Who Invented Contact Lenses?

Contact lenses are strange little objects.

They are thinner than paper.

You place one directly on your eye in the morning, spend an entire day looking through it, and—if it is a daily disposable—throw it away before bed.

We have become so used to them that we rarely stop to think about how absurdly ambitious the basic idea is.

Put a piece of transparent material directly on the cornea and somehow make vision better.

Who looked at the human eye and thought that was a reasonable plan?

The story starts much earlier than you might expect.

It begins in 1508. Sort of.

Leonardo da Vinci is often given the opening scene in the history of contact lenses.

Around 1508, he made drawings exploring how vision and light changed when the eye interacted with water.

But there is an important caveat.

Da Vinci did not invent a wearable contact lens.

There was no Renaissance ACUVUE.

What he explored was something more fundamental: if the optical environment in front of the cornea could be changed, perhaps vision itself could be altered.

It was an extraordinary idea.

Unfortunately, humanity still had to wait roughly four centuries before anyone could put something practical on an actual eyeball.

By the late 19th century, researchers including Adolf Fick, Eugène Kalt and August Müller had begun experimenting with large glass lenses that covered not only the cornea but much of the white of the eye.

There was just one obvious problem.

They were made of glass.

And they were huge.

Compared with today's soft lenses, early contact lenses were less like invisible vision correction and more like tiny transparent bowls attached to your eyeballs.

Better vision?

Possibly.

Comfort?

That part needed work.

Plastic solved one problem and created another

In the 20th century, polymethyl methacrylate—PMMA—began replacing glass.

Plastic was lighter.

It did not shatter.

And in 1948, Kevin Tuohy developed a smaller corneal contact lens that looked much more like the basic form we recognise today.

Problem solved?

Not quite.

The cornea is a demanding piece of biology.

It needs oxygen.

A contact lens can correct your vision beautifully while simultaneously making life difficult for the tissue underneath it.

This became one of the central questions of contact-lens development:

How do you improve vision while making the eye notice the lens as little as possible?

The person who changed that equation was a Czech chemist named Otto Wichterle.

The soft lens revolution did not begin in a glamorous laboratory

Wichterle was a polymer chemist.

Together with chemist Drahoslav Lim and other researchers, he worked on hydrophilic polymers—materials capable of absorbing water while remaining soft and flexible.

This research would eventually provide the foundation for the modern hydrogel contact lens.

If this were a conventional science story, the next part would involve a giant research institute, generous funding and an executive shaking hands beside a prototype.

Instead, politics intervened.

In communist Czechoslovakia, Wichterle lost his academic position during political purges. His contact-lens work was interrupted, and official support for the project faded.

So he did what any sufficiently stubborn scientist might do.

He continued at home.

Then came Christmas, 1961.

One of the most important machines in contact-lens history was built from a children's construction set

At home, Wichterle assembled a small experimental device.

Among the parts were pieces from Merkur, a Czech metal construction toy similar to Meccano.

He used a bicycle dynamo.

A transformer.

Homemade moulds.

And on Christmas afternoon in 1961, he experimented with a process known as spin casting, in which liquid polymer is shaped inside a rotating mould.

The result was a small batch of soft lenses.

They were not perfect.

But they were flexible, relatively uniform and far more comfortable than the hard lenses that had come before them.

One of the foundations of today's soft contact-lens industry had been created.

Not in the headquarters of a multinational medical company.

At home.

Using children's construction pieces.

Innovation occasionally has a sense of humour.

Then he and his wife made thousands of lenses at home

Wichterle kept improving the device.

When the original power system became inadequate, he reportedly adapted a motor from a record player.

During the early months of 1962, Wichterle and his wife Linda produced thousands of soft lenses using variations of the homemade setup.

It sounds remarkably like a modern startup story.

Build a prototype.

Test it.

Improve the process.

Produce small batches.

Prove that the idea works.

The main difference is that today's startup founders are usually testing software.

Wichterle's prototype went onto human eyeballs.

The consequences of a bug were slightly different.

Then Bausch + Lomb turned the invention into an industry

Soft-lens technology eventually moved from experimental laboratories and kitchens into industrial manufacturing.

Bausch + Lomb acquired rights to related technology and developed methods for large-scale production.

In 1971, the company introduced the first mass-produced soft contact lens approved in the United States.

That moment changed contact lenses from an unusual medical invention into a genuine consumer industry.

But people still had to clean them.

Store them.

Disinfect them.

Deal with protein deposits.

Lose one down the sink and become strangely emotional about it.

The next major revolution came from an entirely different question.

What if people simply replaced their lenses more often?

ACUVUE changed not only the product, but the economics

Johnson & Johnson entered the business after acquiring Frontier Contact Lenses in 1981.

That business later became Vistakon.

The company developed highly automated moulding techniques and launched ACUVUE in 1987.

Frequent-replacement contact lenses became mainstream.

Later, daily disposables pushed the logic even further.

Open.

Wear.

Throw away.

Repeat tomorrow.

The contact lens was becoming less like a pair of glasses and more like a toothbrush.

A personal device turned into a recurring consumer product.

That distinction would eventually create one of the most powerful business models in vision care.

But contact lenses still had another identity waiting to emerge.

Then somebody decided eyesight was not enough

Originally, the goal of a contact lens was very simple.

Help people see without glasses.

Eventually, another question appeared.

What if brown eyes could look slightly lighter?

What if the edge of the iris looked darker?

What if eyes looked larger in photos?

What if we added grey?

Olive?

Honey?

Mauve?

A tiny highlight that makes the eye look as though a studio light is permanently reflected in it?

Vision correction collided with beauty.

Today, browse a Korean or Japanese coloured-contact-lens shop and you could be forgiven for thinking you were choosing lip tints.

Choco Brown.

Ash Beige.

Dew Gray.

Olive.

Mauve.

Glowy.

Smoky.

The product is still technically a contact lens.

The language belongs to cosmetics.

And that is what makes the history so interesting.

In 1508, people were studying how water altered light around the eye.

In the 1880s, they were placing glass over the cornea.

In 1961, a Czech scientist built a lens-making machine from a children's toy.

In 1971, soft lenses became a mass-market product.

In the 1980s, replacement lenses transformed the economics.

Today, a contact lens can correct your eyesight and redesign the mood of your face at the same time.

The lens kept getting thinner.

The industry built on top of it kept getting bigger.