The Man Who Invented Glasses Was Forgotten From History

By The Hidden History Project

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In 13th-century Europe, scholars, monks, and merchants watched their careers end the moment their vision began to fail. The tools to fix that existed in fragments — Roman curiosity, Islamic optics, Venetian glassmaking — but no one had put them together yet. Until an unknown friar did, around 1285, in a workshop that history has never been able to name. This episode traces the History of Spectacles: from the reading stones of medieval monasteries to Ibn al-Haytham's revolutionary Book of Optics, from a Dominican friar who shared what the inventor refused to, to the Florentine historian who in 1684 carved a fake name into a tomb. It took 236 years to prove it was a lie. Along the way: Pope Leo X squinting at Raphael's canvas, Benjamin Franklin cutting two pairs of glasses in half, Sam Foster selling tinted lenses on an Atlantic City boardwalk in 1929, and a Baltimore Colts wide receiver who shouldn't have been able to see the field at all. Chapters 0:00 — Introduction and The Monk

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