Posts Tagged: "Leonardo da Vinci"

Any story about innovation that starts with Leonardo da Vinci is one worth telling. The fact that the great French philosopher René Descartes also plays a starring role in the history of the contact lens makes this story of innovation all the more noteworthy. Conceived in the earliest parts of the 16th century, 34 million Americans wear thin film contact lenses over their eyes for some form of vision enhancement. The first true contact lenses was created by Swiss physicist A.E. Fick in 1888, when the lens maker fabricated a spherical glass segment for the correction of refractive errors in a wearer’s eyes.