcting eyesight but more to explore the mechanics of the eye and how this information could be used to improve existing eyeglasses.

Regardless, the philosopher Descartes did design a liquid-filled tube based on the same concept, but given that it would have made blinking impossible, it was completely impractical.

The first successfully applied contact lenses were created nearly three centuries after Mr da Vinci by Adolf Eugen Fick.

They were made from blown glass and covered the entire eye, floating on a solution of dextrose to stop them from causing permanent eye damage.

However, because they were so big, rigid and unwieldy, they could only be worn for a couple of hours at a time before being removed, but they proved the principle and paved the way for the more flexible and versatile lenses used today.

The first true rigid plastic contact lenses were developed in Germany in 1940 by Heinrich Wöhlk and these were less fragile than glass lenses. The polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) they were made from did not allow much oxygen to reach the eye and the lenses were still large and difficult to insert.

These issues were partially solved later in the same decade thanks to Californian optician Kevin Tuohy, who created smaller corneal lenses that were far easier to use.

Then, in the 1970s, new gas permeable materials were developed to solve the problem of oxygen supply to the cornea when wearing a rigid lens, resulting in the modern rigid gas permeable (RGP) contact lenses that we still use today.

Meanwhile, behind the iron curtain, the first soft hydrogel contact lenses had been manufactured in a Czechoslovakian apartment block in the late 1950s by chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lím using a machine made from bicycle parts. Due to the politics of the time, the new lenses did not reach Western Europe until the 1970s.

These were more comfortable when first worn than RGP lenses and by the 1990s were available in daily disposable form for excellent hygiene and convenience.

As hydrogels did not transmit as much oxygen to the eye as RGPs porous silicone was incorporated creating silicone hydrogel contact lenses that could be worn for longer periods without side effects.

Since then the technologies of contact lens materials and designs have continually advanced and this brings us up to date with our story. We can see that the development of modern soft and rigid lenses was not a single event or idea but a journey of many steps achieved through the cumulative effort of many great minds.