All lenses are plastic nowadays!  Not quite true but very nearly so. There was a time when all lenses were glass – true:  and then there was that time in between when all lenses were glass – also not quite true but nearly so, although some people thought that with plastic taking over so many aspects of our lives, all lenses must by now be plastic!  In the U.S.A. and continental Europe, plastic lenses superseded glass long before that was the case in U.K.  This was because the National Health Service still required 99.9% of lenses to be glass, the only exceptions being bifocals (not very popular in the plastic lenses of the day, apart from the fact that there was an extra charge), and lenticular lenses.

What did we do before glass?  Can anyone remember?  Unlikely, as they would have to be about 400 years old.  The answer is that lenses were once upon a time made from Quartz.  Yes little pebbles of quartz.  This gave rise to lenses being called “pebbles” and some aged opticians, including, regrettably, the gifted author of this tome, may well recall some clever customers as late as the early 1950’s referring to lenses by what they believed to be their technical term as “pebbles” 

Tags: cheap glasses, Glasses, spectacles, Transitions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Lenses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.