Who Really Invented Spectacles?

When working to protect and correct eyesight, opticians use state-of-the-art technology to detect potential eye issues and prepare corrective lenses to help people see better without hurting themselves, but the concept of using spectacles has existed for over a thousand years.

One of the earliest uses of a corrective lens as a visual aid is depicted by Pliny the Elder, who explained that the Roman Emperor Nero used an emerald as a primitive reading stone.

The first mention of the use of corrective lenses to help make written texts easier to read is credited to Ptomely’s book Optics in the second century, but it took until the 11th century for Arabic scholars to build on his concepts and until the 13th century for dedicated spectacles to be developed.

One person credited for their invention is Salvino D’Armato degli Armarti, a Florentine man who was claimed to have invented eyeglasses at some point in the 13th century.

This claim was first mentioned in 1684 by Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore who claimed he had a burial register which stated on Mr D’Armarti’s epitaph that he was the inventor of eyeglasses.

This belief endured for over three centuries, despite the fact that the only source for this claim was Mr Del Migliore himself, who claimed that the epitaph was destroyed along with the tomb during the restoration of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in the 17th century.

However, in 1920, this claim was comprehensively debunked by Isidoro del Lungo, who noted that the man did not seem to exist around 1286 when spectacles were believed to have been invented.

As well as this, no other work claimed him as the inventor, the epitaph uses then-contemporary Italian rather than the form that would have been used at the time, the word “inventor” did not even exist in Florence in the 14th century and the only Salvino degli Armati known to exist was an artisan who had never worked with glasses.