The first contact lenses were made of glass.

Modern contact lenses are made of plastic, using various high-tech polymers that allow oxygen to flow through and reach the cornea. But that hasn’t always been the case: The first usable contact lenses were made of regular ol’ glass. 

The basic concept of contact lenses can be traced all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, who described a method of vision correction that involved wearing a water-filled glass hemisphere over the eye. Though highly impractical, the concept was similar to a modern contact lens. Centuries later, in 1801, the British polymath Thomas Young created a contact lens prototype made of glass and filled with water based on another theoretical idea posited in 1637 by the philosopher and scientist René Descartes.

The first dual-lens eyeglasses were invented by a monk in 1158 CE.

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It’s hard to say who invented glasses, as the development of corrective lenses was a gradual progression rather than a single aha moment. Evidence of optical lens use dates back as far as the ancient world, while modern reading glasses were likely developed in 13th-century Italy.

The true breakthroughs began in the 1880s, when new glass production technologies allowed for more precise cutting and shaping, making thin lenses possible for the first time. In the same decade, glass contact lenses that actually allowed the wearer to blink were independently invented by Adolf Fick, Louis J. Girard, Eugene Kalt, and August Mueller, making it hard to pinpoint who gets the credit for producing the first practical — albeit imperfect — contact lenses. 

Those early glass contact lenses were far from ideal; they were heavy and uncomfortable, and being made of glass posed a major problem. Unlike other organs in our bodies, which are oxygenated by the blood, our eyes get their oxygen directly from the air — so covering them with glass suffocates them, causing severe eye pain after a few hours. 

Nonetheless, glass lenses were the only option for at least a half-century after their creation. The next great leap forward came in the 1930s, when inventors Theodore Obrig and William Feinbloom began developing plastic lenses made from acrylic resin. Eventually, plastic lenses, which were safer and could be worn for much longer without discomfort, consigned their glass ancestors to the annals of optical history.

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